Originally published in American Thinker on April 21, 2019 –
http://www.americanthinker.com –
I had the opportunity to see the movie “The Invisibles” a German made film depicting the real life stories of four holocaust survivors who disguised their true Jewish identities in war-time Berlin and were able to escape deportation to concentration camps and certain death. In 1943, Joseph Goebbels declared that Berlin was finally rid of the Jews. The true facts were that 7,000 Jews continued to live in the city and by the end of the war a total of 1,500 survived with the assistance of a select group of anti-Nazi citizens, devout Christians and devoted Communists. The movie is based on the true stories of four of these individuals and mixes reenactment of their hallowing individual stories of their daily struggle to survive during these times in war time Berlin with real life interviews of all four of these survivors to add authenticity to the narrative.
Overall, this film provided me a very potent remainder and vivid illustration of the destructive power of a totalitarian government such as the Nazis when in power to perform evil. The well documented highly organized and executed extermination of over six million Jews during the years of World War 2 is at the top of an extensive list of shocking undertakings performed by Hitler and the Nazis. Adding to the tragic history of the Third Reich was that it all started when the Nazis were voted for by the German people in large enough numbers in 1932 for Hitler to be able to assume complete power a year later.
The Nazi Government in Germany and the lands they conquered extended absolute control over their citizens dictating how they lived on a daily basis or quite often how and when they died. It was a society dominated by the terror and the dictates of the Third Reich. Nazism maintained its power by coercion and through mass manipulation and by disseminating a continual outpouring of propaganda. Nazism required the subordination of the individual to the state and demanded the necessity of blind and faithful obedience. The rise of Nazism in Germany is especially troubling given that it occurred in a country with a long history of liberalism and democracy combined with impressive economic, academic and cultural achievements.
There was much to learn while watching the various episodes and stories of the four survivors unfold during the movie especially when they came to inevitably directly encounter the German authorities. What I noted was how highly organized the Nazis Government officials depicted in the movie were and how they had access to comprehensive records on every citizen they interacted with. The Nazis were excellent at keeping records as a means of maintaining widespread total control over their population.
Index cards containing extensive personal information of each of the four main characters and other people that attempted to assist them were readily available and used by the German officials at any time in the movie in a threatening way when interacting with any of them. Information was controlled in this highly powerful and evil totalitarian state simply by a system based on pen and paper with the assistance of a virtual army of loyal and highly motivated bureaucrats. This index card based system cataloging the personal information for virtually every German citizen was maintained by multiple levels of the state security system and collected by the police. How much more tragic would this this era have been if the Nazis had access to computers, the internet, mobile communications, search engines and social media?
In our times, the government of the People’s Republic of China under the increasingly totalitarian rule of Xi Jinping does. President Xi Jinping is leading a long term movement of enhancing the control of the Chinese Communist Party over every aspect of their society from politics to business and even more alarmingly by establishing a high degree of social control over the personal lives of its citizens. The difference today is that the Chinese state security system is enhancing their ability to maintain social control through the use of the latest in 21st century technology.
The emerging political structure being implemented by Xi Jinping with his consolidation of power since his assumption of office in November of 2012 is familiar. It is the reinstatement of a Mao-style all-encompassing Chinese Communist Party led society and a demonstrable move away the previous reform movement era of Deng Xiaoping. Communist leader Deng Xiaoping was influential in Chinese politics from the late 1970s until he died in 1997. He led China out of the Mao era by introducing elements of capitalism and other reforms to the Chinese economy. Those reform elements have been reversed by Xi Jinping over the last several years. Power is once again being consolidated by the Party with Xi Jinping as the designated sole leader in command unencumbered by term limits.
China’s digital totalitarian experiment that is currently actively under development since 2010 is called The Social Credit System. Its objective is to use the latest technology to constantly monitor individuals for the purposes of social management. The emerging system is built on the premise that the demands of society as determined by the state are more important than those of any person or group. It is based on the idea that an individual must be socially trustworthy to remain a citizen in good standing in China and every citizen is subject to rewards and punishments administered by the state for compliance or non-compliance. On a daily basis, Chinese government agencies and private companies are collecting information via electronic means on various networks and their versions of social media on every aspect of people’s lives including finances, social media activities, taxes paid, purchases made on-line and records of a person’s interactions with others.
In addition to the Chinese Government aggregating the data collected from all sources, they are setting up hundreds of millions of public surveillance cameras to track behavior. The system is planned to be completed by 2020 for all citizens, however, the Social Credit System is being currently piloted now in several regions, cities, towns and villages of China. In addition, today across all of China there is ongoing data collection involving all citizens as the Social Credit System’s infrastructure is being built for the nation-wide system.
The goal is for each citizen to be assigned a social credit score based on their behavior on an ongoing basis. The system assigns 1,000 points to every current citizen being tracked as a starting point with 200 or so evaluation points that rate daily social behavior. Positive behavior such as volunteering and taking care of elderly parents are rewarded by adding points to a person’s score while negative behavior such as violating traffic laws, breaching family planning policies and not paying taxes on time are deemed as negative marks on a record and lowers the score.
The system is designed to reward citizens that are rated to be trustworthy by their behavior and to take punitive measures to people who do not comply with authorized behavior. Attractive additional benefits are available as rewards for a citizen’s compliance ranging from priority access to popular on-line dating sites, advantageous travel deals and better access to doctors or being offered superior credit terms when attempting to purchase items such as real estate.
A lower social credit score can negatively influence a citizen’s life in various ways such as limiting their ability to purchase certain premium goods, a new home, work at certain jobs, qualify for various loans, buy tickets to travel or attend sought after schools. The system will be comprehensive in scope enough to track and all on-line activities including how a person uses leisure time evaluating such things as time spent playing video games.
All citizens will have on-line access to everybody’s else’s records and can add comments at any time reporting information about another person’s behavior by adding both positive and negative comments to the system. In many villages, towns and locations across the country, there are appointed people today providing input to the system by evaluating the observed social behavior of their neighbors. In addition, all foreign businesses that want to operate within China must comply with the system.
Chinese government agencies have created blacklists of serious offenders and this has led to serious limitations for these people in their lives. With the Social Credit system being implemented, there is serious potential for abuse of its citizens for political reasons by an increasingly powerful Chinese Communist Party. The system permits the Chinese government to collect virtually unlimited real-time personal information on every citizen in a country that is governed by a political system that is not bound by any rule of law.
It marks the absolute end of any personal privacy in China opens up the average citizen to potentially suffer severe human right violations. The Chinese Communist Party is in the process of creating a virtual information monopoly with comprehensive and unlimited access to personal and private information of each and every citizen. The Social Credit System uses information collected in a way that can be used as a weapon against any citizens that challenges the authorities for any reason or in any fashion. Therefore, the potential for the arbitrary abuse of political power by the government is virtually unlimited and made more effective and efficient by the use of the latest advances in technology and surveillance.
The system is morphing into totalitarianism on steroids and is being exported to other emerging countries of the world as an advanced socialist model of governing and as an alternative to Western style democracy. The message is made to many countries as they evolve both politically that China has been able to build a record of impressive economic record so far without creating a corresponding democratic political system.
Socialism seems to have a greater degree of appeal to certain segments of our society including many potential Democratic Party voters and younger voters such as millennials. So far, all the announced Presidential candidates for 2020 election on the Democratic side are moving politically leftward in their pronounced policy positions. Today, the future potential for all of this goes well beyond the standard Democratic Party policy agenda based on the Utopian fantasies of free everything for everybody. The promise of free healthcare through Medicare for all, free college tuition, paid family leave and child care and energy policies based on a Green New Deal are only opening gambits for future more ambitious plans to fundamentally change our society.
It is inevitable as a Socialist Agenda in this country is started to be implemented it will evolve over time and morph into something increasingly more draconian in nature. The Democratic candidate’s proposals ultimately involve controlling the behavior of individuals for the social good to be defined by a growing Administrative state and unelected bureaucrats based in Washington D.C. and elsewhere with the power to potentially curb any dissent and unauthorized behavior. The emerging world of technological innovation and social media provide powerful tools to assume absolute power over time.
As demonstrated by the Nazi Regime and the Chinese Communist examples, Big Government requires the collection and use of Big Data. Socialism requires extensive record keeping in order to implement its far reaching agenda that extends the scope of government and its reach toward the extensive regulation of the lives of all citizens.
While today the Chinese Government and its Communist Party are actively working on creating an absolute monopoly on access to personal information in their country, Google, Facebook, Amazon and other social media companies are attempting to do the same here in America.
The majority of American adults extensively use social media of one type or another. Social media companies supposedly exist to use personal information collected for commercial reasons. These companies have evolved to become extraordinarily powerful and unregulated networks for the interchange of news and ideas plus platforms for commerce of many types as they progressively connect more and more people every year.
Meaningful access to all types of personal data by Government provided by private companies with monopolistic type access to troves of personal data such as the three Big Tech companies mentioned is a powerful potential vehicle to strictly rule a country with a certain agenda in mind. Would any of these tech companies be willing to share personal information or actively work in behalf of a left leaning candidate, party or government? The answer is they already actively are.
As Google, Amazon and Facebook grow in power and reach ever larger numbers of users in America and globally, they have become increasingly active in the political arena. A major issue with this growing phenomenon is that these dominate and most influential of the social media companies tend to aggressively promote a predominantly left leaning political point of view on a daily basis in various ways and they are alleged by many critics to suppress politically conservative individuals and viewpoints.
Additional examples of political partisanship by Big Tech in conjunction with the Left are as follows. President Obama harvested Facebook freely provided personal data on millions of their users in the 2012 Presidential election. Google previously worked with China for years to build a censored Chinese search engine called Dragonfly that could track its users and Jeff Bezos’s owned Washington Post acts as a daily and vociferous critic of the Trump Administration.
As we approach the 2020 elections, will American voluntarily surrender their freedom by choosing to vote for increasingly left leaning Democrat candidates who will promise to lead us down the path of the Socialism and to implement a political system that proposes to regulate and judge the social responsibility actions of each of its citizens? It must be repeated that Adolf Hitler was elected by the German people in the 1930s to a position where he could eventually assume absolute power and implement his plan for a totalitarian state. Will we vote in 2020 for an American future that will one day allow the possibility for a person to go on-line to read their favorite magazines, bloggers, books; watch their preferred TV shows and movies, make travel plans, interact with certain people and by their actions and choices be subject to a long prison sentence or worse?
The RightQuestions 