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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

The biggest obstacle to enacting fascist surveillance and control over western society is getting the relevant laws through the legislature. And I don't mean laws like "all communication must be monitored, but rather "criticism of the Supreme Leader is punishable by death." Without that, none of the rest gets you to fascism. With that, all of the rest could be built in short order.

I think the paranoia over potential tyrannical uses of this stuff to be misplaced. If you want to avoid tyranny, you need to prevent your leadership from being taken over by a tyrant. That's not to say that ubiquitous surveillance and such is not a worry, just that the worry isn't that it will turn our countries into Nazi Germany 2.0.

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It doesn't jump straight to that. The intermediate steps usually involve one or more of:

1) A political ideology (Nazism, Communism, Islamism)

2) A real external threat (Communism, Capitalism, Islamism)

3) Sanctions or economic depression (Weimar Germany, Russia today)

The real external threat is essentially a sociopolitical system that propagates itself inside the turf of another sociopolitical system. This leads to far-right war hawks, and then center-right, issuing xenophobic statements. The step before "supporting supreme leaders" is usually "suppressing enemy ideologies". Like McCarthyism in USA or anti Muslim sentiment today. Or Iran's hatred of the USA and the Shah prior to their revolution. Or Soviet hatred of capitalist bourgeouis. Or Ukraine's hatred of communists. And so forth and so on.

Once "the enemy" is identified, the crackdown begins, which leads to more clamps on civil liberties. Then you might want to read the poem attributed to Martin Niemoller:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

I think this all agrees with what I'm saying. It's not the NSA that's the tyrannical worry, it's the crazy politicians saying that we should only accept Christian refugees.

Regarding your poem, it's the "coming for" people that's the big problem, not merely the ability. If you don't want the government to "come for" people, you need to make sure the people in charge won't do that. It's not very useful to try to make it so they can't

You need to make sure the people in charge won't do that indefinitely. Even one particularly bad politician can cause some serious harm. If you limit their ability to monitor everyone, it limits their ability to round up dissenters. Given that surveillance doesn't seem to have much other use, it's reasonable to oppose it.

How can you limit their ability to monitor everyone, but not be able to limit their ability to round up dissenters?

If you discuss and regulate the privacy issues in times of peace it limits, or at least hinders, their ability to cause harm when they can take advantage of fear or rage.

Really? Weimar's human rights laws were second to none in the world for their time, and are considered exemplary even now. If what you say is true, how did the Nazi abuses occur?

I agree, but only when somewhat reasonable leaders get caught up in fear and rage. The issue of being or becoming a fascist state is rather different. I think there are excellent reasons to curb the surveillance state, I just don't see one of them being the avoidance of a totalitarian government.

actually, it is the other way around. first, you must build the surveillance capabilities and make people accept it as inevitable. you also maintain certain level of paranoia in population to keep that fear simmering. the last piece, "criticism of supreme leader is punishable by death" can be quickly added at any time. in the meanwhile we have to live with second best thing: "telling the truth about government affairs, be it surveillance programs or shooting unarmed iraqis from apache helicopters, is punishable by life in prison or exile".

Did Weimar Germany have a surveillance state and concentration camps and secret police? I don't think so. All of that can be built on more or less a moment's notice once you get the "right" leadership, though.

Except it was not built overnight - it began with the Enablig act granting extraordinary power to the government, which then extended their power gradually over the late 30s leading to the war.

If you read primary sources it is obvious that many people are aware of what is happening but none felt powerful to act, a situation not that dissimilar to our present.

"I don't think so."

a) It is irrelevant what you "think so", that is not an argument. Weimar Republic indeed did have a secret police, Gestapo was modelled from that.

b) You are probably referring to the subsequent Holocaust and World War 2. If so, argumenting with Weimar Republic and drawing a quick installment of aforementioned practices from it is a straw man argument. You create a notion of how Weimar Republic immediately, "on a moment notice", preceded WW2 etc. (which is incorrect) and then beat that notion (incorrectly) into dust. All of that was built gradually from 1933, which is 6 years before WW2 and 9 years before Wannsee Conference.

a) Of course it's not an argument. Why do you take a clear admission of ignorance, like "I don't think so," and use that as the basis of an attack? That's just bizarre.

Can you name a successful country with no protected military secrets? How would that even work?

Costa Rica?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou

I don't know, I'm more concerned about subversion and sabotage of legitimate political groups, like we saw with COINTELPRO.

I really wish people in Pakistan understood this.

I do not understand your comment. Could you please explain?

They instituted the mandatory death penalty for blasphemy in 1990.

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