You may never be able to walk into the same river twice, but no matter how the river changes, you can still drown in it. This is a metaphorical way of rephrasing the French epigram, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I grew up in a country where most of the economy was nationalised, the state had vast powers and individuals next to none, freedom of speech – along with all other civil liberties – was curtailed, people could be imprisoned for what they said or wrote, religion was despised but the state’s ideology was supposed to be worshipped – and all citizens older than 16 were supposed to carry ID cards on pain of arrest.
We grumbled, some of us dissented and took their concomitant lumps, but deep down everyone knew that was par for the course. We lived in a Marxist state, and Marxist states do as Marxist states are.
Expecting such a state to act differently was like expecting dogs not to chase cats, the sun to rise in the west, and winters to be warmer than summers. A leopard and a Dalmatian may have different spots, but neither is going to change his.
It would be an exaggeration to say that I still live in a country like that. No, not quite. Then again, political systems are never static, they are always in flux. They turn, twist and meander, but they always develop. And the curve of their development may look jagged, but an attentive observer can always detect the overall vector, the destination towards which the state is moving.
If the observer can justifiably say “been there, done that”, his power of discernment becomes more acute, the analogies he can spot more obvious. It’s on the basis of such experience that I can state with absolute certainty: the country in which I grew old, Britain, is inexorably moving closer to the country in which I grew up, the Soviet Union.
Look at the features of a Marxist state I enumerated above, and you’ll see that Britain already shows all of them, or at least is conspicuously moving in that direction. Labour’s plan to introduce compulsory ID cards puts another tick on that list.
I keep repeating like a broken record that trying to find rhyme or reason in anything Starmer’s government does is a pointless exercise, akin to an attempt to figure out why dogs chase cats. They do so not because they think it’s a jolly good idea, but because they are dogs.
The overarching urge of socialism is to transfer the maximum amount of power from the periphery to the centre, and ultimately from the individual to the state. The ideal every socialist sees in his mind’s eye is the omnipotent state lording it over the impotent individual. And Marxism is the extreme version of any socialism, one towards which it endlessly gravitates.
Marxists, especially those running what used to be civilised countries, are glossocrats, rulers relying on language as the instrument of power. Unlike their totalitarian brethren, they can’t yet back up glossocracy with concentration camps and execution cellars, which makes them ever so more loquacious.
They’ll never say outright that everything they do is solely designed to increase state power. Instead, they’ll wax sanctimonious and solicitous round the clock, explaining how citizens will benefit from yet another turn of the thumbscrew.
That’s why those who put forth rational arguments against compulsory ID cards are merely spinning their wheels without moving any closer to reality. And the reality of this Marxist measure is that it’s Marxist. That’s all.
Yes, Starmer and his accomplices may not be excessively bright, but that’s not the point. They aren’t so stupid as not to realise that none of their declared aims for this totalitarian law holds water. ID cards won’t prevent illegal aliens from coming to our shores. They won’t stop anyone from working in the black market. They won’t reduce crime. They won’t curb tax evasion.
They’ll do nothing but enable the state to say in English what totalitarians of yesteryear used to say in Russian or German. Instead of Dokumenty or Papiere, it’ll be “Let’s see your ID card”. But the meaning, both text and subtext, will be exactly the same.
I’m not sure I agree with Joseph de Maistre’s maxim that every nation gets the kind of government it deserves. Not without reservations at any rate, not where modern democracies are concerned.
The statement would be unequivocally true if the people casting their votes understood clearly what kind of government they are ushering in. But they don’t, for two reasons.
First, glossocrats are useless at creating free, secure, prosperous commonwealths, but they are real wizards at duping people with pious pronouncements and phony promises. Show me incoming government officials who don’t make grandiose promises they have no means or intention of keeping, and I’ll show you a fairy tale.
Second, people fall for such canards because they haven’t been trained and educated to think properly. There again, some well-meaning commentators talk about the failure of our education system. They are wrong. If we define failure as an inability to achieve the desired outcome, then our education is a huge success.
A one-eyed man can become king, but in order to do so he must blind everyone else. It’s on this logic that our education system is designed. Our socialists, Lite or full Marxist strength, don’t want Britons to be able to invoke studies in economics, political science, history, philosophy or, God forbid, theology to challenge and defeat glossocracy.
They want people to lap up whatever falsehood is tossed their way off the top table of the glossocrats. And our system of comprehensive ignorance is a perfect training ground for such uncomprehending docility.
British democracy has degenerated to a level where ignoramuses cast their votes for nonentities and predictably get governments that are both incompetent and increasingly evil. But with this damnation sometimes comes a blessing in disguise, as it does in this case.
Marxist governments are not only wicked but also incompetent. Hence it’s almost certain that the ID card project will never get out of the foreplay stage. This government will take years and squander billions of pounds devising the system, but then the democratic blessing in disguise will kick in: Labour will almost certainly lose the next election before this totalitarian scheme can come on stream.
It’s far from guaranteed that the next government will be much better but, in the good democratic tradition, one can be certain it’ll undo most things done by its predecessor. One of its easiest and most visible claims to virtue will be to ditch the ID card scheme and write off all the billions wasted.
I can’t cover every aspect of this exercise in sinister Marxist tyranny, nor is it my intention. I’m only proposing a methodology for decorticating anything this government does. And the starting point is realising that things like ID cards can only be analysed in the light of Marxist ideology. An evil ideology practised by evil people to achieve evil ends.
P.S. The other day, I saw a video of a Russian Archpriest whose name I didn’t catch railing against the soulless, godless materialist West. Nothing new there, but the sample list of principal Western culprits gave me a start.
Father Whatsisname singled out Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Duns Scotus. I can understand Darwin or, stretching things a bit, perhaps even Smith. But Duns Scotus?
That important Scottish theologian was a contemporary of Aquinas, with whom he sometimes disagreed. Yet even a confirmed Thomist would hesitate to describe anyone who isn’t one as a godless materialist. Duns Scotus was a Franciscan friar, for God’s sake.
This goes to show that, when a church attaches itself to a wicked state, it itself becomes wicked – and in this case also moronic.
Like you, I’m puzzled. Insofar as Orthodox theologians deign to take notice of Scholastic theologians, they tend greatly to prefer Scotus to Occam, with Aquinas somewhere between. I regard them all as mere reproducers of the errors of Boethius, but perhaps the holy and learned Archpriest hasn’t read the De Trinitate closely enough to notice either its Sabellianism or its disastrous influence on all later Western thought.
I hope I’m not excessively wicked or moronic, but I’m not an admirer of the friars or their founders. What, I wonder, was so badly wrong with the Benedictines that they had to be marginalised by fanatical innovators?
As for the question of ID Cards, it’s amusing that Sir Keir presents them as a solution to some of the problems caused by immigration – as if a shepherd presented tigers to his flock as a solution to some of the problems caused by wolves. But as you say, it probably won’t happen.