In defence of Big Brother: I want more snooping, not less … Dan Hodges is a Blairite cuckoo in the Miliband nest. He has worked for the Labour Party, the GMB trade union and managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation … We want an Even Bigger Brother, please I want to live in a surveillance state. Big Brother, come cast your watchful eye over me and mine. I love you, bro. Seriously, when I saw the outcry over Government plans to gain access to telephone, email and internet, my initial reaction was: "You mean they can't do that already?" I assumed, somewhat stupidly, that everything we said, typed or viewed was routinely monitored, and then filtered by some giant, super-secret computer tucked away in a heavily guarded subterranean basement of GCHQ: "Hodges has just said he wants to shoot another Liverpool player, sir." "Oh, he's always saying that, Jones. Ignore him." – UK Telegraph/Hodges

Dominant Social Theme: The world needs security in a dangerous age. Where have you gone, Tony Blair?

Free-Market Analysis: Every now and then the UK Telegraph – which is surely the most free-market oriented of major British newspapers – posts a really wacky article. It's probably because the Telegraph is traditionally royalist, as well, and these trends are at war with each other.

This article by Dan Hodges is one of the strangest we've read recently, but from our point of view as elite meme-watchers it is certainly noteworthy. First, it repeats the various justifications for government snooping in the form almost of a parody. And second, Hodges is virtually assaulted in about 600 feedbacks.

The feedback comments themselves are interesting to read because they tend to bear out our contention that many educated folks both in the US and Britain really "get it" when it comes to the advent and prosecution of the expanding surveillance state. If the comments are any indication, they don't like it at all. Here are some excerpts at random:

Rose_Hempton/Today 03:42 AM … The Labour Party is a Frankfurt School, Marxist, totalitarian front. I will not submit to or obey your psycho-political "rules" since they are utterly corrupt and unlawful. I would remind Mr Hodges that governance in this country is by the consent of the people. Where is our consent in these totalitarian diktats? The EUSSR is alive and well.The only law is God's law and English common law. Wake up everyone and take back your rights and freedoms before these psychopathic one-world Marxists get rid of you and your children. Alfred's Law,The Bill of Rights, our Constitutional rights and the Magna Carta are THE LAW and guaeantee our rights and freedom. Go to hell Mr Hodges along with your war criminal, Satanic political hero – Tony B- LIAR

Axl Bollinger/Today 12:17 AM … Eventually all democracies … fall and a small group of senior Government members will rule the world through force, brainwashing, mass killing, scaremongering (like false wars between countries, carefully planned by both Governments) and the dangling of carrots to a select few civil servants. Eventually machines will keep the few at the top in a life of bliss and laziness, and most of the people on Earth will be gone. Only a few genetically modified and brainwashed workers/vegetables will remain. Every time the Governments want a new harem or wife, they will simply have them grown in a laboratory.The above is exactly what will happen if people listen to Cameron, Clegg, Miliband, Blair, Brown, and journalists like Dan Hodges. The assumption of goodness and benevolence from an increasingly powerful state by a poorly educated and gullible public will lead to 1984 every time. For those who laugh at the above in disbelief, look up Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Mao, Mugabe (take your pick) and read books like Animal Farm and 1984.

Roger Brown/Yesterday 09:55 PM … For years East Germany broadcast the advantages of their 'clean society' their propaganda would slag of the West saying there was no prostitution, no crime in East Germany and there wasn't (compared to the decadent West) how could there be? Every third person in the state was working for the Stasi, who in your own family who would fit that profile? This is what happens when the State, Secret Police and security agencies take over full control. … Obama has signed into law the NDAA on the 31st of December 2011 when the US was partying. In effect it abolishes Habeas Corpus it allows the President to have anyone anywhere in the world detained for life without evidence it applies to all US citizens wherever they are. The US government have still not published the bill … Obama said it will never be used against ordinary citizens. Can he be trusted? Obama in the last few weeks has signed the NAT DEFENSE RESOURCES PREPAREDNESS (NDRP). The President now has the authority to take over all resources in USA. Any federal agent can go onto any place i.e. a farm or anywhere and requisition the farm's fuel, supplies, food anything! Everything and everybody's possessions now belong to the state whenever they want them! What happens in the US happens here – you have been warned!

These three responses present the tenor of many others. That they are published in a major UK newspaper is a comment on the unusual times in which we live. The last comment, above, shows us once more that British media is alerting readers not just to what's happening in Britain but in the US as well.

Of course, the article is "over the top" – a kind of parody, and Hodges surely knows it and intends it. (It's not dated April 1, however, so it can' be an April Fool's joke.) The importance of the article to us as elite meme watchers is the virulence of the responses. This cross-section of British respondents is well aware of the direction in which Britain is heading.

This brings up the larger point we make regularly about what we call the Internet Reformation. Like the Gutenberg Press before it, the 'Net has woken up many to the Way the World Really Works. And these individuals are often the more perceptive, verbal and successful in society. They have a disproportionate impact.

Yes, there is a power elite that wants to run the world and is apparently close to doing so. But we often ask how that goal will be truly achieved in the midst of so much exposure of basic goals.

The elites operated in secret throughout the 20th century, but the 21st century has not been kind to them. They are fighting back, of course, attempting to move ahead with world-spanning plans by introducing chaos, economic depression and perhaps world war.

But for us the question remains. How do you implement world government – or a facsimile thereof – when one of your main weapons was stealth and misinformation?

The elites have used fear-based promotions – dominant social themes – to pursue their goal by frightening people into accepting globalist facilities. But more and more these memes are ineffective.

The power elite has turned to brutality and regulatory fascism in the past few years in our view. They have also taken to launching transparent false-flag events to reaffirm their authoritarian memes. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Hodges closes his article as follows:

I don't want less surveillance, I want more of the stuff … Unfortunately, it looks at the moment that the Government is backing off … That's a mistake. For now the civil liberty lobby is in full cry. But one day their clamour will be drowned out by the sound of sirens heading towards the scene of a new terrorist outrage. Those had better be some damn important emails we're all keeping under wraps.

This is always the fallback of authoritarianism – that only government can provide for people's security. But in the 21st century it seems that governments, at the behest of the shadowy elites that run them, are increasingly manufacturing civil unrest and even terrorist incidents.

After Thoughts

The Telegraph feedback seems to show that such manipulations are increasingly subject to skepticism, as is elite control generally. This is a problem that is likely not going to go away. The Internet is a process not an episode.