In his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a totalitarian society in which a menacing Ministry of Truth, headed by the mysterious ‘Big Brother’, subjects all citizens to non-stop surveillance and thought control. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been immensely influential ever since its release a few years after the Second World War, and phrases like ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Orwellian society’ are used in the post-9/11 debate on the rights of the individual v/s national security.
On the one hand, many people oppose the attempts made by governments of Western countries to squash terrorism by subjecting their citizens to surveillance which greatly diminishes the freedom and personal privacy that we have come to take for granted. What is the point of defending democracy, one might ask, if our struggle to preserve it is ultimately going to destroy it?
On the other hand, supporters of the new stringent security measures argue that freedom and personal privacy is no good to you if you are dead, and that honest and law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from surveillance and crime control. On this view, we must face reality and accept that terrorism is a much bigger threat to our personal freedom than a few cameras and monitored e-mail.
In your fifth blog, I would like to read your thoughts on this issue. What is good and bad about restricting the freedom of a democratic country in order to preserve democracy itself? Perhaps you have experiences of your own that you would like to share, or maybe you would like to argue that this is a non-issue.
The deadline for this assignment is Sunday, 17 May.
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