The following are excerpts from a speech recently given by Seth Hertlein to the Patriots for Europe Foundation, Brussels. Hertlein is Vice President and Global Head of Policy at Ledger, a leading hardware wallet company for securing cryptocurrencies and digital assets.
Fifty-two years ago, the world was given a book that tore open the façade of a monstrous ideology. That book was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
It is not, as many believe, simply a history of prisons. Rather, it is the anatomy of a system. An organism. Solzhenitsyn describes it as a metastatic cancer, a network of “sewers” running beneath the grand, utopian façade of the Soviet Union, into which millions of its citizens were flushed.
The Gulag was not an accident of the Soviet state; it was its most perfect and necessary expression. It was the state’s primary organ of digestion, processing “human material” that the system, or its rulers, deemed undesirable, problematic, or simply . . . “un-managed.”
And how did one end up in this archipelago of ice and death? What were the great crimes that warranted ten years, twenty-five years, or all too often, a life sentence of hard labour?
It was terrifyingly simple. The system was codified in the infamous Article 58 of the criminal code. It had sections for Treason, Armed Uprising and Espionage. But it also had sections for Propaganda or agitation against the Soviet power (section 58-10) and, most terrifyingly, “Any organisational activity directed to the preparation or commission of [such] crimes . . . as well as participation in any organisation formed for the preparation or commission of one of [these] crimes” (section 58-11).
This was the Soviet “thought crime” statute, and it was a blank cheque for terror.
Solzhenitsyn tells their stories.
- There was the engineer, an “Old Specialist,” who was denounced as a “wrecker” and arrested because a piece of factory machinery failed. He went to the Gulag for “sabotage.”
- There was the plumber arrested for “terrorist activity” simply because he carried a set of tools in his bag near a government building.
- There was the woman who, in a private letter to her husband, complained about the shortages in their town. She was arrested for “anti-Soviet agitation.”
- There was the man who told a private joke about Stalin. Ten years.
- There was the shopkeeper who wrapped a piece of fish in a newspaper that happened to contain a picture of Stalin. He was arrested for “counter-revolutionary propaganda.”
Does any of this sound familiar?
The Gulag was not built for murderers and thieves. It was built for plumbers and engineers, poets and farmers. It was built for anyone who knew the wrong person, said the wrong word, or thought the wrong thought.
But the machine could not run on terror alone. It needed a fuel. And that fuel was surveillance. The system sought to be omniscient (or as close to it as was possible at that time). The goal was to atomize society. To destroy trust. To isolate every citizen, terrified of each other, capable of confiding in no one. The state, in its godlike ambition, sought to erase the very concept of a private sphere. This was a society where every citizen was both a prisoner and a guard, where the most dangerous crime was simply to have an independent thought.
We sit here today, in the comfort of this chamber, and we tell ourselves, “That was then. That was them. That could never happen here.”
But we are wrong, and it already here.
While we have busied ourselves and distracted ourselves with the conveniences of the modern age, a new and far more sophisticated system is being built all around us. A new archipelago of control is being assembled piece by piece, not with watchtowers and barbed wire, but with vast real-time data collection and predictive analytics linked to personal identities.
It is a new architecture of total, administrative control. It is the Digital Gulag.
The regime building it is not the overt, brutal socialism that Solzhenitsyn faced. This is something more subtle, and perhaps more insidious. This is the new oligarchy of managerialism.
As writers like James Burnham, Christopher Lasch and, more recently, N.S. Lyons have described, our new ruling class is not one of ideological zealots, but of credentialed so-called “experts.” A transnational professional class of technocratic managerial elites who believe, to their very core, that the common person—the demos—is, according to Woodrow Wilson, a “clumsy nuisance,” or, if you ask Hillary Clinton, a “basket of deplorables.” At best, we are a problem to be managed.
Their highest value is not freedom, which is messy and unpredictable. Nor is it democracy, despite their platitudes, for the same reason. Nor is it truth, because the truth has a knack for getting in the way of a well-planned agenda. No, their highest values are stability, because stability keeps them in power, and consensus, provided it is a consensus they define, but above all, compliance.
And to achieve this managed, sterile, “safe” society, they require the same fuel as the Soviets: total information.
Despite their exhortations, the managerial class despises democracy, because it is a threat to their unchallenged control. It is the un-managed, unpredictable, and authentic voice of the people – the demos. And so, to protect their system from the dangers of a fickle populace, they build fences.
Fence One: The End of Private Thought
They call it the Child Sexual Abuse Materials Regulation. We call it Chat Control. But, what a noble cause? Who could be against protecting children? No one, of course. But therein lies the danger. They use this unassailable pretext to perpetrate a grave injustice.
The original proposal was blunt. Mandatory surveillance of all private communication. And when Europeans rightfully spoke out, the Commission and its supporters in the Council simply reframed. The new version is more subtle. In place of mandatory screening, it would place the burden on communication providers to “take all reasonable risk mitigation measures,” which it leaves to the Member States to define.
And, because a managerialist state must always grow, the Chat Control proposal calls for the establishment of a new EU Centre on Child Sexual Abuse, to serve as a central hub for spying on European citizens in the name of “protecting the children.”
In the digital age, end-to-end encrypted communication is the only truly private way for citizens to communicate with each other. And the chat control proposal remains squarely on the table.
Following closely behind Chat Control is the so-called ProtectEU Roadmap. Here again the Commission demands breaking encryption so that law enforcement can have what they call “lawful access to information.” These are top notch Orwellian euphemisms that actually mean the opposite of what they say.
The police, of course, already have lawful access to information. They can go to a court, swear out under oath the evidence they have against a suspect, and if it passes muster, a judge will issue a warrant. This legal process protects the rights of citizens who are, after all, innocent until proven guilty. But the Commission finds due process too tedious and time consuming. It wants information in real time and it doesn’t want to have to justify it. It also wants information not only on criminal suspects, but on everyone all the time. So, what it calls “lawful access to information” is actually unlawful access, or, more precisely, extra-legal access in that they want it outside of the law.
But make no mistake about what this so-called “lawful access” is. It is the Stasi opening your mail and staking out your home; the KGB tapping your phone and planting listening devices in your bedroom; a commissar in place of a priest in the other side of the confessional. The only difference today is how much easier it is.
And, what happens to a human soul when the state infiltrates the private sanctum of one’s own mind? Solzhenitsyn saw it. It creates a permanent chilling effect. You stop innovating. You stop questioning. You stop dissenting. You stop trusting your family, your friends. You self-censor. You become that atomized Soviet citizen, terrified that your private thoughts will be flagged by an algorithm and misinterpreted by a bureaucrat. In short, you lose your humanity.
To be continued
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