really safe!?
Today’s security policy is paving the way for tomorrow’s fascism
The security policy in Saxony, Germany and Europe now consists of an extensive architecture of institutions, fences, prisons, police forces, border guards, surveillance systems and databases. These are supposedly there to protect people in Europe, but in fact they control, monitor, exclude and kill people. The argument is security, but the alleged danger is often a political construct designed to scare people and create a need for security mechanisms. The best example is video surveillance, which does not prevent crime but can monitor everyone once installed.
And the greater the injustices and problems in society actually become due to crises, capitalism and climate change, the more fragile the whole system becomes. The state’s solution to this is not to remedy these injustices. Laws are being created that interfere more and more in the lives of individual citizens, restrict our freedom and privacy, monitor us and criminalize protest.
Let’s take a look at the latest police laws, for example. Many of the measures enshrined in them are offensively directed against refugees. In the public debate, problems are then so often linked to the issue of migration that the classification of asylum seeker accommodation as so-called “dangerous places” no longer causes an outcry. Everyone living there is placed under general suspicion. The police have the legal framework to control everyone at all times. House arrest and technical surveillance make it easier to locate and deport people at any time. Stronger border controls with the help of video surveillance and facial recognition do not serve general security but to prevent people from entering. The state treats people as criminals, patronizes and harasses them. This is not a security policy, it is racist exclusion.
So if we want to defend ourselves against authoritarianism, we have to talk about security policy, because these institutions and apparatuses that have been created and the corporations that produce these means and techniques are very powerful. It is therefore not surprising that we find authoritarian and fascist ideas in these very structures. In Germany, there have been cases of organized right-wing networks in the police, military and security authorities for years. Surveillance tools such as the police analysis software that was to be introduced in Germany last year was developed by the US company Palantir, whose boss is an anti-democratic technocrat with fascist ideas.
Collecting data, linking databases, creating systems of complete technical surveillance and control in public spaces, in our homes and on the internet play into the hands of the very people who want to establish authoritarian systems. And if we look at the past, it hardly matters which party has been in power, the laws have been tightened further and further – there have only been very few relaxations and no AfD has been in power yet.
The people who end up in police databases today because they live on the street, occupied a tree to prevent it from being cut down, were at a demonstration, at a football match or in a Kurdish community center are the first to be affected by repression in an autocratic system of tomorrow.
This must not happen! We must fight against this total surveillance that is increasingly tightening our throats and cutting off the path to a just and free society. We need to talk about social concepts in which surveillance and punishment are not the basic logic, but in which social problems are solved with mutual help and solidarity. We need alternatives to police, prisons and security organs that do not function in our interests but only protect the state and capitalist interests. We need a decentralization of power. And alternative concepts for dealing with social conflicts.