kyser_soze said:
...Seriously - you should take a trip to somewhere like China, Kazahkstan or Turkmenistan, or maybe Burma (where being the democratically elected leader gets you over a decade under house arrest) and find out what a real police state is, somewhere where just walking down the street whistling a tune that a state official doesn't like can mean you can go to jail and sit there for years without being charged.
Then come back and say that the UK is a police state.
I lived in Beijing for a year and a half, ended up with an invalid visa through changing jobs and my visa not being processed correctly, I was hit by jingcha, and kind of deported, and while there I witnessed a fair few protesters in Tian'anmen Square being bundled into the back of vans and the vans shaking as those inside were being assaulted.
I just think it's a matter of scale.
It really opened my eyes to what a slippery slope we're on with the gradual erosion of our rights.
Lots of my Chinese friends think we in the UK live in some kind of liberal utopia where we can say and do what we please. They have no idea that there are more similarities than they can possibly imagine.
All they hear from Western countries is about China's appalling record on human rights, when we have Belmarsh, a government that enacted a law specifically (although unsuccessfully) with the intention of depriving Brian Thingymajig of a right to protest near parliament, people are treated brutally by the police more often than is widely known or believed by the general public.
I just think it's hypocritically one-sided to condemn countries such as those you mentioned -- which rightly deserve that condemnation in respect of those issues -- without similarly taking a long, hard look at our own record of human rights. We tend to act as though we're on the moral high horse and beyond reproach, but really we're not. Like I said, it's just a matter of scale, in the UK there's probably a handful of people who die in police custody each year, whereas in other, 'badder' countries there are probably hundreds or thousands. We're not beyond reproach, there's blood on our hands, war crimes committed in our name in Iraq/Afghanistan and so on.
I just don't see it as a matter of black and white, we're a police state as bad as China/Burma or wherever or we're not a police state at all; we're guilty of human rights abuses as bad as those inflicted in China/Burma, or we're not guilty of any human rights abuses at all. There are shades of grey. We're not blameless. We're just not as bad as the other countries you mention, but just because we're not as bad, doesn't mean that we're not on that spectrum, we are, but just at the mild end of it.
