Here’s a convenient list of questions HR typically asks during a job application (ie. the Personal Details for Personnel Records form). You might like to print it out for convenience so you have everything ready for your next interview:
| Name | |
| Father’s name | |
| Place of birth | |
| Social origin | |
| All relevant details about family members (include activities and places of residence) | Mother
Father Others |
| Education details | |
| Employment history (include exact dates of commencement and resignation and reasons for each resignation) | 1 2 3 |
| Party membership details | |
| Have you ever had a Party reprimand? (If so, who applied/removed them? When?) | |
| Did you have deviations from the Part line? | |
| Were you involved in discussions/meetings of Party subgroups and factions? | |
| Give details of your ideological positions. | |
| Have you ever had your citizen’s rights taken away? | |
| Have you ever run for election to government positions? | |
| During the war, were you present in German-occupied territories? | |
| Do you have relatives that live overseas? | |
| Have you ever been overseas? If so, when and for what purpose? | |
| Have you ever been investigated or stood trial? (If you’ve been convicted, when, for what and how many years imprisonment? Were your family members also convicted?) |
Of course as you’d have guessed, this is not common practice in Australia but is an exact copy of the questions listed in a [frighteningly accurate] novel I’m reading about life in the USSR in the 70s. The novel and this form have a sense of true horror (the violence and repression being implied, just behind a thin veil). Lots of fascinating details and lots more to come, but I think this form gives a hint of what living in a police state is like.
There are lots of curtailments of civil liberties in western countries and lots of protests where people often say something like “we’re getting closer to a police state”. I hope this form shows the difference between a true police state and a fake police state. In the most heated parts of Bush’s presidency, the US had a thousandth of the police-statehood expressed in this form. And this is meant to be the 70s, two decades after Stalin’s death!
The main feature of a true police state is that you have a permanent record. Everything is on your permanent record. And if you do something your boss, your teacher, your neighbour doesn’t like, it’s on your record. The HR details form was technically unnecessary since what you filled out would be checked against your actual permanent records (and any omissions would lead to criminal prosecution). I think it was more of a form of intimidation, to remind you that nothing is between just you and your employer, you and your parents.
The novel describes how people would hurriedly answer No to everything. Such was the desire to avoid sticking out whilst being examined under this microscope that people would almost accidentally and automatically even answer No to the first three questions. Name? None. Father’s name? No. Place of Birth? None. And if you think getting a job with a criminal record is tough now–!
8 comments ↓
The UK government are (were?) trying to implement a national database who wants to work with vulnerable people – mainly children.
Details on this database would include any criminal record along with any innuendo or suspicion about the person. The database would be used to give a simple YES/NO response as to whether someone was fit to work with children. e.g. If you had a conviction for dangerous driving you’d be banned from working with children with no explanation saying you are safe to work with children but shouldn’t be allowed to drive them anywhere.
There has been (finally) a public outcry at the assumption that everyone is a danger to children unless they have passed this database check that costs money and has to be repeated at regular intervals.
Also, in London there are more CCTV cameras than any city in the world. Crime has been solved due to these cameras, at the rate of one crime per 1,000 cameras per year. The UK has about a quarter of all CCTV cameras in the world, we are the most watched nation on earth. We also have terrorism laws that are being used by local councils to detect fly tippers (rubbish dumpers). We have police who cover up their badge numbers during demonstrations so they cannot be identified. We can also be arrested for filming police. We can be stopped and searched by police for no reason in some areas, in others they have to ask for permission, but if you refuse that is suspicious behaviour and they can then search you.
And Australia has the firewall stopping access to sites that the government deem unsuitable.
We are on a slippery slope. We have people scared of their governments (and their state police) when it should be governments that are scared of their people.
While this is something of the past (USSR police state), we nowadays have to face (and react to) an almost voluntary submission of personal data for big data bases which are there to stay permanently and used for who-knows-what purposes. I am talking about CCTVs, the Internet, recorded phone calls, etc, etc. Young people do not value privacy at all: they are ready to submit all kinds of data to a big brother like facebook. In the UK alone, as commented above, there is one CCTV per 14 people. Staggering number. And, as I commented a couple of days ago, the government is asking us, professors, to act as police agents to monitor overseas students with visas and have them expelled if they miss 10 classes.
There is a difference with a police state like USSR and a democracy like USA and the UK: it is much harder to see the evil coming in the latter case.
In all of my reading I don’t know of anyone who said that the Bush administration was even roughly the equivalent of the USSR. What I did read was that we were headed in that direction. The conflagration of disagreement with treason, the arrest of people at public events for having T-shirts or bumper stickers that criticize the president. The claims of executive power to indefinitely detain citizens without judicial oversight. The assignment (for the first time ever) of the regular Army to US soil. Pervasive and unregulated data collection on citizens.
None of these actions were performed at the levels seen in the Soviet Union, but I don’t know anyone who said they were, and your creation of such a straw man seems an attempt to dismiss them. I hope it is not.
Phaedrus, like the teabaggers who compare Obama to Hitler, I’ve seen plenty of such rhetoric and I suspect you have too (although people rarely word it as blatantly as the teabaggers).
The point was to suggest that the difference between a police state and a democratic state with government infringement of civil liberties is:
1. a difference in degree to an extent that’s hard to even fathom for people who’ve lived in democratic states [with government infringement of civil liberties] all their lives
2. a difference in kind. The HR form shows that a totalitarian state presumes to own the whole person and there’s not even a question of any part of it being otherwise.
I think keddaw’s example of the Y/N database is the closest to this mentality of all the examples cited: a complex impersonal machine which combines the presumption that any part of one’s life can spill over into any other with arbitrariness.
Takis, what did you mean by it being harder to see in a democracy? Or is it just that in the police state the evil is already here so it’s not coming?
Police states aren’t a thing of the past, I think the closest at the moment to the society described in this post might be North Korea. I think it also has something to do with how pure the socialism is, N Korea is probably the only one of the old communist countries left where there’s no capitalist enterprise. Which makes every employee a government employee — and that’s the key to the type of monitoring we’re talking about.
Not sure how Facebook specifically is relevant, it’s no different to you posting anything on the net since it all becomes a matter of permanent unexpungable record. (And yet the internet makes this type of police state almost impossible to run.)
Michael: As far as I know, there is a difference between me posting something on the Internet and an organization, like Facebook, which collects, *organizes*, and uses users’ information for a variety of purposes. Currrently, to “connect to friends”, but, in the future, who knows? I read a couple of days ago (but can’t find the source at the moment) that Canada took issue with Facebook because the latter keeps organized permanent records of all its members.
As for my sentence about evil and democracy, I didn’t really mean something profound. I meant that, in a police state everyone knows that the government is acting against people. Whereas in a democracy it may take a little while for people to find out about some evil.
Takis, thought you might be interested in the new tightening of immigration policies for UK academia in action:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1243
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1244
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1245
That’s seriously messed up.
[...] working. For of course, the notion of privacy especially in terms of your career is nonexistent (see a previous post). So if you get fired because of a Transgression against Party Lines, every future employer will [...]
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