I'd like to say that this was eye opening, but this has been going on since Bush came to power, and probably before. One only has to watch George Clooney's new film 'Good Night and Good Luck' to draw parallels between the war on terror and the McCarthy witch hunts.
I knew about the Moz thing already; I'm thinking of making a t-shirt for the gigs: 'Morrissey - our threat to national security'
What was interesting was the bit about Henry Rollins and the book ... WTF, have these governments no sense of irony, surely to God they've heard of '1984' and 'Farenheit 451'? It appears that in a few short decades the West has gone from a morally stringent society fighting for liberalism, to a morally reprehensible one fighting to reinstate autocratic rule.
It often forces me to throw the newspapers aside, put my head in my hands and despair. Because, while governments fiddle, their countries are burning; by all means have a tight system of security, but my God, when you see how our so called 'immigration' system shoves vulnerable foreigners into housing estates that make Iraq look like Disneyworld, when you see how those born here have been dragged up, when you see how many people live below the poverty line and how right wing newspapers cater for the illiterate masses ... well, it makes you want to cry, and you question the efficacy of all this money spent on pissing off half the population and whipping the other half into a frenzy of hatred. But I can never stop reading these stories and getting angry about the double standards of a government (in Britain) that we thought might stand for human values. It might spur us angry people into some sort of revolution. I never thought Blair could turn this ship around in just 8 years, but I thought he could start steering to avoid the iceberg ... Now, come voting day, I don't know what I'll do. Go set up home in a cave in the Lake District probably.
