More accurately labeled Liberalism and Fascism

An important distinction is security for whom? When a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie passes some piece of security legislation, their sole concern is security for the rich elite, not the commoners. In that case, oppression of the people is not an unintended consequence of the legislation going wrong like this image suggests, we’re collateral damage at best and the intended victims of the legislation at worst.

Eh, one can’t really make a decent analysis using vague abstract ideals like ‘liberty’ and ‘security’.

In some ways, security is liberating! For example, some religions have anonymous (private) confessionals and electoralism has anonymous private ballot booths to encourage freedom in voting. I don’t know if I’d be as honest online if I knew people with too much time and money could track my posts back to my real identity and harass me. And without security, these privacies would be merely illusions (see: deanonymization)

And obviously, on the other hand, state security understandably sees certain personal liberties (like downloading bomb-making guides and then buying fertilizer) as a risk beyond the liberty they’re willing to permit. Corporate security might see user anonymity techniques as a legitimate fraud/bot risk. I’ve picked diverse and good-faith examples to demonstrate, there’s plenty of midground and abusive examples of both, don’t worry, I know. (I left reddit many years ago partly for privacy reasons, no need to preach to the choir).

I guess my point is, security and liberties don’t necessarily contradict. But if you have governments and corporations run by the owning class, they have a material interest in suppressing your liberties for their own security. To make that appealing and tolerable, they have an incentive to rebrand this as being about your security. I’ve been in protests that obviously wouldn’t harm a fly and the police presence is consistently absurd. It’s clearly not actually about any of our security, or even the security of property owners, but rather the security of the bourgeois owning class and their way of life.