There’s a good article by Henry Potter about ID cards in the Guardian this week. I was talking to someone about this on Wednesday and repeated the point Potter makes – we cannot predict or trust future government. My colleague retorted that we cannot trust or predict current government. Which takes me on the recent reading.

Browsing in second hand bookshops is always a great way to pass time and stimulate the mind and imagination. I was recently deeply engrossed in the contents of Unsworths Booksellers on the Euston Road in London, flicking through a book called ‘Fallen Bastions’ by G.E.R.Gedye; machine guns in Vienna, artillery bombardment of the Karl Marx Hof. What’s this all about? New intellectual territority.

It’s a terrifying account of how Austrian democracy was subverted by the nazis and how fascism eventually came to power there in 1938 (with the open connivance of the British government of the time). Gedye talks about the concentration camp in Dachau, the Jews made to scrub the streets with harsh acidic water. The beatings and attacks. The book was published in 1939.

Let us move on. The day I finished this, I was in another secondhand bookshop in Norfolk and found ‘Men Crucified’ by Bruno Heilig published in 1941. Heilig was one of the inmates of Dachau who Gedye had described. Heilig describes the experience from the inside of Dachau, the daily deaths from overwork, the relentless cruelty of the guards. He’s one of the lucky ones and is freed and released in 1938 and moves to England.

Back to Unsworths a week later and another book catches my eye ‘ Story of a Secret State’ by Jan Karski. Poland, August 1939. The invasion by the German and Russian armies. The destruction of a country. Karski is a prominent member of the underground, is captured by the Gestapo but is helped to escape, not before he has almost been tortured to death. Karski is sent out of Poland by the underground so the true story of what is happening in the country occupied by the nazis can be told.

The book is published in 1944 and very quickly sells almost 400,000 copies. Karski describes how in the underground, the resistance fighters would change their identities; their new life story was called their legend.

Then I spotted ‘The River of Angry Dogs’ by Mira Hamermesh. The story of a young Polish woman, wrenched from her mother and father, both who perish in the holocaust. She survives by a mixture of luck and cunning, lying about her past and present. She escapes the terrible fate of Poland in 1941. It is estimated that 20% of the Polish population is killed during the war.

Did anyone in 1935 expect this catastrophic development of events? Did anyone in 1938? Did anyone in the summer of 1939 imagine that 20% of the population of Poland and 20% of the population of Ukraine would be slaughtered in the next five years?

Chamberlain was a British Prime Minister who the peolpe were expected to ‘trust’. He mercilessly helped the nazis take what they wanted in Austria and Czechoslovakia. He helped create the conditions for the murderous history that followed.

It’s less than 70 years ago.

Many countries in Europe have had many more years of repressive governments than ’stable’ democracies.

Hand over all our data to governments? Either the current or the future?