David Arranovitch: Lessons in Raping History

The Antagonist's attention has been drawn to a BBC web site article The Price On Your Head which asks the very necessary question that everyone seems to be ignoring in the ID card rumpus, "Why are our personal details worth anything at all?"

The fact is our personal details aren't worth anything at all, other than some arbitrary value that someone who stands to gain or profit from them tells us they have, and which we then either ascribe to, or ignore for the valueless nonsense that it is.

Without fully exploring the valuelessness of identity and the requirement to prove it as perceived by governments and authorities the world over, or as perceived by we, the people, who can happily go about most of our daily business without the need to prove our identity to anyone, the BBC article ends with a quote from David Aaranovitch, who writes in The Times:

"I don't care if the folks in Old Tesco House are joking about my purchase of a family-sized tub of Vaseline, or if I am entered on a national DNA database which could help to track down rapists.

I am not a shoplifter or a rapist."

And with these disingenuous words Arranovitch at once shoplifts the history of all persecuted peoples everywhere and rapes the memories of their tortured pasts.

The Antagonist suggests that it would be sensible for someone with a surname of Aaranovitch to understand properly the well-documented history of 1930s and 1940s Germany which led to the persecution of 6 million Jews and millions of other people deemed 'undesirable' such as the Roma people, who probably weren't shoplifters or rapists either, before committing such trite nonsense to paper before the 'educated' readership of The Times.