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For a start, lose the whole "ID card" advertising slant on the thing. In China, they are the same, Internal Passports that Josef Stalin taught Mao how to use. They serve the same purposes, too, as they do in many other Soviet legacy locations.
They are used as a control mechanism, and in their day, they had an advertising campaign of their own, too. Follow me here, and you might find it entertaining. I know that I do.
The story was - and still is, by the way - that you, by which I mean you, yourself, sitting there, desperately WANT to live in the wondrous, egalitarian totalitarianality of a Soviet system.
The place is irrelevant.
It's the dazzling Chinese rural health clinics to which prospective patients must bring not only much money, in cash, to bribe nurses for exotic items like Band-Aids and tissues, but must pack their own pharmacy, as well. THOSE are what you have a lust to obtain.
You stay awake at night, plotting, under your tattered sheets, with flickering flashlights, scribbling covert methods of obtaining the thrill of standing in line for six hours to get the permission stamp upon your papers which will allow you to stand in line for ten hours to get the next stamp in line, and if you're as lucky as the average Ukrainian, you might find that a luxurious allocation of ten cubic meters of concrete-floored housing has been your glorious reward, although it might be decades before graft and corruption allow more than the foundation of that building to be installed. But, you seethe with desire for it.
You would chew your way through barbed wire, leap tank traps, swim rivers and navigate Alpine glaciers in winter to get the ten-kopek-an-hour rate on ping-pong table rentals in a Russian park. Though there may be not net, though the table is shattered, thought the paddles are stripped of facings and the balls are sorely dented, you would brave deserts of hazard to obtain that especial joy.
For your lust, your seething envy, your plotting and your greed, it is NECESSARY for good citizens to guard themselves. Against your predacious intentions the governments of whole nations must act upon those citizens' behalves.
And so, there are Internal Passports, which must be carried at all times, in all places, and without which the next stop is jail. Frequent checks are enacted to assure state security that only good citizens and not you nefarious plotters are enjoying the glories of the nations' prides. Refusal to provide that passport upon demand at any time and in any place is to join the ranks of sinister co-conspirators, who are known to be active on your evilly intentioned behalves. They are instantly arrested to prevent you from overturning the wonderful lifestyle which you envy so much.
It is known that your envy has driven you to hatred of innocent children and harmless adults. Every ill that occurs is swiftly laid at your doorstep, and the march of glory goes on.
For seventy-five years, that particular story has filled the schoolroom lectures of more than a third of the world.
Yet, in 2004, within five minutes, I saw an East European woman face down a policeman who asked for her Internal Passport by rearing up and demanding to know, "Why? What do you think that I've done, you idiot?!", and overheard two American businessmen in an outdoor cafe, fifteen feet away from her, assure each other, "With the ID Cards, we'll be safer, from them."
What goes around may come around.
But some things require volunteers.
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