“What happened here was the gradual
habituation of the people, little by little,
to being governed by surprise; to receiving
decisions deliberated in secret; to
believing that the situation was so
complicated that the government had to act
on information which the people could not
understand, or so dangerous that, even if
the people could understand it, it could not
be released because of national security...
This separation of government from people,
this widening of the gap, took place so
gradually and so insensibly, each step
disguised (perhaps not even intentionally)
as a temporary emergency measure or
associated with true patriotic allegiance or
with real social purposes. And all the
crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so
occupied the people that they did not see
the slow motion underneath, of the whole
process of government growing remoter and
remoter.”—Historian Milton Mayer,
They Thought They Were
Free: The Germans, 1933-45
February 24, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Brace yourself.
There
is something being concocted in the dens of
power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t
bode well for the future of this country.
Anytime
you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the
antics of the political ruling class that they
are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in
the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and
rules by fiat, you’d better beware. And anytime
you have a government so far removed from its
people as to ensure that they are never seen,
heard or heeded by those elected to represent
them, you’d better beware.
The
world has been down this road before.
As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his
seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power,
They Thought They Were Free,
“Most of us did not want to think about
fundamental things and never had. There was no
need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful,
fundamental things to think about—we were decent
people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous
changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes,
fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national
enemies', without and within, that we had no
time to think about these dreadful things that
were growing, little by little, all around us.”
We are
at our most vulnerable right now.
The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not
extremism—delivered by way of
sovereign citizens
or
radicalized Muslims—but
despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose
only allegiance is to power and money.
Nero fiddled while
Rome burned.
America is burning, and all most Americans can
do is switch the channel, tune out what they
don’t want to hear, and tune into their own
personal
echo chambers.
We’re
in a national state of denial.
Yet no
amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh
reality that the danger in our midst is posed by
an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no
regard for the Constitution, Congress, the
courts or the citizenry.
If the
team colors have changed from blue to red,
that’s just cosmetic.
The
playbook remains the same. The leopard has not
changed its spots.
Scrape
off the surface layers and you will find that
the American police state is alive and well and
continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the
American people.
“We the
people” are no longer living the American Dream.
We’re
living the American Lie.
Indeed, Americans have been lied to so
sincerely, so incessantly, and for so long
by politicians of all stripes—who
lie compulsively and without any seeming
remorse—that they’ve almost come to prefer the
lies trotted out by those in government over
less-palatable truths.
The
American people have become compulsive
believers.
As Nick Cohen writes for The Guardian,
“Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They
can harm no one, if no one listens to them.
Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they
should terrify you.
Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes
give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns
the charlatan into the president. Their
credulity ensures that the propaganda of
half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the
power to change the world.”
While
telling the truth “in a time of universal deceit
is,” as George Orwell concluded, “a
revolutionary act,” believing the truth—and
being able to distinguish the truth from a
lie—is also a revolutionary act.
Here’s
a truth few Americans want to acknowledge:
nothing has changed (at least, not for the
better) since Barack Obama passed the reins of
the police state to Donald Trump.
The
police state is still winning. We the people are
still losing.
In
fact, the American police state has continued to
advance at the same costly, intrusive,
privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying,
relentless pace under President Trump as it did
under President Obama.
Police haven’t stopped
disregarding the rights of citizens.
Having been given the green light to probe,
poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip, shoot
and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in
almost any circumstance, all with the general
blessing of the courts, America’s law
enforcement officials are no longer mere
servants of the people entrusted with keeping
the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep the
masses corralled, under control, and treated
like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.
SWAT teams haven’t stopped
crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed
to address an astonishingly trivial array of
criminal activities or mere community nuisances
including angry dogs, domestic disputes,
improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer,
and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With more
than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every
year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively
routine police matters and federal agencies
laying claim to their own law enforcement
divisions, the
incidence of botched raids
and related casualties continue to rise.
The Pentagon and the Department
of Homeland Security haven’t stopped
militarizing and federalizing local police.
Police forces continue to be transformed into
heavily armed extensions of the military,
complete with jackboots, helmets, shields,
batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles,
body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized
drones. In training police to look and act like
the military and use the weapons and tactics of
war against American citizens, the government
continues to turn the United States into a
battlefield.
Schools haven’t stopped treating
young people like hard-core prisoners.
School districts
continue to team up with law enforcement to
create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by
imposing a “double dose” of punishment for
childish infractions: suspension or expulsion
from school, accompanied by an arrest by the
police and a trip to juvenile court. In this
way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the
state continues to be taught by example in the
schools, through school lockdowns where
police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the
classroom, and
zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses
equally and result in young people being
expelled for childish behavior.
For-profit
private prisons haven’t stopped
locking up Americans and immigrants
alike
at taxpayer expense. States continue to
outsource prison management to private
corporations out to make a profit at taxpayer
expense. And how do you make a profit in the
prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws
that impose harsh penalties for the slightest
noncompliance in order keep the prison cells
full and corporate investors happy.
Censorship hasn’t stopped. First
Amendment activities continue to be pummeled,
punched, kicked, choked, chained and
generally gagged
all across the country. The reasons for such
censorship vary widely from political
correctness, safety concerns and bullying to
national security and hate crimes but the end
result remained the same: the complete
eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred
to as the “principal pillar of a free
government.”
The courts
haven’t stopped
marching in lockstep with the police
state.
The courts continue to be dominated by
technicians and statists who are deferential to
authority, whether government or business.
Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decisions in recent
years have most often been characterized by an
abject deference to government authority,
military and corporate interests. They have run
the gamut from suppressing free speech
activities and justifying suspicionless strip
searches to warrantless home invasions and
conferring constitutional rights on
corporations, while denying them to citizens.
Government
bureaucrats haven’t stopped
turning American citizens into criminals.
The average American now unknowingly commits
three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance
of vague laws that render otherwise innocent
activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of
the police state and its corporate allies.
The
surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying
on Americans’ communications, transactions or
movements. On any given day, whether
you’re walking through a store, driving your
car, checking email, or talking to friends and
family on the phone, you can be sure that some
government agency, whether it’s your local
police, a fusion center, the National Security
Agency or one of the government’s many corporate
partners, is still monitoring and tracking you.
The
TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling
travelers. Under
the pretext of protecting the nation’s
infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems,
water and power supplies, telecommunications
systems and so on) against criminal or terrorist
attacks, TSA task forces (comprised of federal
air marshals, surface transportation security
inspectors, transportation security officers,
behavior detection officers and explosive
detection canine teams) continue to do random
security sweeps of nexuses of transportation,
including ports, railway and bus stations,
airports, ferries and subways, as well as
political conventions, baseball games and music
concerts. Sweep tactics include the use of x-ray
technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs,
among other things.
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
|
Congress hasn’t stopped enacting
draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and
the NDAA. These
laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law
and the constitutional rights of American
citizens, continue to re-orient our legal
landscape in such a way as to ensure that
martial law, rather than the rule of law, our
U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we
navigate life in the United States.
The
Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped
being a “wasteful,
growing, fear-mongering beast.”
Is the DHS capable of plotting and
planning to
turn the national guard into a federalized,
immigration police force?
No doubt about it. Remember, this is the agency
that is notorious for militarizing the police
and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents
and veterans; stockpiling ammunition;
distributing license plate readers; contracting
to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones
with Stingray devices; carrying out military
drills and lockdowns in American cities; using
the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual
strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying
out soft target checkpoints; directing
government workers to spy on Americans;
conducting widespread spying networks using
fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free
border control searches; funding city-wide
surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and
other spybots.
The
military industrial complex hasn’t stopped
profiting from
endless wars
abroad. America’s expanding military
empire continues to bleed the country dry at a
rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20
million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on
war than all 50 states combined spend on health,
education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most
Americans fail to recognize is that these
ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the
country safe and everything to do with enriching
the military industrial complex at taxpayer
expense.
The Deep State’s shadow
government hasn’t stopped calling the shots
behind the scenes.
Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats,
corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and
button-pushers who are actually calling the
shots behind the scenes, this government
within a government continues
to be the real reason “we the people” have no
real control over our so-called representatives.
It’s every facet of a government that is no
longer friendly to freedom and is working
overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot
and render the citizenry powerless in the face
of the government’s power grabs, corruption and
abusive tactics.
And the American people haven’t
stopped acting like gullible sheep.
In fact, many Americans have been so carried
away by their
blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their
respective political gods
that they have lost sight of the one thing that
has remained constant in recent years: our
freedoms are steadily declining.
Here’s
the problem as I see it: “we the people” have
become so trusting, so gullible, so easily
distracted, so out-of-touch and so sure that our
government will always do the right thing by us
that we have ignored the warning signs all
around us.
In so
doing, we have failed to recognize such warning
signs as potential red flags to use as
opportunities to ask questions, demand answers,
and hold our government officials accountable to
respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of
law.
Unfortunately, once a free people allows the
government to make inroads into their freedoms,
or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips
for security, it quickly becomes a slippery
slope to outright tyranny. And it doesn’t really
matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican
at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on
both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the
same philosophy of authoritarian government.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People,
this is what happens when you ignore the warning
signs.
This is
what happens when you fail to take alarm at the
first experiment on your liberties.
This is
what happens when you fail to challenge
injustice and government overreach until the
prison doors clang shut behind you.
In the
American police state that now surrounds us,
there are no longer such things as innocence,
due process, or justice—at least, not in the way
we once knew them. We are all potentially
guilty, all potential criminals, all suspects
waiting to be accused of a crime.
So you
can try to persuade yourself that you are free,
that you still live in a country that values
freedom, and that it is not too late to make
America great again, but to anyone who has been
paying attention to America’s decline over the
past 50 years, it will be just another lie.
The
German people chose to ignore the truth and
believe the lie.
They
were not oblivious to the horrors taking place
around them. As historian Robert Gellately
points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted
to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration
camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and
persecutions need only read the newspapers.”
The
warning signs were definitely there, blinking
incessantly like large neon signs.
“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority
voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what
they could read in the press and hear by word of
mouth about the secret police, the concentration
camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . .
[T]here is no getting away from the fact that at
that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German
people backed him.’”
Half a
century later, the wife of a prominent German
historian, neither of whom were members of the
Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone
felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty
percent who lived productively and positively
throughout the time. . . . We also had good
years. We had wonderful years.”
In
other words, as long as their creature
comforts remained undiminished, as long as
their bank accounts remained flush, as long
as they weren’t being discriminated
against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot,
stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor,
life was good.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
As
Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor observed,
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number
to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the
common men, the functionaries ready to believe
and to act without asking questions.”
Freedom
demands responsibility.
Freedom
demands that people stop sleep-walking through
life, stop cocooning themselves in political
fantasies, and stop distracting themselves with
escapist entertainment.
Freedom
demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and
Republicans and start thinking like human
beings, or at the very least, Americans.
Freedom
demands that we not remain silent in the face of
evil or wrongdoing but actively stand against
injustice.
Freedom
demands that we treat others as we would have
them treat us. That is the law of reciprocity,
also referred to as the Golden Rule, and it is
found in nearly every world religion, including
Judaism and Christianity.
In
other words, if you don’t want to be locked up
in a prison cell or a detention camp—if you
don’t want to be discriminated against because
of the color of your race, religion, politics or
anything else that sets you apart from the
rest—if you don’t want your loved ones shot at,
strip searched, tasered, beaten and treated like
slaves—if you don’t want to have to be
constantly on guard against government eyes
watching what you do, where you go and what you
say—if you don’t want to be tortured,
waterboarded or forced to perform degrading
acts—if you don’t want your children to grow up
in a world without freedom—then don’t allow
these evils to be inflicted on anyone else, no
matter how tempting the reason or how fervently
you believe in your cause.
As
German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident
Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, “We are not to
simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the
wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke
into the wheel itself.”
Constitutional attorney and author John W.
Whitehead is founder and president
of The
Rutherford Institute.
His new book Battlefield
America: The War on the
American People (SelectBooks,
2015) is available online at
www.amazon.com.
Whitehead
can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
