“The triumph of
the S.S. demands that the tortured victim
allow himself to be led to the noose without
protesting, that he renounce and abandon
himself to the point of ceasing to affirm
his identity. And it is not for nothing. It
is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism,
that the S.S. men desire his defeat. They
know that
the system which succeeds in destroying its
victim before he mounts the scaffold . . .
is incomparably the best for keeping a whole
people in slavery.”—Hannah
Arendt reporting on the trial of Adolf
Eichmann
March
02, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- You can’t have it both ways.
You
can’t live in a constitutional republic if you
allow the government to act like a police state.
You
can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the
government to operate like a dictatorship.
You
can’t expect to have your rights respected if
you allow the government to treat whomever it
pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard
for the rule of law.
If
you’re inclined to advance this double standard
because you believe you have done nothing wrong
and have nothing to hide, beware: there’s
always a boomerang effect.
Whatever dangerous practices you allow the
government to carry out now—whether it’s in the
name of national security or protecting
America’s borders or making America great
again—rest assured, these same practices can and
will be used against you when the government
decides to set its sights on you.
Nothing
is ever as simple as the government claims it
is.
The war
on drugs turned out to be a war on the American
people, waged with SWAT teams and militarized
police.
The war
on terror turned out to be a war on the American
people, waged with warrantless surveillance and
indefinite detention.
The war
on immigration will be yet another war on the
American people, waged with roving government
agents demanding “papers, please.”
So you see, when you talk about empowering
government agents to demand identification from
anyone they suspect might be an illegal
immigrant—the current scheme being entertained
by the Trump administration to ferret out and
cleanse the country of illegal immigrants—what
you’re really talking about is creating a
society in which you are
required to identify yourself
to any government worker who demands
it.
Just recently, in fact, passengers arriving in
New York’s JFK Airport on a domestic flight from
San Francisco were
ordered to show their “documents” to border
patrol agents
in order to get off the plane.
This is
how you pave the way for a national
identification system.
Americans have always resisted adopting a
national ID card for good reason: it gives the
government and its agents the ultimate power to
target, track and terrorize the populace
according to the government’s own nefarious
purposes.
National ID card systems have been used before,
by other oppressive governments, in the name of
national security, invariably with horrifying
results.
For instance, in Germany, the Nazis required all
Jews to carry special
stamped ID cards
for travel within the country. A prelude to the
yellow Star of David badges, these stamped cards
were instrumental in identifying Jews for
deportation to death camps in Poland.
Author
Raul Hilberg summarizes the impact that such a
system had on the Jews:
The whole
identification system, with its personal
documents, specially assigned names, and
conspicuous tagging in public, was
a powerful
weapon in the hands of the police.
First, the system was an auxiliary device
that facilitated the enforcement of
residence and movement restrictions. Second,
it was an independent control measure in
that it enabled the police to pick up any
Jew, anywhere, anytime. Third, and perhaps
most important, identification had a
paralyzing effect on its victims.
In South Africa during apartheid, pass books
were used to regulate the movement of black
citizens and segregate the population. The Pass
Laws Act of 1952 stipulated where, when and for
how long a black African could remain in certain
areas.
Any government employee could strike out entries,
which cancelled the permission to remain in an
area. A pass book that did not have a valid
entry resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of
the bearer.
Identity cards played a crucial
role in the genocide of the Tutsis
in the central African country of Rwanda. The
assault, carried out by extremist Hutu militia
groups, lasted around 100 days and resulted in
close to a million deaths. While the ID cards
were not a precondition to the genocide, they
were a facilitating factor. Once the genocide
began, the production of
an identity card with the designation “Tutsi”
spelled a death sentence at any roadblock.
Identity cards have also helped oppressive
regimes carry out
eliminationist policies such as mass expulsion,
forced relocation and group denationalization.
Through the use of identity cards, Ethiopian
authorities were able to identify people with
Eritrean affiliation during the mass expulsion
of 1998. The Vietnamese government was able to
locate ethnic Chinese more easily during their
1978-79 expulsion. The USSR used identity cards
to force the relocation of ethnic Koreans
(1937), Volga Germans (1941), Kamyks and
Karachai (1943), Crimean Tartars, Meshkhetian
Turks, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars (1944) and
ethnic Greeks (1949). And ethnic Vietnamese were
identified for group denationalization through
identity cards in Cambodia in 1993, as were the
Kurds in Syria in 1962.
And in the United States, post-9/11,
more than 750 Muslim men were rounded up on the
basis of their religion and ethnicity
and detained for up to eight months. Their
experiences echo those of 120,000
Japanese-Americans who were similarly detained
75 years ago following the attack on Pearl
Harbor.
Despite a belated apology and monetary issuance
by the U.S. government, the
U.S. Supreme Court has yet to declare such a
practice illegal.
Moreover, laws such as the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA) empower the government
to arrest and detain indefinitely anyone they
“suspect” of being an enemy of the state.
Fast
forward to the Trump administration’s war on
illegal immigration, and you have the perfect
storm necessary for the adoption of a national
ID card, the ultimate human tracking device,
which would make the police state’s task of
monitoring, tracking and singling out individual
suspects—citizen and noncitizen alike—far
simpler.
Granted, in the absence of a national ID card,
“we the people” are already tracked in a myriad
of ways: through our state driver’s licenses,
Social Security numbers, bank accounts,
purchases and electronic transactions; by way of
our correspondence and communication
devices—email, phone calls and mobile phones;
through chips implanted in our vehicles,
identification documents, even our clothing.
Add to this the fact that businesses, schools
and other facilities are relying more and more
on fingerprints and facial recognition to
identify us. All the while, data companies such
as Acxiom are
capturing vast caches of personal information
to help airports, retailers, police and other
government authorities instantly determine
whether someone is the person he or she claims
to be.
This
informational glut—used to great advantage by
both the government and corporate sectors—is
converging into a mandate for “an internal
passport,” a.k.a., a national ID card that would
store information as basic as a person’s name,
birth date and place of birth, as well as
private information, including a Social Security
number, fingerprint, retina scan and personal,
criminal and financial records.
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
|
The Real ID Act, which
imposes federal standards on identity documents
such as state drivers’ licenses, is the prelude
to this national identification system.
Individuals from states that fail to comply with
the Real ID Act (there are
nine states still not in compliance)
will be unable to use their drivers’ licenses as
forms of identification in airports starting in
January 2018).
A
federalized, computerized, cross-referenced,
databased system of identification policed by
government agents would be the final nail in the
coffin for privacy (not to mention a
logistical security nightmare
that would leave Americans even more vulnerable
to every hacker in the cybersphere).
So what
is privacy?
In its
purest sense, privacy means the right to walk
down a street without fear of being accosted by
a government agent demanding to know who you
are, where you’re going and what you’re doing in
that particular place at that particular moment
in time.
Privacy
means you have the right to tell any government
agent who pokes his nose too far into your
business to butt out.
Privacy
means the right to remain anonymous, if you so
choose.
Unfortunately, in an age of constant
surveillance, in which we are constantly watched
and our movements monitored and tracked—by our
technology, by the government, by the
corporations, and through our own obsession with
social media and smart devices—the case for
privacy is no longer quite so clear-cut.
Likewise, the penalty for telling the government
to stick it (or mind its own business) is
growing more severe with every passing day.
Noncompliance with a direct government
order—whether that order is to show your papers,
step out of a car, exit your house with your
hands up, or bend over and submit to being
searched, fondled or frisked—can now result in
missed flights, broken bones and dead bodies.
Remember, the police state does not
discriminate.
At some
point, it will not matter whether your skin is
black or yellow or brown or white. It will not
matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen.
It will not matter whether you’re rich or poor.
It won’t even matter whether you’re driving,
flying or walking.
After
all, government-issued bullets will kill you
just as easily whether you’re a law-abiding
citizen or a hardened criminal. Government jails
will hold you just as easily whether you’ve
obeyed every law or broken a dozen. And whether
or not you’ve done anything wrong, government
agents will treat you like a suspect simply
because they have been trained to view and treat
everyone like potential criminals.
Eventually, when the police state has turned
that final screw and slammed that final door,
all that will matter is whether some government
agent—poorly trained, utterly ignorant of the
Constitution, way too hyped up on the power of
their badges, and authorized to detain, search,
interrogate, threaten and generally harass
anyone they see fit—chooses to single you out
for special treatment.
You
see, it’s a short hop, skip and a jump from
allowing government agents to stop and demand
identification from someone suspected of being
an illegal immigrant to empowering government
agents to subject anyone—citizen and noncitizen
alike—to increasingly intrusive demands that
they prove not only that they are legally in the
country, but that they are also lawful, in
compliance with every statute and regulation on
the books, and not suspected of having committed
some crime or other.
It’s no longer a matter of
if, but when.
You may
be innocent of wrongdoing now, but when the
standard for innocence is set by the government,
no one is safe. Everyone is a suspect. And
anyone can be a criminal when it’s the
government determining what is a crime.
We’ve
been having this same debate about the perils of
government overreach for the past 50-plus years,
and still we don’t seem to learn, or if we
learn, we learn too late.
All of
the excessive, abusive tactics employed by the
government today—warrantless surveillance, stop
and frisk searches, SWAT team raids, roadside
strip searches, asset forfeiture schemes,
private prisons, torture, indefinite detention,
militarized police, etc.—started out as a
seemingly well-meaning plan to address some
problem in society that needed a little extra
help.
Be
careful what you wish for: you will get
more than you bargained for, especially when the
government’s involved.
In the
case of a national identification system, it
might start off as a means of curtailing illegal
immigration, but it will end up as a means of
controlling the American people.
Taking a prophetic cue from George Orwell’s
1984, a
2013 video game Papers, Please
“puts players in control of an unnamed border
agent in the fictional Eastern Bloc totalitarian
state of Arstotzka in 1982.”
As journalist Jason Concepcion explains, “The
rules are simple:
Decide who can enter the country.
This is accomplished by checking each traveler’s
documents — passports, visas, work permits — for
authenticity and cross-referencing with various
guidelines handed down by the state. The state’s
instructions are initially simple. Those holding
Arstotzkan passports — assuming the information
contained therein matches the person at the
window — are considered citizens and may cross
the border. Take out your green ACCEPTED stamp,
mark the appropriate box on the entry visa, hand
the owner back his or her documents, and call
the next person in line.”
Where
things start to get dicey is when the stakes get
higher, when there’s money to be made, when
there are lives on the line.
Concepcion continues:
As the game progresses, the
restrictions on immigration become more
complex.
A trade war with a neighboring country
causes the Ministry of Admission to ban
travelers from the nation. Rumors of
insurgent groups with forged documents mean
every seal and stamp in an entry visa must
be double-checked against those in your
handbook. If a traveler is heavier than the
weight indicated in their passport, then
they must be questioned and X-rayed for
contraband. Faces are checked against the
state’s most-wanted list. Perhaps a
prospective immigrant doesn’t resemble the
photograph in their documents, in which case
fingerprints must be taken and processed.
With each passing day, there are more
details to check. Some travelers don’t have
the correct work visa, or have papers that
would have been valid yesterday. These must
be scrutinized closely.
Around day two or three on the job, one of
the soldiers who guards the checkpoint steps
to your window. He tells you he gets a bonus
for each person processed for detention. He
offers to cut you in. Criminals — sometimes
even terrorists — attempt to pass through
the Grestin checkpoint. But this is rare.
Immigrants who haven’t kept abreast of the
constant changes in state policy are much
more common. Every now and again, a traveler
comes to your booth with a heartrending
story — a dying loved one, children they’ve
never seen — but the wrong documentation.
You could, easily and legally, hand a few of
these people over to the guards and make a
few bucks on the side.
This is what the
banality of evil
looks like, as described by historian Hannah
Arendt.
Arendt explains: “The essence of totalitarian
government, and perhaps the nature of every
bureaucracy, is to
make functionaries and mere cogs in the
administrative machinery out of men,
and thus to dehumanize them.”
How do
you persuade people to just follow orders and
carry out the dictates of a police state?
You
turn them into mindless robots. You teach them
to obey unquestioningly. You brainwash them into
believing that compliance and patriotism go hand
in hand.
As Concepcion concludes, “Papers, Please
gives players a window into how fascism
manifests itself in bureaucracy. The brilliance
of the game’s paperwork gameplay is that
it makes the player complicit in the projection
of state power…
‘What I found making this game,’ [designer Lucas
Pope explained], ‘is that this communist setting
or this dystopian, fascist setting works nicely
for game mechanics because you can tell the
player, ‘you have to do this.’ There’s not a
whole lot of questioning of, ‘why?’ ‘You have to
do it because that’s how we ... run things here,
we tell you how to do it and you do it.’ That
works perfectly well with the setting of some
kind of communist government or some kind of
bureaucracy where the rules just come down from
the top and boom, that’s your job.’”
Boom.
That’s your job.
That
about sums things up, doesn’t it?
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People,
it’s not just the border patrol agents or the
police or the prison guards who are marching in
lockstep with the regime. It’s also the populace
that obeys every order, that fails to question
or resist or push back against government
dictates that are unjust or unconstitutional or
immoral.
We have
been down this road before.
Reporting on the
trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann for the
New Yorker in 1963,
Hannah Arendt describes the “submissive meekness
with which Jews went to their death”:
…arriving
on time at the transportation points,
walking under their own power to the places
of execution, digging their own graves,
undressing and making neat piles of their
clothing, and lying down side by side to be
shot—seemed
a telling point, and the prosecutor, asking
witness after witness, “Why did you not
protest?,” “Why did you board the train?,”
“Fifteen thousand people were standing there
and hundreds of guards facing you—why didn’t
you revolt and charge and attack these
guards?,” harped on it for all it was worth.
But the sad truth of the matter is that the
point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group
or non-Jewish people had behaved
differently.
The
lessons of history are clear: chained, shackled
and imprisoned in a detention camp, there is
little chance of resistance. The time to act is
now, before it’s too late. Indeed, there is
power in numbers, but if those numbers will not
unite and rise up against their oppressors,
there can be no resistance.
As Arendt concludes, “under
conditions of terror most people will comply
but some people will not,
just as the lesson of the countries to which the
Final Solution was proposed is that ‘it could
happen’ in most places but it did not happen
everywhere.”
It
does not have to happen here.
We do
not have to condemn ourselves to life under an
oppressive, authoritarian regime.
We do
not have to become our own jailers.
We do
not have to dig our own graves.
We do
not have to submit.
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.
