The Police State Isn't Coming, It's Already Here

“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable”.

- Eric Hoffer

Not that I care very much for John Rutherford of the Whitehead Institute, a notorious right-wing think tank but as the old adage goes – even a broken clock is right twice a day. In his latest piece entitled ” ‘Boston Strong’: Marching in Lockstep with the Police State. Rutherford, who backed that ugly tramp Paula Jones in her lawsuit against the horndog in chief Bill Clinton cuts through the flag-swaddled dreck to call a spade a spade. Boston was placed under MARTIAL LAW last Friday, a day that will prove to be as dark as any in this nation’s history when all is said and done with. The Rubicon was officially crossed on April 19, 2013 and the only thing that is more disturbing than the massive show of paramilitary power in Beantown is the degree that it has been accepted, just another feature of “The New Normal”. 

I will now excerpt from Whitehead’s piece  -

 

Whatever the threat to so-called security—whether it’s rumored weapons of mass destruction, school shootings, or alleged acts of terrorism—it doesn’t take much for the American people to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, even if it means submitting to martial law, having their homes searched, and being stripped of one’s constitutional rights at a moment’s notice.

As journalist Andrew O’Hehir observes in Salon:

In America after 9/11, we made a deal with the devil, or with Dick Cheney, which is much the same thing. We agreed to give up most of our enumerated rights and civil liberties (except for the sacrosanct Second Amendment, of course) in exchange for a lot of hyper-patriotic tough talk, the promise of “security” and the freedom to go on sitting on our asses and consuming whatever the hell we wanted to. Don’t look the other way and tell me that you signed a petition or voted for John Kerry or whatever. The fact is that whatever dignified private opinions you and I may hold, we did not do enough to stop it, and our constitutional rights are now deemed to be partial or provisional rather than absolute, do not necessarily apply to everyone, and can be revoked by the government at any time.

Particularly disheartening is the fact that Americans, consumed with the need for vengeance, seem even less concerned about protecting the rights of others, especially if those “others” happen to be of a different skin color or nationality. The public response to the manhunt, capture and subsequent treatment of brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is merely the latest example of America’s xenophobic mindset, which was also a driving force behind the roundup and detention of hundreds of Arab, South Asian and Muslim men following 9/11, internment camps that housed more than 18,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II, and the arrest and deportation of thousands of “radical” noncitizens during America’s first Red Scare.

To be a Muslim in America today it to be “Juden” in 1930’s era Germany, already the persecution machine is ramping up. It may not exactly be September 11,  2001 but it’ll do.

It is astonishing to witness the degree that unquestioning American lemmings so easily acquiesce to the rapidly tightening of the iron fist of state. This is what happens when a society is conditioned to live in fear. There was a time not so long ago where being forced to take off one’s shoes at an airport and being aggressively frisked by government goons would have elicited outrage. This is no longer the land in which we dwell, the sate and those who profit from it have seized on the September 11^th 2001 events to justify any and all foreign aggression and the stripping of rights here at home. No perceived offense is too small to add more paramiltary equipment and training to local police forces, already augmented by the Homeland Security Gestapo. The bad assed bogeyman Osama bin Laden may now be sleeping with the fishes but leave it to the Neocon embeds, Dick Cheney’s stay behind network and the ever complicit state media to ensure that there will be new arch villians and “monsters” to arm the police against, now it is the brothers Tsarnaev who serve as our Emanuel Goldstein. As I sit here sipping my morning cup o’ joe there are forces desperately looking for any sort of ginned up linkage between the Chechens who set off their dastardly shrapnel bomb at the Boston Marathon and overseas groups, like the Manichean devil Al Qaeda. It is very, very essential for the America that we now exist in to keep the already cowardly public in a state of constant fear. I recall a book that I once read entitled American Terminator that examined the role of Hollywood movies as an essential propaganda tool for shaping and reinforcing the basis for a mythical American exceptionalism and its desire for empire. The following passage is from that book which I strongly recommend to everybody with an interest in just how celluloid serves as a delivery device that is very useful in the indoctrination process.

Fear is essential: ‘Be afraid, be very afraid’ is the American condition.

To live in America is to be beset by fear, anxiety and insecurity, to be surrounded by potential harm, enemies and evil intent. And the wolf is always at the door. A nation of optimists is the more usual self-representation of America. Repetitively, Hollywood films conclude with a resolution, a rescue, and the winners ride off into the sunset or snuggle into a warm embrace that reassures us they will live happily ever after. The formulaic ending, however, is necessary because the plot, the narrative, is founded on and propelled by fear and anxiety, the dark essential underpinning of the American condition. For America fear is an original, natural condition, the inescapable birth rite (and birth right), the inherited condition of a fragile existence that must constantly be defended. Without fear there is no America; constant recourse to fear is the motivating force that determines its actions and reactions.

That was until 9/11 and the brain freezing FEAR of potential terrorism in the USA became the ultimate talisman of the state.  Herman Goering had it absolutely correct when he famously said:

“Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country”

And as Whitehead puts it

As the events in Boston have made clear, it does indeed work the same in every country. The same propaganda and police state tactics that worked for Adolf Hitler 80 years ago continue to be employed with great success in a post-9/11 America.

And the public of course always buys it, quivering, sniveling, pissing in their pants and practically screaming “please….take my freedom away”. Already, the Boston lockdown has provided cover for the TSA (an un-American entity that should be shredded into a million pieces and cast to the winds so counter to the concept of freedom that it is) to revoke the recently granted permission to carry miniature pocket knives onto airplanes. Really, just how fucking stupid are Americans if they believe that something so small as this can be used to actually highjack a plane? Americans watch too much television and too many movies, a decade and a half ago if a potential hijacker would have pulled out a mini-swiss army knife he would have been laughed off the plane. But the official state conspiracy theory of September 11, 2001 has become gospel that a group of losers who were allegedly well enough trained to take over jet airplanes with nothing but a box cutter and then to utilize their simulator flight training to pull off precision military daredevil piloting that even the most crackerjack pilots in the world would have trouble with has worked. It has worked out so well that any questioning of said official conspiracy theory is treated as a great apostasy and will have one immediately shunned by those whose worldview has been shaped by such lurid dramas as “Homeland” and “24”, but I am not going to go there this morning.

My oh my how the black vans will roll…