The War at Home: We Are the Enemy in State of Undeclared Martial Law

It needs to be noted right off the bat that John Whitehead isn’t exactly a weepy, bleeding-heart, Obama supporting,  liberal whiner. It was after all his Rutherford Institute that provided legal assistance to Paula Jones in her lawsuit against the sexual depravity of former president Bill Clinton.  The man has serious gravitas as a conservative so when he comes out with a blistering critique of the militarized police state it merits paying attention.  With the now typical divisiveness that only benefits the elite that is arising out of the events in Ferguson, Missouri splitting the country into warring factions yet again, Whitehead hits the target on the most important of all issues. The transformation of America into a nascent totalitarian police state.

Mr. Whitehead has for years been writing of the dangers of incipient American fascism and smacks it out of the ballpark in his latest piece entitled "Turning America Into a War Zone, Where ‘We the People’ Are the Enemy" in which he writes:

What Americans must understand, what we have chosen to ignore, what we have fearfully turned a blind eye to lest the reality prove too jarring is the fact that we no longer live in the “city on the hill,” a beacon of freedom for all the world.

Far from being a shining example of democracy at work, we have become a lesson for the world in how quickly freedom turns to tyranny, how slippery the slope by which a once-freedom-loving people can be branded, shackled and fooled into believing that their prisons walls are, in fact, for their own protection.

Having spent more than half a century exporting war to foreign lands, profiting from war, and creating a national economy seemingly dependent on the spoils of war, we failed to protest when the war hawks turned their profit-driven appetites on us, bringing home the spoils of war—the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.—to be distributed for free to local police agencies and used to secure the homeland against “we the people.”

It’s not just the Defense Department that is passing out free military equipment to local police. Since the early 1990s, the Justice Department has worked with the Pentagon to fund military technology for police departments. And then there are the billions of dollars’ worth of federal grants distributed by the Department of Homeland Security, enabling police departments to go on a veritable buying spree for highly questionable military-grade supplies better suited to the battlefield.

Is it any wonder that we now find ourselves in the midst of a war zone?

We live in a state of undeclared martial law. We have become the enemy.

In a war zone, there are no police—only soldiers. Thus, there is no more Posse Comitatus prohibiting the government from using the military in a law enforcement capacity. Not when the local police have, for all intents and purposes, already become the military.

In a war zone, the soldiers shoot to kill, as American police have now been trained to do. Whether the perceived “threat” is armed or unarmed no longer matters when police are authorized to shoot first and ask questions later. 

Interestingly and very ominously, the divisiveness over the shooting of the unarmed teenage thug Michael Brown and the overwhelming response of militarized police to protests are not only splitting into the standard black versus white. We are increasingly seeing a division between those who find it acceptable and actually preferential to live under the red, white and blue jackboot of apple pie authoritarianism and those who are finally, like John Whitehead, saying that enough is enough.

The Whitehead piece riffs off of an article gone viral, written by a Los Angeles police veteran named Sunil Dutta who has now become the poster boy for the American police state. In the piece, Dutta proclaims that “If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you." It is the ultimate declaration of the blue supremacy that has metastasized through American law-enforcement like a cancer. Dutta's declaration of police godhood ran in the Washington Post and is entitled "I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me."

The piece has drawn both deserved condemnation as well as praise from those who have a skewed idea of what it is to live in a free country with a system of legal checks and balances. No matter how much that the U.S. Constitution has been gutted by Clinton, Bush and Obama it is still the only document that truly matters if we are to still live in that shining city on the hill as President Ronald Reagan liked to refer to America.

More terrifying than the militarized police and the "undeclared state of martial law" that Rutherford refers to is that so many are lining up in lockstep unity behind the government goon squads. There will always be those who support the hard-liners, skull-crackers, knuckle-draggers and whichever alpha male politician emerges from the pack to lead them. There is a certain percentage of those who are prone to authoritarianism in every society. These types have been chronicled in many a work including Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" of which President Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly was a fan. Ike truly understood the dangers of fascism from a real first hand perspective as the Supreme Commander of the American forces that defeated the Nazis. He also understood the menace of the Military Industrial Complex which he famously warned of in his farewell address - the American police state is the bastard child of this.

The true believers, the authority worshippers and the adherents of the cult of the uniform are of particular danger in these twisted times but even worse are the apathetic and clueless Americans, the sheeple as they are often referred to. Whitehead also addresses them in  "Turning America Into a War Zone, Where ‘We the People’ Are the Enemy":

You see, what Americans have failed to comprehend, living as they do in a TV-induced, drug-like haze of fabricated realities, narcissistic denial, and partisan politics, is that we’ve not only brought the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan home to be used against the American people. We’ve also brought the very spirit of the war home.

This is what it feels like to be a conquered people. This is what it feels like to be an occupied nation. This is what it feels like to live in fear of armed men crashing through your door in the middle of the night, or to be accused of doing something you never even knew was a crime, or to be watched all the time, your movements tracked, your motives questioned.

This is what it’s like to be a citizen of the American police state. This is what it’s like to be an enemy combatant in your own country.

So if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, by all means, stand down. Cower in the face of the police, turn your eyes away from injustice, find any excuse to suggest that the so-called victims of the police state deserved what they got.

But remember, when that rifle finally gets pointed in your direction—and it will—when there’s no one left to stand up for you or speak up for you, remember that you were warned.

The window of opportunity to stop - or at least slow the momentum of the juggernaut - is rapidly closing. People should heed the warnings of patriotic Americans such as John Whitehead instead of sitting on their couches and just tuning out. It will be too late when their doors are kicked down by militarized police shock troops in the middle of Dancing With the Stars.

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…