- In Nazi Germany at this time of year, people freely shopped
in large department stores for gifts for family and friends. The streets
were full of traffic. It was "business as usual" for most of
the citizens. While in the colonial states conquered by the Nazis, and
in the concentrations camps for Jews, gays and communists, life was a living
nightmare of dehumanization and human-rights violations.
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- In the United States today, people freely shop in large
department stores for gifts, and the streets are full of traffic. While
in our most recent victim states of Afghanistan, Iraq under murderous sanctions,
Argentina after engineering its economic collapse, and Colombia under U.S.
military aid for repression, life is a living nightmare of dehumanization
and human-rights violations.
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- But what once separated the United States from Nazi Germany
was the protection of civil liberties for American citizens. People of
Germany had no rights and did not care. Those few who did care were so
terrified of their government that they did not dare to speak out. Those
who did speak out were declared "enemy agents" and sent to concentration
camps.
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- Today, people of the United States have given up their
rights through the "Patriot Act," the "Homeland Security
Act" and the Pentagon's new system of "Total Information Awareness."
The astonishing thing about this "land of the free" is that most
Americans now have no effective rights and do not care.
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- As long as they are free to shop in department stores
and have traffic in the streets (with automobiles burning oil stolen from
dying Iraqi children), they do not care. And to a greater degree every
day, those few who do care about our liberties and rights are too terrified
of our government to speak out.
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- The so-called "Patriot Act" expanded our government's
secret search and wiretapping powers enormously. It empowered racial profiling
as a recognized police practice and allowed broad sweeps of people of Middle
Eastern or Asian origin. It effectively abolished immigrants' rights, allowing
noncitizens to be held in secret locations on secret "evidence,"
without right to an attorney, for as long as the government wishes.
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- The government now has the power to enter your home or
your computer and secretly record whatever they find without ever having
to notify you. They do not even have to obtain a warrant from a publicly
accountable judge showing reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed.
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- Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold spoke the following
words from the Senate floor on Oct. 11, 2001, when he was the only senator
to vote against Attorney General John Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act: "There
is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch
terrorists. If we lived in a country where police were allowed to search
your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country where the
government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations,
or intercept your e-mail communications; if we lived in a country where
people could be held in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think,
or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, the government
would probably discover more terrorists or would-be terrorists! But that
wouldn't be a country in which we would want to live."
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- But today, it has gotten worse with the passage of the
Homeland Security Act. Notice that these titles, "Patriot" and
"Homeland," sound very much like the language of the Nazis. A
common slogan of the Nazi regime was "the highest freedom is a noble
slavery of the heart." People are free, the slogan meant, when they
have enslaved their hearts to the "homeland" in absolute obedience
to their government. "Deutschland, Deckhand, uber alles!" they
shouted. Blind loyalty, patriotism, and emotion must triumph over liberty,
reason and sound judgment.
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- Under the U.S. Homeland Security Act (our rights again
given away freely by a bipartisan Congress), 22 U.S. agencies are combined
in order to achieve "total information awareness" on every American
citizen. The government will soon be amassing a file on every American
that includes every magazine subscription, credit card purchase, Web site
visit, medical record, library record, bank deposit or withdrawals, every
airline purchase, as well as judicial, divorce records, and so on. This
will be recorded in a central data base, not by a publicly accountable
authority, but by the Pentagon, which already operates in total secrecy
from the American public.
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- Government intimidation for political reasons is real
and it has begun. Our government already is using its secret data bases
to harass Americans. Political activists checking in at airports at the
airline desk have had their names come up from a secret government list
as "flight risks." They and their luggage have been supersearched
to the point where they are made to miss their flights, and then released
to fly. Obviously if they were really "flight risks," they would
not be allowed to fly.
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- Attorneys have found that their attorney-client privilege
has all but disappeared. The government has even placed hidden cameras
in prisons to record attorney discussions with their clients. The government
has begun harassing people maintaining Web sites they consider politically
objectionable.
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- The Justice Department announced a plan to use its newfound
power to designate U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants" to place
such people in concentration camps. Declaring them "enemy combatants"
would strip them of their constitutional rights, their access to the courts
and allow the government to indefinitely hold them without trial.
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- This is identical in purpose to some of the Nazi concentration
camps.
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- Do we citizens care at all about the future of our children
or the plight of the millions of citizens in this country of Arab descent,
or those who nonviolently oppose government policy? We have repeated for
so long the slogan "it can't happen here." But the darkness and
terror of totalitarianism is coming rapidly.
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- Do we have the courage and integrity to speak out now,
before it is too late? Or will we continue to freely shop in our large
department stores for gifts for family and friends - as they did in Nazi
Germany.
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- GLEN T. MARTIN is professor of philosophy and religious
studies at Radford University.
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