- "It is always a simple matter to drag 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. This is easy. All you have to do
is 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
every country." - Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering, testimony at
Nuremberg
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- As I stated in Part I of this series, the state of our
union is dismal at best and is slowly inching toward an authoritarian government.
But anyone looking for black shirts, mass rallies or men on horseback will
miss the telltale clues of what professor and former presidential advisor
Bertram Gross calls "creeping fascism."
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- If and when the authoritarian state rears its head in
America, it will not be the goose-stepping variety that we saw in Nazi
Germany. Indeed, as Gross writes in his book Friendly Fascism (1980), "it
will be super modern and multi-ethnic - as American as Madison Avenue,
executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It will be fascism with
a smile." And television will probably be its most important vehicle.
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- Faced with an increasingly authoritarian government that
has at its disposal the technology to nudge us in the direction it desires
us to go - and an American people increasingly willing to forfeit their
civil liberties for security and expedience - it is evident that our civil
liberties are in a perilous state.
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- For example, shortly after September 11, 2001, polls
showed that two-thirds of Americans believed it was necessary to give up
basic civil liberties for the sake of security. Polls since then show that
about half would still forfeit their constitutional rights for safety.
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- Not long after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the
USA Patriot Act, which effectively took away certain protections guaranteed
to American citizens in the Bill of Rights. This long, detailed piece of
legislation allows government agents to come into your home and search
it without your ever knowing they've been thereóclearly gutting
the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
This law also allows the government to monitor telephone conversations,
Internet usage, business transactions and library reading records, among
other things.
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- The Patriot Act, however, is merely one more link in
a chain of control that is effectively enhancing the power of government
which has been building for years. In fact, the government keeps close
tabs on nearly everything we do. This ranges from government tracking of
everyone who travels on an airplane to FBI agents visiting homes of ordinary
citizens who are targeted by local police as free speech protesters to
invasive, detailed census forms that demand to know everything about us.
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- A national ID card looms in the near future. Cameras
are now positioned on street corners and in public schools to watch over
us and our children. This is what Matthew Brzezinski in his book Fortress
America calls "the surveillance state." In fact, there are very
few things that are really private matters anymore as the government seeks
to know the most intimate details of our lives. "The only person who
is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member
of the Nazi hierarchy after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody
who is asleep."
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- The recent emergence of free speech zones and demonstration
zones that cage demonstrators and others who want to protest or simply
exercise their free speech effectively destroys the First Amendment. Some
judges have actually upheld such zones, based on the need for security.
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- What such governmental censorship indicates is that in
America we no longer really operate under a written Constitution. Rule
of law, the bedrock of the Constitution, has now been replaced largely
by the rule of bureaucrats and judges.
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- Many average citizens, however, lack any knowledge about
their basic constitutional rights. The Constitution is poorly taught in
the schools, and, thus, few have even read it. Moreover, because of the
low literacy rate - America ranks seventeenth in the top 30 industrialized
nations in the world, despite $745 billion spent on public education -
many are not able to read and understand the foundational document of the
U.S. government.
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- With the Bush Administration's draconian plans to impose
mandatory mental testing, accompanied by an increased drugging of school
children, any awareness of violations of basic liberties will most likely
go unheeded. America is already a drug-saturated populace, and the infiltration
of the drug industry into the schools is an ominous development.
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- This is just the tip of the iceberg of the emerging police
state in America. Sadly, that mindset has filtered into the schools, where
under zero tolerance policies children are even arrested by police for
refusing to follow dress codes. And our work places - especially those
of the international corporations - are becoming places of such stark uniformity
that differences of opinion are not really welcome. Freedom, so to speak,
is swiftly becoming passe.
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- The parallels between present-day America and pre-Nazi
Germany become even more ominous when you consider the increasing public
loss of faith in political and governmental institutions. In pre-Nazi Germany
under the Weimar Constitution, the people in drastic fashion had lost trust
in their governmental structures. Likewise, there has been a collapse of
the American public's faith in its major institutions. These include the
presidency, Congress, the courts and the gargantuan federal bureaucracy
that continues to expand.
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- The increasing presence of the military in our lives
is another cause of concern. "Overgrown military establishments are
under any form of government inauspicious to liberty," George Washington
once wrote, "and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican
liberty." When combined with the militarized nature of our police
force, Americans should be alarmed. However, just the opposite is true.
Unlike much of the American government, the military has enjoyed a remarkably
steady climb in popularity. And since the 1980s, the military has become
more and more involved in civil problem solving - a trend that, as Air
Force General Charles Dunlap has warned, can easily lead to a military
state in the U.S.
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- There is also the possibility of martial law being instituted
if there are other terrorist attacks. And former Attorney General John
Ashcroft's plan several years ago to establish "camps" for so-called
enemy combatants - some of whom would be American citizens - reveals the
thinking of some of those in power. Allegedly, some 600 camps, replete
with barbed wire and guard stations, are already sprinkled throughout the
U.S.
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- Finally, there is the impact on the populace of the ongoing
war on terrorism. In his classic novel 1984, author George Orwell issues
a prophetic warning against governments that remain perpetually at war
against a vague, ever-changing enemy. In 1984, the continuing wars took
place largely in the abstract. However, the wars and military skirmishes
served as a convenient method of nurturing fear in the populace in justifying
the government's authoritarian regime and its practices - including the
institution of the forced military inscription (that is, the draft).
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- Since World War I, the evolving military-industrial complex
that is the United States has either been in a war or an armed conflict
on a continuing basis. Yet with the so-called war on terrorism, the U.S.
government has moved into a new paradigm as amorphous as that described
by Orwell.
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- "Although we are told the president's resolve is
steady and the mission clear, we seem to know less and less about the enemy
we are fighting... Exactly what will constitute success in this war remains
unclear," writes Daniel Kurtzman (www.tompaine.com), "but the
one thing the Bush administration has made certain is that the war will
continue 'indefinitely.'"
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- Add to this the continuing colored alerts and other scare
tactics by the government, and is it any wonder that the American public
swings from numbness to fear to paranoia - and that the state of our union
is in disrepair?
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- - Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead
is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and author of the
award-winning Grasping for the Wind. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
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- http://www.rutherford.org/
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