- Informing as part of an open society? Indeed, under Mr.
Bush's proposed Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS for short)
- a kind of national, atomic-mutation of Neighborhood Watch - an estimated
four percent of Americans will join a long and glorious tradition of state-security
informants.
-
- The tradition of citizen informants has roots going back
at least to the French Revolution. During the terror, citizens were encouraged
to inform on neighbors and even children to inform on their parents. More
than a few harmless people went to the guillotine just on the basis of
a hateful neighbor denouncing them.
-
- Of course, there was Stalin's immense bloodbath over
two continents. Informants played an important part in his heavy industry
of organized murder. And one recognizes other suggestive similarities to
what's happening in America. When Stalin was ready to announce another
purge, he often spoke indirectly of "wreckers," wreckers of the
Revolution. Just this suggestion >from his lips was enough to get the
thugs and psychopaths busy about their work.
-
- Has anyone noticed the paler-but-still-similar sense
of the term "terrorists"? With the heavily-biased press in America,
we have all been conditioned to have an immediate mental image of a terrorist:
He's a swarthy fellow with a difficult Arabic or Persian name and a strange
religion. Remember, if there is one thing America is good at, one thing
at which it has no equal on the planet, it is marketing. And America has
intensively marketed this image for years.
-
- The informing tradition was carried on in societies as
diverse as Nazi Germany, the East German Stasi, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and
the horrific youth brigades of China's Cultural Revolution.
-
- My right-wing readers, yes I do have some, sometimes
question how I can possibly ever associate America with ugly things like
fascism. Well, the TIPS program and the Patriot Act, both deliberately
bland names for insidious, dangerous things, is the word made flesh, so
to speak.
-
- I have in the past humorously observed the prevalence
of insanity in America. I admit to using that term in a rather loosely-defined
sense, but America is the land of Black Helicopters, alien abductions,
Aryan churches, rattlesnake worship, speaking in tongues, and Texas.
-
-
- You cannot live in America without discovering there
also are a lot of angry people there. You see them on the streets, you
meet them in stores, you experience them as neighbors. In your face. Mind
your own business. Foul language. Indeed, I can attest to a fair sampling
of such language in e-mail from my more perverse readers. Odd, don't you
think, to send a person you've never met a disgustingly foul letter only
because you don't agree with his column? And although I receive mail from
many countries, the only source for this kind of stuff, I'm sorry to say,
is America.
-
- I believe Social Darwinism, whose roots now deeply vein
American society, is largely responsible for this. We should never forget
that Social Darwinism was the underlying philosophy of Adolf Hitler, and,
while America's version is not quite so poisonous, there are similarities.
It is a philosophy that breeds an atmosphere of contempt for others, especially
the less fortunate. A sense of "I'm alright, Jack!" It raises
the shabby idea of winners and losers to an exalted status. This breeds
a lot of human misery in the midst of a very prosperous society.
-
- Of course, the tender ministrations of America's fundamentalist
Christians only add to a pressure-cooker climate. If you're not of the
correct profession, something must be wrong with you. And for sure, if
you're anything unusual, any kind of non-conformist or person born with
the wrong genes, then your life may well qualify as an abomination. "Oh,
how we love the sinner but hate the sin," making it extremely difficult
for the recipients of such bounteous love to distinguish which of the two
is being hated at any given moment and always forgetting the Good Lord's
claim to the exclusive right of judgment.
-
- Despite all the rhetoric about good neighbors in America,
you are pretty much on your own when something goes wrong. The anarchy
of urban decay, brutal police, racism, rotten public schools, large numbers
of functional illiterates, unethical and predatory business practices,
a lack of decent health care for many, a pervasive invasion of individual
privacy for the advantages of corporate marketing, love-it-or-leave-it
attitudes, guns and the influence of the military's culture of death everywhere
- these things generate resentment, division, loneliness, and anger. Lots
of anger.
-
- A friend, recently returning to America from a long stint
in Europe, provided an excellent, illustrative anecdote of institutionalized
insanity in America when an airport security man held his laptop computer
upside down and started shaking it. My friend naturally enough asked what
he was doing, and the security man's reply was, "You never heard of
anthrax?"
-
- Now I ask, in view of these readily-observed characteristics
of American society, does anyone in his right mind believe that it is a
good idea to promote institutionalized informing? Why, something like one-half
to one percent of the population suffers from schizophrenia. Another equal
slice suffers from various forms of depression. About three-quarters of
a percent is behind bars. Many times that are ex-convicts. Huge numbers
of Americans are addicted to booze or drugs. Taking into account the amount
of Americans who are fundamentalist Christians, around ten to twenty percent
believe the end of the world is imminent, or that people walk around with
the "Mark of the Beast" on their foreheads.
-
- And any of them may just be of a mind to inform on you.
- ___
-
- John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian
oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history.
He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and
concern for human decency. He is a member of no political party and takes
exception to what has been called America's "culture of complaint"
with its habit of reducing every important issue to an unproductive argument
between two simplistically defined groups. John regards it as a badge of
honor to have left the United States as a poor young man from the South
Side of Chicago when the country embarked on the pointless murder of something
like three million Vietnamese in their own land because they happened to
embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond
of calling "the peaceable kingdom."
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