A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State
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Friendly Fascism
As anyone who has studied history knows, police states assume control with the mantra of "freedom, equality, and fraternity"–and maybe more apropos for us, "security and safety." The world, it must be remembered, has not been terrorized by despots advertising themselves as devils. As former presidential advisor Bertram Gross, who worked in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, explains in his book Friendly Fascism:
I am afraid of those who proclaim that it can't happen here. In 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote a popular novel in which a racist, anti-Semitic, flag-waving, army-backed demagogue wins the 1936 presidential election and proceeds to establish an Americanized version of Nazi Germany. The title, It Can't Happen Here, was a tongue-in-cheekwarning that it might. Butthe "it" Lewis referred to is unlikely to happen again any place...Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism... In America, it would be supermodern and multi-ethnic–as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic façade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal.6
In this respect, what I am describing within these pages has not come about as an overnight change. Rather, the emerging American police state can be seen in subtle trends introduced by those in leadership—government, media, education—toward greater control and manipulation of the individual. With the advent of electronic media and the increasing computerization of American society, the mechanisms for manipulation have arrived. Wedded to the state and/or supportive of the statist apparatus, the corporate media (which now includes the Internet) is the one instrument more than any other that forms public opinion. In a society where the state and the media have merged, authoritarianism can and will be established even though in appearance the citizenry enjoys so-called democratic freedoms.
Years ago William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, observed that America may be the first country in which fascism comes to power through democratic elections.7 When and if fascism takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain. That, as Bertram Gross notes, is its "subtle appeal." It will appear friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections and the news media will cover all the political trivia. "But consent of the governed will no longer apply," writes journalist Chris Floyd, because "actual control of the state will have passed to a small and privileged group who rule for the benefit of their wealthy peers and corporate patrons." Moreover:
To be sure, there will be factional conflicts among the elite, and a degree of debate will be permitted; but no one outside the privileged circle will be allowed to influence state policy. Dissidents will be marginalized usually by the people themselves. Deprived of historical knowledge by a thoroughly impoverished educational system designed to produce complacent consumers, left ignorant of current events by a corporate media devoted solely to profit, many will internalize the force-fed values of the ruling elite, and act accordingly. There will be little need for overt methods of control.
The rulers will act in secret, for reasons of national security, and the people will not be permitted to know what goes on in their name. Actions once unthinkable will be accepted as routine: government by executive fiat, state murder of enemies selected by the leader, undeclared wars, torture, mass detentions without charge, the looting of the national treasury, the creation of huge new security structures targeted at the populace. In time, this will be seen as normal, as the chill of autumn feels normal when summer is gone. It will all seem normal.8
Fear Propaganda
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.9
This was the testimony of Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials. Goering, an expert on the propaganda of fear, knew very well how to cow and control a populace.
In like fashion, the transformation we as a society are undergoing is based on fear. In fact, one of the major forces currently shaping the psyche of the American people is fear. People are afraid of communists and socialists. People are afraid of crime. People are afraid of their neighbors. People are afraid of terrorism, and so on, ad infinitum.
Thus, as the rationale goes, to save our democracy (or republic, as it used to be called) we have to be secure and free of the onslaught of terrorism, the infiltration of immigrants, protesters, and other misfits (that is, other American citizens with whom we might disagree). That's why, we are told, we need a war on terrorism, a war on crime, a war on drugs, and other military euphemisms.
A Stop and Frisk, New York-Style
(Blend Images via AP Images)
Fear, and its perpetuation by the government, is the greatest weapon against freedom, and propaganda is the most effective tool for keeping the populace in check. Propaganda, an expertise of politicians, is in reality a fiction. But it is an effective fiction. And in an age of amusements and entertainment, the so-called masses of Americans, who often take what television's talking heads say as the gospel truth, have difficulty distinguishing between fiction and reality. As author Hannah Arendt recognized:
The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time.10
On the Road to a Police State
How did we allow ourselves to travel so far down the road to a police state?
American police forces are not supposed to be a branch of the military, nor are they meant to be private security forces for the reigning political faction. Instead, they should be an aggregation of the countless local police units, composed of citizens like you and me that exist for a sole purpose: to serve and protect the citizens of each and every American community.
In recent years, however, there has been an increasing militarization of the police. This has not occurred suddenly, in a single precinct. It cannot be traced back to a single leader or event–rather, the pattern is so subtle that most American citizens, distracted by entertainment and/ or simply trying to make ends meet, are hardly even aware of it. Little by little, police authority has expanded, one weapon after another has been added to the police arsenal, and one exception after another has been made to the constitutional standards that have historically restrained police authority.
Already in some larger cities, the police have adopted the routine practice of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing (a practice that is sure to spread to smaller cities).11 This is the mark of a police state where everyone is a suspect. Joseph Midgley of Picture the Homeless, a homeless advocacy group, explains the average experience of a person stopped and frisked:
I have been stopped and frisked four times and each time I have been standing in public places. I've been questioned by the police and asked if I had anything illegal on me. To which I replied, "no." My pockets were still searched. Nothing illegal was found. I was never charged. Never even given a ticket on all four occasions. This form of discriminatory policing is outrageous and it must stop. Not tomorrow, not next year, but today.12
As journalist Herman Schwartz recognizes, "The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official."13 Nowhere is this loss of Fourth Amendment protections more evident than in the practice of roadside police stops, which have devolved into government-sanctioned exercises in humiliation and degradation with a complete disregard for privacy and human dignity.
Consider, for example, what happened to 38-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, who were pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for flicking cigarette butts out of the car window.14 First, the trooper berated the women for littering on the highway. Then, insisting that he smelled marijuana, he proceeded to interrogate them and search the car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or possessing any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper, who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into the older woman's anus and vagina, then performing the same procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves.15 No marijuana was found.
Leila Tarantino was allegedly subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain view of passing traffic during a routine traffic stop, while her two children–ages one and four–waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer "forcibly removed" a tampon from Tarantino's body. No contraband or anything illegal was found.16
Meanwhile, four Milwaukee police officers have been charged with carrying out rectal searches of suspects on the street and in police district stations over the course of several years. One of the officers is accused of conducting searches of men's anal and scrotal areas, often inserting his fingers into their rectums and leaving some of his victims with bleeding rectums.17 Half-way across the country, the city of Oakland, California, has agreed to pay $4.6 million to 39 men who had their pants pulled down by police on city streets between 2002 and 2009.18
And then there's the increasingly popular practice of doing blood draws at DUI checkpoints, where drivers who refuse a breathalyzer test find themselves subjected to forcible blood extractions to test for alcohol levels. Police in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, actually had a registered nurse and an assistant district attorney on hand "to help streamline the 'blood draw' warrants and collect blood samples from suspected impaired drivers" at one exercise in holiday drunk driving enforcement.19
It must be remembered that the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended to protect the citizenry from being subjected to "unreasonable searches and seizures" by government agents. While the literal purpose of the amendment is to protect our property and our bodies from unwarranted government intrusion, the moral intention behind it is to protect our human dignity. Unfortunately, the rights supposedly guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment have been steadily eroded over the past few decades. Court rulings justifying invasive strip searches as well as Americans' continued deference to the dictates of achieving total security have left us literally stranded on the side of the road, grasping for dignity.
Emerging Technology
As utterly distasteful as stop-and-frisks and roadside strip searches may be, soon there will be no need for the police to physically stop and search Americans. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, and see through their clothing. In fact, thanks to the federal government's willingness to share its surplus of military weapons with law enforcement, local police agencies now have a veritable arsenal of firepower and surveillance gadgets to inflict on the American people.
For example, local police agencies are now making use of the same drone technology employed by the military to bomb and spy on people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, and Yemen; only this time, these drones are being used to spy on American citizens. These aerial drones, some as small as insects, can stealthily spy on unsuspecting citizens without making their presence known.
Another military weapon that has been created in partnership with domestic police agencies is Terahertz Imaging Detection, which allows police officers to see through the clothing of citizens on the street, thus treating all passersby as if they were suspects.20 This portable scanning technology functions by detecting the radiation emitted by a human body and highlighting any objects–such as a gun, a pocketknife, nail clippers, or any other paraphernalia in one's possession–which block that radiation.21
Caution: Police State (CS Muncy)
Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike–including homes.22 Nowadays, police drive through parking lots, scanning the license plates of parked cars and filing the information into police databases. Even if a car isn't tied to a crime, the time that a car was in a certain location is uploaded to a police database for future reference.23 In other words, the police can track you wherever you go–even if the places you visit are very intimate and private.
Police are also using mobile fingerprint identification scanners which instantly pull up the biographical information of those who are compelled to put their finger on it.24 Eventually, virtually all Americans will be going through this process–a process that was once only used for criminal suspects.
Have We Become a Government of Wolves?
Whereas we once abided by a rule of law–the U.S. Constitution–which guarded our freedoms and shielded us from government abuses, we have entered a phase in our nation's life where the government largely operates above the law, while the law has become little more than another tool for compliance and control.
CHAPTER 2
Who Will Protect Us From Our Government?
"The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn't represent the people. It controls them."25
-JOHN LENNON
Since the early days of the American republic, we have operated under the principle that no one is above the law. As Thomas Paine observed in 1776 in Common Sense, "in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other."26 Several years later, John Adams, seeking to reinforce this important principle, declared in the Massachusetts Constitution that they were seeking to establish "a government of laws and not of men."27
Prisoner at Abu Ghraib
(AP Photo, File)
The history of our nation over the past two hundred years has been the history of a people engaged in a constant struggle to maintain that tenuous balance between the rule of law–in our case, the United States Constitution–and the government leaders entrusted with protecting it, upholding it, and abiding by it. At various junctures, such as during the McCarthy era, when that necessary balance has been thrown off by overreaching governmental bodies or overly ambitious individuals, we have found ourselves faced with a crisis of constitutional proportions. Each time, we have taken the painful steps needed to restore our constitutional equilibrium.
Now, once again, we find ourselves in a state of crisis, skating dangerously close to becoming a nation ruled not by laws but by men–and fallible, imperfect men at that. Yet this latest crisis did not happen overnight. Its seeds were sown in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, when fear-addled Americans started selling their freedoms cheaply, bit by bit, for the phantom promises of security. From the hideous torture at CIA black site prisons, extraordinary renditions of Abu Ghraib abuses, and TSA body scanners to warrantless wiretaps and the USA Patriot Act, Americans have failed to be outraged by the government's repeated violations of the rule of law. In this way, as the so-called "war on terror" has unfolded beyond our wildest imaginings–from the barbaric treatment of foreign detainees at American-run prisons to the
technological arsenal being used by the U.S. government to monitor and control its citizens– our rights have taken a meteoric nosedive in inverse proportion to the government's rapidly expanding powers.
USA Patriot Act
Those who founded this country knew quite well that every citizen must remain vigilant or freedom would be lost. This is the true nature of a patriot: one who sounds the alarm when freedom–in our case, the rights protected by the Constitution–comes under attack. If on the other hand, people become fearful and sheep-like, it gives rise to a government of wolves. This is what we are faced with today, and it is epitomized by the USA Patriot Act.
Although the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures go far beyond an actual police search of our homes, the passage of the Orwellian-named USA Patriot Act in 2001 opened the door to other kinds of invasions, especially unwarranted electronic intrusions into our most personal and private transactions, including phone, mail, computer, and medical records.
The Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the Constitution's ten original amendments, namely, the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments–and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well. The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that anyone desiring to engage in non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations, and civil disobedience–all historically protected First Amendment expressive activities which are now considered potential terrorist acts–is thereby rendered a suspect of the police state.