Strange things are happening in the United States these
days, and every day seems to bring additional scary news. The similarity to the erosion of civil
liberties in Germany during the 1930s is a bit too close for comfort. Many will
regard this statement as hyperbole, and, to some extent, it is. But let’s take
a close look at what is going on before we dismiss the comparison out of hand.
In terms of the historical record for Germany, legal
discrimination against Jews certainly existed before the Nuremberg Laws of
1935, and grew steadily over time. There was always a feeling in the Jewish
community—most of whom regarded themselves as Germans, after all—that “OK,
that’s the worst of it.” Hence, the decision to stay. Then came the next set of
restrictions, and again the response: “This is as far as it will go.” It was
like the classic experiment of turning up the heat on frogs placed in warm
water. Gradually, they get boiled to death, because the increase of heat is
incremental. It was only toward the end
of the thirties that the choice began to look like: jump or die. Finally, it
became simply, die.
In 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional
Civil Service banned “non-Aryans” from the civil service.
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German
citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and “Aryans.” They also prohibited sexual intercourse
between Jews and “Aryans,” and the employment of “Aryan” females under
forty-five years of age as domestic workers in Jewish households. In addition,
Jews could not work as lawyers, doctors, or journalists; could not use state
hospitals; and could not be educated by the state past the age of fourteen.
They could not enter public parks, libraries, or beaches, and could not receive
winnings from the national lottery.
In 1938, Jews with first names that were not
characteristically Jewish had to adopt the middle name Sara (if female) or
David (if male). Passports of German Jews were stamped with a “J”.
In 1939, Jews living in German-occupied Poland had to wear
the yellow star. This was extended to all Jews living within Nazi-controlled
areas in 1941.
By way of comparison, one thing that makes me particularly
nervous is what has been called the “conspiracy of silence.” Almost nobody
spoke up in Germany as this process was unfolding, and the American public has
been similarly silent about the events documented below. Indeed, I would
venture to say that 98% of the American public (maybe more) is unaware of events
such as these, or of the passage of repressive legislation, and that they wouldn’t
care even if they did know about it. (“Hey, I ain’t no Ay-rab!”) The classic
quote that has come down to us is from Martin Niemoeller, a German pastor and
theologian who wound up in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps (he
was liberated by the Allies in 1945). It goes something like this:
“First they came
for the communists, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then
they came for the trade unionists, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a
trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, but I didn't speak out because I
wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me,
but by that time there was no one left to speak out.”
but by that time there was no one left to speak out.”
It is no accident
that Chris Hedges entitled a recent article “First They Come for the Muslims”
(see below, Item IV). God forbid
something like that might happen in the U.S., but the signs of a gradual slide
towards Nuremberg, and concomitant citizen apathy, are very much present in the
current political milieu. Let’s have a look at what has been going on in the
decade since 9/11. I’m going to discuss the following topics:
I. The creation
of a political climate in which the police are out of control, arbitrarily free
to intimidate anyone for virtually anything
II. The
persecution of whistleblowers, protesters, and dissenters
III. The dramatic
expansion of the surveillance of American citizens on the part of the National
Security Agency (NSA)
IV. The
corruption of the judicial system by means of show trials of Muslim activists
V. The
construction of political detention centers, also known as Communication
Management Units (CMU’s)
VI. The shredding
of the Bill of Rights by means of the National Defense Authorization Act
VII. Future
scenarios: The “disappearing” of intellectual critics of the U.S. government?
I. The creation of a political climate in which
the police are out of control, arbitrarily free to intimidate anyone for
virtually anything
The evidence for
this is perforce anecdotal, but events such as the ones discussed below are
getting to be so common that we have to keep in mind that when you have accumulated
enough anecdotes, the result is called “data.”
-In June 2011 the
sheriff of Nelson County, North Dakota, called in a Predator B drone from the
local Air Force base to capture three men who had stolen some cows. Once the
unmanned aircraft located the suspects, police rushed in to make the first
known arrests of U.S. citizens with the help of a Predator spy drone. It turns
out that predator drones are frequently used for domestic investigations all
over the U.S.—by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and by state and
local law enforcement officials.
-In July 2011 police in a small town in Georgia
shut down a lemonade stand being run by three girls, ages 10-14, who were
trying to save up for a trip to a local water park. The police said that they
didn’t know what was in the lemonade; and in addition, that the girls needed a
business license, a peddler’s permit, and a food permit in order to run the
stand. The permits, by the way, cost $50 a day.
-In January 2012 the
library system of Charlton, Massachusetts, called the police to collect some
overdue books charged to Hailey Benoit—a five-year-old girl.
-Also in January
2012, a young couple was arrested in Baltimore for asking a police woman
directions to highway I-95. They spent the night in jail.
-In April 2012 the
Supreme Court ruled that jail authorities may strip search people arrested for
minor offenses before they are jailed while awaiting a hearing. Individuals
have been strip searched for offenses such as biking with an inaudible bell,
walking a dog without a leash, and driving with a noisy muffler. The sexual
humiliation involved in these searches, writes Naomi Wolf, is clearly a way of
keeping the masses in line, politically docile. How long, she asks, before
saying anything controversial online or on the phone (see Item III, below) will
result in the “guilty” party facing arrest and sexual humiliation? I think we need to pause a moment before we
summarily dismiss this as paranoia.
II. The persecution of whistleblowers, protesters,
and dissenters
This has been
going on throughout the past decade, first under President Bush, and then more
aggressively under President Obama. According
to the New Yorker, “the Obama
Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness.”
To which the New York Times added:
“In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous
president in pursuing leak prosecutions.” In the famous case of Bradley
Manning, who revealed government documents to Wikileaks, Mr. Obama publicly
declared him guilty before he went to trial or was convicted of a crime. The
overall result is that the government has basically criminalized public
servants who speak out to expose waste or corruption or unethical behavior.
Whistleblowing and dissent have, in themselves, become criminal activities.
-Since 2006 the filmmaker Laura Poitras, who made a documentary about the
U.S. occupation of Iraq, has been detained and questioned at airports more than
forty times. Government agents confiscate her computer and notebooks without a
warrant. She is hardly an isolated case. With no oversight or legal framework for
its activities, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out
individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them at the airport when
they return to the U.S. from an international trip, and then seizes their
laptops, cameras, cellphones, notebooks, and credit card receipts.
-William Binney,
an intelligence official who worked for the NSA for nearly forty years,
resigned in October 2001 when massive domestic spying became the norm. Binney
and several other NSA officials reported their concerns about this to Congress and
the Department of Defense. In 2006, he
exposed the NSA practice of installing secret monitoring rooms in major U.S.
telecommunications facilities. Finally,
in 2007, a dozen FBI agents charged into his house with guns drawn, pointed
their weapons at his head, and interrogated him at length. Three other ex-NSA
employees were raided the same day.
- You
can now go to jail in the United States simply for speaking. In July 2011,
environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for
his repeated declaration that environmental protection required civil—i.e.,
nonviolent—disobedience. One wonders if the same judge, Dee Benson, would have
also put Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi in jail, had he been around during their
lifetimes.
-In March 2012
the president signed H.R. 347, the so-called trespass bill, into law, which
allows the government to jail anyone protesting near someone with Secret
Service protection for up to ten years. This makes it quite easy for the
government to criminalize protest per se, because the exclusion zones defined
by the law have no clear boundaries. In fact, they can be as large as the law
wants them to be; which means that the free speech zone is a moving target.
III. The dramatic expansion of the surveillance of
American citizens on the part of the National Security Agency (NSA)
-On 19 July 2010 the
Washington Post reported that 854,000
people work for the National Security Agency in thirty-three building complexes
amounting to 17 million square feet of space, in the DC Metro and suburban
area. Every day, collection systems at the NSA intercept and store 1.7 billion
emails and phone calls of American citizens, in what amounts to a vast domestic
spy system. Writing in the New Yorker
on 23 May 2011, Jane Mayer reported that the NSA has three times the budget of
the CIA, and has the capacity to download, every six hours, electronic
communications equivalent to the entire contents of the Library of Congress.
They also developed a program called Thin Thread that enables computers to scan
the material for key words, and they collect the billing records and the dialed
phone numbers of everyone in the country. In violation of communications laws,
ATT, Verizon, and BellSouth have opened their electronic records to the government.
At the height of its insanity, the Stasi in
East Germany was spying on 1 out of 7 citizens. The U.S. is now spying on 7 out
of 7.
-To make the
surveillance of American citizens even more comprehensive (assuming that is
even possible), the NSA is currently building the biggest-ever data complex in Bluffdale,
Utah, as part of a secret surveillance program code-named “Stellar Wind.” The
center, scheduled for completion in 2013, will be twice as large as the U.S.
Capitol, and contain 100,000 square feet of computer space, at a cost of $2
billion. In addition, the NSA has
established listening posts throughout the country as part of this
operation. All in all, there are now
1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related
to counterterrorism and homeland security in about 10,000 locations across the
U.S. The goal is to store and review the e-mails, phone calls, online shopping
lists, and virtually every bit of information about every single American.
Everything you do, from traveling to buying groceries, will be displayed on a
graph. William Binney (see above, Item II) has stated that we are about two
millimeters away “from a turnkey totalitarian state.”
IV. The corruption of the judicial system by means
of show trials of Muslim activists
This was
discussed at length by Chris Hedges on truthdig, 16 April 2012. That very week,
Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced to 17½ years in prison. He was
convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers in Iraq and giving material
support to al-Qaeda. No proof of these charges was provided. What seems to have
been the more relevant issue is that Mehanna had spoken out against U.S.
foreign policy, and had refused to become a government informant.
These types of
trials have been going on since 9/11. In them, federal lawyers are allowed to
prosecute people on “evidence” that the defendants are not allowed to see. Stephen
Downs, a lawyer who has defended Muslim activists since 2006, has documented
the phony charges used to label these people as terrorists and then put them
behind bars, typically for long stretches of time. He told Hedges: “People who
have committed no crime are taken into custody, isolated without adequate
recourse to legal advice, railroaded with fake or contrived charges, and
‘disappeared’ into prisons designed to isolate them.” Basically, they are
condemned before they have committed a crime, in a process that Downs calls “pre-emptive
prosecution.”
Downs discovered
all this in 2006, when Yassin Aref, the imam of a mosque in Albany, New York,
was entrapped in a government sting operation. What then happened, he told
Hedges, was that the government “put together a case that was just one lie
piled on top of another lie, and when you pointed it out to them they didn’t
care. They didn’t refute it. They knew it was a lie....But the facts are
irrelevant. The government has decided to target these people.” Essentially, he
went on, the government lawyers “must know they’re prosecuting people before a
crime has been committed based on what they think the defendant might do in the
future.” These are, in other words, kangaroo courts.
The bottom line,
of course, is that if you destroy the judicial system, then finally nobody is safe.
The government could wind up railroading anyone they don’t like, and I very
much doubt that this possibility is far-fetched. First they came for the Muslims...
V. The construction of political detention
centers, also known as Communication Management Units (CMU’s)
Where do the
suspected Muslim terrorists go? It turns out that the government is using
secret prison facilities to house inmates accused of non-violent activities,
i.e. of allegedly being tied to terrorist groups. As it turns out, these are
not just Muslim groups; the CMU’s are also being used to house environmental
activists. The first CMU was built in 2006 in Terre Haute, Indiana; in 2008 a
second facility was constructed in Marion, Illinois. Restrictions on contact
with the outside world are quite severe—for example, having all phone calls
monitored and limited to fifteen minutes per week. Among the so-called
terrorists housed in these units are the following:
-Rafil Dhafir, an
Iraqi-born oncologist from Syracuse, New York, who created a charity called
Help the Needy to provide food and medicine to the people of Iraq who had been
suffering from U.S. economic sanctions. He was sentenced to twenty-two years in
prison for violating those sanctions. (I cite some of these in Dark Ages America; they include a ban on
the importation of medicine and toilet paper.)
-Daniel McGowan,
an environmental activist who committed two acts of arson to protest logging in
the Pacific Northwest, was sentenced to seven years. He was not convicted of any terrorist crime or
being affiliated with any terrorist group, although the government claimed that
he was a member of the Earth Liberation Front, which they regard as a domestic
terrorist organization. One thing that
did not help was his public visibility, both through media appearances and his
website.
-Andrew
Stepanian, recently released—the first prisoner ever to be released from a CMU.
He spent three years in jail, which included six and a half months at the
Marion facility, for trying to shut down an animal testing laboratory. He was
then put under house arrest in New York. In fact, he was not accused of any
violent crime or property destruction.
What
distinguishes the CMU’s from other jails is that they are political prisons.
All of the defendants are incarcerated there for what appear to be ideological
reasons. Meanwhile, the definition of “terrorist” continues to grow (see below,
Item VI); it won’t necessarily stop with Muslims or environmental rights
activists. Significantly, the word
“ecoterrorism” was coined by corporations in the early 1980s. The CMU’s even contain
antiwar tax protesters. In general, the legal wall separating “terrorist” from
“dissident” is starting to break down, if, indeed, it hasn’t already.
VI. The shredding of the Bill of Rights by means
of the National Defense Authorization Act
The NDAA, also
known as the “indefinite detention bill,”
was signed into law by President Obama on 31 December 2011. It has no
temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by Mr. Obama or any future
president to military detain U.S. citizens. As in pre-Magna Carta days, you can simply be
swept up and put away forever—disappeared—with no explanation of why, no right
to call a lawyer or anybody else, and no right to a trial. You can actually be tortured to death, if the
government decides it is in the national interest. The NDAA is probably the
greatest rollback of civil liberties in the history of the United States. Under
the Act, literally anyone can be described as a “belligerent,” or as they are
now called, “covered person.” The president claimed that he signed the bill
only to provide funding for American troops, and that he had been reluctant to
sign it because it included American citizens. This b.s. was subsequently
exposed by one of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Carl Levin, who revealed that it
was Mr. Obama himself who insisted that the indefinite detention clause include
U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, the White
House had been conducting a misinformation campaign to secure this incredible
dictatorial power while portraying the president as some type of reluctant
absolute ruler. It is also important to note that there was virtually no
coverage of this issue on the part of the mainstream media. In effect, as Naomi
Wolf has written, the U.S. “is sleepwalking into become a police state.” The
New American website posted the following comment on the new law:
“The universe of
potential ‘covered persons’ includes every citizen of the United States of
America. Any American could one day find himself or herself branded a
‘belligerent’ and thus subject to the complete confiscation of his or her
constitutional civil liberties and nearly never-ending incarceration in a
military prison.”
You don’t have to
be convicted of terrorism to be rounded up, under this new law; you only have
to be suspected of terrorist activity.
And as Senator Rand Paul pointed out prior to the passage of the bill, the
Department of Justice now has a list of “identifying characteristics” of
terrorists that includes having one or more fingers missing from your hands;
having more than seven days’ worth of food in your house; and having a loaded
weapon on your property—which describes half the households in the United
States. In effect, with the NDAA, if the government, for any reason, doesn’t
like you—for example, if you are simply a critic of the U.S., nothing more—they
can brand you a terrorist and put you away forever, with literally no one
knowing what happened to you.
Note also that
even before the passage of this law, the president had the legal right, even though
it violates the Geneva accords, to designate anyone on the planet an enemy, and
have him or her assassinated. Thus on 30 September 2011, Mr. Obama had two
American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, assassinated because of
suspected—i.e. not proven—al-Qaeda membership and terrorist activity. Two weeks later, the CIA killed al-Awlaki’s
sixteen-year-old son. The real problem in these cases is not whether these
people were actually guilty of terrorism; it’s that the Constitution says that
no matter how heinous the crime, every American citizen has a right to his or her
day in court. If I remember correctly, it does not say that the president has
the right to rub them out without a trial.
(Just as an
aside, there are, in general, more people under “correctional supervision” in
America than there were in the Russian gulag under Stalin, at its height.
Writing in the New Yorker on 30 January
2012, Adam Gopnik declared: “Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in
human history is a fundamental fact of our country today.”)
VII. Future scenarios: The “disappearing” of
intellectual critics of the U.S. government?
This leads me to
my final point. The distinctive characteristic of American democracy, from
1776, was the protection of the individual and the preservation of individual
rights. That no longer exists. Anyone is a potential terrorist now; anyone can
be persecuted, prosecuted, and in effect, destroyed. Democracy is only possible if dissent is not only permitted,
but also respected. This too is finished. What does this mean for someone such
as myself?, is something I lay awake nights thinking about. I have published
three books, and half a collection of essays, showing where we have gone wrong,
predicting our eventual collapse—indeed, this repression is part of that
collapse—and arguing that the U.S. no longer has a moral compass; that it is
spiritually bankrupt. I run a blog that is anything but polite: it says the
U.S. is finished; that it is basically a corporate plutocracy, run by a
gangster elite; that the American people are basically morons, with little more
than fried rice in their heads; and that anyone with half a brain and the means
to do so should emigrate before it’s too late. I’m not really a threat to the
U.S. government, largely because I am not a political activist and because it’s
not likely that more than 74 people out of 311 million regularly read my blog
(it’s probably more like 24, in fact). But as the definition of terrorism
widens in this country, what is to prevent the creation of a category known as
“intellectual terrorism” from arising, and putting folks like myself in that
category? What is to prevent the government from calling such activity a clear
and present danger to national security? As must be obvious by now, the government
can do anything it wants to now; as in Nazi Germany, we now have a government
of men, not of laws. Indeed, the “laws” are little more than a pretext for
whatever the government wishes to do.
Is the following
scenario completely paranoid? Five or ten years down the line, as I fly into
the DFW Airport en route to giving a lecture somewhere, or simply visiting
friends, I am suddenly surrounded by government agents, whisked off to a
holding cell, and eventually sent to Guantanamo. Nobody knows what happened to
me, and I’m not allowed to phone anyone—not my lawyer, not a friend, and
certainly not Chris Hedges, who is probably being tortured in the adjoining
cell. Two points to remember here, historically speaking:
-When a country
puts laws such as torture or indefinite detention or arbitrary assassination on
the books, sooner or later it will use these legal instruments. They won’t just lie dormant, in other words. As
in the case of technology, once the mechanisms are there, the temptation to
employ them simply becomes too great to resist. That is what is happening
today.
-In a world that
is politically construed along Manichaean lines—which, as I have argued
elsewhere, America has been doing since Day 1—the first line of attack is
against the enemy outside. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about
Protestants or Catholics or al-Qaeda operatives or infidels of any kind, the
first order of business is to go to war with them. But as the British
anthropologist Mary Douglas shows in her book Purity and Danger, or Norman Cohn demonstrates in The Pursuit of the Millennium, if the
war goes on long enough, inevitably the enemy is also seen to be a fifth
column, i.e. within the walls of the body politic itself. They become Huguenots or Marrano Jews or
heretics of whatever stripe, and as in the case of Goya’s famous painting, Saturn Devouring His Son, the country
begins to eat itself alive. Everybody
becomes an enemy; no one is safe any longer. And so I believe that I, and you, really
do have reason to worry.
Somewhere along
the line, God stopped blessing America.
We are not marching to Pretoria; rather, we are slouching towards
Nuremberg. To quote Edward R. Murrow,
Good Night, and Good Luck.
(c)Morris Berman,
2012
References
