U.S. on the verge of a police state

[dogday]

The new "post-911" reality of the Bush administration characterizes anything other than instant agreement with treason.

We have two active combat zones - Afghanistan and Iraq - with no real exit strategy, no mission to accomplish and no reasons for our continued presence.

Our rights are being eliminated by the Patriot Act and by a president who sincerely seems to believe that his office gives him the authority to overrule the Constitution and the laws of the land.

We are poised on the brink of declaring an entire group of people, numbering in the millions, as felons, something that has not been done since the 1930s in Germany.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0409sunlets093.html


This is an opinion piece, I found it to be right on time

[zbdent]

1. He's right . . . it might just begin

11/8/2006, if * sees that he will no longer be able to hide behind a Rubber-Stamp House and Senate . . .

[MadMaddie]

3. If he tries that I honestly think their will be a Civil war in the US...

his supporters are dropping left and right...that would push more off of the bandwagon....

[zbdent]

6. Civil war in this country was averted 5-4

on 12/12/2000 . . . when Sandy mollified the armed mobs of the right . . .

[paparush]

2. Ja! Bush Nukes Iran...then declares Marshal Law here in the US

No elections.

[greenbriar]

4. I honestly think the people would rise up against the machine

if that happened

[WCGreen]

7. I think the Armed Forces would rise up and stop that

nonsense......

[converted_democrat]

9. I'm really considering selling everything off, and just taking a

"vacation" for a couple of years outside of the US..

[RaleighNCDUer]

14. Just be careful where you go.

If we nuke Iran, a whole lot of the world is going to be mighty uncomfortable for Americans.

[leeroysphitz]

17. Which people? The ones glued to American Idol? or the ones

that spend all their time down at the MALL or Wal-Mart. Maybe it's all the internet addicts. Hmmm...?

Those of us that stay informed and try to be involved are in the minority here. If nothing that has occured in the last 6 years has managed to break throught the giant wall of APATHY that most Americans live behind then I posit that perhaps NOTHING will...

Hope I'm wrong.

[VelmaD]

8. I hate to be pedantic...

but it is Martial Law.

[Atman]

5. After watching the Mark Crispin Miller talk on CSPAN...

I wouldn't put anything past them. They are intent on holding on to power any way they can, because they think everyone else is crazy. Seriously. An interesting premise I'm not sure I agree with, but I'm sure as hell not discounting it yet, either.

[BrklynLiberal]

10. Once again. "They Thought They Were Free"

An excerpt from
They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
<snip>
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
<snip>
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
<snip>

more...

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

and
http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free.html

[kath]

27. 2nd the rec. for "They Thought They Were Free". See "Slouching Toward

Kristallnacht", a DailyKos diary that includes a much longer excerpt from Mayer's book:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/20/12819/467

A few more paragraphs:

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

<snip> (the portion below follows immediately after what Lynne quoted in her post):
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in, your nation, your people is not the world you were in at all."

<more>

[iconoclastNYC]

11. It's here already. It's stealthy, but it's here.

Alex Jones and his ilk are right.... the foundation for a full on police state is in place. If the people rise up against our government they will be crushed ruthlessly and efficiently.

[sui generis]

12. harsh reality

the people making these laws live in white suburbs far far away from any concentrations of immigrant housing. For all intents and purposes, Texas is the northern united states of mexico already.

Police state or not the only way to effectively pick up illegal immigrants is to go house to house demanding identification and immediately removing anyone who can't comply, and that essentially means targeting neighborhoods as well as racial profiling.

Now just imagine how a roundup would really work in a suburban neighborhood . . . and where do you put the natural citizen children after you've taken the parents? What do you do with empty homes and apartments to keep looting and crime from growing?

It wouldn't be a civil war, it would be a door to door slaughter. Add to that you have hispanic police officers, national guardsmen, and soldiers who would be required to assist. Is it even possible for these idiots to possibly be more stupid and shortsighted? I think they're pretty much at rock bottom.

Go ahead GOP - suicide is suicide, whether slow or quick. This one will at least be interesting.

[genie_weenie]

13. The US has been a police state since at least 1861.

If not from the destruction of the Dorr "Rebellion", the Whiskey "Rebellion" or Shay's "Rebellion" (note: the government historians are able to frame the dissenters as rebels each and everytime...)

[RaleighNCDUer]

15. The putting down of citizen rebellions does not make a police

state.

It is the putting down of civilians that are NOT in rebellion that makes a police state.

[400Years]

20. I disagree

we have been living in a police state for a very long time, as genie said.

Just because you didn't witness it yourself doesn't mean it didn't happen.

From the Palmer Raids to the mass deportation of politically active people
from 1915 onwards.

The establishment of Hoover's FBI and the Dulles boy's CIA all solidified the
total domestic control of dissent.

You can march around with a sign all you want but when you become effective is
when they take you out.

[RaleighNCDUer]

21. My disagreement was in Genie's citing of the crushing of open

rebellion as a sign of a police state.

The rounding up of dissidents when NOT is a time of war, the surveillance of law-abiding civilians by government agencies, and the restrictions of individuals' movement by the state -- those are signs of a police state. In the last four years we have met all three of those criteria, and moves are being suggested and apparatus set in place to take them farther. I think, in fact, that the whole "illegal immigrant" issue is being pumped up as an excuse to issue citizens a national ID card.

So I don't disagree that we ARE in a police state, now. The very fact that a couple weeks ago, posting here, I altered a post and added caveats to it, which should not have been necessary, because I was afraid that what I said might be taken as a threat against the president, argues that we are already there (or that I am simply paranoid, but that was a different thread).

[genie_weenie]

22. "Crushing of open rebellion"

is the key to argument. Why are the people in "rebellion"?

So let's look at The so-called Dorr Rebellion. Dorr was fighting to change the illegal voting system which disenfranchised most of voters of Rhode Island. The eventually believed they could not change the system from within (1776 was still in people's memories) so they drafted a new Constitution, which called for voting rights for all white males with residence. this of course would have broken the power of the old regime, which declared martial law and the militia was used to defeat Dorr. Dorr was found guilty of treason against the state, and sentenced in 1844 to solitary confinement at hard labor for life.

The key is the State has always put down and mislabeled persons who do not agree with their policies because the act of labeling throughout history has always allowed people to define the debate. So call it a rebellion because uneducated people or people not involved in it automatically accept as TRUE the words of the imposing State official whom they have been conditioned to believe.

The State has always maintained it's power over the citizens, Just because * is bald-faced using that power doesn't mean previous God-Emperors of America didn't have it or wield it. For example, Conscription wasn't ended until 1973. The President since LBJ has had these extra-legal war power acts. Wilson had people locked up for speaking against his war, no one seems to remember this. Lincoln used draconian measures and killed more Americans than any other President. (though his generals had something to do with that, frontal assault after frontal assault). J Edgar Hoover had huge files on all sorts of dissidents.


Ludlow 1913

[dogday]

16. I was at one of my sponsor's site- a credit card site

and at the bottom of the application on their page, it has the following

The USA Patriot Act is a Federal Law that requires all financial institutions to obtain, verify and record information that identifies each person who opens an account. You will be asked to provide your name, address, date of birth, and other information that will allow us to identify you. You may also be asked to provide documentation as proof of identification. "Everyone is Approved" and "No One is Turned Down" is contingent upon successfully passing this mandatory identification confirmation.


If that don't scare the shit out of you...

[yodermon]

18. I agree philosophically, but

.. I just don't think they have the manpower nor resources to actually enforce MARTIAL LAW on the general populace without it failing miserably, and the regime is kicked out of power.

Even with "private contractors", halliburton security, and Fox "protecting bill o'loofah's good name" security thrown into the mix.

[B3Nut]

30. I can't see where an attempt at nationwide martial law would be

anything but a colossal and hilarious failure. Where are the human resources going to come from? Most of the military is tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan! What are they going to do, send the base janitors door to door? They'd *like* to do something like this, and they may even be stupid enough to *try*, but they will fall flat on their face. They could lock a few cities down, but that would leave other areas totally unlocked so to speak, allowing for the ptoential of mayhem. It would be a mess, but I don't doubt that Bush and his gang are stupid and insane enough to try anyway...

Todd in Beerbratistan

[Initech]

19. Sending nukes to Iran, stealing elections and declaring martial law.

Yup... all I have to say is, this is the government the evangelicals voted for.

[ShortnFiery]

23. Now I get why they are "swift boating" Conyers tonight ...

We need to IMPEACH and IMPEACH NOW!

What will it take for these Zombie Republicans to realize we're now ruled by CRAZIES!?!

[Initech]

24. I keep saying Bush would be able to kill a guy on TV at this point...

And Limpballs and Insanity would somehow find a way to spin that...

[dogday]

25. Look at the way the train the police now

They used to subdue their suspects, now they taser them and beat them down... They are taught by homeland security and it is a different world my friends...

[genie_weenie]

26. I think you're wrong

Do you think police nowadays are worse than the Pinkertons? Or what was done in Ludlow 1913? Or the rousting of the Bonus Army in 1932? Or the Democratic Convention in chicago in 1968? Or what was done to the so-called Haymarket Square "rioters"?

I think people need to realize raw, naked force has been used by the US Government since it's founding, because like all governments force keeps the people in line.

[dogday]

28. I am talking about City Police or County Police

Who used to subdue their suspects by bringing them down... They used to never try to hurt the people like they do now... When they taser a little girl, I would argue that it was not the standard for the police until 2001.. You can site specific groups which yes went after people with a vengeance, but I am talking about City and County police.... They are being trained by homeland security, so all of them are the same now....

[Hutzpa]

29. Hell!! its been a Police state as far back......

I can remember.