“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 understand it, it could not be released because of national
security... And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so
occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of
the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”—Historian
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.
While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to
lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of
power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the
future of this country.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the
political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better
beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in
a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.
And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as
to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to
represent them, you’d better beware.
We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.
As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted,
occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each
other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to
present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and
ineptitude) in any form.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan,
two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m
referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State
that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and
has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.
So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the
finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can
out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.
Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows
political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity
and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.
This is how evil wins.
This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.
This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves
to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and
fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail
to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from
the map and place us all in chains.
The world has been down this road before, as historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free.
We are at our most vulnerable right now.
The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but
despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power
and money.
We’re in a national state of denial, yet no amount of escapism can
shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed
by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the
Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
No matter how often the team colors change, the playbook remains the same. The leopard does not change its spots.
Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that nothing has changed.
The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.
In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the
same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying,
heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current
Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House
before him (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).
Consider for yourselves:
- Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
- SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
- The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
- Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
- For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
- Censorship hasn’t stopped.
- The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
- Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
- The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements.
- The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers.
- Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws.
- The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.”
- The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.
- The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
- And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep.
So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still
live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to
make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to
America’s decline over the past century, it will be just another lie.
The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.
They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. The
warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large
neon signs.
“Still,” historian Robert Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted
in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press
and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration
camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on.”
The German people backed Hitler because for the majority of them, life was good.
In a nutshell, life was good because their creature comforts remained undiminished, their bank accounts remained flush, and they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor.
Life is good in America, too.
Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep
sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies
that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone
else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus
entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.
Life is good in America as long as you don’t mind being made
to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars,
subsidization of foreign nations, bloated workforce, secret agencies,
fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive
technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item
that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite
at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the
99%.
Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.
So, please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the
hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to
be largely dictated by their political loyalties.
Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious
callousness of the U.S. government are unique to any one particular
administration has not been paying attention.
WC: 1251
