Lightly Tripping Down the Road to Fascism

At the end of February, Bush eviscerated the Intelligence Oversight Board. (H/T to C&L)

This is all a part of the Bush objective to strip away all rights of privacy from Americans. One of the things that the IOB was supposed to look for was that the foreign intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and DIA, weren't spying on Americans. Bush, of course, can't have anybody other than his version of Harvey the Rabbit overseeing him.

When I was a child, unless, of course, you were a homosexual, a hippie or a minority, the cops were pretty much a benign group. They drove around in squad cars and they were armed with six-shot .38 revolvers, loaded with round-nose lead ammunition. A lot of cops shot their revolvers at the Police Academy when they went there and then went for the duration of their careers without firing another shot. I'll bet that some of them never took the guns out of their holsters.

It was also a fairly widely-held view that the bust-down-the door, middle-of-the-night police raids and arrests were the hallmark of a totalitarian state. That's what the Gestapo and the KGB did, not Americans. True, the cops used to torture confessions out of suspects, but that had largely died out. (Not completely, though.)

Then came the Vietnam War, with the police and the military infiltrating opposition groups, a tactic that was repeated recently when the Defense Department sought to combat the terroristic threat posed by the Quakers. The Vietnam War brought about police riots and mass arrests carried out at behest of a future Supreme Court Chief Justice (using legal arguments put forth by the British when they were trying to suppress the American Revolution.)

Then came the War on Drugs, with no-knock warrants. The cops became hooked on the drug war, as they began stealing people's property through aggressive forfeiture laws. If the cops today find you with what they consider to be too much cash, they will "confiscate" it from you and you have to prove that it was legally your money. (Yes, that's right, the burden of proof is on you.)

Along with the War on Drugs came the militarization of the police. While never a bunch of long-hairs, many police departments now expect that their uniformed officers have haircuts that would make a Marine DI happy. Police firepower has grown. The police have formed SWAT teams or ESU teams and they use them for routine arrests. (Or they use the SWAT team to take a child at gunpoint to the hospital because the paramedics think the kid should go and the parents do not.)

What drove this home to me were a couple of incidents. One was in Ohio, where an inmate in one of the state prisons wrote to his girlfriend about the proper care of the marijuana plants that she was tending for him. The fact that one woman (who, if I remember correctly, was in her40s) had some pot plants in her basement brought out the full SWAT team to execute a search warrant. As a result, there was a great photograph in the newspaper of a rather chubby cop, in SWAT black and wearing a SS helmet, carefully carrying a potted marijuana plant out of the house.

The second was during the search for the DC Sniper. The cops in Maryland were running a series of roadblocks; some of the cops at the roadblocks were wearing jeans, t-shirts, balaclavas over their heads and carrying assault rifles. If it were not for the badges hung around their necks, in a style reminiscent of the Feldgendarmerie, they looked like well-dressed terrorists.

The police don't seem to care very much that for at least some people, when they run around in all-black uniforms, wearing helmets that look like German Army surplus, they look like Nazi storm troopers. They should care. Whether they like it or not, this is still nominally a free nation and the police need the support of the people in order to be able to function in anything other than "occupying army" mode. When the police are perceived to be acting as occupiers, they are treated as such and nobody wants to be viewed as a Quisling.

We also have a situation where freedom of ideas and freedom of thought is being suppressed. Congress outlawed the sale of adult pornography on military bases in 1995, a bill that was championed by the Right as "protecting the morals of our soldiers" or some such nonsense like that. After all, God forbid that a young soldier get to read through a skin magazine like Penthouse or Hustler after having been on patrol, shot some people and helped pick up the guts of a couple of his buddies who were blown to doll rags by an IED, the poor kid might have his morals corrupted. The outlawing of adult pornography is an outcome that is cheered by the same God-fearing folks on the Right who worry more about the morals of the soldiers than their being properly equipped (a trait that goes back at least as far as World War I) and of some on the Left who regard pornography as being offensive to women.

And yes, this is all a piece of the movement by the goons on the Parents Television Council to make sure that nothing, absolutely nothing, is broadcast that would not have been out of character with the 1950s, when babies sort of arrived on TV by parthenogenesis. It's the mindset that you, as adult Americans, are too feeble-minded to exercise any control over what you may read or what you may watch. You are considered to be too lazy or too stupid to exercise any control over your children. Some of the best things ever aired on television cannot now be aired because of the thugs on the PTC and their enthrallment of the FCC. They could not now air the 1970s miniseries "Holocaust," which had a scene showing naked corpses being removed from a gas chamber and dumped into burial pits. They cannot re-air "Saving Private Ryan," one of the better war movies ever made, and which was shown on network TV before the PTC's goons took over the FCC. They could not re-air the documentary "9/11," which aired on CBS in 2002 with limited commercial interruption.

On the Right, you have prohibitions against drugs and, still in some jurisdictions, prohibition on the sale of alcohol, all under the guise of "protecting the morals" of people. On the Left, you have the attempts to greatly restrict, if not outlaw, the private possession of firearms. The Right is particularly incensed at times with what books may be available through the public libraries or are sold in bookstores. "Heather Has Two Mommies" and the "Harry Potter" series" were examples of that (note the one imbecile who claimed that reading about Harry Potter would mean more school shootings). Bipartisan support exists for the Thought Crime Act of 2007, which can be read to outlaw political protest.

All of this is a form of creeping fascism. When you use the power of the State to make sure that others conform to behavior you approve of, you grant to the State the power to stop you from doing things you may want to do. When you give the State the power to use extraordinary force in some situations, then you will find that, because they invested so much money and training in their shiny new toys, they will use them. And that is how you get grandmothers killed when the police throw a hand grenade into her home. That's how you get great-grandmothers shot over 30 times when the police raid the wrong home on a no-knock raid (and then plant drugs to try and cover up their mistake). And that is how you get an unarmed man shot to pieces, including through the soles of his feet.

We need to get back to a few concepts if we are ever going to have a hope of continuing to live in a free society:

1) Just because someone else does something that you don't approve of, you should not have the power to outlaw it. If their conduct does not directly harm you, keep your nose out of their lives. If they want to sit in their homes and do drugs or collect guns or read adult port or gay porn or Karl Marx or Ann Coulter, that's their business. It is none of yours.

2) Any government confiscation of anyone's property on the charge of being an "instrumentality of a suspected crime" must be held to the same burden of proof that is used for a criminal conviction. If you want to run around with $50,000 in a briefcase, it should be up to the government to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you had nefarious reasons for doing so. If you cannot convict the person, you cannot convict the property.

3) Your right to control your own life doesn't mean that you have the right to control everyone else's. Your television set, for example, comes with a channel-changer and on/off buttons. Learn how to use them.

4) The government cannot spy on Americans. Not without a warrant. And if they do have a warrant, there must be independent oversight. Nobody can be trusted with that level of power without independent supervision. Ever. No exceptions, no excuses. National Security Letters, which give the FBI and other agencies the ability to paw through your records without a warrant, should be outlawed.

I apologize if this seems rambling and disjuncted, but I am writing tonight more from my heart. I am sorry if this does not read like a polished article, for it is not meant to be that. I feel that if we are going to stop fascism from taking over this country, whether from the Right or the Left, we must get away from the idea that we can make people "better". As Malcolm Reynolds said, I do not hold to that. And yes, there may come a time when we have to misbehave. It will be far easier to keep our freedom (at least what is left of it), than it will be to take it back after it has been taken away.