It won't happen here
Posted by unbrand on 22 December 2004 | 0 Comments
There’s a niggling question that’s been snapping my synapses for a few years now. Is America becoming a police state? I was raised, as an American, to believe in the amber waves of grain, the fruited plains, and an unlimited future based solely on my own ambition.
These ideas served me well for about 35 years. I believed these precepts down to the core of my being. And I believe that I was fortunate enough to take advantage of much of what America has to offer.
Now PATRIOT acts I and II have passed and most of Congress didn’t read them before voting to ratify them. The most diligent web sites are still digging through these bills to expose what’s hiding under the rocks because if they don’t, well, who will? Certainly not our representatives in government.
So today I come across an article by at U.S. Representative Ron Paul where he gives an insider’s view on the current police state in the United States of America. He sums up what I believe quite nicely.
There was (I hate to say was) a band called Consolidated that had an album called Friendly Fascism from about 13 years ago. This album basically said through industrial beats and intelligent lyrics that the new form of fascism was not the Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler type of fascism that our parents and grandparents knew. Today’s fascism is well-scrubbed, quite palatable, and available in bite-size-chunks. Slow and steady it seeps into American culture and politics such that it’s not even noticeable.
Like a frog in hot water, the slow erosion of constitutional rights due to the War on Drugs, 9/11, the War on Terror, the Real War on Afghanistan, and its sequel, the War on Iraq, and to complete the triptych, the War on Iran, and pretty much the War on Anything-To-Induce-Fear are all designed to keep people down and afraid and subservient.
One quote springs to mind, from the movie Network: “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.”