John Whitehead's Commentary

It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
-- Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering, testimony at Nuremberg

As I stated in Part I of this series, the state of our union is dismal at best and is slowly inching toward an authoritarian government. But anyone looking for black shirts, mass rallies or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of what professor and former presidential advisor Bertram Gross calls "creeping fascism."

If and when the authoritarian state rears its head in America, it will not be the goose-stepping variety that we saw in Nazi Germany. Indeed, as Gross writes in his book Friendly Fascism (1980), "it will be super modern and multi-ethnic--as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It will be fascism with a smile." And television will probably be its most important vehicle.

Faced with an increasingly authoritarian government that has at its disposal the technology to nudge us in the direction it desires us to go--and an American people increasingly willing to forfeit their civil liberties for security and expedience--it is evident that our civil liberties are in a perilous state.

For example, shortly after September 11, 2001, polls showed that two-thirds of Americans believed it was necessary to give up basic civil liberties for the sake of security. Polls since then show that about half would still forfeit their constitutional rights for safety.

Not long after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which effectively took away certain protections guaranteed to American citizens in the Bill of Rights. This long, detailed piece of legislation allows government agents to come into your home and search it without your ever knowing they've been there--clearly gutting the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. This law also allows the government to monitor telephone conversations, Internet usage, business transactions and library reading records, among other things.

The Patriot Act, however, is merely one more link in a chain of control that is effectively enhancing the power of government which has been building for years. In fact, the government keeps close tabs on nearly everything we do. This ranges from government tracking of everyone who travels on an airplane to FBI agents visiting homes of ordinary citizens who are targeted by local police as free speech protesters to invasive, detailed census forms that demand to know everything about us.

A national ID card looms in the near future. Cameras are now positioned on street corners and in public schools to watch over us and our children. This is what Matthew Brzezinski in his book Fortress America calls "the surveillance state." In fact, there are very few things that are really private matters anymore as the government seeks to know the most intimate details of our lives. "The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."

The recent emergence of free speech zones and demonstration zones that cage demonstrators and others who want to protest or simply exercise their free speech effectively destroys the First Amendment. Some judges have actually upheld such zones, based on the need for security.

What such governmental censorship indicates is that in America we no longer really operate under a written Constitution. Rule of law, the bedrock of the Constitution, has now been replaced largely by the rule of bureaucrats and judges.

Many average citizens, however, lack any knowledge about their basic constitutional rights. The Constitution is poorly taught in the schools, and, thus, few have even read it. Moreover, because of the low literacy rate--America ranks seventeenth in the top 30 industrialized nations in the world, despite $745 billion spent on public education--many are not able to read and understand the foundational document of the U.S. government.

With the Bush Administration's draconian plans to impose mandatory mental testing, accompanied by an increased drugging of school children, any awareness of violations of basic liberties will most likely go unheeded. America is already a drug-saturated populace, and the infiltration of the drug industry into the schools is an ominous development.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the emerging police state in America. Sadly, that mindset has filtered into the schools, where under zero tolerance policies children are even arrested by police for refusing to follow dress codes. And our work places--especially those of the international corporations--are becoming places of such stark uniformity that differences of opinion are not really welcome. Freedom, so to speak, is swiftly becoming passé.

The parallels between present-day America and pre-Nazi Germany become even more ominous when you consider the increasing public loss of faith in political and governmental institutions. In pre-Nazi Germany under the Weimar Constitution, the people in drastic fashion had lost trust in their governmental structures. Likewise, there has been a collapse of the American public's faith in its major institutions. These include the presidency, Congress, the courts and the gargantuan federal bureaucracy that continues to expand.

The increasing presence of the military in our lives is another cause of concern. "Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty," George Washington once wrote, "and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." When combined with the militarized nature of our police force, Americans should be alarmed. However, just the opposite is true. Unlike much of the American government, the military has enjoyed a remarkably steady climb in popularity. And since the 1980s, the military has become more and more involved in civil problem solving--a trend that, as Air Force General Charles Dunlap has warned, can easily lead to a military state in the U.S.

There is also the possibility of martial law being instituted if there are other terrorist attacks. And former Attorney General John Ashcroft's plan several years ago to establish "camps" for so-called enemy combatants--some of whom would be American citizens--reveals the thinking of some of those in power. Allegedly, some 600 camps, replete with barbed wire and guard stations, are already sprinkled throughout the U.S (www.apfn.org/apfn/camps).

Finally, there is the impact on the populace of the ongoing war on terrorism. In his classic novel 1984, author George Orwell issues a prophetic warning against governments that remain perpetually at war against a vague, ever-changing enemy. In 1984, the continuing wars took place largely in the abstract. However, the wars and military skirmishes served as a convenient method of nurturing fear in the populace in justifying the government's authoritarian regime and its practices--including the institution of the forced military inscription (that is, the draft).

Since World War I, the evolving military-industrial complex that is the United States has either been in a war or an armed conflict on a continuing basis. Yet with the so-called war on terrorism, the U.S. government has moved into a new paradigm as amorphous as that described by Orwell.

"Although we are told the president's resolve is steady and the mission clear, we seem to know less and less about the enemy we are fighting.... Exactly what will constitute success in this war remains unclear," writes Daniel Kurtzman (www.tompaine.com), "but the one thing the Bush administration has made certain is that the war will continue 'indefinitely.'"

Add to this the continuing colored alerts and other scare tactics by the government, and is it any wonder that the American public swings from numbness to fear to paranoia--and that the state of our union is in disrepair?

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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