Groping Towards Totalitarianism

In the name of public safety, everybody at airports will be groped: the elderly, women and children.

Speaking of the “legality” of warrantless searches, judges in Indiana have “ruled that Indiana residents have no right to obstruct unlawful police incursions into their homes [italics added].” So never mind that state’s constitution, the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the English Bill of Rights of 1688 and Magna Carta of 1215: in the name of “public policy,” the state’s agents can infringe the law “legally” and with impunity. “We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” wrote Justice Steven David.

More generally, if you or I do it, it’s a crime called theft; if the state’s agents do it, it’s a “public policy” called “taxation” and fiscal policy.” If you or I do it, it’s a crime called counterfeiting; if the state’s central bank does it, it’s a “public policy” called “monetary policy,” “quantitative easing,” etc. And if you or I try it, it’s a crime called attempted murder (and, if “successful,” murder). But if people wearing costumes issued by the state do it, it’s a “public policy” in “the national interest” called “defence” and “anti-terrorism.”

Meanwhile, and tragi-comically, most Americans (and Australians, etc.) insist -- vehemently -- that they live in a free country. Truly, those who are wilfully blind cannot see. In the words of Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press, 1966):

What no one seemed to notice ... 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.

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.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. 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.