Can Evil Be Defeated?
By Paul Craig Roberts
April 03, 2015 "ICH"
- John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney. As head of the Rutherford
Institute he is actively involved in defending our civil liberties. Being
actively involved in legal cases, he experiences first hand the transformation
of law from a shield of the American people into a weapon in the hands of the
government.
American civil liberty was seriously eroded prior to 9/11 and
the rise of the police/warfare state, a story I tell in
How America Was Lost. Lawrence Stratton and I documented the loss of law as
a shield of the American people in our book,
The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000, 2008). Whitehead in his book,
A Government of Wolves (2013) and in his just released
Battlefield America (2015) shows how quickly and thoroughly the police state
has taken root.
We live in an electronic concentration camp. We are addicted
to images on screens that disinform and propagandize us to accept and even
welcome the police state activities that have destroyed our autonomy, privacy,
and independence.
I write many columns on this subject. The advantage of a book
is that it all comes together under one cover, and that is what Whitehead has
done in Battlefield America.
“The outlook for civil liberties grows bleaker by the day,
from the government’s embrace of indefinite detention for US citizens and armed
surveillance drones flying overhead to warrantless surveillance of phone, email
and Internet communications, and prosecutions of government whistle-blowers. The
homeland is ruled by a police-industrial complex, an extension of the American
military empire. Everything that our founding fathers warned against is now the
new norm. The government has trained its sights on the American people. We have
become the enemy. All the while, the American people remain largely oblivious.”
Whitehead gives it to us straight. We are continually abused
in the name of protecting us. Ordinary Americans are subject to far worst abuse
from government than they ever could be from criminals and terrorists, both of
which are bogymen used to justify the government’s terrorism of the citizenry.
Four-year old children are handcuffed by police. Ninety-five
year old citizens with walkers are body-slammed with their neck broken by
police. War veterans without legs and wheelchair bound are shot and murdered by
police. The police always justify their abuse and criminal acts by claiming they
felt threatened. What kind of heavily armed police, usually together in gangs,
is threatened by a four-year old, a 95-year old, a double amputee? The fact that
police get away with this brutality shows their total lack of humanity and the
total transformation of the purpose of police. Today a paranoid police protect
not the public but the police state and themselves from an imaginary threatening
public. We pay them to abuse and murder us.
On September 6, 7, and 8, 2014, the Washington Post reported
that state and local police had become bandits, as in Mexico, who stop drivers
in order to rob them. In “Stop
and Seize,” the Washington Post reported that “aggressive police take
hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes.”
There are now
training courses in which police are trained in the art of highway robbery.
September 11, 2001, was used to create an industry that trains police in the
aggressive techniques of highway interdiction. It is now routine for a traffic
stop, whether justified or not, to result in the confiscation of your cash,
other possessions, and your car itself. You can be
robbed by police on the basis of their assumptions without being ticketed or
charged with a crime.
Whitehead reports that in fiscal year 2012 the federal
government alone seized $4.2 billion in assets despite the fact that in 80
percent of the cases no charge was issued.
Did you know that the school security industry is a $4.9
billion annual business that instills in youth acceptance of tyranny and
punishments for infractions that are simply the normal behavior of youth?
Did you know that in 2006 a Halliburton subsidiary, Dick
Cheney’s firm, was awarded a $385 million federal contract to build
concentration camps in the US?
Did you know that Republicans have privatized the prison
system and turned it into a $70 billion per year industry that demands ever more
incarceration of citizens in order to drive profits. Consequently, 2.7 million
American children now have at least one parent in prison, often on charges that
would not constitute crimes in a civilized country.
US prison labor is now the cheapest form of labor available
with prisoners paid between 93 cents and $4.73 per day. Prisoners make office
furniture, work in call centers, fabricate body armor, take hotel reservations,
work in slaughterhouses, manufacture textiles, shoes, and clothing, process
agricultural products like milk and beef, package Starbucks coffee, shrink wrap
software for Microsoft, sew lingerie for Victoria’s Secret, produce the
military’s helmets, shirts, pants, tents, bags, canteens, and a variety of other
equipment, make circuit boards for IBM, Texas Instruments and Dell. Sew
McDonald’s uniforms, and perform labor services for Boeing, Motorola, Compaq,
Revlon and Kmart.
Even the “mainstream” presstitute media has reported the US
military drills in South Florida where military teams working with local police
practiced rounding up American citizens for detention. The media has also
reported the upcoming military occupations in Texas and Utah. There are protests
but not on the level that a people conscious of the threat to their liberty
would mount.
It seems clear that these are federal troops practicing
control of the population which is being stripped of the constitutional right to
hold government accountable. The pointless lockdown of Boston and its suburbs
and the gratuitous house to house searches, a martial law exercise clearly
prepared prior to the Boston Marathon Bombing, used fear created by the bombing,
possibly a false flag operation, to teach the population compliance with, and
acceptance of, martial law. The insouciant American population went along with
it. If someone points out how they were manipulated, the fools scream
“conspiracy theorist.”
The official explanation of the military exercises practicing
population control in South Florida, Texas and Utah is that the military is
practicing for overseas actions. Why then are local police involved? More likely
we are witnessing drills described in the US Army’s 2010 publication,
“Internment and Resettlement Operations.”
It is now routine for police to amuse themselves by carrying
out strip searches and vaginal searches of women. Police go out of their way to
provoke resistance so that they can beat, taser, and murder. If they can’t
provoke it, they beat, taser, and murder anyway and claim their victim resisted
arrest or threatened them. Have you noticed how the police find everyone
threatening?
Whitehead shows that the educational system, entertainment,
and television serve to indoctrinate and teach compliance. Television can do
more than form public opinion. It is used to alter the worldview of the
population. Our cars, household appliances, and smart homes are becoming devices
designed to spy on us and report noncompliance. A society is being created in
which there can be no autonomy and no freedom.
The technology that permits the electronic concentration camp
is produced by thoughtless people who have no concern for liberty. How,
Whitehead asks, do we maintain our humanity in the face of technologies designed
to dehumanize us?
America now has preemptive prosecution. Whitehead reports that
95 percent of those convicted of terrorism between 2001 and 2010 were prosecuted
not for deeds, but for beliefs, ideology, or religious affiliations.
The two most engaging chapters in Battleground America are
“The Matrix” and “The Posthuman Era,” together a mere 17 pages. The fusion of
machines with humans to which trans-humanists are committed will destroy human
sensibility, memory, and morality, and probably humans themselves.
Corporate America is in it for the money. Whitehead tells us:
“With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, and every Twitter,
Facebook, and Google account we open, we’re helping Corporate America build a
dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we
spend our money, and how we spend our time.”
Whitehead quotes Bill Joy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems: “I
think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection
of evil.”
Jim Edwards says, “we humans are now data bits.”
In the penultimate chapter, Whitehead tells us what we can do,
a question that I am forever asked by readers. Whitehead says that armed revolt
is not an option. He believes that the tens of millions, perhaps 100 million,
Americans who have pistols, rifles, and shotguns are not only unorganized, but
outgunned. The 21st century has been used to militarize state and local police
forces and to brutalize their attitude toward the American public. Even police
in small towns now have helicopters, armored personnel carriers, tanks, machine
guns, rocket-propelled grenades, drones, night vision, heat sensors, sensors
that can see through the walls of houses and into cars.
If this is not enough, in comes the National Guard or federal
troops, Army Rangers, Navy Seals. Or simply the release of germs. Washington can
deal with its citizens the same way it dealt with the indigenous peoples we call
Indians. Washington has retained in its hands live smallpox, a deadly killer,
and there now have been several generations of Americans who have not had
smallpox vaccination, because the disease was eliminated by vaccination. All the
government has to do is to release smallpox on resistant populations, and, of
course, the government has numerous other such means.
How did it come to this?
In my opinion, as I so often write, Americans are distracted
by sex, entertainment, the difficulty of providing for themselves and for
families. They are locked into the disinformation that sustains the American
Matrix, blinded by their patriotism and the 4th of July speeches and by their
indoctrination that Americans are “exceptional and indispensable.” And, of
course, by their ignorance and arrogance. Americans simply have no clue.
The purpose of the evil that masquerades as a government in
Washington is to prevent those few Americans who do have a clue from informing
the rest of the population. Whistleblowers are arrested and falsely prosecuted
and imprisoned. Journalists have been intimidated into silence.
Now, to Whitehead’s answer to what can we do. He says that we
can mount “militant nonviolent resistance.” This worked for Christians in the
decomposing Roman Empire.
It worked for Mahatma Gandhi in India against the British
colonialists. It was working for Martin Luther King in America before he was
assassinated, most likely by the FBI.
Whitehead says that the mass of the citizenry cannot be
assassinated. If citizens simply stop cooperating by listening to the lies on
TV, by purchasing the devices used to control them, by amusing themselves in
front of propaganda screens, by learning again how to think, how to be human,
how to be moral, the American police state can be defeated.
It worked in the past, and possibly it can work again. If not,
Washington will remain the home of Sauron, a threat to every American citizen
and to the entire world.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of
the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His
internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West
and
How America Was Lost.