A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (3 page)

Occupy Protester Arrested by NYPD

(AP Photo/John Minchillo)

While scenarios may vary, the police state response remains virtually the same—brutality, oppression, and intolerance.

The response by law enforcement to the 2011 Occupy protests in cities across America perfectly illustrates this state of affairs. Armed with pepper spray, rubber bullets, tear gas, and other instruments of compliance, the police waged war against the protesters from Oakland, California to New York City. For example, police in Seattle peppersprayed an 84-year-old woman and a pregnant 19-year-old, among others, in their efforts to break up a non-violent rally.
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The young woman allegedly suffered a miscarriage due to the pepper spray.
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Police fired tear gas and flash grenades at peaceful protesters in Oakland in an effort to force them to disperse.
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Signs

With each passing day, America is inching further down the slippery slope toward a police state. And while police clashes with protesters, small farmers, and other so-called "law breakers" vividly illustrate the limits on our freedoms, the boundaries of a police state extend far beyond the actions of law enforcement. In fact, a police state is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions. In this regard, the signs of an emerging police state are all around us. In Orwellian fashion, it has infiltrated all aspects of our lives.

We were once a society that valued individual liberty and privacy. Increasingly, however, we have morphed into a culture that has quietly accepted surveillance in virtually every area of our lives–police and drugsniffing dogs in our children's schools, national databases that track our finances and activities, sneak-and-peek searches of our homes by government agents without our knowledge or consent, and anti-terrorism laws that turn average Americans into suspected criminals. All the while, police officers dressed in black Darth Vader-like costumes have become armed militias instead of the civilian peacekeepers they were intended to be.

This is not to say that the police are inherently "bad" or "evil." However, in enforcing policies that both injure citizens and undermine freedom, the police have become part of the bureaucratic machine that neither respects citizen dignity nor freedom. Operating relatively autonomously, this machine simply moves forward in conveyor-belt fashion, utilizing the police and other government agents to establish control and dominance over the citizenry.

Gradually, but with increasing momentum, a police/surveillance state has been erected around us. This is reflected in the government's single-minded quest to acquire ever-greater powers along with the fusion of the police and the courts and the extent to which our elected representatives have sold us out to the highest bidders–namely the corporate state and military industrial complex. Even a casual glance at the daily news headlines provides a chilling glimpse of how much the snare enclosing us has tightened and how little recourse we really have.

Friendly Fascism

As anyone who has studied history knows, police states assume control with the mantra of "freedom, equality, and fraternity"–and maybe more apropos for us, "security and safety." The world, it must be remembered, has not been terrorized by despots advertising themselves as devils. As former presidential advisor Bertram Gross, who worked in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, explains in his book
Friendly Fascism:

I am afraid of those who proclaim that it can't happen here. In 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote a popular novel in which a racist, anti-Semitic, flag-waving, army-backed demagogue wins the 1936 presidential election and proceeds to establish an Americanized version of Nazi Germany. The title,
It Can't Happen Here, was
a tongue-in-cheekwarning that it might. Butthe "it" Lewis referred to is unlikely to happen again any place...Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism... In America, it would be supermodern and multi-ethnic–as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic façade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal.
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In this respect, what I am describing within these pages has not come about as an overnight change. Rather, the emerging American police state can be seen in subtle trends introduced by those in leadership—government, media, education—toward greater control and manipulation of the individual. With the advent of electronic media and the increasing computerization of American society, the mechanisms for manipulation have arrived. Wedded to the state and/or supportive of the statist apparatus, the corporate media (which now includes the Internet) is the one instrument more than any other that forms public opinion. In a society where the state and the media have merged, authoritarianism can and will be established even though in appearance the citizenry enjoys so-called democratic freedoms.

Years ago William L. Shirer, author of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, observed that America may be the first country in which fascism comes to power through democratic elections.
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When and if fascism takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain. That, as Bertram Gross notes, is its "subtle appeal." It will appear friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections and the news media will cover all the political trivia. "But consent of the governed will no longer apply," writes journalist Chris Floyd, because "actual control of the state will have passed to a small and privileged group who rule for the benefit of their wealthy peers and corporate patrons." Moreover:

To be sure, there will be factional conflicts among the elite, and a degree of debate will be permitted; but no one outside the privileged circle will be allowed to influence state policy. Dissidents will be marginalized usually by the people themselves. Deprived of historical knowledge by a thoroughly impoverished educational system designed to produce complacent consumers, left ignorant of current events by a corporate media devoted solely to profit, many will internalize the force-fed values of the ruling elite, and act accordingly. There will be little need for overt methods of control.

The rulers will act in secret, for reasons of national security, and the people will not be permitted to know what goes on in their name. Actions once unthinkable will be accepted as routine: government by executive fiat, state murder of enemies selected by the leader, undeclared wars, torture, mass detentions without charge, the looting of the national treasury, the creation of huge new security structures targeted at the populace. In time, this will be seen as normal, as the chill of autumn feels normal when summer is gone. It will all seem normal.
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Fear Propaganda

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.
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This was the testimony of Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials. Goering, an expert on the propaganda of fear, knew very well how to cow and control a populace.

In like fashion, the transformation we as a society are undergoing is based on fear. In fact, one of the major forces currently shaping the psyche of the American people is fear. People are afraid of communists and socialists. People are afraid of crime. People are afraid of their neighbors. People are afraid of terrorism, and so on, ad infinitum.

Thus, as the rationale goes, to save our democracy (or republic, as it used to be called) we have to be secure and free of the onslaught of terrorism, the infiltration of immigrants, protesters, and other misfits (that is, other American citizens with whom we might disagree). That's why, we are told, we need a war on terrorism, a war on crime, a war on drugs, and other military euphemisms.

A Stop and Frisk, New York-Style

(Blend Images via AP Images)

Fear, and its perpetuation by the government, is the greatest weapon against freedom, and propaganda is the most effective tool for keeping the populace in check. Propaganda, an expertise of politicians, is in reality a fiction. But it is an effective fiction. And in an age of amusements and entertainment, the so-called masses of Americans, who often take what television's talking heads say as the gospel truth, have difficulty distinguishing between fiction and reality. As author Hannah Arendt recognized:

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time.
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On the Road to a Police State

How did we allow ourselves to travel so far down the road to a police state?

American police forces are not supposed to be a branch of the military, nor are they meant to be private security forces for the reigning political faction. Instead, they should be an aggregation of the countless local police units, composed of citizens like you and me that exist for a sole purpose: to serve and protect the citizens of each and every American community.

In recent years, however, there has been an increasing militarization of the police. This has not occurred suddenly, in a single precinct. It cannot be traced back to a single leader or event–rather, the pattern is so subtle that most American citizens, distracted by entertainment and/ or simply trying to make ends meet, are hardly even aware of it. Little by little, police authority has expanded, one weapon after another has been added to the police arsenal, and one exception after another has been made to the constitutional standards that have historically restrained police authority.

Already in some larger cities, the police have adopted the routine practice of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing (a practice that is sure to spread to smaller cities).
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This is the mark of a police state where everyone is a suspect. Joseph Midgley of Picture the Homeless, a homeless advocacy group, explains the average experience of a person stopped and frisked:

I have been stopped and frisked four times and each time I have been standing in public places. I've been questioned by the police and asked if I had anything illegal on me. To which I replied, "no." My pockets were still searched. Nothing illegal was found. I was never charged. Never even given a ticket on all four occasions. This form of discriminatory policing is outrageous and it must stop. Not tomorrow, not next year, but today.
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