Originally posted by: RichardE
That in 10-13 years time the government would be listening in on every call, sending people to prison camps off base. That police officers would be training with semi and fully automatic weapons in some major cities. That the government would be keeping a list of "unfriendly" targets (also known as the no fly list). That this would just be the tip of the iceberg as known by the public due to "traitorous" whistle blowers.
I would probably be called a fear mongerer and laughed out of the room (or forum for this matter).
I ask this because, even back than we had signs of an authoritarian state moving in slowly. Another thread here sorta worried me a bit with the reactions (DHS to beging collecting DNA). Where many of the reactions to it, most along the lines of "oo this is bad, but nothing to get worried about yet as long as it doesn't get abused, which if it does would might throw us into an authoritarian state." So is it really that easy to make a police state? Just keep the populous happy until it is too late to bread apathy to the changes? I'm hoping this doesn't turn into a flame bait sessions, and that a discussion can be had. The changes I listed would have made me a fear mongers 10 years ago, now the reaction to them is apathy and ignorance.
So when is the line crossed?
Have you ever heard the metaphor about boiling a frog?
If you put the frog in boiling water, it will jump out, but if you put it in room temperature water and slowly raise the heat, it'll stay in and cook.
Now, I have no idea about the literal truth to this - I'd guess the frog might be instakilled by boiling water, and jump out when the gradual heat gets too hot - but of course, that's not the point, the point is to discuss how publics react to change, and it seems pretty accurate for that.
This is where people reading history - yes, including the history of Nazi Germany - comes in handy for recognizing how people are led down bad roads.
If they don't, they're like the mythical goldfish who remember only 7 seconds and can't put it in context (goldfish actually remember longer than that, per Mythbusters), who are simply led like the cow to slaughter (what is it with animal analogies this post, at least I didn't kill the goldfish) - while a better situation is for people to read, say, Paul Krugman's warning years ago in "The Great Unraveling", about the connection of my frog metaphor to the US public in recent years, summarized in this interview:
LO: In the intro of "The Great Unraveling," you mention how you came across an old book by Henry Kissinger from 1957 that you believe helps explain what's happening in American politics today. How so?
PK: What Kissinger told me was not so much what the people running the country are doing, as why it's so difficult for reasonable, sensible people to face up to what it is in fact dead obvious.
He talked in very generic terms about the difficulty of people who have been accustomed to a status quo, diplomatically, coping with what he called a "revolutionary power."
The book is about dealing with revolutionary France, the France of Robespierre and Napoleon, but he was clearly intending that people should understand that it related to the failure of diplomacy against Germany in the 30s.
But I think it's more generic than that. It's actually the story about how confronted with people with some power, domestic or foreign, that really doesn't play by the rules, most people just can't admit to themselves that this is really happening.
They keep on imagining that, "Oh, you know, they have limited goals. When they make these radical pronouncements that's just tactical and we can appease them a little bit by giving them some of what they want. And eventually we'll all be able to sit down like reasonable men and work it out."
Then at a certain point you realize, "My God, we've given everything away that makes system work. We've given away everything we counted on."
And that's basically the story of what's happened with the Right in the United States. And it's still happening.
You can still see people writing columns and opinion pieces and making pronouncements on TV who try to be bipartisan and say, "Well, there are reasonable arguments on both sides." And advising Democrats not to get angry -- that's bad in politics. And just missing the fact that -- my God, we're facing a radical uprising against the system we've had since Franklin Roosevelt.
LO: Do you sense that people are starting to catch on?
PK: If I believe the rumors, Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" is Number One, and Joe Conason's "Big Lies" is going to hit the best seller list.
In some ways for me, the low point was those months after September 11, when everyone wanted to believe in the picture of a heroic president and a noble, unified nation confronting the threat.
And I was watching the actual policies. I was in touch with people in Congress who knew what legislation was being pushed. And that wasn't what was happening. What you actually had was a cynical power grab.
I felt for a little while there like I was all alone, [that] they're all mad but me.
And now, a large number of people understand what's been going on. It's still, unfortunately, a minority. But it's a large minority. It's not a handful of voices in the wilderness.
Krugman's point is pretty much exactly the same as the one you're making.
The question for we patriots is, how do you combat it?
Despite the movies having happy endings, Hitler wasn't stopped by the German public, Japan wasn't stopped from launching WWII by its public, Stalin wasn't stopped in his purges by the Soviet public, the US was not stopped from stealing half of Mexico or killing 2 million Vietnamese, in part with bomber-delivered chemical warfare. The radical Bush agenda has mostly proceeded without being stopped, even by a democratic congress (though I'd say new wrongs were probably blocked since Democrats took over).
In other words, our protection from Bush lies not so much in the ability of the US public, Congress and Courts to stop him, as in the 22nd amendment limiting his time in office.
One of the better statements I've seen on how you combat the radical agenda of a government like Bush's is that you have to develop your own media - which has happened to an extent from the documentary industry to the liberal magazines and books like Krugman's to the internet (DailyKOS, Salon, this forum, and countless others). These seem to have had a real effect on preventing Rove's 'permanent Republican majority' plan, that seemed so plausible with the magic GOP formula selling out to the religious right and to the corporate agenda, from funneling money in 'faith-based programs' to the former, and the ruthless conspiring with the latter, to monopolize corporate K Street donations in exchange for letting the corporations literally put their people into the government's regulatory positions and write their own laws.
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