Originally post at Oswald's Mother 12/11/10.
Ayn Rand
“Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
I think by now we all know that the death of John F. Kennedy changed America forever and was a pivotal event in American history of the twentieth century. It’s a long and winding road from Dealey Plaza to where we are now. When he died it showed us the true nature of our Republic. That while we cherish the Founders, and our rule of law, we are not ever far from the Night of the Long Knives. No matter what we think of ourselves, the Kennedy Administration was ended by bullets and not ballots. Checks and balances be damned–the fiefdoms that arose since the founding of the National Security State in 1947 came to the fore and made their play. Van Jones, in discussing his time in government service, called them the “informal systems of power.” He could have been echoing Eisenhower’s final address to the American public.
Since then the increasing power of the Federal Government has been in its ascendency since 1963 and was accelerated as the result of the attacks on 9-11. Don’t think the Patriot Act was created as a result–the legislation has its genesis in the 1990’s. It was lying in wait for a major event to make it more palatable to the public.
Parallel to this has risen the other beast in the Secret Team, the CIA, NSA and numerous other three-letter agencies with their hidden cloak and dagger empires and its multi-billion dollar black budgets and hidden political and foreign policy agenda. It is probably more insidious than the Federal behemoth but its ways are mysterious and the fruit it bears is not known till afterward. Under the cloak of National Security it can cover up all of its deeds both good and bad.
It all happens gradually as the Germans experienced under Hitler. They took away just enough liberty each time, but not enough to fight about. Till finally, one morning they all woke up in a Fascist state. There was nothing left to do but submit. The population was conditioned to accept a totalitarian state. Just as we are today, being conditioned by being forced to take off our shoes to get on a commercial aircraft or have the most private areas of one’s body touched as if we are one large nation of criminal suspects, both young, old, and handicapped.
Now we live in a state of Security Mania. It’s not enough to treat the average person as a potential criminal to board a commercial aircraft. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has started a “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign. Getting national retailer Walmart to play along, monitors are being set up in stores near cash registers to broadcast the government message to the public encouraging them to spy on their fellow citizens (and fellow shoppers) for the National Security State. Orwellian? You bet!
The Internet
The Wikileaks document dump is another part of the roundabout. What the WikiLeaks-Assange leaks have shown is just what a vast, criminal enterprise the Federal government has become. It is such a great stretch to say the assassination of John Kennedy, let alone his brother and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, were killed by this cabal? Some have suggested it’s a 9-11 event against Internet free speech and the free dissemination of information. Maybe so.
Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote that what the WikiLeaks document dump means:
“The media, not merely in the US but also throughout the English speaking world and Europe, has shown its hostility to WikiLeaks. The reason is obvious. WikiLeaks reveals truth, while the media covers up for the US government and its puppet states.”
Amen. And the truth is always the enemy of the totalitarian state. They hate the Internet with a passion as too much information is being discovered, spread, read, and published (republished) by the masses. (I’ve already published more facts on the JFK assassination from a conspiracy perspective than you’ll ever read in the mainstream corporate press. Yet they show up here to read it. Hear me CBS? NY Times? CBC? Tribune Corp?)
Contrary to what some might say, the leaks have nothing to do with National Security, but rather Nation Insecurity. All the documents do is embarrass and humiliate the ruling class. And more importantly, it shows how conspiratorial they all are. It shows what they were, and are, doing behind the people’s back and it’s a nasty business. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is shown in a signed document, encouraging spying on UN bigwigs. Did this come from the top? Mrs. Clinton’s reputation for blackmail and digging up dirt on political opponents is well known. Yet the American media is so sidetracked it can’t deal with the how and why of this. She has since declared she will retire from public life. Was it because of Wikileaks? We shall see.
Everything Surveilled
In an excellent piece of independent investigative journalism, researcher Christopher Soghoian at his site, paranoia.dubfire.net, describes a successful FOIA request that netted a ten page document related to DOJ spying of financial records particularly credit card transactions with just a simple subpoena. This can be viewed on his site. As he states:
“As the document makes clear, Federal law enforcement agencies do not limit their surveillance of US residents to phone calls, emails and geo-location information. They are also interested in calling cards, credit cards, rental cars and airline reservations, as well as retail shopping clubs.”
Notice the mention of geo-location. That is satellite technology to monitor the citizenry. Soghoian goes on to the salient part:
“The document also reveals that DOJ's preferred method of obtaining this information is via an administrative subpoena. The only role that courts play in this process is in issuing non-disclosure orders to the banks, preventing them from telling their customers that the government has spied on their financial transactions. No Fourth Amendment analysis is conducted by judges when issuing such non-disclosure orders.”
So there you have it. The DOJ is going through your financial records without your knowledge or consent in violation of your 4th Amendment rights. This would normally be considered a felony but the government apparently has no need to obey its own laws anymore. Evidence of paranoid state apparatus that fears its citizens.
So Here We Are
In the last days of 2010 we faced a year of outrageous and unnecessary treatment of air travelers-as-criminals, hints that the same maltreatment is headed for the bus and the train travel industry, more legislation that restricts our liberty, and a huge document dump that has a potential of restricting the public’s liberty online. A relentless pounding. It’s as if it’s all been fast-tracked. In 2011 watch for more of the same or more intense than what we just had. It can be prevented if we do what Solzhenitsyn suggested–simply, fight back. But the People seem to have no fight left in them. What will it take?
So in the final consideration–yes–John Kennedy’s death set us on the path we are on to what amounts to a police state. Kennedy was in formal opposition to almost all of the “informal systems of power” behind the curtain. They have been in operation a long time and their power is unabated to this day. When full frontal tyranny comes it will be from them and hidden in the guise of security. What history, it’s always the same. John F. Kennedy was the last president to govern as if he was the main man in charge, the sole leader. But as he tragically found out, there is more than one King in Camelot.
Sources
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., The Gulag Archipelago; Proudy, R. Fletcher, The Secret Team
Paul Craig Roberts: http://www.vdare.com/roberts/101201_wikileaks.htm
Christopher Soghoian:
http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2010/12/dojs-hotwatch-real-time-surveillance-of.html
Web site: Wikileaks.com (if up)
