A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

by Whitehead, John W.

  Movements toward police states are very subtle. As author Naomi Wolf recognizes, police state environments slowly seep into a populace's consciousness:

  It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface: peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere–while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster."

  As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedent-edly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war"–a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president–without US citizens realising it yet–the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.48

  Welcome to the American Gulag

  When most people think of a police state, they think of mass arrests, detention camps, and storm troopers with automatic rifles standing on street corners. But with the rapid advances in technology and the development of a mass media aimed primarily at entertaining the public, such methods of coercion no longer need to be employed on a mass scale. In fact, technology now allows the government to erect an electronic concentration camp over entire populations and countries using much subtler and less jarring means than those employed by past regimes. Nevertheless, the results remain the same: total control.

  Total control of whom, though? Despite the government's colorcoded alerts and fear-inducing warnings about terrorists lurking among us, the individuals being targeted for government surveillance, control, and detention are, more often than not, Americans merely exercising their constitutional rights. To the government, however, these individuals are known by other labels–extremists, malcontents, activists, rule-breakers, disrupters of the peace, and misfits.

  We would do well to remember that the original purpose of concentration camps, which have operated historically as gulags or detainment and/or detention centers, was for the prevention of crime (preventive detention) and re-education (that is, "rehabilitation") of dissidents or "social misfits." Such individuals, depending upon the definition, can mean anyone: peace activists, those involved in the Occupy movement, a Tea Party supporter, an "irritant" at a city council meeting, or grade-school children who engage in a food fight.

  As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum observes in Gulag: A History:

  The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can "pay their debt to society," make themselves useful, and not contaminate others with their ideas or their criminal acts, is a practice as old as civilization itself. The rulers of ancient Rome and Greece sent their dissidents off to distant colonies. Socrates chose death over the torment of exile from Athens. The poet Ovid was exiled to a fetid port on the Black Sea.49

  The advent of psychiatry eliminated the need to exile political prisoners, allowing governments instead to declare such dissidents unfit for society. For example, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union often used psychiatric hospitals as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally50 through the use of electric shocks, drugs, and various medical procedures. Insisting that "ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,"51 the psychiatric community actually went so far as to provide the government with a diagnosis suitable for locking up such freedom-oriented activists.

  In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, Russian officials also made use of an "administrative" process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

  The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime ... but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is "prejudicial to public order" or "incompatible with public tranquility," he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years. Administrative exile-which required no trial and no sentencing procedure-was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.52

  Sound familiar? This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by declaring them mentally ill and locking them up in psychiatric wards for extended periods of time is a common practice in present-day China.53 What is particularly unnerving, however, is that this practice of making individuals disappear is happening with increasing frequency in America.

  Disappearing Citizens

  Brandon Raub's case exposes the seedy underbelly of a governmental system that is targeting Americans–especially military veterans–for expressing their discontent over America's rapid transition to a police state. On Thursday, August 16, 2012, a swarm of local police, Secret Service, and FBI agents arrived at Raub's home, asking to speak with him about posts he had made on his Facebook page. These posts were made up of song lyrics, political opinions, and dialogue used in a political-thriller virtual card game. Among the posts cited as troublesome were lyrics to a song by the rap group Swollen Members.

  After a brief conversation, and without providing any explanation, levying any charges against Raub, or reading him his rights, law enforcement officials then handcuffed Raub and transported him first to police headquarters, then to a medical center, where he was held against his will due to alleged concerns that his Facebook posts were "terrorist in nature." Outraged onlookers filmed the arrest and posted the footage to YouTube, where it quickly went viral, which may have helped prevent Raub from being successfully "disappeared" by the government. A subsequent hearing, reminiscent of the kangaroo courts of earlier days, sentenced the decorated Marine up to thirty days' confinement in a Veterans Administration psych ward.

  Under so-called "civil commitment" laws in place in all fifty states, tens of thousands of similar arrests are taking place across the country, with Americans being made to "disappear" into mental institutions. So it was no surprise, then, that within days of Raub being seized and forcibly held in a VA psych ward, news reports started surfacing of other veterans having similar experiences. These incidents were merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009. One such initiative, Operation Vigilant Eagle, calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorists because they may be "disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war."54

  Right- and Lef t-Wing "Extremists"

  Two reports from the Department of Homeland Security, one dubbed "Rightwing Extremism" and the other, "Leftwing Extremism," made a broad swipe at individuals and groups who engage in political activism. For example, the "Rightwing Extremism" report broadly defines as extremists those individuals and groups "that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely"55 Obviously, these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

  Although these initiatives caused an initial uproar when announced in 2009, they were quickly subsumed by the ever-shifting cacophony of the news media and its ten-day cycles. Yet while the American public may have forgotten about the government's plans to identify and disable anyone deemed a potential "threat," the government put its plan into action. Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush a
dministration was used as an operation manual under the Obama administration to exile those who are challenging the government's authority.

  An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent-it is also locking up individuals trained in military warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent. Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.56 In 2012, for instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.57

  As we saw with Brandon Raub, one tactic being used to deal with vocal critics of the government is through the use of civil commitment laws, which have been employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear. For example, in 2006, officials with the National Security Agency (NSA) attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, as "mentally unbalanced" based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.58 In 2009, NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered byway of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.59

  The Electronic Concentration Camp

  The farther we advance into the electronic concentration camp, the more the police, as well as the prisons, will be considered responsible for the identification and re-education (that is, "rehabilitation") of "social misfits"–a.k.a. dissidents, rabble-rousers, nonconformists, and extremists. By "police," I am referring to the entire spectrum of law enforcement and surveillance personnel from local police and state troopers to federal agents (the FBI and intelligence police that work locally through "fusion centers"), as well as the military and agents employed by private corporations who work in tandem with government-funded police.

  Line of Riot Police

  In order to ferret out individuals who might potentially upset the status quo, police and other government agencies will have to focus more of their resources on preventive detention, which means viewing everyone as potential "suspects" and using surveillance technology to monitor their activities. This has already come to pass.

  The end result, as author Hannah Arendt recognized, is that more and more innocent citizens will need to be taken into "protective custody" and "handled as a 'protective police measure that is, a measure that deprives people of the ability to act."60 In today's world, such "protective custody" is technologically induced. Arendt, who survived a Nazi concentration camp and wrote the definitive work on totalitarianism, saw early on that the largest group of inmates in concentration camps were "people who had done nothing whatsoever that, either in their own consciousness or the consciousness of their tormentors, had any rational connection with their arrest."61 In fact, the "ultimate goal ... is to have the whole camp population composed of this category of innocent people."62

  Moreover, the police primarily exist to protect and keep safe the "good" (or compliant) citizens who reside in the electronic concentration camp alongside the less savory elements. The point, however, is that all citizens are inhabitants of the electronic concentration camp. In such a society, where the citizens believe the zookeeper to be friendly and looking out for their best interests, there is really no need for overt, generalized tyranny of the masses.

  Yet even in such a system, periodic and/or sporadic crackdowns and arbitrary arrests are necessary to ferret out the misfits (even the nonviolent ones), the majority of whom will be innocent. "The arbitrary arrest which chooses among innocent people destroys the validity of free consent," writes Arendt, "just as torture–as distinguished from death-destroys the possibility of opposition."63 This is now being played out in the streets of some of the larger American cities where stop-and-frisk searches and racial profiling are common occurrences.

  Logically, then, if a police state is to operate at optimum level, each and every citizen, even the completely innocent, must be kept track of– geographically, biologically, and economically–from cradle to grave. The police must know orbe capable of finding out precisely what every citizen is up to at every moment. The resulting loss of privacy and blurring of any distinction between private and public life and thoughts are common denominators in societies that shift toward state authoritarianism. "The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."64

  Indeed, the government is already preparing electronic dossiers on virtually every citizen. Take, for example, the National Security Agency (NSA). A clearinghouse and a depository for vast quantities of data, the NSA makes it possible for the government to keep track of what Americans say and do, from the trivial to the damning, whether it is private or public. Anything and everything you've ever said or done, especially electronically–such as phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, and commuter toll records–can now be tracked, collected, catalogued, analyzed, and placed in an electronic file by the NSAs super computers and teams of government agents. In this way, as former intelligence agent Jim Bamford writes, the NSA "has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created. In the process–and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration–the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the United States and its citizens."65

  Human Goldfish

  We have to face facts. Mandated by advancing technology, a pervasive surveillance is here to stay. Undoubtedly, we have become human goldfish. Not knowing who is looking in, we have created an electronic concentration camp from which escape is less likely with each passing day short of living in a cave.

  The pressing issues we now face also raise other important philosophical and spiritual questions. What totalitarian ideologies aim at "is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society," writes Hannah Arendt, "but the transformation of human nature itself".66 Thus, the questions we wrestle with are profound ones. Will the citizenry be able to limit the government's use of these invasive technologies, or will we be caught in an electronic nightmare from which there is no escape? Can human nature really be altered in such a way that people will forget the longing for freedom, dignity, integrity, and love (longings that often consumed those of past generations)? Can we forget that we are human? Can humanity be obliterated?

  CHAPTER 4

  Fiction Has Become Reality

  "The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us."68

  –film director STEVEN SPIELBERG

  Art–whether in the form of movies, novels, or paintings–has an uncanny way of predicting the future. As the renowned media analyst Marshall McLuhan once recognized, art acts as an early warning system to enable us to cope with inevitable technological change.69 "Inherent in the artist's creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change," observed McLuhan in a 1969 interview. "It's always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it."70

  The emerging police/surveillance state that is c
urrently being erected around us has been hinted at and prophesied in novels and movies for years, starting with George Orwell's increasingly relevant novel 1984. However, it may be that filmmakers, the dominant visual artists of our time, have given and continue to give us the best representation of what we now face as a society. To this end, I shall use some of the best sci-fi films in recent decades as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the emerging police state.

  Perhaps the most disturbing fact about these futuristic films is that the future is now. Fiction has become fact. Virtually everything predicted in the following films has come to pass or is about to become reality. The question, of course, is whether we will accept a totally dehumanized existence or work to retain some semblance of our humanity. Will we actively resist the police state or passively cling to our technological devices and smile as Big Brother and Big Sister dictate the terms of our existence?

  Future Films

  Fahrenheit 451 (1966), adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel and directed by Francois Truffaut, depicts a futuristic society in which books are banned and firemen are called on to burn contraband books–451 Fahrenheit being the temperature at which books burn. Montag is a fireman who develops a conscience and begins to question the book burning. This film is an adept metaphor for our obsessively politically correct society where virtually everyone now precensors speech and even thoughts. Here, a brainwashed people addicted to television and drugs do little to resist governmental oppressors.

  The plot of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), as based on an Arthur C. Clarke short story, revolves around a space voyage to Jupiter. The astronauts soon learn, however, that the fully automated spaceship is orchestrated by a computer system-known as HAL 9000–which has become an autonomous thinking being that will even murder to retain control. The idea is that at some point technology in the form of artificial intelligence will become autonomous, and that human beings will become mere appendages of technology. We are already seeing this come to pass with the massive intelligence systems tasked by the government with amassing information on average citizens and monitoring their communications and activities.