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4 Steps to a Totalitarian America:

What You Can Do to Stop It.
 4 Steps to a Totalitarian America:
What You Can Do to Stop It.
Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a health-care professional for the last
45 years. He is the author of 9 books, including Looking for Love in
All the Wrong Places, Male Menopause, The Irritable Male
Syndrome, and Mr. Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the
Irritable Male Syndrome . He offers counseling to men, women, and
couples in his office in California or by phone with people throughout
the U.S. and around the world. To receive a Free E-book on Men’s
Health and a free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go to
www.MenAlive.com. If you enjoy my articles, please subscribe. I
write to everyone who joins my Scribd team.

John Petersen of the Arlington Institute offers us a most chilling, yet

hopeful view of our future. Read this and learn where we’re headed
and how to change direction if you don’t like what you see.

As Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said:

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little

security will deserve neither and lose both.

PUNCTUATIONS
by John L. Petersen

Edited by John L. Petersen

johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

Government Groping

Let me cite a number of events of the past few days that suggest to
me that a fundamental shift is happening in our country.

Item 1: A comment from John Whitbeck to the Salon group that I

monitor:
"One might have thought that yesterday's New York court conviction
of Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Ghailani for the crime of conspiracy
to damage a government building, in connection with the 1998
bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam,
would have given rise to almost universal satisfaction in the United
States. After all:

"(I) Under America's habitually draconian sentencing guidelines, the

crime for which Mr. Ghailani, whom the U.S. government clearly
considers a "bad guy", has been convicted guarantees him a
minimum sentence of 20 years in prison -- and potentially a sentence
of life imprisonment without possibility of parole; and

"(ii) The acquittal of Mr. Ghailani on 285 of the 286 charges against
him can be interpreted (and presented to the world) as evidence that
the United States is not yet a totally totalitarian state where the courts
always rubber-stamp whatever convictions the government seeks in a
trial with "political" or "national security" connotations -- not yet the
sort of state where, to quote U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder,
"failure is not an option" when the government really needs a
conviction or where, to cite former U.S. Deputy National Security
Adviser Juan Zarate, everyone knows that people whom the
government really dislikes (or does not dare permit to speak their
minds for public consumption) would never be released even if they
were found not guilty of all charges asserted against them in court
proceedings.

"However, to judge from the New York Times news report and other
media coverage which I have seen or read, satisfaction is far from
universal. The totalitarian mindset has become so prevalent in the
United States over the past decade that prominent people are
comfortable arguing publicly against applying the rule of law to
persons suspected of involvement in "terrorism" (and, very
theoretically, presumed innocent until proven guilty) precisely
BECAUSE applying the rule of law cannot guarantee 100% certainty
of conviction -- a risk presumably not present in the kangaroo
"commissions" performed at the law-free zone of the Guantanamo
Bay Naval Station.
"The legal systems of China and Russia used to provide the degree
of certainty of a "right result" aspired to by people like Representative
Peter King, the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security
Committee. While the U.S. government has the extraordinary
chutzpah to continue to lecture China and Russia (and many others)
on "human rights", these countries are, even if slowly and haltingly,
taking steps away from totalitarianism while the United States itself is
taking giant strides in the opposite direction.

"Democracy and the rule of law used to be widely viewed, at least by

Americans, as hallmarks of the United States of America and as its
most deeply held values. However, true democracy must risk
producing the "wrong result", as, in most American eyes, in the case
of the most democratic elections ever held in the Arab world, the
Palestinian legislative elections of 2006. A true rule of law also must
risk producing the "wrong result", as, in many American eyes (even in
the absence of any knowledge of the case or the evidence), in the
case of the 285 acquittals accorded to Mr. Ghailani -- or even if,
astonishingly, the jury had dared to acquit him on all charges. If
people only support democracy or the rule of law when the results are
to their liking, then they do not really believe in democracy or the rule
of law.

"What then are the deeply held values of most Americans today?"

That is the big question: what are our most deeply held values?

Item 2: The fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,

and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not
be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the
place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That seems pretty straight-forward. You cannot be searched in this

country without probable cause and without a warrant issued. Having
just come through security in an airport this morning, I'm wondering
how it is that this Constitutional amendment is finessed by the
government in the case of flying in commercial aircraft.

The fact is, they are not finessing it. Former TSA Director of Security
Operations, Mo McGowan said on Fox News: "Nobody likes to
have their 4th Amendment violated going through a security
line, but truth of the matter is, we're gonna have to do it."

Item 3: In every one of the states of this country, sexual molestation

is a crime. Different states craft their laws variously, but in all cases
the descriptions are quite specific and graphic. Here is how Utah's
law is written:

A person is guilty of sexual battery if the person under circumstances

not amounting to rape, rape of a child, object rape, object rape of a
child, forcible sodomy, sodomy upon a child, forcible sexual abuse,
sexual abuse of a child, aggravated sexual abuse of a child,
aggravated sexual assault, or an attempt to commit any of these
offenses intentionally touches, whether or not through clothing, the
anus, buttocks, or any part of the genitals of another person, or the
breast of a female, and the actor's conduct is under circumstances
the actor knows or should know will likely cause affront or alarm to
the person touched.

One could quickly go to prison, branded as a sexual criminal if they

did any of these things to a stranger.

This is significant, because what is described above is exactly what

the US government, through the Transportation Security
Administration, is doing to randomly selected individuals in our
country's airports. In the interest of "security" they are groping and
feeling the genitals of travelers if the individual chooses not to go
through the backscatter x-ray system that explicitly shows the details
of their anatomy to the screener. Many people are choosing not to go
through the x-ray system because of published warnings by
healthcare professionals questioning the safety of the machines.

How is it that it is acceptable for government officials to sexually

grope common travelers in a way that is illegal in every state in the
country? What are the conditions that make it acceptable for our
government to justify this kind of otherwise unacceptable activity?

Criminals and prisoners and suspects are searched in this intrusive

way, but we're not talking here about criminals or terrorists. We're
talking about ordinary citizens who are just trying to get on an
airplane.

Let's leave aside for a moment whether these kinds of probes are
effective and serve the presumed purpose that the government
claims. Security experts from Israel and within our country suggest
that the present process leaves clear options available for smuggling
explosives on an airplane that could easily down it in flight. What I
want to talk about here are the underlying principles and motivations
that are in play in this situation.

Here's data point four. I was in New York's Penn Station yesterday
and heard an announcement that I had never heard before in a train
station. The public message was that roaming security teams could
randomly select individuals for searching of their body and their
belongings. The operative term here is random. There need be no
probable cause; all you needed to be doing is walking through Penn
Station.

About a year ago TSA had made an announcement that they were
going to start these roving patrols with dogs in train stations and start
their random searches. Congressional representatives and personal
rights advocates asked about whether there were any identified
threats in train stations. The response was that there weren't yet, but
the initiative would keep the terrorists off balance. At that time, they
were convinced that absent a specific threat they weren't to hassle
train passengers. Apparently a threat is not required anymore.

If all of the above examples were truly thoughtful responses to

pressing threats, it might be another issue, but they're not. As I've
recounted in this space in the past, the literal threat of terrorism is so
much less than the danger of electrocuting yourself in your bathroom
that it is impossible to justify the extraordinary costs and measures
that have been put in place to seemingly defend against it. In a very
real sense the terrorists have won -- we have become so terrorized
by a single event that we have expended billions and billions of
dollars in processes and measures supposedly designed to eliminate
all possibilities of threat. And many of those measures - particularly
those used in our airports -- are discounted by the Israeli security
people, who are the best in that business in the world.

Keep in mind that this piece of our government spent years searching
travelers for manicure scissors, considering them as potential
weapons that could be used to hijack an aircraft. I remember one
poor soul thoughtfully considering whether he would allow me to take
fingernail clippers on a airplane . . . "because they have sharp
edges".

There are a number of things that could be said about this situation.
One could reasonably suggest that in this case the government
generally sees its citizens as threats. Think about it: why, out of
everyone else in an airport, would only the TSA folks all wear latex
inspection gloves - even when checking identification? The cues are
all wrong -- they clearly believe that interfacing with travelers presents
a threat to their well-being. It's as though they needed to protect
themselves from us.

Others have also argued that this agency (that now has 65,000
employees) has too much funding and is a prime example of
"Parkinson's second law" -- expenditures rise to meet income. If they
had less funding, it certainly would cramp their style, I suppose.

But, what's more interesting to me is to contemplate the environment

that allows all of this aberrant behavior to transpire in the first place.
What changed that allowed the leaders of our country to think that all
of the above and, for example, torturing prisoners of war - even
though is against common decency and international law - is
acceptable? What's going on here?

It's fear. Simply fear. When people are fearful, things become
acceptable that otherwise are not. They do things that are inhuman
and demeaning. They revert to responses that are common to lesser
developed societies. They move down the development ladder or
spiral and operate from far more basic perspectives. They become
less civilized. Like love, fear is contagious. If you drive apprehension
into a social system it will breed upon itself. If you keep telling people
that the situation is dangerous, the presumed threats will become
"real", and you'll become acutely aware of all of the things that "could"
go badly or turn against you. In a sense, all of the possibilities are out
there and certainly can be activated - all we need to do is think about
them and give feelings and energy to them.

If you believe, as I do, that your consciousness plays a causal role in

shaping and manifesting the reality that shows up around you, then I
can guarantee that if you get a lot of people seriously worrying about
bad things that might happen . . . they will. There is good reason to
also believe that the larger systems of this planet - weather,
earthquakes, etc. -- mimic the energetics of the general human
population. The worse we feel and act, the worse everything else
becomes. Conversely, the better we feel about ourselves and the
general situation, the better things will be.

So, it seems counterproductive, don't you think, to advocate fear?

Nevertheless, that seems to be the only approach that government is
able to contemplate. Get very fearful and defensive. Keep the threat
level at orange . . . where it's been for years. Tell people to worry.

This general approach needs to change as things tend to get better

or worse - not stay the same. We fuel the system, no matter how we
feel. Since fear just generates bad things, maybe we need a law that
forbids the government (or other institutions) from promoting fear.
Now, that would be interesting!

So, whether we're talking about ourselves as individuals, our families,

workplaces or society, the key to a new future that we can all look
forward to is to learn to live without fear. The only way to do that, by
the way, is to live in the present.

As Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said:

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little

security will deserve neither and lose both.