Monday, September 16, 2013

The Emerging Police State



It all began with the War on Drugs and racial profiling. If you're looking for the origins of the new police state, Chris Hedges writes, that's where you should begin. Both developments made it easy to target minorities. Any police state begins with an attack on an easy to identify minority:

The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ these tactics against the wider society. “Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.” 

Hedges writes that the last decade has seen a steady erosion of civil liberties in the United States:

Under a series of Supreme Court rulings we have lost the rights to protect ourselves from random searches, home invasions, warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping and physical abuse. Police units in poor neighborhoods function as armed gangs. The pressure to meet departmental arrest quotas—the prerequisite for lavish federal aid in the “war on drugs”—results in police routinely seizing people at will and charging them with a laundry list of crimes, often without just cause. Because many of these crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The police and the defendants know that the collapsed court system, in which the poor get only a few minutes with a public attorney, means there is little chance the abused can challenge the system. And there is also a large pool of willing informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police.

And, if you were thinking it's only happening in the United States, think again -- of the G20 summit and Sammy Yatim.



10 comments:

Lorne said...

After the G20 in Toronto, Owen, when 'ordinary' citizens were exposed to the ugly strong-arm tactics utilized by those who 'protect and serve', I have often thought that we got a peek behind the curtain of what the underclass is subjected to on a regular basis: unlawful searches, police intimidation, brutality, bogus arrests, etc., mainly directed against those who have no voice in society. And the sad and most dangerous aspect of it is that most of us who may witness the victimization of the underclass walk away with the comforting fiction that it could not happen to us.

Time for all of us to wake up.

Owen Gray said...

As Hedges says, Lorne, it begins with minorities and then spreads to everyone -- because, in a police state, everyone and anyone can be an enemy.

Anonymous said...

In case you missed the memo....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRjwpCrCMc

Owen Gray said...

Thanks for the link, Anon. It's not exactly the peaceable kingdom, is it?

Anonymous said...

This is what happens in a Fascist government. Harper was Policy Chief for his, Northern Foundation of 1989. Did not Harper hire Wolfgang Droege and his Heritage Front as, security for Preston Manning?

There are many of us, who saw this coming, a very long time ago. This should have been peoples first clue, as to what Harper really is.

People just refuse to listen. Canadians are known, to sleep through absolutely every thing. Harper is still counting on that.

Owen Gray said...

We can only hope, Anon, that they wake up before it's too late.

e.a.f. said...

It is as simple as shotting a young man on a bus in Toronto or shotting a man in Vancouver, through the head while he was crawling on his hands and knees.

This is not good thing.

Harper is simply taking lessons from his southern breathern. One man was shot at 12 times, 10 hits, after he ran towards the police, following a car accident. He is dead. What did he do, Wellit would appear, having a car accident while black.

Owen Gray said...

It's all about fear, e.a.f. When you stoke the fires of fear. everyone becomes an enemy.

thwap said...

This is why there should have been a MASSIVE protest after the Toronto G20. With HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS in the streets.

Bill Blair should have been fired.

Instead, we had fascist twerps praising the cops for a job well done both in the papers and in the legislatures.

Those people revealed themselves for the scum they are.

Owen Gray said...

I agree, thwap. The more we allow the forces of oppression to go unchallenged, the more we ensure that we will become the victims of that oppression.