Prison state
During the early 1930s Germany was transformed into a police state by the National Socialists—a democratically elected government, it's worth remembering. By the end of the war in 1945 it had become a prison, as had all of Europe under their control. As in any prison, mobility was not at the option of the inmate but by permission of the regime, or worse, at their command.
A police state, as Ayn Rand put it, is where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission. As Remus told you in the previous issue of Woodpile Report: with security forces now allowed to sign their own search warrants, with police no-knock home invasions, with random highway checkpoints and warrantless searches of our person at airports and rail stations, the militarization of law enforcement, the telephone taps and internet surveillance, the arrests for photographing police while their surveillance cameras photograph us everywhere, civilians disarmed with confiscatory "common sense" gun laws, de facto federalization of the Guard, zero tolerance lunacy in the schools, free speech zones (formerly, all of America), a perpetual state of emergency and constriction of liberties, with the DHS becoming a military police force, prosecuter and jailer faster than even its allegedly tinfoil hat critics thought possible; with all this, nobody should believe these are only photographs from the past.
Where the state's responsibility under the Constitution was limited to protecting transactions between free people, it has metastasized into dictating the economic, political and even the formerly private lives of the citizenry. Detention without trial under the Patriot Act can't be reconciled with the Constitution's requirement for due process of law for instance, nor can institutionalized Affirmative Action be in accordance with its provision guaranteeing all persons equal protection of the laws. Even the most passive citizen recognizes the imminent failure, or actual failure, of constitutionally limited government. Consent of the governed is now presupposed, assumed rather then solicited, which is a pretty good definition of illegitimacy in itself. Initiatives are justified with alleged cold, hard facts, meaning statistics. In turn the statistics are manipulated or plain bogus. The Will of The People has no standing other than as a contraindicator.
Nor is there a mystery about which way transparency works, just notice who's standing on which side of the one-way mirror. Other than lending an appearance of legitimacy by voting, the citizenry is kept out of the decision making loop by removing him and his putative representatives from the real legislative process. Even the cost and consequences of significant legislation are withheld or buried in crypto-speak, the health care reform bill for example, or ObamaCare as it's called, written in secrecy, sprung on the legislature fully formed and voted on in willing ignorance of its content. Who will say this was anything other than enabling act with bills of attainder, passed sight unseen?
We became a police state some time ago when government became anti-constitutional rather than merely unconstitutional. "What's not forbidden is compulsory" is the classic description. Nobody under the age of fifty remembers it any other way. If freedom is the exercise of options, and it is, if our options have been removed by protectionism, and they have, then we no longer are free. And we aren't. Protectionism—consumer protection and environmental protection and the rest—mainly protects the agency's budgets and their patron's ambitions. The citizen's part is to pay the bills and follow directions. Consider: the FDA recently stated outright we have no actionable right to choose our own foods. As things stand, they're not wrong. Franklin was right, we've traded liberty for security and gotten neither. We've gotten a police state.
After Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he persuaded his cabinet to declare a state of emergency and ended many individual freedoms.In the youth of today's adult citizen there were emergencies. He remembers where he was when they happened, maybe even saved the newspaper. In later life they came closer together. Now they've merged into a continuum, like shingles on a roof. He's told the Constitution applies in normal times, during a good growing season in peacetime Vermont, say, but it's too fragile to rely on in an emergency because these are exceptional times. He notices there's always an emergency and the times are always exceptional. It's the police state that's become unexceptional.
Photo caption, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md
The key feature of a police state is the multiple enforcement agencies with overlapping authority. They rely on overachieving to poach the contested authority of other agencies. Those agencies which take a cautious view of their mandate don't survive. And while this cannibalist furball is going on, the hapless citizen can't know his own legal standing because the agencies themselves don't know. He knows some things are always a crime and some things are sometimes a crime. Opposition for instance, always a crime. Dissent, sometimes a crime. Nor can he know what legal restraints the agencies are bound to observe, if any, not least because the judiciary has walked away from its responsibility to supervise law enforcement. And so it is he relies on the indoctrination he received in government schools with periodic refreshers from the mass media.
In prison states, as in police states, we find unannounced and warrantless searches of persons and property, detention without trial, gratuitous violence, identity papers, sanctions for resisting illegal intrusions, surveillance with electronic tracking and biometric identification and so forth, with one addition key feature: restrictions on travel. If a person absents themselves from their known places they want to know about it, which is why all of serfdom is required to submit to prison-like processing before boarding planes and trains. It's why the black box in your car records indictable human input and only incidentally the vehicle's response—and then only to acquit it, and why your GPS devices keep a record of your movements that's of no use to you, in fact, it's not readily available to you. Add the license-plate readers, facial recognition video, toll-paying smart cards and all the rest.
Kafka's novel centers around a man who is arrested but not informed why. He desperately tries to find out what triggered his arrest and what's in store for him. He finds out that a mysterious court system has a dossier on him and is investigating him, but he's unable to learn much more. The Trial depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people's information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.
Daniel Solove, Chronicle of Higher Education
The No-Fly list rightly gets the attention but the more efficient restriction on mobility is self imposed, meaning intimidation by low-level but continual fear, and to that end they keep cause for detention at the ready. The citizen knows he lives under a virtual indictment, its particulars constantly updated. We, The People have become we, the criminal class. The state considers us to be its property and they don't just let property wander around. They don't actually care if some of the herd wanders off to Vegas and plays the tables with public funds or welfare money, it's the wandering around part they care about. After all, we may be up to no good.
It was Nazi practice to pin a defeated populace in place by severely limiting mobility, notably by curfews and checkpoints, sometimes by cordoning off neighborhoods. Once confinement was established the inmates were abducted simply by going door to door, or taken at checkpoints or just plucked off the streets. At the end of the war millions of Europeans had been slave laborers. Needless to say, they were routinely starved, physically abused and worked to death.
It's significant that resistance movements in occupied Europe commonly started in response to the confinement and the roundups. Civilian undergrounds established courts where lists of collaborators and German agents were drawn up, tried in absentia and convicted. Death sentences were carried out at the rate of a few dozen a day. It was the reprisals and the rule of terror which led to the insurrections and large scale guerilla warfare. But take note, the crucial condition was the prison state. Should a genuine resistance arise in America, something beyond street theatre and manifestos, creeping confinement will have brought it about. Limiting people's mobility drives them together and underground at the same time.
In light of FEMA's performance during the Katrina incident, an ill-conceived trust in our bureaucracy to protect us is utterly outdated and foolish. In fact, FEMA's actions only made the situation in New Orleans worse, and caused substantial loss of life. NEVER, ever, put your fate in the hands of strangers, especially strangers from government organizations that have little to no vested interest in your well-being.There are lessons for resistance in all of this but the survivalist isn't about confrontation other than self-defense, nor is he a partisan or guerilla or military irregular, they have different rules and draw different lessons. The lesson for the survivalist is always Rule One: stay away from crowds. A crowd is a form of captivity, the crowd's fate becomes his fate. Avoidance is always the default but should avoidance fail, especially should he be forced into any sort of gathering, the survivalist will escape and then evade pursuit if necessary, even in so-called normal times.
Brandon Smith, Alt-Market
[It's been reliably reported that during Katrina law enforcement largely deserted, or confiscated legally owned firearms when they were most needed or joined in the crime wave. Take note, this was an emergency in normal times - Remus]
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