“Omnipresent surveillance:” Dystopian society in our global era, Part 4

by Reverend Dr. Doe West

by Anthony J. Marsella, PhD

There have been many suggestions about what is needed in response to the growing national security state of the United States.  Responses have come from around the world, and many names are now familiar (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Mairead McGuire, Amy Goodman, Johan Galtung, Chris Hedges). Here are some options for building a more enduring and effective response:

  • Become informed: Become informed and educated about the scope and sources of the national security state threats to privacy and behavior control. This can only be done by reading credible sources, reading beyond popular media, and questioning sources with specific hidden agendas (i.e., corporate, military).
  • Engage in activism: Become as active as your circumstances permit in peaceful protests that may include opinion writing, letter writing, petition signing, phone calls to elected representatives, and joining discussion groups via the internet or in real time. Become as active as your circumstances permit with regards to supporting alternative information sources (e.g., Transcend Medial Service, Truthout, Guardian, Engaging Peace), and supporting pathways to prosecution for those violating Constitutional and civil rights. 
  • Commit to non-violence: Be committed to non-violence and non-killing as viable pathways for bringing about change. This may well make change a slow and arduous process, and it may never be completely successful. Yet the course of violence, insurgency, and revolt can only lead to destruction and death, as we are witnessing in the United States and around the world.

The challenges are many and complex; there is little reason to believe citizens can easily reduce or eliminate the massive national and international surveillance network. If change is to occur, it will be because hope as an essential enduring human virtue can inform action and that non-violent action will be undertaken.

Footnote 1: The term “omnipresent surveillance” is taken from John W. Whitehead’s recent article, “The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No longer Fiction.” Information Clearing House. June 11, 2019. See also Rutherford Institute, Virginia, USA

References:

Bacevich, A. (2012). The short American century: A post-mortem.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chumley, C. (2014). Police State USA: How Orwell’s nightmare is          becoming our reality.   NY: WND.

Deneys-Tunney, A. (July 12, 2012) Rousseau shows us there is a way      to break the chains from within. The Guardian, London, UK.

. Harris, S. (2010).  The watchers: The rise of America’s surveillance         state. NY: Penguin Group.

Hedges, C. (2015). A nation of snitches.

Mills, C. W. (2000). The Power Elite. NY: Oxford University Press

Priest, D., & Arkin, W. (2011). Top secret America: The rise of the new American Security State. NY: Little Brown.

Slavo, M. (July 31, 2019). Satellites Have Already Started Watching Your Every Movement.

Taggart, D. (2019). Americans Don’t Trust the Govt, the Media, or Each Other: Fading Trust is “Sign of Cultural Sickness and National Decline.

Unger, D. (2012). The emergency state: America’s pursuit of absolute security at all costs. NY: Penguin Press

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu.  He is known internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 21 books and more than 300 articles, tech reports, and popular commentaries. His TMS articles may be acessed HERE and he can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

This article, lightly edited and abridged, originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 5 Aug 2019. TMS: “Omnipresent Surveillance:” Dystopian Society in Our Global Era .

Corporate America: Purveyor of Inhuman “Rights”

U.S. Supreme Court Building
U.S. Supreme Court Building, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Photo by Farragutful

When you hear the word “rights” in the American corporate media, it is usually preceded by “Constitutional” rather than “human.”

 The Supreme Court has declared that corporations have the same rights as people. Their first declaration of this principle came as early as 1818 and most recently in 2010 in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case.

 The Citizens United decision serves the latest cabal of robber barons and further empowers the military industrial complex, which may be credited by the Court as having enough brain to exercise rights but has manifested little in regard to a heart.

 Indeed, in exercising their putative Constitutional rights, the profiteers of the military industrial complex have shown an enormous talent for crushing human rights both within the borders of the United States and in other lands wounded by US hegemony.

 In one of the latest examples of human rights violations in the US, the City of Detroit has been shutting off water to the poorest residents of the city, unable to pay their water bills.

 The shutoffs have been linked to a push towards privatization of the water system. Like the privatization of prison management, this effort is one more giant step forward in the rush to privatization that disproportionately violates the human rights of people of color and poverty in the U.S.

 Former President Jimmy Carter is appalled by the U.S. record on human rights violations.

How about you?

 Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology