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.
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 acessedHERE and he can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.
Sign at the March for Science 2017 in Washington, DC. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Author: scattered1 from USA
“Man is born free, but he is
everywhere in chains.”
— Jean Jacques Rousseau (28 Jun 1712 – 2 Jul 1778), Social Contract, 1762
I.
Authoritarian Control, Dominance, Rule: Course of Human History
Fictional accounts of compelling
dystopian societies, including, Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaiden’s
Tale, Fahrenheit 451, The Matrix, and scores of apocalyptic movies,
are proving prescient.
Once confined to popular reading,
entertainment, and college seminars, fictional accounts of dystopian societies
have assumed a frightening reality as government, military, corporate, and
private sectors impose oppressive surveillance strategies, methods, techniques,
and tactics on citizens. These impositions are destroying the last semblances
of legal and moral individual “privacy,” freedoms, civil rights, and USA
Constitution First and Fourth Amendment rights, especially those guaranteed by
the Bill of Rights. 2
Citizen fears for personal safety
and security are encouraged and promoted by media collaborators with
governments, military, and corporate beneficiaries of violence and war; a
pervasive sense of peril, danger, and jeopardy is now normal. This sense of
fear both sanctions and authorizes authoritarian national security sectors to
impose egregious abuses of citizen rights and privileges with oppressive and
punitive measures.
Playing upon Western nations fears
of being overrun by invasions, occupations, and exploitations by
international migrants, especially from Islamic, Sub-Saharan African, and
Central American nations, citizens in many European countries have elected
right-wing populist governments determined to implement draconian immigration and
refugee policies, limiting or blocking immigration to selective groups and
conditions.
USA President Donald Trump announced
all “illegal” resident immigrants will be expelled form the USA beginning June
24, 2019, under the auspices of the United States Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) by the Department of Homeland Security. President Trump
considers illegal immigrants to be a threat to national security as sources of
violence, crime, disease, and competing cultural traditions.
A convincing xenophobia has found
its way into minds and hearts of citizens and officials resulting in the
emergence of widespread of “hate” cultures and outbursts of gun violence. “Our
nation is under attack by dangerous foes seeking our demise and collapse!” This
is the thematic cry of those seeking more power, control, and domination of
citizen masses, an appeal to fear and heroic nationalism.
Condemnation of violations of
citizen privacy and rights, guaranteed in the Fourth Amendment of the USA
Constitution, is drawing urgent attention from legal and NGO sources, with
little legal consequence. Government, police, military, and corporate and
private agencies are supporting numerous laws and regulations legitimizing
pervasive surveillance, monitoring, and storage of citizen information for
potential prosecution.
Control, Domination, Rule of
Citizens: An “Old” Policy and Practice
“Experience has shown that even
under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have in time,
and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Preamble to a Bill for the More General
Diffusion of Knowledge, Fall 1778, Papers 2: 526-527.
Control, domination, and rule of
citizen thought, behavior, and identity by authorities and ruling classes is
the story of human history; it is the logical outcome when States, Nations,
Empires, and Colonial Rulers, especially dictatorships, assume disproportional
power.
Protests and rebellions are quelled
by a variety of oppressive measures, including arrests, imprisonment, torture,
as well as murder, beatings, and crowd control tactics. Assassinations and
disappearance of rebel leaders is common, as desperate authorities oppress
contention.
While inspirational stories of
citizen uprisings protesting control, domination, and rule, including the
French and American Revolutions, are celebrated each year as sacred holidays,
the harsh reality emerging is “omnipresent-mass surveillance.” Past
glories are diminished in the presence of new oppressions.
Never before in history have the
vast means of citizen control, domination, and rule been as total and complete
as they are now because of the uses and abuses of technology. Romantic notions
of citizen heroes leading uprisings against abusive and corrupt governments and
authorities are the stuff of past myths. Mass government surveillance and
monitoring of citizens and groups has destroyed individual and group privacy
and rights. Oppressive conformity, homogenization, and subjugation are now
accepted goals for authorities claiming national security needs.
Tragically, continued use of effective media and propaganda has resulted in citizen concurrence and acceptance of oppression and violation of Constitutional rights and privileges. A tragic paradox! “Yes, oppress and control me; I need your protection in a dangerous world.” (“Escape From Freedom. . . . . .”)
Control, Domination, Rule . . .
Governance is needed! This reality
cannot be contested! Contestations of abuses of power,
however, omnipresent in the government-congressional-corporate-military-educational
complex is required and essential. As elections approach, why are no candidates
willing to risk the tolls of exposing the situation? Where are calls and
accusations of encroaching oppression,
A challenge for citizens is the
reality “society” often hides, distorts, and represses concerns for freedom.
Openness, transparency, participation is required in a democracy. Past
presidential candidates have won on a platform of these admirable goals, only
to find upon election, they succumb to shadow powers, and conform to
traditional agendas using war and violence to achieve unwarranted goals. Who
controls the leaders? Hidden governments?
In the USA, most citizens never
imagined government would “betray” citizens given the protections of the USA
Constitution. Today, however, surveys indicate less than 10% of USA citizens
trust the government, and often see the government as biased in favor of
special interests via lobbyists.
“Secret State” and “Shadow State”
groups of powerful and positioned individuals assumed power and control,
betraying their oaths and loyalty in favor of personal agendas keeping them in
power. Much of the “Secret State” individuals are ensconced in Justice
Department offices and agencies (i.e., CIA, FBI, DHS, NSA). Crimes and abuses
of these groups continue to unfold daily revealing a tragic story of
corruption, collusion, and crime.
When societal institutions breakdown
and collapse under pressures of corruption, cronyism, special interests, and
inadequate funding, citizens are bereft of resources for protection and
security. In an open and democratic society, transparency, social
responsibility, and voting are keys to citizen awareness and empowerment. What
happens, however, when these too are lost to political interests?
Tragically, many “secret state”
societies around the world have already destroyed or denied citizen rights,
enabling groups with special interests and concerns to exist and to exact their
toll. Under these circumstances, citizen wellbeing and welfare yield to special
interests and the advancement of control in favor of mega-groups pursuing their
own interests. Citizens are no longer players, and when they attempt to
act against control, they are promptly subdued as enemies of the State.
Citizens look to government to
protect them, but corrupt governments are too closely linked and connected to
secret and known “power” groups, to offer citizen protection. In the process,
citizens lose trust in governments and societal institutions; this raises the
threshold for both protests and repression.
Within this context of institution collapse, and the rise of special interest and concerns, citizens become identified with certain groups at the cost of a society’s democratic identity and membership. They seek the comfort and security of identity with fringe elements offering simple solutions and identification of obvious enemies among minorities, immigrants, and radical revolution members. Heroes, calling for change, become victims.
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.
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.
During America’s conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Mark Twain declared: “America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”
More recently, Martin Luther King reminded us: “Wealth, poverty, racism, and war – these four always go together.” To these four we should also add the pervasive presence of political sophistry, now culminating in the tragic triumph of the Reagan counter-revolution against The Spirit of The Sixties.
Masters of mind control, the puppeteers at the apex of world power continue to steer the planet toward economic collapse, ecological apocalypse, and nuclear holocaust. Decades ago, Noam Chomsky published an essay on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” to address these questions, thus echoing Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. In Orwell’s words: “History is more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
The reason we are now collectively sliding back toward medieval barbarism – supported by evangelical voters of whom Jesus is ashamed – is simple. In Michael Parenti’s words: “The rich are never satisfied. They want it all. If you know that, and nothing else, you still know more than all those people who know everything else, but not that.”
Recalling Plato’s cave parable, Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Chomsky adds the Socratic twist: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” And the problem is exacerbated by the moral and intellectual cowardice of most teachers in American public, private, and higher education, dazed and confused by their own historical illiteracy, and unable to comprehend George Santayana’s prescient warning that “those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
When perpetual kindness is met with constant and increasing cruelty, it’s time for some righteous ferocity. Even Jesus chased the money-changers out of the temple; and he likely did it with a bull-whip, since he knew that merely saying “please” was utterly futile. Yes, peace begins with us; and peace and justice sometimes require a ferocious roar, like the late-life speeches of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
To paraphrase Michael Parenti: It is better to swim against the current than to be swept over the cliff.
As Victor Wallis notes in his book Red-Green Revolution, the long overdue and most effective solution to our social and global crisis is the merger of resistance movements into a unified force, because this is what it will take to overcome the lunacy of those in power.
America desperately needs a news media no longer subservient to the dominant corporate elite; just as it desperately needs a civic discourse informed by informed citizens. Meanwhile, it is well to remember that individual innocence is no protection from collective responsibility.
Little Sister says, “Now is the time to read or reread George Orwell’s 1984.” It is available online.
1984 is a disturbing portrayal of perpetual war, massive propaganda, government control of the media, and ubiquitous surveillance. Published in 1949, it is a chilling nightmare of a novel foretelling a future wherein people live in constant fear of Big Brother, who can monitor their every behavior from their own televisions.
Consider this information and decide for yourself whether that future is now.
The novel and the film based on it are horrifying, but–despite Orwell’s fertile and perhaps diabolical imagination–he failed to envision the wonders of technology with which Little Big Brother has flooded our communities, devices with the ultimate potential to track all our activities all the time.
For example, an updated version of 1984 would include:
electronic online shopping that allows those with a credit card to buy devices that enable them to play at being spies
Maybe what we need in 2014 is a less dystopian novel, 2014, in which Winston Smith, the hero of 1984, pulls together the shreds of democracy and faces down Big Brother. At his back he has:
And possibly some Congressional hearings in which a sufficient number of the power elite put the brakes on the National Security Agency (NSA) and other parts of our shadow government
As Victor Wallis notes in his book Red-Green Revolution, the long overdue and most effective solution to our social and global crisis is the merger of resistance movements into a unified force, because this is what it will take to overcome the lunacy of those in power.