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CounterPunch
January
18 / 19, 2003
Is It Time to
Move to Canada?
The Degeneration of the Liberals
By ANIS SHIVANI
Dissenters have failed to come to terms with the
enormity of the totalitarian revolution underway in the U.S.
Radicals, leftists, progressives, liberals have all chosen,
for the most part, different forms of denial and escapism. But
now the time is at hand to decide once and for all how our individual
lives must change in response to the beast that has arisen in
this country. None of us can wait anymore, to see what will
happen next, nor can any of us remain fence-straddlers, quiet
objectionists. There should be no more reason to be surprised
at events that are scheduled to happen, if there ever was any
justification for being caught unawares.
The disbelief among all those who love
this country is understandable, but it is time to move beyond
it. We can only escape into our private selves for so long;
this regime is so brutal that sooner or later there will be a
knock on everyone's door (literally and figuratively). Not one
out of the 300 million people in this country will be left alone.
Nobody will escape this vise, this continent-wide dragnet.
If you've ever thought or spoken or written or done anything
that the Dear, Great Leader of ours might not find acceptable,
be very afraid. Make plans now, to protect yourself. All the
love and good feelings in the world won't be any good if you're
chosen to be the target of the Dear, Great Leader's affection.
The government has been conducting an
unprecedented campaign of psychological warfare against Americans.
One understandable response to this barrage of terror is to
become numb, hide within our shells. But this is a luxury that
will not be afforded to us for long. Make the decision for yourself,
pre-empt their plans for you, before it happens to you and it's
too late.
It is American as apple pie that when
democracy in this country lost even its formal, procedural trappings,
and when the empty husk that used to cover up the worst inequalities
in the developed world was taken over by a gang of criminals
the likes of which the world has not seen since Hitler, the revolution
would go unnoticed by intellectuals. It is quite in tune with
American delusion that the current issue of The Progressive
is mostly devoted to Iraq. The Nation (which I shall
henceforth call the world's worst propaganda sheet) devotes its
January 13/20 issue to yet another affirmation of its hip-hop
credentials, its old fogey (or young fogey?) writers hyping the
subversiveness of popular music (fogeys of whatever age at the
world's worst propaganda sheet chatting up hip-hop is not
an advance over endless memorializing of Dylan and Springsteen).
We're witnessing the sequential watering down of Orwell through
Raymond Williams through cultural studies through the world's
worst propaganda sheet, tapping into resistance where it doesn't
really exist. Meanwhile, the music in our lives falls silent.
The more we lose our formal, procedural
freedoms at home, the more obsessively the dissenting media latch
on to Palestine and Iraq. The world's worst propaganda sheet's
former other stylist, in a prolonged fit of fanciful insanity,
wants to bring democracy to Iraq, while being completely blind
to the totalitarian transformation occurring right here under
his contrarian nose. The world's worst propaganda sheet joins
Naomi Klein, the Canadian student of protest currently at the
London School of Economics, in asking for more funds for bioterror
preparedness (leaving out a discussion of how those with weakened
immune systems might be affected by mass vaccinations).
These are signs of massive psychological
dissonance. In the last two years, the world's most advanced
democracy, at least in terms of its formal acclamation of human
rights, has become potentially the most dangerously totalitarian
regime in recent history (the liberal journals always tell us,
we're not there yet). The Progressive, The
Nation, In These Times, Mother Jones, The
Village Voice and all the rest have failed to note this transformation,
or collapse, in these stark terms. They talk about "secrecy"
in government, to echo the New York Times. This is like
talking about the difficulty of journalists obtaining court records
on the deportation of Jews during the Nazi reign of terror (the
same routinization of evil, making it banal by bureaucratization,
is in operation in America today: for instance, the mass deportation
of Arab and Muslim men under the guise of following immigration
technicalities that have never been enforced). Hopes have been
affixed to a revival of progressivism within the Democratic party,
when it was the Democrats themselves who proposed the Homeland
Security Department, endorsed the Patriot Bill for the most part,
and earlier failed to stand up to a stolen election that was
predictably going to usher in the dictatorial actions that we've
seen this regime engage in.
The other side to the blindness of liberals
is indiscriminate condemnation by so-called radicals, who don't
see any real distinction in the state of freedom in America before
and after Bush. For these critics, America was just as much
a hell before Bush as it is now: a Gore presidency for them
would have made no difference. Some even take delight in watching
the chaos unfold: for these prophets, it is all in the service
of the final collapse of capitalism, which shall surely usher
in the era of Marxist hunting, fishing, and--is it reading?
And then there are the populists--like Ralph Nader--who also
don't claim to see a significant distinction between America
before and after. I don't see Nader, or the Canadian student
of protest who is currently at LSE, showing up at the INS office
in Los Angeles to protest the mass arrest of hundreds of Iranians
who voluntarily showed up to comply with a new law to have themselves
registered, finger-printed, and interrogated.
The most sweeping set of changes in American
history has occurred in two short years, all our cherished freedoms
annihilated beyond recognition, and the happy-faced dissenters
and self-proclaimed contrarians have for the most part failed
to raise the alarm. They should be dismissed out of hand, not
taken seriously, no one should heed them, for they only dispense
brain candy, telling us day after day, week after week, month
after month, that things are still within control, that it's
simply a matter of bringing things back within balance soon (maybe
next election time?). These dissenters tell us that unlike Nazi
Germany, there are (so far) no trains to camps, no camps themselves,
no mass arrests, no mass deportations. But in fact the lives
of tens of millions of people--not whites, for the most part,
so far--have been radically disrupted. All noncitizens, legally
or illegally in this country, have been terrorized that they
have no legal rights (that's about a tenth of the population,
or thirty million people, right there). How many people have
changed plans, shelved ambitions, or lost jobs and suffered deprivation
because of the loss of formal legal rights? In fact, there are
mass arrests and mass deportations, with the potential for rapid
escalation.
The most profoundly revolutionary thing
the dissenting journals could do would be to shut up and shut
down for a while, stop jabbering about the plight of the Iraqis
and Palestinians, let us think about the revolution that is going
on right here. Let us gather our wits, stop and think about
what we have to deal with. Some time ago, street revolution
might actually have stopped the process underway at headlong
speed. But now it's too late even for that. Events have lost
all connection with facts. The worst economic crisis in either
two decades, three decades, or seven decades, depending on the
angle of concern, failed not only to result in loss of congressional
representation for the ruling party, but led instead to historic,
unprecedented gains at all levels of government. The Voter News
Service, which was never at fault in the 2000 election and had
correctly called the election for Gore, relying on the trustworthy
exit polls we'd so grown to love and hate, is on the verge of
final dissolution. Will there be exit polls to verify the results
of election 2004 (as if we don't already know the foregone conclusion)?
The leading progressive member of the U.S. Senate conveniently
died in a plane crash as yet unexplained (call it the Carnahan
syndrome). This changed the shape of Senate races across the
country, and led to unbelievable victories for Republicans in
Minnesota and elsewhere. Profoundly incomprehensible election
results occurred in Georgia.
David Corn and Eric Alterman are not
going to be on a train to a gas chamber anytime soon, that's
true. But the Iranians and Middle Easterners who dutifully showed
up to register with the INS in Los Angeles have had their lives
radically disrupted. Extend this scenario to 300 million people,
in some form or other. The aim of this regime is to cleanse
the entire country of undesirables, eventually including whites,
the elite, the intellectuals, the rich, the privileged, everyone.
In the next stage of the crackdown, borders will be shut down,
people will not be allowed to leave, and emergency powers will
let them coerce us into feeling completely naked and exposed.
Tens of millions of people in this country have suffered dramatic
declines in peace of mind and standard of living, having lost
the sheer ordinariness of life proceeding lazily and predictably
along its normal course. And this is just the beginning. We
are only on the cusp of a total transformation that has barely
begun to be implemented yet. At the end of it, the newer generation
will have grown up without memory of what it meant to have the
right to privacy, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty,
the right to counsel and access to courts, the ability to read
and write and speak of free will. When that memory is gone,
then the revolution will be complete.
Is all this alarmist? Is this crying
wolf before there's any need to? Can things still be brought
under control? Is it drugs or paranoia or conspiracy theory
on my part? Is our political system really so susceptible to
takeover by a gang of fascists? Will the New York Times
and the CFR and the Brookings Institution and the Americans for
Democratic Action and the ACLU not be able to step in to help
us, in the nick of time? Can such a great nation be brought
down so low so fast? Will there not be a full reckoning at the
next elections?
There are two answers to this. One,
the study of history--our own, and that of other empires that
have succumbed quickly to calamity--lets us quickly discern the
invariant, unmistakable marks of the collapse of civilized order.
Second, the study of the present, with signs so obvious and
visible that everything one needs to know about the future components
of this continuing transformation is already on the pages of
the New York Times every day, and has been so for some
time now. There is no need anymore to consult the pages of the
dissenting journals: everything is out completely in the open.
Nothing is occult, nothing obscure. That alone tells us how
far down the road to annihilation we have progressed.
What's in store for the next couple of
years? Surely, no Democrat will dare to call for suspension
of the Patriot Act or any part of Homeland Security. Optimists
are mistaken to have any hope for 2004; this regime can change
the whole subject of discourse to terror should the need arise.
If the economy starts doing better, there may not be as much
need to declare an emergency, to give unprecedented search and
arrest powers to the military. But they may do that anyway,
just to make the point, just to show us that they can do that
if they want. Bioterror seems to be the most efficient way to
terrorize the largest number of people in this country, to cast
the widest possible net, without respect to class and color and
region, and so some form of trumped-up bioterror attack should
be the way to finally and fully crack down on all remaining non-conformists.
Even if hundreds or thousands of people were to die because
of smallpox vaccinations, the country would simply accept it.
This regime is too good at psychological warfare against its
own people to let protest of any nature derail its plans. We
may expect the Northern Command to be given some excuse to make
its presence felt, so that each of us lives constantly in terror
of the bayonet breaking down the door and making us disappear
into the unknown. The distinctions between law enforcement,
intelligence, and military action will be completely erased,
and that will be the most lasting and unalterable part of the
transformation; no future government, Democrat or otherwise,
will be able to challenge this merger. War against Iraq should
prove to be costless to America, and this will boost the president's
ratings to stratospheric levels. But should the need arise,
there are many other dangerous enemies in waiting: Iran, Saudi
Arabia, Syria, Egypt. The corollary of each brutal conquest
abroad is radical erosion of liberties at home. By the end of
it all, we'll be left with nothing. It seems that a direct crackdown
on intellectual dissent--which so far has been delayed as a secondary
step--is now about to occur. They won't need to make examples
of many people to bring out the full flavor of cowardice among
our so-called intellectuals; the academics with cushy positions
at universities have already bailed out and won't be heard from
again under any circumstances. They will join the German university
professors of the thirties in the highest ranks of modern cowards
(yes, this means you, professor and former dissenter Cornel West,
and all like you).
We are now living in potentially the
most totalitarian regime the world has seen since the catastrophes
of the middle of the last century. And yet life seems to go
on as usual. But is that really the case? Aren't there already
numbers of people afraid, disoriented, desperate as to what they
can expect in the future? Look at the news any day of the week,
and you'll be numbed by information such as the following random
snippets:
Ashcroft's "guidelines on general
crimes, racketeering enterprise and terrorism enterprise investigations"
extend the scope of investigation to normal political activity.
The FBI can now spy on political groups without warrants, without
the primary purpose being intelligence gathering.
The Lackawanna Six, Seattle activist
James Ujaama, Rabih Haddad (founder of Global Relief Foundation),
and individuals linked with the Holy Land Foundation, have been
arrested on charges of links to terrorism without any evidence
whatsoever. A Quincy, Massachusetts software firm named Ptech,
with a Middle Eastern co-founder and employees, has been brought
low after negative publicity associated with a raid conducted
on suspicion of terrorist ties. The Justice Department has caught
not a single individual since September 11 having anything to
do with terrorism. All the individuals "caught" have
been out in the open, in some cases volunteering to help with
investigations, and fully cooperative. Individuals arrested
in connection with anything having to do with terrorism have
only been caught in other countries, in Europe and Asia, since
September 11. So this is not about catching terrorists, but
terrorizing the rest of us.
The FBI on New Year's Eve put out pictures
of five men it said were of Middle Eastern descent (although
the men had South Asian names and faces). It then admitted that
both the pictures and names may not have anything to do with
actual people it was looking for. This meant in effect that
every single person of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent
was suspect because there was no certainty about actual identity
(on New Year's Eve, cable news kept interrupting broadcasts of
celebrations with the update that the FBI was conducting raids
across the country, particularly in New York). Actually, this
gave them scope to suspect all 300 million of us, and all 6 billion
people in the world, since nothing could be said about the physical
appearance or names of the persons being searched. Now the FBI
has admitted that the whole story was made up by a Canadian tipster
under American scrutiny. A Canadian Mountie told the Toronto
Globe and Mail, "It was a slow week at the White House.
They needed something to stir the pot because nothing was happening
in Iraq."
The Northern Command, established on
October 1, has recently been making statements that it's all
geared up and ready to move into swift law-enforcement action
should the need arise in case of a bioterror or other emergency.
General Ralph E. Eberhart counts "medical scenarios: smallpox,
you name the disease that we might be involved in terms of quarantine"
among threats the military must be able to confront. Talking
to the New York Times, he gloats, "You name
the infrastructure. It could be a bridge, it could be an oil
refinery, the list goes on and on." Chomping at the bit,
he adds, "I guess you could conjure up a situation where
it was so bad that no one else had the capability to be in charge.
We could be in charge at that point." Gen. Eberhart is
fond of repeating that the military is prepared to defend us
from "two or three [attacks] at the same timedifferent in
nature." Is he giving away too much?
According to the New York Times
of January 8, a commission chaired by Paul A. Volcker has suggested
that congress should give the president the authority to conduct
a sweeping reorganization of the federal government into a small
number of "tightly focused departments" and "greater
management flexibility." The Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) would be the model to do away with the General Schedule
classification and pay system, as well as reducing ethical and
financial disclosure requirements for federal employees.
Bookstores and libraries have been complicit
for some time now in giving the FBI information about customers'
and clients' reading habits. Bookstore employees and librarians
may not divulge to patrons that they are being surveilled; this
would subject employees or librarians to criminal prosecution.
When noncitizens from Iran, Iraq, Syria,
Sudan, and Lybia voluntarily showed up to register with the INS
last month, hundreds across the country, particularly in Los
Angeles, were detained. The same fate awaits noncitizens from
other countries scheduled to register in the coming weeks. The
INS's "Call-In Special Registration" program (under
the N-SEERS, or National Security Entry-Exit Registration System)
is a classic Catch-22: if immigrants show up they are interrogated,
and sometimes detained or put into deportation proceedings even
if they have a valid adjustment of status application in process.
The Association of Immigration Lawyers of America (AILA) reports
on its website harassment of immigrants at offices across the
country during special registration: immigrants are asked to
empty their wallets, turn in their credit card and bank account
information, and even video rental cards. They are asked intrusive
questions about political affiliation and beliefs. All this
information is being entered into a permanent data base, and
we can anticipate the INS (soon to fold into DHS), in conjunction
with law enforcement and intelligence agencies, following up
on the activities of these immigrants on a more intrusive basis
in coming years (everyone reporting for registration is assigned
a lifetime Fingerprint Identification Number, or FIN). The
Boston Globe reports on January 4 that hundreds of Middle
Easterners and South Asians are lining up at the Canadian border
to seek refugee or political asylum status, afraid to continue
living in the U.S., even though many have been here for years
and are professionals. The media continue to calmly describe
the registration plan as applying to "visitors," when
in fact many of those affected may have been here for as long
as twenty years, with families and established careers.
The visa granting process has become
part of the infinitely elastic terrorism investigation, so that
individuals are tainted as potential criminals before they're
even allowed entry into the country. Foreigners are being fingerprinted
at ports of entry, to become part of a permanent database. Foreign
students are now systematically being tracked under the Student
and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) for their activities,
so that any move that raises suspicions (a change in major to
physics?) can land them in trouble.
Internet service providers, as part of
"The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" prepared
by the president's Critical Infrastructure Board, are to take
part in universal surveillance of internet use. According to
the New York Times, an official with a "major
data services company says that "part of monitoring the
Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track
incidents while they are occurring." The official calls
it ten times worse than Carnivore, because "Carnivore was
working on much smaller feeds and could not scale," while
"this is looking at the whole Internet."
The Denver police recently revealed that
they have gathered information on thousands of political activists
going back to the 1950s. This type of local police involvement
in surveillance of political groups will be the new standard.
The foreign intelligence agencies are back in the business of
domestic spying, and more ominously, the focus has shifted to
military intelligence agencies linking up with local police to
infiltrate and disrupt political groups. The New York Times
reports about the new tools: "Using filters from the Navy's
space warfare project, Spawar, the agents are now dumping all
that data into one big computer so that with one mouse click
they can find everything from traffic fines to immigration law
violations." This program is being tested in San Diego,
Baltimore, Seattle, St. Louis, Portland, and Norfolk.
Health officials complain that the smallpox
vaccination effort will divert resources from such essential
heath services as cancer and tuberculosis screening, and children's
dental examinations. First half a million health care and emergency
workers, and then ten million more health care workers, police
officers, and emergency medical responders will be vaccinated.
People with certain skin conditions and weakened immune systems
cannot be vaccinated. Those who have been newly vaccinated can
infect those who have not been vaccinated, with vaccinia, a related
virus used to make the smallpox vaccination. The New York
Times says: "The virus is shed from the vaccination
site for two or three weeks, and people who come in contact with
it can become very ill if they have certain skin disorders or
a weakened immune system. Doctors have been especially worried
that vaccinia would be brought into hospitals by vaccinated workers
and then spread among vulnerable patients." Dr. Kent A.
Sepkowitz, director of infection control at Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center in Manhattan, reassures us that there won't be
vaccinia epidemics in hospitals as long as medical workers follow
instructions to keep the vaccination site covered (aren't you
relieved?). Smallpox is the deadliest of all vaccines. It's
as if the government were reviving a plague that had been extinguished
from the world, intentionally reintroducing it to terrorize Americans.
(The last known case of smallpox in the U.S. was in 1949, and
worldwide in 1977.)
Two major hospitals, one in Atlanta and
one in Virginia, have refused to take part in vaccinations, but
the bulk of doctors have been quoted as saying that we need to
make sacrifices (thousands of dead people?) to make the plan
work.
The New York Times reports that
police are conducting random and extensive DNA dragnets in different
jurisdictions, violating all norms against "compelled self-incrimination
and unreasonable search and seizure." After all, if you
haven't done anything wrong, what have you got to hide?
MIT has rejected federal funds to the
tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than let the
government have a say in approving foreign nationals involved
in scientific projects. But what other schools have succumbed
to this pressure and started meeting the government's demands?
On January 10, the New York Times writes about a broad
government assault on independence in scientific research. Lewis
Branscom of Harvard speaks of "an elaborate web of controls
that look and smell and taste like classification." He
adds that excluding from scientific research certain types of
people, like noncitizens, marijuana users, or those with a history
of mental illness reminds him "very much of the McCarthy
days."
Before leaving or re-entering the country,
Americans will have to give the government detailed personal
information to become part of a permanent database. The New
York Times says that the "added information would be
collected while the aircraft or vessel[is] en route to the United
States and electronically transmitted to immigration officials
on the ground at the port of entry." This is all part of
the border security bill overwhelmingly approved by Congress
last spring.
New airline baggage screening rules
went into effect on the first of the year, resulting in the checking
of all bags for explosives. The New York Times reports
that "officials acknowledgethat the screening machines can
generate false positive readings up to 30 percent of the time.
In such cases, transportation security officials inspect the
bags by hand." To help the snoops, passengers are asked
to leave "their bags unlocked," because "security
agents will break into a locked bag or locate its owner if it
raises suspicions."
The government continues to deny legal
protections under international treaties to detainees at Guantanomo
Bay, and to Yasser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, two American
citizens held as enemy combatants. Since August, the government
has won a series of victories in the courts in detaining people
without legal representation, or without even bringing charges
against them, indefinitely and incommunicado. If any cases work
their way to the Supreme Court, the result there is foregone
too. Military tribunals have been formalized, and await use
should that be necessary. On January 8, a federal appeals court
overturned a lower court ruling, declaring that the government
can hold U.S. citizens as enemy combatants without constitutional
protections: "Any effort to ascertain the facts concerning
the petitioner's [Hamdi's] conduct while amongst the nation's
enemies would entail an unacceptable risk of obstructing war
efforts authorized by Congress and undertaken by the executive
branch." The panel also found that "the constitutional
allocation of war powers affords the president extraordinarily
broad authority as commander in chief and compels the courts
to assume a deferential posture in reviewing exercises of this
authority." The Defense Department has only filed a two-page
statement, lacking details, to justify Hamdi's indefinite detention
as an enemy combatant. As for Padilla, the hapless Chicago gangbanger,
the New York Times reports on January 10 that the government
says in a new court filing that allowing a lawyer to see Padilla
"would threaten permanently to undermine the military's
efforts to develop a relationship of trust and dependency that
is essential to effective interrogation." As part of a
new brief, the government brags in a nine-page declaration by
Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, that it is "engaged in a robust program" to
interrogate detainees.
Total Information Awareness (TIA), part
of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) of the
Pentagon, led by Iran-contra felon John Poindexter, "could
link for the first time such different electronic sources as
video feeds from airport surveillance cameras, credit card transactions,
airline reservations, and telephone calling records." The
idea again is to "pre-empt" patterns of activity that
fit certain standards. All parts of one's life--what one eats,
what movies one rents, what one reads--will be linked in real-time
as part of the most sophisticated data-mining technology ever
conceived. This passes under the benign rubric of information-sharing
among agencies and databases, accepted by both political parties
as a necessity.
This is just a random selection of news
from recent days; one can cull stunning new items like this everyday.
Freedom of Information has been eviscerated: the new standard
is to avoid disclosure if at all possible (the Clinton administration
told agencies early on to release records whenever possible,
even if the law provided a reason not to, while Ashcroft announced
a new policy on Freedom of Information in late 2001 directing
agencies to reject requests for documents if there was any legal
basis to do so, and promising to defend the agencies in court).
Secret courts, secret evidence, and secret prosecutions have
been legitimated for the most part by the courts. The documents
of previous administrations are being withheld from scholars.
Immigration hearings are being conducted in secrecy in their
entirety, on the ridiculous justification that holding them openly
would provide terrorists with a "road map" of the investigations.
All that needs to happen now is some other fabricated emergency
to put the final stages of the plan into action.
We who love this country have always
done so because--although we don't have good health care and
have to pay for education and basic social services--at least
this country has let us be free (in the restricted, private sense
of the term). But for twenty years now, these freedoms have
been progressively eroded. The Reagan era drug war was a huge
affront to civil liberties, but the puritan-progressives were
constrained by their own ideological leanings to really try to
push the country back into a more libertarian stance. Ruby Ridge,
Waco, Oklahoma City, welfare "reform," and impeachment
were the next preliminaries leading up to the full-fledged assault
that began with the stolen election.
An entirely new model of post-liberal
governance seems to be emerging; political scientists, as usual,
are behind the curve in anticipating and describing its contours.
Even the venerable postal service, long operating according
to the principles of universal access and uniform rates, is in
danger of being privatized. A business model that differentiates
between customers according to rank and privilege should replace
the standard of equal treatment of citizens even at the reliable
old post office. As usual, whenever capitalism escalates into
its next brutal phase (as it did in the 1930s), those who most
fervently believe in the pieties of liberal democracy are the
first and most tragic targets of oppression. Jews in Germany
in the 1920s and 1930s considered themselves more German than
most Germans, and so felt untouchable; South Asians and Middle
Easterners in America today see themselves similarly with respect
to Americanness, being at the forefront of the struggle for liberal
values. But it is precisely the most naïve and zealous
believers in enlightenment ideals that must be subject to radical
silencing at each new stage of capitalist brutalization. The
new strategies of suppression then become part of the permanent
shared legacy of civilization (the German and Soviet totalitarian
innovations haven't disappeared: they are latent, always available
to the next innovative capitalist regime to appropriate according
to its particular needs). The components of the new American
model of human degradation should also be always available to
other nations.
At no point in our degeneration did liberals
in the established media come out to protest the gravity of the
situation. They have always underestimated the powers they were
up against. Where has the smallpox threat come from? What information
does the government have that leads it to believe that this is
a real threat? Why is nobody asking this question? Will the
military be involved in quarantining large segments of the population
if mass vaccinations are ordered? Will door to door searches
be permitted? Is the INS special registration a mere prelude
to registration (next of Middle Easterners, South Asians, and
Muslims, even if citizens), detention, and deportation on a colossal
scale? How many other Americans will fall under the ambit of
"enemy combatant?"
Do Americans seek refuge in Canada?
Do we go to Britain, France, Italy? Do we figure out how to protect
ourselves from smallpox vaccinations, although the trap is so
elegantly laid that there seems no escape from it? Do we destroy
the papers and documents in our homes, so that the wrong hands
don't get a hold of them? Do we cease "dangerous"
email and phone conversations? Do we continue to risk flying,
despite the fact that any of us might at any time end up on a
no-fly list, and face harassment, arrest, even torture, depending
on what other disagreeable parts of our lives the government
databases can get hold of? Do we drive and walk around and travel
like cowards, afraid of the cop pulling us over, interrogating
us about anything he wants to, making us feel naked and exposed
and weak? Do we disconnect our association with organizations
and interests that we feel may taint us by guilt with association?
Do we cease all activity, all thought, all dissent, all individuality,
because anything different we do stands out, noticed by the snoops
and spies? Do we cease to exist as human beings? Is there any
way to stop this dehumanization before we lose memory of how
things used to be?
Anis Shivani
studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments
at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
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William Hughes
Give Me That Old Time Republic
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January 11
/ 12, 2003
Omar al-Qattan
How
Muhammad Migrated to America
Saul Landau
"The Coup Lacked Professionalism"
David Bloom & Bill Weinberg
Palestinian Solidarity Activists
Subcomandante
Marcos
Zapatistas to Invade Spain!
Gary Leupp
Gallic Nukes
Carl Estabrook
Democracy or Corporations?
Annie Higgins
Life Story of the Olives
Lenni Brenner
CIA as Art Patron
Kevin Summers
Australia Will Be There!
Brad Carlton
NPR: Spinners of Venezuelan Fairy Tales
Carol Norris
Bush's Un-Mandate
Jackie Corr
Ferdinand Pecora:
an American Hero
Philip Farruggio
My Flag Held Hostage
Lee Sustar
Gangs of New York:
Whitewash of Epic Proportions
Sydney Smith
/ Shahid Alam
Poets' Basement
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|