Infrastructure of Tyranny--A Citizenry That Excuses or Ignores These Things

In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny,"  we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear.  In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to.  In the third part of the series, we looked at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands.  In the fourth part, we looked at indefinite detention without trial.  In the fifth part, we looked at assassination without trial.  In the sixth installment, we looked at the goal of Total Information Awareness.  In the seventh installment, we examined the repeated enactment of legal decisions secretly without public knowledge or review.  In the eighth installment, we took a look at the seemingly innocuous spread of political correctness throughout the Western world.  In this ninth post, we'll examine perhaps the most dangerous and deadly part of the infrastructure of tyranny out of all of them: a citizenry that excuses or ignores these things.

Let us begin by observing what should be obvious by now: what once was unthinkably crazy, the realm of the mentally ill and irrationally paranoid, is far from impossible or unthinkable today. Go back through the series, and recognize that I have not touched up all the bits and bobs of the infrastructure of tyranny. Perhaps I'll add more to the series before too long and discuss civil forfeiture, the dangers of eminent domain, or the peculiarities of the Bilderberg gatherings. But I think I've gathered enough information on enough troubling realities to point out that something has gone badly wrong with the way the West works.

The question is whether anyone cares enough to change the direction in which the country is going.  Consider, for instance, the following:

There are columnists reassuring us that Big Brother isn't watching.  Note also the way in which the left vociferously criticized President Bush's Patriot Act and other policies which pursued an "anything in the name of National Security" course, but have remained astoundingly silent in the face of President Obama's expansion of Bush era policies.  The right embraced the notion of anything in the name of National Security under President Bush and are having a hard time doing anything differently under President Obama.  Opposition to these policies, then, are unlikely to come from the institutional right or left.

h/t George W. Obama

To whom, then, shall we go?

There are signs of rising opposition from the USCCB to certain of the government's policies when it comes to religious liberty.  Add to that the religious witness against abortion, the consistent opposition to torture across administrations, and the triumphant religious stances against slavery and for civil rights, and I think the best hope for a renewal of civil liberties and freedoms in this country lies with a religious or at least philosophically motivated defense of human rights and freedoms against the potential for abuse in so many of the structures discussed throughout this series.

Remember a society will either have a citizenry with highly honed consciences or it will have a high level of cops.  But we live in an age which claims for conscience the right to decree good and evil, not merely the responsibility of recognizing right and wrong.  We live in a rising tide of the dictatorship of relativism, identified by Pope Benedict XVI when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger.  As Mussolini purportedly put it:

...Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition.
If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth ... then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity... From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable. --Diuturna [The Lasting] (1921) as quoted in Rational Man : A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962) by H. B. Veatch

So it may be increasingly difficult to defend human rights when the citizenry doesn't believe in the existence of human nature or the natural law.  It may be impossible to defend that antiquated notion which resides in so quintessentially modern a document as the Declaration of Independence:

...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. ..

The texture of the moment may be seen more clearly when one takes a look at the dystopias of the past and discovers how closely they resemble our daily news, our daily realities.  See, for instance, the following, and mark which moment you finally realize what year it supposedly is referring to:

...It is impossible at this time to determine their whereabouts, due primarily to a policy of total media blackout regarding the more extreme government activities (illegal arrests, incarceration without due process of law, torture and grotesque executions—most of which are carried out in secret). Add to this the media disinformation about the more visible government activities which the public can hardly fail to notice (forced closure of churches and schools, arrests on unsubstantiated charges of treason, and the more socially acceptable forms of execution — all of which are apparently “legal” under the new statutes). It is widely believed that our people are being held in “civilian internment camps”, the euphemistic term for concentration camps used in the president’s Omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act of March, 2108.

How has this come to pass? How has the unthinkable become the ordinary? Although Americans are very different from us, they are human after all, and thus quite susceptible to the psychology of perception. The average citizen strolling down an average street in a totalitarian state does not experience his world in terms of continuous absolute madness. However distressed it may be, the passage of months and years gives to even the most extreme of situations a certain semblance of normality. The image Americans once had of their society was a mental construct. And when more than a century ago it began to mutate, they found it extremely difficult to believe that the land of the brave and the home of the free was becoming a landscape of secret nightmare where millions of children were murdered annually, discreetly, hygienically in the clinics and hospitals of their land. Legalized murder, loss of the transcendent vision, and the death of authentic culture should have been sufficient warning to them, for each is a key symptom of a society’s collapse into totalitarianism. But democracies are not immune from self-delusion, although they tend to forms of oppression which are not overtly violent. Democracies in the final stages of decline, however, will degenerate into overt oppression, but they will do so in the name of freedom. That Americans began to realize this fact only when it was far too late, played no small part in the development of outright tyranny...--Michael O'Brien, "Three Views of the Future: The Church in A.D. 2109"

Still far fetched, thank God.  Still far future speculation, and perhaps a nightmare never to come.  But the powers that have been turned against Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorists could well some day be turned against other international religious organizations.  The infrastructure exists.  It has been used against American citizens without trial.  Why are we safe, if these others weren't?  Why should we assume that we have done no wrong, that we will never trigger a datamining operation, never be flagged on a no fly list or a kill list, never be indefinitely detained on suspicion of being suspicious, never be disappeared and judged too dangerous to ever be released?  What safeguards do you have against this apparatus?  Innocence?  Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was innocent of anything other than being the son of an extremist cleric who exhorted other men to violence.  Abdulrahman was innocent.  It did nothing to protect him from sudden death from the sky.  No arrest.  No trial.  No Miranda rights.  No chance to prove innocence in court.  No protection of any kind.  Why should you be any different?  Why should I?

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.--attributed to Martin Niemöller

No. We must respond--and that response is the subject of the last post in the series.