As we observe and reflect upon the tenth anniversary of 9/11, please take time to consider the gross injustices perpetrated against humanity by a manipulative United States government who callously exploited a tragedy to strip our civil liberties and subvert the rule of law in an unprecedented power-grab by the executive branch.
Democracy is a delicate thing, and history repeatedly teaches that its debasement is rarely sudden and obvious, but slow and insidious. Only a tirelessly vigilant, educated and compassionate society can prevent it from becoming a closed-state, ruled by fear, shrill demagoguery, surveillance and political abdication to unaccountable corporations, working not for people, but for profits.
When United States journalists can be detained and imprisoned in solitary confinement, suspects are denied trials in public courts, dissent and opining is branded as treason, and emails, library records and phone conversations can be monitored without provocation from watch-lists that now exceed one-million people, the Democracy created carefully by the Founders to guard against such abuses is wounded, perhaps critically.
I have long wished that our leaders' reactions to 9/11 had been to open dialogue; to foster spirited conversations about our country, and to heal collectively while simultaneously exploring the ideas of participatory democracy that were, with such bills like the Patriot Act, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, passed into law with the mass-media's increasingly uniform unrelenting militaristic drumbeat.
Author Chris Hodges 'Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle' maintains similarities between our current situation and that of Germany's 1930s Wiemar Republic, claiming that any administration that dictates with impunity can easily capture the stilted imaginations of an increasingly frustrated and disillusioned public by using ideologically-sanctioned channels for disseminating propaganda in an era when the image is supreme. The more our citizenry supplants the printed word with the passivity of the televised spectacle, the more vulnerable they become, as thoughtful objectivity is replaced by more pliable emotionalism.
Don't think it can't happen here? According to author Naomi Klein, in a transcript from her 2008 speech, The End of America, the ten tactics employed by oncoming totalitarian regimes are already happening within these borders. These include: to establish external or internal fear and threat; secret prisons where torture takes place (chillingly, Nazi Germany didn't call it torture, but 'enhanced interrogation,' the same language used by the United States in the years following 9/11. Also, the creation of paramilitary forces, like Blackwater, who employ hand-picked murderers from other countries with no domestic accountability, and the infiltration of citizens' groups.
During my residency in Saint Paul, MN during the 2008 Republican National Convention, I bore witness to the military presence employed to protect the power elite from protesters, some two-hundred of which were arrested without justification in a nearby park. Amy Goodman, the independent journalist for Democracy Now, was also arrested. Later, Dan Rather was fired from CBS for airing a piece skeptical of George W. Bush's military service record, and incident he later recounted in defense of free-press.
Despite these, just the more egregious examples of civil liberty violations exposed by the indefatigably courageous whistle-blowers, I remain hopeful that all isn't lost; that the realities of our current spectacular economic disparities awaken activism among us to stop buying their digital distractions, become informed, and reclaim a democracy on life-support, but still sustainable.
www.myamericaproject.com
www.naomiklein.org/main
www.democracynow.org
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