General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI had a dream a few nights ago
That I was interred in a Camp for political prisoners. I was wandering and saw in a corner, talking to a few people, an emaciated and literally beaten Joe Scarborough. The Camp was a visual memory from the film The Great Escape. I awakened with a start. It all seemed so real.
I could easily see a minister of propaganda getting his hands on the list of posters here and rounding us up for re-education.
rampartc
(5,405 posts)when the trumpists inter us in their abandoned wal marts we will not be so fortunate.
Kid Berwyn
(14,884 posts)By Chris Hedges
TruthDig.org, Posted on Jan 5, 2014
EXCERPT...
The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.
I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasithe Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the shield and sword of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.
The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the populationone for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in Americas black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.
The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is not, in the end, to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. And because Americans emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough evidence to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.
The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.
CONTINUED...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105
As I frequently mention Don the Con serves Pooty Poot, Ill be in camp, too.
lastlib
(23,216 posts)Kid Berwyn
(14,884 posts)Then there are the motorsports...
doc03
(35,325 posts)coming after those of us that don't display a Trump flag. Some of them would do it if he told them to..
bigtree
(85,988 posts)PCIntern
(25,539 posts)Stuart G
(38,419 posts)Last edited Thu Sep 24, 2020, 02:59 PM - Edit history (3)
by Nazi's at their concentration camp..and also when the camps were liberated by the Allies..
Absolutely incredible true movie..Not a Hollywood film, but actual film take by the Nazis and Allies
when the camps were liberated..Yes, those death camps we know and read about.
Movie is a Internet Movie Data Base.... Here is a link to that film...One more thought, if you ever watch it,
you will never forget it. Probably the most powerful film ever made. I know, you don't believe that..just read the
reviews then go to the library & take it out. You will never ever forget those 32 minutes.
I reviewed that film 16 years ago on November 16, 200..".see all 94 user reviews"
If you hit that link you will see my review of that film..(..look for stuartpiles..... The Most Powerful Film Ever Made)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048434/