We're in a Post-Constitutional America: and Nobody's Saying Much About It

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/were-post-constitutional-america-our-country-going-sideways-plain-sight-and-nobodys


We're in a Post-Constitutional America: Our Country Is Going Sideways in Plain Sight, and Nobody's Saying Much About It


Close your eyes for a moment, think about recent events, and you could easily believe yourself in a Seinfeldian Bizarro World. Now, open them and, for a second, everything looks almost familiar... and then you notice that a dissident is fleeing a harsh and draconian power, known for its global surveillance practices, use of torture, assassination campaigns, and secret prisons, and has found a haven in a heartless world in... hmmm... Russia. That dissident, of course, is Edward Snowden, just granted a year’s temporary asylum in Russia, a.k.a. the defender of human rights and freedom 2013, and so has been released from a Washington-imposed imprisonment in Moscow’s international air terminal and the threat of far worse.

Now, close your eyes, open them again, and for just a moment, doesn’t the world look a little more orderly? After all, a draconian imperial power has taken one of its own dissidents, who wanted to reveal the truth about its cruel war practices and global diplomatic maneuverings, thrown him in prison without charges, abused and mistreated him, brought him before a drumhead military court and, on essentially trumped up charges of “espionage,” convicted him of just what its leaders wanted to convict him of. That power, of course, must be Russia and all’s right with the world... oops, I mean, that’s U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning and the “evil empire” that mistreated him is... gulp... the United States.

Think about it for a moment: if Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a place of asylum for American dissidents and the U.S. is doing a reasonable job of imitating aspects of the old USSR, we are on Bizarro Earth, aren't we?

Today, former State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, considers how America’s distant wars have come home and how, under that pressure, this country is morphing into something unrecognizable. Worse yet, it’s quite possible that we’re only at the beginning of that transformation. To give but a small example of what the future might hold, psychiatrist and author Jonathan Shay, famous for his work with traumatized Vietnam veterans, suggested in Daedalus in 2011 that no one knows what it means for similarly traumatized employees of our Warrior corporations, the rent-a-gun “veterans” of our recent war zones to come home to no health care and no support system. And he offered an eerie, if provocative, comparison to the footloose German veterans of World War I who, in the 1920s, joined the Freikorps and played their part in the radicalization and then Nazification of that country.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. The Minions wil be here shortly to explain why we are all idiots. Nt.

[xchrom]

2. !

[Junkdrawer]

8. 1 hour 33 minutes....

Monday morning and all...

[Octafish]

3. DUers have said a lot about it.

Problem is that individual posts reach a very limited number of people. Thus, the BFEE don't care.

[Junkdrawer]

4. We know we need to rebel. We've collectively forgotten how.

The only tool we now know is participation in the campaigns of hand-picked Democratic candidates.

And it's not working.

[davidn3600]

5. I don't see an immediate solution

Unfortunately today our choice is either the Democrats who support Big Brother or the Republicans that resemble the Taliban. We are being led by a bunch of corrupt, authoritarian whack jobs who have no respect for the Constitution and work only to protect the wealthy class.

[eShirl]

6. Not "Bizarro Earth" so much as, we switched at some point with our "Mirror, Mirror" Universe.

Anyone notice the quiet proliferation of goatees as things get weirder and weirder?

[JoePhilly]

7. Another ... "we're becoming Nazi Germany article".

[Mojorabbit]

9. Do you have anything to say about the subject itself? nt

[JoePhilly]

13. Yes, we're aren't becoming Nazi Germany.

[Spider Jerusalem]

10. And how did Nazi Germany become Nazi Germany?

Under colour of law, through orderly and perfectly legal means.

An excerpt from
They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

[xchrom]

12. +1

[JoePhilly]

14. GASP!!!!

An old friend from high school, sadly now a Tea Bagger, sends me similar stuff. His subject line is usually something like: Is Obama Hitler?

The main difference is that he would have highlighted this part of that 2nd paragraph ...

And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

... to compare President Obama to Hitler. Then he starts talking about FEMA work camps.

[Spider Jerusalem]

17. Except I'm not comparing Obama to Hitler.

I'm just pointing out that things like secret courts and "classified" Congressional votes are not really healthy signs in a supposedly free and open democracy.

[marions ghost]

11. People don't know what to do about it

--"loss of constitutional rights" seems overwhelming.

But I don't think everybody likes it. Not at all.

[Harmony Blue]

15. I am young enough where I can consider moving to another country

I have relatives that live in Canada. However, to become a citizen of Canada requires a lot of paperwork but also showing that you will be a positive contributor to the Canadian society (eg. good profession).

[KoKo]

16. The whole article is worth a read...Thanks for posting in "GD"

I read it this a.m. from "Nation of Change" and just posted a different snip from the article in "Good Reads," before I saw you posted the introduction here.

It's getting good coverage because "Tom Dispatch, Naked Capitalism, NOC and now Alternet," have it up. It's an informative read and goes along with the latest revelations about the Drug War Surveillance being used on all of us that's just come out.

These are really depressing times. The worry is that all this is being exposed...but, that it will go down the August Vacation Time Memory Hole" and some crises in the MENA will overshadow it all. Come September...who will remember?