Slavery: How To Think About The Origins Of The American Surveillance State

[villager]

<snip>

Think about it this way. Slaves were controlled in a largely totalitarian society, even before the American Revolution, and this lasted until the Civil War. This society involved radical restrictions on peoples’ ability to read, travel, work for pay, trade, own property, marry, and not be physically and mentally abused. At the core of slavery was an aggressive need for control, it was the mother of all totalitarian surveillance cultures. This surveillance didn’t just involve slaves, but surveillance of those who sought to free slaves via such institutions as the Underground Railroad.

After slavery and a brief interlude of Reconstruction, sharecropping and segregation took its place, and sharecropping was enforced by a reign of terror by both legal institutions like local police and commercial monopolies of credit, railroads, and farm supplies, and extra-legal institutions like the KKK.

Finally, in the early 1900s, we get to the establishment of the FBI and the ACLU, as well as the creation of public relations, propaganda, and the entire advertising culture. This was kicked off or accelerated by mass consumption and World War I, and the development of fingerprinting and photograph techniques. The next big leap forward was the computerization of records, in the 1960s, and the reaction against the civil rights movement with COINTELPRO and so forth. But political surveillance, it’s important to remember, is part of the fabric of American culture, and always has been.

http://disinfo.com/2014/03/think-origins-american-surveillance-state/

[LuvNewcastle]

1. I wish this author had explored this subject more and written a more

thorough article. I think that our surveillance system did have part of its beginnings in anxieties about the institution of slavery and the need to control so many people. Remember that in the Deep South, there were lots of areas where there were many more slaves than white people, thus the white people were constantly worried about any kind of organization among the slaves. Slaves often spoke to each other in code so their overseers and the spies couldn't understand what they were saying. Slave owners always kept tabs on their slaves' whereabouts as well as their sentiments.

During the Civil Rights movement, there was a similar anxiety about black organization, and not only in the South. A lot of FBI time and attention was devoted to surveillance of and research about Civil Rights leaders and the different organizations that were pushing for change. I don't think that most people at the time looked at it this way, but the reasons for all the anxiety and surveillance were basically the same as they were during the days of slavery. There was still an unjust system in this country, and the people who benefited from it (or thought they benefited from it) wanted the system to remain the same.

J. Edgar Hoover was the father of the surveillance system in this country, and I believe that its goals are about the same as they've always been -- to keep us in our place by stopping anyone or any organization which might empower us so we can bring about real change. I'd say that today they have it down to a science.

[villager]

2. Thoughtful addtions, LuvNewcastle!

I, too, wish the article had been longer.

But the essential thesis is also, in retrospect, a very sad one: That our experiment in democracy was (fatally?) hobbled from the beginning, due to the racism that couldn't be transcended at our very founding.

And now it's metastasized into the corporate surveillance state.

The question left for us being then: How do we countermand their "science," that you mention?