[extropy-chat] POLITICS: National security

[Amara Graps]

Gennady Ra anyservice at cris.crimea.ua  :
>The best prefix to describe the situation: peri-? Perifascist state?
>Is the game over?

>-- Jim Garrison - New Orleans District Attorney
>  JFK Assassination Investigation Remarks


>"What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case,
>is that we in America are in great danger of slowly eroding into a
>proto-fascist state.



I wrote the following two years ago to the extropians list under
the Subject  "botched diplomacy". I think very little has changed
in the last  two years, only further along in a direction, which
nobody likes.

Amara

==========November 25, 2002===========================================

Among the hypocrisy and ironies about the country that is flag-waving
the world's freedom, it that it has given it up so much freedom
within its own borders. Now international human rights organization
are watching the U.S.  So what is going on? Did the U.S. citizens
fall asleep ?

Freedom for Safety
http://www.reason.com/0210/fe.ng.freedom.shtml
For whom the Liberty Bell tolls
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1301751

The New Neighborhood Watch (horrors of Orwell's 1984)
http://www.citizencorps.gov/watch.html
http://www.geocities.com/hal9000report/hal30.html

U.S. correctional population at record high
(and it has more people in prison than Russia, Belarus, South Africa,
Thailand, England, China, France, Italy, Japan ... read more
in The Economist 10 August 2002)
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/25/jail.stats/

Plus, does anyone notice how the U.S. government uses the
word 'freedom'?

The context is 'liberty' and 'freedom' forced upon other people
at the point of a gun.

I am alarmed to the depths of my toes to see the words:
"morality", "human rights", "liberty" used in the way I've
seen it used in the U.S. media. and among some U.S. citizens.

Part of the foundation of the Total State (totalitarianism) is laid
when common but valuable words are rewritten to have a new meaning.
That is, propaganda. For example the Soviet propaganda in 1979 for
why the Soviets invaded Afghanistan was to "free their women"
[you mean those women who were going to university and wearing
blue jeans?) and "modernize their country" [that had a flourishing
infrastructure?] and 1939 invading the Baltics was to "protect
them against the threat of incursion" [no comment needed]. The
word "liberty"  is the worst  offender, according to Hayek.

                      -------------
Quote from F. Hayek (pg. 172-173, _Road to Serfdom_):

"The most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words
but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at
the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so
characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete
perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which
the ideals of the new regimes are expressed.

The worst sufferer in this respect is, of course, the word
"liberty." It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as
elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said -- and it should serve as
a warning to us to be on our guard -- that wherever liberty as we
understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done
in the name of some new freedom promised to the people.
[...]

But "freedom" or "liberty" are by no means the only words whose
meaning has been changed into their opposites to make them serve as
instruments of totalitarian propaganda. We have already seen how the
same happens to "justice" and "law," "right" and "equality." The
list could be extended until it includes almost all moral and
political terms in general use.

If one has not one's self experienced this process, it is difficult
to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words,
the confusion which it causes, and the barriers to any rational
discussion which it creates. It has to be seen to be understand how,
if one of two brothers embraces the after a short while he appears
to speak a different language which makes any real communication
between them impossible. And the confusion becomes worse because
this change of meaning of the words describing political ideals is
not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed
consciously or unconsciously to direct the people. Gradually, as this
process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, and words
become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of
denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional
associations which still adhere to them."

                      ------------

I can't begin to express how upset it makes me when I see the direction
that the U.S. is going.

Amara

-- 
through December 2002: Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik,
Cosmic Dust Group, Heidelberg, Deutschland
from January 2003: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche,
Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario, Roma, Italia