One wonders if the Nazis ever instituted a strip search policy or felt up their people before allowing them to use transportation systems? The answer would be no.
Did Stalin or Mao order "pat downs" and feel ups as state policy in either Russia or China?
What boundaries of totalitarianism has America run up against -- or pushed past lately?
We have been on a very dark trajectory in this modern age, ever since the republic was replaced by the hyper-secretive "national security state." With the introduction of the CIA and unaccountable secrecy, the government has steadily devolved. It has assumed great powers for itself with little in the way of "checks and balances."
Checks on these power grabs have become lesser. We are finally left with merely the "good will" of individual state operatives to choose of their own accord not to grab more power over our lives, our rights and the wealth of our future grandchildren.
Good will don't cut it.
Rights are what we must demand. Rights are what we were supposedly guaranteed, back in grade school, when modern history was ignored completely in favor of some idealized celebration of "Founding Fathers" and their inviolable principles, which scarcely exist today.
One of these guaranteed rights, from the Bill of Rights, the highest law of the land they sometimes say, is called the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Well, there you have it. The legality of "rape scanners," where government agents examine your naked body at "more than 70 airports" today, hinges upon the word "unreasonable."
Apparently, Americans have been bludgeoned by their media into accepting this idea as "reasonable" with shrill threats of "terror" at every opportunity. The American public, never very diligent in its defense of civil liberties, has been convinced that we all should be assumed to be terrorists carrying bombs in our undergarments unless proven otherwise. By some stretch, this position passes for reasonable in 2010.
As absurd as these assumptions are, the actual scenario we are told to fear is even more unreasonable. In many decades and many millions of flights, the single person who put a bomb down his pants found that it was too small to inflict much damage on anything except upon the frail minds of the public.
Further, we find that a would-be attacker could inflict as much, or more, damage to civilians by simply attacking the massive security gate lines where passengers are forced to gather. And what of the luggage turnstiles, where random public can walk in off the street without passing through security at all, carrying large opaque cases no less?
America has been forewarned that it can have a republic, or it can have a global empire that provokes hatred and retaliation -- it cannot have both. This is exactly what the warnings were meant to address. Liberty and global domination are opposites. If you wish to remain free, you will need to stop aggressing other peoples and their lands and resources. Short of that, America is on a spiral descent into Orwellian realms. It has clearly stepped off the path of reasonableness this month. Reasonable people don't strip down and spread their anuses for the uniformed regiments in order to board a flying bus. It's hard to exaggerate the unreasonableness of the territory we find ourselves.
If you're not "mad as hell" and "not going to take it anymore" you probably aren't a real American, my friend. Your civil rights are not a dead issue printed on a rotting old parchment in some museum. Civil rights are a living, breathing, very current and daily reality.
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