America’s long and painful decline into fascism is masked by a spirit of hypocrisy: Orwellian terms enter our lexicon, where “freedom” means “obedience” and “defence” means “war of aggression” and truth has become so muddled that rather than try to untwist all the lies we merely take sides with people who look like us, or who live near us, or who fall roughly into the same socio-economic background as us.

So it is that this little piece of bald-faced news escaped most people’s attention last October: Congress has given the President the right to deploy troops on American soil and to commandeer control of the National Guard from the various states’ governors. There is a word for this: it is martial law.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) wrote at the time:

“We certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders.”

He wrote further:

“The implications of changing the (Posse Comitatus) Act are enormous… There is good reason,” he said, “for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy. We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty.”

And so both Liberty and Justice, like frogs in the slowly boiling pot of proverb, are cooked alive, leaving behind nothing but a fascist dictatorship, oh-so-thinly disguised as democracy.

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