The British government is claiming up to 1500 white people have converted to Islam and are now part of al-Qaeda.

To the people of Britain:

Soon it won’t be just “those dodgy brown people” getting locked up without charge and tortured. This is the next logical step towards the creation of a fascist state in which all citizens live in fear of the secret police, and neighbour reports neighbour for crimes real or imagined, and thought crime is punishable by torture and death.

To the government of Britain:

If 1500 white people really are engaged in a secret war against you, has it occurred to you that maybe it’s because they don’t like having their freedoms taken away from them? Ignore a terrorist and he will fade away. Fight a terrorist and he grows powerful. If this report is really true then it’s your own bloody fault, and you get what you deserve.

America is rapidly descending into the straitjacket of fascism. Telephone calls are monitored; emails recorded; web traffic analyzed. The government is watching you, and it is not a friendly gaze. We live in a time of fear.

Historically, one of the few practical checks on tyranny in America has been greed. Greed is the carrot that spurs innovation. Quite simply, insufficient liberty is bad for the bottom line.

So the question is: has the swelling chorus of fascism begun to dampen innovation in America? When will Big Business push back?

Or will they? Perhaps the time of innovation is at an end. An increasing array of frivolous patents are granted each year by the US Patent Office; lawsuits threaten the inventor, engineer and software developer at every turn. Many foreign inventors and engineers find it so hard to get a US visa they simply go somewhere else.

There is another possibility. The Western world view may have already spent itself entirely, its mojo gone, its creative juices spent. There may, in fact, remain only tyranny and stasis. Without the greed that fuels innovation, there will remain no one and nothing to defend the rudimentary vestiges of liberty in America, and the world will fall into the black pit of lock-step, mindless uniformity, critics ruthlessly silenced, creative people crushed under heel as deviants.

Wake up America! The house is fucking burning already!

From The Guardian:

“From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.”

The Fascist State desires to have citizens of a certain type: namely,
obedient. A questioning, wondering, thinking citizenry is by definition
a threat to the Fascist State.

The thing we must remember, also, is that in general fascism is
something the majority of people desire: they wish to be ruled by a
strong hand, they wish to obey, they wish to lose the omnipresent
burden of self and the painful options of choice available in a truly
free society.

Computers, I am beginning to think, and specifically computer games, are
a cultural expression of a desire to give up free will and be ruled by
autocratic fascist forces.

Let’s consider the model of most computer games. The player must go on a
virtual journey, killing monsters, collecting valuables, advancing
levels, and finally defeat some evil baddie at the end in order to win
and make it into the list of high scores.

At each step the player must do only one of a very few things or his
character, his avatar, will die. A computer game is generally not a
venue for creativity, but for learning specific response mechanisms,
without which the player’s avatar will most certainly die.

(It should be noted there are a very few computer games that do involve
and encourage creativity; but their lack of popularity proves my point:
no one wants to think during his time off.)

Consider the effect this sort of learning has on the human mind,
especially the developing young mind. The lesson is clear: to succeed
and get ahead, there is a narrow band of options that will take you to
the top. Any deviation, any creativity, anything resembling free
thinking or exploration will lead to inevitable failure.

Computer games are also highly addictive. They are designed to be. You
always want more. Dying only makes you want to play again and get
further ahead, like a lab rat in a maze, obediently solving the puzzle,
all for the sake of a digital piece of cheese that does not even exist
in the real world.

It is as though an XBox were some sort of pagan deity, before which we
sit cross-legged, bowed, as though in worship or prayer, with a joystick
(the word: a joy stick!) between our legs, attempting to please the
god-in-a-box, receiving a steady IV drip of calmative anti-psychotic
digital drug each time we kill a monster or collect some virtual
treasure.

This is true of computer use in general as well. The convergence of
fictional computer games and computer-aided real life should not be
underestimated. Information in general now becomes that anti-psychotic
drug: what else can explain the unbearable itch to check your email
every five minutes?

Why waste hours chatting on instant messenger when you could pick up the
phone and just call the person? With skype you can call anywhere in the
world for about $.02/minute — is it really “just to save money” that
you IM? Or is it to spend time, to get rid of time, to force the digital
hour hand to move faster, to obliterate the hours that might otherwise
be spent thinking unspeakable thoughts, engaged in the horror of self-
examination?

There is, of course, no ultimate satisfaction to be found in computer
games, any more than television or summer movies provide the catharsis
of true drama. The aim of all three — computer games, television, and
the summer blockbuster — is to leave you wanting more, craving more,
tickled but, at bottom, never ultimately satisfied.

It is only by putting the citizen on a hamster wheel of always-craving-
more than he can be kept tame, kept down, kept submissive.

This sort of entertainment, or rather, propaganda, creates the sort of
citizen the United States of America wants: obedient, unreflective,
compliant individuals who don’t ask questions, salute the flag, and
worship Jesus. Hallelujah.

– this essay originally appeared at www.jensporup.com/essays.

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.

See the full article here.