1984-style Homeland Security telescreens in Wal-Mart stores represent pathetic new low in America’s collapse into a dictatorial banana republic
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Americans have reacted with outrage to Big Sis Janet Napolitano’s announcement that Homeland Security messages encouraging shoppers to spy on each other will play at Wal-Mart checkouts, but the announcement is part of a wider takeover of America that will see the DHS invade virtually every aspect of public life in the United States as the country sinks into a decrepit banana republic.
The Department of Homeland Security’s official You Tube channel has been bombarded with complaints, many of them littered with furious profanity, after the announcement yesterday that the DHS would team up with 588 Wal-Mart stores in 27 states to place monitors at checkout locations that would play a video message by Janet Napolitano encouraging Americans to spy on each other and report “suspicious activity” to law enforcement and Wal-Mart employees.
The announcement leaves no room for doubt that America has officially entered the realm of Orwell’s 1984 as the federal government moves to entrench an onerous surveillance society where ordinary members of the public are enlisted as spies for the state to create a constant sense of distrust and fear.
From VIPR teams that now patrol Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor and Los Angeles rail lines; ferries in Washington state; bus stations in Houston; and mass transit systems in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore, to invasive pat downs at bus and train terminals and on street corners across the country, to radiation-emitting naked body scanners that roam the highways scanning vehicles and homes, to interrogation checkpoints at sporting and other public events, Big Sis is engaged in a total takeover of society, turning America into a giant prison grid where everyone is guilty until proven innocent and treated as a potential terrorist.
Openly encouraging Americans to become informants for the government as they purchase their weekly groceries represents a new low in America’s total collapse into a dictatorial banana republic. It’s a sad and pathetic reminder that this once great beacon of freedom, strength and prosperity has now been hijacked by people who hate everything about what America once represented.
Given the fact that Homeland Security is mimicking British authorities in its Orwellian approach, we can expect “suspicious activity” to include such behavior as paying for Wal-Mart’s Chinese slave goods with cash, or merely daring looking back at the surveillance cameras spying on Americans in the shopping mall.
As America sinks deeper into a militarized police state, society begins to parallel more and more aspects of Nazi Germany and other historical dictatorships, especially in the context of citizens being turned against each other, which in turn creates a climate of fear and the constraining sense that one is always being watched.
One common misconception about Nazi Germany was that the police state was solely a creation of the authorities and that the citizens were merely victims. On the contrary, Gestapo files show that 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information provided by denunciations by “ordinary” Germans.
“There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors,” wrote Robert Gellately of Florida State University.
Now the federal government is urging Americans to “denounce” each other at Wal-Mart. Are we seeing the beginnings of President Barack Obama’s promised “civilian national security force” that would be just as powerful and well funded as the US military?
Gellately discovered that the people who informed on their neighbors were motivated primarily by banal factors – “greed, jealousy, and petty differences,” and not by a genuine concern about crime or insecurity. Indeed, history tells us that any Stasi-like society does nothing to increase genuine security and only turns the host population against each other while decaying the country from within.
Gellately “found cases of partners in business turning in associates to gain full ownership; jealous boyfriends informing on rival suitors; neighbors betraying entire families who chronically left shared bathrooms unclean or who occupied desirable apartments.”
“And then there were those who informed because for the first time in their lives someone in authority would listen to them and value what they said.”
Gellately emphasizes the fact that the Germans who sicked the authorities on their neighbors knew very well what the consequences for the victims would be – families torn apart, torture and internment in concentration camps, and ultimately in many cases death – but they still did it with few qualms because the rewards of financial bounties and mere convenience were deemed more important to them.
This strikes at the root of the selfish and childish urges the government is trying to manipulate in getting people to report on their fellow Americans. The self-important feeling of being listened to, ascribed some temporary sense of authority, and the cult-like pavlovian reward of being metaphorically patted on the head by someone in a uniform, are all tendencies such campaigns play on.
However, if we don’t want to end up in a society that exists in a constant state of tyranny and fear as in Stasi East Germany or Stalinist Russia, we must learn that our neighbors and friends are not our enemies, and that the only real threat against which we need to unite is an oppressive state that tries to destroy us by turning us against each other.
This role has now been undertaken by Big Sis and the Department of Homeland Security, which is actively finalizing the invasion and total takeover of American society, using tools and programs that every single odorous dictatorship in modern history has resorted to – checkpoints, interrogations, strip-searches, training the people to spy on each other, guilty until proven innocent. Each and every facet betrays a country in terminal decline and one that will end up as a decrepit, lifeless, authoritarian cesspit, forever confined to the slagheap of history as just another example of how a civilized, cultured and prosperous society allowed itself to be destroyed from within by fear at the hands of a gaggle of jackbooted thugs.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
