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CounterPunch
August
13 / 19, 2002
What's Next...Concentration
Camps?
by Anis Shivani
This is the season of demystification. What people
of my generation never understood about the mass delusions of
recent history--Nazism, Stalinism, holocaust, genocide, thought
crimes, totalitarian spying--is all becoming crystal clear.
We who grew up since the youth and social
justice movements of the 1960s used to ask ourselves: How could
the intelligentsia in Germany have been so acquiescent in the
1930s? Could Germans really not have known that mass extermination
of Jews was under way? Why didn't the Jews fight back? Why did
they let themselves be annihilated? Why was there nobody able
to pinpoint the precise nature of what was happening, until after
it was over? How could these things have happened, and could
they ever happen again?
Of course they couldn't happen again!
There is no Great Depression now. The world is so much more interconnected,
information travels so fast and wide, nothing can remain hidden
for too long, there simply isn't the stomach to embark on mass
repression and annihilation of entire peoples, the liberal consensus
about protecting human rights is too strong, wealth is so spread
out that ordinary people put portfolios before pogroms, too many
institutionalized liberal barriers exist to counter a dictator
making the world over in his brutal image.
This is what some of us continue to believe.
Evidence doesn't matter. What we see
and read and hear and intuit as about to happen takes secondary
place to what our rational faculties tell us about the nature
of the modern world.
We are in mass denial, mass psychosis,
mass deceit once again.
Have we already forgotten what Adorno
and Horkheimer said about the enlightenment always coming to
a dead-end? Do we not know that capitalism, after a certain point,
always ends in concentration camps? Do we not already have the
Hitler of the twenty-first century lording it over the world?
Hitler was not an isolated maniac, a
once-in-history occurrence. Hitler is how capitalism purges itself
from time to time. It takes itself to its most extreme Darwinian
selectivity, makes transparent the brutalities that remain beneath
the surface for the most part, until, when the purge is over,
people are more than willing to live with those little things
they used to complain about the system. What? Wealth and income
inequality? No real meaning in life? Liberalism that functions
only to paste over the blackest indignities against ordinary
workers? Fine, we'll live with all that. As long as there are
no concentration camps, mass deportations, genocide, totalitarian
recruitment of all in the spying, snitching, self-destroying
venture. Please, just not that!
For there is no doubt that the whole
idea behind forcing Bush to the presidency was for America to
enter the era of concentration camps, mass deportations, cultural
genocide, and the redundant addition of Orwellian, or hard, totalitarianism
to its already existing Huxleyan, or soft, totalitarianism, in
order to ratchet things up to such a depressing level that mere
survival, mere existence as we knew it before apocalypse would
become a breath of fresh air.
We are being made to dramatically lower
our level of expectations.
Is it still not clear what is happening?
Until a few weeks ago, there was little
mention in the media, even in most of its alternative, progressive
form, of words like "fascism," "totalitarianism,"
"dictatorship," "police state," "martial
law," "genocide," "concentration camps,"
etc. So the dirty work of laying the foundations of the genocidal
state occurred in full sight, with open "coverage"
by the media.
The entire framework for martial rule
under the most extreme conditions of surveillance was allowed
to come into existence; and it is happening even as we speak,
with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), essentially the
president's nearly 200,000 strong paramilitary, coming into being
as the entity that will harbor the brownshirts of this country,
and give them license to annihilate common decency.
What is Bush's sticking point with congress
over DHS? That there not be civil service protections for the
170,000 workers that will fall under its jurisdiction. No whistle-blower
and freedom of information protections. So if you don't fall
in with whatever it is that they have planned for us, you can
be fired immediately--no thirty-day notice! And replaced with
any of a legion of workers with fascist sympathies more than
happy to embark on the genocide.
The alarm bells are going up now, but
it is too late. The dirty work has already been done. It has
already been demonstrated what is possible to achieve with one
orchestrated "attack." Wait till the next bioterror
"attack," or anything using "weapons of mass destruction"
is orchestrated, and every dissenting voice will shut up. Then
the brownshirts will go into action.
Two things above all are necessary to
complete the genocidal state. The national ID card, which will
be unlike anything anyone's ever seen or dreamed of. Eventually,
every fact about your life--where you travel, who you speak with
on the phone, what government aid you have received that you
were or were not qualified for, what books you read, what magazines
you subscribe to, what organizations you belong to, how much
money you have and what bills you're behind on, what diseases
you've been treated for or are susceptible to--will potentially
be instantly available. So if you're stopped by the police--and
the line between police and intelligence and military is being
blurred to nothingness--and you've ever done anything that as
a good bourgeois following the lines of responsible capitalist
living you ought not to have done, you're in trouble.
This national ID card is coming. If nothing
else, as soon as the second massive "attack" occurs,
its execution will go into overdrive. As a sidenote, one of the
companies eager to assimilate every known bit of data available
to American corporations about the trivialities of your life--which
are not so trivial anymore when the spooks are putting everything
into a profile of terrorists, or dissidents, which are now one
and the same thing--is Choicepoint, the same company that illegally
purged tens of thousands of black voters in Florida under Jeb
Bush and Katherine Harris's patronage.
Second, the military must be allowed
to supersede civilian authority--in "emergencies" of
course, except that the state of emergency, as in all dictatorships,
will become permanent. The second "attack" will be
the excuse to let the military take over. We've already heard
that the military will monitor the 2002 and 2004 elections, that
it will "quarantine" people in case of bioterrorism,
that it should have, according to Tom Ridge, shoot-to-kill and
arrest powers. Senator Biden agrees that the Posse Comitatus
Act of 1878, which forbids military involvement in civil affairs,
ought to be subject to review. The idea has already been put
forth. It is as good as accepted doctrine. The Northern Commander,
General Ralph Eberhart, is for scrapping the Posse Comitatus
Act as we know it. The Northern Command, functioning with the
new DHS, will take us to Stalinist Russia, Hitlerian Germany.
What they want to do more than anything
else is an excuse to search people's homes, go door to door,
ask for everyone's papers, make anyone who fits the "terrorist"
or dissident profile disappear without a trace, as they already
have been doing on a small, preparatory scale.
The East German style TIPS (the Terrorist
Information and Prevention System) program will recruit more
than a million service workers--phone, gas, mail, delivery people--to
send in tips about suspicious people or activities to the government.
What is suspicious? If I read books on terrorism to write a scholarly
article, I'm suspect. The librarian or bookstore owner is already
being forced to turn over this information. Millions of "tips"
about suspicious people will end up in a permanent database,
to be used as and when necessary.
We wonder about the Germans, how could
they not have known? Today, millions of people of Arab and South
Asian and Islamic origin walk the streets of America, sometimes
even in distinctive garb or identifying marks, not knowing what
is to befall them. Will some of them end up in concentration
camps, perhaps in Arizona on the U.S. border? Will they be among
the mass roundups that will result in the deportation of hundreds
of thousands of people? Will mother be separated from child,
husband from wife, and will many do so with some degree of willingness
to preserve their own life?
The Bush administration fought hard to
replace a liberal member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
with a hard-right ideologue. This same Peter Kirsanow now says
that in the event of a second attack--which we've already been
assured is inevitable--Korematsu (the Supreme Court decision
of 1944 upholding the internment of Japanese Americans) would
make a comeback, that there would be no civil rights for certain
ethnic or religious groups.
There, he's already said what's on everyone's
mind. Now do we wonder why the Jews didn't leave Germany? Why
the Japanese in California professed patriotism to the end, thinking
it couldn't happen to them?
Absolutely every immigrant is deportable
now, even if you have never done anything to break the law. Ashcroft
says that all non-citizens are to report a change of address
within 10 days, or face deportation. Even if you follow this
procedure, will the INS admit to having received the notification,
if you're among those targeted for deportation?
Those who believe that an American attack
on Iraq will be enough to soothe the military beast, and that
a second "attack" on America itself will not be orchestrated,
are sadly mistaken. An attack on Iraq will come, but that doesn't
necessarily let the military take over this country, it doesn't
allow the national ID card plan to go full-speed ahead.
Skeptics wonder if the Bush administration
will not open itself up fatally to the charge of a second major
lapse in intelligence if they allow a second, even bigger 9/11
to occur. That's already been taken care of. They've told us
that a second, bigger attack is inevitable and we've accepted
it. The anthrax perpetrator has been suspected for months, including
now by the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof--as a dangerous
man with white supremacist sympathies working at a military biodefense
lab--and there has been no outrage about the FBI's failure to
expose him. No, the remnants of liberal opposition will fall
quickly in line to defend the homeland. They will not want to
subject themselves to the charge of engaging in "conspiracy
theory," just as they've failed to see all the evidence
pointing to the first one.
We wonder why in Germany and China and
Russia neighbor snitched upon neighbor, parents and siblings
sacrificed each other to preserve their own lives, people refused
to see what was happening in front of their eyes to maintain
their sanity. Is it still mysterious? Does one not find oneself
hoping for an attack on Iraq--even though all scenarios lead
to a nuclear or chemical weapons exchange of some sort, thereby
leading to calamity for the people of that region--in order that
we the privileged liberals in the U.S. may be spared concentration
camps for a while? We used to wonder how the most civilized nations
could tumble seemingly overnight into utter darkness.
We wonder how a mother could have made
a choice between children, to send one to the gas chamber only
in order to preserve the other for a while. It won't be long
before we snitch on our closest and dearest ones to save our
own skins for a while.
We will be afraid to think dangerous,
political thoughts, since thought has already been criminalized.
It matters who you speak to, what you read, what you write--and
so thought must shut down for four or eight or twelve years,
until the beast has gone into retreat and it is safe to come
out into the open. We will watch ourselves, in O'Brien's final
imperative, to the extent that we will stop believing what we
believe, what we see in front of our eyes, so that two plus two
is never four, only what the rulers tell us. The boldest amongst
us, used to thinking of ourselves as heroic and invincible, will
be like lambs.
That is all coming, and if you don't
see that, then--well, maybe it will be all right in the end,
and we will come away mostly unscathed.
Anis Shivani
studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments
at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
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August 14
/ 19, 2002
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