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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI know this is Scalia talking but still
Supreme Court justice predicts internment camps in Americas future
A distinguished member of the U.S. Supreme Court gave a sobering reminder of how history can and likely will repeat itself when the conditions are right. Justice Antonin Scalia said that he would not be surprised if Americans were once again imprisoned in concentration camps by the federal government."
The 77-year-old justice was answering questions after giving a classroom lecture to a group of law students in Honolulu. One student asked about the deplorable 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court verified the constitutionality of the president ordering the mass-imprisonment of Americans in the name of national security."
It was wrong
But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again.
- Justice Scalia
http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/justice-scalia-internment-camps/
villager
(26,001 posts)People of course can busy themselves not "believing" it, etc.
But eventually, when the climate unravels further.... One suspects the 1% and their "public" office servants have some back-up plans...
UncleMuscles
(44 posts)don't hesitate to believe that they will drop the hammer mighty quick. Look at the civil rights movement, the black liberation movement, left-wing movement ideology in the 60s. Occupy.
We were never truly free in this country. We aren't free now. If you behave, they let you walk around and don't incarcerate you.
damnedifIknow
(3,183 posts)BeeBee
(1,074 posts)UncleMuscles
(44 posts)the sooner the scales will fall from their eyes.
mstinamotorcity2
(1,451 posts)be first in line????
Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)Look at the lengths we went to after 9/11. The Constitution was trampled, liberty was traded for 'security', Gitmo, etc. Now imagine what we'd do if there was an actual threat. I think Scalia is a deplorable shitbag who is wrong most of the time, but in this case I just don't think he's all that far off. Americans are masters of the knee jerk. A few major attacks it all it would take for us to suspend the Constitution and start rounding people up. It's just a matter of history repeating itself.
unblock
(52,230 posts)in the same vein as "an impeachable offense is whatever the house decides it is", scalia believes that the court can decide that anything is constitutional or not if 5 justices agree. there doesn't have to be any logic to it. they don't even have to show their reasoning if they don't want to.
if 5 justices were so inclined, they could decide that slavery was constitutional, or that women couldn't vote, or whatever.
in practice, they can't get away with anything quite that outrageous. they got away with bush v. gore at some cost to institutional respect. they can take hits like that. but scalia believes they can do whatever they can get away with.
joeybee12
(56,177 posts)and there's a war against Christians and they'll be the ones imprisoned...bullshit from an asshole.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)By Chris Hedges
TruthDig.org, Posted on Jan 5, 2014
EXCERPT...
The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.
I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasithe Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the shield and sword of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.
The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the populationone for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in Americas black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.
[font color="purple"]The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is not, in the end, to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. And because Americans emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough evidence to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant. [/font green]
The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.
CONTINUED...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105
damnedifIknow
(3,183 posts)Yeah, there has to be a reason we are seeing all this domestic spying along with police going haywire. I don't know but it's not right.