I am reading "
The Great Influenza" the fascinating book by John M. Barry on the 1918 Spanish Flu. In it Barry vividly describes the events leading to the worst pandemic in recorded history. Of particular interest is the year 1917.
Prior to 1917, President Woodrow Wilson had opposed entering the United States into World War I. When he could no longer, he turned this country into a white hot weapon of war.
How he did that should give everyone pause. Keep in mind that W. finds affinities with President Wilson. It may not be the Wilson we choose to remember (the League of Nations etc.).
From J.M. Barry's book (my emphasis):
Anyone who believed that Wilson's reluctant embrace of war meant that he would not prosecute it aggressively knew nothing of him. He was one of those rare men who believed almost to the point of mental illness in his own righteousness.
Sounds familiar?
"I will not cry 'peace' so long as there is sin and wrong in the world," he went on. "America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture"
War on sin... Ugh oh.
He is probably the only American president to have held to this belief with quite such conviction, with no sigh of self-doubt. It is a trait more associated with crusaders than politicians.
I know what you guys are thinking.
Wilson declared, "It isn't an army we must shape and train for war, it is a nation." ... The hard line was designed to intimidate those reluctant to support the war into doing so, and to crush or eliminate those who would not. Even before entering the war, Wilson had warned Congress, "There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit,... who have pored the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life ... Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out." He intended to do so.
You're with us or you're with the enemy.
The government compelled conformity, controlled speech in ways, frightening ways, not known in America before or since. Soon after the declaration of war, Wilson pushed the Espionage Act through a cooperative Congress, which balked only at legalizing outright press censorship - despite Wilson calling it an "imperative necessity." The bill gave Postmaster General ... the right to refuse to deliver any periodical he deemed unpatriotic or critical of the administration. And, before television and radio, most of the political discourse in the country went through the mails.
Total control of the media.
Attorney General Thomas Gregory...demanded that the Librarian of Congress report the names of those who asked for certain books and also explained that the government needed to monitor "the individual casual or impulsive disloyal utterances." To do the latter, Gregory pushed for a law broad enough to punish statements made "from good motives or ... [if] traitorous motives weren't provable." The administration got such a law.
Patriot Act, the prequel.
The new Sedition Act made it punishable by twenty years in jail to "utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States." One could go to jail for cursing the government, or critizing it, even if what one said was true."...To enforce the law, the head of what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation agreed to make a volunteer group called the American Protective League an adjunct to the Justice Department, and authorized them to carry badges identifying them as "Secret Service". Within a few months the APL would have ninety thousand members. Within a year, two hundred thousand APL members were operating in a thousand communities.
Okay you get the point.
We don't need to go abroad to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union to find disquieting parallels with our current slide toward a police state.
It happened here less than a hundred years ago. Here in the good old U.S. of A. You know what they say about learning the lessons of History...