General warrants. Lettres de cachet. And now, our own government engaging in wholesale ignoring of FISA, wiretapping without warrants and daring us to care. The Founding Fathers are certainly rotating in their tombs. I'm sure they never thought we their descendants would be craven enough to crawl back under a tyrant's skirts, merely because we're afraid. What one fears blindly, one risks becoming...and guess what we are becoming?
It's funny, isn't it, how we're faced with the same questions the French and American Revolutionaries faced. Taxation (of the poor and middle class) without representation (a Congress/Presidency comprised of the economic top 1%.) General warrants. Live free or...well, just shop. The truly odd thing is that tyranny very rarely changes. In order to turn a free country into a nation of servility, dictators and their cabals take the same steps, time after time.
You'd think we'd learn by now.
Lettres de cachet, back in pre-Revolutionary France, were special letters signed by the king that one could obtain (for enough cash) to imprison without trial, due process, or habeas corpus just about anyone except the king himself. Aunt Bessie's standing in the way of your inheritance? Buy a lettre de cachet. Grandfather Luc is senile and won't die quietly soon enough for you to get your inheritance? Lettre de cachet. That uppity commoner bourgeois is interfering with your rents? Lettre de cachet.
Or, commoner Milt is spreading the idea that the king should answer to the people? The idea that the king's power should be checked? Threatening to expose scandalous information about a king's minister? Or even a rich noble with a minister's ear?
You guessed it. Lettre de cachet. One-stop shopping for all your dictatorial needs.
General warrants were much the same thing, one of the leading causes of the American Revolution. (The Forth Amendment is a direct response to these warrants.) Dissent, even lawful and necessary dissent for the good of the country, can be stopped cold with a general warrant or a lettre de cachet. As with any instrument of total power, a general warrant is particularly prone to autocratic, capricious, and just plain corrupt usage. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, how much more will a general warrant corrupt?
One hallmark of totalitarian dictatorships is the ability to imprison at will just about anyone without due process or habeas corpus. The Nazis, Stalin, Franco, and Saddam Hussein all understood this; it is a prerequisite for stoppering dissent and creating the atmosphere of fear that leads to the general citizenry censoring itself/falling into line. You might just as well call tyranny the propagation of fear to benefit the few at the expense of the many, who are held voiceless by the fear of prison and death.
The propagation of fear is what far-right Republicans specialize in; they define an "other" that is at once subhuman and superhuman (for example, the perception of Cold War Russians, so stupid we can outwit them, so superhuman they are always endangering us in new ways that require the sacrifice of our freedoms/decency) that we must define ourselves against. (This is a peculiarly fundie-Christian weakness, not just a totalitarian one.) Any call for tolerance, thoughtfulness, or common international decency/ethics is "helping the others" and hence, the mark of weakness or treason. (Journalists that told the truth about Vietnam in the 60s or America's treatment of South America in the 70s and 80s suffered this, as Noam Chomsky pointed out.) Conservatives found a good friend in fear during the Cold War, in the Vietnam Era, and in the Reagan years. During the Clinton administration the facade of fear began to crack; the American public is far less likely to be afraid when it is well-fed and there is business to conduct. The conservatives had to content themselves with character smears and election-fraud hijinks to regain the White House with their chosen puppet.
And then came 9/11.
9/11 shocked any reasonable, thinking person. Any terrorist atrocity on that scale would. What shocks a reasonably decent, thinking person as much is the alacrity with which the Bush Administration seized the day, so to speak, to use 9/11 for its own purposes.
Almost six years later, with the goodwill of the world squandered, bogged down in a war that benefits Halliburton and mercenary armies at the cost of the blood of American and Iraqi sons and daughters, in a rich country where the poor still lack health care and children still go to school hungry, we are faced with insult on top of injury--the basic rights that the Founding Fathers enshrined so carefully in response to 18th-century tyranny contravened and under attack by a privileged scion of a wealthy family with ties to (the Saudi) royalty, and the cabal of that wealthy scion daring to call their crusade "moral" and "the fight for freedom." Daring to say that if we protest the taking-away of our rights, if we dare to use the power granted us by the Constitution, that we are "traitors." That they "know best" and will continue with the surge and the arrests and detaining without habeas corpus, because it's necessary, and if we don't think so we're traitors or worse--and by extension, we are in danger of being hauled off to Gitmo ourselves.
Right now the general warrant is very much alive, my friends, since habeas corpus is missing or dead. Since FISA has been gutted and the executive branch has arrogated to itself the power to wiretap, spy on, or detain you or me if they decide we are "enemy combatants". Since the Justice Department and Supreme Court have become a partisan playground, we have little recourse except for the fiction of "liberal activist judges".
Stunning, isn't it. We thought we got rid of general warrants all the way back when the Fourth Amendment was penned.
It's interesting to note that the French revolutionaries got rid of lettres de cachet, but re-instituted them by any other name during the Terror, when an enemy of the Revolution could be imprisoned and executed in a very short period of time, without the presumption of innocence or the luxury of an advocate. It took so little time--and the perception of enemies everywhere within and without the state--for the high-sounding rhetoric of liberty to falter under endemic fear and the perception of the murderous subhuman-superhuman "other," ending in a bloodbath and the re-institution of monarchy by any other name (Napoleonic empire.)
The reason why dictatorial and fascistic regimes end up using fear is because the human animal is prone to it, and because little else works to stop the mouths of uppity people who don't want to be treated like cattle for the benefit of the rich. We've seen what happens, historically, when general warrants aren't challenged. We're seeing it now, in our own time. Without taking notice, we are doomed to repeat the worst excesses of fascism--we have already come so very close, with the purging of the Justice Department and the violation/abolishing of some of our most cherished and basic rights. To continue to let fear blind us to the precipice we are standing on the edge of is not just stupidity. It's unAmerican.
The French sent a king to the guillotine, and later sent Robespierre to the same platform of gore. We're hopefully more civilized, and have a provision of impeachment in our Constitution besides. Let's hope we use it before the lettres de cachet start being used on you and me--more than they already are.
If not, I suspect we do not deserve to call ourselves either American or free.