Since 9/11, the Bush Administration has worked hard to justify the need for a Total Surveillance State: a country where all citizens are subservient to the needs of "national security;" where a person's home, email, phone conversations, private discourse, and records can be easily accessed by the government; where the requirements provided by the Fourth Ammendment no longer apply. In short, a state where warrants are not needed and government fiat supercedes Constitutional protections.
Sounds like Orwell's 1984 fantasy state, yes? Not at all like the United States we all know and love. But look closely..... the model George W. Bush is working to implement did exist. It was the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). For a fascinating, albeit scary look into what kind of country George W. Bush wants the USA to become, see the movie "The Lives of Others."
I remember the first time I read "1984" and the creepy feeling that came over me at the scene of the Two Minutes Hate. Mindless people, fearful of reprisals, hurling hatred because everyone else is doing it, unsure of who or why they are hating, but convinced that if they don't, something really, really bad will happen to them, because Big Brother Will Know.
At the time, like everyone else, I took this book to be about the Soviet Union, those oppressive Communists in the totalitarian lands behind the Iron Curtain. It was a horrible vision, but one I believed could never come to America, a land where people have protections under the Constitution, and a belief in decency and the common good made us different, and better, than the Evil Empire.
Seven years of George W. Bush have changed my opinion on this.
Recently I saw an excellent movie from Germany called "The Lives of Others." It won an Academy Award in 2007 for "Best Foreign Film." And, it is indeed an excellent film. Yet above and beyond the excellence of the film-making itself, the story line, and the acting, there is a much more chilling truth to this film. In a very real way, it tells the story of how private citizens learn to cope with, rationalize, and exist in a state in which the Stasi (the East German Secret Police) are literally everywhere.
Today, in 2007, when we as American citizens gradually succumb to a grudging and inevitable acceptance that the needs of "national security" trump all other considerations - that torture is OK, that listening to private citizen's phone calls and reading their email without probable cause is OK, that entering a person's home without warrants is OK, that holding American citizens without trial or access to lawyers is OK - we are gradually becoming more and more like the country depicted in "The Lives of Others."
I strongly recommend this movie to anyone who is concerned about the gradual loss of our civil liberties and Constitutional protections. America has not yet turned into the German Democratic Republic, but we are slowly but surely moving in that direction.
Here is just one link from today's news that proves how far we've already come in becoming a country where the needs of the Stasi (e.g., the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the NSD, and dozens of other elements of the National Security State), trump the rights of average citizens. From today's Yahoo News: "Definition Changing for People's Privacy."
http://news.yahoo.com/...
Ironically, in the film "The Lives of Others," two Stasi agents have a conversation where they both agree on exactly the same principle as asserted in this news story: that it's not the government's actions that are wrong in bugging a person's home to see if they have committed "crimes" when there's no outward proof of wrongdoing, but the citizen's understanding of privacy that is wrong.
When we reach a point in our national life where Nazi torture techniques (waterboarding) are justified by our government, and Communist East German surveillance techniques (e.g., datamining and fishing to find possible crimes) are justified by our government, we are already well down a road to becoming a different society than we were before. Is that where we want to go???
We haven't yet arrived at the Two Minutes Hate. But, can it really be all that far off, when people like Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Michelle Malkin make very lucrative livings heaping hate upon "liberals" and the government is quickly moving into arenas where Probable Cause is no longer the standard, but mere suspicion of possible wrongdoings based upon keyword sorting? In short, based upon what Orwell called "thought crime?"
In "The Lives of Others" the Stasi exists to find and root out thought crime. Today, the justifications asserted for domestic spying, surveillance and torture are - in a supreme twist of historical irony - exactly the same as those we fought a 50-year cold war to bring down. In just seven years under George W. Bush, we have rapidly moved toward becoming a society that spies upon its citizens in the exact same ways - using the same justifications - as the Communist East German Republic.
In a question once posed by Lewis Carroll, have we gone through the Looking Glass? Watch "The Lives of Others," listen closely to the privacy and surveillance debate in Congress, and then ask yourself if the answer may not already be YES.