With all the accusations of Nazism against the Democratic Party and most of the American people flying around - even on the Rec List - you could be forgiven for maybe having a little bit of amnesia and thinking the Nazis were a bunch of sneaky pests intercepting people's mail rather than the most deranged and murderous purveyors of alternate-universe conspiracy theories in human history. But then you might start to raise an eyebrow at the protests-too-much significance of the extremely violent Teabaggery rhetoric, delusional screeds, and stereotypical CT iconography (e.g., the eyeball in the pyramid associated with the Illuminati - a favored subject particularly of the Alex Jones-inspired Libertarian right) appearing in the same comments that draw those comparisons.
Pop quiz: Is this image actual Nazi propaganda, or something posted on the Daily Kos Rec List with umpteen gajillion Recs sincerely criticizing US policy and culture?
Surely it can't be the propaganda of racist, warmongering animals like the Nazis, what with the critical portrayal of the KKK, a machine gun, and a bomb? But then there is that WW2-looking Allied warplane wing, the Stars and Stripes with unstaggered star field, clearly contemptuous depictions of black-skinned arms, and the Star of David banner. Yes, of course it's Nazi propaganda, as I'm sure you realized after some brief reflection, but what explains the bizarre, contradictory visual word-salad of the imagery? How can it be that Nazis would find something objectionable in the KKK?
Maybe it's just that malevolent, violent minds on a hate-bender don't really stop to consider whether their shriekings are sane or even self-consistent? Which brings us to the banner of the image, which I had hidden to preserve a few split seconds of doubt and consideration:
Now, I don't speak German, but I'd say it's pretty safe to guess that "Kultur-Terror" is roughly accusing the United States of having a "culture of terror." And this is an accusation made by the actual, literal Nazis in 1944, as the forests of Poland were being caked in the ashes of their victims and the other peoples of Europe were climbing over mountains of their own dead to retake their stolen land. Maybe this is so obvious as to be mind-numbing, but apparently being paranoid and malicious makes people incoherent and believe a bunch of mutually exclusive things simultaneously.
Like that Barack Obama is both a Communist and a Fascist, a Muslim and an Atheist, a dictator and a weakling, and all manner of other heinously deranged, delirious shit we hear from teabaggers. And things like harping about "liberty" while they try to rig elections, steal ballots and registrations, prevent people from voting, and do all manner of other decidedly un-libertlylike behavior that the people they demonize never seem to reciprocate. Self-consistency has a liberal bias, apparently.
And so it is that we find ourselves in the surreal position of being told by some rather Paulite-sounding sources that...
1. America is a police state, has been a police state for generations, and freedom is a nonexistent fiction Americans have relinquished while still believing in it like credulous sheeple. BUT...
2. This is totally unprecedented!!1! How are you not jumping up and down and crawling on the ceiling at the sudden, complete, utter affront to fundamental American values that I've just denied exist?! BUT...
3. Gubmint's been savagely, brutally destroying and crushing all dissent since like the '60s, man. There were, like, several thousand clear-cut incidents of suppression over half a century where millions of people expressed dissent without being bludgeoned, firehosed, attack-dogged, gassed, pepper-sprayed, or dragged away, and I have several images of these incidents! SEVERAL! And they occurred over a mere fifty year or so period. During which America was apparently indistinguishable from the Soviet Union, if not worse because at least they gave you food in the USSR. BUT...
4. I am shocked and outraged to hear that the NSA is computationally analyzing Google metadata! This is exactly like the East German Stasi, except for the part about no human being seeing 99.99999999....% of the material, ever, and the fact that it will never be humanly possible for them to - and gets less possible every single moment that passes as data traffic explodes. But people who see and consider facts like that are Enemies of Teh People. Fuck all you stupid Holocaust survivors and relatives thereof too dumb to see how much America today is like Nazi Germany. It's so much like Nazi Germany that you can't even criticize it without being instantly bombed by drones, which is why I am at this very moment a smoking crater. Or, at least, I would be targeted for saying this except that...uhh...hey, look over there! (runs away)
But seriously, here is a basic reality check:
1. America is not a police state. It's generally dangerous to say "This is a police state" when you're actually in a police state. Because when you say that, your comments tend to disappear from the internet, and if you keep saying it, you tend to disappear from your house in the middle of the night. But you knew that, which is why you stick around this "police state" when you protest instead of, for instance, going to Africa, the Middle East, or China and trying to do so, because your attitude carries no weight there. Your pretenses are not admired there. You are an heir to quite a lot of default political wealth who thinks oppression consists of being informed third-hand by a commentator that someone could theoretically know things about you they could abuse. Which is like how teabaggers are terrified by the knowledge that the government possesses superior weaponry to theirs.
2. You cannot stop anyone from accessing data about you that's on the internet. It's worldwide. Would it make you feel better if the government put in the extra step of accessing your metadata from British, French, or Israeli intelligence data logs instead of having it immediately available? That little Linus security blanket going to help you sleep at night? Or perhaps it would be comforting if they were prevented from maintaining the logs. Yeah, that would be better - so they could access the foreign servers, look at the info whenever they want, but delete it each time to comply with this desired law. Or let's say they can't even look at your data without a warrant. But, oops, how do they know what data is yours until they look at it? Gee, reality is a lot more complicated than dumb people think, isn't it? Perhaps we should ban the US government from electronic surveillance altogether - then we only have to worry about every single other government on Earth with any sort of intelligence resources having all that same data. Oops.
3. Thoughtful and non-crazy people have every right to be angry, worried, even fearful - emotions are things that happen to you, and aren't really chosen. What is chosen is what you do with the information and the response to it. The ACLU's lawsuit is a great, intelligent response. There are some intelligent responses in defense of the data program too, although they tend to rely on more hand-wavy logic than one finds in positions that are right. But that has nothing to do with the kind of shrill, fervid, violently toxic Paulite harangues that have been posted here and elsewhere under the guise of "defending liberty" - a conceit far more crazed and Orwellian in its dishonesty given the content of the comments than the merely flimsy arguments I've seen from the administration rationalizing the program.
So let me be as polite as it's possible to be on the subject: When the temptation comes on you to compare your internet privacy concerns to the Holocaust, just shut your stupid, arrogant, filthy, self-absorbed mouth until the impulse passes and cede the floor to more accountable voices until you can speak to facts and reason rather than building your own rage to violent orgasm. CTs like that are literally - not hyperbolically, but actually - the stuff of witch hunts, lynchings, and the mob-silencing of dissent, so keep that in mind before you fly your hate and spasmodic fantasies under the banner of liberty like a common teabagger hypocrite. Liberty can only be defended with truth and reason, so make your choice which you value more - them or your own rage.
8:35 AM PT: PS, I will be out most of the day, so comments should bear in mind the delay in response.