Keeping it Honest as US Slides into Fascist Dystopia
The destruction of the America we knew has come in baby steps that largely went unnoticed
Cambridge, UK — I keep reading that in the US the masks and lack of any personal identification like an ID Number or nameplate on the ICE officers who grab unsuspecting targets (dark-skinned “Latino-looking” men and women snatched off the street or in raids on gathering places like parking lots, street fairs or courthouses).are a new thing for America and then find myself thinking of the dark days of the rise of fascism in 1930s Weimar Germany.
But the masking of state terror agents actually has a long history in the US. It datea bck at least to the beginnnings of the Ku Kux Klan, with their white sheets and hoods hiding the identities of local white worthies as they spread terror through black and Jewish neighborhoods across the Southland. That fascist organization sprang up after the Civil War and is still with us, primarily in the fetid regions of the Deep South.
Or what about the cops of the now ubiquitous Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) units, the brainchild of that now deceased and unmourned pioneer of state terror, former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates? He’s the guy who introduced the idea of cops bursting into homes with battering rams, after tossing “flash-bang” grenades through windows, armed with AK automatic assault weapons, clad in black bulletproof armor and masks to do everything from ending a hostage situation (often killing the victim in the process), to delivering a court summons for an unresolved bald tire citation.
I knew the country was going in a very bad direction when, during a 2015 visit to Philadelphia by the Pope, the Philadelphia Police had called up every live body they had to handle the crowds and I saw SWAT unit cops in their operational attire, the bright white letters “SWAT” emblazoned on their military armor, directing traffic in Center City!
But you want to talk fascism? How else to explain how the US several decades ago became and still holds the title as leading carcereal country in the world, not just in terms of percent of the population that is in jail or is a former prisoner, but in absolute terms. That is to say, The total number of such people in the US is greater than in China, a country with more than three times the population of the US.
A total of close to two million people are in some kind of prison or jail at any given time— a number that has stayed that high for decades. The number is actually deceptively low because many of the people imprisoned each year are jailed for a short time and are eventually released on bail, a process that can be quick for those who have, or whose families have cash or assets to put up. (Many of those released on bail are later returned there within weeks or months, either for missing a required meeting with a parole officer , or because, as arrested criminals they can’t get a job). A better picture is to say that each yaar over 7 million people get locked up for some period of time. Some 400,000 of those jailed have not been convicted of anything. They are in pre-trial detention, mainly because they. and their families cannot “make bail, and they can end up staying locked up until they have a trial, after which they may well be found innocent, or to have more than served their “time’ just waiting for a court hearing on their case.
One might think that it’s a good sign that the number of people in jail in the US hasn’t risen much since it began to soar during the war on drugs of the Nixon years and the
get-tough-on-crime of the Clinton years. Actually, though, crime in the US has been declining and last year, according to FBI statistics, was at a level last seen in 1961 when the US population was 162 million instead of the present 342 million. In other words, the number in prisons should have been declining, but instead it is staying high.
The reason is a “lock ‘em up” mentality that has replaced whatever “correctional’ philosophy might have been operating in the US justice system earlier.
I remember as a little kid in elementary school in the 1950s going on a class trip to visit the local State Police barracks. The thing that sticks in my mind was when the officers showing us around put groups of us into a holding cell there and clanged the grated door shut. There we were in.a grim concrete cell with a grimy porcelain toilet bowl that had no seat or cover, as the warned told us, “This is where you end up if you break the law.” It’s also pretty much what passed for a third grade “civics” course for the year. There are much better things we could have been taught like “innocent until proven guilty,” a jury of peers to determine guilt or innocence, no “cruel or unusual punishment,” etc.
Intentionally or not, it was all part of paving the way towards broad acceptance of fascism, when I think about it.
I also remember being one of a hundred thousand or more young people outside the main entrance to the Pentagon in October 1967, facing off against a wall of federalized troops armed with loaded rifles. We were there to demand an end to a criminal war against the people of Vietnam half a world away from the US. The troops were there to protect the building and its tens of thousands of “good German” military brass keeping that war going. I ended up spending a couple of days in a federal prison cell with several hundred others who were arrested, charged with trespassing on government property.
All these things — the provision of surplus military equipment including even weaponized drones, assault rifles and grenades, weaponized armored personnel carriers and warrantless spy equipment,etc. — were preparation for what is now arriving.
If full-on fascism takes hold in the US, it will be thanks to the way the increasingly dictatorial federal and state governments have been conditioning us to accept the idea of a police state and of one-man dictatorial rule.
I lived in Germany for most of a year in 1964-5, attending a local Darmstadt gymnasium (high School). It was only 20 years since the end of WWII, and the city, which had been torched by British bombers using incendiary bombs to create a lethal firestorm, the ruins of which were still visible. Also fresh were the memories of life under the Nazi dictatorship and of the round-up and removal and extermination of city’s Jewish population.
After almost a year spent living here in the UK, and reading reading of the systematic destruction of the America I grew up in, with all its faults, most of the years od which I’ve spent , as a student protester and later as a journalist, trying to correct or at least expose, I have to say what I remember now is the incredible blindness so many Americans have shown to what is happening. With few exceptions, over the course of all those years there’s been a slow slide of the country into acceptance of autocracy, the expansion of police power, of federal and state governmentw passing endless new laws limiting freedom and of presidents of both. parties launching wars that had no real justification.
As I return to life in the US, I want to focus on pointing out this blindness, because the biggest danger at this point is how much of the new America under Trump can start to be accepted as “the new normal” if we don’t see it for what it is. And looking at how we did that already for several generations, paving the way for a Trump and a MAGA movement.