You might ask—well isn't freedom already dead? And you'd have a point. Older people can certainly recall a simpler, freer time, in which people didn't take it for granted that their DNA should be collected and stored for "their own good" by various government agencies, or when it wasn't thought necessary to consider constitutional rights easily ignorable "guidelines".
As John Cornyn put it, pointing out the Patriot Act was all about crushing freedom (yet he was in full support of it): "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."
Of course now we allegedly have a kinder, gentler leadership in charge of the empire, so presumably they will want to turn the clock back to when we were a little freer, and borgification wasn't so seriously looming on the horizon as a "patriotic" obligation. But if you read the common theme in some recent news stories, you'll see that basically it doesn't matter who is in charge. Fear is the true common capital and your masters are going to spend it to better enslave you like there's no tomorrow—for freedom anyway.
1. Do We Need a New Internet?
Here for example, we see that there are plans afoot to construct a newer, safer, far less free, internet. Of course, for people who primarily view the internet as an instrument of commerce, the surrender of identity and privacy, through licensing and monitoring by police and military, will seem like a positive development. Both corporations and governments love to collect personal data on their customers. Might as well collect it on one identity card, and require that card to access the internet. Who knows after all when a customer might want to buy something specific you're selling, or when one of them might write something specific you're banning? Gotta keep tabs on that sort of thing, for the integrity and security of the system. And, after all, why would any honest person want to be anonymous? As for the "security" argument, you know where only the licensed, "good" users get in, do you really think the combined forces of Chaos, which is to say people who disagree with the dominant model, are going to be locked out by a little licensing problem? Of course not. If anything, they'll be inspired to not merely invade and exploit the new fortress of fear, but to shatter it.
2. Rise in Jobless Poses Threat to Stability Worldwide
Meanwhile, global instability, that condition greatly feared by the forces of—well, same old, same old—as well as the forces who happily profit from the mechanical operation of the life-smashing, climate-killing, capitalist way of things, is rising in the worst (or best) way since 1929. That's because the masses of mechanical parts, generally content if you oil them with the basic elements of survival (food, shelter, narcotics), start getting really grumpy when their dream of working every day till they slump over in their cubicles, is interrupted by massive unemployment. In fact, they start to get rather pissed off and revolutionary. That's the real reason the global masters, including Barack Obama, want to fix the global economic crisis. They don't want you starting to actually think about how fucked up is the system which has brought us to this lovely point. You might want to join a labor union or do something even more socialist for Christ's sake! Note in the article that "Just last week, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism." And you probably recall how annoying that terrorism thing was. In fact, the instability thing could actually end up fueling and supercharging the terrorism thing, and make it into its higher power—the global war thing.
3. U.S. Military Will Offer Path to Citizenship
Of course if there are going to be more wars, you'll definitely want more soldiers, right? And frankly, the war spirit in most Americans seems to be waning, even though they're still technically fighting wars in at least two or three (or hey, twelve, whatever) foreign places, but who wants to hear about that anymore? Precisely, Americans especially want novelty, and wars a lot of times just drag on and on, like ever getting the last few episodes of Battlestar Galactica. So, let's see, lots of new wars are likely, but Americans don't want to fight them. Hey, how about if, in addition to offering jobs (killing people) to the rising ranks of the unemployed, you also open a quick and very dirty path to citizenship to the millions of illegal aliens. The latter are already used to doing crappy jobs for lousy pay, and hey they were born in places where life expectancy wasn't so good anyway, right? And a lot of them speak foreign languages, so they can facilitate telling the unstable foreign people to line up against a wall to be shot. And you know, when they get out of the military and have their citizenship papers, and they get their new Borg implants, so they can be safely licensed on the internet, they'll be OK with that, because they never had much freedom to lose in the first place. Great when serious problems can be solved in an integrative, comprehensive manner, huh?
4. The Coming Swarm
You know what the "Mumbai Model" is, right? No, it isn't the newest Indian attempt at building a cheap automobile—it's the newest name for a terrorist technique the military is telling us will soon be coming to a city near you. It is also referred to as "swarming". You may have heard about it, since it is the technique the terrorists in Mumbai recently used to hold "the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people." "Swarming" is a useful term, since it sounds so terrifying, like swarms of evil all around you so you can't escape no matter where you are, and also it makes our endless lists of enemies sound like insects, thus making whatever we do to them sound perfectly reasonable and justified. After all, it's not like your torturing and killing people, but swarms, or larvae who might grow up to be swarms. The real point of the article however is to prepare us for the notion of being "protected" in the manner done in such wonderfully free places as Iraq and Afghanistan. Yep, as seems perfectly just, the brutal lessons learned in our foreign wars are coming home to repress us too. Soon, instead of just having local police to protect us from road ragers and jaywalkers, we'll have "lots of small [military] units [sprinkled] about in a countrywide network of outposts". The writer encourages us to think of them as "latter-day Minutemen", or you might say present-day killer bees, ready to swarm forth (no doubt in black helicopters) from their sprinkled outposts in the hive to go after the corresponding swarms of "terrorist gunmen and bombers." Of course, the really good thing about this plan is that it gets the people used to the notion of regularly swarming military in their midst, and you can always expand the lists of threatening swarmers to include pretty much anybody who is deemed destabilizing or who isn't onboard for the great borgification.
Now recently, some people on Facebook have gotten upset at me for criticizing Obama, and suggesting he's a failure and a traitor. They think I'm being too hard on him, for after all he's hardly had a chance to govern they say, and holding him accountable for things he's actually done seems unfair when Bush was never held accountable for pretty much anything. Of course, Obama is perpetuating that policy too, isn't he?
But you see, my point has been in these pieces to show and suggest that it isn't whether or not you find a leader trustworthy, or likely to have your interests in mind (and do you even know what those are?), or that he claims he will bring change you can believe in, but that you're so repeatedly hopeful that somebody, anybody, is going to save you.
They aren't. Why would they? They're Moloch managers. And you're lunch.
What can you do about it? I suppose you could quit your job, organize protests, swarm about trying to say things have gotten really bad and out of control, and somebody (not you of course) needs to do something!
These days, especially as you may apportion blame to the newest version of President Messiah, you will alienate the true believers on the left, just as if you had done so during Bush's regime, you would have had the same effect with the same brand of nincompoop on the right. And the center. Hey, fence-sitting shrimp, waiting to see into which part of Moloch's mouth the school is heading.
Look at the great evil that has happened, not just in the last eight years, but in your lifetime, while you sat there and watched and had faith and hope.
Don't you kind of deserve what's going to happen? Like a lemming deserves a certain outcome for repeatedly putting one foot in front of the other, following the majority (or at least the majority around you)?
Well, whether you deserve it or not, the future's name is Moloch. And he'll be very happy to see you and your children.
(jk)
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