Occupy Dachau:
Remember “Occupy Wall Street”? Some people, so far as I could learn, decided that the real power in the world is Big Money and that it was not working in our best interest so they said as much. The Arab Spring was in full cry at the time so everybody thought the way to change things for the better was to have demonstrations. You don’t hear much about them any longer.
So I have been thinking. Let’s pretend that the government is spying on us and that our liberties have been trampled on by the Patriot Act, and we’d like things to go back the way they were at the turn of the century. We can survive the occasional nut but we cannot afford to lose our liberty. How would you start? A demonstration might seem like a possibility. So just for fun, let’s compare such a demonstration with one prisoners in the Dachau Nazi German prison camp might have done. Yes, I know, they’d all have been shot at the first hint of resistance, but let’s ignore that for now.
Justification: I think it would be fair to say that the prison camps were not working in the prisoners’ best interests. The food was lousy, housing and clothing inadequate, medical care was pretty much restricted to sadistic experiments. Worst of all you couldn’t leave. There are not many places I would rather live than in the US, but I think the justification for action is unquestionably better on the part of the prisoners.
Guards: There are a million police and seven million people either locked up or on probation and so forth (which counts as a deterrent for the rest of us), and there have to be a couple million people looking after them. Then there is the entire justice system, lawyers, aids, officials and so forth. Let’s say there are fifteen million people total keeping 300 million Americans in line. That’s one in twenty. I doubt there were that many guards in the prison camps.
Communication: How well can those guards keep track of prisoners communicating? At times there it might be possible to stop people talking altogether, but that would be really hard to do twenty four seven. On the other hand, my only question about privacy is whether the American government will have this on their desks when I post it or do they even have to wait until I am through writing?
Loyalty: You start a movement. How many of your friends are going to sell you out to the authorities? Not many in the prison camp I should say. Probably a lot in the US.
Infiltration: You start a movement. How long before government spies join you? You’ll know who they are; they’re the ones who pay their dues on time.
Audience: A protest in a prison camp of course is going to get no attention outside the prison. A protest in an American prison might actually get some attention. But at the end of the day nobody is going to care.
Money: How much is the government spending on the prison camp per person compared with how much the government is spending per person spying on US citizens? I’m pretty sure the US outspends them.
Defecting guards: How many guards in a prison camp are going to decide that this is not right and challenge the system. Not many I’d say. How many have done that in the US? Not many more. And those that have tried have not exactly seen the nation rise as a man to praise and thank them.
As far as getting shot, Obama has made it clear that he claims to have killed Osama. He has also made it clear that he thinks he has the right to kill anybody he cares to call a terrorist and not even tell us that he did it.
So our government has the power to be the bad guys. Some day bad guys will get in charge. We will be unable to unseat them. We probably won’t even know. Personally I don’t much care. Our demographic situation is so dire that other things still in the future, except extreme environmental changes maybe, will never matter.
All right, I’ll try to stay on topic for a while now.
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