|
|
| [Return To Reading Room] |
|
Orwell's 1984 Revisited In 2002 |
|
Osama
bin Laden, dead or alive, may now be said to have truly won the ultimate victory
in his unprecedented onslaught against the continued survival and threatened
future of our uniquely precious American civil liberties, too often taken for
granted and now under heavy fire from a government apparently,and perhaps
willfully, blind to the broader and potentially dangerous ramifications
contained within its own antiterrorism measures in its ill-advised rush to
appear decisively proactive.
The
terrible price of 9/11 must soon be measured not only by the tragic yardstick of
unfathomable death and destruction set in motion on that despicable day, but
also, as it is becoming increasingly clear, in terms of the precarious condition
and inevitable loss of our basic rights and responsibilities as free Americans
due to the evil at the hollow core of a fanatic madman. All
of this is in reference to the innocuously named Operation TIPS, or Terrorism
Information and Prevention System, to be directed by the Department of Justice.
The president's original plan had called for TIPS to become
institutionalized in 10 targeted cities by August of 2002.
However, as of this writing Bush has run into embarrassingly stiff
Congressional opposition, whose members now perhaps see this insidious compact
with the devil for what it truly is, an injurious scheme and shameless affront
to American liberty that would basically prey upon the goodwill of the American
people by seducing them into repeated acts of mutually destructive spying
reminiscent of Hitler's Third Reich, Mao's China and Stalin's Soviet Union in
the name of patriotic duty as a fail-safe smokescreen against concerned
detractors impelled to speak out in defense of true democracy! If
the current Congressional obstruction remains in place, Bush will have no
recourse but to implement his totalitarian gimmick by way of the back door, the
ultimate insult to the common face of a people proudly free, a compromised and
thus contemptible freedom enshrined on disaffirmed parchment unworthy of the
blood of our founders! An
omen of things to come may be seen in the government's Machiavellian goal to
corral and instruct those public workers with direct access to private homes,
such as cable and alarm systems installers, to report what they subjectively
feel to be any suspicious activity on the premises.
This might very well include, for example, the prominent display of
various Confederate tokens of ancestral allegiance and familial remembrance,
deemed perhaps treasonous given today's lockstep mentality. Strangely
ominous though it may be for those of us today basking in America's false
triumph of freedom over despotism in the Cold War, our forefathers and mothers
suffered the tragic experience of such a perilous breakdown in civil affairs
with the advent of Lincoln's ruthless war of Southern genocide, in which the
revocation of the right of habeas corpus, the protection under which an
individual may not be forcibly detained for an extended length of time without
trial, was conveniently thrown out the window so as to safeguard the American
way of life as Lincoln saw it! The irony would be amusing were it not so deadly.
Portentously, one may go even further back and ultimately trace the dark
roots of TIPS to the unconstitutional mayhem wrought by the Alien and Sedition
Acts passed under then president and Federalist John Adams, alarming legislation
which almost guaranteed the premature demise of free speech on American soil! In
the case of the former, politically fueled conquest was the operative hinge; in
that of the latter, stark fear with all its ignorant prejudices and irrational
pronouncements. Citizen
Corps is the umbrella entity under which five other federal tentacles currently,
or will soon, operate: Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), designed to
provide crisis relief professionals with a cadre of citizens trained in basic
emergency protocol; Volunteers in Police Service (VIPS), designed to enable law
enforcement personnel to perform free from the distractions of
administrative paperwork; the Neighborhood Watch Program, for community
surveillance of the criminal element, now expanded for inclusion of suspected
terrorists; the Medical Reserve Corps, for those medically trained and either
active or retired; and lastly the sinister specter of TIPS.
The
present administration in Washington has been shrewd enough to couch these
embryonic initiatives in the grand Kennedyesque rhetoric of personal sacrifice
for the greater good that proved itself so attractive on college campuses in the
counterculture 60's, thereby masking the hidden dangers lying dormant beneath a
seemingly blameless facade.
After all, who could rationally argue against community involvement in
the face of overwhelming disaster? All
of the feel-good platitudes and high-flown phrases lauding local citizen action
appear unassailable on paper and in the mass media, but we must be brutally
honest with ourselves to determine if such a program as TIPS, with all of its
attendant risks to the functioning of a free society, is indeed the correct
response to a criminal breakdown of intelligence and consequent human tragedy
that should not have occurred in the first place.
One
need only meditate on the despotic regimes of the mid-twentieth century, in
which the innocent and impressionable were actively recruited and encouraged to
spy on their guardians as part of their loyal duty to father or motherland, to
understand the critical magnitude of the dilemma we are facing today in post
9/11 America. Security
is the new obsessive watchword, all-encompassing in its total reach, but at what
cost?! A fundamental drive and normal response to catastrophe to be sure, but
one whose projected attainment dare not include the progressive devaluation of
the individual in blind deference to the collective authority of the state.
True democratic freedom in the classic republican sense might then be
needlessly sacrificed on the altar of a faceless combination of powers intent
solely upon their own self-preservation. Derek
Pacheco |
 |