The State Vs.

The People The Rise of the American Police State

By Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman
Published by: Mazel Freedom Press, Inc. ISBN 0-9642304-7-X Aaron Zelman Permission granted by Mr. Aaron Zelman to publish first chapter only. Please purchase directly from www.jpfo.org.

Chapter One

What Is A Police State

[C]itizens were deprived of all rights and privileges. Every existence was comprehensively subordinated to the purposes of the State, and in exchange the State agreed to act as a good father, giving food, work, and wages suited to the peoples capacity, welfare for the poor and elderly, and universal schooling for children. - John Taylor Gatto1

Goose-stepping jackboots in an old documentary. Enforcers hiding behind faceless masks. Demonstrators clubbed to their knees. Dissidents detained without charges. These are the images of a police state. Secret dossiers kept on enemies of powerful men. Sophisticated electronic tracking devices. Ever-morepresent surveillance. These, too, signal a police state. A professor loses a job for vague, political reasons. A scientist is defunded after publishing unpopular findings. People fear to reveal opinions in front of their own children, who may be spies for some hazy, but terrifying, government apparatus. Neighbors are dragged from their homes in midnight raids, charged with vaguely defined crimes. Their property is seized; their reputations trampled, their finances ruined. We worry that these point toward a police state. We suspect that a government whose friendly face we see on television is, in some dark reality, far different than were told a government of secrets, disinformation, black budgets and lethal wet work. What is a police state? Like pornography or good art, everybody knows a police state when they see one. Pundits right and left accuse opponents of police-state tactics. The media designates one foreign government as a police state while extolling another, equally brutal, regime as a democracy. We often use the term police state as a synonym for tyranny; forgetting that a police state is actually a complex system and philosophy of government (which can indeed be tyrannical). Precise definitions are hard to come by. In the 1970s, Praeger Publishers issued a series of textbooks that analyzed commonly used political terms. Its book Police State2 showed in detail the origins and nature of such governments. But nowhere did the books author, Brian Chapman, even hint as a concise definition of the term. Similarly, David Wise, writing his book The American Police State in the wake of Watergate, described wiretapping, bugging, break-ins, burglaries, opening of mail, cable interception, physical surveillance,

clandestine harassment, widespread use of informants, detention lists and political tax audits3 as characteristics of a police state. But what made them characteristics of a police state? Wise didnt say. In Police State: Could It Happen Here? Jules Archer used this definition: A police state is a state in which a dictatorship imposed by a single ruler, party or group exercises total, rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of its citizens, usually by means of terror through a secret police force.4 Attorney Richard W. Stevens, who has written extensively on tyranny and justice, offers this: A police state exists where (1) the state imposes its comprehensive vision of economic welfare and correct behavior upon the citizens, (2) the police apparatus serves the state (instead of serving the citizens), (3) the police apparatus takes upon itself to actively enforce the will of the state [rather than respond to criminal misdeeds], and the citizens serve the state and the police apparatus because of pervasive fear of punishment.5 All these definitions are useful. There are excellent reasons why it is difficult to arrive at a single comprehensive definition for a police state. One reason: The nature of police states has changed as societies, police state of Robespierre France was different from the one in Hitlers Germany, so the nature of a police state is altered in any new country or new era. Within this book, we will need to add to existing definitions to reflect some twenty-first century realities such as burgeoning electronic surveillance systems no Hitler, Machiavelli, or Stalin could have imagined. Modern police statist are learning some subtleties their jackbooted predecessors never knew. Yet the electronic Big Brother states of the future will still be police states, as long as they rigorously oversee the everyday activities of citizens, mold individuals to the states purposes, and suppress political dissent, independent thought, or independent non-violent action through tactics of fear. To truly understand police states and to learn whether we are in the midst of one or in danger of ending up in one we first need to come to terms with what police states have been in philosophy and history. Then we need to examine what one might look like if it rises up in our path to the future. This first chapter will examine the past. The rest of the book will look at today and see what it portends for tomorrow.

Polizeistaat: Original meaning of police state

Our phrase police state is a literal translation from the German Polizeistaat. The term was used in Prussia as far back as the seventeenth century, when Frederick William, Elector of Brandenberg (1620-88) and his successors crafted the first modern police state. The term wasnt commonly used in English until the rise of Hitler, when it entered our language with connotations of evil and insane brutality it didnt originally have. Its easy for English speakers to misinterpret the term, because, to us, police generally signifies the cop on the beat. Historically, police in American and British commonwealth countries have been uniformed officers who investigate (an, ideally, aim to prevent) crimes such as murder, rape, and burglary. In parts of Europe the term police has different and broader significance, deriving from ancient Greek roots the same roots that gave us the English terms policy and politics. As Brian Chapman explains: The [Greek] term politeia was a comprehensive one, touching on all matters affecting the survival and welfare of the inhabitants of the city [polis]. It comprised within itself the whole notion of the art of governing the city. Plato and Aristotle regarded the officials responsible for the police as being involved with the ultimate responsibility

for ensuring the safety of the republic. This involved the power to regulate the affairs of the city in the general interest of public order, security, morality, food supplies, and welfare.6 Therefore the term police state relates directly to our verb to police (to surveil or oversee). That same connotation is found in our legal term police power.7 This meaning of police is much different from, and related only peripherally to, the concept of a police force of uniformed officers. While tyranny is an ancient curse of humanity, the police state is a relatively modern phenomenon and surprising though it seems grew out of Enlightenment efforts to reform and improve political systems. Just as we better understand the definition of police state if we go back to the Greeks, we must also return to the Greeks Plato, specifically for an early insight into why police states develop. Two millennia before the Prussians constructed the first police state on earth, Plato had created a proto-police state in words.

The police state of Plato

In his dialog The Republic,8 Plato envisioned what he called the Just City.9 It was the highest form of government and the highest form of human society he could conceive. Platos ideal society would be run by a class of guardians, chosen in childhood and raised to their task. Directly beneath them would be a class of brave warriors. All property would be communal and all wives and children shared.10 The people would support the guardians and warriors, and in return these superior classes would guide and protect the state. The fist concern of this society would be education, especially music and art. By law, however, artists would be forbidden to depict any but virtuous things. No portrayals of evil or discord, or of anything disruptive to public order, would be tolerated. Platos next concern was physical training, and, after that, the character of doctors and judges. In Platos world, however, doctors would deal only with the temporary ills of healthy people. Chronically ill people would be left to die. The insane would be put to death. Plato called for strict regulation of sex so that the Just city could achieve the finest genetic stock. Citizens could have sexual intercourse only within their own group and only after a relationship received the sanction of the rulers. All babies would be taken by the rulers. Children of inferior people would be left to die, while those judged to have superior eugenic qualities would be taken care of by nurses. In reality, people would never choose their own sex partners because the guardians would run a rigged lottery to make sure the best men bred with the best women. Plato believed it would be moral for the guardians to deceive the common people because of their greater wisdom and understanding. All citizens would refer to each other as son, daughter, brother, sister, father, or mother. Plato asserted that this system would bring rulers and common people together as one cohesive family, free of an us vs them rivalries. In this vision of a perfect republic, the bounds of the nuclear family would be broken, as would ties to dynasties or classes. They would be replaced by utter devotion to society where the desires of the inferior many are controlled by the wisdom and desires of the superior few. How would all this be enforced? Although modern readers will recognize that nearly everything Plato envisioned has been tried, in one variation or another, in modern police states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, there are no police in The Republic. (The warriors apparently only protect against external enemies.) As

Plato (via the character of Socrates) blandly asserts, the Just City would function harmoniously because the guardians would all be philosophers the famous philosopher kings. At this point in the dialog, one of the participants astutely objects that the public will never accept a philosopher as king, because all philosophers are either vicious or useless. Socrates explains that philosophers in his state would be so wise and well-qualified that no one would question their will. End of argument. Until philosophers bear rule, he asserts, States and individuals will have no rest from eveil.11

Mores vision of Utopia

Eighteen hundred years after Plato, in 1516, another philosopher envisioned an ideal society. Sir Thomas More, now St. Thomas More, patron of statesmen and politicians, composed Utopia.12 Utopia is also a dialog, with a nod to Plato. In it, a traveler named Raphael Hythloday describes the marvelous island of Utopia. More a man of contrasts makes it clear hes not quite as serious about Utopia as Plato was about the Just City. The name Hythloday is Greek for talker of nonsense, and in some parts of the book the reader cant be sure whether More agrees with the fictional Hythloday or is merely speculating on various means of improving European culture. Nevertheless, Utopia, like The Republic, describes ones mans ideal society and government. Once again its an ideal that leaves a state-weary twenty-first century reader asking, How many enforcers would it take to make everybody so happy? As with the Just city, Utopia is a homogeneous society, based on Mores idea of rational thought. It features communal property, no greed, no serious class distinctions, no poverty, and little crime or immoral behavior (all immoral behavior is, in fact, outlawed). It imposes a strict and utter uniformity upon its citizens. Utopia is an island of 54 cities, so much alike as to be virtually indistinguishable same size, same architecture, same customs, same ideas, same behavior on the part of all citizens. Each house is identical. No locks and keys are allowed. No private spaces exist. Hythloday, Mores spokesman, consider elimination of privacy a fine way to promote friendship and reduce harmful gossip. More envisioned homogeneity as the key to justice.13. he believed that rational thought would lead all rational people toward the same values. Each household in Utopia consists of a group of thirty people once again, no nuclear families who choose their own administrators. These managers operate within a detailed administrative hierarchy (a prototype of our modern bureaucracy which, as we shall see, was a key component of the first and all subsequent police states). Anyone caught discussing issues of state outside of the ruling committees is put to death. (More, soon to become Henry VIIIs chancellor of England in a turbulent era, believed this would eliminate plots and conspiracies.) No officials can be bribed because there is no money. City-dweller More spells out an agricultural labor plan that would make any full-time farmer laugh or cry. City residents perform two years stints on the land. Harvests take about a day. All surplus is shared at no charge. Utopians spend their plentiful free time on intellectual pursuits, music, gardening, and physical exercise. As Plato did, More also exempts intellectuals from the need for physical labor.

Sick Utopians receive excellent care, but those too ill to perform their duties are gently urged to let themselves be killed in their sleep rather than be a burden to society. As in Platos Just City, sex is rigidly controlled by the state, as are marriage and religion with harsh penalties, including death or slavery, for violators. Of course, everyone is happy and lives in harmony under a just government that operates more on reason than on specific laws. More, like Plato, expends almost no ink explaining how such uniformity and perfection would be enforced. We can excuse More. Unlike Plato, he may have been just kicking around ideas rather than describing his desired real-world system. But philosophers ideas tend to end up in the hands of politically powerful people. Eventually, through the winding channels of history, Mores conceptions flowed through the minds of French revolutionary thinkings and to Karl Marx, where they sprang to life in the doctrines of communism. It seems odd but appropriate that More eventually became the only Christian saint honored with a statue at the Kremlin.

Common Elements
More and Plato have a great deal in common with each other, and with modern police states: They begin with a philosophical ideal imposed by an elite. They presume that there is one right way to live and think, and that all reasonable people will agree. Individuality is devalued and may be severely punished. (As horror writer Dean Doontz quipped about this mentality, Apparently, utopia required the absolute uniformity of thought and purpose exhibited by bees in a hive.14) The ideal government reaches into every aspect of human life from sex to education to commence to religion to the very design of houses. People are focused on betterment, and betterment of the self is secondary to betterment of the whole. People unable to meet the rulers standards for quality are judged disposable. Privacy is non-existent. Though brotherhood is presumed to reign, in fact there are distinctly privileged classes (philosophers, warriors, intellectuals). These ideals require a complete makeover of society and assume extraordinary high expectations for individual behavior; yet both authors avoid discussing the measures that would be necessary to bring about such change. Many other philosophers contributed to the development or eventual refinement of police states. Two of the foremost were Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Rousseau taught that man was noble, free and happy in a state of nature, and that only society brought about vice, corruption and misery. He believed that the general will of a new type of society was capable of forcing a man to be free again.15 Thus Rousseau laid the groundwork for the Marxist contention, two centuries later, that a government can customize human mentality and behavior to its specifications, simply by changing a persons circumstances. In decrying property as the chief corrupting influence, Rousseau also helped give the Communists their justification for abolition of private property. Finally, Rousseaus ideas are the origin of the widely held contemporary belief that society, not the individual, is responsible for crime, poverty, and eveil.16 Bentham, an Englishman of the Enlightenment, was more pragmatic, less theoretical. He was among the first to promote the use of law to engineer a desired form of society. Bentham reduced human motivation to two factors: pain and pleasure. He considered the desire to avoid pain the stronger motivator of the two, and therefore viewed threats of punishment as an effective prod toward good behavior. In the name of producing the greatest

good of the greatest numbers17 (the only standard by which right and wrong were to be judged, in Benthans view), government could legitimately practice any method from extreme regulation of daily life to torture. Not surprisingly, this philosophy Utilitarianism was promoted in a time and place where government was generally benevolent (at least to members of Benthams race, sex and class). Bentham had no working concept of what government could do given the unlimited power be advocated giving government to inflict pain or deliver pleasurable rewards.18 As we shall see, the ideals of Plato, More, and Rousseau, combined with the legal theories and enforcement methods advocated by Bentham, became the inspiration even the script for some of the worlds most tyrannical police states. But the first real-world police states didnt set out to be that barbarous.

Prussia: The first police state

There have been brutal, rapacious regimes throughout human history. But the first government to bear the designation police state Polizeistaat appeared three and a half centuries ago in Prussia.19 It was certainly repressive by American and English standards, but it wasnt characterized by brutality or terror, nor was it the kind of greed-driven marauder state that thinkers from Aristotle onward had considered synonymous with tyranny. On the contrary, it was an effort at modern social and organizational management. To a Europe weary of squabbling princes and unstable principalities, the first police state must have seemed a relief. As Brian Chapman explains: The Polizeistaat as it was developed in Prussia was the product of economic, social, and military policies. The municipal economies of medieval times came to be replaced by territorial economies, and mercantilism involved the creation of a balanced national economy, a favorable balance of trade, a buoyant national revenue and the means of war under state control. This economic doctrine was reinforced by social and dynastic considerations. The devastation of the Thirty Years War in Europe to prefer order to liberty, and protection to freedom. The dynastic interests of rulers favored the creation of strong, internally stable and strictly disciplined states. In a Hobbesian world political survival seemed to be dependent on military strength placed at the service of the state.20 The Prussian state was so highly militarized that Mirabeau, the French Revolutionary-era orator, called war the national industry of Prussia. Nearly a century later a French military attach wrote that other countries possessed an army, but in Prussia the army possessed the country.21 As the eighteenth century progressed, Enlightenment ideas the rule of law, religious tolerance, the authority of the state over that of the church, rational and scientific thinking were added to the mix (and, as Chapman notes, were interpreted in a special wayto justify the benevolent despotism of the prince). State control was so comprehensive that, by 1776, female citizens of Prussia were even required to report the onset of their menstrual periods to the police.22 Ultimately, the Prussian Polizeistaat was dedicated to three purposes: 1. Protection of the population (both in the military sense and the sense of public safety and order) 2. The welfare of the state and its citizens (with the two being seen as inseparable, and the state seen as the guarantor of public welfare) 3. The betterment of society.

The state that resulted was rigidly structured and rigorously administered. For civil administration, Prussia created the first modern bureaucracy. Drawing its members largely from the middle class, the bureaucracy perpetuated itself, while ensuring the stability of the government via a centralized hierarchical structure. Bureaucrats wrote unbending rules for the management of security, the economy, morality, public works, and public affairs. Offices and departments were structured in a pyramid, each block with its own purpose. Information proceeded up the structure; orders traveled downward to petty bureaucrats and ultimately to the people. Bureaucracy is one of the key features of a police state and not merely because an all-encompassing state needs a vast administrative apparatus. Bureaucratic administration is based on the belief that experts are better equipped to promulgate rules for society than ordinary citizens or their elected representatives.23 Max Weber, the German sociologist (1864-1920), who was the first to formulate a systematic theory of bureaucracy, asserted: Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally the exercise of control o the basis of knowledge. This is the feature of it which makes it specifically rational.24 (As we examine police states and police states in the making we will repeatedly see claims by their advocates that the states methods are scientific, rational, expert, or based on higher moral principles, or unique, elite knowledge. Society, we repeatedly hear, is too complex for ordinary people to understand; therefore it must be managed by those with superior knowledge, perspective and purposes. These claims serve to silence citizens, who are generally willing to trust that experts are capable of making sweeping decisions for society when they themselves are not. That society is and always has been too complex and variable for any central authority to manage is never stated.) Like the perfect societies of Plato and Moe, the first police state was considered by its creators to be rational and therefore unquestionably correct. Anyone challenging it would be challenging not merely authority, but reason itself. The state, as Chapman wrote had to be all-powerful since, in the last resort, its welfare must transcend the individual and particular interests of individuals within the state. Citizens who were properly aware of this would always recognize that the state must have the last word, even at the cost of injury or injustice to themselves, since the fundamental concern of all citizens was the protection and integrity of the state. Without the state, all would be lost25 Legislative and administrative powers were bundled together under the aspect of the police. Initially, the individual had little legal recourse in any dispute with the government. However, sheer brutality did not rule. Both citizens and officials were expected to observe written laws. Officials were expected to operate within certain precise limits on their power. And, at least theoretically, they were help legally and financially accountable for their actions. They possessed none of the immunity from prosecution or lawsuits that modern officials increasingly enjoy.26

The secret police join the state

The Prussian Polizeistaat had abundant police powers. But it didnt extensively use police as moral censors or arbiters of everyday behavior something we associate with police states today. The development of police as watchers, censors, and moral authorities came not in Prussia, but in Austria, under Emperor Joseph II (1741-90). Joseph was inspired by the police states of Frederick William and Frederick II, but took their work further.

Josephs state had many noble aims and achievements. The emperor made it possible for peasants to buy land from their masters, opened parks and hardens to the public, ended religious persecution, abolished the death penalty, introduced more fairness to the justice system, extended personal freedom, increased education (because an education citizenry benefited the state), and made myriad improvements in civil, criminal, and property law. Following his Prussian mentors, he pinned hopes for social improvement on an efficient and honest bureaucracy. Joseph II was a high-minded reformer who was always accessible to his subjects, and dealt with and, indeed encouraged, complaints. He would personally follow up reported abuses, and he drove himself, as he drove his officials, to be upright, compassionate and equitable. He also looked forward to the time when , with [the states] help, citizens would develop a natural maturity and responsibility which could justify a greater increase in personal liberty.27 But, at the same time, Joseph II was a man who trusted no one. He used despotic means to impose and consolidate his reforms. He doubted the integrity of his officials. He didnt believe common people were sensible enough to run their own lives. His reforms (and means of achieving them) had overthrown and alienated the traditionally powerful classes, who became his enemies. Finally, he governed at a time when secret revolutionary societies, like the order of the Illuminati,28 were springing up all over Europe and were widely perceived as a threat to established order. Ironically, those secret orders were populated by the very same educated middle-class men to whom the new police states had given power and authority. Joseph responded by creating an omnipresent police system. Its first purpose was to conduct surveillance on his own government officials to ensure that the regulators were regulating properly and the enforcers enforcing properly. These police were also to observe and report on the behavior of priest who might be opposed to Josephs religious reforms. Beyond that, they had a duty to oversee the condition of everything from private homes to military barracks, and the welfare of everyone from foundlings to alcoholics. Where police had traditionally answered to provincial governors (much as American police have answered to city and county governments), Joseph shifted the chain of command so that special police commissioners reported directly to, and served the interest of, the central government. But that was only the beginning. Under the cloak of this wide-ranging police force hid yet another force a secret police corps operating on instructions from the emperor himself. This force determined whether officials or army officers took bribes, sold secrets, or communicated with relatives abroad. It watched priests to make sure they didnt express any opinions hostile to the emperor. It investigated activities of any groups considered suspect, or potentially disruptive, identified malcontents, and discovered whether people were sending money out of the country. If freely used paid and unpaid informants. In other words, it was a virtual second government, operating parallel to, and keeping an eye on, the main government and the people. It was a giant, paternalistic, autocratic, surveillance and enforcement organization.

Secret police used for elite purposes

The next developments came in pre-Revolutionary France, where Cardinal Richelieu created and his successors refined the concept of the high police. This was essentially a political police corps with an almost unlimited mandate to sniff out plots (as opposed to the low police who regulated markets, controlled sanitation, and oversaw the prostitution trade). We look back on the French Revolution and think of mobs in the streets. But Richelieu and other powerful men of the day were far more concerned about conspiracies in high places than about the power of the unruly masses. Their high police are the functional ancestors of modern intelligence services. The high police covered up scandals in the best families and the royal court. Accessing palaces through hidden passageways, they fostered a reputation for being anywhere and everywhere without being observed. Offenders were secretly arrested and detained without trail sometimes because a trial would lead to public scandal, and sometimes because the suspects actions werent against any law.

Hundreds of years later, and thousands of miles away, Richard Nixon would claim national security as a blanket justification for burglaries, wiretaps, and cover-ups. The pre-Revolutionary French similarly maintained that anything damaging to the reputation of the elite threatened the security of the state. (Ironically, the real threat to the French state went unheeded until too late, in part because of this obsession with misbehavior in high places.) France refined various concepts of police forces during both pre- and post-Revolutionary years, but whether the government was royal or democratic, the extralegal secret police remained in force thus proving the good old French saying, The more things change, the more they stay the same. Joseph Fouche, Duke of Otranto and minister of police under Napoleon, made the high police the center of an extraordinarily developed enforcement system. He extolled these police as the regulating power which is felt everywhere, without ever being seen. He likened them to the power which sustains the harmony of the celestial bodies a power whose regularity strikes us although we are unable to divine the cause. Every branch of the administration, he said, was subordinate to the police.29 Under Napoleons rule, those who offended powerful people continued to be detained without trial for activities that were not actually against any law. Police operated more on their own discretion than on law because they were presumed to be morally superior and in a better position to understand the needs of public order than other people (even better than other officials). Opposition groups on both left and right were infiltrated and suppressed, whether they were covert or open and legal. Fouche spoke of reconciliation and compromise, but that often meant that others must reconcile to his views and compromise on his position. His police had achieved not only power, but moral certitude. Throughout the nineteenth century, the concept of government altered throughout Europe. Generally, the trend was toward decentralization and, in most cases, more individual liberty. But because revolutionary movements also abounded during the period, no state dared give up its political police forces. In fact, in many ways, the scope of their authority expanded. Changing times prompted governments to pass more social legislation, responsibility for which often fell to state police agencies. Police apparatuses were granted authority to contain communicable diseases, provide soup kitchens for the poor, deliver aid to orphans, and improve the workplace. As late as the 1920s, Otto Meyer glorified the police as the culmination of a systematic working-up of the human material available in order to lead [the state] to a greater goal.30 In some countries, the authority of government agents to control the most intimate and wide-ranging aspects of human life approached the status of religion. Unlike their philosophical forebears Plato and More, the pragmatic rulers of these states recognized that human beings would not simply fall in line behind leaders ideals. Thus they created and ultimately raised to an almost holy Ideal the legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement mechanisms to impose the police-state philosophy.

War is the health of the police state

Note that the police states weve just examined all thrived in turbulent times. War, social upheaval, or fear or revolution gave them their raison detre. Here we discover another key characteristic of police states: They grow on crisis. Crises and wars justify their existence and crises and wars keep them in power. As long as their leaders can point to a credible threat enemies on the border, enemies within, criminals, monopolists, saboteurs, plotters, moral decadence, foreigners. Selfishness, poverty, inflation, unemployment, falling education standards, almost any problem will suffice the populace is likely to accept the loss of its liberties in the name of public safety, national security, humanitarianism, or law and order.

What happens when the crisis ends? It never does. There is no final solution to every human problem. When one war ends, or when the public becomes weary of one crusade, another always awaits. A police state can invariably find a crisis around which to rally. However, the very structure of a police state also carries a kind of built-in crisis generator, a self-perpetuating mechanism. It works like this: The human race is too fractious, too individualized for total mass cooperation. No experts have yet mastered the art of perfectly overseeing all citizens and all institutions. Despite the most diligent attempts at social micromanagement, someone, somewhere, will always misbehave. So everyone, everywhere, must be watched and punished as necessary. This requires an ever-escalating force of spies, spy agencies, and informers. A heavily watch and regulated people tends to become discontent and even more fractious. The evergreater number of watchers inevitably observes more unacceptable behavior behavior that violates the ever-greater number of laws and regulations. Continued misbehavior necessitates more spies and regulators, which fosters more rebellion, or uncovers more infractions, which necessitates more efforts by the government to gain control, ad infinitum. Distrust increases, as does the brutality of the states attempts to exert total authority. It is a familiar process that we have seen in our own lifetimes. A police state is a self-perpetuating system that will grow until it collapses under its own weight, or until people have reached the limits of their endurance.

To this point weve been dealing with a type of police state that effectively no longer exists. Its elements are familiar, but it doesnt encompass such modern developments as mass media, mass indoctrination, technology, political parties, or the drive to place the entire world under its sway. Nor did the pragmatic managers of these states actually expect to achieve utopia. They merely wanted order and security, not paradise on Earth. They required obedience, not universal belief. For ultimate utopianism and therefore ultimate force, we must look at the totalitarian police states of the twentieth century.

Communism: The police state goes global

Americans generally trace communist philosophy to Marx and Engels. The French, however, will tell you with greater accuracy that the inventor of modern communism was one of their own the Revolutionary figure Gracchus Babeuf31 a journalist and agitator who internalized not only the idealism of More, but the political realities of the guillotine. Babeuf promulgated a doctrine that called for the abolition of all private property (particularly ownership of land, food and manufactured goods). He decreed that the purpose of society is to defend such equality that is, to enforce abolition of property rights and to augment the general welfare through the cooperation of all. He really meant all. In Babeufs doctrine, there are no innocent bystanders or apolitical citizens. Anyone refusing his share of labor is a criminal. Anyone who appropriates exclusively to himself the products of the earth or of manufacture is a criminal. Any rich people who refuse to renounce their surplus in favor of the poor are enemies of the people.32 Any every citizen is obligated to comply actively and willingly with the states social goals. Unlike Plato and More, Babeuf was activist who worked to implement his ideals. Also unlike Plato and More, his words make it clearer he didnt finch from swift and harsh use of force. He brought us that much closer to the deadliest combination: utopian ideals imposed by force of arms. Babeuf had a close encounter with a guillotine before implementing his plan. But his Doctrine and methods are considered a model for left-wing movements that followed especially the rise of communism.

The history of communism is detailed extensively elsewhere. In the following discussion, we show very briefly that both communist philosophy and its earliest real-world implementations were police statist from their inception. We examine a few of the ways communists further expanded upon the type of government that began as the Prussian Polizeistaat. Marx and Engels were not primarily philosophers. They were activists who believe that ideals were useful only insofar as they influenced social change. Their Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, was intended to give the (already existing, already fomenting) communist philosophy a powerful voice that would roar across the world. They wrote that there were no universal truths or even fixed beliefs. Harking back to Rousseau, they maintained that, when a government radically changed peoples material conditions, it would transform how those people thought and behaved not merely in superficial ways, but down to the core of human nature. Therefore, by altering workers circumstances, it was possible to free the world from private property, nationality, and the constraints of the family structure. Marx and other communists especially aimed to free education from the influence of the family so they could more efficiently condition new generations to their goals. Marx and Engels acknowledged that, in the beginning (prior to achieving a worldwide change of heart), some despotic inroads would have to be made on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production. Those first steps included: Abolition of private land ownership Imposition of a heavy graduated income tax Abolition of inheritance Confiscation of emigrants and rebels property Universal labor for all State centralization of credit State ownership of communication and transportation State appropriation of factories Gradual combination of agriculture and manufacturing Elimination of distinctions between town and country, and Universal government education. In their Manifesto, they called for all these changes to be achieved through an immediate workers revolution. Babeuf Doctrine and Marxs are very similar. Both call for the overthrow across the board of existing economic systems. Both call for the overthrow across the board of existing social structures. Both leave no room for dissenting or even disinterested - individuals; anyone who doesnt actively cooperate is an enemy, a criminal, or worse. Furthermore, Marx wanted all this done on a global scale and his political descendants sought to follow that mandate and that vision. According to Jules Archer: Russian idealist who supported the early Bolsheviks believed that they would be building a new world, not only in Russia but everywhere. A world without prisons, hunger, poverty, war, or cruel police. The Soviet Union was a gigantic experiment by Lenin and Trotsky to create a model state for the new world.33 The communists would, decades later, learn that they couldnt reform the entire world to their specifications. But clearly, they couldnt even begin the attempt without police powers of an almost incomprehensible scale and the ruthlessness to apply those powers without mercy. From the Russian Revolution through the Stalinist years (and beyond), the communist program featured:

Identifying, dehumanizing and ultimately annihilating anyone who disagreed with the rulers. Opponents were not people, but enemies of the people, saboteurs, wreckers, spies, and counter-revolutionaries. Deliberate use of terror against the population including mass assassinations, engineered famine, constant surveillance, threats to family members of dissidents, and arbitrary disappearances. Policies of annihilation against entire classes of people the bourgeoisie under Lenin, independent farmers under Stalin (and later, political enemies and Jews). Resistance to the Communist Party program brought more brutality. When society failed to conform to communist ideals, communist governments simply resorted to making wilder accusations and leveling more extreme measures against the wreckers who secretly sabotaged the path to Utopia. This is the typical, and tragic, path of the modern police state. It cannot achieve its ideals, but it will not yield them. The Ideal is right, true, rational, scientific, moral; those who oppose it, or fail to achieve it, are at fault. Repression escalates until the society can no longer sustain itself.

From the Soviet Joke Book

Actual jokes told in the Soviet Union34 What was the nationality of Adam and Eve? Russian, of course. Why else would they think they were in paradise when they were homeless, naked, and had just one apple between the two of them?

A speaker tells his listeners, The communist ideal is already on the horizon. The audience silently wonders, What IS a horizon? Answer: An imaginary line where the sky comes together with the earth; it moves off into the distance when you try to get closer.

The brutalities of the communist state have been examined repeatedly (most notably by historian Robert Conquest, and most recently in the international best seller by French scholars, The Black Book of Communism). But the police-state nature of Soviet society that is, its desire to control every aspect of life is equally evident in everyday living: Manipulation of truth. Soviet schoolchildren were taught that Russians built the worlds first airplane and invented televison.35 Factory-production figures were invented out of than air. For a full generation, biological science was held hostage, because Stalin found truth in the theories of a crank agronomist named Trofim to create a miracle food plant, created a disaster that contributed to mass starvation in the Soviet Union.36 Manipulation of language. Dissidents were mentally ill and required treatment. People expressing heretical thoughts were re-educated. Disasters didnt happen (and, if reports of them go out anyway, the reports were lies, distortions, and the work of those all-purpose enemies of the people.) Regimentation of everyday living. Citizens worked where the state wanted, lived where the state decreed, went to the doctors chosen for them, and were educated as (and if) the government preferred. Citizens carried internal passports wherever they traveled, while the state tracked and regulated their activities. Uniformity of thought. The state-controlled education and the media. It fed the masses its version of history and current events. Through punishment, social pressure, compulsory participation in civic events, and other forms of coercion, it prevented heretical ideas not only from being discussed, but from developing, in millions of citizens.

The jackboots of the Nazis

The rise of Hitler and the course of his Third Reich are well documented. Here we examine some of the characteristics demonstrating that Nazi Germany was a true police state in the philosophical and historical sense. Hitlers case also serves as a warning that even a democratically elected government can be turned into a police state and that the entire transformation can be worked with scrupulous attention to (and manipulation of) law and democratic processes. Every bit of legislation enacted and enforced by the Nazis had, as Chapman states, impeccable constitutional origins. But as Richard Lawrence Miller notes in his book Nazi Justiz, the Nazis were actually legal atheists37 using the forms of law without any respect for laws meaning or purpose. The Nazis had discovered one key to a successful modern police state: Retain the institutions and procedures the populace is accustomed to, and the presence of the familiar forms will lull them into accepting the evils you perpetrate. The Nazis were, from the beginning, masters at building a police state on law, order, and the ruins of familiar democratic institutions. Hitler was lawfully elected chancellor in 1933. But he skillfully persuaded the Reichstag to pass (and later extend) the Enabling Act, which granted him emergency powers to govern unopposed. Gradually and always legally he striped existing institutions (the judiciary, the army, and the civil service, among others) of their independent authority.38 Thus he exerted the one man, one party, one group rule typical of a police state. As the very first police state rulers did; Hitler used the traditional grounds; improvement, protection, welfare, mobilization, modernization, and development39 to justify wide-ranging control of society including censorship of speech and the press, universal conscription, and a revamping of the education system. Gobbels persuaded Germans to believe that the Nazis seizure of power was genuine democracy and equality, because even though the government had eliminated their political participation, it represented the true will of the people. Thus he used a modern police-state method (manipulation of language and truth) to pursue the traditional police-state goal domination of the states will over that of the people. Just as the original Prussian police state appealed to a populace weary of war and craving security, Hitler used the troubles and ineffectiveness of the Weimar Republic as a springboard to dictatorial control. Because propaganda labeled Hitler the living embodiment of the German will, no limits, neither political nor moral, could be placed on his power. This came as a relief to a people tired of inflation, post-war moral chaos, and the messiness of democratic processes. Within weeks of seizing power, Hitler created the Geheimestaatspolizei the Gestapo a secret police force whose mission was to root out political opposition. Secret watchers and brutal enforcers are, or course, the very core of a police state. The secret police, like their Enlightenment-era predecessors, were granted authority over business licenses, passports, ID cards, and many other forms of everyday paperwork. This power was justified on the grounds that business and everyday activities could be a cover for subversive activities. The control became a tool to intimidate and enforce obedience upon millions of innocent citizens. (The attitude that every citizen is potential criminal is one well see again in this book.) Just as Lenin blamed the bourgeoisie (middle class), and Stalin blamed the kulaks, Hitler blamed every evil, every form of discord, on the Jews. Long before Vernichtung annihilation the Nazis engaged ordinary people, priests, schoolteachers, doctors, and bureaucrats in an effort to root out the hidden Jews infecting society and to separate them from pure Germans and tolerable mongrels.

The Nazis used law to solve the Jewish crisis and to justify other forms of repression. For instance, they searched the homes of political opponents looking for firearms as the existing gun-control laws of the Weimar Republic empowered them to do. Later they added laws specifically disarming Jews, and outlawing any firearms that could be disassembled beyond the common limits of hunting and sporting activities.40 The secret police used political pressure and dread of the jackboot in the door as tools to dominate the bureaucracy and the judiciary, as well as the business community. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany brought together all that encompassed the traditional European police state stern enforcement, omnipresent surveillance, oversight of every aspect of life but added to it the soaring idealism of the philosophers in search of a perfect state. They mutually held the belief that they had both the right and the scientific knowledge to impose what Plato and More could only envision. This combination led to ruthlessness never before seen. Hitlers Germany and the Soviet Union shared four other characteristics not seen in earlier police states: Compulsory ideology citizens were not only expected to behave as the state wished, but to believe as the state wished. Earlier police states might have aimed for this, but only mass education and communication enabled these states to attempt it. A monolithic political party With no loyal opposition allowed, the party itself became an integral part of state machinery. A monopoly on communications Whether or not the state owned the media, it had total control over what was printed or broadcast. Centrally directed economies The Soviet state held outright ownership of industry and markets. The Nazis achieved control through subsidy, regulation, political pressure, and the building a military-industrial complex geared for conquest (the economic system known as fascism). Nazi Germany and the soviet Union werent the only twentieth-century police states, just two of the most familiar and archetypal. Spain under Franco, Mussolinis Italy, Pinochets Chile, and the Greek junta of Papadopoulos generally followed a right-wing model. Maos China, the tragic Cambodia of Pol Pot, Castros Cuba, Allende in Chile, and others in Asia and Africa, adopted various localized forms of communism. Some states, like Singapore, have developed models that simply arise from home-grown paternalism and authoritarianism. Japan before World War II was also a police state whose powers were so comprehensive that the police apparatus controlled a compulsory state religion, as well as having broad authority to oversee everyday lives of citizens. Even today, Japanese police may search any dwelling, at any time, under any pretext, and are allowed to hold suspects 23 days without legal counsel or charges. Their methods are so brutal that 92 percent of all criminal defendants confess and the conviction rate in Japans authoritarian courts approaches 100 percent.41

The heart of the police state

If we were to define the single core philosophy that creates and defines a police state, it would be this: Advocates of a police state believe that Anything not under government control Is, by definition, out of control. That is, they are completely committed to the Idea that voluntary relationships, free markets, selfregulation, personal choice, individual conscience and belief in short, all the hallmarks of freedom equal chaos. They are convinced that they, and only they, can bring order to a world whirling out of control.

Of course, the world will always remain out of their control. Human nature and the law of unintended consequences ultimately trump and prerogatives of any tyrant on Earth. Thus, when police statist fail again and again to impose their Ideal of perfection, the only limits to their ruthlessness, as former slave and ardent abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, are prescribed by the endurance of those they oppress.42

Are we becoming a police state?

In this chapter we have examined two types of police states: The traditional police state a product of the Enlightenment whose goal was the moral, physical, and intellectual improvement of the populace and the military security of the state. The totalitarian police state Monolithic institutions under a monolithic party and an Ideal so powerful that every individual must bow to it, body, mind, heart and soul or be disposed of. But there is a third form of police state the modern authoritarian police state. This state is modern in that it encompasses manipulation of the mass media, mass education, political parties, and theories of democracy. It is traditional in that the states aims are considered to supersede the rights and liberties of the individual. But it is not, at first, tyrannical. The modern authoritarian police state may appear to be democratic in form holding elections and having a legislature. But within the traditional forms its nature and power have shifted. Typically: The executive branch gradually comes to dominate the nation. The legislature and judiciary become rubber stamps on increasingly harsh, dictatorial power. Enforcement and rule-making agencies proliferate, independent of any elected body. At the same time, the government as a whole (including the relatively weakened legislative and judicial branches) grows in power and authority relative to the citizens. It is only the authority and freedom of the individual that diminishes in real terms. A tamed electorate lets the government have its way perhaps under the ancient narcotics of bread and circuses, perhaps under terror. Opposition is allowed, but is controlled by being channeled through organized mainstream institutions such as labor unions, industry lobbies and other quasi-official interest groups. Individual or small-group opposition is crushed through mockery and demonization, studious non-coverage by the media, infiltration and arrest, or outright brutality. Public opinion is molded via mass education, mass media, and propaganda. Public policy, though it may be voted on in the legislature, is largely made by bureaucrats or other insiders careerists who are not answerable either to public opinion or to votes. Gradually, in this state, local police are brought under the umbrella of the central authority. Instead of answering to the citizens of cities, counties, provinces, or states, the police are subsidized, regulated, trained, equipped by, and ultimately loyal to the central government. This newly centralized police service becomes more and more of a political force not hunting down murderers or rapist, but ferreting out (sometimes provoking, or even framing) offenders who violate the states social ideals, or who threaten bureaucratic control. Ultimately, a politicized police apparatus expands into areas previously overseen by non-police agencies, such as licensing, inspection of products or workplaces, regulation of trade, education, communications, social security, and foreign affairs. This politicized force also gains ever-greater powers to investigate, arrest, and inflict punishment outside of the normal justice system because it is considered both a moral force and an unstoppable force. Therefore, in matters where a citizen opposes the police, the police are nearly always assumed to have the moral and legal

high ground, even in the face of repeated accusations of illegal force, corruption, perjury, evidence tampering, or other abuses of liberty. Because we have come to associate the term police state mainly with totalitarian terrorist police states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we may overlook an authoritarian state developing under our own eyes. Because of this selective blindness, when we see an apparent injustice or political danger signal, our tendency is to say, Well, yes, its true that X is happening, but thats not as bad as what happened in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. So theres no danger of a police state developing here. Because traditional institutions and processes remain representatives are elected, laws made, trials held we are lulled into believing a republic still exists, long after its institutions have been taken over by legal atheists who ambitions know few bounds. A police state can be imposed in a short time, as Lenin, Pol Pot, and Hitler proved. Or it can accrete slowly, as drops of moisture collect around microscopic particles hidden high in the atmosphere before a thunderstorm. A government naturally gathers more power to itself, branch by branch, agency by agency, law by law, year by year. Before the average person knows whats happened, the cage of a police state has been constructed around him. We forget that, even in Nazi Germany, the ultimate horrors were imposed gradually, as ordinary people and leaders became conditioned to ever-higher levels of abusiveness, rhetoric, and desperation. What was unthinkable in 1933, when the Nazis took power, was routine by 1943. What began with forced sterilizations for purposes of hygiene ended with mass slaughter in death camps. Hitler may have intended the final solution all along;43 but gradualism was required to accustom both the public and the perpetrators to the deeds needed to achieve the evil end. A police state begins when someone with the power to govern decides to impose and ideal for the betterment of society or the security of the nation. Ironically, yet not surprisingly, the greater the ideal, and the more it departs form human nature or cultural custom, the greater the force necessary to implement it. We must therefore be at out most wary when politicians make pronouncements such as: [E]conomic growth and prosperity, political democracy, and freedom are not enough. We need a sense that our lives are part of some greater effortto remold societyand even redefine who we re as human beingsWe need a politics of meaning.44 These may be noble sentiments when voiced by a minister or a philosopher. But government has unique power one power not possessed by any other institution. As Ludwig von Mises described it, State or government is a social apparatus of compulsion and coercion.45 Government is the only institution in society that has the power to force compliance on individuals. In coercive hands, soaring idealism all too often translates into: We will make you bend to our vision at any cost. For the greater good of the greatest number. We maintain that an authoritarian police state is in the process of developing in America (and other English-speaking nations). America and its Western cousins are in danger of slipping slowly, almost undetectably, into police states. We believe, and we will demonstrate in this book, that the process is well under way. We fear that one day well wake up and know a police state when we see one because it will surround us. But we wont have recognized its jackboot coming down on the face of the nation.

Recommended reading:
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Oxford University Press, 1999). An account of work, family relationships, propaganda and culture in Stalins Soviet Union. Touches on the horrors, but focuses on everyday life.

Grunberger, Richard, The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany (Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1971, now out of print but available from used book services). Does for Hitlers Germany what Sheila Fitzpatrick does for Stalinist Russia. Gives an idea of ordinary life, bureaucracy, academia even humor in Germany from 1933 to 1945. Courtois, Stephane et al. The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999). The international bestseller, first published in France, in which scholars from primarily socialist and communist backgrounds dispassionately and exhaustively document the worst horrors of communist regimes from Lenin to Castro.

What is a Police State?

Core Characteristics: 1. Begins with a social ideal; the more lofty the ideal, the more brutal its execution. 2. Is imposed by an elite for the good of the whole. 3. Claims its authority derives from science, reason or enlightened social theories. 4. Asserts authority over all aspects of life. 5. Uses force to achieve anything that cant be achieved through propaganda or persuasion. Believes there should be no limits on its power.

The police statist believes: Anything not under government control Is, by definition, out of control.
In Action, a Police State: 1. Indoctrinates citizens early to submit and obey; values uniformity and considers people to be resources. 2. Enlarges its power by creating programs in the name of health, welfare and safety. In the end, the state itself is the chief beneficiary, while individuals are deprived of choice, prosperity and independence. 3. Is driven constantly by crises, wars or crusades. 4. Has numerous laws, arbitrarily enforced. Everything not forbidden is compulsory. 5. Has a court system that becomes a tool of the states will, rather than a instrument for justice. 6. Fears privacy. What it cant see, it cant control, so it demands to see everything via electronic surveillance, human informers and extensive means of tracking individual lives and business activity. 7. Uses lies, secrets and manipulation of language to ensure that the populace thinks as the government wishes. 8. Becomes increasingly ruthless as it fails to produce the perfect, orderly society it demands. 9. Out of fear of distrust of the people, it enforces a monopoly on the means of armed combat. In Addition, A Totalitarian Police State: 1. Enforces compulsory ideology; you are either a believer or an enemy, never a bystander. 2. Has a monolithic political party which becomes integral to the structure of government. 3. Holds a monopoly on communications, either through ownership or regulation and subsidy. 4. Centrally directs the economy, either through ownership or regulation and subsidy.

FOOTNOTES
1Gatto,

John Taylor, The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteachers Intimate Investigation into the Problems of Modern Schooling. The Oxford Village Press, pre-publication edition, 2000. Gatto is writing about the Prussian police state under Frederick William II, nephew and successor of Frederick the Great.

2Chapman, 3Wise,

Brian, Police State. Praeger Publishers, 1970. David. The American Police State: The Government Against the People. Vintage Books, 1978. Jules. Police State: Could It Happen Here? Harper & Row, 1977.

4Archer,

5Stevens,

Richard W. What Is a Police State? Police State Policeies Alert, Winter 2000. (Newsletter of Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States, P.O. Box 270205, Hartford, Wisconsin 53027, http://www.ccops.org.) Stevens adds that police apparatus doesnt necessarily mean traditional peace officers, but a special class of functionaries with extensive power and the will to actively pursue the governments goals not merely to respond when an act of theft or violence has been committed.
6Chapman, 7Blacks

op.cit.

Law Dictionary defines police power as (in part): The power of the State to place restraints on the personal freedom and property rights of persons for the protection of the public safety, health, and morals or the promotion of the public convenience and general prosperity. In Blacks, this definition is part of a larger one that deals with the U.S. Constitution and the scope of federal and state powers.
8Platos

Republic is available in a variety of print editions from Amazon.com or local bookstores. It may also be downloaded free in the text form from Project Gutenbert, http://promo.net/pg/.
9To

the Greeks, the city was the fundamental independent political entity, just as the nation is to the modern world.
10Plato

sometimes writes as though communal marriages and shared children apply only to the top two classes; but elsewhere he writes as though they apply to all of society: its impossible to tell what he actually intends. But he does say no man would call anything his own, and has a discussion about why it would be moral for leaders to lie to the common people to get them to agree to his ideal breeding scheme. So it appears likely he wished to extend these relationships to all. Plato also stated in The Republic that man-boy relationships were the highest form of love; but he opposed man-boy sexual relations on the grounds that they compromised educational benefits such relationships might otherwise offer.
11To

his credit, Plato noted that this ideal city which he identifies as a kingship or an aristocracy is doomed. As it decays, it will fall through four lesser stages: timocracy (rule by brave and noble warriors); oligarchy (rule by the rich); democracy (mob rule); and tyranny (dictatorship). Ironic as it seems looking back on the catastrophic twentieth century in which most of Platos ideas were tried by Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and others Plato had no clue that tyranny would be necessary to implement the rigid society he considered the height of perfection. Platos blindness to this fact is evidence that governing should definitely not be left to philosophers. Interestingly, although he lists tyranny as the lowest form of degenerate government, Plato saves his most biting contempt for democracy the type of government under which he himself lived.
12Mores

Utopia is available in a variety of print editions from Amazon.com or local bookstores. It may also be downloaded free in text form from Project Gutenberg, http://promo.net/pg/.
13It

is notable that many writers since Orwell, Huxley and Ayn Rand among them have seen such uniformity as a key component of the most oppressive forms of injustice. Ironically, followers of the Rand mythos also know that Rand famously attempted to impose exactly that type of uniformity on her circle of friends, and for precisely the same reasons More advocated it because she believe that all rational people, by definition, would share her beliefs and preferences.
14Koontz,

Dan. Seize the Night. Bantam, 1999.

15Rousseaus

two major works on these topics, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) and The Social Contract (1762) are available in a variety of editions from Amazon.com or major book stores. Both works can also be found in compliations of his major writings. In his diary of life in Nazi Germany, I Will Bear Witness (Random House, 1998) Victor Klemperer wrote on July 19, 1937: Rousseau has never triumphed to such a degree nor been taken ad absurdum to such a degree as today. The posthumous unmasking of Rousseau is called Hitler.
16Ironically,

another philosopher with a starting point the opposite of Rosseaus also influenced police-state development, Thomas Hobbes wrote (in Leviathan, 1651) that life in a state of nature was poor, nasty, brutish, and short. His solution? Like Rousseaus government. Hobbes advocated a state so all-powerful it could control even a persons inner mental and emotional life.
17Sometimes 18An

written as the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

essay, Benthams Utilitarianiam in Victorian England, by Paul Roach, gives a pocket glimpse of Benthams work and influence. It can be found at http://www.gover.net/victorian/reports/utilitar.html. Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton give a long explication of Benthams influence in their book The Tyrany of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Forum, 2000.
19Description

of the early Prussian and French police states are adapted largely from Chapman, op. cit. Interpretation and interpolation are our own.
20Chapman, 21Quoted

op. cit.

in Gerard, James W. (U.S. ambassador to Germany). My Four Years in Germany. George H. Duran Company. 1917. Found at http://www.ukans.edu/~libsite/wwi-www/Gerard/4yrs1.htm.
22Gatto,

John Taylor. The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteachers Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling. The Oxford Village Press, pre-publication edition, 2000.
23Bureaucratic

administration is a key point of departure from early American systems of governance, which prized the citizen-legislator, the town-meeting, and the ability of common people to know their own will and make their own decisions.
24Weber,

Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 1947 (as quoted in The Encyclopedia Britannica, Britiannica.com.http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/7/0,5716,18397+1+18129,00.html).
25Chapman,

op. cit.

26Hayek, in his Constitution of Liberty, notes, The most distinctive contribution of eighteenth-century Prussia to the realization of the rule of law lay in the field of the control of public administration. The guiding ideal which profoundly affected the liberal movement of the nineteenth century was that all exercise of administrative power over the person or property of the citizen must be subject to the judicial review. The most far-reaching experiment in this direction a law of 1797 went so far as to subject all disputes between the administrative authorities and private citizens to the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts.
27Ibid. 28Some

people have come to regard secret societies as a joke merely a preoccupation of conspiracy theorists. Whatever they are today, secret societies were a serious factor in eighteenth century Europe, pledged to fight

tyranny, oppression, and superstition (as they saw it). The Illuminati, one of the most prominent, was founded by Adam Weishaupt at Ingolstadt, Bavaria in 1776. As Brian Chapman describes it: Its members had much in common with comparable groups known to police in later generations. They were sincerely devoted to the welfare of the masses for whom they simultaneously felt contempt, and they had an inflated sense of their own importance, reinforced by their sense of belonging to a clandestine organization operating outside the law.
29Chapman, 30Quoted

op. Cit.

in Chapman, op. cit.

31Courtois,

Stephane. Introduction: The Crimes of Communism. The Black Book of Communism. Courtois, Stephane, etall. Harvard University Press, 1999. Originally published in France, 1997.
32The

Doctrine of Gracchus Babeuf, http://www.iun.edu/~historyn/primary/babeur.htm op. cit.

33Archer, 34The

Soviet Joke Book online at http://www.st-andres.ac.u/~pv/coureses/sovrus/jokes.html op. cit.

35Archer, 36Not

coincidentally, Lysenko taught that hereditary traits could be changed simply by changing environment. This scientific concept was borrowed from Lamarck and just happened to provide convenient confirmation of the social theories of Marx. For more on Lysenko, and the dangers of perverting science to serve political purposes, see Faria, Miguel A. Jr., M.D., The Perversion of Science and Medicine (Part II): Soviet Science and Gun Control, http://www.haciendapub.com/article7.html.
37Miller,

Richard Lawrence, Nazi Justiz. Praeger Prublishers, 1995. the German civil service Hitler subordinated to his purposes traced its roots to the original Prussian

38Ironically,

Polizeistaat.
39Chapman, 40Kopel,

op. cit.

Favid B. Lethal Laws. (A review of the book of the same title by Jam Simkin, Aaron Zelman, & Alan M. Rice). Originally published in the New York Law School Journal of International and Comparative Law, 1999, Vol. 15, pages 355-398. Also found at http://www.jpfo.org/L-laws.htm.
41Second

Thoughts: A False Confession Jailed Mr. Yakushiji; Then Fate Intervened. Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2000.
42Douglass,

Frederick. The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies. (Speech given in Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or with both. The limit of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
43Historieans

disagree on whether Hitler always intended to exterminate the Jews of Europe or whether his original deportation plans escalated to mass slaughter in 1941, driven by opportunities discovered on the Eastern Front. (See Garrard, John and Garrard, Carol. The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. The Free Press [a Division of Simon & Schuster], 1996).

44Clinton,

Hillary Rodham. Speech at the University of Texas, Austin, April 6, 1993. Part of the Liz Carpenter Lecture Series on Civil Society.
45Mises,

Ludwig von. Human Action. Regnery, 1963.