The test for whether one is living in a police state
is that those who are charged with enforcing the law
are allowed to break the laws with impunity..
~ Jon Roland ~ (1944-)
founder of the Constitution Society
Reader comments:
An excellent observation, one inevitably leading to thoughts about other practical aspects of Power and freedom. For police power (imprisonment and dispossession) is the most basic and intrusive of all state powers. Such authority is always ripe for abuse, corruption that survives only when it's tolerated at the next level of authority, thence upwards.
Roland's thought holds particularly negative connotations for the U.S., Planet Earth's premier police, surveillance and prison state.
On the other hand, according to the White House and its Press(titute) Corps, all can be made well by sending our celebrated war machine, er, DEFENSE apparatus to Ukraine. After all, those damn Russkies have got a real nerve ... putting their bloody country so close to all those military bases of ours.
Obama = Bush. Both they and their respective Parties are practicing now-firmly established, neoconservative expansionist (Imperial) policy via pre-emptive warfare and endless FBI-CIA destabilizing operations, on at least five Continents.
Pursuit of global hegemony has also meant the end of seriously organized domestic dissent, the personal freedom simply to be left alone and the ultimate, inevitable exclusion of certain entitled Persons from the Rule of Law.
In case one hasn't noticed, cops are increasingly, violently running amok everywhere in the U.S., with near total-impunity.
Consider the Tsarnaev witness, Ibragim Todashev, shot six times by a Special Agent, once in the head, six hours into his 3rd formal FBI interrogation. An apparent execution, his death would appear to constitute manslaughter at least.
Todashev's killing was recently ruled "justifiable" by the Miami-Dade D.A. In an awake society that would constitute grounds for an instant recall election and replacement of an apparently tainted D.A.
Unfortunately the precise opposite is the general reality: Todashev's is anything but an isolated case. The killer cop almost always walks.
Isn't it 'curious' that out of all the crime statistics kept in America's endless supply of security-state computer memory, one statistic that ISN'T kept is how many people die annually at the hands of police?
Roland's is more than a quote. It's a truism.
"A-mer-ika, A-mer-ika ... God's Face has turned from thee ...
No lamp of Light, no Bill of Rights ...
corrupt from sea to sea."
-- Mann, Kalamazoo
I am now quite sure that 'Tragedy and Hope' was suppressed although
I do not know why or by whom. ~ C.Quigley ~
