"Pure authoritarianism"
by digby
Good insight from Greenwald in this interview with Elias Isquith:
Is there a connection between the era of mass incarceration and the era of the burgeoning national security state?
Oh they’re completely connected and inextricably linked. There’s so many different similarities that bind them together, but the most important one is just the mentality. Part of the War on Terror is how we’re taught to think that once you have a group of people who are identified as some kind of menace or threat to security, essentially anything can be done to them. They can be killed or brutalized or imprisoned without any real due process, and that’s all justified because they’ve demonstrated themselves to be a threat.
It reminds me a bit of how you hear some people say they don’t care about the NSA because they aren’t doing anything wrong. That logic seems to inform the “just do what a cop says and you won’t get hurt” argument you’ll see on Facebook or Fox News.
Yeah, it’s pure authoritarianism, in both cases. The idea that the people you should fear are not the ones who wield … political or corporate power — that those are the people you actually trust and want to even be more empowered because they will protect you from the people you’ve been told to fear (the terrorists or African-Americans or people deemed to be criminal or immigrants); that’s what power centers need to do to breed acquiescence and submission. I think you’re exactly right that it’s the same dynamic in both cases.
Here's a little example of this for your average citizen who doesn't normally find themselves interacting with the authorities: the TSA. We are expected to behave very compliantly with this authority, speak in low tones, no complaining, even take off pieces of our clothes for no good reason in public. (The Europeans look at us like we're nuts when we automatically start disrobing in the security line.) We have learned to just accept whatever indignity they choose to inflict on us without question.
This is not the biggest deal in the world. But it's training us all to unquestioningly accept conformity of action and ultimately thought. That's authoritarianism.