Snowden DU Cognitive Dissonance Syndrome

[JDPriestly]

48. How can anyone who contributes to corrupting democracy be viewed as a hero?

Our government is little by little turning into a dictatorship.

They thought they were free.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

Fascism does not necessarily come in with guns blazing. Sometimes it takes over slowly. It can simply be a reaction to social unrest or fear of terrorism or an enemy to the nation, fear of upheaval due to inflation or a severe shortage of raw materials, hunger and so many things. But fascism and the surveillance by the state of innocent people go hand in hand. We have moved faster toward fascism than I ever thought possible. Many people thought that fascism would be painful. It isn't, at least not in the beginning.

Years ago when we lived in German speaking countries, we learned that many, many, perhaps even most people did not suffer from the fascism until it was way too late. It is like a leaking faucet. Just a slow drip for most people. But it destroys creativity. It rewards conformity. It wastes money and time and eventually it seeks victims and the drama of public punishment for innocent people.

So, if you aren't bothered, it is because you don't know what fascism looks like at the beginning. This surveillance is just the beginning. It will get a lot worse. Already, Obama is punishing more whistleblowers than previous presidents. It is partly the problem that people are not happy with what is going on in the government and thus less loyal. But it is also that a lot more really shockingly awful, undemocratic things are going on in the government, so there is more to reveal and more that is really reprehensible to bring to the public. That is why we have an increase in the numbers and frequencies of whistleblowers' revelations.