How they rule by fraud

[anarch]

Rereading an old favorite novel, the following struck me with a new kind of force:

“…if they showed their hand now and went totalitarian all the way, there would be a revolution. Middle-roaders would rise up with right-wingers, and left-libertarians, and the Illuminati aren’t powerful enough to withstand that kind of massive revolution. But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.”

“What sort of tools?”

“More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can’t be trusted.”
<…>
“And the beauty of it is, the majority of the Americans will have been so frightened by Illuminati-backed terrorist incidents that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip.”

Shea, Robert J., and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, (New York: Dell Publishing, 1975), 197-198.


Now, this book is, of course, an absurdist work of fiction. There is no group of power-mad collaborators at work dismantling the Constitution, of course, and never has been. There is no cabal of seemingly disparate members of the global power elite joining together to engineer terrorist incidents so as to frighten the American public right out of their Constitutional freedoms. Such a thing just “couldn’t happen here.” This is America, for chrissakes! Of course. Fnord. Absolutely.

…

This was published in 1975. And what has come to pass in recent years? Do not many legislative acts uncomfortably similar to the ‘tools’ mentioned above seem to have been brought into play—notably after ‘terrorism’ frightened the public into begging for stricter security measures “as a masochist begs for the whip”? What’s to stop ‘them’ from going all-the-way totalitarian now? Especially since the sort of general, populist movement discussed herein would seem to be totally out of the question now…even simple discourse between basically “good Americans” who disagree with one another on certain issues (yet who may have common ground elsewhere that neither side recognizes) seems to have given way to blindly partisan personal attacks and pointless bashing of the ‘other’. The left wing is no different from the right when it comes to this. I wonder: could this complete lack of discourse be engineered? Could it be that a broad populist movement, or in fact any real discourse between the parties, is indeed intentionally suppressed?