FALCONS ARE PREDATORS

Mike Whitney has a jaw-dropping report over on Atlantic Free Press (“Operation FALCON and the Looming Police State”, (http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1055/81/).

It’s one of those put-things-together pieces that enables us to suddenly climb above the Fog of Daily Events and clearly perceive a pattern threaded in among the boom-buzz.

In this case: since 2005 the government has been ‘coordinating’ local and State as well as federal police agencies, and these armadas of cops have been conducting ‘sweeps’ named Operation Falcon (I and II have already been held).

Whitney leads off his piece with a quotation from Hitler’s justification of the Night of the Long Knives in June, 1934: his sudden round-up of S.A. leaders without warrants and executing them without trial or any judicial process whatsoever. It was an ‘emergency’, Hitler said matter-of-factly, and no good leader can stand by when his people are threatened by such evil. Ja.

Once again, the treacherous Alberto Gonzales – this time assisted by the Director of the US Marshal’s Office, one Ben Reyna – is behind this. The Marshal’s Office is a shrewd pick: a 2nd-tier ‘law enforcement’ agency, but with a national writ: it isn’t as loaded with baggage and claimed-turf as are the FBI, DEA, and others, yet it can operate nationwide to implement the plan.

The plan, actually, is even more classically Hitlerian than the quotation and the round-up context suggests. Whitney is right to focus on the very early 1930s when considering historical precedents to our present situation here; most Americans – those who are still even modestly familiar with the Second World War era at all – are familiar with the period 1939-1945, the span of the War itself in Europe. But it was in the very early 1930s that Hitler began his quick march through German society and government. The task was to subvert and control the government and the people as quickly as possible without at the same time frightening them with the full vision of what he had in store for them and the country.

The overall strategy he called “Gleichschaltung”, the ‘coordination’ of all institutions of the German nation and State so as to operate more ‘efficiently’ with the central (and Nazi) government in Berlin. We often forget that in January 1933 all that Hitler took over was the Chancellorship of a democratic, constitutional Republic, and one whose individual states (Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, and so forth) were still kind of independent of the government in Berlin, and had become especially so since the abdication of the Kaiser in 1918. Hitler’s immediate problem was to bring all of the still-powerful State governments under the control of the national government in Berlin.

Thus universities and schools, the media, the unions, even the churches would be ‘coordinated’ with the government in Berlin and thus with the Nazi plan and vision. So while the States were put under increasing pressure to cede authority to Berlin, they were also undermined by the Nazis’ going directly to the various institutions and in yet another end-run going directly to the people (das Volk) themselves.

But first the police. Before anything else, the police agencies had to be ‘coordinated’ throughout the country. Goring and later Himmler held the post of head of the Prussian police, and authority over the police agencies of the several German States was quickly transferred to them in order to meet the ongoing ‘emergency’ of German existence more efficiently. Who could say no to that?

From Hollywood, we picture Germany in that time as run by the Gestapo in long leather coats and wide-brimmed fedoras, and by the S.S. in their black uniforms and boots. But there weren’t that many of either, really (Hitler never managed to achieve the proportional saturation of police agents to citizens that Stalin and the postwar Communist satellites achieved); much of Hitler’s police work was done by local guys just doing their job, their mothers and wives and kids happy that Pappi wasn’t on the Eastern Front. Just local kids doing their bit. And once the police were ‘coordinated’, then Goebbels went right to work making them ‘heroes’, and would any good German disobey such heroes?

Whitney’s report on the FALCON initiative, therefore, is a huge and terrible piece of news. Taken in conjunction – as Whitney notes – with the Military Commissions Act, the Homeland Security Act, the Patriot Acts, the Warner Defense Authorization Act, and I would add the effort to secure control of all of the U.S. Attorneys (to ‘coordinate’ against troublesome citizens a-n-d to prevent prosecutions of Bushista pals) this FALCON initiative is revealed as the implementation of the actual, hand-on, boots-on-the-ground, operational control of the police throughout the nation – down to the local level. How excited the local and State officers are about all this is a greatly interesting question. And an urgent one. Far earlier than any of our troops who might one day be deployed domestically, the cops may find themselves in the position of being ordered to do things to American citizens … and unlike the troops, cops are naturally set up to work in and among the citizenry, and to arrest folks, and lock them up, and even shoot them if the occasion arises.

The justification of 'efficiency' and the minimization that it's 'just more efficient' and 'just the next logical step' have to be dismissed forthwith. Democracy, and certainly this one, is precisely designed not to be efficient. The checks-and-balances are there precisely to keep a too-great momentum from building up. They serve as baffles in a tanker: to keep the fluid from building up an inertial momentum that enables it to overturn the whole rig. It may be a tad 'inefficient' for the freee flow of the fluid, but that - for the sake of survival - is precisely the point: the fluid, which is the reason the tanker is built, can destroy the tanker if it's not prevented by those 'inefficient' but utterly life-saving baffles. Bush's 'war', and the 'war on crime' that has led to the Krime state, both lubricate - from Right and from Left - the slide toward the utter efficiency (in theory, anyway) of totalitarian and military government. And history shows that by the time such a theory is proven to be a deadly pipedream, death and destruction are almost always triumphant.

It is an open question whether all of this represents an abstract course that any central government would – upon reflection - have to devise and follow in order to perfect its control of a democratically divided nation, or whether the Bush government (very possibly with the help of those eerily Central-European, World-War-Two-besotted neocons) is actually running Hitler’s gameplan here and now. And all this time we’ve been mocking the truly mockable neocons for ‘doing’ Churchill; when all the while they’ve really been channeling Hitler. You can’t leave History alone for a minute, folks! You cain’t never tell where in tarnation that sum-bee’s gonna head off to next! Stonewall Jackson and Hitler – courtesy of the Fundamentalist Southrons and the Hapsburgian neocons.

And don’t look so surprised. Since 1945 we’ve taken a whole bunch of stuff from Hitler: rockets and ballistic missiles, jets, blitzkrieg (now known more cockily as Shock & Awe), the whole concept of Air-Land Warfare, and even the damned shape of the helmets. Before the present sad exigencies occasioned by the problems on our own eastern front, it was the dream of every Army and Marine troop commander to instill into his unit the remarkable spirit and initiative instituted throughout the enlisted, NCO, and junior-officer ranks of the Wehrmacht; not – of course – that you’d ever say it straight out at an American Legion rubber-chicken banquet.

And Whitney blesses us with the news that the neocon American Enterprise Institute is already proposing to Congress that in the event of a ‘major catastrophic emergency’ it be permitted to the Executive to APPOINT persons to Congress. But of course! And we could call it the Kongress-tag, or the Reichskongress, or – why complicate things? – the Reichstag.

After what Congress has supinely and treacherously allowed over the course of the Twelve Years, would we get good odds from any bookie on this possibility?

The FALCON sweeps were announced in media articles that all seemed suspiciously the same, glorifying the program. Even more suspiciously, he reports, most of those articles have now disappeared from Google. And how does anything ever disappear from Google? Have you ever tried to get inaccurate stuff about yourself erased from Google? Google, like the SS and the Gestapo, never ever destroys a file.

And of course, the FALCON ‘emergencies’ were aimed at those handy horribles: sex offenders. Who could argue with swooping down like flocks of predator-birds to sweep up sex-offenders? Soccer moms are down with that; and we might recall in those numerous film clips of Berlin parades after 1934, there were a lot of very proper looking ladies – flowered hats, tasteful gloves and accessories, who had mastered the intricacies of holding a handbag and not exposing one’s underarm (the horror!) while yet delivering an enthusiastic Nazi straight-arm salute. Ever resourceful! Of course, the best solution for the problem is to get oneself and one’s hubby invited to the private reception, where one can dispense with the raucous salute and simply burble one’s name to Power over a flute of champagne. Ach ja. Sehr tastevoll.

In an earlier Post on this site (“When Crime Goes Bad”) it had been proposed that we are now faced with a new and very dangerous phenomenon: the purposeful use of ‘Crime’ to stampede and manipulate The People into accepting the increasing – perhaps defining - police power of the central government. A society thus governed by the (impossible) goal of eliminating ‘Crime’, a society thus wracked by wave after wave of ‘crimes’ and ‘criminals’ whose significance is purely virtual, virtually created overnight, a society thus addled and beset by such an endless cycle of ‘emergencies of Crime’ is a society beset by Krime. And a government that deploys ‘Crime’ primarily for the purposes of extending its police power and controlling the citizenry through fear and anxiety is the National Krime State.

I also think that for the purposes of this Krime State sex-offenders play the role of the homosexuals and the Jews in the early years of the Third Reich: their ‘crimes’, and even their very presence among das Volk – walking among them and participating in society, constituted an ‘emergency’ for which the police power had to be expanded and the police to be allowed to do things that would not under normal circumstances be tolerated.

Who remembers ‘sex offenses’ before 15-20 years ago? Was there ever a time when sexual assaults were legal? Was there ever a time when sex with children was considered a good thing, consensual or otherwise? No. And yet suddenly, in the huge betrayals of the hugely wasted 1990s, there are ‘sex offenders’ and ‘sex offenses’, uttered in the same tones that were once reserved for ‘communists’ and ‘witches’. And – far more ominously, and far more relevant to what we are facing now – the police power of the States and of the central government was expanded to deal with the emergency.

The question has been posed more than once on this site: can it be any surprise that having watched the successful invention and deployment of the ‘sex offender’ in the 1990s (and in Clinton’s Administration), in 2001 the Incumbency felt like it could invent Saddam as a world-threatening dictator and literally create out of whole cloth his imminently deployable weapons of mass destruction? It’s not hard to imagine that on the basis of watching Our sorry performance in the sex-offender mania, then selling pre-emptive war on Saddam would be a slam-dunk and a cake-walk and that the war’s creators in Washington would be greeted as liberators BY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. And so they were. Until they lost. Americans are nothing if not practical, and there’s nothing more practical than losing interest in a losing cause. Especially when the losing cause starts to demonstrate a distinct ability to generate unpleasant consequences.

The sex-offender mania is only just beginning to demonstrate its consequences, the ones that weren’t printed up in the brochure: perversion of our system of laws and of Law itself; perversion of our law enforcement; perversion of scientific, medical, and psychological expertise in the service of extending and sustaining the mania; perversion even of our political structures as Congress found it impossible as well as unpleasant to make any attempt to infuse reason and proportion into such discussion as was allowed; perversion of our Constitutional ethos as police powers and prosecutorial authority were engorged by legislators and law-makers at all levels who were eager to avoid looking like obstructors of the ‘justice’ or being tarred as ‘supporters’ of perversion. The hot ironies!

And how similar then was the sorry, supine, infamous and treacherous truckling to the Unitarium after 2001, when ‘Islamofascist totalitarians’ became the ‘sex offenders’ of American foreign affairs, and it was lazily decidered to just go swoop-and-scoop those raghead pervs and toss their asses in the hoosegow after a nice perp-walk and Register ‘em all. Yah. That works. Maybe make’em wear tee-shirts and have to use colored license-plates. Maybe even wear a colored triangle on their clothing – no, wait, that’s not an Islamic thing … that’s … ach ja.

History and Consequences are coming back. In fact, they’re here. Adapting themselves to current American praxis, they may not stop to knock when they come through the front door.