Politicians Come And Go… The Machinery Of Oppression Remains

Authored by John W. Whitehead via OffGuardian,

“There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame?” V for Vendetta

A revolution can topple a tyrant without dismantling tyranny.

An election can replace a president without curbing the powers of the presidency.

A new political majority can inherit the instruments of repression and adapt them to their own purposes.

In other words, what good is a political change if the weapons of oppression merely change hands?

After a midterm election that saw billions of dollars spent on political advertising and a Democratic wave sweep Republicans out of power in Congress, Americans have once again been promised a new direction for the country.

The voters have spoken. The balance of power in Washington has shifted. A new Congress will have the opportunity to rein in an imperial presidency and hold the government accountable for its abuses.

But the question that must rightfully be asked is: what comes next?

Will Congress finally rein in the surveillance state, the militarization of the police, the detention machinery, the endless wars, the government spending spree and the corporate interests that profit from the American police state? Or will the politicians settle back into their comfortable routines while the government machine keeps right on running?

This is where Hollywood’s dystopian warnings become disturbingly relevant.

Twenty years ago, V for Vendetta offered moviegoers a terrifying glimpse of a future in which government surveillance was everywhere, dissent was dangerous, the media served as an instrument of state propaganda, and the promise of safety had become an excuse for stripping people of their freedoms.

It was supposed to be a warning about how easily a free people can become accustomed to living without freedom – and how little good it does to replace the people in power if the machinery of tyranny remains intact.

Two decades later, the twentieth-anniversary screenings coinciding with Guy Fawkes Day – a pivotal day in the film’s plot – on November 5 remind us that the questions the film raises about freedom, fear and government power have lost none of their urgency or relevance.

Released in 2006 and set in a future Britain ruled by Norsefire, a fascist regime, V for Vendetta depicts a country in which the government knows all, sees all, controls the airwaves, and promises safety and security above all. Behind those promises lies a machinery of surveillance, detention, censorship and intimidation. People who refuse to conform can be branded enemies of the state. Others simply disappear.

Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

The imagery borrows from the Third Reich and George Orwell’s 1984. London is blanketed by surveillance cameras, subjected to curfews and fed a steady diet of official warnings. Political prisoners are detained and tortured. The regime makes enemies of those who refuse to fall in line, while much of the population retreats into televised entertainment and the comforting illusion that someone else is in charge of keeping them safe.

The parallels to the modern-day American police state’s methods for entrenching its powers are hard to ignore: exploiting fear, demonizing dissent, turning security into a blank check and treating constitutional restraints as inconveniences.

As director James McTeigue observed in a recent interview marking V for Vendetta‘s twentieth anniversary, the political circumstances may change, but the methods used by authoritarian governments remain remarkably consistent, and the same struggles over executive authority, government control and the suppression of dissent continue to resurface.

“It’s always the same playbook,” McTeigue warned.

Yet the film’s most unsettling lesson is not that tyranny arrives all at once but that people can be frightened, distracted, entertained and worn down until they begin accepting as normal what once would have been unthinkable.

That is how a government supposedly created to serve the people becomes a power unto itself.

All the while the citizenry is expected to obey, pay up, keep quiet and show gratitude for whatever scraps of liberty the government machine permits them to retain.

In Vendetta, television screens dominate the film’s public life. Norsefire’s official broadcasts present the government as the people’s protector while casting dissenters as dangerous enemies. What the public hears is not an independent account of events but a carefully managed version of reality. The state’s power depends as much on controlling the story as on controlling the streets.

Then there is Gordon Dietrich, the television personality who dares to ridicule the chancellor. For that act of satire, government enforcers come for him. His fate makes the regime’s message clear: ridicule the rulers, question the official story, step out of line, and the machinery of repression will come knocking.

But propaganda is only one weapon in the oppressor’s toolbox. Fear does the rest.

Evey Hammond is confined, interrogated, threatened and presented with a choice between submission and death. In one of the film’s cruelest turns, she discovers that V himself staged her captivity. The man fighting tyranny has adopted some of its methods. Her ordeal exposes not only how fear can be used to break a human being, but how easily a self-appointed liberator can become another tormentor.

That contradiction should give us pause.

It’s one thing to recognize that government abuses can drive people to desperation. It is quite another to assume that anyone who promises to destroy an oppressive system will replace it with freedom.

Other dystopian films drive the point home.

In Land of the Blind, released the same year as V for Vendetta, a soldier helps overthrow a brutal ruler, only to watch the revolutionary leader establish another repressive regime.

In The Hunger Games, President Snow’s defeat does not automatically bring justice. President Coin, who leads the rebellion against him, proposes another Hunger Games – this time using the children of the defeated Capitol. Although the names and uniforms change, the logic of cruelty remains.

The point is not that elections are meaningless or that every political leader is the same, but we cannot vote our way out of tyranny if we keep voting to hand someone else the keys to the police state.

That is the cycle at work in V for Vendetta and in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries.

Authoritarian regimes manipulate fear, punish dissent and treat critics as enemies of the state. In doing so, they may breed the unrest they claim to be suppressing, then point to that unrest as proof that still more power is needed.

The police state is a make-works system: it is hard-wired to ensure its own survival.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuses of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has little regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

By “government,” I’m not referring merely to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to government with a capital “G”: the entrenched Deep State, the sprawling network of agencies, contractors, surveillance systems, security bureaucracies and accumulated powers that is largely unaffected by elections and increasingly insulated from accountability.

The politicians come and go. The machinery of government remains.

What one president puts in place, the next inherits. What one political party condemns when it is out of power, it may find remarkably useful once it controls the machinery of government.

Consider what has remained largely unchanged despite decades of elections, campaign promises and assurances that this time things will be different.

The American people are still being subjected to invasive government surveillance, with intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials acquiring ever-greater means of monitoring our communications, movements, associations and private lives.

The technology has changed dramatically since V for Vendetta arrived in theaters, but the government’s appetite for knowing everything about everyone has hardly diminished.

Indeed, agencies within the Department of Homeland Security have purchased access to commercially collected cellphone-location data that would allow the government to circumvent constitutional privacy protections by buying information that would otherwise require judicial authorization to obtain.

In other words, the surveillance state no longer needs a camera on every street corner. Americans carry much of the technology needed to monitor their movements in their own pockets.

Meanwhile, the militarization of America’s police forces continues. Through federal equipment-transfer programs and other funding mechanisms, local law enforcement agencies have gained access to military equipment and capabilities, further blurring the distinction between policing a community and occupying a battlefield. The federal government’s own records show that this transfer apparatus remains active.

Neither has the government abandoned its increasingly punitive approach to dealing with the citizenry.

We are still contending with an enormous system of prisons, jails and detention facilities; laws that criminalize an ever-expanding range of conduct; and government agencies that too often treat due process as an obstacle to enforcement rather than a constitutional obligation.

Nor have successive administrations managed to dismantle the military-industrial complex, end the government’s dependence on endless military commitments abroad, curb its appetite for taxpayer dollars or sever the cozy relationship between government power and corporate profit.

The war machine keeps running.

The surveillance apparatus keeps expanding.

The government contractors keep collecting their checks.

And the taxpayers keep footing the bill.

All the while, we are encouraged to believe that everything will change if only we elect the right people.

We’re in trouble, folks.

We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers whose labor and tax dollars keep the government machine running, while those in power remain largely insulated from the indignities and injustices inflicted on ordinary Americans.

This is the illusion of freedom: that we are free so long as the government permits us to be free, that our rights are secure so long as those in power choose to respect them, and that our constitutional protections can be suspended whenever government officials utter the magic words “national security.”

But the Bill of Rights was not intended to be a bill of temporary privileges, handed out by the government machine and taken back whenever those in power find them inconvenient.

And the Constitution was not written to ensure the survival of the government at any cost. It was written to restrain government power and protect the freedoms of the people it was created to serve.

Yet here we are, being asked to trust that the latest political victors will somehow use the same extraordinary powers more responsibly than their predecessors.

That is the great deception of the American police state.

The citizenry is repeatedly offered the same rotten bargain: surrender a little more privacy, accept a little less due process, tolerate another restriction on freedom, and the government will keep you safe.

And when those powers are abused, the public is told to wait for the next election, the next Congress, the next president, the next political savior.

Round and round we go.

The predators of the police state keep right on operating, no matter who wins an election.

As V for Vendetta, Land of the Blind and The Hunger Games remind us, replacing the people who operate the machinery of tyranny is not the same as dismantling it.

So how do we wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

It won’t be easy.

But the answer cannot be to put our faith in another politician, another election or another promise that this time the machinery of government will be used for good.

The Founders understood something that Americans seem to have forgotten: the greatest danger to freedom is not simply who holds power, but how much power government is permitted to wield.

That is why they established a system of checks and balances, dividing authority among three coequal branches of government – the executive, legislative and judicial branches – and placing constitutional limits on each.

Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

The Constitution was not written on the assumption that those entrusted with power would always be wise, benevolent or restrained. It was written with the understanding that power corrupts, that government officials are fallible, and that power once seized is rarely surrendered willingly.

Yet we have lingered too long in a strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents – enabled by compliant legislatures, deferential courts and a distracted populace – claim powers that should never belong to one office alone.

Congress has too often surrendered its constitutional responsibilities. The courts have too often deferred to government claims of authority. And the executive branch has continued to accumulate powers that the Framers never intended any one individual to possess.

This is how the machinery of tyranny survives elections.

The newly elected Congress has an opportunity to provide a meaningful constitutional check on executive power. It can investigate government abuses, demand accountability, exercise its legislative authority and refuse to rubber-stamp an imperial presidency. But if the new majority merely substitutes partisan retribution for constitutional accountability, or defends the same abuses when they serve its own political interests, the machinery of tyranny will remain intact.

The test is not whether Congress can make life miserable for the president. The test is whether it can make government obey the Constitution.

When the constitutional checks on government fail, replacing one set of rulers with another does little to change the underlying balance of power.

The answer is not to find a better ruler. It is to ensure that no ruler – no president, no Congress, no government agency – is permitted to operate beyond the restraints of the Constitution.

There is no ten-step plan for recovering a free society.

If there were, however, the first step would be simple: stop treating politics as a spectator sport and do your part to defend freedom principles in your own community.

Stand up for your own rights, of course. But more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you disagree. Defend freedom when the speaker is offensive, the accused is unpopular or the person being targeted has a different race, religion, nationality, immigration status, politics or point of view. The Bill of Rights is not a reward for good behavior or a privilege reserved for people who think like us.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. Don’t excuse a constitutional abuse because your preferred party happens to be in power. When officials sidestep the Constitution, demand that they obey it.

That’s their job. Make them do it.

When a neighbor’s rights are threatened, defend them as if they were your own.

Twenty years after V for Vendetta reached theaters, its warning is not simply that a free people can be frightened into submission. It is that they can be persuaded, again and again, that someone new will save them if only they surrender a little more power.

Land of the Blind and The Hunger Games offer the sequel to that warning: overthrowing one tyranny means little if the next government inherits its habits and its weapons.

As I have made clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

The most frightening future is not one in which the wrong candidate wins or a dictator refuses to leave office. It is one in which the citizenry keeps changing the people in charge while allowing the machinery of tyranny to remain intact.

Freedom requires more than a vote.

It requires a government that is forced to play by the rules of the Constitution – and a citizenry willing to hold those in public office accountable when they don’t, no matter which party is in power.

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