: John W. Whitehead
: Battlefield America The War On the American People
: SelectBooks, Inc.
: 9781590793152
: 1
: CHF 9.80
:
: Gesellschaft
: English
: 352
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
In Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the follow-up to his award-winning book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead paints a terrifying portrait of a nation at war with itself and which is on the verge of undermining the basic freedoms guaranteed to the citizenry in the Constitution. Indeed, police have been transformed into extensions of the military, towns and cities have become battlefields, and the American people have been turned into enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.
CHAPTER 4
The Dismal State of Our Freedoms
“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.”1—Author TOM CLANCY
Imagine living in a country where armed soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for criticizing government officials. Imagine that in this very same country, you’re watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you on the off-chance you’re doing something illegal. Keep in mind that if you have a firearm of any kind while in this country, it may get you arrested or, worse, shot and killed by agents of the government.
If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong. However, the scenario described above took place more than two hundred years ago, when American colonists suffered under Britain’s prenatal version of a police state. It was only when the colonists got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.
Any attempt to understand the dismal state of our freedoms in the present day must start with an understanding of where it all began.
The Founding “Terrorists”?
No document better states the colonists’ grievances than the Declaration of Independence. A document seething with outrage over a government that had abused those in its care, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by fifty-six men who laid everything on the line and pledged it all—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free.
Had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants. (Illustration by Caroline Jonik)
Brande