Anti Federalist
02-02-2011, 06:54 PM
Long, but worth the read.
Egypt, Like Its U.S. Model, Is a Totalitarian Secret And Indirect Police State
by Jack D. Douglas
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/77220.html#more-77220
Vast numbers of American tourists pour into Egypt, mostly into Cairo, every year to see the incredible pyramids and the other historical wonders and beauties of Egypt. They are generally intrigued by the friendly people who speak pretty good English within the tourist enclave of Egyptian society, the world of taxi drivers, hotels, restaurants and the historical sites. They sometimes get a glimpse of the vast Lower Depths of Egyptian society, the tens of millions of very poor people living literally on the margin of subsistence, commonly about $2 a day for a typical family earned each day. But few seem to realize that Egypt is one of the most terrible police states in the world. The vastly secret Interior ministry, which to Americans sounds like a benevolent department of government running national parks, is said to have about one and a half million people spying on Egyptians and everyone else and “maintaining law and order” by ordinary policing, torture and murder. And the Egyptian “siloviki” [Russian for all the present and former members of the secret security forces working together] are far more omnipresent and unseen.
It is these “plainclothes” secret police who pose as gang members to beat and disappear anyone who protests too loudly, as they did in these current revolutionary eruptions. Tourists would almost never realize the “thugs” beating young protestors are really professional secret police like the FBI, CIA, ATFA, DEA, etcetc. Once in a while the American secret police get caught on camera attacking and even murdering young people, even women and children, as happened at Waco when Bill Clinton and his AG, Janet Reno, sent them in with heavy arms, including tanks belching fire to set the building on fire to burn the women and children alive. But these brutal attacks by the secret police are far more common in Egypt and most of the other puppet regime tyrannies in the Middle East built up by the U.S. over many decades to protect Big Oil interests.
Egypt looks like a pretty free society, since people can come and go and taxi drivers seem to talk freely, if not often about the secret police or Mubarak’s totalitarian tyranny. It seems on the surface to be in that way an “open society.” But it is a society with a smiling, partially open surface behind which lurks a vast tyranny of the government and oligarchs “made “secure” by the vast secret police who may be literally anywhere and everywhere, but not seen, blending into the everyday life more than Soviet KGB agents commonly did in their much more limited numbers inside the USSR borders.
The totalitarian police state of Egypt is largely built on the U.S. Model of Secret-Systemic Totalitarianism. In some ways it is less totalitarian than the U.S. and in some ways it is more so. There are always variations around the Prime Model of Totalitarianism at any time, as we saw in all of the Marxist-Socialist-Communist states from the USSR to China and N. Korea and Cuba and so on. Egypt has a large prison population, but Prison Nation U.S.A. is the extreme Prison Nation when you look at all of the massive juvenile prisons, halfway houses, house arrest, drug knock downs, psychiatric wards and drug-controls, parole, probation, investigation, arraignment, trials, sentences, imprisonments, jailings, and so on. But Egypt has more systematic and blatant torture chambers, so much so that the U.S. has used them to do U.S. torturing in many instances [such as CIA "Renditions"]. The U.S. tortures prisoners more by using drugs, putting weak prisoners in with strong homosexual rapists, etc., to hide its tortures far better.
All of these totalitarian systems, as I have shown over decades, watch each other closely for ways to better hide their totalitarian powers, secret police, failings, tortures, etc., and to learn new, more effective techniques of deceiving and lying in the Media without getting caught, torturing to inflict maximum pain with the least visible wounds and the best data, etc. They copy each other when it seems useful, just like any professionals in any occupation. TOTALITARIAN SECRET POLICE ARE AMONG THE BIGGEST PROFESSIONS IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY USE ALL THE EFFECTIVE DEVICES OF PROFESSIONALISM, INCLUDING JOURNALS, RESEARCH, ETC.
Egypt has obviously followed the U.S. Model far more than the U.S. has followed their newer and far less professional and scientific model of totalitarian research and work.
But the U.S. has recently been rushing under Obama’s Party regime to get control of the internet and all means of communications for the day when the slaves revolt and in doing so they are apparently following in Egypt’s footsteps, though I think the basic research and plans for total MEDIA CONTROLS IN EMERGENCIES LIKE SLAVE REVOLTS were developed in the U.S. earlier. The U.S. plans were exposed to the slaves and that created PR problems, so they have been searching for “New Rationalizations” to deceive the slaves. The Egyptians put it into effect more quietly and easily and are using those plans and technical methods right now. The U.S. pros are there watching to learn how to do it better and acting as secret consultants for the Egyptian secret police and Army psyops and cyberwarriors. Count on it. That’s how real pros work.
Aa I have also argued for decades, the U.S. text books and Media present absurdly extreme ideas to Americans about what “totalitarianism” is.
They pretend a society is only a totalitarian police state when the police spy directly on everyone, including children on parents in the home, and are always invading homes and hauling people off for torture because they say “evil things” about the regime or Big Brother. Even Albania and East Germany could not achieve that extreme! The great majority of Germans were more free frrm secret poli ce observation and controls than most Americans are today. The Gestapo had very limited manpower and none of the massive, secret electronic spying the U.S. sixteen secret police armies at the federal level alone use to spy on our communications and analyze them with AI software to find “dangerous” things.
A far smaller percentage of the German population was in the open-air concentration camps than Americans in the concrete and steel dungeons and they used almost no drugs to knock people down or silence them. [The six million people murdered in secret death camps were almost all in top secret camps abroad and the people who were killed were from a huge part of Europe and from specific groups--Jews mostly, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally retarded....] The American torture and death camps are also mostly done abroad to “enemies.”
ALMOST ALL OF THE MODERN TOTALITARIAN POLICE STATES TODAY RELY AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE ON THE MOST INDIRECT AND MOST EFFECTIVE MEANS OF SPYING, TORTURING, IMPRISONING, AND MURDERING WHICH THEY CAN DEVELOP WITH SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.
The U.S. found long ago that taxation hurts less and is less resisted if it is “withheld” before the “donor” receives the money. They learned also that using inflation, by pouring out more paper dollars for the same amount of economic transactions, is the most indirect, least seen, least understood form of taxation. And having the Fed set interest rates to drain money form savers like old people to give it to the very rich in the Big Banks and other Big Corps. and Hedge Fund speculators, etc., is almost never understood by ordinary Americans, so the government has gone to more and more indirect ways of taxing and expropriating from one group to give to another. The same is true of central planning. If you massively plan the lives of people in detail, as Gosplan did to a large degree in the USSR in the early days of the Stalinist high tyranny, they get mad as hell and revolt.
So the government moved more and more to using “indicative central planning” by which the government plans and controls general indices and activities which create a general, wrap around situation of choice of the citizens. They get to choose, but only within the context set by the government and its vast legal and regulatory agencies, so they wind up choosing only from the alternatives which the government approves of–plans and controls by determining the wrap around situations.
The U.S. has the most vast spying and secret police system in the history of the world. Most of the spying is done indirectly and very secretly by the NSA and all of the other fifteen known federal secret police armies. The NSA spies on the U.S. and the entire world through vast systems using all of the media known to mankind, from billions of telephone intercepts every day to spy satellites circling the globe to listening devices under the oceans to drone tv and plane radar and radio interception to massive internet and other print surveys, including secret surveys and analyses of all major financial transactions. Even vast armies of government workers who do not look like secret police feed masses of personal, supposedly private data into this immense system of U.S. Omni-Spying. Internal Revenue and overt police date of all kinds feed into this System The vast “private” security cameras now placed almost everywhere in our stores, schools, hospitals, apartments and streets are almost instantly available to the Omni-Spying System of the U.S.
NO SOCIETY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD HAS BEEN SECRETLY, INDIRECTLY SPIED ON TO THE VAST DEGREE AMERICANS ARE SPIED ON BY THE FEDERAL, STATE AND LCCAL GOVERNMENTS. As any data search worker can tell you, there is almost nothing about Americans in print, sound or videos that is not easily accessed and surveyed and used to control you directly or indirectly.
NO SOCIETY IN HISTORY HAS HAD SUCH AN IMMENSE PROPORTION OF ITS POPULATION INVOLVED IN PROFESSIONAL SECRET POLICE AND OVERT POLICE AND CONTROLLERS OF ALL KINDS AT THE FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL LEVELS. A few states infamous for their direct totalitarianism, such as Albania and East Germany and North Korea, may at times have had a greater proportion of civilian, part time spies in neighborhoods, but the U.S. relies overwhelmingly on the far more indirect, secret Omni-Spying of the NSA and other secret armies of professionals.
I AND MANY OTHER PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WRITING ABOUT THIS RAPID GROWTH OF THE OMNI-SPYING AND INDIRECT, WRAP AROUND TOTALITARIAN SYSTEM OF THE U.S. SECRET POLICE STATE FOR DECADES. Almost all intelligent academics, scientists, intellectuals, journalists and higher level government workers know about it in some vague way, just as was true in Nazi Germany, the communist USSR and other societies. But they have almost all chosen to play deaf and dumb and blind and stupid to what is happening because anyone who deals with it in major public settings is “banished” by the modern disappearance from the System, which can be devastating to one’s life in all ways. Some pretend we need this System for our own safety and well being, but that is as insane as shooting yourself in the head to save yourself from a sore foot.
This vast, growing central planning and control of American lives directly and indirectly by all possible means, including the immense spying and secret police activities, have distorted our society more and more, pushed us into vast inflationary-deflationary Booms and Busts, and is now destroying the foundations of our economy and more and more of our lives. The inflation-deflation cycles obscure the fact that we are trending down faster and faster in all basic ways, from education and science and technology to jobs, incomes, and health. The Fed is quietly rigging the whole system of paper money, finance and credit to move incomes away from the middle classes to the very rich, the Oligarchs. People are suffering more and more across a growing spectrum of life and are getting more and more depressed, anxious, and enraged. We seem clearly to be in a Great Crisis produced by the government planning, controls and expropriating money by the Fed to build the immense wealth of the Oligarchy. We are trapped in the spiral downward that led to the crash and implosion of the Soviet Global Empire, except that we are suffering far greater Bubbles of inflation which are very destructive. Since the Republicrat Party controls the laws to prevent the emergence of an independent political reform party, just as the Soviets and Egyptians did but in different ways, the “reforms” of the System even in this Great Crisis are absurd charades which will only make things worse.
It seems very clear that at some point the U.S. will face the same kind of mass revolt of the people we have seen in the USSR, Egypt and many other societies in recent decades.
__________
Jack D. Douglas is professor emeritus of sociology at UCSD
Egypt, Like Its U.S. Model, Is a Totalitarian Secret And Indirect Police State
by Jack D. Douglas
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/77220.html#more-77220
Vast numbers of American tourists pour into Egypt, mostly into Cairo, every year to see the incredible pyramids and the other historical wonders and beauties of Egypt. They are generally intrigued by the friendly people who speak pretty good English within the tourist enclave of Egyptian society, the world of taxi drivers, hotels, restaurants and the historical sites. They sometimes get a glimpse of the vast Lower Depths of Egyptian society, the tens of millions of very poor people living literally on the margin of subsistence, commonly about $2 a day for a typical family earned each day. But few seem to realize that Egypt is one of the most terrible police states in the world. The vastly secret Interior ministry, which to Americans sounds like a benevolent department of government running national parks, is said to have about one and a half million people spying on Egyptians and everyone else and “maintaining law and order” by ordinary policing, torture and murder. And the Egyptian “siloviki” [Russian for all the present and former members of the secret security forces working together] are far more omnipresent and unseen.
It is these “plainclothes” secret police who pose as gang members to beat and disappear anyone who protests too loudly, as they did in these current revolutionary eruptions. Tourists would almost never realize the “thugs” beating young protestors are really professional secret police like the FBI, CIA, ATFA, DEA, etcetc. Once in a while the American secret police get caught on camera attacking and even murdering young people, even women and children, as happened at Waco when Bill Clinton and his AG, Janet Reno, sent them in with heavy arms, including tanks belching fire to set the building on fire to burn the women and children alive. But these brutal attacks by the secret police are far more common in Egypt and most of the other puppet regime tyrannies in the Middle East built up by the U.S. over many decades to protect Big Oil interests.
Egypt looks like a pretty free society, since people can come and go and taxi drivers seem to talk freely, if not often about the secret police or Mubarak’s totalitarian tyranny. It seems on the surface to be in that way an “open society.” But it is a society with a smiling, partially open surface behind which lurks a vast tyranny of the government and oligarchs “made “secure” by the vast secret police who may be literally anywhere and everywhere, but not seen, blending into the everyday life more than Soviet KGB agents commonly did in their much more limited numbers inside the USSR borders.
The totalitarian police state of Egypt is largely built on the U.S. Model of Secret-Systemic Totalitarianism. In some ways it is less totalitarian than the U.S. and in some ways it is more so. There are always variations around the Prime Model of Totalitarianism at any time, as we saw in all of the Marxist-Socialist-Communist states from the USSR to China and N. Korea and Cuba and so on. Egypt has a large prison population, but Prison Nation U.S.A. is the extreme Prison Nation when you look at all of the massive juvenile prisons, halfway houses, house arrest, drug knock downs, psychiatric wards and drug-controls, parole, probation, investigation, arraignment, trials, sentences, imprisonments, jailings, and so on. But Egypt has more systematic and blatant torture chambers, so much so that the U.S. has used them to do U.S. torturing in many instances [such as CIA "Renditions"]. The U.S. tortures prisoners more by using drugs, putting weak prisoners in with strong homosexual rapists, etc., to hide its tortures far better.
All of these totalitarian systems, as I have shown over decades, watch each other closely for ways to better hide their totalitarian powers, secret police, failings, tortures, etc., and to learn new, more effective techniques of deceiving and lying in the Media without getting caught, torturing to inflict maximum pain with the least visible wounds and the best data, etc. They copy each other when it seems useful, just like any professionals in any occupation. TOTALITARIAN SECRET POLICE ARE AMONG THE BIGGEST PROFESSIONS IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY USE ALL THE EFFECTIVE DEVICES OF PROFESSIONALISM, INCLUDING JOURNALS, RESEARCH, ETC.
Egypt has obviously followed the U.S. Model far more than the U.S. has followed their newer and far less professional and scientific model of totalitarian research and work.
But the U.S. has recently been rushing under Obama’s Party regime to get control of the internet and all means of communications for the day when the slaves revolt and in doing so they are apparently following in Egypt’s footsteps, though I think the basic research and plans for total MEDIA CONTROLS IN EMERGENCIES LIKE SLAVE REVOLTS were developed in the U.S. earlier. The U.S. plans were exposed to the slaves and that created PR problems, so they have been searching for “New Rationalizations” to deceive the slaves. The Egyptians put it into effect more quietly and easily and are using those plans and technical methods right now. The U.S. pros are there watching to learn how to do it better and acting as secret consultants for the Egyptian secret police and Army psyops and cyberwarriors. Count on it. That’s how real pros work.
Aa I have also argued for decades, the U.S. text books and Media present absurdly extreme ideas to Americans about what “totalitarianism” is.
They pretend a society is only a totalitarian police state when the police spy directly on everyone, including children on parents in the home, and are always invading homes and hauling people off for torture because they say “evil things” about the regime or Big Brother. Even Albania and East Germany could not achieve that extreme! The great majority of Germans were more free frrm secret poli ce observation and controls than most Americans are today. The Gestapo had very limited manpower and none of the massive, secret electronic spying the U.S. sixteen secret police armies at the federal level alone use to spy on our communications and analyze them with AI software to find “dangerous” things.
A far smaller percentage of the German population was in the open-air concentration camps than Americans in the concrete and steel dungeons and they used almost no drugs to knock people down or silence them. [The six million people murdered in secret death camps were almost all in top secret camps abroad and the people who were killed were from a huge part of Europe and from specific groups--Jews mostly, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally retarded....] The American torture and death camps are also mostly done abroad to “enemies.”
ALMOST ALL OF THE MODERN TOTALITARIAN POLICE STATES TODAY RELY AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE ON THE MOST INDIRECT AND MOST EFFECTIVE MEANS OF SPYING, TORTURING, IMPRISONING, AND MURDERING WHICH THEY CAN DEVELOP WITH SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.
The U.S. found long ago that taxation hurts less and is less resisted if it is “withheld” before the “donor” receives the money. They learned also that using inflation, by pouring out more paper dollars for the same amount of economic transactions, is the most indirect, least seen, least understood form of taxation. And having the Fed set interest rates to drain money form savers like old people to give it to the very rich in the Big Banks and other Big Corps. and Hedge Fund speculators, etc., is almost never understood by ordinary Americans, so the government has gone to more and more indirect ways of taxing and expropriating from one group to give to another. The same is true of central planning. If you massively plan the lives of people in detail, as Gosplan did to a large degree in the USSR in the early days of the Stalinist high tyranny, they get mad as hell and revolt.
So the government moved more and more to using “indicative central planning” by which the government plans and controls general indices and activities which create a general, wrap around situation of choice of the citizens. They get to choose, but only within the context set by the government and its vast legal and regulatory agencies, so they wind up choosing only from the alternatives which the government approves of–plans and controls by determining the wrap around situations.
The U.S. has the most vast spying and secret police system in the history of the world. Most of the spying is done indirectly and very secretly by the NSA and all of the other fifteen known federal secret police armies. The NSA spies on the U.S. and the entire world through vast systems using all of the media known to mankind, from billions of telephone intercepts every day to spy satellites circling the globe to listening devices under the oceans to drone tv and plane radar and radio interception to massive internet and other print surveys, including secret surveys and analyses of all major financial transactions. Even vast armies of government workers who do not look like secret police feed masses of personal, supposedly private data into this immense system of U.S. Omni-Spying. Internal Revenue and overt police date of all kinds feed into this System The vast “private” security cameras now placed almost everywhere in our stores, schools, hospitals, apartments and streets are almost instantly available to the Omni-Spying System of the U.S.
NO SOCIETY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD HAS BEEN SECRETLY, INDIRECTLY SPIED ON TO THE VAST DEGREE AMERICANS ARE SPIED ON BY THE FEDERAL, STATE AND LCCAL GOVERNMENTS. As any data search worker can tell you, there is almost nothing about Americans in print, sound or videos that is not easily accessed and surveyed and used to control you directly or indirectly.
NO SOCIETY IN HISTORY HAS HAD SUCH AN IMMENSE PROPORTION OF ITS POPULATION INVOLVED IN PROFESSIONAL SECRET POLICE AND OVERT POLICE AND CONTROLLERS OF ALL KINDS AT THE FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL LEVELS. A few states infamous for their direct totalitarianism, such as Albania and East Germany and North Korea, may at times have had a greater proportion of civilian, part time spies in neighborhoods, but the U.S. relies overwhelmingly on the far more indirect, secret Omni-Spying of the NSA and other secret armies of professionals.
I AND MANY OTHER PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WRITING ABOUT THIS RAPID GROWTH OF THE OMNI-SPYING AND INDIRECT, WRAP AROUND TOTALITARIAN SYSTEM OF THE U.S. SECRET POLICE STATE FOR DECADES. Almost all intelligent academics, scientists, intellectuals, journalists and higher level government workers know about it in some vague way, just as was true in Nazi Germany, the communist USSR and other societies. But they have almost all chosen to play deaf and dumb and blind and stupid to what is happening because anyone who deals with it in major public settings is “banished” by the modern disappearance from the System, which can be devastating to one’s life in all ways. Some pretend we need this System for our own safety and well being, but that is as insane as shooting yourself in the head to save yourself from a sore foot.
This vast, growing central planning and control of American lives directly and indirectly by all possible means, including the immense spying and secret police activities, have distorted our society more and more, pushed us into vast inflationary-deflationary Booms and Busts, and is now destroying the foundations of our economy and more and more of our lives. The inflation-deflation cycles obscure the fact that we are trending down faster and faster in all basic ways, from education and science and technology to jobs, incomes, and health. The Fed is quietly rigging the whole system of paper money, finance and credit to move incomes away from the middle classes to the very rich, the Oligarchs. People are suffering more and more across a growing spectrum of life and are getting more and more depressed, anxious, and enraged. We seem clearly to be in a Great Crisis produced by the government planning, controls and expropriating money by the Fed to build the immense wealth of the Oligarchy. We are trapped in the spiral downward that led to the crash and implosion of the Soviet Global Empire, except that we are suffering far greater Bubbles of inflation which are very destructive. Since the Republicrat Party controls the laws to prevent the emergence of an independent political reform party, just as the Soviets and Egyptians did but in different ways, the “reforms” of the System even in this Great Crisis are absurd charades which will only make things worse.
It seems very clear that at some point the U.S. will face the same kind of mass revolt of the people we have seen in the USSR, Egypt and many other societies in recent decades.
__________
Jack D. Douglas is professor emeritus of sociology at UCSD