Monday, April 9, 2012

Tea Party Silent on Conservative Supreme Court Strip Search Decision and fading Freedoms.

What should have surprised many conservatives was the 5-4 ideologically conservative Supreme Court Justices ruling in favor of strip searches, for even for the most frivolous offence. That’s not what we’ve been led to believe is a part our constitution or what they like to call freedom. The liberal justices considered the decision “a serious affront to human dignity.” Yet there were no complaints from the party of supposed “liberty.”

That’s because their authoritarian tendencies are now superseding and redefining everything in their world view. This is no small matter, and certainly a red flag decision that should not be taken lightly.

 Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, “a historical look at the rise of fascism, outlining the 10 steps necessary for a fascist group (or government) to destroy the democratic character of a nation-state,” wrote her response below. But first, take a look at her 10 points of fascism in the picture above right.

Naomi Wolf
How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses: Believe me, you don't want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. And yet, it's exactly what is happening.

These criminalization’s of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement. In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven't been introduced into a prison population.

Believe me: you don't want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. The most terrifying phrase of all in the decision is justice Kennedy's striking use of the term "detainees" for "United States citizens under arrest". Justice Kennedy's new use of what looks like a deliberate activation of that phrase is illuminating. Now the term – with its associations of "those to whom anything may be done" – is being deployed systematically in the direction of … any old American citizen.


Where are we headed? Why? These recent laws criminalizing protest, and giving local police – who, recall, are now infused with DHS money, military hardware and personnel – powers to terrify and traumatise people who have not gone through due process or trial, are being set up to work in concert with a see-all-all-the-time surveillance state. 

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