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Police state

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I can't even begin to picture how we would deport 11 million people in a few years where we don’t have a police state, where the police can’t break down your door at will and take you away without a warrant... Unless you suspend the Constitution and instruct the police to behave as if we live in North Korea, it ain't happening. ~ Michael Chertoff
As an anarchist, I view all states as police states, because every law is ultimately backed by police force against the body or property of a scofflaw, however peaceful he may be.  I see only a difference of degree, not of kind.  But even small differences in the degree of repression can be matters of life or death, and so they should not be trivialized. ~ Wendy McElroy

Police state is a term denoting government that exercises power arbitrarily through policing. Originally the term designated a state regulated by a civil administration, but since the beginning of the 20th century, the term has taken on the emotionally-charged and derogatory meaning.

Quotes

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  • All dictators risk being overthrown by their opponents... [and] therefore need large police forces to protect them. ...The police force in Nazi Germany ...their job was to arrest people before they committed crimes. ...All local police units had to draw up lists of people who might be 'Enemies of the State'. They gave these lists to the Gestapo... a branch of the SS... [with] the power to do... as it liked. ...'Enemies of the State' ...are [likely] woken ...by a violent knocking at the door. ...[M]en in black uniforms ...[give] three minutes to pack a bag. ...[T]hey take you to the ...police station where you are shut in a cell. ...[D]ays, weeks or months ...[later] ...you are ...told to sign Form D-11, an 'Order for Protective Custody' ...agreeing to go to prison ...[Y]ou are too scared to refuse to sign ...Without ...a trial you are ...taken to a concentration camp where you ...stay for as long as the Gestapo pleases.
    ...A former prisoner ...described ...'In Buchenwald there were 8000 ...2000 Jews and 6000 non-Jews. ...first ..."politicals" ...many ...in concentration camps ...since 1933 ...many ...accused of having spoken abusively of the sacred ... Fuehrer ...After the "political", the ..."work-shy" is the largest. ...A business employee lost his position and applied for unemployment relief. ...he was informed by the Labour Exchange that he could obtain employment as a navvy on the ...roads. This man, who was looking for a commercial post, turned down the offer. ...[R]eported as "work-shy" ...he was ...arrested and taken to a concentration camp.
    The next group were the "Bibelforscher" a religious sect ...proscribed ...by the Gestapo since ...members refuse military service.
    The fourth... homosexuals... To charge this offense is a favorite tactic of the secret police. ...The last class ...professional criminals...'
    • Josh Brooman, Hitler's Germany: Germany 1933-45 (1985) p. 6.
  • Sipo and SD was a conglomerate, formed... when Heinrich Himmler, Reichfuehrer SS, became chief of the German Police. He fused the Criminal Investigative Police (Kripo) and the Gestapo (the political police) to form the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei or Sipo) under the command of SS General Reinhard Heydrich. ...[T]he exchange of personnel ...produced an amalgam of party and state agencies that became central to the execution of most of the terror and mass murder of the Third Reich. ...Although no single organization carries full responsibility for the evils of the Third Reich, the SS-police system was the executor of terrorism and "population policy" in the same way that the military carried out the Reich’s imperialistic aggression. Within the police state, even the concentration camps could not rival the impact of Sipo and SD. It was the source not only of the "desk murderers" who administered terror and genocide by assigning victims to the camps, but also of the police executives for identification and arrest, and of the command and staff for a major instrument of execution, the Einsatzgruppen. ...Sipo and SD was ...central to many ...controversial developments in the Third Reich—the totalitarian efforts to achieve conformity and to end opposition, the race and resettlement programs, the development and implementation of imperialistic expansion ...The creation of the totalitarian police state as an essential step toward the Final Solution provides one ...perspective for this study. ...[H]ow [could] a modern industrial society of such cultural prestige as Germany... be twisted to Hitler's ends, how so many thousands of functionaries—more ordinary Germans than Nazi extremists or sadists—could be found to execute Hitler's will[?] When the Nazi experience becomes the will of the Fuehrer... the result is both an alabi... and a smoke screen that obscures insights into how similarly extreme developments might reoccur, perhaps without a Hitler or a German Sonderweg.
    • George C. Browder, Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of Sipo and SD (1990) Introduction, pp. 1-4.
  • [T]he real key to power in the State—control of the Prussian police force and of the... State Administration—lay with Goering, as Prussian Minister of the Interior. ...In the critical period of 1933-1934, no man after Hitler played so important a role in the Nazi revolution ...His energy and ruthlessness together with his control ...were indispensable to Hitler's success. Goering showed no intention of being restrained ...he enforced his will, as if he already held absolute power.
    The moment Goering entered office he began a drastic purge of the Prussian State service, paying particular attention to the senior police officers, where he made a clean sweep in favour of his own appointments, many of them — S.A. or S.S. leaders. ...Goering issued an order to show no mercy to the activities of "organizations hostile to the State" ...Goering continued: "Police officers who make... use of fire-arms in the execution of their duties will... benefit by my protection; those who... fail in their duty will be punished..." In other words, when in doubt shoot. ...All they had to do was ...put a white arm-band over their brown ...or black shirts: they then represented the authority of the State. ...For the citizen to appeal to the police for protection became more dangerous than to suffer assault and robbery in silence. At best, the police... looked the other way; more often the auxiliaries helped ...S.A. comrades ..beat up their victims. This was “legality” in practice.
    • Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1990) pp. 111-112.

  • We are pretty free in America when you compare us to other nations around the world, but we're not pretty free in America when you compare us to past generations.

    If you look at the state of what's going on in America right now—and, y'know, in my book I chronicle easily a hundred different cases where government has overreached and encroached on Constitutional liberties of Americans—we're at the point now in America, a little girl can't run a lemonade stand in her driveway without having the local zoning zealots come in and fine her fifty dollars.  We're at the point now where elementary school kids down in Georgia have their irises scanned as they board the bus—all in the name of "safety."  We're at the point now where nebulous environmental laws prevent homeowners from building a shed in their own back yard because there might be a flood plain issue in a hundred years.

    This is the America where we're at, and I really implore people to read my book and tell me how we're not in a police state, because my research shows we're right on the cusp.

  • [P]erpetrators of the Holocaust were ordinary Germans. Many were not particularly Nazified... not being in the SS or even in the Nazi Party. ...Many of the perpetrators, at least in the police battalions, were older. They were not particularly martial. ...It is not just that perpetrators were ordinary Germans, but that there were also vast numbers of them... The number... who took part in the extermination of the Jew... was greater than 100,000... probably far greater. ...Over 10,000 German camps of various sizes and kinds existed for incarcerating and destroying Jews and non-Jews. ...The German justice center ...catalogued over 333,000 people ...who served ...institutions used to kill Jews and others. ...Nazi authorities ...assigned ...virtually anyone who was available. The perpetrators were not coerced to kill. ...[I]n many units officers announced... they did not have to kill, and... at least nine police battalions... had been informed that they did not have to kill. There is similar evidence for the some... Einsatzkommandos. There is... evidence... Himmler... issue[d] orders allowing those... not up to the killing... excused... [O]rdinary Germans killed... [T]he... initiative... zeal, and... cruelty... all were found among the ordinary Germans who were the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
    • Daniel J. Goldhagen, presentation on Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) in the “Willing Executioners”/“Ordinary Men” Debate, Selections from the Symposium at the United States Holocaust Research Institute , April 8, 1996.

  • [D]oes America now embody this common description of a police state?

    Clearly it does.  The American government exerts extreme control over society, down to dictating which foods you may eat. Its economic control borders on the absolute.  It politicizes and presides over even the traditional bastion of privacy—the family.  Camera and other surveillance of daily life has soared, with the Supreme Court recently expanding the "right" of police to perform warrantless searches.  Enforcement is so draconian that the United States has more prisoners per capita than any other nation; and over the last few years, the police have been self-consciously militarizing their procedures and attitudes.  Travel, formerly a right, is now a privilege granted by government agents at their whim.  Several huge and tyrannical law-enforcement agencies monitor peaceful behavior rather than respond to crime.  These agencies operate largely outside the restrictions of the Constitution; for example, the TSA conducts arbitrary searches in violation of Fourth Amendment guarantees.

    As an anarchist, I view all states as police states, because every law is ultimately backed by police force against the body or property of a scofflaw, however peaceful he may be.  I see only a difference of degree, not of kind.  But even small differences in the degree of repression can be matters of life or death, and so they should not be trivialized.

  • The prosecutors have all the power.  Not even the judge has discretion, because lawmakers have mostly taken that liberality away in the name of cracking down on crime.  This happened all through the 1980s and 1990s, and the prosecutorial dictatorship has entrenched itself to become the norm since 2001.  For the last ten years, the police state has had free rein.

  • These people are politically, socially, culturally, and economically invisible.  How many are actually guilty?  We can't know.  How many could be let out today to make a wonderful contribution to building a productive society?  We don't know.  How many are completely nonviolent, not even guilty by any normal standard of law but only guilty according to the letter of the current dictatorship?  Probably a majority.  …  Yet the rise and entrenchment of the American police state are rarely questioned

    .

    However, in the end, what is really needed is a fundamental rethinking of the notion that the state rather than private markets must monopolize the provision of justice and security. This is the fatal conceit. No power granted to the state goes unabused. This power, among all possible powers, might be the most important one to take away from the state.

  • Despite making up only 13 percent of the male population of the United States, black men constitute almost half of the male prison population, and on any given day, nearly a third of all black men in their twenties are in prison, on probation, or on parole. These black men are overwhelmingly from ghetto communities. The high levels of police surveillance, racial profiling, stiff penalties for minor parole violations, felon disenfranchisement laws, and general harassment of young urban blacks intensify their hostility toward the criminal justice system, and invite urban blacks to conclude that they are living under a race-based police state whose intent is to prevent them from enjoying all the benefits of equal citizenship and to contain social unrest.
  • An extreme reflection of the dangers confronting modern social development is the growth of racism, nationalism, and militarism and, in particular, the rise of demagogic, hypocritical, and monstrously cruel dictatorial police regimes. Foremost are the regimes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Tse-tung, and a number of extremely reactionary regimes in smaller countries, such as Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Greece, Albania, Haiti, and other Latin American countries. These tragic developments have always derived from the struggle of egotistical and group interests, the struggle for unlimited power, suppression of intellectual free­dom, a spread of intellectually simplified, narrow-minded mass myths
  • There isn’t any difference between the totalitarian Russian Government and the Hitler government and the Franco government in Spain. They are all alike. They are police state governments.

See also

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