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1984-style Homeland Security telescreens in Wal-Mart stores represent pathetic new low in America’s collapse into a dictatorial banana republic Also on this page:
Paul Joseph Watson Americans have reacted with outrage to Big Sis Janet Napolitano’s announcement that Homeland Security messages encouraging shoppers to spy on each other will play at Wal-Mart checkouts, but the announcement is part of a wider takeover of America that will see the DHS invade virtually every aspect of public life in the United States as the country sinks into a decrepit banana republic.
The Department of Homeland Security’s official You Tube channel has been bombarded with complaints, many of them littered with furious profanity, after the announcement yesterday that the DHS would team up with 588 Wal-Mart stores in 27 states to place monitors at checkout locations that would play a video message by Janet Napolitano encouraging Americans to spy on each other and report “suspicious activity” to law enforcement and Wal-Mart employees. The announcement leaves no room for doubt that America has officially entered the realm of Orwell’s 1984 as the federal government moves to entrench an onerous surveillance society where ordinary members of the public are enlisted as spies for the state to create a constant sense of distrust and fear. From VIPR teams that now patrol Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor and Los Angeles rail lines; ferries in Washington state; bus stations in Houston; and mass transit systems in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore, to invasive pat downs at bus and train terminals and on street corners across the country, to radiation-emitting naked body scanners that roam the highways scanning vehicles and homes, to interrogation checkpoints at sporting and other public events, Big Sis is engaged in a total takeover of society, turning America into a giant prison grid where everyone is guilty until proven innocent and treated as a potential terrorist. Openly encouraging Americans to become informants for the government as they purchase their weekly groceries represents a new low in America’s total collapse into a dictatorial banana republic. It’s a sad and pathetic reminder that this once great beacon of freedom, strength and prosperity has now been hijacked by people who hate everything about what America once represented. Given the fact that Homeland Security is mimicking British authorities in its Orwellian approach, we can expect “suspicious activity” to include such behavior as paying for Wal-Mart’s Chinese slave goods with cash, or merely daring looking back at the surveillance cameras spying on Americans in the shopping mall. As America sinks deeper into a militarized police state, society begins to parallel more and more aspects of Nazi Germany and other historical dictatorships, especially in the context of citizens being turned against each other, which in turn creates a climate of fear and the constraining sense that one is always being watched. One common misconception about Nazi Germany was that the police state was solely a creation of the authorities and that the citizens were merely victims. On the contrary, Gestapo files show that 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information provided by denunciations by “ordinary” Germans. “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors,” wrote Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Now the federal government is urging Americans to “denounce” each other at Wal-Mart. Are we seeing the beginnings of President Barack Obama’s promised “civilian national security force” that would be just as powerful and well funded as the US military?
Gellately discovered that the people who informed on their neighbors were motivated primarily by banal factors – “greed, jealousy, and petty differences,” and not by a genuine concern about crime or insecurity. Indeed, history tells us that any Stasi-like society does nothing to increase genuine security and only turns the host population against each other while decaying the country from within. Gellately “found cases of partners in business turning in associates to gain full ownership; jealous boyfriends informing on rival suitors; neighbors betraying entire families who chronically left shared bathrooms unclean or who occupied desirable apartments.” “And then there were those who informed because for the first time in their lives someone in authority would listen to them and value what they said.” Gellately emphasizes the fact that the Germans who sicked the authorities on their neighbors knew very well what the consequences for the victims would be – families torn apart, torture and internment in concentration camps, and ultimately in many cases death – but they still did it with few qualms because the rewards of financial bounties and mere convenience were deemed more important to them. This strikes at the root of the selfish and childish urges the government is trying to manipulate in getting people to report on their fellow Americans. The self-important feeling of being listened to, ascribed some temporary sense of authority, and the cult-like pavlovian reward of being metaphorically patted on the head by someone in a uniform, are all tendencies such campaigns play on. However, if we don’t want to end up in a society that exists in a constant state of tyranny and fear as in Stasi East Germany or Stalinist Russia, we must learn that our neighbors and friends are not our enemies, and that the only real threat against which we need to unite is an oppressive state that tries to destroy us by turning us against each other. This role has now been undertaken by Big Sis and the Department of Homeland Security, which is actively finalizing the invasion and total takeover of American society, using tools and programs that every single odorous dictatorship in modern history has resorted to – checkpoints, interrogations, strip-searches, training the people to spy on each other, guilty until proven innocent. Each and every facet betrays a country in terminal decline and one that will end up as a decrepit, lifeless, authoritarian cesspit, forever confined to the slagheap of history as just another example of how a civilized, cultured and prosperous society allowed itself to be destroyed from within by fear at the hands of a gaggle of jackbooted thugs. ********************* Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
Critics Of Big Sis/Wal-Mart Spy Campaign Branded Insane Paul Joseph Watson
According to the driving force behind Big Sis’ creepy Wal-Mart spy campaign, if the state encouraging Americans to report each other to the authorities causes you unease, you’re insane, similar to how critics of informant programs were also branded mentally ill and persecuted in the former Soviet Union. In what has been dubbed “the battle of Wal-Mart” by The New York Observer, the controversy over Big Sis Janet Napolitano’s announcement that Homeland Security messages encouraging shoppers to “report suspicious activity,” without telling them what constitutes suspicious activity, will play at Wal-Mart checkouts, has “set off a rebellion among the conspiracy-theory crowd, a number of whom are among the store’s core customers,” writes Aaron Gell. But the man behind the creepy slogan, “If you see something, say something,” claims that the likes of Matt Drudge and Alex Jones’ opposition to the campaign is “ridiculous”. “That’s absurd. The whole reason for doing it was to save lives, and I think the sane people of the world see it as a positive slogan,” said Allen Kay, of Korey Kay & Partners, implying that anyone who perceives the state encouraging citizens to report on each other as a negative move towards an authoritarian society is insane. Kay’s glib justification that the campaign is about saving lives can be demolished from two angles. Firstly, even if you believe that Muslim terrorists are creeping around every street corner with bombs in their underpants, and it’s a legitimate concern given the fact that the FBI is so keen on providing such dimwits with all the explosives they need, then why has the federal government and Homeland Security instead labeled politically aware, patriotic Americans to be the number one domestic terror threat? As we have seen from the MIAC report, DHS spying on tea Party and second amendment activists in Pennsylvania and a host of other examples in recent years, the federal government has little interest in Muslim extremists and has instead targeted Americans knowledgeable of their rights and critical of big government as the primary domestic terror threat. The feds have defined “terrorist propaganda” as any material critical of the state. The Department of Defense characterizes peaceful protest as “low level terrorism” in its own report. Given the fact that rhetoric identifying conservative and libertarian Americans as domestic extremists has saturated the news media, don’t be surprised when ignorant Wal-Mart shoppers begin to report people who wear t-shirts with political slogans or ones that carry an image of the upside-down American flag, or merely individuals who talk about the Constitution, since federal authorities have identified all these as examples of terrorism in numerous cases over the last several years. Secondly, no matter where you look, from East Germany, to Communist Russia, to Nazi Germany, historically governments who encourage their own citizens to report on each other do so not for any genuine safety concerns or presumed benefits to security, but in order to create an authoritarian police state that coerces the people into policing each other’s behavior and thoughts. As Robert Gellately of Florida State University has highlighted, Germans under Hitler denounced their neighbors and friends not because they genuinely believed them to be a security threat, but because they expected to selfishly benefit from doing so, both financially, socially and psychologically via a pavlovian need to be rewarded by their masters for their obedience. At the height of its influence around one in seven of the East German population was an informant for the Stasi. As in Nazi Germany, the creation of an informant system was wholly centered around identifying political dissidents and those with grievances against the state, and had little or nothing to do with genuine security concerns. Even if you subscribe to the notion that Americans should be spied on, which is completely unconstitutional in and of itself, should that role be entrusted to untrained Wal-Mart shoppers? If Americans are going to be policed by a 21st century KGB, can the watchers at least be professionally recruited and trained? No, because having fat slobs report on “suspicious activity” that is defined by what they were told on ABC News last night or what they saw in a plot of 24 or CSI Miami makes it a lot easier for Big Sis to chill free speech and frighten Americans away from exercising their rights. Every example in recent history of a government enlisting its population as a swarming army of spies leads to, at the bare minimum, the evisceration of freedom and the creation of an autocratic dictatorship, and in the worst case, mass political oppression, assassination of political dissidents or outright genocide. And Allen Kay has the temerity to imply that anyone expressing concern about a similar program arriving in America is insane and that their worries are “ridiculous,” ironically echoing how critics of the state were also branded mentally ill and sent to psikhushkas – mental hospitals – in the former Soviet Union.
Judging by Wal-Mart’s response in refusing to acknowledge the scale of the backlash they have received in reaction to the announcement on Monday, and their slavish repetition of the glib Orwellian rhetoric that the spy campaign is about safety and security, Americans are outraged, and until Wal-Mart kills this un-American insult to everything that the country stands for, their Christmas is going to be a lot less profitable than expected, with numerous boycotts already on the horizon
DHS Telescreens To Encourage Walmart Shoppers To Spy On Each Other Big Sis Stasi moves from the airport to the malls as America sinks into a total East Germany-style police state U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Feel free to let Big Sis know how you feel about this by leaving a comment on the You Tube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czoww2l1xdw WASHINGTON — Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today announced the expansion of the Department’s national “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign to hundreds of Walmart stores across the country—launching a new partnership between DHS and Walmart to help the American public play an active role in ensuring the safety and security of our nation. “Homeland security starts with hometown security, and each of us plays a critical role in keeping our country and communities safe,” said Secretary Napolitano. “I applaud Walmart for joining the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign. This partnership will help millions of shoppers across the nation identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to law enforcement authorities.” The “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign—originally implemented by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and funded, in part, by $13 million from DHS’ Transit Security Grant Program—is a simple and effective program to engage the public and key frontline employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities. More than 230 Walmart stores nationwide launched the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign today, with a total of 588 Walmart stores in 27 states joining in the coming weeks. A short video message, available here, will play at select checkout locations to remind shoppers to contact local law enforcement to report suspicious activity. Over the past five months, DHS has worked with its federal, state, local and private sector partners, as well as the Department of Justice, to expand the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign and Nationwide SAR Initiative to communities throughout the country—including the recent state-wide expansions of the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign across Minnesota and New Jersey. Partners include the Mall of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, sports and general aviation industries, and state and local fusion centers across the country. In the coming months, the Department will continue to expand the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign nationally with public education materials and outreach tools designed to help America’s businesses, communities and citizens remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping the county safe.
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