Michael Snyder

Activist Post

Why do so many Americans want us to become more like Nazi Germany? When I was growing up, I was taught that Nazi Germany was the antithesis of everything that America stood for. I truly believed that we were “the land of the free” and that we were a bright, shining example for the rest of the world. Unfortunately, over the past couple of decades America has been eagerly embracing the secret police culture of the Nazis. In a desperate attempt to feel “safe”, we have decided to become much more like our arch-enemies of the past. In fact, in many ways we have already surpassed them.

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union never had facial recognition cameras, “enhanced pat-downs”, automated license plate scanners, voice recognition software, mobile backscatter vans or drones in the skies. In America today, every single form of electronic communication is monitored by shadowy government intelligence agencies. All over the globe, the emerging Big Brother electronic surveillance grid becomes more pervasive with each passing day. Never in the history of the world have citizens been monitored so closely by their own governments. But is all of this surveillance actually keeping us safer?

Of course not. Just look at what happened in Boston. But every time another tragedy strikes, our politicians tell us that the answer is to tighten security even more. If this continues, eventually security will become so tight that it will choke all of the life out of this country.

Much has been written about the abuses on the federal level by the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security, but this is not just a phenomenon that is happening on the federal level.

Sadly, the truth is that Americans are embracing the secret police culture of the Nazis in local communities from coast to coast.

For example, just check out what is happening down in Palm Beach County, Florida. The Sheriff is setting up a 24-hour hotline, and he is encouraging people to call that hotline to report on their neighbors. In particular, he wants people to report on anyone that “hates the government”…

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradshaw said. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’”

This sounds very similar to the “See Something, Say Something” program set up by the federal government a few years ago. We are being trained to spy on one another, and nobody seems too concerned that this is exactly the same type of thing that used to happen in East Germany during the Cold War.

Aren’t we better than that?

We have become so consumed with fear that we now even consider little girls to be terror threats.

Down in Florida, a 16-year-old girl that always got high grades was recently expelled from school, hauled away in handcuffs and charged with two felonies because her science experiment produced a small explosion…

The teen is accused of mixing household chemicals in a tiny 8-ounce water bottle, causing the top to pop off, followed by billowing smoke in an small explosion.

Wilmot’s friends and classmates said it was “a science project gone bad, that she never meant to hurt anyone.”

Even the teen’s principal said, “She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone. She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked too.”

How bizarre is that?

Everyone involved in treating that precious little girl like that should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.

And in the name of “security”, we are turning public schools all over the nation into prison camps.

When I was growing up, I never heard of schools holding “terror drills”. But now they are a regular part of school life. Sometimes teachers are not even told that a drill is happening and they think that it is real. For example, check out what happened the other day during an unplanned drill at a school in Oregon…

Teachers were shocked and caught off guard when an Oregon school held a school shooting drill.

The Oregonian reports Pine Eagle Charter School in Halfway held the drill last Friday as children were home for an in-service day. Two masked “gunmen” burst into a meeting room holding 15 teachers firing blanks. Teachers only realized it wasn’t a real shooting when none of them were bleeding.

Can you imagine that?

Can you imagine having armed men storm in and thinking that it is real?

If I was one of those teachers that had blanks fired at them, I would immediately resign.

What kind of nation are we becoming?

We are becoming a global embarrassment.

And how are we supposed to protect our children from all of this?

Even if you don’t put your kids in the public schools, the police state may still come and grab them from you. The following is from a recent article by Simon Black…

In the Land of the Free recently, a California couple had their child kidnapped by the state. At gunpoint.

It all started in mid-April when Anna and Alex Nikolayev took their 5-month old son Sammy to the hospital in Sacramento to be treated for flu symptoms.

The parents didn’t particularly care for the treatment that their son was receiving. Doctors were pumping him full of antibiotics and soon began talking about performing surgery.

Anna and Alex argued with the doctors and said that they were going to get a second opinion; they took the baby and went to another hospital where another physician deemed it perfectly safe for the child to return home with his parents without the need for surgery.

The next day, with the family resting comfortably at home, the police showed up with Child Protective Services.

Alex, the father, went outside to talk to them where he was thrown to the ground by police. Officers then relieved him of his house keys and proceeded to let themselves into the house with hands on their pistols.

Then, still with their hands on their pistols, they told the mother “I’m going to grab your baby, and don’t resist and don’t fight me…”

Is this how we want to live?

Do we want to live in constant fear with the government constantly watching every single thing that we do?

Isn’t that the exact opposite of what our founding fathers intended?

Even as you read this, the government is watching you. The truth is that governments around the world have Internet surveillance capabilities that are far beyond what most people would ever imagine. In an article entitled “The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution“, Google’s Eric Schmidt explained that all of the technology for “an incredibly intimidating police state” is “commercially available right now”…

Despite the expense, everything a regime would need to build an incredibly intimidating digital police state—including software that facilitates data mining and real-time monitoring of citizens—is commercially available right now. What’s more, once one regime builds its surveillance state, it will share what it has learned with others. We know that autocratic governments share information, governance strategies and military hardware, and it’s only logical that the configuration that one state designs (if it works) will proliferate among its allies and assorted others. Companies that sell data-mining software, surveillance cameras and other products will flaunt their work with one government to attract new business.

And in fact governments around the world, including the U.S. government, have been caught using such spy software to spy on the Internet behavior of private citizens…

Mozilla has sent a cease-and-desist letter to a company that sells spyware allegedly disguised as the Firefox browser to governments. The action follows a report by Citizen Lab, which identifies 36 countries (including the US) hosting command and control servers for FinFisher, a type of surveillance software. Also known as FinSpy, the software is sold by UK-based Gamma International to governments, which use it in criminal investigations and allegedly for spying on dissidents.

Mozilla revealed yesterday in its blog that it has sent the cease and desist letter to Gamma “demanding that these illegal practices stop immediately.” Gamma’s software is “designed to trick people into thinking it’s Mozilla Firefox,” Mozilla noted.

But we will never see this kind of behavior change until people start demanding it. And even after all of the horrible abuses that have been publicized over the past several years, one recent poll found that 43 percent of all Americans are still answering yes to the following question…

“Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?”

Obviously we still have a long way to go.

Meanwhile, the emerging Big Brother police state gains a little bit more ground with each passing day.

This article first appeared here at The Truth. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.