Hitler is alive in Burma, the sign says.

Ellen Page, star of Juno, stands alone on a street corner with a piece of cardboard held above her head, the unsettling message scribbled with Sharpie onto her sign. Burma, also known as Myanmar, is a Southeastern Asian country ruled by a tyrannical militant junta who came into power in 1962 through the act of a coup d’état. In 2007 a number of street protests occurred, the first public protests in a decade. Led by a large number of Burmese monks, these protests earned the name “The Saffron Revolution”, christened after the color of the robes that the monks wore. After the first few initial uprisings the public at large began taking an interest in the protests, and while at first the Burmese government begrudgingly allowed the monks to engage in peaceful gatherings, soon the violence escalated into what some considered an all-out war between the monks and the military junta, with the military actively invading and ransacking monasteries around the country. Foreign journalists were rounded up and imprisoned on sight, with a Japanese photojournalist named Kenji Nagai killed on September 27th, 2007, simply for being present at a street protest. While the official death toll rests at 13 killed, Colonel Hla Win, who defected from the army some days prior to the official report, is quoted as having said, “Many more people have been killed in recent days than you’ve heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand.”

This is nothing new. While these are some of the most recent examples of atrocities taking place in our world, a government’s desire to quash dissent and maintain complete rule over its citizenry has been around for as long as civilization itself. Early Roman emperors declared themselves chosen by the gods to have complete executive ruling over every aspect of their society. Japanese emperors are believed to actually be gods, sent to our world to lead their people to prosperity through the invention of Motorola cell phones and hara-kiri, and our current president, George W. Bush, has weekly conference calls with Ted Haggard, the leader of Stupid People Worldwide, a subsidiary group of the Republic Party.

Some of the most well known examples of these actions are such incidents as the 1989 June 4th protest at Tiananmen Square, where intellectuals, labor activists, and students all gathered to protest the authoritarian rule of the government. The death toll in that particular instance ranges wildly, with official reports from the Chinese government stating 200-300 dead to reports let out by the Chinese Red Cross, declaring between 2,000-3,000 dead.  Another is the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s, where Hutu militia groups, aided by the Rwandan government, began a systematic killing of all Tutsis, as well as political moderates, irrespective of their ethnic backgrounds. Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’, a period spanning several years and several countries where anyone of Jewish background was rounded up and killed, is another extreme example. Since this time it’s been widely accepted worldwide that nothing positive has stemmed from these atrocities, barring a one single exception: the critically acclaimed major motion picture Swing Kids, a charming story of a rebellious group of German teenagers in the 1940s who fight off the pressure to become Hitler Youth by evoking the power and spirit of swing dancing.

When a government terrorizes its own people, who benefits? The government itself does not. In fact, it suffers. With an unhappy citizenry and a climate of control looming over the heads of every man, woman and child within its borders, the only safe refuge becomes their minds. And when this begins, when thought-crime becomes the only crime committable, a revolution is soon to follow. For the government and government organizations in charge of a country, this spells bad news. So, for whom does the advantage lie? The answer is simple: for the people in charge of the government. The people who desire constant and perpetual money, influence, and power are those who benefit from corruption.

A common tactic used to secure themselves as the Never-Ending Leaders of their Frightened Herds of Beaten and Abused People is the nationalization of certain requisite influential and important markets, usually including pharmaceutical companies, oil reserves, real-estate, farmland, and, more recently, internet and telecommunication services. The previous example, the Burmese protests, happened due to backlash from the Burmese people over the government removing fuel subsidies, which caused the price of diesel and petrol to suddenly rise, in some cases as much as 100%.

Why would a government employ such tactics and practices? It’s usually done by a rogue few in order to allow, through the use of bribery, monetary/business influence, resource control, or force, those who are in power to stay in power indefinitely.

These ideals are not exclusive to foreign countries, however. The United States of America has had its share of near-fascism moments, the most famous and far-reaching of which being the Watergate scandal. In 1972, President Nixon and his staff used their influence, power, and resources to cover a massive array of crimes and abuses, which included campaign fraud, political espionage and sabotage, illegal break-ins, improper tax audits, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, and a secret slush fund laundered in Mexico to pay those who conducted these operations. More recently, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was exposed to be participating in massive illegal warrantless wiretapping practices, for the purposes of detecting and battling international terrorist threats, specifically those of the al-Qaeda regime, as well as allying itself with such powerful private-sector businesses as AT&T to create a large-scale data-mining operation. AT&T provided the NSA with its customers’ phone and internet records, an act of privacy invasion so appalling that it makes what happened next seem absolutely par-for-the-course. After a major exposure by media outlets of these classified operations, the government spearheaded a bill that would allow ‘retroactive immunity’ of any private corporations, specifically Verizon and AT&T in this case, that complied or aided the government in illegal activities. This bill was proposed as necessary for our safety, well-being, and privacy; a move so blockheaded that I’m surprised the writers of the speeches that the telecom PR drones were giving didn’t explode in a giant fireball of Irony.

Obviously though, governments aren’t the only culprits. Those responsible for breaching upon our rights as citizens and manipulating information for their own gain come in more flavors than Baskin Robbins ice cream. Corporate fraud has no better figurehead than Enron Corporation, a former American energy corporation based in Houston, Texas. The corporation used offshore entities, with full anonymity, to hide the extent of their annual monetary losses from investors and create the illusion of profitability. Paperwork was smudged and trades were insided, resulting in the executives, as well as those working closely with them, to come out of the entire fiasco able to use hundred-dollar bills as toilet paper, while the stockholders’ investments and the actual business worth plummeted toward the ground faster than George Bush’s approval ratings (zing!).

If all (or any) of this makes you think, “Hey, what does Enron have to do with me?” or, “If I have nothing to hide, why should I be so concerned with my privacy anyway?”, you’re in for a treat. President George Bush signed the Patriot Act into law as a response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September of 2001. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, which is actually an acronym that stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by ProvidingAppropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act”, in a nutshell:

“[The Patriot Act] increases the ability of law enforcement agencies to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial and other records; eases restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering within the United States; expands the Secretary of the Treasury’s authority to regulate financial transactions, particularly those involving foreign individuals and entities; and enhances the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting immigrants suspected of terrorism-related acts. The act also expands the definition of terrorism to include domestic terrorism, thus enlarging the number of activities to which the USA Patriot Act’s expanded law enforcement powers can be applied.” 

What this basically means is that while you’re at work or school (or anywhere, really) the government can allow an official to enter your home, search and confiscate anything you own, access your library or financial records without your consent, sift through your telephone or internet records, and search your personal information. All of this without a court order, all of this without notice, all of this without cause or reason for suspicion, and all of this without explanation afterward. The 4th amendment of the constitution, a guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, has been rendered obsolete by now.

The Pentagon, within as recently as the past few weeks, was also exposed as manipulating the media in order to brighten its own image over reports of prisoner mistreatment and generally inhuman conditions at its now infamous Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The government enlisted CNN military analysts, former U.S. military officials, and hired journalists to spin a web of positive propaganda for them in order to combat Amnesty International’s scathing report about Gitmo, which called the center “the gulag of our times” and detailed years of extreme abuses that had taken place there. The shadow-journalists hired by the government’s PR department were led on a three-hour staged tour through the premises of three prison camps, including Camp Delta, Camp V, and Camp X-Ray. The result of these guided tours: a bevy of positive spin within the mainstream media outlets, and major television broadcasts that might as well have been written by Donald Rumsfeld.

Now that we’ve shown why government powers would become corrupt, let’s examine several of the hows that they could implement to achieve their goals. With a well of pop-culture trivia knowledge so deep that it would make the Mariana Trench blush, I’ve been able to imagine several possible scenarios, and the tactics that would be used to achieve them.

1. In true V for Vendetta fashion, powerful government officials with ties to pharmaceutical companies could create a disease, and then control the manufacturing and distribution of the antidote. With the entire country- possibly even the world- buying their products, the stockholders in that company would become immensely wealthy almost overnight. We’ll call this concept the ‘Lego Rule’, as its factors are practically interchangeable with a never-ending exchange of different components. All that it takes is to switch the pharmaceutical companies with oil companies, and have the government nationalize the country’s oil refineries. In many ways the idea of nationalization has already snagged its filthy claws into our society’s rug. For example, as a product of the climate of fear that overtook the populous after the September 11th terrorist attacks, the government has taken advantage of our willingness to sacrifice liberty for safety and instilled the TSA as sole power over our nation’s airplane safety regulations.

This scenario is probably the most likely of all of them to actually happen. In fact, it already has. One only needs to take a quick glance at Vice President Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton, and Halliburton’s ties to the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, to realize that something fishy is going on.

2. With the population showing record-high levels of political dissent, the bigwigs in their spacesuits at the White House cut budgetary spending on education and dedicate an overwhelming majority of the national budget on ‘defense contracts’ (see: Halliburton) and military spending. With its citizens showing a decreased level of interest in pursuing higher education and college degrees, those who do are labeled as ‘elitists’ and ostracized in regular society. Being labeled as an intellectual becomes as derogatory a term as ‘racist’ is in today’s current society. The social stigma attached to it affects ones personal standing amongst civilized people as severely as being an atheist affects your chances of being elected president of the United States. As concern over, and attention paid, to the availability of public data fades, the government pushes for a tiered internet model, hoping to limit the availability of information to regular citizens and deterring those who may express concern against their suspicious practices. They continue to become less and less a tool of democracy to govern and appease the people than they develop into a lobbying tool used to pad the pockets of big-business leaders. They also begin to heavily influence media and news outlets, which forces those institutions who wish to stay in business to ignore scandalous stories or those that negatively portray those in power.

3. With the youth in revolt and angry at the elders for being out of touch, inhumane, racist towards minorities, or any other (valid) concern, the younger generation begins boycotting school, the number of teenagers becoming involved in gangs rises and also takes place at younger and younger ages, and Elvis Presley shakes his hips on national television. The government, in response, passes the B.R. Act of 2010, which takes one eight-grade public school class each year and sends them to a deserted island. Each student is randomly assigned a weapon, and let loose to roam the island unsupervised. The students are given three days to kill their classmates or they themselves will be killed. At the end of the three days, the survivor is taken home and allowed to live. This act is passed with the intent of using negative reinforcement on the general child/teenage populous to make them begin acting appropriately. The citizens are promised that, if gang violence lowers significantly and truancy levels lower similarly, the act will be revoked.

The world that we live in today is filled with uncertainty. We don’t know how much food will cost tomorrow; we don’t know how expensive our gas prices will be or how much the cost of crude oil will rise; due to global warming we don’t even know what the temperature will reach; and most importantly, we don’t know whether or not Miley Cyrus will finally issue an apology to the public for her risqué cover photo that she posed for in Vanity Fair. We also don’t know what’s going through the minds of our elected officials. The Clintons campaigned on a platform of healthcare reform, Alberto Gonzales promised us justice, Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig forgot to mention that in his off time he liked to solicit sex from young boys in public bathroom stalls, and George Bush swore on a bible to maintain sanity. All lies. Since the 1980s we’ve been in a state of manufactured democracy, going back and forth from George Bush to Bill Clinton to George Bush again and nearly back to a Clinton (fingers crossed for an Obama election), with only the illusion of democracy keeping the public complacent. The blueprints are nearly complete, and the pieces set in place for a fascist state to overthrow our country. And us, here, on a local basis? We wouldn’t even take the time to look up from our People Magazine and our American Idol to notice, let alone take a stand.

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