Insanity or security

(YellowTimes.org) - Informing as part of an open society? Indeed, under Mr. Bush's proposed Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS for short) - a kind of national, atomic-mutation of Neighborhood Watch - an estimated four percent of Americans will join a long and glorious tradition of state-security informants.

The tradition of citizen informants has roots going back at least to the French Revolution. During the terror, citizens were encouraged to inform on neighbors and even children to inform on their parents. More than a few harmless people went to the guillotine just on the basis of a hateful neighbor denouncing them.

Of course, there was Stalin's immense bloodbath over two continents. Informants played an important part in his heavy industry of organized murder. And one recognizes other suggestive similarities to what's happening in America. When Stalin was ready to announce another purge, he often spoke indirectly of "wreckers," wreckers of the Revolution. Just this suggestion from his lips was enough to get the thugs and psychopaths busy about their work.

Has anyone noticed the paler-but-still-similar sense of the term "terrorists"? With the heavily-biased press in America, we have all been conditioned to have an immediate mental image of a terrorist: He's a swarthy fellow with a difficult Arabic or Persian name and a strange religion. Remember, if there is one thing America is good at, one thing at which it has no equal on the planet, it is marketing. And America has intensively marketed this image for years.

The informing tradition was carried on in societies as diverse as Nazi Germany, the East German Stasi, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the horrific youth brigades of China's Cultural Revolution.

My right-wing readers, yes I do have some, sometimes question how I can possibly ever associate America with ugly things like fascism. Well, the TIPS program and the Patriot Act, both deliberately bland names for insidious, dangerous things, is the word made flesh, so to speak.

I have in the past humorously observed the prevalence of insanity in America. I admit to using that term in a rather loosely-defined sense, but America is the land of Black Helicopters, alien abductions, Aryan churches, rattlesnake worship, speaking in tongues, and Texas.

You cannot live in America without discovering there also are a lot of angry people there. You see them on the streets, you meet them in stores, you experience them as neighbors. In your face. Mind your own business. Foul language. Indeed, I can attest to a fair sampling of such language in e-mail from my more perverse readers. Odd, don't you think, to send a person you've never met a disgustingly foul letter only because you don't agree with his column? And although I receive mail from many countries, the only source for this kind of stuff, I'm sorry to say, is America.