“We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”— Benjamin Franklin
John W. Whitehead – Divide and conquer.
It’s one of the oldest military strategies in the books, and it’s proven to be the police state’s most effective weapon for maintaining the status quo.
How do you conquer a nation?
Distract them with football games, political circuses and Black Friday sales. Keep them focused on their differences—economic, religious, environmental, political, racial—so they can never agree on anything. And then, when they’re so divided that they are incapable of joining forces against a common threat, start picking them off one by one.
What we’re witnessing at Standing Rock, where activists have gathered to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline construction on Native American land, is just the latest incarnation of the government’s battle plan for stamping out any sparks of resistance and keeping the populace under control: battlefield tactics, military weaponry and a complete suspension of the Constitution.
Militarized police. Riot and camouflage gear. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Drones. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Concussion grenades. Arrests of journalists. Intimidation tactics. Brute force.
This is what martial law looks like, when a government disregards constitutional freedoms and imposes its will through military force.
Only this is martial law without any government body having to declare it.
This is martial law packaged as law and order and sold to the public as necessary for keeping the peace.
These overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear.
What Americans have failed to comprehend is that the police state doesn’t differentiate.
Jon Rappoport – The protests and the violence started as a response to what has been happening in inner cities: the police killing innocent people. That was the heavily promoted media and political narrative.
“If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?”—Sunil Dutta, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for 17 years
The thin veneer of civilization has once again proven, to be too fragile for confidence in the long-term future of a disintegrating country. As the mainstream media coverage of the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown and the ensuing riots illustrates, “never let a crisis go to waste”, also applies to situations cooked up to spread the gospel and virtues of a Homeland Security Brown Shirt Corp. The race-baiting machine loves to broadcast the PC culture as the time-tested diversion from the existential threats to our very survival. “Keep hope alive” is just as dead as Rodney King, and his unforgettable plea, “Can we all just get along?”
Hot Air Weekend Editor Jazz Shaw believes that pointing out police militarization – not just in Ferguson, Missouri but everywhere – is “a rather rapid rush to judgment and lacking in larger context.” He is flabbergasted that “one local disturbance has turned into a national demand to defang the police.” And he wants everyone to know that he finds this trend of thought insulting to first responders, because “police departments in cities and towns of all sizes have been equipped with more modern, military style equipment for quite some time now and they don’t seem to be converting the rest of the nation into a series of oppressive death camps.”