Friday, November 07, 2008

Concern for national security or preparation for silencing the ideologically unwanted?


In a speech given this past summer, President-elect Barack Obama said, "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." (Read full story here).

Where have we heard this before? It was Adolph Hitler, writing about the creation of the Gestapo, who said: "An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation..We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland." And what was this "evil" Hitler spoke of? For Hitler, the Jewish People were an evil which needed to be eradicated. But it was not just the Jewish People who were viewed as "evil" by the Third Reich. But anyone who was deemed ideologically unsuitable. As Patrick mentioned in the comments section of the previous Blog post here at La Salette Journey, Dr. Leon Alexander, a psychiatrist at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, once explained how the Third Reich came to devalue ALL human life:

"The beginnings were at first merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived. This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually, the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude toward the nonrehabilitable sick."

Why do we suddenly need a civilian national security force? Is this desire for civilian security force connected in any way with the creation of civilian internment camps here in the United States?

It was my good friend of happy memory, Father Vincent P. Miceli, who said, "..St. Peter relates that he saw the evil spirits 'being drawn by infernal ropes into the pit of hell.' The attempt to rule heaven without God ended in enslavement in hell without rule, heaven or God. On the other hand, the faithful spirits won both heaven and the direct presence of God. 'For to serve God is to reign'...The same lesson is horrifyingly clear throughout all sacred and profane history: Whoever strikes against God strikes down himself. The atheist denying God degrades himself. The atheist exalting himself above God sinks below the level of animate and inanimate beings. Liberation from God is enslavement in creatures. Absolute humanism is the sure road to absolute despotism. Denial of God as truth begets the imprisonment of man in the self-imposed darkness of his own myths. Flight from total dependence on God guarantees for man the utter loss of his freedom in a brutal enslavement either to sheer anarchy or to the tyrant who must eventually arise to impose upon the chaos of limitless human liberty the artificial, inhuman order of the concentration camp." In the words of Pope Benedict XVI in a keynote address of the Fourth Bishops' Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center on "Moral Theology Today: Certitudes and Doubts," - given in February of 1984: "Only at the price of ignoring what is precisely human could the question of morality be analyzed in the ordinary way of human knowing. The fact that this is actually being attempted in various quarters today is the great inner threat to mankind today. The tree of knowledge, from which man eats in this case, does not give the knowledge of good and evil, but rather blinds man to discerning the difference between them. Man will not return to paradise through such blindness, because it is not based on a purer humanity but on the rejection of humanity."

Eventually this "inner threat" manifests itself externally: in the concentration camp (which might be euphemistically referred to as a "civilian internment camp"), in torture and in mass-genocide. But first it is necessary to demonize those ideologically unwanted people one wants to silence (or worse). Such people must be cast in the most negative light possible. They must be labelled as being somehow "backward" or "obsolete." They must be portrayed as people who are delusional and even perhaps dangerous. One might say something like the following to begin to raise public opinion against such ideologically unwanted people: "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest [read Bible-belt], the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." (See here).

Related reading here.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

No rational person can deny that strange things are happening in this country now. We have already taken measures to guard against terrorism and terrorists. Why do we now need a civilian security force as big as the military? What is our government planning for? We need to wake up people....before it is too late.

Anonymous said...

This is all terrifying. There are Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990
allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995
allows the government to seize and control the communication media.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997
allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998
allows the government to seize all means of transportation, including personal cars, trucks or vehicles of any kind and total control over all highways, seaports, and waterways.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10999
allows the government to take over all food resources and farms.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000
allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001
allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002
designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003
allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004
allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005
allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051
specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310
grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049
assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921
allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has broad powers in every aspect of the nation. General Frank Salzedo, chief of FEMA's Civil Security Division stated in a 1983 conference that he saw FEMA's role as a "new frontier in the protection of individual and governmental leaders from assassination, and of civil and military installations from sabotage and/or attack, as well as prevention of dissident groups from gaining access to U.S. opinion, or a global audience in times of crisis." FEMA's powers were consolidated by President Carter to incorporate the...

National Security Act of 1947
allows for the strategic relocation of industries, services, government and other essential economic activities, and to rationalize the requirements for manpower, resources and production facilities.

1950 Defense Production Act
gives the President sweeping powers over all aspects of the economy.

Act of August 29, 1916
authorizes the Secretary of the Army, in time of war, to take possession of any transportation system for transporting troops, material, or any other purpose related to the emergency.

International Emergency Economic Powers Act
enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or national. These powers were transferred to FEMA in a sweeping consolidation in 1979.

But you know what is even more chilling? The Churches aren't warning the people about all of this. Most Christians are unaware of what is really going on.

It was the same way just prior to the Third Reich taking control of Germany. Some Christians an others spoke out. But they were first labelled "paranoid" and later silenced as the citizenry remained blissfully ignorant. By the time most people realized what was occurring, it was too late to act.

I think we have almost arrived at the time for entering the catacombs. God bless you Paul for addressing this whole issue.

Anonymous said...

Italy's Prime Minister hails the election of Obama as the "arrival of a messiah":

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gave an enthusiastic, if unconventional, welcome on Thursday to the election of Barack Obama, citing among his attributes youth, good looks and a "suntan."

Speaking at a joint news conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow, the 72-year-old media tycoon also said Obama's election to the White House had been "hailed by world public opinion as the arrival of a messiah."

"I will try to help relations between Russia and the United States where a new generation has come to power, and I don't see problems for Medvedev to establish good relations with Obama who is also handsome, young and suntanned," he said.

Berlusconi, who himself sports a year-round tan, is famed in diplomatic circles for making sometimes inappropriate quips.

On his first meeting with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen in 2002, Berlusconi complimented him with the words: "Rasmussen is not only a great colleague, he's also the best-looking prime minister in Europe."

He added: "He's so good looking, I'm even thinking of introducing him to my wife."

He sparked a minor diplomatic incident in 2005 by suggesting he had wooed Finnish President Tarja Halonen to ensure her backing for Italy to host the European Food Safety Authority.

"I had to use all my playboy tactics, even if they have not been used for some time," he said, prompting Helsinki to call in the Italian ambassador to explain the comments.

(Reporting by Alberto Sisto; writing by Robin Pomeroy; editing by Keith Weir)

Anonymous said...

Have any of you heard of NSPD-51? Read this from World Net Daily:

Bush makes power grab

Posted: May 23, 2007
1:00 am Eastern


By Jerome R. Corsi


President Bush, without so much as issuing a press statement, on May 9 signed a directive that granted near dictatorial powers to the office of the president in the event of a national emergency declared by the president.

The "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive," with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive, establishes under the office of president a new National Continuity Coordinator.

That job, as the document describes, is to make plans for "National Essential Functions" of all federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president's directives in the event of a national emergency.

The directive loosely defines "catastrophic emergency" as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions."

(Column continues below)


When the president determines a catastrophic emergency has occurred, the president can take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an "enduring constitutional government."

Translated into layman's terms, when the president determines a national emergency has occurred, the president can declare to the office of the presidency powers usually assumed by dictators to direct any and all government and business activities until the emergency is declared over.

Ironically, the directive sees no contradiction in the assumption of dictatorial powers by the president with the goal of maintaining constitutional continuity through an emergency.

The directive specifies that the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism will be designated as the National Continuity Coordinator.

Further established is a Continuity Policy Coordination Committee, chaired by a senior director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, to be "the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination."

Currently, the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism is Frances Fragos Townsend.

Townsend spent 13 years at the Justice Department before moving to the U.S. Coast Guard where she served as assistant commandant for intelligence.

She is a White House staff member in the executive office of the president who also chairs the Homeland Security Council, which as a counterpart to the National Security Council reports directly to the president.

The directive issued May 9 makes no attempt to reconcile the powers created there for the National Continuity Coordinator with the National Emergency Act. As specified by U.S. Code Title 50, Chapter 34, Subchapter II, Section 1621, the National Emergency Act allows that the president may declare a national emergency but requires that such proclamation "shall immediately be transmitted to the Congress and published in the Federal Register."

A Congressional Research Service study notes that under the National Emergency Act, the president "may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens."

The CRS study notes that the National Emergency Act sets up congress as a balance empowered to "modify, rescind, or render dormant such delegated emergency authority," if Congress believes the president has acted inappropriately.

NSPD-51/ HSPD-20 appears to supersede the National Emergency Act by creating the new position of National Continuity Coordinator without any specific act of Congress authorizing the position.

NSPD-51/ HSPD-20 also makes no reference whatsoever to Congress. The language of the May 9 directive appears to negate any a requirement that the president submit to Congress a determination that a national emergency exists, suggesting instead that the powers of the executive order can be implemented without any congressional approval or oversight.

Homeland Security spokesperson Russ Knocke affirmed that the Homeland Security Department will be implementing the requirements of NSPD-51/ HSPD-20 under Townsend's direction.

The White House had no comment.

Don't expect to hear about this on the evening news. It's being kept from most Americans by a media blackout.

Anonymous said...

It hasn't been lost on me that the mainstream media - and others - have levelled one attack after another against Sarah Palin. The latest refers to her as a "hillbilly." In other words, she is labelled as "backwards" because of her deeply-held religious convictions.

Anonymous said...

Only those who remain united with the Holy Father and the Magisterium of the Church will be able to resist the seduction of the spirit of Antichrist in the last days. Others will be mesmerized and stand in awe of his eloquence and ability to unite people in a common cause.

It will only be through fidelity to the Holy Father and the Magisterium and through prayer that we will be able to avoid being caught up in the worship of this man who comes to promote a humanitarian religion, a religion which is man-centered rather than God-centered.

Obama says that "We are the change we have been waiting for." I say that our world will only know true peace when it worships the Lord Jesus Christ.

Anonymous said...

Saul Alinsky Takes the White House
By Quin Hillyer on 11.6.08
The American Spectator

Conservatives may not realize just how difficult it might be to recover from this week's elections.

The day after the big defeat, the conservative chatter everywhere was about how the "movement" and the Republican Party (two different things) could finally unshackle themselves from the bad old habits that brought them down, and about how the ability to draw a sharp contrast with the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate would allow us to focus attention, rally the faithful, and re-storm the castle in 2010 and 2012.

Fat chance.

Too many conservatives think we've seen all this before -- in 1964 and 1974 and 1992 -- and that we know how to handle it. Fly, meet ointment: We're not dealing with the same sorts of opponents. These New Alinskyites who are taking over the White House, combined with the most leftist congressional leadership in memory, will not let us play by the same rules under which conservatives recovered from those earlier debacles. They will try to drastically tilt the playing field, seed our side of the field with land mines and, in short, rig the process to make it next to impossible for the political right, or Republicans, to recover. And they are likely to succeed in at least some of these designs.

It will begin with their efforts to secure a filibuster-proof majority of 60 senators (including the two independents). Right now the libs (and yes, all the Democratic senators, with the possible exception of Nebraska's Ben Nelson, are libs) have 56, with three Republican moderates and one conservative leading their races but awaiting recounts or runoffs. Watch for the Alinskyites to try stealing all four, and to succeed in at least two. We've seen this game before. They did it in Indiana's "Bloody Eighth" congressional district in 1984. They almost succeeded in 2000 in Florida. They did succeed, outrageously so, in the Washington State governor's race in 2004. Those are just the most obvious of many similar examples. And now they are even more ruthless, more lawyered-up, and in a more powerful position to pull it off than they were in any of those instances.

Next, watch what happens if they regularly can't peel off enough Republicans (or hold their own semi-fairminded people like Nelson and Joe Lieberman) to overcome whatever filibuster attempts Republicans do mount. Watch for an assault on the filibuster itself. Watch how they use as precedent the GOP "nuclear/constitutional option" on judges in 2005 -- except instead of just using it for judges, watch them use it against all filibusters. It's easy: Make the ruling from the chair that the filibuster is out of order for some reason. Instruct the parliamentarian to rule in their favor. Win the appeal of the parliamentarian's ruling by simple majority vote. And watch the courts pronounce it an internal matter of the legislative branch and thus outside of courtroom purview.

Watch a cheerleading establishment media -- the Fourth Estate as a veritable Fifth Column -- actually back these lefty maneuvers. It's all in the name of one-man/one-vote democracy, dontcha know? The filibuster once served its purpose, they'll say, but as a vestige of Southern "massive resistance" to integration it is now being used for massive resistance to the first black president, which invalidates it (suddenly) as a legitimate tool.

Watch the left use these tactics and others to pass even more liberalized voting laws -- an open invitation to even more fraud that is more creative, easier to hide, and less challengeable in court.

Watch what Michael Barone called the Obama "thugocracy" use the Justice Department to stifle dissent. Anybody who complains about vote fraud will be charged with "vote suppression." Anybody who complains about DoJ's actions will be charged with interfering with an investigation. Anybody who denies having interfered will be charged with perjury. Likewise, anybody who peacefully protests abortion clinics or the use of state-sponsored racial quotas will be charged with a civil rights violation. And the accused won't be able to look to the Supreme Court for help: Anthony Kennedy's "evolving standards" of justice will evolve to match the new zeitgeist, providing a 5-4 majority for the administration. Meanwhile, of course, Obama's other appointments will be filling up the rest of the judiciary at a rapid clip, with nobody able to stop them.

Other ways the Obama axis will tilt the playing field: "card check" legislation to eliminate secret ballots in unionizing and to force union victories in contract negotiations. Provision after provision giving favors to the trial bar so it can sue enemies into submission. Copious new regulations, especially environmental, to be used selectively to ensnare other conservative malcontents. Invasive IRS audits of conservative think tanks, other conservative 501 organizations, and PACs.

What Ohio officials did in rifling through so many of Joe Wurzelbacher's files will serve as ample precedent. (Just watch, by the way: Nobody ever will be effectively disciplined for the violation of Wurzelbacher's rights.)

And, only when the time is right and the ground (or air) has been well prepared, will come the grand-daddy of all fights, the re-enactment of the misnamed "Fairness Doctrine."

Oh, they'll be clever. They'll pick their spot. They'll wait until Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Mark Levin says something innocent they can twist out of context and call "hate speech" -- and then they'll highlight some schoolyard fight where a member of a "victim group" gets the worst of it as if the "attack" were caused by talk-rad…no, make that "hate radio," which will be the new moniker the Fifth Column/Fourth Estate hangs on the talkmeisters.

(Even before imposing the Fairness Doctrine, they'll use the Federal Communications Commission in other ways to put a muffler on their opponents.)

And, always, a few carefully calibrated street demonstrations, splashed with just the right headlines across the East Coast newspapers and captured by just the right camera angle on CBS News, will be used any time, on any issue, to make the point that civil unrest would be the price of resistance to the benevolent desires of the Obama regime.

The erosions of conservative rights will be incremental. Each one will have its own justification. Each one will be supported by the establishment media. Each one will be timed so as to allow the general public to become accustomed to it, to accept it as unremarkable, or even to come to regard it as a public good for the sake of keeping conservative "troublemakers" from fomenting disorder.

And the Obamessiah, still speaking frequently to stadia full of admirers, will provide a tone of reasoned moderation, combined with further appeals to hope, in order to justify it all.

These are the sorts of things Alinskyites do. These are the sorts of tactics used by ACORN, at whose conferences Obama himself regularly taught seminars on "power." These are the sorts of policies favored by the academic left, Obama's old milieu -- the policies that favor speech codes and stolen campus newspapers and the firing of faculty for "offensive" remarks.

Conservatives have fought things like this for years already, of course. But they've never fought it while the left controlled so many of the levers of power, and certainly not when the left was led by such a charismatic and near cult-inspiring leader who was so smart, so well steeped in these stratagems, and so fully supported by a Fourth Estate up whose legs warm feelings run every time he waxes eloquent.

It will take very focused, very intelligent, very skillful action by conservatives to stop this creeping subversion of a free society. This is a whole different political battlefield than any on which we've fought before. And we haven't yet found our Omar Bradley.

Quin Hillyer is an associate editor at the Washington Examiner and a senior editor of The American Spectator. He can be reached at qhillyer@gmail.com.

Anonymous said...

And then there's "net neutrality," which will do to blogging what the "fairness doctrine" will do to talk radio.

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