Forum Post: OCCUPY The National Security State

For ten years, we’ve watched one of the most draconian laws passed with incredible haste systematically destroy the freedoms that were supposedly under attack by terrorists and the “axis of evil.” In the name of national security, the Patriot Act has allowed our government – one that touts itself as the freeist in the world – the ability to spy on its citizens without justification, search their homes without warrants, and even penalize them for speaking a word of such actions.

Now, we see the application of this security state in the streets of many cities that contain Occupy movements. In the name of “public safety,” elected officials, right leaning media, and police have justified the use of excessive force and arrests when confronting Occupy activists. At one time, we looked at images of activists assaulted and arrested in the streets as a dark time in our history. We see state sanctioned violence towards peaceful protest in other countries across the globe as a violation of basic human rights. However, when our nation holds the baton in hand today, we justify it by reducing our citizens with demonizing descriptors. Occupy protesters are called troublemakers, anarchists, lazy hippies, a clueless collegiate of criminals, and sometimes even equated with terrorists.

Various law enforcement agencies have always snooped on, harassed, arrested, and openly attacked political activists. Whether anti-corporate globalization protesters or environmental activists, anti-war activists, the victims of COINTELPRO operations, or the targets of the red scare – United States law enforcement has always done what it can to disrupt dissent. Now however, we live in an age where one need only raise a single suspicious eyebrow to an organization before every facet of the national security state begins bringing the hammer down. With a multitude of both national and local politicians in the back pockets of corporations and Wall Street, it was only a short matter of time before reactions to a major resistance of the status quo – Occupy movements – became violent.

Occupy The National Security State