Dinhternet

So I’ve been telling peo­ple about this book I’ve been read­ing, The End of Amer­ica, and now that I just fin­ished read­ing it, I thought I’d blog about it. It’s about how when­ever indi­vid­u­als want to take con­trol of a free, demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety, they go through the same ten steps, every time. And those ten steps are hap­pen­ing right now in America.

In order to take over a coun­try, all you need to do is:

1. Invoke an Exter­nal and Inter­nal Threat
2. Estab­lish Secret Prisons
3. Develop a Para­mil­i­tary Force
4. Sur­veil Ordi­nary Citizens
5. Infil­trate Citizen’s Groups
6. Arbi­trar­ily Detain and Release Citizens
7. Tar­get Key Individuals
8. Restrict the Press
9. Cast Crit­i­cism as “Espi­onage” and Dis­sent as “Treason”
10. Sub­vert the Rule of Law

Obvi­ously we are still a free soci­ety, but that doesn’t mean that these steps aren’t hap­pen­ing. Like in Ani­mal Farm, they don’t hap­pen all at once, and some­times you don’t even real­ize that they’ve hap­pened at all until much later. Not all of them are in full swing yet, either, but I can def­i­nitely see smoke from the embers for all of them. And each one that is suc­cess­fully installed makes it eas­ier to imple­ment the other steps, and makes the other steps that are already imple­mented more powerful.

I’ve had some con­ver­sa­tions with my dad about this issue in the past, and more since the Viet­namese gov­ern­ment ille­gally impris­oned seven peo­ple. When they tell me about how those peo­ple are being treated, I kept ask­ing, “How can they think they can get away with stuff like that?!” But they can, and do, every day. I took my lib­er­ties here in Amer­ica for granted. And now it’s the scari­est thought in the world that the place my par­ents fled to for safety is becom­ing more and more like the place they ran away from.

Please, take the time to read this book and see for your­self. You can bor­row my copy if you want. If you don’t think these things can hap­pen in Amer­ica, I’d be happy to dis­cuss any of the ten steps with you.