What's the Threat to Our Constitutional Rights?

What do you think is the greatest enemy or threat to our constitutional rights?

I ask this question because a five page article in Foreign Policy Magazine says "The Greatest Enemy of Privacy Is Ambiguity"

The main thesis of the article is "If we can't define what it means to be left alone, don't be surprised when the government comes knocking."

Is that all there is to it? It took me only a few minutes to decide there are numerous threats to privacy, and numerous threats to constitutional rights in general.

What about ambivalence, coercion, and ignorance?

The public is force fed lies about why we need all these security measures. Most believe the lies. As a result of believing lies, most are ambivalent about the loss in constitutional rights.

Others are simply too stupid to understand what is happening in the first place.

Still others are ignorant of what history teaches us about freedoms given up, or taken away by the state.

Beware Charismatic Politicians

An American major after the destruction of the Vietnamese Village Ben Tre: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

Vice President Joe Biden: "We Have to Go Spend Money to Keep From Going Bankrupt."

President George W. Bush: "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system."(For a discussion please see The Most Redeeming Feature of Capitalism is Failure)

Nancy Pelosi said "We have to pass the health care bill to see what's in it." (YouTube Video)

Larry Summers says "The central irony of financial crisis is that while it is caused by too much confidence, too much borrowing and lending and too much spending, it can only be resolved with more confidence, more borrowing and lending, and more spending." (Reuters)

Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

Please recall what Reichsmarschall Hermann Wilhelm Göring (in English his name is also spelled as Hermann Goering) Nazi founder of the Gestapo, Head of the Luftwaffe, said at the Nuremberg Trials.

Here is a clip of the interview in Goering's cell in prison, after the war.

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

And now we are told by charismatic politicians that we are under attack. We must give up our constitutional rights to prevent further attacks.

With that in mind, what is the greatest threat to our rights?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com