THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE AND LOSS OF CIVIL LIBERTIES

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

       From September 11, 2001, the day Arab Muslim terrorists attacked America , the nations of the world have tightened their national securities. The nations of the world have become national security states. Every effort is made to nip terrorism in the bud before it occurs. This often entails invading citizens’ privacies. This invasion of the people’s privacies is justified with the notion of security: the government is providing the people with personal security.

       The people are afraid of being killed by terrorists and are generally afraid of death.  In their desire to live at all costs people are increasingly willingly authorizing their governments to do whatever it takes to protect them.  Hence we now live in a security world where our governments are taking away our civil liberties all in an effort to protect us.

       In a way this development is funny: Arab terrorists attack us and we respond by destroying our civil liberties! One would think that the right thing to do is to go after those who attacked us, as we did in Afghanistan, with the entire world with us, until George Bush replaced the war on terrorism with his own personal agenda: to get even with a man who threatened his daddy, and to complete the war that his father began and did not complete, a shortcoming that allegedly caused him reelection, the misadventure in Iraq. 

       People have always lived in fear of death. Indeed, Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) argued that it is the fear of death from the hands of other people that led human beings to form civil society and government in the first place. In the state of nature people warred among themselves, the strong killing the weak, taking their property and enslaving them and a band of weak warring with the strong and killing them. Thus, in nature, life everywhere was “nasty, brutish and short”. In pre-civil society people lived in perpetual insecurity and to reduce their insecurity formed governments and gave them the authority to make laws that protect them from each other’s depredations.

        Apparently, if people did not have a need for security there would be no need for government.  Hobbes argued for absolute government for the people are so self-centered and depraved that they needed the power of an absolute monarch to coral them into respecting each others rights to live as free citizens.

        John Locke (Second Treaty on Government) modified Hobbes by positing that we need governments with limited powers. We established governments to protect us and we have a right to determine in what areas we want the government we established to protect us. That is to say that while essentially agreeing with Hobbes on the need for a government that protects the people, Locke wants the people themselves to determine the scope of that protection, the function of government and for the government to leave the people with relative freedom in areas where they feel able to protect themselves. 

       Locke’s idea of government led to the concept of limited government, a government that protected the people’s lives while preserving their civil liberties.  The government is supposed not to interfere in certain areas of social life, such as people’s sexual life. 

         With the rise of national security world people now seem willing to extend the scope of their governments and allow them to operate in every aspect of their lives, including their sexual lives. Governments are now allowed to look at people’s naked bodies (some of the equipments used at airports to screen passengers for possession of illegal objects see the naked body inside the clothes people wear). No doubt, soon, people would permit their governments to take pictures of them engaged in sexual activities if that enables the governments to better protect them (there are cameras that can look through walls). 

        Without knowing what is happening before their very eyes, people are increasingly trading their civil liberties for personal and national security; they are gradually slouching towards totalitarian governments.

        Civilization has come full cycle. We set up governments to make us relatively free and those governments are taking away our freedom, with our consent! We are reaching Jean Jacque Rousseau’s (Social Contract) so-called civilized state where though we were supposedly born free, everywhere we live in chains.

       All it would take are a couple more Arab Muslim terrorist attacks on American soil and the American political system scraps whatever civil liberties it had and go full blown authoritarian and passes laws to monitor all citizens “for their own protection”. George Orwell’s Big Brother government would come into being. It is not inconceivable that soon folks would have to report to their nearest Homeland Security Department’s office every time they change their addresses.

        I assume that that this scenario could come to pass; what really interests me is why it could? What is it in our nature that makes us willing to trade our freedom for security?

         Human beings are creatures who are aware of the inevitability of their own death. They are born, grow, age and must die.  Death is inevitable for all biological organisms.

        One would think that given the inevitability of death that human beings would be used to death and accept it. Apparently, what it means to be a human being is to not want to accept the inevitable, death.

         Human beings are afraid of death; they do not want to die and want to live in their bodies for as long as is possible. If they could live in bodies forever they would do so.

       On the other hand, most biological indicators show that the human body has an optimum number of years that it can last. Perhaps, the human body can exist for one hundred and twenty years?  It is doubtful that a human being can live to be a hundred and fifty years.

       The human body is a temporary agglomeration of the various elements of matter; a composition of matter held together by chemical bonds, bonds that will eventually break and the body is decomposed. Whether people like it or not they must die.   

        The fear of death is rooted in many factors including the belief that death means the end of life; death is believed as disappearance into oblivion. Folk believe that when they die they end and cease in being and, apparently, they want to be in being forever.

       This fear of death is funny since folk’s religions tell them that they would continue living after they die. One would think that if, indeed, people took their religions seriously that they would not fear death, that they would welcome death as liberation from the suffering and pain that mark this world.

      Christianity, for example, teaches that those who follow the alleged founder of that religion, Jesus Christ, upon death, would continue living with him in an immortal place called heaven.  If this hypothesis of life after death were true, one would expect Christians not to fear death! Indeed, one would expect them to willingly die and go meet their lord and savior and their God.  Apparently, they do not believe in their theology of life after death; if they did they would not fear death.

        I believe that as long as people are afraid of physical harm and death and seek protection from harm and death they would be amenable to control by any one who promises them security. In the extant world, governments promise people personal security.

          People obey their governments (and their laws) largely because they believe that governments protect them from the harm each of them is capable of inflicting on them. They obey the laws and policies made by their governments because they are afraid of death. 

        Clever politicians, such as George Bush, undertake to manipulate the people’s fear of harm and death; they use that fear as a ruse to expand their governments’ powers. See, all that George Bush does is engage in talks that arouse fear of terrorists killing Americans, and having made the people afraid he gets them to flock to him and permit him to enact laws that eliminate whatever civil liberties they had.

       The Patriot Act and other legislations purporting to fight terrorism practically permit the American government to snoop into citizens’ private lives (including listening in on their phone calls, reviewing what books they check out from libraries and so on).

      As noted, a few more terrorist attacks on America and Bush the Machiavellian would excite Americans fear to hysterical level and compel Congress to pass more laws to give him the power to protect Americans. As he sees it, he is a war time president (big words for a man who, in his youth, schemed to avoid going to war in Vietnam ) and during wars Presidents have war powers, emergency powers, to arrest and hold citizens indefinitely without due legal process.

         I am using America as an example; however, what is going on in America is going on in other countries. Human beings are the same everywhere. Human beings everywhere are animals that want to live-forever and ever in their bodies and fear death and, therefore, flock to whoever promises to protect them, to enable them live long.

        I believe that as long as human beings are invested in living in bodies forever and fear death that they are exploitable by devious politicians.  I, therefore, see a future where amoral and power drunken politicians manipulating terrorist attacks and using them as cover to increase their destruction of people’s civil liberties. I see a world where people are essentially turned into slaves to their rulers, all due to their fear of harm and death. 

        One does not have to be rocket scientist to recognize that with improvements in science that, sooner or later, smart folks would be able to rig nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and use them to perpetrate horrendous terrorist acts.

       Give or take, by the end of this century most nations would have the capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons. Despite the West’s efforts to limit the knowledge of nuclear physics to itself and possession of nuclear weapons to itself, the fact is that the genie is out of the bottle. Other countries are smart enough to understand that the West is not altruistic in its crusade to limit nuclear weapons to itself. The so-called nuclear non-proliferation crusade is actually a crusade to make the world safer for Western hegemony.

       It is very simple: if only the West possesses weapons of mass destruction she is like terrorists and is able to intimidate other countries into doing as she wants them to do or else they are wiped out. Those countries obviously do not want to be wiped out and do not like to be intimidated by those who possess nuclear weapons; their desire for survival disposes them to seek possession of nuclear weapons. As scholars of International Politics tell us, what prevents war is not human goodness but balance of power. What prevents one country from attacking and swallowing others is balance of power between them. Therefore, rational countries try to acquire whatever weapons their neighbors have that give them more power than them.

        History tells us that every new weapon system devised by mankind is initially in the possession of few countries and gives them advantage over others. Those with such advantage in weaponry try to protect their advantage by preventing others from acquiring the weapons that give them advantage.

        In time, other countries acquire the weapons that hitherto gave some advantage over them and equalize the playing fields in International Relations.  Simply stated, nuclear technology would spread to all parts of the world and there is nothing the West can do to stop it (unless the West destroys its own nuclear weapons). At present, nuclear physics appears difficult but it is reaching a critical mass where it permeates human consciousness and somehow most people would understand it.

        A few centuries ago only the brightest minds understood Isaac Newton’s mechanics, but today most secondary school students understand it. By the same token, at present only the best minds understand Einstein’s relativity and Bohr’s quantum mechanics, but by the end of this century such understanding would be common place.

       Here are the facts. Not too long from now high school kids would understand nuclear physics and the brighter ones would be able to rig nuclear weapons in their parents’ garages (as they are currently able to do with crude bombs). 

       When knowledge of nuclear physics becomes common, the fun truly begins. We all know that many third world persons perceive the West as thieves who stole their raw materials, and if they could would get back at the West by any means necessary.  By and bye, those who consider themselves oppressed by the West will show the West how angry they are at them. 

       In a hundred years or so nuclear weapons could be exploding in Western cities. This seems inevitable and we ought to get used to the idea (or prevent it by helping third world countries develop their economies rather than cart their resources to the West for our own good). Of course, we would not do the right thing; like drunken sailors we would continue robbing the rest of the world and not expect them to be angry at us and when they show their anger we pretend that their anger is unjustified. The resources of this world belong to all human beings and no group has a right to take more than others; this is simple justice unless we define justice as might make right.

       In the meantime, our leaders will promise us ability to protect us from what is in store for us: third world anger. They would do so by taking way our civil liberties. I envisage a future whereby America and other countries are countries of slaves with slave masters as their leaders.

        The only way for slave society not to come into being is if two things happen. One, we must share our collective wealth more equitably. Some form of democratic socialism is inevitable if we are to avert disaster. You cannot go on having a few with billions of dollars and many starving in third world countries (particularly in a world where third world countries’ students are increasingly doing better than Western students in the sciences). One is fully informed on the dangers of soviet type socialism where the state became the terrorist and used state power to intimidate the people into going along its preferred policies and jailing or killed those who opposed it. Nevertheless, we can device a form of socialism that preserves aspects of capitalism (that leads to economic productivity) and democracy (that leads to freedom).

       The second thing that needs to happen is for societies to begin training their citizens to overcome their fear of death, rather than encouraging them to have it so as manipulate them. ( America ’s rulers, being devious creatures, encourage Americans to fear death and in doing so run to them to protect them from Arabs terrorists).

        Here are the facts. Once born in flesh, we must die. If one accepts ones future death why would one seek unnecessary protection from terrorists? Let the terrorists attack us; we should counter attack them and chase them to wherever they hide and kill them.

      What matters in this world is that while we live, we live like free men and women.  Only those who do not fear death would look terrorists in the face and deny their effort to use terror it arouse fear in them; deny these cowards efforts to use fear to control human beings, rather than use reason to persuade them into accepting their point of view (assuming that their point of view is reasonable…and one does not see why any rational person would want to live under a theocracy of religious fools; only science is worth guiding people).

       When human beings accept the inevitability of death and resolve to live freely within the window life offers them to live in body no one is going to terrorize them.  Clearly, fear cannot be completely eliminated from animals. Fear alerts animals to dangers and compels them to take self protective measures. If it were possible to eliminate fear from animals, human beings included life on earth as we know it would end. We know so because children who were born without the capacity for pain (anhedonia) hence experience less fear tend to live recklessly and sustain wounds and die in childhood. It seems that all we can do is reduce and manage fear. Unfortunately, for as long as we are prone to fear some people would try to manipulate our fears; terrorists (individuals and governments) would always try to control us through exploiting our tendency to fear. We must, therefore, understand fear and its role in our lives and not permit others to use it to take us to where they want to go that we do not think is good for us (such as theocratic state).

        One is an eternal optimist and believes that the creature called human beings somehow would always muddle through difficulties and continue its evolution to higher levels of being. Somehow, people will understand terrorism: individual, group and governmental, and the risk it poses to their civil liberties and work through it and evolve a more advanced civilization. In every dark cloud is silver lining; every problem has the germ for its solution; human beings will continue marching from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom. It is in this hope that life on earth is worth living.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

June 8, 2007

ozodiosuji@gmail.com

Robot  Villager

# 1 var sbtitle3521=encodeURIComponent(The Nationa...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 09.06.2007 09:14