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In Semayne’s Case, it was decided that an “execution of process” had to be announced, that the King’s agents simply couldn’t break down the door or walk in unannounced. In another case, Entick v. Carrington, general warrants not showing probable cause were ruled against when agents of the crown raided homes in search of polemical pamphlets attacking not only governmental policies but the King himself. In the colonies, English authorities made use of writs of assistance, which were general warrants authorizing the bearer to enter any house or other place to search for and seize ”prohibited and uncustomed” goods, mostly smuggled and thus untaxed goods. The Fourth grew directly out of this experience.
Now, more than two hundred years later, we are so lax, so distracted, or so ignorant as to not understand that a fireman poking around in our desk as he conducts an “inspection” amounts to the same sort of abuse inflicted on colonists by agents of the King.
Of course, fire chiefs who believe they have the right to search for “material or behavior that may indicate terrorist activities,” that is to say material and behavior “hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States,” likely do not consider themselves fascist in the traditional sense. If they think about it at all, no doubt the more intelligent fire chiefs among us consider “fascism” little more than an outmoded, pejorative epithet, a word that conjures up images of Hitler and maybe Mussolini. For as George Orwell said, the word is almost completely meaningless, because it is used to describe all manner of bullies and thus divorced from the political context.
However, whether they realize it or not, firemen who snoop around looking for evidence of political crimes are foot soldiers for an authoritarian political ideology, even if they do not fully comprehend this ideology. In a dictionary definition sense, fascism is typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life and this is precisely what our rulers are attempting to do.
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As Mike German, a former FBI agent, told Keith Olbermann, the Department of Homeland Security — let us call this agency what it really is, the “Ministry” of Homeland Security, an apropos if not frightening reference to Orwell — is attempting to turn firefighters into government spies, or more politely “intelligence gatherers.” In response to Olbermann’s question about firefighters now tasked with the job of ferreting out materials that may express “discontent” with the government. Mr. German said:
“Anytime you look at these stories, they always focus on certain reading materials, terrorist propaganda they might call it… and their focus on literature. Of course, again, there is a First Amendment in operation too, so we are concerned that is where the firefighters are turning their attention.”
However, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes so aptly noted, a “page of history is worth a volume of logic,” that is to say during “times of war” (even undeclared wars), the Constitution and the Bill of Rights become the first victims. “It is difficult to read our constitutional history,” explains Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas,
“without believing that the Constitution is often reduced at best to a whisper during times of war.”Constitutional liberties were restricted during the Civil War (or more accurately, the “Northern War of Aggression”), World War I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. According to constitutional experts and commentators, however, the coming suppression of liberty may make the abuses of those past conflicts pale by way of comparison.
“Experts disagree on what effect the war on terrorism will have on First Amendment freedoms. Some constitutional experts say the most egregious affronts to the Constitution have occurred in the Fourth Amendment arena. But many believe that freedom of speech will be curtailed,”warns David Hudson, writing for the Freedom Forum.
“I am very worried that there will be more efforts to suppress speech if the war on terrorism drags on,"explains Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law professor at the University of Southern California.
Indeed, if the neocons have their way, the “war on terrorism,” actually a war on liberty at home in the name of globalist fascism, will drag on for a hundred years or more.
It’s not called the “Long War” for nothing.
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