Demowp

Tag: State of emergency

  • This Is How It Begins: The Deep State Wants to Terminate the Constitution

    This Is How It Begins: The Deep State Wants to Terminate the Constitution

    That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale This is how it begins. This is how it always begins, justified in the name of national security. Mass roundups. Raids. Indefinite detentions in concentration camps. Martial law. The erosion of habeas corpus protections. The suspension of […]

  • “This Is an Emergency, Laws Don’t Apply”

    The first chapter of Agamben’s The State of Exception (U. of Chicago, 2005) presents a brief outline of the history of the state of exception, including concrete examples from Nazi Germany, the U.S. (the Civil War and after 9/11), France, Switzerland, Italy, and England, roughly in that order. He explains that World War I was […]

  • Mistakes Were Made

    Mistakes Were Made

    Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any […]

  • COVID-19 Tested Our Commitment to Freedom

    COVID-19 Tested Our Commitment to Freedom

    The remedy is worse than the disease. — Francis Bacon, “Of Seditions and Trouble” in Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall The government never cedes power willingly. Neither should we. If the COVID-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of […]

  • We’ve Already Got a Dictator-in-Chief: How Absolute Power Corrupted the President

    We’ve Already Got a Dictator-in-Chief: How Absolute Power Corrupted the President

    Once a dictator, always a dictator. Power-hungry, lawless and steadfast in its pursuit of authoritarian powers, the government does not voluntarily relinquish those powers once it acquires, uses and inevitably abuses them. Likewise, any presidential candidate who promises to be a dictator on day one, if elected, will be a dictator-in-chief for life. Then again, the […]

  • The Next Crisis Is Anyone’s Guess, But the Government Is Ready to Lockdown the Nation

    The Next Crisis Is Anyone’s Guess, But the Government Is Ready to Lockdown the Nation

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. — H.L. Mencken, In Defence of Women, 1918 First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state. Then the COVID-19 […]

  • The Emergency State’s Plot to Override the Constitution

    The Emergency State’s Plot to Override the Constitution

    Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow. — Justice Neil Gorsuch We have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency. Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers […]

Generated by Feedzy
en English
ar Arabiczh-CN Chinese (Simplified)nl Dutchen Englishfr Frenchde Germanit Italianpt Portugueseru Russianes Spanish