From the Editor

Concentration Camps, Tyranny and the 

Rise of Totalitarian Police States

By:  David Deschesne

Editor/Publisher, Fort Fairfield Journal

If you build one of the world’s most powerful militaries, you will need to find people to fight.

If you partner with banks that you authorize to create artificial money from nothing, based upon the forced confiscation of the citizenry, you will be able pay people to fight.

If you place agents and sympathetic ideologues in positions of power inside the news media you will be able to wage never-ending wars for financial gain to your own military-industrial co-op and the banks that finance it.

If the citizenry tolerates endless war, they will lose all of their freedom under the false pretext of preserving it.

It’s no secret that I don’t support the illegal police actions we are undertaking in the Mideast and around the world, but that’s besides the point. I want to deal with the mindset of our troops who are the basic reason the illegal wars are continuing in the first place.

It’s been said that Sadam Hussein had to be taken out because he was so evil. Well, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin were much more evil than Sadam on his worst day, but we didn’t “liberate” any of those leaders’ citizenry. Let’s see, what did Sadam have that Stalin, Pot and Amin didn’t? Perhaps it was: “Black Gold, Texas Tea...Oil, that is.”

Historically, people blame their current president for the perpetual war machine that most of the inhabitants in the U.S. don’t want, or can even afford. However, I submit that our president - as with all others throughout U.S. history - is merely a figurehead with little to no actual, political power.

I hear some of our troops saying, “We don’t get involved with the politics, we have a job to do and we do it.”

That’s an interesting statement. I thought their “job” was encoded in the oath they took to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. If protecting and defending the Constitution is the mission, then I do more to that end in one edition of the Fort Fairfield Journal than some U.S. soldiers will do in their entire career. I’ve at least read the Constitution and understand it. How many of them have?

There’s nothing that I know of in the military oath to “just do your job.” When that type of mindset settles in, it is very easy for a totalitarian dictator to exercise power he was neither legally granted, nor authorized to use.

In order for tyranny to perpetually exist, a tyrant must posses three things. They are:

NUMBERS: A tyrant must have a sufficient number of enforcers to do his will.

LOYALTY: In addition to vast numbers of enforcers, a tyrant must have their complete and unquestioned loyalty to “do what they’re told” regardless of the mission. Money is usually a good way to attain this.

ARMS: The loyal enforcers of the tyrant must be equipped with a sufficient number of armaments in order to enforce the tyrant’s edicts on a population which vastly outnumbers them. Disarming the population is always helpful to these ends.

The essence of tyranny is that a tyrant requires a sufficient number of loyal, armed enforcers. If just one of those three legs of the tyrant’s stool falls, (i.e. “numbers, “loyalty”, or “arms”) so, too, will the entire stool and also the tyrant.

A tyrant cannot be voted out of office, nor will he voluntarily relinquish control. A tyrant considers opposition to his will as an act of “terrorism.” A tyrant cannot be appealed to, or negotiated with, for a redress of grievances. A tyrant cannot be reasoned with. The only language a tyrant understands is that which he communicates in - overwhelming physical force.

Soldiers and police who “just do their job” and don’t analyze what they are being asked to do paradoxically enable the same tyrannical power structure to grow and develop in their homeland that they are attempting to quash elsewhere.

Throughout history, tyrants have come to power based solely upon the loyalty of their military troops and establishment citizen police forces.

Let’s see how troops and police “just doing their job” and “just enforcing the law” have enabled other great, tyrannical leaders to ply their trade:

Nero had his police cause a fire that burned much of Rome in 64 AD. He then blamed it on the Christians and proceeded to have them rounded up and executed. Nero hardly did any of his own killing, it was his loyal guards - his “troops” - “just doing their job.”

Long before Hitler persecuted the Jews, the infamous Spanish Inquisitor, Torquemada brought the art to sadistic perfection in the mid 1200s. However, Torquemada didn’t discriminate. He was also responsible for the torture and death of thousands of innocent Spaniards. In the city of Ciudad alone, he ordered 52 heretics to be burnt alive. He is credited with perfecting the toca, or water torture where water was forced down people’s throats; the potro, where a person was bound to a rack by tight cords that could be continually tightened; and the garrucha where a prisoner was hung by his wrists with weights suspended from his feet, then he was raised a few feet and dropped, dislocating his limbs. Torquemada’s loyal police officer inquisitors were often referred to as the “train of death” and were feared by all whenever they came into town.

Circa 1460s, Vlad the Impaler, as he was also known, was responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 people. His preferred method of murder was impaling people - many times while still alive - on wooden stakes, like so much teriyaki chicken.

A battle once ensued where Vlad attempted to capture then kill Sultan Mehmed II. Mehmed escaped, but on his way back into his city, he found in a narrow gorge a forest of impaled human cadavers, estimated at 20,000 men, women and children. Of course, Vlad did not impale all 20,000 people all by himself. He relied heavily on his loyal troops and police who were more than willing to “just do their job.”

Ivan IV, Tsar of all the Russias in the mid-1500s was a ruthless tyrant whose campaigns of pillage, torture and desolation were infamous. He created Russia’s first “Secret Police” and boasted of deflowering a thousand virgins and destroying thousands of his own offspring.

While Ivan was terrible, he relied heavily on men of narrow minds, with supple backs, who never contradicted him and encouraged him in his debauchery. These men were loyal to their leader and “just did their job” without asking questions or considering the inhumanity of the actions they were carrying out for their leader.

Stalin was leader of the Soviet Union in the mid 1900s. He was responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million of his own citizenry - many of whom were dragged off to the Gulags in assembly line arrests to die horrible, inhumane deaths.

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
Archipelago he describes Stalin’s gulags as crowded concrete cells some holding as many as fifty men, mostly naked with little to no bathroom facilities eating a thin gruel of flour and water out of a dirty laundry tub. The slave trains taking men to forced labor camps would stack men in box cars like cord wood and they would have to travel like that for days, sometimes urinating and defecating on each other because there were no bathroom facilities. Many froze to death during the winter in the unheated railroad cars. The “crime” of most of these prisoners was that of not agreeing with the official ideology of the government, or that the government didn’t think they could be trusted to tow the party line.

In those jail cells you could be severely punished for talking too loudly, or even coughing.

Stalin didn’t torture, kill, or starve those people to death personally. It took a monolithic infrastructure of guards, “judges,” inquisitors and police officers who excelled in the art of torture and SWAT team style death squads to arrest and exterminate that many people over a twenty year period. Those loyal troopers “just did their job” for Stalin, too.

Adolph Hitler was infatuated with exterminating anyone of the Jewish race, as well as any of his political enemies regardless of their nationality or religion. He even went so far as to institute the “Blood Purge of 1934” where many of his own police officers were mass-executed by fellow officers because their loyalty could not be counted upon. In addition to hideous medical experiments on Jews, Gypsies, Pols, Russians and others, Hitler also perfected the efficiency of mass extermination using machine gun death pits and the infamous gas chambers—all manned by his loyal police officers.

Ilse Koch was the wife of Karl Koch, who was commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany during World War II. Buchenwald killed its Jewish and Polish inmates by working them literally to death. It was also the location of bizarre medical experiments and live vivisections of human beings. Ilse used the camp as her personal playground. As a nymphomaniac sadist, she enjoyed standing topless at the gate to the camp to greet new prisoners only to have them beaten to death if they looked upon her. She also organized strange orgies amongst the prisoners where they were forced to have sex with each other before being beaten to death by SS guards. While Ilse did do some of the beating and murdering personally, along with her husband, she relied on the loyalty of the SS officers—Hitler’s own private police force to do most of the dirty work. The depravities were so severe at Buchenwald, that the NAZIs themselves put the Koches on trial and eventually executed Karl.

Dictator of Uganda in the 1970s, Idi Amin was a sadist who ordered his police to kill anybody who dared defy him. At times, the Ugandan police killed so many people and dumped their bodies in the river that they frequently clogged the hydroelectric dam downstream at Owen Falls and blacked out power in parts of the country. The Ugandan police perfected the art of torture by cutting off a victim’s flesh and force-feeding it to him raw until he bled to death. Other times they cooked it, first. These were the loyal law enforcement officers of a citizenry that had lost all control of its police force.

The U.S. installed dictator of Cambodia in the 1970s ultimately killed three million of his own countrymen using a loyal police and military “just doing their jobs.” He forced his political prisoners—many were women and children—to work to death, or until they died of starvation. Any who didn’t work were shot on sight. His police were noted for killing all people who wore glasses because they perceived them as being intelligent and that ability to think and reason could, he believed, threaten their power structure.

Blind Loyalty of U.S. Police and Military

Today, our troops (and police) have been taught a blind, stupid, submissive loyalty to their leaders. They are brainwashed throughout public school to never question authority and in their police and military training to never question the law or their government. They are trained to “just do their jobs” and leave the politics up to their “superiors.”

We the People didn’t hire the military to “just do their job” we hired them to protect us from tyrants - foreign and domestic. We didn’t hire police to be “law enforcement” - the government did. We hired our police to protect our rights both from private criminals as well as an overreaching, tyrannical government—that after all was the essence of the “Separation of Powers doctrine” where police were to be a check against unjust laws from the legislative branch and unjust rulings from the judiciary.

“Just doing their job,” without asking questions, or contradicting their superiors sets us up to be just another tyrannical oligarchy like so many before us.

Surely, there’s nothing new under the sun. But, it’s up to all of us to decide if a U.S.-based tyrannical police state is what we truly want for our children and for humanity, or not.

note: Information in this editorial was gleaned from The Most Evil Men and Women in History, by Miranda Twiss.

More Editorials by David Deschesne