Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today announced the expansion of the Department's national "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign to hundreds of Walmart stores across the country—launching a new partnership between DHS and Walmart to help the American public play an active role in ensuring the safety and security of our nation.

Coming soon to a Walmart checkout line near you ...


I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.


Addendum: (long but worth it)

From a PropagandaMatrix.com article:


As America sinks deeper into a militarized police state, society begins to parallel more and more aspects of Nazi Germany and other historical dictatorships, especially in the context of citizens being turned against each other, which in turn creates a climate of fear and the constraining sense that one is always being watched.

One common misconception about Nazi Germany was that the police state was solely a creation of the authorities and that the citizens were merely victims. On the contrary, Gestapo files show that 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information provided by denunciations by “ordinary” Germans.

“There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors,” wrote Robert Gellately of Florida State University.

Now the federal government is urging Americans to "denounce" each other at Wal-Mart. Are we seeing the beginnings of President Barack Obama's promised "civilian national security force" that would be just as powerful and well funded as the US military?

Gellately discovered that the people who informed on their neighbors were motivated primarily by banal factors – “greed, jealousy, and petty differences,” and not by a genuine concern about crime or insecurity. Indeed, history tells us that any Stasi-like society does nothing to increase genuine security and only turns the host population against each other while decaying the country from within.

Gellately “found cases of partners in business turning in associates to gain full ownership; jealous boyfriends informing on rival suitors; neighbors betraying entire families who chronically left shared bathrooms unclean or who occupied desirable apartments.”

“And then there were those who informed because for the first time in their lives someone in authority would listen to them and value what they said.”

Gellately emphasizes the fact that the Germans who sicked the authorities on their neighbors knew very well what the consequences for the victims would be – families torn apart, torture and internment in concentration camps, and ultimately in many cases death – but they still did it with few qualms because the rewards of financial bounties and mere convenience were deemed more important to them.

This strikes at the root of the selfish and childish urges the government is trying to manipulate in getting people to report on their fellow Americans. The self-important feeling of being listened to, ascribed some temporary sense of authority, and the cult-like pavlovian reward of being metaphorically patted on the head by someone in a uniform, are all tendencies such campaigns play on.

However, if we don’t want to end up in a society that exists in a constant state of tyranny and fear as in Stasi East Germany or Stalinist Russia, we must learn that our neighbors and friends are not our enemies, and that the only real threat against which we need to unite is an oppressive state that tries to destroy us by turning us against each other.

This role has now been undertaken by Big Sis and the Department of Homeland Security, which is actively finalizing the invasion and total takeover of American society, using tools and programs that every single odorous dictatorship in modern history has resorted to - checkpoints, interrogations, strip-searches, training the people to spy on each other, guilty until proven innocent. Each and every facet betrays a country in terminal decline and one that will end up as a decrepit, lifeless, authoritarian cesspit, forever confined to the slagheap of history as just another example of how a civilized, cultured and prosperous society allowed itself to be destroyed from within by fear at the hands of a gaggle of jackbooted thugs.

The Boldfaced above sounds exactly like human nature*, and this is important, with great dollops of massaged, coerced, manipulated foreign AND domestic policy in Afghanistan, and Iraq and on the homefront...


*

Human nature, being what it is, is prone to delusions and self-righteousness. The Federal Transportation and Safety Administation once commissioned forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow to perform a study of how to improve airline safety by examining the behaviour of passengers during airplane crashes. What he found and reported was that a grown man in a burning room consistently demonstrates no compunction about stepping on the face of an infant that blocks his access to an exit. The FTSA refused to publish the report or to believe that human beings would act that way.

H/T: Monolycus



Now, take food , shelter, livelihood, family, societal norms, away from someone or a whole group, and you you get transference. One of the issues raised in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is the issue of collective responsibility. Responsibility, only comes with awareness. Awareness of a fear driven life where you fuck anyone in your way just to keep food on your family; Arendt maintains that he was an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested only in furthering his career, which seems like a game one can not, NOT play in our current system. What the late Bob Wilson spoke of in that of, bio-survival drives..

As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed "anomie" or "alienation" or "existential anguish" about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call "money".

Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn't look for biosurvival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. "You can't live without money," as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.

Imagine, as vividly as possible, what you would feel, and what you would do, if all your sources to bio-survival tickets (money) were cut off tomorrow. This is precisely what tribal men and women feel if cut off from the tribe; it is why exile, or even ostracism, were sufficient punishments to enforce tribal conformity throughout most of human history. As recently as Shakespeare's day the threat of exile was an acute terror signal("Banished!" cries Romeo, "the damned use that word in Hell!")

In traditional society, belonging to the tribe was bio-security; exile was terror, and real threat of death. In modern society, having the tickets (money) is bio-security; having the tickets withdrawn is terror.

Welfare-ism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. represent attempts, in varying degrees of rationality and hysteria, to re-create the tribal bond by making the State stand-in for the gene-pool.

Conservatives who claim that no form of Welfare is tolerable to them are asking that people live with total bio-survival anxiety and anomie combined with terror. The conservatives, of course, vaguely recognize this and ask for "local charity" to replace State Welfare - i.e., they ask for the gene-pool to be restored by magic, among people (denizens of a typical city) who are not
genetically related at all.

On the other hand, the State is not a gene-pool or a tribe, and cannot really play the bio-survival unit convincingly. Everybody on Welfare becomes paranoid, because they are continually worrying that they are going to get cut off ("exiled") for some minor
infraction of the increasingly incomprehensible bureaucratic rules. And in real totalitarianism, in which the bogus identification of the State with the tribe is carried to the point of a new mysticism, the paranoia becomes total. Real bonding can only occur in face-to-face groups of reasonable size. Hence, the perpetual attempt (however implausible in industrial circumstances) to decentralize, to go back to the tribal ethos, to replace the State with syndicates (as in anarchism) or affinity-groups (Reich's "Consciousness III"). Recall the hippie crash-pad of the sixties, which lives on in many rural communes. Back in the real world, the tickets called "money" are the biosurvival bond for most people. Anti-Semitism is a complex aberration, of many facets and causes, but in its classic form (the "Jewish Bankers' Conspiracy") it simply holds that a hostile gene-pool controls the tickets for bio-security. Such paranoia is inevitable in a money economy; junkies have similar myths about who controls the supply of heroin. Thus, as anti-Semitism has declined in America, the "Bankers' Conspiracy" lives on in a new form. Now the villains are old New England WASP families, the "Yankee Establishment." Some Leftists will even show
you charts of the genealogies of these WASP bankers, the way anti-Semites used to show Rothschild genealogies.

C.H. Douglas, the engineer and economist, once made up a chart, which he showed to the MacMillan Commission in 1932 when they were discussing money and credit regulation. The chart graphed the rise and fall of interest rates from the defeat of Napoleon in 1812 to the date the Commission met in 1932, and on the same scale, the rise and fall of the suicide rate in that one
twenty-year period. The two curves were virtually identical. Every time the interest rate went up, so did the suicide rate; when interest went down, so did suicide. This can hardly be "coincidence." When interest rises, a certain number of businessmen go bankrupt, a certain number of workers are thrown out of their jobs, and everybody's bio-survival anxiety generally increases. Marxists and other radicals are urgently aware of such factors in "mental health" and hence scornful of all types of academic psychology which ignore these bio-survival issues. Unfortunately, the Marxist remedy-making everybody dependent for bio-survival on the whims of a State bureaucracy-is a cure worse than the disease.

Bio-survival anxiety will only permanently disappear when world-wide wealth has reached a level, and a distribution, where, without totalitarianism, everyone has enough tickets.

Until then we will have joe sixpack and susie soccer mom, as little eichmanns.



...the peculiar nature of the game...makes it impossible for [participants] to stop the game once it is under way. Such situations
we label games without end.
- Watzlawick, Beavin, Jackson,
Pragmatics of Human Communication