Not many left who remember the days of real freedom.
By Paul Craig Roberts
According to Mark Crispin Miller in “News from Underground,” “Germany is on the brink of modifying its constitution, to allow all 19 secret services to hack anyone at any time, for any reason, secretly.”
We are witnessing in every Western country a rapid transformation of what were formerly free countries into police states. Governments violate their constitutions, issue edicts in place of legislation, treat citizens arbitrarily, and pursue agendas on the basis of justifications that are contrary to the facts. The digital revolution has given governments powers far beyond those of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.
I can remember when the year 1984 seemed to be the far distant future, and I can remember the free country in which I was born and grew up. That country is no more.
The youth of today have never experienced a free country and do not know what has been lost. Indeed, they are absorbed in the digital revolution that they think is freedom.
The “War on Terror” launched by 9/11 and the “War on Covid” launched in order to learn techniques of mass population control have together terminated free societies. Today privacy is a nonexistent right, as are free speech, free inquiry, open public debate, and the right to operate a business.
In place of debate, people who disagree with official explanations enforced by the presstitutes and social media are “cancelled.” Your every email, phone call, purchase, and web search is captured and used to build a profile of you for marketing purposes and for future arrest should you prove troublesome for the regime.
Whistleblowers are prosecuted despite legislation defending them from prosecution. Thought control and behavior control are imposed by firing people and destroying their careers for using unapproved words and taking unapproved positions.
The collapse of liberty has been rapid in the 21st century. But it has been creeping upon us for some time. Few Americans alive today remember when a wife could not testify against her husband or a husband against his wife. Such testimony was considered a violation of marriage that had formed one out of two. It was self-incrimination, which is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution in those days when the Constitution was respected and had authority.
Few who are alive remember that there was no such thing as Child Protective Services with the power to intervene in the family, seize children from parents, and have parents prosecuted on charges of child neglect or abuse whether real or fabricated.
You could yell at your child without being arrested and maybe even spank them. You didn’t live in fear that bruises from sports activity or falling off a bike would be noticed by a schoolteacher, doctor, or neighbor and result in an intrusion into the family by Child Protective Services determined to prosecute parents in order to justify the budget.
Kids of my generation were free to be wherever they chose to be without adult supervision on weekends, holidays from school, and summers as long as they were home by dinner time. Our bikes made us mobile, and we could be anywhere in range of a bike and a pair of legs, and our parents weren’t arrested for child neglect. It was mass third-world immigration, integration of formerly stable homogeneous neighborhoods, and the rise of the pedophile sex trade that made children no longer safe. Multicultural society failed to protect children and began persecuting parents instead.
A person could start a car without, if it had a manual transmission, having to push the clutch pedal to the floor. A person could drive away without having to put on a seat belt or endure endless warning beeps. Soon, if not already, you must be strapped in or the car will not move. The range of free judgment has been greatly narrowed. Even the appliances we use bully us.
I could go on at great length, but it is too depressing.
If Donald Trump wins the election and is permitted to be inaugurated, perhaps he will make it a part of “making America great again” to get the intrusive government out of our lives. I was born a free person, and I would like to die a free person.
But I am not holding my breath.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President Ronald Reagan and was associate editor and columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He has been a professor of economics in six universities and is the author of numerous books available at the American Free Press bookstore.
