Successive Degrees of Unfreedom

 I'm sorry to keep going on about André Brink's A Dry White Season. But I wish that our government wouldn't keep proving my point for me that it feels more and more by the day that we are living in a political situation very much like the one he depicts in the novel. 

The book is about apartheid South Africa—and everyone knows these days that apartheid South Africa was an authoritarian state. 

But what disturbed me so much about the novel was realizing that the people in its pages didn't realize they were living in an authoritarian state—at least not all the time; or at least not at first. They thought: we have an elected government; we have an independent judiciary. 

And so, when the security police in the novel first kill an innocent man while he's in their custody, the protagonist thinks: our court system will ensure justice and accountability. "They won’t get away with it in court," he says; "Our courts have always had a reputation for impartiality."

He doesn't see himself at first as a rebel against apartheid or the government—but rather as someone who is working within what he still sees as a basically just order. "The system doesn't concern me," he says of his efforts to seek justice; "I'm just making a few small practical arrangements." 

But then the courts let him down. They fail to secure accountability. And so, he starts doing some detective work of his own. 

The police take various measures to intimidate him into silence. They visit his home. They search his office. They tap his phone. But these things only encourage him to go further. Why would they be trying to frighten him off the scent, after all, if they had nothing to hide? 

Eventually, he starts finding unexploded bombs in his mail. He receives threatening anonymous phone calls. The other people working with him on the case disappear or show up dead under suspicious circumstances one by one. 

When he confronts police about it, though, they claim to have no knowledge or involvement. "Are you accusing us—" they say, in mock outrage. 

My point is that it's not like the government just came out one day and told all the citizens of South Africa: "we are now a police state." People—especially white people—could bury their heads in the sand and content themselves if they wanted with the belief they were still a democracy. 

Just as we do today. 

I'm not saying things here have already gone as far as they did in South Africa. But we are quite evidently on a continuum with the events Brink describes. 

I'd say we are currently about half-way through the book in terms of our own society's degeneration into a police state. 

Our government officials too have recently committed extrajudicial killings under suspicious circumstances. There were the two U.S. citizens murdered earlier this year in Minnesota. This summer, two immigrants were killed in similar ways in Houston, Texas and Biddeford, Maine. 

Many Americans of course spoke out against these killings. After all—it's a "free country," and we have a First Amendment, right? 

(That's what they told themselves in South Africa too. "Our courts have a reputation for impartiality" and all that.)

But the Wall Street Journal reports this morning that DHS agents have been retaliating against these Americans for their public statements on the extrajudicial killings—even in cases of what appears to be unambiguously First Amendment–protected speech. 

DHS has reportedly developed a vast apparatus to monitor and surveil Americans' social media activity, to hunt for what they construe as "threats" against ICE agents. Often, these purported "threats" are nothing more than identifications of ICE agents by name. 

Then, DHS agents have shown up at Americans' homes and workplaces in an apparent effort to intimidate them into silence—even when they have no credible charges to press against them that would hold up in court. 

One woman apparently did nothing more than post the widely-reported name of one of the officers involved in the Minnesota shootings, and said it would be a good day for him to be "indicted." 

DHS agents then came to her workplace—by the Journal's account—flashed badges and a print-out of her social media activity, and tried to induce her to sign a statement saying that her comments "may" have been a violation of federal law. 

So, maybe we're not yet at a point where federal agents are putting bombs in people's mailboxes. But they are apparently stalking, harassing, investigating, surveilling, and intimidating American citizens, just because they took a stance on suspicious deaths at ICE's hands. 

They are tracking people who have spoken out against what appear to be extrajudicial killings in government custody. They are finding them at their homes and trying to frighten them into silence. 

In short, they are doing exactly what the apartheid South Africa police do in the first half or so of Brink's book. 

I'd say, then, that we have reached in this country about the point in the book where Colonel Stolz is showing up at Ben Du Toit's house just to "ask him a few questions" about why he keeps poking his nose into the death of Gordon Ngubene.  

Well, okay, we might think, so we're on a continuum with apartheid South Africa and other authoritarian police states at this point—but we're not all the way there yet!

But what if it's never a matter of being "all the way there." What if there is no "there," there are only "successive degrees of unfreedom," as Arthur Koestler puts it in The Yogi and the Commissar. 

"The danger is not that we may wake up one morning to find a fascist world; that would be easy to prevent," Koestler writes. "The danger is that we went to bed the previous night in a world which was already turning fascist without our noticing it." 

But we still have our First Amendment!, we think. We cling to that, just as the white South Africans clung to their "impartial" judiciary. 

Koestler anticipates this: "you will probably object by referring to constitutional guarantees," he writes. 

But "Let us […] get it straight," he says, "that Hitler too has a parliament which is theoretically free to sack him any time; that under Horthy’s rule the Hungarian Labour Party was allowed to remain legal and even to publish a daily paper until a few months ago; and that the most democratic constitution in the world, the Soviet constitution of 1936, is apparently compatible with a one-party system and the banning of all oppositional activities. […[ In other words, one can’t rely on constitutional guarantees and use them as an excuse for complacency."

"We always think of fascism as of something solid," he says, "palpably different from our forms of life. It would be more correct to compare it with a gas which can be put into any container regardless of shape." 

When our own government is already visiting people's homes and businesses in order to frighten them for daring to criticize ICE extrajudicial killings on social media; when they are devoting taxpayer resources to surveilling what we say about DHS agents online; when they are pursuing hollow criminal cases against former government officials just for criticizing the president... the "gas" in our political container has already expanded pretty far.

I mean—let's tally it up: 

We have a government that kills. 

We have a government that then lies about it and tries to smear the victim in order to create a pretext for killing him, and refuses to investigate on a transparent and impartial basis. 

And we have a government that then comes to the homes of ordinary citizens who dare to scrutinize these acts or speak out against them in an effort to frighten them into biting their tongues. 

In short, we have a government very much like the one in Brink's novel. 

To borrow a phrase from Edna St. Vincent Millay: "We have not far to fall!"