I Am NOT Paranoid

Since I skim literally hundreds of articles per day in my news feed — some days are upwards of 2,000 or more — there is no question I stay on top of the latest developments in a whole host of categories (just look in the right sidebar at “Posts by Category” and you will see most of them). Add to that my deep interest and layman’s knowledge of history — and my awareness of the circumstances that have led up to massive shifts in power which have led to totalitarianism, fascism and war — and you bet your life I’m deeply concerned but don’t consider myself paranoid.  

Friends, family (and two of my clients who read my blog) have pooh-poohed my seeming “paranoid” concern about what is going on with the National Security Agency and the revelations. I must admit feeling vindicated and pleased that my fellow citizens are finally feeling outrage and are making their thoughts known to Congress.

Over the weekend I did some blog cleanup and was fascinated to take a look back at posts I wrote as early as 2006. I also remember deleting numerous posts in the 2002-2005 timeframe since it didn’t feel safe to publish them. Not that some shadowy figures would come to get me, but the sentiment and mood in the country had already shifted to the “rah-rah, waving the flag” toward treating anyone dissenting (or even questioning) with a mix of revulsion, anger and a seeming certainty we were traitors.

Albert Einstein Leaves Germany in 1933
A painting by Daniel Hudson

It is how a German paying attention must have felt in the early 1930s watching the rise of the National Socialist Party and knowing that, left unchecked, would institute totalitarianism. We now know that did happen and that the masses quickly turned against anyone dissenting and leapt upon the regime’s view of Jews as sub-human, worthy of discrimination, and ultimately genocide. It is exactly how one man, Albert Einstein, did feel in 1993 and he got the hell out of there:

As soon as Adolf Hitler was granted German citizenship and began to take power and spread his Nazi anti-Semitic ideas, the German-Jewish physicist Albert Einstein took a stand against Nazism and quickly took action to leave Germany. Einstein helped to organize a non-partisan group that stood united against fascism. Einstein, his family, and his secretary left Germany, and in March 1933, he renounced his German citizenship, declared his resignation from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, quickly separated himself from all German institutions that he had worked with, and announced that he would not return to Germany. Einstein stood against the Nazi regime and declared as he and his family moved to the United States of America in 1933: “I shall live in a land where political freedom, tolerance, and equality of all citizens reign.”

Thank God he left.

I know you cannot believe that anything like what happened in Germany could happen here. But it could. If you ever wonder why the German Jews allowed themselves to be “relocated” by the Nazis who used relocation as a ruse to lure them to the death camps, it’s because even then it was beyond human comprehension that any government could systematically murder thousands on their train. That is why it is possible and can happen, even here in the United States of America, and why there must be checks-and-balances and transparency in what the NSA does and how they do it.

Here are a handful of my past posts on this topic that might help you understand why my concern grew and still remains:

• October 2006: Massive, sweeping surveillance on *all* you do
• November 2007: Where’s the Outrage?
• February 2008: Acceleration of the Surveillance Society
• June 2013: Thoughts About the Secret Police
• June 2013: UNREASONABLE Search & Seizure: Why *Don’t* You Care?

If you’re not too fearful of someone finding your comment on this post, leave one and let me know what you think.