Historian and futurist, Nils Gilman, wrote a piece earlier this year in his substack, “Small Precautions”, positing that, although the words “secret police” tend to conjure up images of the Gestapo or the Stasi or the KGB, should we place them in a slightly larger context, the whole idea might begin to sound chillingly familiar.
“The fundamental distinction between a police force and a secret police,” he writes, “lies in their respective clients. A traditional police force…is theoretically accountable to the public and bound by the constraints of statutory law…By contrast a secret police is not a law enforcement agency at all, but a regime-preservation tool that operates in the vacuum where the rule of law expires. It serves a single client—the political elite…In this context, the ‘criminal’ is replaced by the ‘subversive’ or the ‘alien’. The objective is not to protect the citizen from the predator…but to protect the state from the citizen.”
So it has, sadly, come to be in our own, battered, country. New ICE recruits are quickly brought on board to swell the ranks of our own secret police. Rules are loosened or abandoned for old and new, setting them free to harass, bully, terrify and kill, not only targeted immigrants, but citizens and protestors. To make the damage even greater, the entire Department of (in)justice is weaponized to harass and pursue fabricated “enemies of the state”, the “state”, of course consisting of just one, bloated, deranged and failing tinhorn president who wants to be a gold-encrusted dictator.
Masked, armed and cruel, they batter down doors, shoot people who are fleeing in their cars, wrestle pregnant women to the ground, drag people out of their homes in the middle of the night, take their children and imprison thousands without due process in nightmarish camps. To add insult to injury (literally), acting as an omniscient administrative arm of the dictator, the DOJ works tirelessly to try to halt journalists, watchdogs and critics in their tracks with endless subpoenas, investigations and court cases, all lost by the agency through incompetence and willful ignorance of constitutional protections. Still they are powerful in scattering tacks in the paths of their critics in their endless efforts to divert and punish criticism and disloyalty to the master.
It is only our far greater numbers, our preparation, our resistance and our unity, that will eventually overcome them. We will protect our voting places, spy on and disrupt the movements of this brutal government force, shield their targets. Face it friends: it’s 1940 in Paris, all over again. Liberté Égalité Fraternité.
Clockwork Orange for Musk and Kennedy
In Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian 1971 crime and punishment film, Clockwork Orange, a violent delinquent, played by Malcolm McDowell, is forced to watch endless images of violent crimes, hour after hour, a device holding his eyes continuously open, while he is injected with chemicals that induce nausea and panic. This aversion therapy, called, by his British captors, the “Ludovico Technique”, is designed to render him physically incapable of choosing to engage in the kind of violence he once inflicted on others.
I was thinking about this film as I read of the many deaths around the world attributable to the acts of HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., and to a gleeful, chain-saw-wielding, Elon Musk, in his short-lived role as the head of DOGE. Kennedy, by stacking his department with anti-vaccine activists, has enabled the greatest resurgence of easily preventable diseases, especially measles, in decades. So far, the surge of measles cases in the US, alone, has racked up thousands of new victims. In just the first half of this year, we have seen more cases than in the entirety of 2020-2024. Two children have died of it in Texas, where thousands are sickened. South Carolina is now experiencing a mass outbreak.
Additionally, by taking a chain saw to the personnel budgets of every agency tasked with identifying and working to prevent the spread of fatal diseases around the world, virtually ending USAID, cutting medical funding here at home, eliminating money earmarked to make Minnesota forests more fire-safe, and firing those who used to be responsible for detecting and warning the country of foodborne illnesses, including those who might have helped to prevent the current multi-state outbreak of cyclospora, Musk has, in essence, committed mass murder.
“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of the horse, the rider was lost. For want of the rider, the battle was lost. For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost.” Thus goes the 14th Century English proverb, which Benjamin Franklin shared with this country as a part of his publication, Poor Richard’s Almanac, printed in 1758.
Actions have consequences. Hundreds of thousands have died of AIDS, other infectious and preventable diseases, botched abortions, lack of maternal and infant care, and starvation, due to the halting of global USAID health programs. Projections for future numbers of such deaths run to over 14 million excess preventable deaths globally. These cuts were made, unthinkingly and unfeelingly, by a newly invented agency in this regime named the Department of Government Efficiency. A more apt name would have been the simple truth. The Department of Government Elimination.
As in Clockwork Orange, I would force both Musk and Kennedy to watch endless photographs and films of their victims worldwide, hour after hour, hopefully making them so nauseous and distraught that they might be moved to face their fault and find their shame. And suffer. Ah, but would they?
A closer look at the film shows that, if the whole point was to make it impossible for the person responsible for the violence ever to chose to do it again, such a result is done by taking away free will. As such, it is wholly different than remedies touching on conscience or shame as a motivator never to make the choice. In this way, Clockwork Orange was also criticizing any government that robs a person of their free will, no matter the reason. A form of dictatorship, if you will. That is not what I have in mind. I want these men to suffer, emotionally and be filled with regret.
Well, dream on. It may sound naive, but I want Musk and Kennedy to have to face the consequences of their actions, to regret them, to feel shame and disgust and, finally, to take responsibility and change their ways, each of them made terrifically and naturally nauseous at the death and destruction they have so casually caused.
Oh well. Unfortunately, neither of these men seems to have the least shred of conscience, or even a flicker of shame. Indeed, neither appears to exhibit any semblance of humanity, at all.
Like the natural looking orange of the film’s title, they may resemble real, living things, but, in reality, are emotionless mechanized machinery, apparently unable to feel or experience human emotions. Remember it was Musk who said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” The only antidote is, again, up to us. Public shaming in any way. Satire and mockery. Boycott. Booing.
It’s beginning. Musk is out of our government. Space X stock is a flop. Though Tesla sales seem to be climbing again, net profit fell because of the heavy cost of overcoming public anger at Musk’s actions. We need a new surge of anger at both of these stunted and dangerous men. Call them out for murder. Be vocal and constant.
Pergite pugnare
Author
About The Author
