JMS on “It Can’t Happen Here”. As pointed out by several weblogs yesterday, this business of a “Citizen’s Corps” reminds people of second-string baddie President Clark’s “NightWatch” on Bablyon 5.
We are talking about at TV show here, but it did a great job of playing with myth (considering it was a near-direct port of LoTR from Fantasy to Science Fiction), and Clark’s brownshirts are classic 20th Century (CE) bad guys.Why do they scare us? The Lurker’s Guide to B5 quotes the show’s creator J. Michael Straczynski: Could it happen right here, right now? No, because the surrounding climate isn’t right. Could it happen if the conditions *were* right? Of course it could. We’re not genetically or evolutionarily different from the Germans or the Russians or the Cubans or the Iraquis. If we think we’d never fall for that, we place ourselves in *exactly* the position of guaranteeing that we *will* fall for it. Because we won’t recognize it when it happens. We can justify and rationalize it as something else. [More Like This WebLog] How can anyone not be scared shitless by the prospect of citizen spies? This sounds like something you would see in Nazi Germany, not the US. I’m afraid that American freedom as we always knew it is on its deathbed. It looks like the terrorists have already won. They don’t need to do anything else – we’re headed to a totalitarian society thanks to blind fear.