Re: UNSC (emotional rant)

Enzo De Ianni wrote:

> >Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 16:23:49 -0800 (PST)
> >From: "Mike J." <pmj6@yahoo.com>
> >Subject: Re: [FT] UNSC (emotional rant)
> >
> >- --- Richard and Emily Bell <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
> >wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> "Parrott, Charles P" wrote:
> >>
> >> > Funny thing is, most totalitarian or authoritarian
> >> governments don't start out that way.  They start as
> >> benevolent democracies, republics or monarchies that
> >> slowly erode citizen rights and freedoms until it's
> >> too late.
> >> >
> >>
> >> Totalitarian or authoritarian regimes form suddenly,
> >> because the previous form of government has
> >> obviously failed, and the would-be dictator has "The
> >> Answer".
>
> Either a sudden change or a violent one or a series of slow
modifications
> of the laws, it definitely happens (or happened) because people
thought
> those guys had the answer to someterrible crisis; yes, I think you are
right.

I cannot believe that I forgot to mention my favorite example of how
things
usually change suddenly, not gradually.  In the late twentieth century,
a former
colony of the British Empire with a long history of parliamentary
democracy
ordered the army to patrol the city streets to impose order and
suspended all
civil rights in response to a terrorist movement.  Armed with new and
sweeping
powers, the police rounded up hundreds, if not thousands, of suspected
terrorists
and anyone who might be terrorist sympathisers and held them for weeks,
without
charging them with any crime and only on the the faintest shred of
evidence (if
any evidence at all).  The surprising thing about the democratic nation
becoming
a police state over night is not that it happened at all, but that
everything