[FoRK] Another one bites the dust

[Kevin Elliott]

On Feb 27, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Russell Turpin wrote:
> In that quote, Buckley prefigures what we see in the Bush right.

I'm sorry, but I think your taking his idea so far out of context as  
to completely eliminate all meaning.

""We have got to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an  
offensive nor a defensive
war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through
the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. …""

He said this in 1952, not long after WW2 ended, and in the context of  
fighting the cold war.  It seems clear
to me that in this context he's not talking about some sort of gestapo  
apparatus, but the very large and
invasive military bureaucracy that was used to fight WW2.  In long  
hind sight, fears about the "Red Menace"
seem overwrought, but the were very real an present at the time.

> The
> excess isn't just from an appeal to security, but also by undermining
> the notion that there is an importance to the procedural constraints
> of liberal government. If government is the enemy, and outcome all
> that matters, then it makes little difference, for example, whether
> wiretapping is done with or without warrant and oversight. It matters
> only whether the good guys are in power, and why they are ordering
> it. "We need government for the duration, so we might as well allow
> that it will be totalitarian."

And YES, in a REAL, HONEST to god war, warrants don't mean shit!  Do  
you think we should have had to apply for
a warrant to crack enigma?  Only decoded messages from outside the US,  
but ignored messages transmitted from
within for lack of probably cause (hypothetically)?  I don't think the  
current "War On Terror", is sufficiently severe to require those sorts
of measures, but we've had all out war in the past, and in 1952 that  
war felt pretty damn real.