Swickard: Arresting citizens before they commit crimes

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. “…society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding.” Former President Theodore Roosevelt, 1913.
             It is revolting that the philosophy of eugenics from the past is raising its head again. Reasonable people destroyed the eugenics movement in the last century but we must confront eugenic thinking as it rises again.
            Note: America should take Theodore Roosevelt off Mount Rushmore and replace him with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., or movie star and WWII B-24 pilot Jimmy Stewart. I respect Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln but despise Progressive Era eugenicist Theodore Roosevelt.
            In the late 19th and early 20th century the Progressive Era Movement embraced the philosophy of eugenics as a method of improving the dominant population by weeding out what elites considered undesirables. The German Nazi Party took eugenics to an extreme by killing millions of people.
            Fast forward to elites in today’s society advocating eugenics without the name. Example: people are saying the government must stop crime before it happens by identifying those undesirables who are going to murder, rape and rob in the future.
            They say an all-powerful government is needed to insure our safety. Already the elitist government can take property from citizens who are neither charged nor convicted of a crime. It is called, Civil Forfeiture, which the elites in government love for the power and money it brings. That leads to something even worse.
            In the website American Intelligence Report, Kristan Harris reports: (Chicago) Police are arresting people for crimes they’ve not committed yet using a new computer algorithm software that identifies criminal behavior and predicts future crime. Suspects were arrested this year as a result of being put on a predictive policing Strategic Subject List and Chicago Special Order S10-06 which equips law-enforcement with the ability to arrest citizens before they commit a crime.
            My concern is that the government will extend this to other classes of citizens. With the bitter fight for gun control in our nation perhaps the government will start with gun owners. They are already tagging members of the military and former members as potentially dangerous.
            But it isn’t just now that this is mainstream. Bill Mauldin in his 1947 book, Back Home, wrote: During a period when veterans were big news, every time an ex-soldier got himself in a jam the fact that he was a vet was pointed out in the headline… But the sad fact was that such headlines gave added impetus to the rumor that always appears in every country after a war that the returning soldiers are trained in killing and assaults and are potential menaces to society.”
            There isn’t more of a betrayal than to send citizens into battle and then view them as a class of killers who are dangerous to the society because of what they learned and did to protect our freedom. Today the leaders of our country, in general, didn’t serve in the military nor do their children serve.
            Returning veterans are not treated well for their sacrifices and as Bill Mauldin pointed out it goes back into World War Two and beyond. Journalist Tom Brokaw in his book, The Greatest Generation, praises the soldiers of World War Two fifty years after they served.
            But we have the 1947 words of Bill Mauldin to remind us that WWII soldiers faced an ungrateful society when they came home. As did the Korean and Vietnam soldiers.
            The politicians who see our former military members as dangerous and take action before these men and women do something are as bad as all of the eugenic progressives combined. We are already betraying our former soldiers by having a Veterans Administration that is shameful in provided care.
            Who knows what will come of the Chicago “arrest them before they commit a crime” but I sense that former military and gun owners are in the cross-hairs of this all-powerful government. Their eugenic moves must be stopped. And we should honor our military and former military members. Without them America would not be a free nation.

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1 comments:

Mary Spence said...

Frightening!

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