The ‘Liberal’ Police State: It’s Here, It’s Now, by Justin Raimondo

From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.org:

Gen. Wesley Clark exposes the rotten soul of modern American liberalism

Wesley Clark, the retired general who almost started World War III with Russia, has a bright idea: why not set up internment camps for “radicalized” Americans in order to stanch the threat of domestic terrorism?

Yes, he actually said this, and, what’s more, MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts didn’t even raise a well-manicured eyebrow. The interview took place in the context of MSNBC’s reporting on the Chattanooga shooting, and Roberts asked him what could be done to prevent such incidents. Here is Clark’s answer:

“We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning. There are always a certain number of young people who are alienated. They don’t get a job, they lost a girlfriend, their family doesn’t feel happy here and we can watch the signs of that. And there are members of the community who can reach out to those people and bring them back in and encourage them to look at their blessings here.

“But I do think on a national policy level we need to look at what self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of terrorists. They do have an ideology. In World War II if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.

“So, if these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States, as a matter of principle fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict. And I think we’re going to have to increasingly get tough on this, not only in the United States but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.”

Gen. Clark isn’t a fascist, or a Fox News fire-breather: he’s a conventional liberal. He was a critic of the Iraq war, a favorite of the Daily Kos/Netroots Nation-types, and he once ran for President. Thankfully his campaign never did get off the ground.

The award-winning liberal blogger Heather “Digby” Parton is shocked by the General’s remarks: “I’ve always liked Clark,” she writes, scratching her head at how in blazes he could’ve said what he said. And apparently others of that crowd found it hard to believe as well: “People are arguing with me on Twitter that he couldn’t have said this,” Digby writes, “but he did. If you still don’t believe me go watch the tape yourself.”

Which just goes to show how clueless today’s liberals are about the authoritarian roots of modern liberalism. They don’t know the slightest thing about the history of the New Deal and the war years: they don’t know that the “left” constituted the core of the War Party of that era, and they would rather not remember that it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt – the chief icon of paleo-liberalism – who set up the first and only internment camps in America into which he herded the entire Japanese-American population.