Here is the terrifyingly chilling Oscar-winning motion picture, The Lives of Others, about the totalitarian surveillance state of communist East Germany under the Stasi’s brutal and all-pervasive intrusive domination. (Please view it with English captions on.) In 1899, the great libertarian William Graham Sumner published a classic (and very controversial) essay called “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” Americans had just beaten the Spanish in open warfare but in the process had cast aside their core principles of individual liberty, non-interventionism, and constitutional restraint and adopted the hubristic values of their opponent, imperial Spain. Sumner dared put forth that we had ceased being a republic and had become an empire. I think what we have been experiencing since the creation of the National Security State in 1947 can best be described as “The Conquest of the United States by East Germany.” We abandoned our first principles beginning during the Cold War, and more significantly and dramatically, since September 11, 2001. The excellent posts today on LRC concerning the situation surrounding Edward Snowden and the NSA by Eric Margolis, Thomas Drake, Justin Raimondo, and Glenn Greenwald confirm this assessment.

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