I respect John Whitehead and appreciate his warning below. We don't know what will happen in the decades ahead, but we need to prepare to stand firm in our faith -- ready to follow God's guidelines and share His love with others -- no matter what lies ahead. [Berit]

"Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed,

for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

November 5, 2013
By John W. Whitehead

Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of every day routine—the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, thereby those important events of the past usually associated with someone’s death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, a celebration of a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 5th, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat.

There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression.

And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? ...

The year is 2020.... Great Britain is ruled by a totalitarian corporate state where concentration camps [see note at the end] have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of various undesirables are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” And, of course, the television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. Most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless....

With the film V for Vendetta, whose imagery borrows heavily from Nazi Germany’s Third Reich and George Orwell’s 1984, we come full circle. The corporate state in V conducts mass surveillance on its citizens, helped along by closed-circuit televisions. Also, London is under yellow-coded curfew alerts, similar to the American government’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

In speaking of the graphic novel upon which the film was based, the director James McTeighe said, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

Clearly, as I show in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we have reached a point where our leaders have stopped listening to the American people. However, what will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

We are—and have been for some time—the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government—from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. We are relatively expendable in the eyes of government—faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

Sadly, we’ve been made to suffer countless abuses since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the name of national security, we’ve been subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have had to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes. Soon drones will be filling the skies in order to corral our free speech activities and further spy on us. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights have been trampled upon by militarized police and marauding SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

“We the people” have not done the best job of holding our representatives accountable or standing up for our rights. But there must be a limit to our temerity. What will it take for Americans to finally say enough is enough?...

“Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer. Indeed, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and you will have tribulation ten days. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life." Revelation 2:10

Note: When Hitler occupied Norway in 1940, we were taken by surprise.  Few could imagine that a free, courageous country could face tyranny almost overnight!  My father, a leader in the underground movement , was eventually caught and kept at the Grini, the main Nazi concentration camp in Norway.  Those facts have seemed distant and unreal in the last fifty years, but it may well happen again -- throughout the western world -- and beyond!

See also Trusting God as Freedom Fades  & The fall and rise of human violence

This commentary is also available at www.rutherford.org.