Thread: TOTALITARIANISM IN AMERICA

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TOTALITARIANISM IN AMERICA


By Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D
December 18, 2007
NewsWithViews.com

Mass incarcerations without trial or charge; forced confessions; children forcibly separated from their parents with no reasons given; doctored hearing transcripts and falsified court records; evidence fabricated against the innocent; government agents entering the homes, examining private papers and personal effects, and seizing the property of citizens who are under no suspicion of legal wrongdoing; special courts created specifically to convict people who cannot be convicted in ordinary courts; children instructed to hate their parents by state functionaries: Is all this the Soviet Union in the 1930s or Communist China in the 1960s? Is this some novelist’s prognosticated dystopia? No, all this and more is routine in the United States today.

Among the most disturbing tales to come out of totalitarianism were the revelations of how both Nazi and Communist governments intruded into family life. The practice of governments dictating to parents what they could tell their children or using children as informers against their parents strikes us as chilling and unnatural. Yet similar practices are occurring in America today on a much more massive scale.

What we are talking about here is family law, a secretive political underworld of which few are aware until it strikes them. Parents summoned to family court discover that their children can be taken away, they can be forced to turn over all their property without explanation to government officials and their private clients, their future earnings can be confiscated to the point where they are unable to house or feed themselves, and they can be incarcerated without trial – all without any evidence or even charge that they have committed any actionable offense.

Unlike any other court, family courts do not even pretend that they are concerned with justice. They claim to determine “the best interest of the childâ€

During my divorce at the end of the 80s, the court insisted upon appointing an attorney, a 'guardian ad litem' for my kids - it had become routine practice. Fortunately she didn't interfere like the custody evaluator, but she did pocket $900 in 1988 (worth what now?) for essentially doing nothing. At least she didn't do anything, it could have been worse, I know.

I had a close call about 12 years ago. My daughters best friends father was the only family court judge in the small town that we were living in. I hired a neighbor to babysit for my children while I went to work. After the second day, my daughter told me "Debbie" drove them around with them sitting in the hatchback of her car. She was fired on the spot. Being left without a sitter on no notice, the judges wife offered to watch the kids for me. two weeks later social services showed up at my door. They were there to take the children. My ex-sitter had reported that my 5 and 2 year old children were home alone all day. I picked up the phone and called my daughter's friends dad and asked him to come over. The social worker was threatening me with arrest for making a phone call. You should have seen the look on her face when he walked in my front door. He simply told her his wife was my sitter and it would not look good for the social services department to have his wife was testifying against them. They needed no proof to pull the kids. They refused to tell us who accused us, but we found out. We would have been in a nightmare situation if we would have had any other sitter. Yes I fear my Government taking my kids for no reason. The "what ifs" has caused many sleepless nights.

I know a few years back a group of parents who had their children pulled near Sacramento sued social services and won.