The linked story discusses Manlin Chee, a Chinese-American immigration attorney. In a nutshell, she was put in jail for a year because the FBI set her up and she filed some papers for them that she shouldn’t have. The more interesting bit of the timeline is that the FBI’s “sting” came after she had participated in a PATRIOT Act forum, in which she (rightly) decried the legislation as a violation of Americans’ constitutional rights.

This brings up an interesting point, as America inches closer to a kind of ‘corporatized Stalinism’. We Americans are going to have to learn how to keep our mouths shut.

When I was a kid, I was of course brainwashed with the “Russians are evil” shit that we all were, and how awful their system was, and how nobody there was “free”. As I got older, I realized that no one anywhere is “free”, and I’ve witnessed more American freedoms disappear in the last 4-5 years than I saw in my entire life to that point. As a kid, I often wondered how citizens behind the Iron Curtain coped.

After a while, I just realized that you just need to develop a strategy whereby you only speak your mind in certain situations. I think that we loudmouthed Americans are going to have to learn how to do that, lest we will end up spending time as slaves in prison ourselves.

It’s sad, but true: criticizing the government is rapidly becoming a “right” that existed only in the past.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 14:07 and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.