The New Dark Age

Don’t say we didn’t warn you...

By Justin Raimondo

"......

What’s next – concentration camps for dissidents? Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia thinks so:

"U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told law students at the University of Hawaii law school Monday that the nation’s highest court was wrong to uphold the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II but that he wouldn’t be surprised if the court issued a similar ruling during a future conflict.

"Scalia was responding to a question about the court’s 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu for violating an order to report to an internment camp.

“’Well, of course, Korematsu was wrong. And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,’ Scalia told students and faculty during a lunchtime question-and-answer session.

"Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning ‘In times of war, the laws fall silent.’

"’That’s what was going on – the panic about the war and the invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time of war. It’s no justification but it is the reality,’ he said."

Interestingly, Scalia makes the key connection between what’s going on abroad, i.e. our foreign policy of perpetual war, and the state of civil liberties at home, which is more than one can say about many if not most of his conservative admirers.

When I was a wee libertarian lad, we used to have a slogan, the kind you put on stickers and leave in public places: SAVE YOUR CANDLES, THE DARK AGES ARE COMING! Back then, in the 1960s, if anyone had suggested that by 2014 we’d be living in the kind of country where one’s every communication is recorded and stored – the kind where journalists fear to report the truth about what their government is doing, and where the abolition of the First Amendment is being openly considered by elected officials – they would’ve been ridiculed as purveyors of pure speculative fiction. And with no small justification: in retrospect, however, it turns out that old bumper sticker was prescient as hell."