Soon after Katrina slammed into New Orleans, the media reported the presence of Blackwater goons (and have no doubt, Blackwater hires “special ops types from South Africa’s former apartheid regime,” according to James Ridgeway and others, people fairly characterized as murderous paramilitary goons). Initially, it was reported that Blackwater was hired to protect the property of New Orleans’ rich elite (and hotels and other businesses), but soon the company admitted it was “helping the U.S. Coast Guard Sept. 1 with search-and-rescue missions, lending one of its Puma helicopters for the missions…. [and] protecting facilities that house ‘priceless art pieces’ and special landmarks” from “looters” who were mostly interested in water and food, not priceless art. “We are preparing for a rather long deployment for this work,” Jack Serpas, who works for Securitas Security Services USA Inc., another “security” firm, told Marguerite Higgins of the Washington Post on September 10.

“As the threat of forced evictions now looms in New Orleans and the city confiscates even legally registered weapons from civilians, the private mercenaries of Blackwater patrol the streets openly wielding M-16s and other assault weapons,” note Scahill and Crespo, a fact that runs counter to Police Commissioner Eddie Compass’ assertion that only New Orleans law enforcement would carry and use weapons. In standard Bushian fashion, the Ministry of Homeland Security has feigned ignorance of this invasion of private security company goons in New Orleans. “A spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, Russ Knocke, told the Washington Post he knows of no federal plans to hire Blackwater or other private security,” write Scahill and Crespo.

It’s like a scene out of Sinclair Lewis’ dystopic novel, It Can’t Happen Here. “Gun toting militias terrorize the nation at a local level, with the redneck morons handed leadership roles in every community, with the right to summarily execute people who say the wrong thing. Resistors are threatened with imprisonment or death if they don’t go public supporting the party line,” opines Rob Kall for Op-Ed News. “Lewis wrote his book in 1937, having see Hitler’s rise to Power. We’ve seen many articles describing how similarly the Bush administration has operated, starting with When Democracy Failed by Thom Hartmann. In 2002, Hartmann’s article seemed to reek of conspiracy theory and paranoia to some. Now, it is a frightening portent, characterizing too many parallels suggesting that we are much further along the dangerous road that Sinclair Lewis created as a fiction.” Kall continues:

An American city is under military rule, with citizens being dragged and handcuffed out of their homes, helpless, frail old women thrown around, manhandled, captured and thrown into transport trucks. FEMA has created “detainment camps” which people are not allowed to leave, where they get two meals a day, are not allowed to cook, can’t leave to go to church…

As our illegitimate president and his cronies keep telling us, it is only a matter of time before a terrorist nuke takes out an American city. If this happens (and we are told repeatedly it is not a matter of if but when), the Bush administration, FEMA, the Ministry of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon will be ready, having field tested their “response” in New Orleans. Expect Blackwater goons, experienced in killing “insurgents” in South Africa and Iraq, to enter your house—by way of kicking in the front door or pitching a stun grenade through the living room window—and confiscate your weapons and haul you off to a FEMA concentration camp. Of course, they will bear special badges, issued by a corrupt or compromised local government, and thus it will be said the gun and Constitution nuts resisting will be going up against the will of the people (that is to say the will of our neolib plutocratic overseers who have decided the Constitution and a constitutional republic are no longer workable under the rubric of their globalist agenda).

Unfortunately, many Americans are so brainwashed (and afraid of al-CIA-duh, due to an unrelenting and highly organized campaign of fake terror alerts) they are unable to realize the threat (due in large part to a complicit media that soft pedals totalitarianism as “compassion”). For as Sinclair Lewis wrote in his prophetic novel, “most of the easy-going descendants of the wise-cracking Benjamin Franklin had not learned that Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ meant anything more than a high school yell or a cigarette slogan.” Many of them will come around when a goon trained by South Africa’s apartheid government shoves the muzzle of an M-16 in their faces, barking obscenities and smashing up the furniture. Of course, by then, it will be far too late.