The article ‘How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses‘ by Naomi Wolf in the Guardian strikes me as particularly important. I commented on Facebook that:

A lot of people recognise that the US is far from being a benign force in the world (British understatement) but I’m not sure we are acknowledging how malign US global and domestic policy is. While Naomi Wolf’s article is about the US it should be clear from recent news stories in the UK that the ideal of an ‘open society’ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_society) is under attack here also.

The first paragraph of Wolf’s article reads:

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

The rest of the article shows a US that is well on the way to totalitarianism.

Given Naomi Wolf’s liberal and establishment credentials this article mainstreams what so called ‘conspiracy theorists’ like Alex Jones and David Icke have been saying for years i.e. that the power elites are profoundly evil and actively enjoy the humiliation and enslavement of what they see as the lower classes. Wolf rightly sees the Occupy Movement and open communication on the Internet as threatening the establishment’s control of perception and political initiative. What she is describing however is not a new phenomenon; this oppression has always existed but it is now threatening people who imagined themselves safe, who believed that they were part of the establishment. Still some good may come of it; a conservative is a liberal who hasn’t been strip searched yet.