Are Federal Agents Learning Tyranny At The Holocaust Museum?

[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Berwick]

In this age of unwarranted, mass surveillance on emails and video calls, it might seem like Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and other intelligence agents seem more versed in tyranny than ever before. Perhaps that is because they are being schooled in it…According to CNN Money, all FBI academy trainees learn about Nazi Germany and police state oppression.

“We send every one of our agents to the Holocaust Museum before they’re agents to know and understand what happens when an agency goes rogue,” ex-FBI director Robert Mueller explained recently.

About this point in the CNN Money story, an advertisement for another story came across my purview: “Related story: How the NSA can ‘turn on’ your phone remotely’.” I wonder how deep the tyranny must go until FBI agents realize their agency has gone rogue as has the entire US government.

Agents even receive a private, guided tour of the museum followed by a “specialized class that highlights how everyday law enforcement played a key role in Germany’s descent into authoritarianism.”

Agents take a private, guided tour of the museum. Then there’s a specialized class that highlights how everyday law enforcement played a key role in Germany’s descent into authoritarianism. It wasn’t only elite military units, like the infamous Schutzstaffel, or SS.

The agents learn about how German police and Nazi bureaucrats compiled data about their targets via tabulated punch cards. I doubt the agents learn that this system – the earliest computers – was provided by IBM.

“The whole point is to show the transition of police from neutral professionals to perpetrators of this mass genocide,” said Marcus Appelbaum, a museum director who coordinates the program.

FBI has had to grapple with “the balance of civil liberties on the one hand, against … the necessity for thwarting terrorist attacks, cyber attacks and the like,” according to Mueller at a cybersecurity conference in June in New York City.

Mueller, in that speech, called for more cooperation and information sharing from the private sector – even as more Snowden disclosures roll on in. Mueller served as FBI director, having started the week ahead of the Sept. 11th attacks and left in 2013, which the US government itself perpetrated.

I can’t help but wonder – are agents being taught how not to commit atrocities or how to commit them? I am pretty confused about that. After all, Justice Scalia thinks it is certainly possibility, and that if you don’t you’re a naif. As CNN Money notes, Applebaum brings up dark chapters in American history:

“Japanese-Americans were sent to World War II internment camps. Civil Rights protestors were beaten by cops. And the FBI’s own covert surveillance program, COINTELPRO, targeted athletes, journalists, politicians and grassroots movements for being “subversive.”‘

“We can’t afford to think we’re different, just because of our DNA or upbringing,” Friedman said. “If we’re not careful, all of us can slide down that slippery slope.”

That slippery slope has been slid down. Two-thirds of Americans live in “Constitution Free Zones.”

In fact, nearly every federal law enforcement agency sends new recruits to the museum. The 90,000 agents who have been there since 1999 represent the Druge Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secret service and US Marshals, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

[Editor's Note: The Dollar Vigilante (TDV) helps US citizens learn the ropes of their police state and get around it in TDV's Homegrown.]

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