Jacobin government

http://lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w252.html

The original Law of Suspects was enacted by France’s revolutionary Jacobin government on September 17, 1793 (as it happened, the sixth birthday of the U.S. Constitution). The decree permitted the wholesale imprisonment of several classes of people deemed enemies of the State:

• Those considered "partisans of tyranny" or "enemies of liberty" – which in the Jacobin lexicon referred to defenders of the monarchy and traditional institutions;
• Individuals who had been denied "certificates of patriotism" issued by the revolutionary regime;
• Former nobles and erstwhile "civil servants" who had been cashiered by the National Convention;
• Those who emigrated from France between July 1, 1789 and April 8, 1792, and their family members, unless they provided suitable displays of "devotion to the Revolution."

As David A. Bell of Johns Hopkins University points out in his study The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, the Law of Suspects – the template for every modern totalitarian legal system, including the NDAA – was the enabling act for the revolutionary Reign of Terror. As is the case with a contemporary American deemed an "enemy combatant," any French citizen branded a Suspect had no right to appeal that designation. Protests of that kind were probably met with some variation of the sentiment recently expressed by Robespierre’s modern disciple, Sen. Lindsey Graham: "Shut up – you don’t get a lawyer!"

The same concept was embedded in the Soviet Union’s Fundamental Principles of Penal Legislation, which identified the central mission of the state's law enforcement apparatus (chiefly the Ckeha secret police, which would later become the KGB) as that of identifying, and removing the threat of, "socially dangerous persons." That mission was enshrined in Article 58 of the Soviet penal code, which was the foundation of that government’s perpetual war of terror against dissent – and the antecedent to section 1031 of the NDAA.

The law dealing with "socially dangerous persons," notes the authoritative Black Book of Communism, dealt with "any activity that, without directly aiming to overthrow or weaken the Soviet regime, [which] was in itself 'an attack on the political or economic achievements of the revolutionary proletariat.' The law thus not only punished intentional transgressions but also proscribed possible or unintentional acts" (emphasis added).

Additionally, the expression "socially dangerous persons" itself was based on "extremely elastic categories" that permitted the imprisonment of people in the gulag "even in the absence of guilt." This is because what the Soviet rulers were pleased to call "the law" specified that incarceration, exile, or execution could be employed as means of "social protection" against "anyone classified as a danger to society, either for a specific crime that has been committed or when, even if exonerated of a particular crime, the person is still reckoned to pose a threat to society." (Emphasis added.) The Regime in Washington has acted on similar assumptions regarding Gitmo inmates who remain in detention despite their demonstrated innocence. The NDAA would authorize similar treatment of U.S. citizens as well.

Soviet "law" discarded entirely with the idea of punishing overt acts, focusing instead on the supposed motivations of those deemed innately threatening to the regime. Note also that the Soviet system was rigged to nullify exculpatory verdicts. Soviet prosecutors, like Federal prosecutors today, considered themselves entitled to "shift the theory of criminality" as needed in order to justify detention of political offenders.

follow on for emphasis

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard84.html

In the history of the United States, war has generally been the main occasion for the often permanent intensification of the power of the State over society. In the War of 1812 against Great Britain, as we have indicated above, the modern inflationary fractional-reserve banking system first came into being on a large scale, as did protective tariffs, internal federal taxation, and a standing army and navy. And a direct consequence of the wartime inflation was the reestablishment of a central bank, the Second Bank of the United States. Virtually all of these statist policies and institutions continued permanently after the war was over. The Civil War and its virtual one-party system led to the permanent establishment of a neomercantilist policy of Big Government and the subsidizing of various big business interests through protective tariffs, [the "modern name is Fascism] huge land grants and other subsidies to railroads, federal excise taxation, and a federally controlled banking system. It also brought the first imposition of federal conscription and an income tax, setting dangerous precedents for the future. World War I brought the decisive and fateful turn from a relatively free and laissez-faire economy to the present system of corporate state monopoly at home and permanent global intervention abroad. The collectivist economic mobilization during the war, headed by War Industries Board Chairman Bernard Baruch, fulfilled the emerging dream of big business leaders and progressive intellectuals for a cartelized and monopolized economy planned by the federal government in cozy collaboration with big business leadership. And it was precisely this wartime collectivism that nurtured and developed a nationwide labor movement that would eagerly take its place as junior partner in the new corporate State economy. This temporary collectivism, furthermore, served as a permanent beacon and model for big business leaders and corporatist politicians as the kind of permanent peacetime economy that they would like to impose on the United States. As food czar, Secretary of Commerce, and later as President, Herbert C. Hoover helped bring this continuing monopolized statist economy into being, and the vision was fulfilled in a recrudescence of wartime agencies and even wartime personnel by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.9 World War I also brought a permanent Wilsonian global intervention abroad, the fastening of the newly imposed Federal Reserve System and a permanent income tax on society, high federal budgets, massive conscription, and intimate connections between economic boom, war contracts, and loans to Western nations.

World War II was the culmination and fulfillment of all these trends: Franklin D. Roosevelt finally fastened upon American life the heady promise of the Wilsonian domestic and foreign program: permanent partnership of Big Government, big business, and big unions; a continuing and ever-expanding military-industrial complex; conscription; continuing and accelerating inflation; and an endless and costly role as counterrevolutionary "policeman" for the entire world. The Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter world (and there is little substantive difference among any of these administrations) is "corporate liberalism," the corporate State fulfilled.