It Can't Happen Here

Representative Jack Brooks (D, Texas) questions Col. Oliver North on plans to suspend the Constitution of the United States

Written by: Evan Jones

In 1976 Dr. William R. Pabst published his 21 page Concentration Camp Plans for U.S. Citizens and so was birthed the martial law conspiracy. In the roughly forty years since the pamphlet's publication, the easiest way to discredit a conspiracy theorist was to ask them why martial law hasn't happened yet. You couldn't blame someone for being skeptical, since Dr. Pabst's detailing of odd empty prisons popping up around the country and Gestapo-style jackboot paramilitary forces training in a city near you was nothing short of an impassioned plea to stir the public to action against an imminent threat. Or perhaps paranoid delusion? And you certainly can't blame conspiracy theorists for buying in to the notion, because after all Dr. Pabst's document was filled with evidence of at least something strange going on around the country.

The FEMA camps and imminent martial law conspiracy has waxed and waned since Dr. Pabst brought it to public consciousness in 1976. The 80s and early 90s were ripe with reports of the black helicopters. For a while in the early oughts, videos that showed millions of oddly-human-sized plastic "boxes" stacked up along interstates and rural areas stoked the flames of fear that martial law and your "re-location" to a FEMA camp was once again imminent. And still, none of it came to pass.

One of the videos purportedly showing hundreds of thousands of FEMA coffins

Maybe Dr. Pabst's problem was timing, not substance.

Because from where I sit today, writing this on May fourteenth, 2020 A.D., Dr. Pabst's warning seems a whole lot harder to discredit as one man's paranoid delusion. Just a few short weeks ago, a third of planet Earth's seven billion people were under shelter in place orders (a fancy way of saying martial law). In a historic irony, while the totalitarian Chinese super State has lifted lock down restrictions, many Governors around the United States are arguing to impose the lock down perhaps indefinitely. In many places around the U.S. the lock down has looked a lot less like your benevolent public officials keeping you safe from a virus, and much more like a growing police state.

NYPD Officer allegedly beats a person for violating strict social distancing "orders"

Ector County, Texas SWAT vehicle confronts protesters at a bar

Of course, Dr. Pabst's nightmare was certainly just that, right? After all, no one is being rounded up and hauled off to FEMA camps. Just don't flout the legitimacy of shelter in place and social distancing. And there's no plan to suspend the U.S. Constitution. Just don't ask Oliver North about it.  And emergency preparedness is just what FEMA does. You gotta store those coffin...er...boxes somewhere! All of these are both valid criticisms of the idea that a future United States may look more like the Gulag Archipelago than the constitutional republic it was intended to be. Except that the reality is that the United States sort of is looking more like the Gulag Archipelago than a constitutional republic. Just without the Gulags. For now.

Human beings are notoriously short-sighted. For many, if it's not staring right at us, we can't believe it. But the federal government has proven that it will take certain steps outside the bounds of the constitution under certain circumstances, like it did during World War Two with the "re-location" of Japanese citizens. And as it is doing now under the guise of protecting us from a virus. And in the most extreme case, as Dr. Pabst highlights in Concentration Camps, even when the reality of Dachau was staring right at German villagers, many chose to ignore the abject brutality taking place just outside their village. Even when it indeed may be staring us right in the face, it seems that it's not until we ourselves are thrown into a FEMA camp, or a jackboot is threatening us with a baton for leaving our house will we be able to say, "hmmm...maybe those FEMA camp people were on to something?"

But the trick is to not let it get that far.

Because human beings are also notoriously ruthless as we are short-sighted. And human history is the history of brutality and tyranny, not of free people peacefully coexisting. So why, then, do we laugh when the Dr. Pabsts come forward to sound the alarm when they see the true nature of Man potentially rearing its ugly head? Why do we think America couldn't ever look like the nightmare of 1984? Why is questioning our government and its motives relegated to conspiracy, to lunacy? Could it be because to question means to get too close to the truth? Or maybe it's much simpler? Maybe it's just because it can't happen here?

You can read the full text of Dr. Pabst's Concentration Camps for U.S. Citizens here.