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Police state

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Politics and government

   A police state is a state with authority which uses the police,
   especially secret police, to maintain and enforce political power, even
   through violent or arbitrary means if necessary. A police state
   typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism or other harsh means of
   social control. In a police state the police are not subject to the
   rule of law in an emergency and there is no meaningful distinction
   between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.

   Police states do not often refer to themselves in this manner, as the
   classification is often established by an internal whistle-blower or
   external critic. The use of term is motivated as a response to the
   laws, policies and actions of that regime, and is often used
   pejoratively to describe the regime's concept of the social contract,
   human rights, and similar matters.

Authoritarianism

   Police states tend to be very strict in authority, often dictatorships,
   though the South African apartheid system was also seen as a police
   state while being notionally democratic (albeit with the majority of
   the population not participating in the democratic process). Nazi
   Germany, while a dictatorship, was at least initially brought into
   being by nominally democratic means.

Enlightened absolutism

   Under the political model of enlightened absolutism, the ruler is the
   "highest servant of the state" and exercises absolute power so as to
   provide for the general welfare of the population. This model proposes
   that all the power of the state must be directed toward this end, and
   does not accept any codified or statutory constraints upon the ruler's
   absolute power. This view was supported by such thinkers as Thomas
   Hobbes, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

   As the enlightened absolutist ruler is said to be charged with the
   public good, and implicitly infallable by right of appointment, even
   critical opposition to the ruling party is deemed to be an crime
   against the state. The concept of loyal opposition is incompatible
   within this political framework. As public dissent is forbidden, it
   inevitably becomes secret, which is met in turn forms of political
   repression such as the use of secret police.

   Liberal democracy, with its emphasis on the rule of law, focuses on the
   fact that the police state is unrestrained by law. Robert von Mohl, who
   first introduced the rule of law into German jurisprudence, for
   example, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state)
   with the aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").

Idiomatic expansion of the term

   In times of national emergency or war, the balance which may usually
   exist between the freedom of individuals and national security often
   tips in favour of the state. This shift may lead to allegations that
   the nation in question has become, or is becoming, a police state.

   Because there are different political perspectives as to what an
   appropriate balance is between individual freedom and national
   security, there are no definitive objective standards to determine
   whether a term "police state" applies to a particular nation at any
   given point in time. Thus, it is difficult to evaluate objectively the
   truth of allegations that a nation is, or is becoming, a police state.
   One way to view the concept of police state and free state as a seesaw,
   where any law focused on removing liberty is seen as moving toward a
   police state, and any law which limits government oversight is seen as
   moving toward a Free state. Most western nations are held as examples
   of a balance between the two.

Fictional examples of police states

     * The best-known literary treatment of the police state is George
       Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which describes Britain under
       a totalitarian régime that continuously invokes (and feeds) a
       perpetual war as a pretext for subjecting the people to mass
       surveillance, policing, and modification of language and the way
       people think in order to make dissent not only swiftly punished,
       but also grammatically and logically impossible to conceive and
       express. The state destroys not only the literal freedom after
       action and thought meant by expressions like "freedom of thought",
       but also literal freedom of thought.
     * In the novel We, Yevgeny Zamyatin depicts a dystopia in which the
       walls are made out of glass, the only means of getting information
       is the state newspaper, and imaginations are forcibly removed from
       people.
     * Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 portrays the United States in
       the future as a police state which enforces extreme censorship and
       suppresses critical thought.
     * The film The Running Man is set in a dystopian USA which is
       described as being a police state in the opening credits.
     * The graphic novel V for Vendetta and the film based on it take
       place in the United Kingdom, in the near future where Britain has
       become a fascist police state.
     * Another example is the fictional City 17 under The Combine, also
       known as the Universal Union, in the computer game Half-Life 2.

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