Sidney, police states are generally established when there is a sense of national emergency, and of perceived threat from without or within. ("The Fatherland is in Danger!") Nazi Germany is a case in point. The case of Einstein is not a very good example of the case you want to make. It just so happened that in 1932 he was offered a post at Princeton, with the idea that he would spend only five months at Princeton, and seven in Germany. He was in the midst of his five months at Princeton when Hitler came to power, and at that point he saw no reason to return. Other Jews in Germany did not have the options that Einstein had, and of course many hoped against hope that Hitler did not really mean what he had been saying all those years before he came to power. But he did, of course, and the one thing you couldn't have accused him of was hypocrisy.
Who is our Hitler?
We never had a Hitler, but we did have our periods of perceived national emergency, notably during World War I and World War II, during both of which there were some notable examples of "police state" behavior (e.g., incarceration of Japanese Americans). And after World War I, the "red scare" and the Palmer Raids; after World War II, the beginning of the cold war & McCarthyism. And so on. (And no recent FBI Director has been as snoopy by temperament as J. Edgar Hoover.)
I see the main threat nowadays coming not so much from the government's "aggressive attitude towards minorities" (I think the government is LESS aggressive towards minorities in general than has been the case in the past -- just ask the Indians, for example), as from technology. Electronic snooping is what we should probably be most worried about, IMO.
It is always important to keep an eye out, and to scream like hell when the occasion calls for it; I agree with you there. But I personally do not see any Nazis or Stalinists or Pol Pots or even Pinochets on the horizon. Nor do I see any kind of looming national emergency that might produce them.
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