(NaturalNews) For those of you who have been called "paranoid" or "schizoid" or just plain stupid for opining that, someday, an authoritarian, "progressive" federal government hell-bent on stifling all political opposition once and for all would round such people up and toss them into camps, you have been vindicated - although that might not really be much of a consolation to you.

As reported by investigative news site The Intercept, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Gen. Wesley Clark, a onetime Democratic candidate for president, in recent days called for the revival of internment camps fashioned after those used in World War II, in which "disloyal Americans" would be placed.

Speaking to MSNBC correspondent Thomas Roberts, following the killing of four Marines and a Navy sailor in Chattanooga, Clark observed, "If someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn't say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war."

Clark couched his belief that internment camps should be revived as a way to combat Islamic extremism, adding: "If these people are radicalized and they don't support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It's their right and it's our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict."

Internment camps - back to the future

He didn't elaborate on the phrase "duration of the conflict," but from that one could assume that so long as the "long war" against militant Islam is being waged, then these Americans would be locked up. Both former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama have said such a fight is going to be "long-term" - or, in another word, indefinite.

You can see the video where Clark made his comments here.

The Intercept noted that Clark's comments were extremely out of character for him. After serving as NATO's supreme commander, he has made a name for himself in progressive, or uber-liberal, policy circles. The site further noted:

In 2004, his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was highly critical of the Bush administration's excessive response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then, he has been a critic of policies that violate the Geneva Convention, saying in 2006 that policies such as torture violate "the very values that [we] espouse."

The following year he wrote a memoir in which he infamously alleged the Bush White House had produced an imperialistic plan for the Middle East, in which his administration would attempt to "take out seven countries in five years," a process begun with the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Who else will be deemed "radical" and worthy of internment?

The Intercept spoke with Clark earlier in the year, at the annual Lewis and Clark University Symposium on International Affairs in Portland, Ore. At the time that discussion centered on how best to deal with the potential threat of foreign fighters returning home from armed conflicts.

Then, the site reported, "Clark spoke out strongly against 'the politics of fear' and eroding democratic institutions and norms, while reiterating his criticisms of the excesses committed by Bush-era neoconservatives under the banner of fighting terrorism."

Now, however, Clark's opinion appears to have shifted, to a point. Rather than espouse the neoconservatism of old (no one in the Bush administration ever advocated prison camps or World War II-style internment) but rather the neoliberalism of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in fact did intern Americans of Japanese descent.

But what makes Clark's idea especially disturbing is that his political ideology appears to have been mated now with national security policy, in that the only good radical is a jailed (or dead?) radical. While that may seem the epitome of common sense, we as Americans ought to be incredibly suspicious of anyone among us who believes mass incarceration of alleged radicals is a good idea because sure as the world, eventually others will be deemed "radical," too, just for speaking out.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaPwqokBn9M

http://web.international.ucla.edu/burkle/article/54426