Will FEMA Round Us Up for the Swine Flu?

Disasters of national or global magnitude bring out lots of emotions in people. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, all brought out expressions of anger, compassion, grief and outrage. While the gamut of human emotions that run through events like these, events that define moments in time, that feel larger than life and wholly out of our control, are often fueled by our sense of humanity, there's almost always a portion of the population that connects darker forces to these events. Roosevelt knew in advance of Pearl Harbor and let the U.S. get dragged into WWII. Katrina was an opportunity to clear out a poor, black largely Democratic-leaning population. 9/11 was a government conspiracy to instigate a war against the Islamic world.

With the news headlines dominated this week by reports of a possible Swine Flu pandemic, another group of conspiracy theorists may soon get their moment in the sun. The FEMA Death Camp conspiracy theory has been knocking around the internet now for about a decade. Predicated on a series of Cold War-era Executive Orders that give the government broad powers to commandeer communications and infrastructure in the event of a major national emergency and the federal Continuity of Operations Plan, this conspiracy theory contends that the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA have a series of concentration camps, prisons and mental health facilities established and waiting around the United States, ready to round up and detain American citizens at a moment's notice.

Enter the Swine Flu.

As DHS and FEMA have worked with local and state governments to prepare for a massive disaster (a morbid exercise, to say the least), more "evidence" of this conspiracy has surfaced. With the potential for a large portion of an urban population to fall seriously ill, and the possibility that a large urban area like Chicago could conceivably see a mass exodus of the population, the FEMA Death Camp conspirators can now point to those meetings between federal and local governments as evidence of the government planning to declare martial law, round us all up and build mass graves.

Never mind that a conspiracy of this scope would require the silence of hundreds of thousands of people, from the civil service to members of the military. Never mind that Congress would have to approve funding for material and capital expenditures to finance such projects. (So-called "black budgets" aside, Congress still has to approve even secret government expenditures.) So take heed, Chicago, and stock up on pork-free turkey Spam, bottled water and .222 caliber ammo. If your neighbors get the piggy sniffles, the military may be rounding you and your family up for an all-expense paid trip to Kingsbury, Indiana