police state
English
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Etymology
[edit]Likely a calque of German Polizeistaat adopted following the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 and the ensuing Demagogenverfolgungen, culminating in the crackdown of liberal and anarchical movements popular in the 1840s during the German revolutions of 1848–1849. Equivalent to police + state.
Noun
[edit]police state (plural police states)
- (usually derogatory) A polity whose government exercises strict and repressive control of the people.
- 1964 September 16, J. G. Sourwine, “Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigatee the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate Eighty-Ninth Congress First Session”, in hearing (US Senate), volume 10, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, page 674:
- You didn't know there is […] an active campaign, propaganda and otherwise, […] against all kinds of security procedures on the ground that they are all police state methods and all interfere with individual rights?
- 1987, Alison Bechdel, “High Anxiety”, in Dykes to Watch Out For:
- [Mo:] But out there in the real world they're bombing abortion clinics... holding Nazi and KKK rallies... trying to quarantine people who might have AIDS. They're making secret weapons deals to illegally fund so-called "freedom fighters" and calling it "the Lord's work"!! We're living in a Protestant police state […]
- 2015, “Police State”, in Police State, performed by Tropidelic:
- A gun up in our faces and they never gave a reason / The writing's on the wall, the politics are fake / Its clear to me we're livin' in a police state […] The prisons are for profit, its society's mistake / How macabre, we been living in a police state
Translations
[edit]nation whose government controls people by police
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