How Liberty Was Lost
When did things begin going wrong in America?
“From the beginning,” answer some. English colonists, themselves
under the thumb of a king, exterminated American Indians and stole their
lands, as did late 18th and 19th century Americans. Over the course of
three centuries the native inhabitants of America were dispossessed,
just as Israelis have been driving Palestinians off their lands since
1948.
Demonization always plays a role. The Indians were savages and the
Palestinians are terrorists. Any country that can control the
explanation can get away with evil.
I agree that there is a lot of evil in every country and
civilization. In the struggle between good and evil, religion has at
times been on the side of evil. However, the notion of moral progress
cannot so easily be thrown out.
Consider, for example, slavery. In the 1800s, slavery still existed
in countries that proclaimed equal rights. Even free women did not have
equal rights. Today no Western country would openly tolerate the
ownership of humans or the transfer of a woman’s property upon her
marriage to her husband.
It is true that Western governments have ownership rights in the
labor of their citizens through the income tax. This remains as a
mitigated form of serfdom. So far, however, no government has claimed
the right of ownership over the person himself.
Sometimes I hear from readers that my efforts are pointless, that
elites are always dominant and that the only solution is to find one’s
way into the small, connected clique of elites either through marriage
or service to their interests.
This might sound like cynical advice, but it is not devoid of some
truth. Indeed, it is the way Washington and New York work, and
increasingly the way the entire country operates.
Washington serves powerful private interests, not the public
interest. University faculties in their research increasingly serve
private interests and decreasingly serve truth. In the US the media is
no longer a voice and protection for the people. It is becoming
increasingly impossible in America to get a good job without being
connected to the system that serves the elites.
The problem I have with this “give up” attitude is that over the
course of my life, and more broadly over the course of the 20th century,
many positive changes occurred through reforms. It is impossible to
have reforms without good will, so even the elites who accepted reforms
that limited their powers were part of the moral progress.
Labor unions became a countervailing power to corporate management and Wall Street.
Working conditions were reformed. Civil rights were extended. People
excluded by the system were brought into it. Anyone who grew up in the
20th century can add his own examples.
Progress was slow–unduly so from a reformer’s standpoint–and mistakes
were made. Nevertheless, whether done properly or improperly there was a
commitment to the expansion of civil liberty.
This commitment ended suddenly on September 11, 2001. In eleven years
the Bush/Obama Regime repealed 800 years of human achievements that
established law as a shield of the people and, instead, converted law
into a weapon in the hands of the government. Today Americans and
citizens of other countries can, on the will of the US executive branch
alone, be confined to torture dungeons for the duration of their lives
with no due process or evidence presented to any court, or they can be
shot down in the streets or exterminated by drone missiles.
The power that the US government asserts over its subjects and also
over the citizens of other countries is unlimited. Lenin described
unlimited power as power “resting directly on force, not limited by
anything, not restricted by any laws, nor any absolute rules.”
Washington claims that it is the indispensable government
representing the exceptional people and thereby has the right to impose
its will and “justice” on the rest of the world and that resistance to
Washington constitutes terrorism to be exterminated by any possible
means.
Thus, the American neoconservatives speak of nuking Iran for
insisting on its independence from American hegemony and exercising its
rights to nuclear energy under the non-proliferation treaty to which
Iran is a signatory.
In other words, Washington’s will prevails over international
treaties that have the force of law, treaties which Washington itself
imposed on the world. According to the neoconservatives and Washington,
Iran is not protected by the legal contract that Iran made with
Washington when Iran signed the non-proliferation treaty.
Iran finds itself as just another 17th or 18th century American
Indian tribe to be deprived of its rights and to be exterminated by the
forces of evil that dominate Washington, D.C.
The vast majority of “superpower” americans plugged into the Matrix,
where they are happy with the disinformation pumped into their brains by
Washington and its presstitute media, would demur rather than face my
facts.
This raises the question: how does one become unplugged and unplug
others from the Matrix? Readers have asked, and I do not have a
complete answer.
It seems to happen in a number of ways. Being fired and forced to
train your H-1B foreign replacement who works for lower pay, being
convicted of a crime that you did not commit, having your children
stolen from you by Child Protective Services because bruises from sports
activities were alleged to be signs of child abuse, your home stolen
from you because a mortgage based on fraud was given the force of law,
laid off by “free market capitalism” as your age advanced and the
premium of your employer-provided medical insurance increased, being
harassed by Homeland Security on your re-entry to the US because you are
a non-embedded journalist who reports truthfully on US behavior abroad.
There are many instances of Americans being jolted into reality by the
“freedom and democracy” scales falling away from their eyes.
It is possible that becoming unplugged from the Matrix is a gradual
lifelong experience for the few who pay attention. The longer they live,
the more they notice that reality contradicts the government’s and
media’s explanations. The few who can remember important stuff after
watching reality shows and their favorite sports teams and fantasy
movies gradually realize that there is no “new economy” to take the
place of the manufacturing economy that was given away to foreign
countries. Once unemployed from their “dirty fingernail jobs,” they
learn that there is no “new economy” to employ them.
Still seething from the loss of the Vietnam War and anger at war
protesters, some flag-waving patriots are slowly realizing the
consequences of criminalizing dissent and the exercise of First
Amendment rights. “You are with us or against us” is taking on
threatening instead of reassuring connotations, implying that anyone who
opens his or her mouth in any dissent is thereby transformed into an
“enemy of the state.”
More Americans, but far from enough, are coming to the realization
that the extermination of the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993 was a
test run to confirm that the public and Congress would accept the murder
of civilians who had been demonized with false charges of child abuse
and gun-running.
The next test was the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. Whose
explanation would prevail: the government’s or that of experts? Air
Force General Partin, a top expert on explosives, proved conclusively in
a heavily documented report given to every member of Congress that the
Murruh Federal Office Building blew up from the inside out, not from the
outside in from the fertilizer car bomb. But General Partin’s facts
lost out to the government’s propaganda and to Congress’ avoidance of
cognitive dissonance.
Once the “national security” government learned that its
pronouncements and those of the presstitute media carried more weight
than the facts presented by experts, conspiracies such as Operation
Northwoods could be put into play. A 9/11 became possible.
The Pentagon, CIA, and military/security complex were desperate for a
new enemy to replace the “Soviet threat,” which had ceased to exist.
The military/security complex and its servants in Congress were
determined to replace the profits made from the cold war and to preserve
and increase the powers accumulated in the Pentagon and CIA. The only
possible replacement for the Soviet threat was “Muslim terrorists.”
Thus, the creation of the “al Qaeda threat” and the conflation of this
new threat with secular Arab governments, such as Iraq’s and Syria’s,
which were the real targets of Islamists.
Despite the evidence provided by experts that secular Arab
governments, such as Saddam Hussein’s, were allies against Islamic
extremism, the US government used propaganda to link the secular Iraq
government with Iraq’s enemies among Islamic revolutionaries.
Once Washington confirmed that the American public was both too
ignorant and too inattentive to pay any attention to events that would
alter their lives and jeopardize their existence, every thing else
followed: the PATRIOT Act, the suspension of the Constitution and
destruction of civil liberty, Homeland Security which has quickly
extended its gestapo reach from airports to train stations, bus
terminals and
highway road blocks,
the criminalization of dissent, the equating of critics of the
government with supporters of terrorism, the home invasions of antiwar
protesters and their arraignment before a grand jury, the prosecution of
whistleblowers who reveal government crimes, the equating of journalism
organizations such as WikiLeaks with spies. The list goes on.
The collapse of truth in the US and in its puppet states is a major
challenge to my view that truth and good will are powers that can
prevail over evil. It is possible that my perception that moral progress
has occurred in various periods of Western civilization reflects a
progressive unplugging from the Matrix. What I remember as reforms might
be events experienced through the rose colored glasses of the Matrix.
But I think not. Reason is an important part of human existence.
Some are capable of it. Imagination and creativity can escape chains.
Good can withstand evil. The extraordinary film, The Matrix, affirmed
that people could be unplugged. I believe that even americans can be
unplugged. If I give up this belief, I will cease writing.
