by Scott Lazarowitz Reason and Jest
Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: The War Propaganda Continues
This is really a follow-up from my previous article on the government-media complex's continuing war propaganda. To clarify, my bringing up Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was not a defense of him but a defense of due process and the rule of law.
I happen to believe that all people must act under the rule of law with no exceptions, including government bureaucrats.
And in my previous article, I referred to "war" as an artificial concept. There's really no such thing as war – only criminal aggression, which is what "war" is. You are either behaving aggressively in society, or you are peaceful and respectful of the lives and property of others. There's no middle ground there.
However, there are those who believe that "9/11 changed everything," and that "we're at war with al Qaeda." They believe those things because they had been bamboozled by government bureaucrats and their apparatchiks who already had questionable plans in place for wars – in Afghanistan and Iraq – and for a police state for America well before 9/11.
And our rulers say we are "at war with al-Qaeda," even though our own government has been supporting al-Qaeda in Syria, supported its rise in Libya, and in fact supported Osama bin Laden early on (similar to the Israeli government's own dippy central planners helping to create Hamas).
Do people know these things?
So I personally find the corrupt buffoons of the U.S. government terrifying. We are not "at war with al-Qaeda"; the U.S. government has been at war against the American people.
But some people want to suggest that my wanting to tell the truth about our government's shenanigans, or my defending the right of all people to due process, or suggest that a Bradley Manning exposing government crimes, could possibly be "aiding and abetting" the enemy, or being an "enemy combatant."
So given our dangerous government's absurdly broad and ambiguous definition of "enemy combatant," you can see why I find these U.S. officials terrifying.
And it isn't just the President's unconstitutional power to kill an innocent human being sans due process, it's also the NDAA's indefinite detention of Americans without due process, the FISA or otherwise searches and seizures without due process, all these thoroughly un-American police state policies now.
For instance, U.S. government agents had paid villagers in Pakistan to drop spy transmitter chips in areas that would lead to innocents being captured for torture or innocents being murdered by drones. And many of the Guantanamo detainees who were taken by U.S. forces from abroad had been found to be totally innocent, having been turned in by local villagers being paid by U.S. government officials, or in which no evidence against them existed or whose capture had been a result of informants giving false confessions (which is the real purpose of torture, by the way).
Can you imagine combining those imbecilic central planner-type policies with the more recent "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign? Can you imagine being the victim of some Nazi-brownshirt neighbor falsely turning you in for no good reason, and government agents treating you like a "terrorist"?
Now, occasionally I hear Mark Levin on the radio. Sometimes he can go on and on and on about how great the Constitution and Bill of Rights are, and criticizing the Obama socialist agenda with point after point on ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, etc., and lately he has even been criticizing the Establishment Republicans in Congress. Good so far.
But then, he starts talking about U.S. government foreign policy, and pulls a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on us – totally turning against the Bill of Rights, due process and the rule of law, and spewing the ignorance and moral relativism of the neo-conned chickenhawks who have been starting the wars and occupations that have caused terrorist blowback against America.
Sadly, the neocons have unwittingly turned Thomas Jefferson's America into a Stalin-like America. The neocons brought their deranged collectivist and globalist vision to America, and the conservatives and "constitutionalists" such as Levin bought it, hook, line and sinker.
One issue that Mark Levin was discussing late last week (on 3/8/13) was the decision of the Obama Administration to bring a terrorism suspect into a civilian court for trial, rather than bring him to Guantanamo or some other torture regime. Of course, the cognitively dissonant Levin was against the idea of a civilian trial.
Levin and other neocons actually believe that we're really at war, as our central planning rulers have been telling us since 9/11, and that "war is different."
"War is an exception, and therefore the Bill of Rights needs to be suspended," seems to be what the zombie neocons have been saying.
Well, Levin – supposedly a big fan of the "Founding Fathers" – doesn't seem to understand that the Bill of Rights includes inalienable rights that all human beings have, pre-existing any government. And these rights, such as the right to due process, the right to require your accuser to present evidence against you in a court of law, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, the right to be secure in your person, papers, property and effects, apply to all human beings, everywhere.
The Bill of Rights doesn't say "These rights only apply to Americans, or to people who happen to be within the borders of the United States."
So, if some government bureaucrat, the President, a military general or soldier, or one's next-door neighbors want to accuse someone of something, then one has a natural, inherent right to require the accuser to present evidence against the accused or otherwise they must leave him alone. That's the American way. (It might not be the Nazi Germany way, but it is the American way.)
And it doesn't matter what crimes others or the government accuses someone of, terrorism, murder, rape, doesn't matter. Nor does it matter who is being accused, foreigner or American, "over there" or "over here."
But due to the widespread cognitive dissonance of today's Americans (and generations afflicted with government-controlled schooling), one type of crime is now different from all others. Terrorism is different. Because of terrorism, we must remove what used to be seen as inalienable rights from all people domestic or foreign, and we must blindly and obediently trust the judgment of politicians and militarists.
This kind of trust in politicians is quite misplaced, to say the least, as Future of Freedom President Jacob Hornberger observed just recently.
The fact is, a crime of aggression is a crime of aggression, whether a suicide bomber blows up a marketplace, whether a drugged-up psychopath shoots innocents at a school, or whether a government ruler takes an organized military overseas and invades a country that was of no threat to his people, and occupies those foreign lands by force and destroys those entire societies. Those are all crimes of aggression.
You see, in 1991 when the U.S. government initiated a criminal act of military aggression against Iraq, intentionally destroyed Iraq's civilian water and sewage treatments and electrical centers, imposed sanctions and no-fly zones and prevented materials from being imported to repair the damage and prevented medical supplies from being imported, and the rates of cancer and cholera and other illnesses amongst the Iraqi civilian population skyrocketed as a result during the 1990s, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, those acts are all crimes, regardless of the propaganda government bureaucrats disseminated.
During the 1990s, Ron Paul actually warned us several times that, if the U.S. government continued with those aggressions against people on foreign lands, there could very well be a terrorist attack within the U.S.
But there are a lot of people now in America who actually think it's absurd to bring up the actions of our own government which preceded 9/11. They think it's absurd for someone to suggest we apply the Golden Rule to U.S. government foreign policy. "How dare you suggest that our government shouldn't "do unto others what we would not want others to do unto us"!
That denial of human rights in others, the same inalienable rights that one claims for oneself, is incredibly selfish and shows how self-centered and anti-social the philosophy of "Exceptionalism" really is.
So the American Exceptionalists believe in our government's right to invade and occupy other countries, but that the people in those countries do not have the same kind of right to self-defense that we Americans have, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out.
For example, while many of the conservatives, the "moral values" crowd and self-proclaimed "patriotic Americans" now fear the Left and the feds' gun control agenda because "patriots" believe in the 2nd Amendment, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, they nevertheless supported U.S. troops confiscating arms from innocent civilians in Iraq, making Iraqis totally defenseless.
Meanwhile, the obsessive bureaucrats and their flunkies fail to see the big picture – they fail to understand the causes and effects regarding terrorism.
And so Bradley Manning has been referred to by ignoramuses as a "traitor," because he released so-called classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks. As I mentioned in my previous article, Manning wanted the American people – not jihadists or al-Qaeda, mind you, but the American people – to know about the crimes, incompetence and corruption of our rulers.
But the real traitors here are our central planners who have been intentionally starting wars and provoking foreigners to justify the always-expanding, tax-eating central planning and military bureaucracy.
The treasonous central planners had a duty is to "protect the peace," to keep Americans safe and secure from foreign aggression. But what they have been doing – starting wars and provoking foreigners – has made Americans less safe and less secure.
The central planners are derelicts of duty who have not been "promoting the general welfare" or well-being of America and instead have diminished it.
But the Exceptionalists still don't see it that way. The zombies continue to stare at their iPhones and their TVs, and let the propagandists hypnotize them.
And then we have a well-meaning filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul, but the real rulers still seem to be the ignorant Sens. Graham and McCain, and the dangerous Obama and John Brennan, to our detriment.
