Dear Editor,
We’re told we have a system where we can elect politicians to represent us and prevent corporate abuse but government obviously serves its corporate masters and not citizens. Our legal system is a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state, the freedom to dissent without government supervision is mostly gone and our basic civil liberties aren’t protected. What we ‘vote’ for and what we get are almost always two different things, locally and nationally, yet about half of Americans still participate in the ‘voting’ game.
The corporate state has passed a series of oppressive laws and set up a vast security and surveillance machinery that obliterates our privacy, allows you to be snatched off the streets by the ‘authorities’ and held without due process in indefinite detention, criminalizing dissent. The corporate state holds in its hands the legal and physical tools to shut us down and has gradually been doing so.
Corporate capitalism holds total, unchallenged power. The politicians, judges, press, and boards of education operate within the decrees of corporate power. Activists have learned things ‘consumers’ have yet to understand: corporations will poison Earth and all of its inhabitants for profit. There are no limits. Resistance will be effective only when we refuse to do what we’re told.
American exceptionalism operates on the belief that the Empire is a uniquely virtuous nation that loves peace, encourages liberty, respects human rights, and embraces the rule of law. Americans like to think their country behaves much better than other states. The Empire isn’t as brutal as history’s worst, but honest historical investigation shows large lies about American moral superiority.
In an ideal world “truth” wins so if you’re innocent, everything’s fine because ultimately you’ll be found innocent. In the real world what really counts is the “perception of truth”. Government institutions with overwhelming resources of skills, money, manpower, organization, computer systems, can create a perception of truth that sends you to prison, even when you’re innocent. The only wise response, when interrogated by government officials, is to exercise your Right to Remain Silent, and demand a lawyer.
People get the government they deserve, and it reflects them. Edward R. Murrow warned, “Unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.”
Edward Snowden exposed a piece of our reality. It’s understandable if ‘consumers’ have difficulty keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur regularly, keeping us distracted, deceived, and insulated from the reality of the growing American police state.
Government acts like it can do a better job of managing our lives than we can, from raising children, to health care and more.
The Department of Homeland Security says if you see something suspicious, call a government hotline, or report it using a smart phone app. If you’re a whistleblower wanting to report government wrongdoing, forget it: government doesn’t like having its dirty deeds publicized. It’s a brilliant plan that keeps ‘consumers’ distrustful of each other and foreign ‘shadowy forces’. They’re incapable of focusing on more definable threats closer to home: government and its group of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners.
You took an oath to defend the constitution against enemies, foreign and domestic, but forget that domestic enemies can be hard to identify. They might be someone you’d ‘vote’ for.
Who are the patriots and who are the traitors in all this? Those who defend the founding Constitutional principles of America or those who have taken America to the dark side, with assassinations, torture, denial of due process, invasions, coups, destruction of democratic systems, support of dictatorships, foreign wars, foreign interventions, foreign entanglements, and foreign bribery/aid?
The air is increasingly unhealthy; we’re sprayed by Chemtrails, and our GMO food is poison which you dismiss because they’re ‘conspiracy theories’: what if you’re wrong. Government can now ‘legally’ secretly snatch you off the street. Everything everywhere is going crazy. We sit in our soon-to-be foreclosed homes as the world we’re living in gets smaller, asking: to be left alone and in return we won’t object. They’re not going to leave you alone.
Don’t protest; the new DARPA weapons of citizen control will make protests more futile. DHS is waiting and watching. Why write to your Congressional critter, which has already been bought and paid for by the forces that are working to enslave you. I don’t know what to do about inflation, your lost pension or crime in the streets. I do know that first; you’ve got to get mad.
Slavery is freedom. War is peace. The pills side effects are worse than what it’s supposed to cure. We’re told that we must only vote for one of two parties so we vote for the other party expecting a different outcome. You can shoot and kill someone in self-defense, but shoot a government official in self-defense and you’re toast.
Most legal prosecutions are done using plea-bargaining: ‘take this offer or we’ll push for worse and add charges’, because government has the courage of their self-righteousness. Feelings are measured the same as reason and logic. Affirmative/positive action for your minorities and everyone else is racist, cracker/gringo whitey. We give amnesty, and free stuff paid for by natural-born citizens, to millions of foreigners who’ve invaded our country illegally. You’re racist if you complain. Government can take/arrest your property, and you have to prove your property is innocent to get it back.
Stand up and let them know what you think of them and their system of corruption.
Your rights are yours by because of your birth. You have them whether a document or government says so or not. Government will always work to limit or destroy your rights; it’s up to you to defend them. How to do that? Thomas Jefferson said: “A free people claim their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
It wasn’t a dictatorship which excused the illegal seizure of territory given to Indians by treaty for “as long as the waters run and the grass grows”. American’s murdered infants in their mother’s arms, and shot running Indian children to demonstrate their shooting skills. It wasn’t Nazis who herded Indians or Japanese into prison camps to die of malnutrition, cold and disease. American history proclaims noble victories and morally justified accomplishments ignoring our heinous deeds.
Once Manifest Destiny ran out of room, America turned overseas in search of new populations of “savages” to Christianize, and new lands over which to exercise “sovereign control”. The first to receive America’s generosity were the Hawaiians, who had already been infiltrated by politically favored interests. In 1887, a gang of plantation owners, acting with the full American support imposed the notorious “Bayonet Constitution” on what had been an independent, constitutionally limited Christian monarchy.
Hawaii’s queen was a Christian who was educated in missionary schools. As the Empire completed the coup the Queen described the event as “a day of infamy in Hawaiian history”.
Following the Spanish-American War the Empire announced its intention to “uplift and Christianize” the Filipinos, many of them Catholics. In a speech defending this murderous evangelism, Senator Nelson of Minnesota assured Filipinos that “We come as ministering angels, not as despots”. Always the same lies.
Independence-seeking Filipino partisans displayed their ingratitude toward their “liberators” so Colonel Jacob Smith, a decorated veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre, was appointed to bring America’s brand of enlightenment to the Philippines. “I want no prisoners,” Smith ordered his troops. “I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and the more you burn, the better you will please me”. He commanded his troops to kill everyone over the age of ten, and reduce the surrounding countryside into “a howling wilderness”.
In the Philippines, American soldiers dragged people indiscriminately from their homes to be arrested, tortured, and executed. In their search for guerrilla leader Emilio Aguinaldo, American soldiers used the same interrogation tactic used decades later by the Japanese, some of whom we tried for those war crimes: The “water cure,” now called “waterboarding” or, as Sarah Palin called it: “terrorist baptisms”. Americans seem incapable of introspection.
During a post-war speaking tour, some officers boasted of their exploits, including torturing Filipinos, and ordering frequent massacres of civilians. Rather than being prosecuted for war crimes, one officer was given the Medal of Honor. The audacity immunity brings led one officer to suggest that “anti-war protestors be dragged out of their homes and lynched”.
Our elected and appointed leaders routinely tell us we’re a peaceful people, yet our nation is permanently at war. Americans believe that we reject being an empire, but in our nation’s capital, an imperial city if there ever was one, references to the United States of America as the rightful successor to Rome in the era of the Caesars and the British Empire flourish. There’s more here than words: America’s military presence around the world firmly testifies about our imperial ambitions. We may be an “empire in denial,” but we’re an empire.
The Empire brings ‘freedom’ worldwide with bombs and bullets. “Free speech” for many humans truly means: it’s vital that the ideas I like be protected, and the right to offend ‘those people’ be respected: anything else is fair game. As a curious side note, perhaps, Netflix doesn’t offer the movie version of 1984. It may be they don’t want those who don’t think to be alerted to the ongoing successful efforts to bring that book/movie to fruition.
In case you’re interested, I’ve been experimenting with a blog: https://patriotismbydegree.blogspot.com/
Craig Dudley