Dear Editor,
We see “patriotic” holidays come and go with identical weepy comments on TV about troops “defending our freedom.” Soldiers think they “defend our freedom” but they don’t;they serve the state, which isn’t interested in your freedom,and fight its wars.
Wars are started by countries to benefit the powerful interests that control it. In case you didn’t notice, the Fortune 500, finance-capital and the military-industrial complex, doesn’t consult you. As George Carlin put it, it’s a big club, and you and I aren’t in it.
The wars “our government” fights, and the soldiers who do the fighting, however sincere their motives may be, are fought mainly for the benefit of Boeing, Monsanto, Cargill, Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, Sony, Disney, Microsoft, and the like, to stamp out freedom in the world where it might threaten the profits of our corporate masters no matter what they tell you on TV. Right now we are in the middle of wars to benefit Israel, which Iraq was and Iran will be.
You’re delusional if you believe freedom is something granted by the authorities, from their generosity.If you call yourself a “small government conservative” yet respectthe authority usedby armed and uniformed state functionaries, the tools the state uses to enforce its authority, you’re even more irrational.
Freedom never comes from the state, but from the citizen’swillingness to defy authority and to resist its invasions of freedom. In our revolution it wasn’t any state that wrote the Declaration of Independence. Our rights aren’t granted by the state and defended by its armed representatives; our rights exist because we forced them on the state against its will, from below. We keep those rights, not because American troops kick down doors in Baghdad or drones massacre wedding parties in Afghanistan, but because ordinary people refuse to obey the state here at home.
Every “patriotic” holiday, columnists and talking headsproduce the same tiresome article: “It’s not the protestor that gives us free speech, it’s the soldier”. That’s completely stupid. None of our wars abroad has anything to do with defending any freedom and when the military is used domestically, you can bet it will be employed to suppress our freedom at gunpoint.
Our freedom comes from the troublemakers, rabble-rousers, outsiders; the people those in control don’t respect, and their willingness to say things the powerfuldon’t want said. Our freedom is expanded and defended by those people who are spat upon by “good respectable citizens,” and tossed in jail by cops who don’t want any disorder. Our freedoms come from the people who were imprisoned by John Adams under the Sedition Act, the Wobblies who packed local jails during the Free Speech Campaign, and those who are tortured in prison for exposing “our government’s” war crimes to the world.
Some Americans, defending “our freedom”, demand a photo id from those who vote but won’t allow the public to see who spends uncounted millions to influence that vote. Maybe its cause gays want to marry each other, or will make your kids read “das Kapital”.
The attitude of “respectable” people toward the active defenders of our freedom was expressed by the mayor of oneAmerican city: “Any time I hear somebody talking about freedom of speech, or the bill of rights, I think, ‘That man is a Red.’ No good American talks that way.”So consider if that freedom is really so free, when you hear officials speak that way about its practice.
Radicals are good citizens driven to despair, by their countries actions, who love their country more than the complacent, enough to stand and speak their truth.
Craig Dudley