Mistaking Slavery and Dictatorship for Freedom and Democracy

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http://americaabroad.tpmcafe.com/blog/ian_macleod/2007/jan/17/mistaking_slavery_and_dictatorship_for_freedom_and_democracy

Or: It’s a Free Country – Until You Disagree or Disobey

My father is gone now, but before I surprised us both by joining up, he and I used to have some wondrous arguments. As far as he was concerned, I had no right to criticize the government or it’s policies, the military or it’s actions, or anything about America, period. Of course, as far as he knew I had nothing good to say about any of it, but there he was wrong. I knew the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence by heart, as well as a lot of civil law in general. This was during Vietnam, Dad was lifer military and a “mustanger” (he worked his way up from enlisted to officer), and it seemed a good idea to learn as much of that sort of thing as I could, what with cops beating and arresting people who dared look, believe or act differently from most other people. I began learning the UCMJ as soon as I decided to join up.

I had a family tradition of wartime service to uphold, but I also had no desire whatsoever to go kill complete strangers in their own country - or to be killed by them, for that matter – for some armchair sociologist’s (is there any other kind, I wonder?) theory: the so-called “Domino Theory”. It seemed reasonable to join the Navy as a hospital Corpsman. After all that soul-searching, and boot camp and “A” school in San Diego, I went to another war zone instead of Vietnam: East Oakland (where I managed to get shot at anyway – after the war), then China Lake. Having been raised on military bases all over the place, I had some idea of what to expect, and some very strong notions of what it meant to be an American.

It amazed me then to hear how many people thought no one had a right to criticize the U.S; to them, such people, myself included, were traitors. Many were willing to back up that opinion with violence, arrest on trumped-up charges, or whatever it took to silence the voices of those who insisted on bringing up inconvenient things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other such terrible things that were obviously sneaked into the law by communists. After that war the passion attached to such things died down a lot, and people in general couldn’t believe that people could have acted like that. Of course, I knew even back then that our Founders viewed dissent and protest as not simply permissible, but a duty. So did I, and I still do.

Now here we are again: protestors who disagree with the government are arrested “pre-emptively” for “trespassing” (on public streets or sidewalks, often after being forced from one to the other by police, or in public gatherings they nonetheless have tickets to). Some who are clearly there to protest are herded into “free speech areas” that are fenced off, filthy, and well away from everything; and here I thought the whole country was a free speech area. As it was thirty years before, these people who object to the criminal activities of the government and of government agencies like the police, the military, the President and others are called “traitors”, “un-American”, and are mistreated, sometimes badly. Somehow, generation to generation, there is a seed of totalitarianism that survives to rear it’s ugly heads like the Hydra, attacking with sublime ignorance any who insist that America follow at least some semblance of it’s own laws and ideals. snip

13). Now add in the “Unitary Executive” concept, a concept totally antithetical to the Constitution, which is yet another thing they choose to ignore. Jefferson wrote, along with many of the other Founders, extensively about the balance of powers and the necessity for it. There’s nothing I can add to those hundreds of papers, except maybe that I wish the administration would read a few. They claim the President should have absolute power and they continue to take that power in defiance of everything ever written by those who created the core document of this country and should know that says the opposite. Then, they also claim the U.S. was originally intended to be “a Christian country”, also in direct contradiction the our core documents and everything the Founders ever wrote. They say what suits them, and what suits them is taking as much power and money from their rightful holders – the citizens of the United States – as they can get away with.

There are too many other such things to even scratch the surface in listing them.

America, land of the free, home of the brave, where everyone has a chance to become great: the American dream is a lie, AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS WHATSOEVER AS FAR AS BUSH AND HIS GOVERNMENT ARE CONCERNED.

So what are you going to do about it?

Ian MacLeod
Oregon
January 17th, 2007