- Mit
How – Actually – Does the State Work?
'Do As You Are Told, Or We Will Kill You'!
by Jeff Knaebel
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"Communism is power based upon force and limited to nothing, by no kind of law and by absolutely no set rule." ~ Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, page 361
The (American) "security organs" can designate and kill as they see fit
"Solicitor General Ted Olson has described the process: 'There is no requirement for the executive branch to spell out its criteria for who qualifies as an illegal combatant. There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations made by the executive that are going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.'"
"In other words, what is safe to say today, might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the 'law' is merely whim of the leader and his minions: their 'instincts' determine your guilt or innocence, and these gut 'feelings' can change from day to day. This is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government. And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder."
"Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people. But that is our reality. To overcome what seems to be widespread cognitive dissonance, we need only examine the publicly available record. There is nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know – if they choose to know it."
"Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval. Nor is it necessary any longer for the president to approve new names added to the target list…the 'security organs' can designate and kill as they see fit. There is no way of knowing how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally… the death squads are able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to enter countries surreptitiously." – Chris Floyd, truthout.org, 2 October 2006
"Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice. Nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity." ~ Lord Acton
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." ~ Patrick Henry
George W. Bush: "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck at them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did …" – as reported by Palestinian leaders to whom Bush spoke after the Iraq invasion.
There you have it, folks. In a nutshell, the quotes above tell us our place in the system: do as you are told, or we will kill you. The rest is all detail. One nuance of history might be highighted for the reader. The men who possess these powers of life and death have rather consistently exhibited patterns of psychopathic behavior in the form of mass murder and torture. In addition to Bush, Hitler and Lenin quoted above, you might consider, among recent others, Mussolini, Stalin, Truman, Mao, Suharto. The list continues ad nauseam throughout history. Hierarchical power structures appear to be an evolutionary dead end for humanity.
My Experiential Observations of Power (abridged)
I've served my country in foreign war zones and returned to face the derision of protestors whom I was supposedly "protecting." I rotated myself from resentment to an understanding thatthey were correct. My friend who had chained himself to other war protestors while they burned their draft cards was a braver man than I.
For them it had worked. Neither conscripted nor prosecuted, they were too hot to handle. I have arrived at a deep respect for the moral competence and physical courage of my young friend. Nonviolence is not for cowards.
I saw "over there" some of the same big construction contractors who, after merger and consolidation, are now gorging on Iraq war profits. I recall a naval leadership journal which carried photos of a French tank mired in a rice paddy circa 1948, alongside a photo of an American tank mired in a rice paddy circa 1968. Paired images of a killing field, stalked hyena-like by cold-blooded central bankers and their political consorts. The dead are but abstractions reported to a balance sheet as corporate dividends. Political payoffs are footnoted as "other expenses."
Today we are viewing the updated remix as "Shock and Awe" murder-of-every-living-thing-from-a-safe-distance. It would pound the earth itself into submissive dust on the Emperor's shoes. An imperialist gone mad in its greed for oil, for corporate dividends, for unlimited power, its mass murder spares not woman nor child nor cow. The revolving door of power brokers rotating between government-defense contracting-banking leads to the same bloody dead end, generation after generation.
Of Power, this much I know from experience both over and under:
- It aggrandizes itself, feeding upon everything in its path
- It comes as corporate CEO and abusive husband, as admiral and chairman, as dictator and patriarch
- Greed is its energy and cowards it crushes, although itself cowardly
- Courage it cannot withstand, especially moral
- It corrupts absolutely kindness into cruelty
- It knows no limit of acquisitiveness
- It attracts the corruptible and the corrupt
- It is pure evil in the hands of no matter whom
- It usually wears a mask
- In the five generations with which I have had direct contact it has brought misery, murder, rape and pillage
- And the nuclear bomb
The battle is for the mind of man. The prize is no longer in vanquishing some "other." The battle is either all against all or all for all. There is no "other" to conquer. We are all in it together. We either grow a garden together or we cannibalize each other in the course of turning the earth into a desert. We can either plant trees together, or race to be the last person standing to cut down the last tree.
ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS OF THE STATE
"Total war is the invention of the modern State." ~ Michael Rozeff, 2 August 2005
"Since a human being has no power to create life, he has, therefore, no right to destroy life."
~ T. N. Khoshoo, 1995
The State as an organization keeps on running with periodic changes of management called elections. Because of its ability to make laws and impose taxes, its power is limited only by the tolerance of the people for their exploitation. The State can coerce its members without reciprocal consequences. It operates without fear of reprisal. It can use aggressive force to make others do things against their will. Its "managers" are protected by sovereign immunity. Because it both rules and taxes, it suffers no agency costs for its errors: it simply shifts the cost to taxpayers.
"To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed adding insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State does. Read the Congressional Record; follow the proceedings of the State legislatures; examine our statute books. Testing each Act separately by the law of equal liberty, you will find that a good nine tenths of existing legislation serves not to that fundamental social law, but either to prescribe the individual's personal habits, or worse, to create and sustain commercial, industrial, financial and proprietary monopolies which deprive labor of a large part of the reward that it would receive in a true free market." ~ Benjamin Tucker, 1890
The US is not a contractual State in the sense of an organization owned by its principals, the citizens. It has become a predatory State in the sense of a corporation owned and operated by a small group. This evolution was made inevitable by the weaknesses of the Constitution and actions of the power brokers and legislature. Rozeff (3 August 2006) estimates that the top management group of USA comprises between 15 and 60 members. These members rotate in revolving door fashion between and among various centers of social and political power. The figureheads and mouthpieces – the Kennedys, Nixons, Clintons, Bushes – are all fungible, each can be replaced by another without perturbing the system. In this manner do elections always come to a choice between two morally indistinguishable candidates. Likewise, no matter who you vote for, the political establishment always gets elected.
A few dozen people control the vast bureaucracies. The State's power depends upon holding the loyalty and obedience of these career employees within the power structure. This is done by passing out special privileges and emoluments. Napoleon noted the amazing lust of men for awards and decorations. The final tool in the arsenal of control is to heap honors upon those who have been corrupted.
M.S. Rozeff (see Lew Rockwell website) argues that the State lowers the cost of immorality, and people subsequently demand more State. Those who do occasionally resist face an "immortal" foe that owns the law-making power. People will rationalize their greater demand for immorality with new ideas of right and wrong. Giving up liberty in exchange, they will come to worship authority, equality, the use of force, and power. They will move away from self-reliance, responsibility, obligation to elders and the disadvantaged of society. They will accept, even enjoy their new situation. The State corrupts social morals and human beings.
COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE
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