I can’t help but shake my head at those who brand groups like the Oath Keepers and others as extremists. Critics charge that they do nothing but circulate anti-government ideas, and stoke the fires of revolution, but do they? Members of Oath Keepers include military and police officers, fire fighters, veterans, and other law enforcement officials, all of whom served the government at some point, so these are not angst-ridden teenage nihilists who crave anarchy. They believe very sincerely in law and order. And they don’t see the same spirit for justice in the actions of America’s current and past leaders, whether they hail from the Democrat party or Republican party. Their split with the US government did not begin with the current corporatist-democratic incarnation, as some assume, but with events like the establishment of the private Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, the Vietnam War, the fraudulent Drug War, the Waco massacre in 1993, 9/11 and the current unconstitutional wars in the Middle East.
Sure, we live in an age of extremism and irrationalism, but if you want to find the true perpetrators of them, you don't have to look no further than your own government, whether you live in Iran, Israel, or America.
If you think it is extreme to call the government extreme rather than reasonable or moderate, then you have one choice before you: who is correct? The oppressors or the oppressed? But before you get philosophical about the question, let's just look at recent history and some inconvenient truths about the nature of government extremism.
Are public assassinations not a sign of extremism? If you agree, then you should be shocked that the governments of all three countries that I listed above are all guilty of that anti-liberty practice. But since America's government topped all of them by assassinating its sitting head of state in 1963, and because it is the sole superpower in the world, I will focus on it only.
The extreme act of killing a people's leader while in office, and blessed with popularity, amounts to a coup d'état by the powers that be in America. It allowed the US elite to consolidate power, and eliminate any prospect for a future reasonable and independent voice in the White House. The military establishment, war contractors, secret intelligence services, and financiers, were all thrilled by the sight of Kennedy's head being splattered to pieces. Even the Iranian elite didn't take such a drastic step in their march towards tyranny. Fort-seven years since Kennedy's death, the US government assassination program has gone universal. The president is now a law unto himself, he has become judge, jury, and executioner for all citizens who threaten the US government's existence, or even question its hold on power.
Independent reporter Jeremy Scahill asked Rep. Dennis Kucinich about his opinion on the US government's assassination policy in The Nation, and Kucinich responded by saying that the unconstitutional policy cuts deep to what has gone wrong in Washington over the last several decades. "Short-cuts," Kucinich told Scahill, "often belie the deep and underlying questions around which nations rise and fall. We are really putting our nation in jeopardy by pursuing this kind of policy."
You could argue that such assassinations are only carried out on high-value suspects, individuals who mean society harm, and that such measures need to be taken in order to keep the public safe. But what about wholesale assassination? And doesn't that describe the situation in Iraq most effectively? Let's reexamine the Iraq war for a minute. Chris Floyd writes:
This, from a war launched unilaterally by the Anglo-American alliance without UN sanction, against a nation that had not attacked them, had not threatened to attack them, was not capable of attacking them – and had no connection whatsoever to the 9/11 attacks, which even today are cited as the main reason for the invasion of Iraq. Just a few weeks ago, Tony Blair was passionately defending the unprovoked attack by saying that 9/11 "changed everything," and meant that the Anglo-American alliance could not "take the risk" that Iraq might, at some point, somehow, pose some kind of threat to the two rich, powerful, nuclear-armed nations thousands of miles away.The US government, not just the Bush administration, but the entire US government, presented false evidence to the public for the sole purpose of inducing popular fear for a war with a country that did not attack America in any way. Both parties, and both houses, endorsed the data, and gave the Administration the seal of approval. And that action resulted in the deaths of one million innocent men, women, and children. Ask yourself, is that not extreme? Isn't killing without provocation extreme?
So we already have examples of lying and killing by the US government. But if that's not extreme enough for you, how does wide-scale looting of the public purse sound? Wall St parasites, in coalition with their Federal government lapdogs, participated in predatory behavior in the Market by using the public's money and trust. Last November, Greg Gordon in McClatchy Newspapers reported that Goldman Sachs made secret bets that the housing bubble would crash, while posing a different public image to investors and clients. Gordon:
WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.Despite the abundance of evidence that Goldman Sachs engaged in massive fraud, the Obama administration has not made a strong case to prosecute the company in its push for financial reform. The economy is still tinkering on disaster, with unemployment reaching 20 percent, and record amounts of personal bankruptcies. Graham Summers of Phoenix Capital Research wrote in a recent guest post at Zero Hedge that there were 158,000 bankruptcies in March 2010, up 19% from last year during the same month. Summers writes:Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.
Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.
Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.
While the market cheers on the fantastic job “growth” of March 2010, the more astute of us are concerned with a growing tide of personal bankruptcies. March 2010 saw 158,000 bankruptcy filings. David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff notes that this is an astounding 6,900 filings per day.
This latest filing is up 19% from March 2009’s number which occurred at the absolute nadir of the economic decline, when everyone thought the world was ending. It’s also up 35% from last month’s (February 2010) number.
The economic crisis has become so huge that the so-called failed banks may acquire people’s pension-funds in the near future in order to keep themselves afloat in a sea of debt. Bloomberg reported in March that:
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is trying to encourage public retirement funds that control more than $2 trillion to buy all or part of failed lenders, taking a more direct role in propping up the banking system, said people briefed on the matter.
Direct investments may allow funds such as those in Oregon, New Jersey and California to cut fees for private-equity managers, and the agency to get better prices for distressed assets, the people said. They declined to be identified because talks with regulators are confidential.
So, let's recap all the extreme actions taken by the US government over the last fifty years and analyze the ground on which we all stand. 1) A public assassination of the country's leader, followed by a wholesale cover-up, 2) assassinations of American dissidents in the name of security, 3) intentional lying and false presentation of evidence to start an illegal and criminal war in Iraq, and 4) economic pillage of the American people through partnership with the biggest banks on Wall St, chief of them being Goldman Sachs. If these actions committed by a corrupt government led by extremists in the pursuit of irrational ends, are not resisted and punished, then what does that make us? Rebelling against such monstrous policies and illegality on the part of public officials is not extremism, it is fair. A measured response against a war criminal would be to punish him, and put him in prison.
It would be extreme, in the context of human nature, to let such things pass as though they were normal. A moderate stance would be to support the prosecutions of Bush, Cheney, and Blair. To practice legal restraint against such men represents a very deep ignorance about how much suffering they and their comrades in arms have inflicted, both in America, and in the Middle East.
It would be extreme, in the context of human nature, to let such things pass as though they were normal. A moderate stance would be to support the prosecutions of Bush, Cheney, and Blair. To practice legal restraint against such men represents a very deep ignorance about how much suffering they and their comrades in arms have inflicted, both in America, and in the Middle East.
Wrongs have been committed by our leaders, lies have been told, so why the caution? Why the hesitation to fight for justice? There should be no division on the issue of accountability and justice. Right and left alike benefit from a fair legal order. To rebel against war criminals is to obey nature. To rebel against financial fraudsters is to obey to the rule of law. To rebel against tyranny is to obey the principles of life, liberty being the highest among them. But anytime a man or a group raises questions about the corruption of publicly elected officials, and the entrenched interests who swarm around them, members of the corporate media get all high and mighty.
Amidst calls for accountability, pundits and establishment journalists get very anxious. They hold the lives of congressmen and senators sacred, the same men and women who have consciously supported a perpetual war in the name of freedom, and have endorsed endless debt for America's future. But where is their concern for the victimless prisoners who are serving life in prison because of a failed and morally bankrupt drug war? A war that has also been supported by members of Congress and the Senate. Where is their concern for the deaths of the Iraqi people? Are their lives less sacred? Is their blood worth less than the blood of Congressman Reid, and Senator Lindsey Graham? Why differentiate between the lives of public officials and regular citizens?
Violence and murder is wrong wherever it takes place and whomever supports it. If public representatives go against the popular consent, and support the killing of innocent human beings, then they should be adequately punished. And if that qualifies for extremism, then color the law extreme.
In the eyes of the US establishment, the country's Constitution was an extremist document. And indeed it was. Rebelling against the King, a once sacred and civilization's most important institution, was paramount to divine treason. To declare your independence to the King means to declare your sovereignty; to declare your sovereignty means to declare your humanity. In 2010, declaring your rights is once again considered as treason.
Describing how low the philosophical thinking and spiritual outlook of America's rulers have gotten doesn't require many public revelations, you can see their contempt for humanity on their faces. From Washington to Bush was like a steep ladder down into political hell. And at each interval critics of the falling government standards were called radicals, paranoids, unpatriotic, ungodly, unsophisticated. If Americans want real leaders in their government once again, they must be all those things, godly, patriotic, sophisticated, radical, and yes, even a little paranoid.
Be A Rebel, Be A Moderate Independent
Towards the end of his long essay The Rebel, French philosopher Albert Camus said:
Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion in itself is moderation, and it demands, defends, and re-creates it throughout history and its eternal disturbances.I respect men who rebel more than men who sleep, sit, or take in the scenery. Does that mean that they who rebel are always in the right? No. Can rebels become too extreme in their thought and acts? Yes. But I'll take my chances with the rebels rather than watch men and women continue to suffer under the real extremism of tyranny. The view that those who raise the alarm about the emergence of a new tyranny are conspiracy theorists, or paranoid crackpots is totally illogical. It is a view that does not take recent history or past human events into consideration.
Being vigilant and wary of men in power is not a feature of lunatics, but of visionaries, poets, rebels, men who are ahead of their time. "The key," writes Jon Roland in Principles of Tyranny, "is always to detect tendencies toward tyranny and suppress them before they go too far or become too firmly established. The people must never acquiesce in any violation of the Constitution." And the more quickly we act to stop the march of tyranny, the better off we will all be. "Failure to take corrective action early," Roland says, "will only mean that more severe measures will have to be taken later."
Today, two separate rallies are being held near Washington D.C. to confront the government tyranny in America. One of them is an open-carry event, featuring the Three Percenters, and other gun-rights activists. And the other is a second amendment march, which is more family-friendly, and is attended by the Oath Keepers, and other groups. Although I detest any kind of show of force in public, if I had to choose, I'd side with your local militia rather than your local police.
In a perfect world, men would be wise and act in the faith that non-violent resistance, in the tradition of Gandhi and King, would serve humanity better than a violent uprising against the huge Goliath that is the US government. I pray that the Oath Keepers will take that path. As of today, they are positioning themselves rightly. Jesse Walker of Reason Magazine recently wrote in his article "Protect and Serve":
Oath Keepers is in the rare position of pushing both groups toward nonviolence—of telling the rebels that there’s an alternative to lashing out and of telling officials with guns that there’s an alternative to mindlessly following orders.Still, even if the Oath Keepers remain non-violent, how we can be so sure that non-violence will achieve success? I'm certainly not. But if I had a message to the rest of the patriot community in the world, it would be, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, take the non-violent leap of faith. Believe that liberty will be victorious again, but this time, without the use of violence. Dream again. If Jefferson and King could dream, why can't we? Be on the side of justice and order, fight to resurrect balance in society between the rulers and the ruled, take the moderate path, be an independent, and most of all, be a rebel.
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