The artistry of American democracy…Its first and only rule: the degree of vitriol and exaggerated importance is inversely proportional to the differences between the candidates. From such a principle we can infer that Hillary vs Hillary would be the most contentious campaign in US history. Instead, we will simply have to make due with the titanic struggle between movealong.org vs righttorule.org…
This cybersecurity bill effectively applies the drug war model to computer security.
Of course, as predicted.
In the 90s, I thought the internet presaged an era of unprecedented human liberty. Now I know better…
Well, Terry Gilliam didn’t get quite right. His version of a storm trooper gestapo enforcing a byzantine bureaucratic regime failed to include the obligatory prayer that would attend the required signature receipts.
Back in 2010, the subject matter of this recent American Conservative article, Our American Pravda, was a dominant theme of my blog. Just compare, for example, my deconstruction at the time of Christine O’Donnell,Andrew Codevilla & the Country Class with the last part of Unz’s article. Frankly, I had no idea who Boris Berezovsky was(apparently, Boris Yeltsin’s puppet master), but his idea of exporting the fake American two-party political model to Russia as means to sustain a bloodless Russian oligarchy was, unfortunately, spot on. Numerous times I laid out the working mechanics of the American culture war–precisely how it negates and thwarts any possible challenge to the status quo–but perhaps my aforementioned linked post was the best and most concise explanation of it. But I’m just making a straight-forward application of Orwell. Mr. Orwell’s work gave us the socialist version. You just have to tweak it a bit to apply it to our present-day capitalist version.
Often is said that we as Americans are the most heavily propagandized people in the history of civilization. But the distinguishing factor of our propaganda is that we actually believe it. The difference between Pravda and Pravda, Inc is that under the Soviet Pravda model, when the walls came down, the people cheered their destruction. But under Pravda, Inc, if our walls came tumbling down, we would dress in sackcloth and ashes and mourn our eternal intent to rebuild the damn things. Pravda, Inc. demonstrates the most virulent form of social control is that which is propagated by the illusion of choice.
Orwell, from his tract, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” in Nineteen Eighty-Four, prophesying how the “progress of human history” terminates. Orwell only failed to foresee the “new aristocracy” composing the guest list for Friday night comedy produced by Oceania’s largest media conglomerate(or second largest–who really knows). Of course, hosted by a comic who traded in his comedy for a baseball team.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
So proclaimed supposed left-winger Bill Maher to the applause of his supposed left-wing audience Friday night. The question: a brief consideration of Ron Paul’s critique of Obama’s assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Seth MacFarlane commented that while he trusted Obama with this power, he would be troubled with the exercise of such power by someone like Michelle Bachmann. Salman Rushdie, apparently unbothered by any consideration of irony regarding unilateral issuance of death edicts, informed us that those who commit treason forfeit any claim to rights, a comment which prompted Maher’s succinct editorial conclusion: “…And the Penalty of Treason is Death.”
That was the cue for the audience applause, but it also served as a reminder that what supposedly passes for “liberal” is usually anything but. The liberal would have corrected Rushdie that US presidential edict is not sufficient to establish the crime of treason. It has to be substantiated in open court. And the liberal would have reminded Bill Maher that death is not the only the punishment prescribed by congress for this crime. The penalty for those convicted is either death or imprisonment not less than five years. However, the liberal would also be quick to remind both Rushdie and Maher that “treason” hitherto has been a very rare charge/prosecution in American history, with conviction even rarer still, and execution yet even rarer. Indeed, there have been as many pardons1 of “treason” convictions as executions.
Convicted and Executed:
WWII:
Herbert Hans Haupt: German-born naturalized U.S. citizen, convicted of treason in 1942.
Civil War:
(i)Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt, conviction by military tribunal concerning the Lincoln Assassination
(ii) William Bruce Mumford: convicted of treason and executed for tearing down a United States flag
John Brown Slave Revolt(technically, tried by the commonwealth of Virginia and not the Feds):
(i) John Brown
(ii) Aaron Dwight Stevens
Those pardoned of the crime of Treason
WWII:
(i) Tokyo Rose, pardoned by Gerald Ford
(ii) Tomoya Kawakita, deported by JFK in lieu of execution
Civil War:
(i) Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other leading confederates given amnesty from indictment or trial of Treason by Andrew Johnson
Dorr Rebellion:
Governor Thomas Dorr, guilty treason verdict in 1844 anulled in 1854
Whiskey Rebellion:
Philip Vigol and John Mitchell pardoned by George Washington
The liberal, then, rather than clapping to Maher’s assertion, dampens the Obama celebration with the point of objection: “Actually Bill, up to now in American History, the penalty of Treason, as a convicted crime, has just as likely resulted in a pardon than execution. This is what is supposed to separate us from the barbarians, such as Iran, right Salman?”
Then the liberal, amidst the onset of partisan booing, proceeds to set the actual historical and legal meaning straight: this power the US Executive claims actually has nothing to with usurping the constitutional parameters of treason. It goes way beyond that. It’s claim of extrajudicial power to murder overturns the entire liberal legal tradition. We’ve returned to the original historical meaning of “outlaw,” which denoted someone declared outside the sphere of legal protection. Any person saddled with this designation was fair game, meaning anyone was “legally” sanctioned to do anything they wanted to against that person, including murder.
The liberal legal tradition ultimately derives from the principle of the Great Writ, habeas corpus, which subjugates any “legal sanctioned” punishment to due process. This simply means that the State, the King, or the Authority cannot sanction any punishment against the accused as “legal” without “due process,” that is, without some mechanism in place for the accused to challenge the accusation. Habeas corpus puts an end to the historical meaning of outlaw because the State does not have the legitimate power to legally define someone as “fair game.”
The liberal will then point out the final egregious error of the partisan Obamatard defenders, such as Mother Jones. If you are liberal, it is far better to deal with a Bush/Cheney regime that operates under a unitary executive principle that any action by the President is legal by virtue of the office itself than with an Obama regime that legitimizes it under the “rule of law.”
Let me spell out the problem for liberalism: The “rule of law” under the “liberal State” has now re-legitimized the old historical legal concept of the “outlaw,” a legal concept, specifically, it’s abolition, that more or defines the raison d’etre of the liberal State itself.
Mother Jones attempt to legitimize Obama under the “rule of law” only reminds us of the validity of the libertarian critique. The “rule of law” phrase itself means shit; the historical definition of “outlaw” was enforced by two thousand years of interpretation regarding the “rule of law.”
Eventually, the honest liberal comes to understand that “eternal vigilance” largely means nullifying the “rule of law.” “Outlaw,” however, cannot be nullified in the court. The American revolutionaries, under charge of “outlaws,” didn’t nullify it in King George’s court of law. They nullified it on the battlefield.
Here’s the current reality. The people of the world, under the rule of “American Exceptionalism,” now largely despise their governments. Thus, there shouldn’t be any surprise that the US wields the greatest unaccountable secret intelligence/military complex in the history of the world. And it shouldn’t be any surprise that American law now has resurrected the historical legal sanction of “outlaw.”
In the end, we should understand what is meant by American Exceptionalism: the liberal legitimization of “outlaw.”
1 The term Pardon here, for brevity, has a more expansive meaning than it’s actual technical meaning. In this context, it refers to pardon, deportation, amnesty, or anullment.
On the eve of Wikileaks expected release of 15,000 additional Afghanistan documents, Julian Assange is accused of rape and molestation. A US smear campaign is immediately suspected.
America, ‘Tis for Thee…
Libérale et libertaire 