Thomas
Jefferson calling: The time for revolution is now
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long
established, should not be changed for light and transient causes;
and, accordingly, all experience [has] shown that mankind are more
disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves
by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long
train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object,
evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it
is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to
provide new guards for their future security."
"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
— two quotes from Thomas Jefferson
Have you noticed? America is on the wrong side of every conflict in
the world.
America encourages slavery and economic exploitation, and opposes
individual rights and people's self determination — everywhere in
the world. And now, with its new hardcore police-state laws, even in
America itself.
No more the land of the free and home of the brave. That's long
gone. Now it's the land of the financially pulverized and the home of
grotesquely overpaid executroids who will say anything for the right
price. Lie to anyone, friend or foe. Betray anyone for those thirty
pieces of silver. Bribe other countries in order to get them to do
things that everybody realizes are wrong. Poison its own soldiers
because somebody makes billions getting rid of nuclear waste. Even
kill a lot of its own citizens with medicines that are never tested,
and protect the vicious felons who distribute these poisons from
shattered parents mourning their dead children. Judasland, that's the
America we have now.
Americans don't tell the truth to anyone, least of all themselves.
And I direct this at not just the government, but also at the American
people.
Y'know, it's easy to say we've been victimized by bad schools and
coma-inducing TV, disgustingly manipulative movies, and a climate of
elitist intolerance reflected in one-sided media versions of history.
It's one thing to be deceived, but it's quite another not to have seen
all these crimes that have happened right in front our eyes since the
Kennedy assassination. I mean: How stupid are we?
How stupid are we to believe that on one day in 2001, we had no air
defenses for the entire Northeast region of the country? And that just
happened to be the day when "terrorists" decided to fly four
big jetliners into national landmarks. As Gerard Holmgren so
eloquently said recently, how stupid are we to believe a conspiracy
theory as far-fetched as that, one that was engineered by dissaffected
Arabs in a cave? See http://www.911-strike.com/debunking.htm
So, yes, we can keep blaming our bad luck and lack of attention to
political reality, but let's not forget to blame ourselves in all
this. And blame ourselves right now for not already having stopped an
entire Congress intent on covering up the most important event of our
lives, and then timidly approving the wars of our new dictator who
seeks to keep the population deceived with one murderous escapade
after another.
How stupid are we to believe all of it? Or any of it?
How stupid are we not to know the stock market crashed months ago
and is being propped up by the Plunge Protection Team?
How stupid are we not to know that nothing the Bush Administration
says remotely resembles an honest assessment of conditions in the
world. All those satanic shills say is designed to ease their task of
stealing money from people everywhere.
Recently many high profile Americans have been caught in
embarrassing lies. Although the media tries to cover them as best they
can, more and more people are noticing that everything the Bush
administration says is a spin, and none of it is an honest recounting
of actual events.
If Powell and Bush are telling lies now about reasons to invade
Iraq — and getting caught at those lies regularly — how are we to
know that they weren't telling lies about the demolition of the World
Trade Center, when it was considered unpatriotic to question the
official version of events?
If they're lying now, what kind of stupid do you have to be to
believe they were telling the truth then? Pretty stupid, is what I'd
say.
I bet it's just hysterical when Poppy Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld get
together and laugh about how efficiently they've ripped off the
American people. Cheney can brag that Halliburton, through its Brown
& Root subsidiary, had made trillions off all these frequent U.S.
military deployments in which his company provides the crappy chow and
the tossed-up buildings. With plenty more of those lucrative military
support contracts to follow in quick succession. North Korea.
Philippines. Colombia. You pick the target.
And Bush 41 can laugh right back by bragging about how many anthrax
tablets and smallpox doses his new company Bioport has foisted off on
the government. It's doesn't matter that they'll never be used by
anyone with a scintilla of common sense. The deal is done and the
money has been paid. If anyone actually gets the shot, well, that's
their tough luck.
For at least a century, the whole world has emulated America,
presidents instead of dictators, legislatures instead of secret
police. Now America has reverted to the secret police method. Woe to
everyone if the world continues to follow America's lead. With its
cooked-book capitalism, where nothing is the truth and all but richest
suffer, America is leading the world over a cliff, and pushing the
world toward that precipice too with weapons that couldn't be
surpassed by the devil himself in their high-tech evil.
America stands for total corporate control with no discussion and
no dissension, and against meaningful self-expression and common sense
ways to ease the burdens of the less fortunate. Virtually no members
of Congress oppose open U.S. aggression in dozens of foreign
countries. And neither, for that matter, do many foreign leaders, our
erstwhile allies, most of whom are on the U.S. bribery payroll.
And America is raising its children in this manner, too, which is
why you see so few kids at peace demonstrations compared to the number
of people with white hair. Something to look forward to — a totally
robotized next generation. But this is far from the most disturbing
trend in America today.
More importantly, America is against saving the environment,
preferring instead to just trash it and then try to make even more
money off the cleanup. Focused totally on the bottom line, America
practices poisoning the oceans and the jungles of the world on the
theory that these places are far away and don't pertain directly to
immediate profits.
But almost all of these so-called leaders and a disturbing
percentage of the general population applaud these empty lies America
uses to ravage the planet. They listen to the TV fascists and believe
what they hear. They see themselves getting richer from these selfish,
shortsighted policies, without realizing they are becoming immensely
poorer.
Most of the rest of the world is beginning to realize that America
is against what is morally right and sociologically sound, and in
favor of what benefits the its rich controllers at the expense of the
poor, no matter how many people these policies kill. In fact, since it
happens in so many countries, America seems to prefer policies that
kill a lot of people.
Roll that over in your mind. America prefers killing large numbers
of people, the more different ways the better.
Afghanistan: 10,000 dead and more dying every day from incredibly
high levels of radioactivity that almost certainly came from the U.S.
use of nuclear weapons, which of course nobody will admit using. All
of those people were, of course, innocent of anything except trying to
eke out a hardscrabble living in a spot where a bunkerbuster bomb
happened to be dropped.
Iraq: 1.5 million dead in 10 years from illegal bombing by the U.S.
and Britain, but the truly heartrending part is all the children that
have needlessly died because sadistic sanctions kept basic medicines
from doctors treating kids with very ordinary illnesses. It is for
this most Americans deserve to go straight to hell.
Colombia: Now they drop the poison rain to get the peasants to move
off land that American corporations want to develop, a fine climax to
30 years of war America has waged through its proxy goons while nobody
in the U.S. noticed.
Remember: America has armed troops in 40 different countries, and
all this horrific stuff is going on there, too. How many Guatemalan
peasants are buried in the mud of unmarked graves because American
corporations wanted to prevent a "Communist" threat?
Remember: Bush set up a secret government and didn't even bother to
tell the Democrats. And now he laughs at millions of people opposing
his policies in the streets, and calls them "a focus group"
not to be trusted.
America insists upon one set of permissive rules for itself, and
another set of restrictive rules for everybody else, which is why it
refuses to allow itself to be ruled by the auspices of any world
court. This is clearly a racist elitism, a plantation mentality, a
neverending extension of the continuing colonialist rape of the world.
America looks down its nose at the rest of the world. Any
legitimately unbiased world court would find America guilty of
innumerable counts of tyranny in a heartbeat. In fact, the list of
indictable offenses, acts of aggression, extortion, espionage,
violations of the Geneva Accords and crimes against humanity would
probably occupy such a world court indefinitely into the foreseeable
future.
That day will come. When the playing field of the world gets
leveled, as it inevitably will, America faces and endless succession
of war crimes charges in just about every country on earth, from rapes
in Okinawa to mass murder by smallpox injection in the Congo.
Which is just what Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was
saying the other day at the summit of Non-Aligned Nations in Kuala
Lumpur. The "…uncertainties of today's world are due not to 'a
clash of civilizations' between the West and Islam, but to a revival
of the old European trait of wanting to dominate the world. The
expression of this trait invariably involves injustices and oppression
of people of other ethnic origins and colours. It is no longer just a
war against terrorism. It is, in fact, a war to dominate the
world."
How many Americans have asked: What right does America have to say
other countries may not have weapons to defend themselves equal to
what America has? Did some God appoint America to rule the world? Are
we to believe the black quisling Condoleezza Rice when she says
America has the best interests of the world at heart?
Many Asians, wrote journalist Andre Vltchek, feel that it is not
just the UN that Bush threatens to make irrelevant. It is the entire
world that is not white, the entire world that strives to remain
culturally different and opposes the world order and one- way
globalisation.
How could it be that a country that made its reputation on
democracy and individual liberties is now an inflexible totalitarian
system bent on bringing every person on earth under its oppressive
fist, either through irresistable bribes to corrupt leaders, outright
invasions, or the imposition of devastating financial shackles through
that economic shell game known as the International Monetary Fund?
It's a simple answer, really.
America has never been a legitimate democracy and is not one now.
From many of the founding fathers who argued against unbridled
democracy during a time where less than a quarter of its citizens were
authorized to cast a vote, through two centuries of continuing
consolidation of power by corporate interests, the legends that anyone
can rise to be president or the U.S. is a real system of one
person/one vote have been exposed as populist myths, imbedded in an
entire curriculum of myths that have led the populace to believe that
America is an honest and just nation.
For many years, to those in other countries under the yoke of
barbaric dictators, the U.S. seemed — from far away — to LOOK like
a democratic system, with all its ceremonial rituals of supposedly
representative government, with its Constitution and Bill of Rights.
But a closer look — for most, limited to the writings of many poorly
publicized and little known social critics — has always revealed a
superficial democratic sideshow masking the same inhumane system of
bribery and extortion that rules all nations.
Now, once again, the world is being shown the real deal.
Once known as the world's greatest democracy, America still
pretends to preach a gospel of freedom, but look at its allies:
blatant tyrannies which survive on American payoffs and rob and kill
their own people. These police state allies are always headed by
puppet dictators who are approved and appointed by American business
interests. Just look at proposed U.S. plans for a future Iraqi
"democracy," to be temporarily headed by a former American
general. Most Americans can't even recall the number of times the U.S.
has tinkered with Iraqi "democracy" in the past.
It's easy to see all this if you just look, but the vast majority
of American choose not to.
You simply have to observe how America must bribe its so-called
allies to get them to go along with repressive policies. America
thinks it can buy its friends. What a horrible price we shall all pay
for this in the future. Imagine the resentment building in every
corner of the globe as people realize they are not allowed to think
for themselves in order to continue receiving pathetic pittances of
America's trickle down largesse. Ask the once-middle-class families
now living in the streets of Argentina about this.
America attempted to solve the crisis in the Middle East by giving
billions of dollars to Egypt in exchange for a promise not to invade
Israel. The majority of Egyptians disagree with this policy, but
Egypt's leaders have instituted a police state that prevents people
from expressing their own beliefs. America funnels trillions to Saudi
Arabia while a majority of that country's citizens chafe under an
inflexible, capricious dictatorship that spends a lot of money in
Monte Carlo.
This is the kind of "democracy" the U.S. now wishes to
inflict on Iraq. America wants to create another flunkie regime to do
its bidding, another fake democracy to advance the anti-democratic
cause of American banks and oil companies. Just like the fake
democracy in America.
America has bombed Iraq for 13 years and claimed it is not at war.
Now it prepares to obliterate the entire population of that country
simply to steal oil fields and provide a better supply of water for
Israel. And to gain a staging area for invasions of other countries.
America enthusiastically endorses the genocide of the Palestinian
people knowing full well Israel is an illegal entity forced on the
indigenous inhabitants against their will, just like many other
Mideast nation-states.
America is now ready to invade Colombia after supporting the
destruction of the people for three decades so it can better control
the importation of oil and cocaine. This aggression will likely
explode over the borders into neighboring countries.
America uses business executives to bribe the people of Venezuela
to overthrow their own democratically elected government, and claims
it is advocating democracy.
America continues to support corporate-connected dictators is most
Central American countries, and resorts to mass murder when popular
movements agitate for justice for poor people. America is so proud of
this longstanding colonialist policy that it promoted one of the chief
executors of this strategy, John Negroponte, to U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, sending a message to the whole world that it intends
to treat all other countries just Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El
Salvador: either accept corporate control over your slavery or you'll
wind up face down in the mud.
America is sending troops to the Philippines to suppress a popular
uprising that seeks democratic control over a corrupt government that
is totally subservient to U.S. business interests. No wonder Muslim
idealists want to get rid of it.
America even manages to make the Taliban look good. The
fundamentalist Muslim fanatics had all but wiped out poppy production,
but now, thanks to the new American-backed government, under the
tutelage of new Republican DEA chief Asa Hutchinson, it's thriving and
Afghanistan now the world's No. 1 producer of heroin that finds its
way to the streets of Europe
You can't argue that these international intrigues are necessary
for America's economic survival when $4.5 TRILLION has gone missing
from the federal coffers in Washington in just the last two years with
no explanation. The basic situation in Washington is that a cabal of
petronazis has managed to change all the laws in order to facilitate
the greatest robbery in human history, which is now underway.
I could go on, of course, but the questions I get most are: What to
do? Unfortunately, I keep coming with what not to do.
• Don't send petitions to your elected representatives. Most of
them are involved in the robbery, and have no interest in liberating
American citizens from corporate totalitarianism because they making
too much money taking bribes. Even many of the ones who say they do
really don't; they're just placating voters. Ask the people who write
letters to phony shills like John Kerry and Diane Feinstein; they
never get an answer
that isn't some kind of vacuous form letter.
• Impeachment attempts? Give me a break. Same deal. Virtually the
entire Congress is on the take. Were any congressperson to back an
impeachment, he or she would be jeopardizing their own criminal income
from the corporate conspiracy. When the day of retribution comes, all
elected representatives and senators who either voted for the Patriot
Act or took contributions from Enron should automatically be thrown in
jail, and held indefinitely under terms of the Patriot Act for
consorting with known terrorists (in this case, George W. Bush and
Kenneth Lay).
Still, in thousands of e-mails, that big question keeps coming:
What will we do to keep from becoming residents of Camp Ashcroft?
Well, here's your answer.
Overthrow the government — NOW.
We must overthrow the government. There is no other choice. Nothing
else will work. Could it be more obvious?
We can't use violence, because real humans would be crushed by all
the hellish weapons arrayed against the entire world by the military
industrial complex that has stolen all our money and erased all our
rights under the Constitution.
Besides, it is illegal under what's left of the Constitution to
advocate the VIOLENT overthrow of the government. And I would never
dream of advocating any such thing.
It is, however, patently legal and indeed our patriotic duty to
advocate the peaceful overthrow of the government.
We have to overthrow the government, just like Jefferson said, in a
fit of moral outrage, using every bit of our wits and our influence to
put these people who are in the process of destroying everything we
hold dear in jail. For a long time, if not forever.
We must demand the president and his evil entourage resign and
present themselves for criminal indictments before a newly constituted
citizens court that is not influenced by the big bucks of big
business.
We need to restore America to the republic it was designed to be
and the democracy it claims to be.
What?! Are you going to wait for the next election? The elections
are all fixed by electronic voting machines and corporate media that
actually change the way people think.
The Congress must resign as well, and most of them are eligible for
indictment, too. Anyone who voted for the first Patriot Act without
reading must be charged with treason, for destroying our rights
without cause, and anyone who has ever taken a campaign contribution
from Enron (or any of a host of other criminal corporations) must be
charged with corruption and receiving stolen property, namely, the
people's money.
And of course the entire judiciary must resign, and a new judiciary
reappointed by the new government.
All this doesn't have to happen all at once. That would probably be
unworkable.
Somebody else can figure out how to conduct new elections —
without the electoral college — later. The first thing to be done is
to remove the cancer immediately, before it's too late. There are
enough responsible people in America to decide democratically what
kind of interim administration should coordinate a transitional
government until new elections can be called.
There are also a very few responsible existing legislators like Ron
Paul and Dennis Kucinich who can help facilitate the transition.
There are those who would protest that this is too radical an idea,
too big to be considered, too shocking to ever gain a hold in the
popular imagination. But I submit there is nothing else to be done. We
must demand they resign and make it stick. Otherwise, we are lost.
Because there is no fixing this corrupt system. And to not fix it is
to throw away the future of the human species.
This is a preposterous idea, you undoubtedly sputter and fume. How
could it possibly work, you inquire incredulously?
Here's how.
Twenty million people converge on Washington and demand the
resignation of the entire government, that's how. I'd like it to be on
July 4, 2003, but it can't be, because all those phony politicos are
out of town fishing or in Vegas gambling our money away, or wherever.
We have to catch them actually in Washington, Congress in session,
President in the White House, Cheney in his bunker or wherever he
actually hangs out. Responsible representatives must serve them with
subpoenas and arrest warrants.
We have to mob our nation's capital with so many people that they
will have no alternative but to step down.
And there has to be so many people that they can't even contemplate
arresting anyone. I mean, where are you going to detain 20 million
people.
Why 20 million? I don't know the right number, but I know one
million isn't enough, because there have been several million-person
gatherings — Farrakhan's, the Moms, the Christian guys — and they
barely elicted a ripple from the establishment.
So it has to be a number that will be absolutely impossible to
ignore. Twenty million, I figure, should do it.
Where would everyone stay? And what would they eat? I submit the
African-American community will take us in, assist us, lead us in
strategically positioning ourselves all over Washington so that the
disgusting perps can't get away. Plus, with such an outpouring of
people from all over America, I believe the cops would come over to
our side, the side of the people, against the side of the tyrants.
After all, cops really aren't tyrants; they're people too.
It's not impossible. Hell, they're are 20 million people in
metropolitan New York; there have to be 50 million in the greater
Northeast alone. But if this thing were really to come down, people
would come from everywhere. The U.S. population is 290 million. Hell,
20 million is less than 10 percent, but I think it would be enough to
get their attention, shut down the entire Northeast Corridor and force
the corrupt sociopaths to call it quits.
The reason I think this will actually work is the makeup of people
I've seen at protests all across the land. The protests have not
consisted of a single age, ethnic or religious group; not a single
race or political splinter group. There has been a tremendous
cross-section of the American population, and I think this augurs
positively for 20 million to come to Washington and simply demand that
the criminals step down and submit to the charges of people's warrants
for treason and obstruction of justice, among many others.
Can we get 20 million? Maybe not. However, as conditions continue
to deteriorate in this country and more people find themselves kicked
to the curb after the stock market really crashes, I think it's
realistic to expect this many people to want to participate.
If we can't get 20 million, maybe 10 million will do. And if we
can't get enough to keep the cops from locking up all of us, well,
then there was never any hope anyway. We might as well be arrested on
the streets of Washington as wait in our homes for them to come and
get us.
We use their own disgusting labels against them, categorizing
politicians like they're now segregating airline passengers into red,
yellow, and green classes. The green ones get to help us, the yellow
ones get subpoenas and the red ones go right to jail. We should let
that fabulous class of black rappers, who have been righteously
commenting for so long on the infernos that are our cities, do the
categorizing.
Among the provisions in this operation to be designed would be a
one-step lockup process, much like they use for illegal immigrant
roundups, that would funnel the most egregious governmental criminals
right into a holding cell for a little diesel therapy. This group, of
course, would include the president and his cabinet.
All of these people need to be held under the provisions of the
Patriot Act, for which they themselves voted, which would deny them
bond, access to counsel, or family visits, until an investigation into
their crimes was completed. Yes, that could take a long time.
Think a revolution of unbridled moral outrage, really the only
response that is called for by caring humans in our present situation.
So, people have asked me what to do. This is what we must do.
And we need to do it while we still can, because if they pass many
laws like the two Patriot Acts, the opportunity to do it will be gone
forever.
Let me ask you one question. Have you considered what will happen
if we don't do this? As dangerous as this idea is, it's more dangerous
not to do. They're already picking off people one at a time. A lawyer
in New Mexico gets busted for saying in a chatroom that Bush is out of
control. A guy in a bar in South Dakota gets three years in jail for
telling a joke about a burning Bush.
Those people languishing in Guantanamo for two years had nothing to
do with the Taliban and were rounded up by Pakistani police on a
bounty system so Rumsfeld could feel like a tough guy keeping innocent
people in jail without having to bring them to trial.
The long ago words of Ben Franklin are appropriate here: "We
either all hang together or we all hang separately." That's the
way it is in a revolution.
As it stands now, America has no respect for anybody or anything,
human or holy. America doesn't even respect itself, because it's too
busy screwing people to steal their money and their resources.
The sad fact is — one which we will learn to our peril if not
ultimate destruction — is that you can't respect yourself if you
don't respect everybody else. So it's obvious America doesn't even
respect itself anymore, because it sure doesn't respect anybody else
in the world.
America is at war with the entire world. And most Americans choose
not to believe it, even though it's happening right in front of their
eyes. And as we speak, Americans are becoming the real victims of a
tyranny they have permitted to grow to truly ominous proportions.
It's time to do something about it. Although massive logistical
problems and ad hoc legal procedures need to be developed, this would
work, I think. And Thomas Jefferson would like it a lot.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of Florida and
believes in an America that guarantees liberty and justice for all,
not just for those with the right fascist political connections and
enough money to buy their way out of trouble and still get good
government jobs.
