Written by Becky Akers
You might assume that revolution brews here in the “Homeland,” given Our Rulers’ paranoia: both the House and Senate have passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA); the bill requires only Obummer’s signature by December 26 to destroy the venerable, infinitely precious right of habeas corpus. Thereafter, the president may declare American citizens “terrorists” with no evidence whatsoever and imprison them indefinitely.
The NDAA implies that the heavily armed sociopaths in office fear us pistol-packin’ serfs. And while the legislation justifies their phobia by painting taxpayers as terrorists, that’s merely Leviathan’s excuse. Our Rulers are instead panicked that we hope to shuck their bankrupting stranglehold. And they plan to pre-empt that by throwing us in the clink and the key away while claiming to “protect” those subjects yet to be rounded up. Always and forever, the State equates slavery with safety.
I don’t know what country these congressional cowards inhabit, but the Americans I know are so far from rebellion they’ve earned the sobriquet “sheeple.” Their major preoccupations seem to be their kids’ performance in Our Ruler’s dumbed-down indoctrination centers — parents don’t yet deem poor grades in propaganda a badge of honor — and how they’ll pay their bills.
Few blame government for their poverty and struggles. They seldom if ever connect high unemployment with licensing of just about every occupation, minimum-wage laws, and smothering regulation; nor do they perceive the equally clear corollary between exorbitant prices at the gas-pumps and the EPA’s diktats. One friend blames the current economic catastrophe not on the Feds’ century of extravagance and swindles but on individuals’ irresponsibility with credit cards.
Indeed, far from faulting the government that so loathes them, most taxpayers are touchingly loyal to it. They’re proud when their kids enlist to fight its endless wars; they blaspheme their churches with its flag; they gape uncomprehendingly at the idea that the State is their worst enemy rather than a third and very doting parent. Sure, they occasionally grumble about a politician whose crimes snag the corporate media’s attention, but they continue voting for him nonetheless, à la Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
So with the NDAA, the government has as usual drastically overreacted. And thereby grabbed immensely more power. Your imagination needn’t be especially vivid to picture the many uses politicians will find for their new toy as the definition of “terrorist” — which already includes little old ladies in Switzerland -— expands at twice the speed of the national debt.
Though Obummer has promised to sign the NDAA, he hasn’t yet. So you can still protest to the White House, as many organizations are urging. Yet Our Rulers have demonstrated over and over that they no longer listen to us: they bailed out their cronies despite millions of constituents’ screams; they not only ignored the petition to abolish the TSA, one of the most popular at their new, highly touted website, they insulted us with an irrelevant screed from John Pistole, the TSA’s chief pervert.
So count on the utterly wicked and despotic Obummer to sign the NDAA (but please God, I’m wrong in this prediction). Where does that leave potential “indefinite detainees,” a.k.a., American citizens?
There’s virtually no chance that the Supreme Court would strike this blatantly unconstitutional legislation from the books. Set aside the fact that its wusses usually rubber-stamp whatever evil Congress and the president concoct: it’s unlikely any challenges to “indefinite detention” would come before the bench. Why? Because not just anyone can bring a case. The plaintiff must have “standing,” i.e., the legislation has to directly affect him. (Judges employed this dodge to uphold George W. Bush’s electronic spying on us: because Our Rulers refuse to name those citizens on whom they eavesdrop without warrants, none of us can prove he has “standing” to argue against such lawlessness. I kid you not.)
“Standing” decrees that only someone “indefinitely detained” can sue to overturn the law and win his freedom — but how? Our Rulers have already vowed to deny their victims legal recourse: in the unforgettable words of Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) , “And when [prisoners] say, 'I want my lawyer,' you tell them, 'Shut up. You don't get a lawyer.’" Talk about your efficient government: in a single sound-bite, this contemptible bully voids both the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
The only bright spot is the battered-and-bloody,-on-life-support-but-still-breathing Second Amendment: 40-45 percent of American households own guns. The other half had better hustle to procure this unfailing safeguard against tyranny before the Feds realize their oversight and outlaw armaments’ manufacture and sale.
Meanwhile, the NDAA will be the most lethal blow to liberty yet — and that’s a high bar, considering the competition from the PATRIOT Act; ATSA, which ultimately legalized wholesale sexual assault at airports by establishing the TSA; and the morass of other legislation supposedly aimed at terrorists that, in reality, has long disguised Leviathan’s all-out war on us and freedom.
It’s been a bipartisan battle. Look at the votes in the House and Senate to confirm that Our Rulers don’t see the conflict as Democrats vs. Republicans; rather, they understand it’s us vs. them — even if we don’t. With one or two very notable exceptions, these megalomaniacs enter politics precisely to lord it over us, to empower and enrich themselves at our expense.
They’ve outdone themselves this time. With the NDAA, the United States joins some of the most draconian dictatorships the modern world has suffered, whether Nazi Germany, Castro’s Cuba, communist China and Russia, the banana republics of Central and South America, or Muslim tyrannies — dictatorships where innocents “disappear” for any infraction or, more often, none at all.
It won’t start that way, of course. If Obummer signs, he’d probably lie low until after the next presidential election. Outrage over this bill is spreading; even the overweening State’s most reliable cheerleader, the New York Times, scolded Obummer over it. And Obummer craves another four years of controlling us. (Or an entire lifetime: what’s to prevent his declaring other contenders for the presidential nomination “terrorists” while installing himself as Führer?)
But thereafter, unless Ron Paul wins, look for whomever is president to begin flexing these new powers. The FBI has obligingly ginned up “terrorists” for the last decade or so; those unfortunates will be among the first to vanish. Following them will be Muslims in general, for just as Germany’s government taught its citizens to hate Jews, ours has tarred folks of the Islamic faith as dangerous for years. Next on the list: members of other unpopular groups (connoisseurs of illicit drugs, pedophiles who don’t “work” for the TSA, etc.), and eventually, political dissidents. Once Our Rulers have imprisoned or executed all the heretics, they’ll start on those who’ve never entertained a political thought in their lives: remember the paranoia spurring the NDAA in the first place. Absolutely no one is safe now.
How will we respond? Will we tamely submit to this final — and fatal — assault on freedom? Or will we heed Thomas Jefferson? Here’s his advice on dealing with tyrants — sagacity he considered essential enough to repeat, devoting 58 of the Declaration’s 1300-some words to it: “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of [Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it … when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government …”
Add to that more wisdom from a man who“spent all [his] life under” totalitarianism such as Congress has voted to impose on us. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recalled, “… how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, … people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror …, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if... We didn't love freedom enough.”
If the NDAA becomes law, we have nothing left to lose. Pray the Almighty we love freedom enough to abolish the State’s cursed machine – now, before it’s too late.
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/opinion/becky-akers/10283-loving-freedom-enough-to-defy-the-ndaa
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