Assassinations?
Assassin Nation.
Yup.
Bet on it.
Since the get-go.
Bet on that as well.
Not to belabor the point, but…awww, what the hell. Let’s make it BeLabor Day as well.
A little over a week ago I posted a piece called “Sociopathic Justice?” Sociopathic Government!. In it I included President Jimmy Carter’s June 25 NY Times op-ed A Cruel and Unusual Record. I will post it below as well, because I believe it to be a statement of true morality by the only U.S. President since Dwight Eisenhower to try to actually run that office on some sort of moral plane rather than one of realpolitik-style deceit, theft and murder. He failed, of course…maybe “morality” of this sort will never work on that level in the real world. I dunno. We do keep trying…
So do the murderers, of course.
Read on.
July 4th.
The Fourth of July, when we celebrate the beginnings of The United States of America’s independence from the British Empire.
The eventual United States of America started out as a few tiny settlements of refugees, cast-offs, criminals and other losers from the various European empires of the 1600s, come to a hard new world desperately seeking some sort of redemption, some sort of rebirth after having been beaten to a near pulp by the massive criminality that eventually settles into every empire’s ruling structure. As the great American poet Robinson Jeffers so accurately noted about another empire some 300 or so years after the first European settlements appeared on these good green shores:
Shine, Perishing Republic (Robinson Jeffers, 1941)
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught – they say –
God, when he walked on earth.
A poem for the ages.
A poem for Independence Day as well.
…man, a clever servant,/insufferable master…
Oh yes!!!
And so it goes.
Going on 400 years of theft, lying and murder.
The massive genocide of the Native Americans. The latest estimates of the Native American population when the first European settlers landed here range into the 10s of millions…100 million is not an uncommon estimate. By 1900? About 240,000 Native Americans survived the massacre into the 20th century.
The massive import of African slaves, treated like chattel instead of human beings as mentioned in that wonderful document “The Declaration of Independence.”
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
An import upon which the earliest days of U.S. prosperity were without any doubt based. Free labor? Ahhh…for the good old days, eh? The One Percenters are still working on it, y’know. Bet on that as well.
Once the Native Americans were thoroughly defeated and the “slave” market was upgraded to include all all so-called ex-slaves and almost all members of recent immigrant groups, the U.S. really began to prosper. By the 1920’s it had become an international power and the One Percent was riding high. But…as is always the case:
…the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother…
Home to the mother.
The vast middle.
The salt of the earth.
The poor.
And yet this country struggled up again. Through a Great Depression and on into The Greatest War Of All. (Too bad Big Pharma hadn’t yet invented pills to make everybody happy no matter what or there wouldn’t have been a “Great Depression,” just one less bump in the seemingly inevitable One Percenters’ road to riches, glory and eventual collapse.)
And then the crowning glory of the U.S.’s Manifest Destiny. The almost simultaneous invention of WMD v.1 and WMD v.2.
Weapons of Mass Destruction and Weapons of Mass Deception.
Which came first? The chicken or the hype?
The hype, I’m thinking, although compared to the hype of today it was as puny as were them little bombs that blew up alla them brownish people in Japan compared to today’s high tech killers. Without the hype, no entrance into W.W. II. No W.W. II, no atom bomb. What’s that you say? Hitler wuz a bad, bad man? Yup. He would have fallen, too. That’s whut happens to them villains, eventually. Alla them. By the way…how many Jews did he kill? Approximately six million? That is some nasty shit!!! But…wait a minute here! How many Native Americans disappeared in the U.S. mass genocide? From tens of millions to 240,000? That’s some nasty shit, too. And how many African slaves were shanghied to the U.S.? By the 1860 United States Census, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million. And how many more died on the way over? How many lives ruined? How many families destroyed? How many lives skewed in horrible directions over the ensuing two centuries of white supremacist bullshit?
If the world owed the Jews someplace like Israel for the Holocaust, how many states in the U.S. are owed as penance for the millions of Native American and African lives that were decimated by the white supremacist depredations of the United States of Omertica?
How many?
Give the Native Americans the whole goddamned Southwest? Give African Americans at least one well-functioning state? Maybe a couple? Georgia and Mississippi would be poetic justice if ever there was such a thing. Or maybe just Washington DC. Whatever.
You see what I’m getting at here, I trust.
I hope so.
Happy Independence Day, motherfuckers.
Blow them fireworks right outta yer asses as far as I am concerned.
And…have a nice day.
AG
P.S. Preznit Jimmeh’s slightly more…polite…polemic follows.
Think, goddammit!!!
A Cruel and Unusual Record
By JIMMY CARTER
AtlantaThe United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.
Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.
While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.
The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Recent legislation has made legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or “associated forces,” a broad, vague power that can be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress (the law is currently being blocked by a federal judge). This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration.
In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications. Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.
Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable. After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone. We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.
These policies clearly affect American foreign policy. Top intelligence and military officials, as well as rights defenders in targeted areas, affirm that the great escalation in drone attacks has turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations, aroused civilian populations against us and permitted repressive governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic behavior.
Meanwhile, the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, now houses 169 prisoners. About half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom. American authorities have revealed that, in order to obtain confessions, some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers. Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defense by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of “national security.” Most of the other prisoners have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either.
At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.
As concerned citizens, we must persuade Washington to reverse course and regain moral leadership according to international human rights norms that we had officially adopted as our own and cherished throughout the years.
Yup.