ZGram - 7/4/2002 - "An Independence Day Message"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

July 4, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite

Every once in a blue moon we get the pleasure of coming across an 
exceptionally well-written essay that buoys our spirits and makes our 
hearts beat faster.  Such an essay was penned by John Perry Barlow at 
the height of the cyberwar around the Zundelsite and can be found at 
http://zundelsite.org/english/advanced_articles/alert.005.barlo.html 
I had meant to run it today, but then I discovered the essay below, 
which is even more fitting.  Relax and enjoy!

And Happy Independence Day!

[START]

The Spirit
Of Independence, Revisited
By Diane Harvey
merak@sedona.net
7-3-2

At a moment in our history when attention is almost entirely focused 
on a temporary external enemy, stubborn attempts to continue rudely 
pointing a finger toward the permanent internal enemy are, in the 
natural way of these things, immediate targets for reactionary growls 
and snarls and gnashings of teeth. All over the country, knees are 
supposed to be jerking in perfect rhythmic synchronization to our 
martial marching orders, as minds are simultaneously dutifully 
emptied of rational thought for the duration of the hostilities. And 
because we are now promised War Without End, the subtext of the 
shrill angry noise emanating from Washington is that we had better be 
prepared to remain in abject uniform obedience to governmental 
dictation- forever- "Or else".

On the occasion of Independence Day, we therefore had better remember 
just what it was we were originally celebrating independence from, 
and to reconsider certain cogent warnings from those whose lives and 
thoughts we are presumably celebrating. Because according to their 
own words- which no one will hear proclaimed in public- we would be 
far more appropriately holding funeral ceremonies than setting off 
fireworks. No politician would dare say aloud today what earlier 
leading thinkers had to say about certain vitally important and now 
excruciatingly touchy subjects. The following thoughts are in effect 
utterly taboo, considered impossible, and shunned in the light of 
day: even, or especially, in the light of Independence Day.

"When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be 
drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render 
powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will 
become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we 
separated." -- Thomas Jefferson

It is necessary adamantly to refuse the increasingly intimidating 
demands from Washington for perpetual, enthusiastic, uncritical 
approval of their policies. Many of us will decline to dance to this 
urgently throbbing drumbeat, however much we are told that our 
attendance is mandatory. We recognize our obligation at present to 
worry more about the everlasting internal enemy to liberty, even 
while keeping watch for whatever external variety may rise to various 
occasions.

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. 
We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and 
one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The 
freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened 
itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw 
all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the 
consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much 
=2E.. to forget it." -- James Madison

Ah, but here we are, so very far from it. We no longer revere this 
lesson too much to forget it; we have forgotten it as completely as 
if it never existed. We no longer even collectively understand, let 
alone believe in, the fundamental principle behind the establishment 
of this nation. This idea nevertheless demands continual restating, 
even though, or better yet because, it echoes mournfully in a near 
perfect vacuum of forgetfulness. And that astonishing idea is that 
all governments are always dangerous, and that the citizenry must 
therefore be resolutely protected from them, at all times and under 
all conditions. Ours was meant to be the first government that had 
the insight to thoroughly arm itself against- itself.

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its 
best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable 
one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries *by a 
government*, which we might expect in a country *without government*, 
our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means 
by which we suffer." -- Thomas Paine

If governments were individuals, they would all be locked up by now 
in maximum-security prisons as dangerous repeat offenders. But since 
governments are amorphous, and constantly spreading themselves around 
in multitudes of elected and appointed particles, they are quite 
difficult to trap and arrest. What,s worse, many of the more urbane 
governments also do the odd morsel of good here and there, as a 
cost-effective way to entrench favored particles. And as villainous 
as governments are by nature, the crumbs they drop always gain them a 
strong measure of devoted cupboard love. But even the occasional good 
they do is so inherently dubious that an armed guard must accompany 
it at all times. Our particular armed guard is called the 
Constitution of the United States of America. At the moment 
professional thugs have overpowered it, and its original weapons are 
being systematically removed, with the staunch approval of a crowd of 
frightened citizens looking on.

"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the 
government off the backs of the people." -- Justice William O. Douglas

All governments, at all times, are genetically predisposed to go 
straight to hell. The history of the human race attempting to create 
and preserve decent governments: read it and weep. In our country, in 
our times, the archetypal downhill devolutionary spiral is playing 
out as usual, but faster than ever before. There is nothing new or 
difficult to understand in this same old pattern of good beginnings, 
followed by a slow steady evisceration of the original energy, which 
then speeds up toward The End. This continues until the sleepy 
populace wakes up one day to discover itself entirely inside a cage, 
bereft of all power of any kind, and the government entirely outside, 
heavily armed and roaming around on the loose. We are pretty much 
there now, except that the public in general is still cheering the 
government on, its short attention span being carefully directed 
elsewhere at all times, as the final walls of the people,s 
penultimate pen are being erected.

"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good 
to be bought at the price of liberty." -- Hillaire Belloc

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy 
from oppression: for if he violates this duty, he establishes a 
precedent that will reach unto himself." -- Thomas Paine

Whenever they meet, whether casually or by clandestine appointment, 
greed and the lust for power routinely murder virtue. After all, such 
profoundly opposing forces cannot occupy the same space at the same 
time. When entrenched worldly authority crosses paths with the common 
good, the common good is consistently left bleeding in the gutter. 
This is the pattern throughout history so far, yet we nevertheless 
continue behaving as if it comes as a shocking surprise.

"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has 
never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable 
are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent." -- H. L. Mencken

The winners of our elections are normally the morally ruined victors 
of a long series of expensive and ferocious ego competitions. The 
exceptions to this are historically so noteworthy we practically 
worship them, rather than having the good sense to demand a system 
that selects for wise and honest servants in the first place.

"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they 
can bribe the people with their own money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville

What good does it do us now that our revered Founding Fathers, for 
instance, were so nobly rational and so inspired by the divine spirit 
of independence? The memory of brilliant leadership in the past is 
only useful if such a standard is energetically applied to the 
present. The very last thing the founders of our nation had in mind 
was to be the nearly the first and last of their kind. They meant to 
generate a very long unbroken line of equally self-sacrificing 
servants of the people- not to stand frozen in memory as the tragic 
monuments to lost possibilities they have in fact become.

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. 
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- Benjamin 
=46ranklin
 
By now we have accepted a system of electing officials that 
positively enforces natural selection for sheer rapacity. At the same 
time, we still manage to be perennially surprised and aghast at the 
inevitable results. What was called for, as the very basis of a 
democratic system, was not eternal disgust, but eternal vigilance. 
Vigilance is a concept no longer even remotely understood as it was 
originally meant. Try to explain what it actually means and most 
people will become immediately terrified at the seditious nonsense 
they are hearing. Such is the profound success of the forces of 
materialism in slowly devouring the inner spirit of the United States 
of America. They have had freedom and justice for all on the run for 
a very long time.
 
"I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our 
moneyed corporations which have already bid defiance to the laws of 
our country."---Thomas Jefferson 1812
 
The long, slow, fatal hollowing out of our nation over generations is 
the direct result of the abdication of all sense of responsibility in 
maintaining the spirit of liberty by the majority of its citizens. 
Liberty is by now hopelessly confused in the average mind with the 
economics of unbridled greed, and with the continued unruffled rule 
by prevailing vested interests. As a country, we no longer know or 
care about the difference between fighting for the principles of 
freedom and fighting for corporate profits. We were warned about this 
all the way along the incremental downhill road, but we never once 
listened.
 
"Corporations have been enthroned.... An era of corruption in high 
places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its 
reign by working on the prejudices of the people until wealth is 
aggregated in a few hands . . . and the Republic is destroyed." 
--Abraham Lincoln
 
No generation of citizens has had the spiritual courage to rebel in 
any useful numbers against the insidious corrosiveness of corporate 
greed, which was present from the very beginning as the seed of our 
eventual destruction. Corporations continually made us an offer, 
decade after decade, that we didn,t refuse. By now, the interests of 
multinational profiteers have thoroughly permeated every aspect of 
national life, from the military to the educational system to the 
actual self-image we have of ourselves as a country. We took their 
product interests as a worthy substitute for liberty, handing over 
the reins of government in exchange for steady jobs and steady 
comforts, as if there was no other way to invent a living for 
ourselves. All along we ignored what we were doing, through endless 
rationalizations, by looking the other way, and by pretending we were 
not really doing what we were doing.
 
"All governments are more or less combinations against the people. . 
=2Eand as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled. . . the power of 
government can only be kept within its constituted bounds by the 
display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of the 
people." -- Benjamin Franklin Bache
 
We have not been forced at gunpoint, against our collective will, to 
give up the principles of the Constitution. The spirit of our nation 
has not been stolen from us: we have ourselves willingly, and 
increasingly eagerly, generation after generation, exchanged it for 
temporal material comforts, a sense of security, and the freedom not 
to be bothered with the difficulties and sacrifices of effective 
self-rule. We took the easy way out, and now we are living with and 
in the inevitably degenerate results. Throughout our history, we have 
been told exactly what was happening, in plainest English, but we 
have never yet cared enough to renounce our lazy materialism and 
fearful insecurity for the responsibilities of genuine freedom.
 
"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all 
mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man 
to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while 
with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they 
please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are 
two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same 
name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the 
respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - 
liberty and tyranny." -- Abraham Lincoln
 
Even the self-sacrifice of several generations of brave young people 
along the way has not shamed us into resurrecting the dormant 
principles they died hoping to preserve. We are at present not the 
free citizens of a noble Republic but, by and large, merely the 
hypnotized consumers of incredibly wasteful lifestyles- and these two 
choices never were and never will be compatible. We have collectively 
severed all ties with the original idea behind the United States of 
America, in favor of the all-encompassing paradigm-parody offered by 
corporate government. We have entirely failed to maintain the 
principles of a democratic system in the face of the forces of greed, 
fear, and materialism that inevitably oppose it. The idea of the 
Republic persists here and there, but the Republic does not. We are 
merely carrying on in the decaying remains of the body of principles 
for which it stood.
 
"This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people 
no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and 
for corporations." - President Rutherford B. Hayes
 
We hire to represent us the very embodiments of everything most of us 
say we don,t like personally in a human being. We elect those who are 
rigorously trained to hide everything they are and think, lest we see 
the real person. We hire those who speak in bone-wearying platitudes 
so as not to offend anyone with actual living thought. We hire those 
who have been the deftest in taking sticky money, festooned with 
invisible ties that bind, from the very beginning of their careers, 
in order to be elected at all. Then we are told to refer to this 
buying-and-selling of cheap consciences as "free and fair elections". 
No oxymoron could be more moronic.
 
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." 
-- H.L. Mencken
 
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to 
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both 
commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never 
developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia 
really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations 
between two gangs of frauds." --- H. L. Mencken
 
When finally succeeding to high office, these poor prize-winning 
egotists, more often than not entirely owned and operated by the 
forces of corporate greed, are forced to try to act under the 
terrific strain of pretending to work for the good of the people. Yet 
the actual relationship between a people and a government is almost 
always like the relationship between a na=EFve, gullible woman and an 
experienced, successful rogue with serious predation on his mind. The 
results are predictable, no matter how many history books are written 
spelling this out for the benefit of hapless posterity. In each new 
generation, the woman continually falls for it, and the rogue 
continually helps himself.
 
"The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very 
thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder." -- 
=46rederick Bastiat
 
There are many understandable fears lurking behind this year's 
celebration of independence. We all have so much more than usual 
weighing on our hearts and minds. First and foremost is the safety 
and security of those we love. Yet security and safety have many 
guises and levels and meanings, and behind the obvious concerns that 
are preying on us all, there exists a terrible underlying reality 
which will not be wished away. Having an external enemy again is not 
a cure for what has ailed us from the beginning. Our nation's outward 
enemies have come and gone, and still we have continued to fall 
further and further away from any resemblance to our original noble 
principles. Indeed, the very concept that nobility in political life 
ever existed at all is widely disbelieved.
 
Those citizens whose chief concern is ever-increasing secrecy in 
government and the generalized corruption of the entire system are 
looked upon as eccentric at best, and as traitors to the cause at 
worst. To be a vocal traitor to the cause of unregulated 
multinational corporate profit and secret government operations is 
becoming more than an unpopular attitude: it is becoming dangerous. 
Those who strenuously object to living in the deadly levels of 
pollution blithely accepted as necessary for business as usual are 
beginning to be labeled "soft terrorists". Those who point out the 
absurdly obvious yet officially fanatically secret aerosol operations 
in the atmosphere, which adversely affect us all, are not only 
marginalized but viciously attacked for their troubles on behalf of 
their oblivious fellow beings.
 
The list of similar accumulated governmental offences against the 
citizenry of this country, and the spirit of liberty and 
participatory democracy itself, is very long and still lengthening 
dramatically. The angry mockery of a multitude of fear-ridden 
adherents to the American Corporate Way, toward all those who have 
not bought into it, is steadily worsening. As tensions in the world 
increase, and as the barbarism of greed which has been funding our 
overweening materialism is being exposed for what it always was, the 
people of America are being forced to choose sides as never before. 
We must decide once and for all whether or not we know what freedom 
really means, and what the difference is between runaway materialism 
and the democratic process. We must decide once and for all whether 
or not we trust secret military, government and corporate operations 
as a reasonable form of government.
 
Either we renounce once and for all the pretense of being a 
functioning Republic, and freely embrace the Brave New World of 
technological global fascism- or we don't. But let us not openly 
accept the pretense that what we are celebrating at present in any 
way factually resembles the original idea behind the United States of 
America. Because that would be a lie so shameful that no one with the 
slightest understanding of and genuine reverence for our history 
would ever say it, no matter what

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