Progressive William Rivers Pitt has lost patience with the Obama regime and with British Petroleum (“Enough of This Crap,” June 15, Truthout). To break through the news blackout that BP maintains over the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill, he wants a hundred thousand Americans to “just show the hell up down there and demand access.”
Pitt is correct that this “is the kind of direct action that has been missing from our national narrative, not just in the Gulf but all over.” Obama, he says correctly, is a “narcotic” for progressives. Apparently, for many progressives having a black man, or a 50% black man, in the White House is what is important, not the fact that he is a continuation of Bush/Cheney.
If a hundred thousand people marched on the Gulf Coast, “big things would happen.”
Pitt writes that “either the people would break through those unconscionable corporate barriers and show the world what is really going on in the Gulf, or the forces BP has arrayed against the truth would react with violence, which would tell us everything we need to know about what is happening, and would be enough to break that God damned criminal corporation finally and forever.”
It was, of course, the Bush-Cheney-Obama administration that permitted the drilling. BP didn’t go about it on its own. This aside, and also putting aside my sympathy with Pitt’s outrage, here we have a progressive advocating direct action that likely would end in violence, not merely from BP mercenaries but from local, state, and federal government forces.
The anomaly in the picture is that it is progressives who have been most determined to disarm the American people. What would the one hundred thousand do when withering fire is directed at them? Amerika’s forces of “law and order” and conquest enjoy killing people. It doesn’t matter if they are women and children. In fact, killing women and children is the way to win 30-year wars like the one we are one-third through in Afghanistan.
And don’t think the government wouldn’t kill Americans. Remember the 100 murdered Branch Davidians that Bill Clinton and Janet Reno dispatched? The U.S. government has never regretted the million dead Iraqi civilians and the unknown multitude of dead Afghan civilians. Have you forgotten Kent State where college kids were gunned down by the U.S. National Guard? YouTube has tens of thousands of videos of cops getting their jollies by body slamming 90-year-old grandmothers and tasering 10-year-old kids. Just the other day Obama official Dennis Blair announced that he had a list of Americans to assassinate. In every society the worst people always get into unaccountable positions of power. It is these people who are the threat to Americans’ lives and liberty, not the Taliban and Iranians.
Ever since it became apparent to progressives, despite their faith in government, that the Bush-Cheney regime was an enormous threat to American liberty, to the environment, to truth, and to world peace, progressives have continued their campaigns to disarm the American people and to reduce them to grist for the Bush-Cheney-Obama Police State’s mill. The obvious question is: How can we trust progressives when they are such reliable agents of the Police State?
Perhaps William Rivers Pitt thinks that a massacre of a hundred thousand Americans would send a moral message that would overthrow the gestapo government in DC. The more likely effect would be to intimidate the sheeple. Don’t confuse Americans with Afghans who, despite their disunity, have thrown off every attempted conquest. Unless the U.S. buys them off with money, they will throw off the “superpower” as well.
Even if progressives could realize that the Bush-Cheney-Obama Police State was a far more dangerous entity than Americans permitted to own pistols and semi-automatic rifles, no American is permitted to own the weapons that the oppressive government has. Perhaps if the sheeple could become aroused, we would have a replay of Joseph Stalin’s dictum that quantity overrides quality of weapons, and the American people, by sheer numbers, would prevail.
If progressives really desire direct confrontation with the evildoers who control our country, they will have to accept that the people must be armed, trained, and have an understanding of who their enemy is. As the Founding Fathers tried to beat into our heads, the enemy is always the government.
Somehow I just can’t see progressives getting this far. They would rather Americans be slaves of the state than armed.
I am not advocating armed rebellion, just pointing out an inconsistency in the progressives’ position.
Every civil liberty is reduced to the Second Amendment. This was recognized by our Founding Fathers, especially by Thomas Jefferson, and it was completely understood by William Blackstone, England’s greatest jurist. Blackstone wrote that whenever government broke free of the constraints placed on it by civil liberty, the “last right of the subject is having arms for their defense.”
Blackstone wrote in the 18th century that when legal constraints on government fail, physical checks remain: The right to bear arms expresses the “natural right of resistance and self-preservation when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.”
There can be no doubt that if Thomas Jefferson and William Blackstone were alive today, they would be on the no-fly list, if not kidnapped, renditioned and tortured to death in the Amerikan puppet state of Egypt.
If progressives like William Rivers Pitt want direct action from Americans, they will have to give up their agenda of disarming the citizenry. Otherwise they are going to get people killed for nothing while the rest become Big Brother’s obedient servants, accepting a bare subsistence from “a caring government” in exchange for docility.
It is the conservatives who are armed, and they think the enemies are blacks, hispanics, pinko-liberal commies, and “terrorists.” Recently a friend told me that Obama was a marxist. Really, how did a marxist get elected with the support of the U.S. military-security complex, the support of AIPAC, the insurance industry, Wall Street, Big Oil? How much money do marxists have with which to make campaign contributions? I mean, really. It is extraordinary that anyone could possibly believe that a stealth marxist could gain the White House. If he did, once he showed his colors, he would be assassinated, and Iran would be blamed, followed by an invasion.
The other day I saw a young man wearing a t-shirt with Obama’s image. Under it was the caption, “socialist.” The stupidity of Americans is extraordinary. Wall Street is going to put a socialist in the White House?! If the word under Obama’s image had been “prostitute,” the message would have been on target.
Roberts seem to suffer under the delusion that firearms ensures freedom. Remember long arms were legal in Iraq under Saddam. Also, physical resistance to cops could easily lead to your death, no matter who dies in the first encounter. If you survive and knock out the SWAT teams that come after you, Striker Brigades will reduce you to possession. Unless you want to lead the ‘free life’ of Eric Rudolph.
I wish I knew what to do about war criminal Obama, murderer of thousands. I wish I knew what to do to stay the hand of my government that has maimed, mutilated and murdered millions of children. Organizing, educating and protesting against the the war criminals that have ruled as presidents during my life time is the only thing I know, since after my return from Vietnam, when I realized I was a war criminal.
Tom, Roberts did not argue that having firearms guarantees freedom. He merely argued that it is a safeguard against the loss of freedom. So arguing that Iraqis could own guns under Saddam but that they weren’t free is a non sequitur.
Dear Paul Craig Roberts,
You are the best of the best,
…………………….
I truly admire you. Your unparalleled ability to distill even the most complex and cloudy issues to crispy clear pictures is truly amazing. Your intelligence and intellectual honesty consistency , your knowledge of economy /politics are beyond any comparison. You are simply a Genius.
may God Bless you for ever and ever
P.S.
Please , Never stop writing …perhaps 3/5 of Americans are Morons and intellectual zombies but there is that other 2/5 of thinking Americans
I second that sentiment, Bulov. Thanks.
4th of July is around the corner but I don’t believe Americans really understand what July 4th is all about.
July 4 isn’t about an “event” that occurred in 1776. It’s not like your birthday where people celebrate the day you were born. The United States wasn’t actually born on July 4. You had to win the war first. You stated your “intentions” on July 4. July 4 was the start of the insurrection against the King.
You celebrate July 4 to reaffirm your commitment to freedom, liberty, freedom of choice. And it is a warning to your government. It was the start, the beginning a constant vigil. You didn’t want to be told what to do, by anyone. You just wanted to be left alone to live in peace. The United States isn’t interested in being a Super Power, only in being left to its own devices, not meddling in foreign affairs. You can’t preserve your freedoms by attempting to control those of others. The purpose of the United States, setting an example for the rest of humanity, has been twisted over the years.
July 4 is a reminder of what Americans were prepared to do to achieve freedom, and what they are constantly prepared to do again. The Constitution is a pledge by the people to themselves to preserve freedom at all costs. The government is the potential threat to that freedom which is why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Your government is like an animal that you keep caged up. You control it, but are armed and prepared to defend yourself against it.
July 4 is not an event that happened two hundred years ago. It is a constant vigil where Americans promised to stand on guard to forever protect their freedoms. Sure, the American people are prepared to defend themselves from any external threats, but the real purpose of the Constitution is for the protection against “internal” threats, a government gone rouge. The government is not your friend, it is your servant, there to do the peoples bidding. It is most inappropriate for the president to stand before the people celebrating the July 4. That is not his/her place. The government is the potential threat, the potential enemy. It’s the Peoples only day. The gun in America is a symbol of freedom, in that is symbolizes that Americans are prepared to fight, and die, to preserve their freedom. This includes being prepared to rise up and revolt against their government, as their ancestors did against their King. That’s what the Constitution means. It is your duty to overthrow the government if there is any sense that it has turned against you or gotten out of control or is attempting to establish a dictatorship.
Americans, I think, have lost all sense of the true meaning of July 4. This is exactly what your government wants you to do. They focus your attention beyond your borders to alleged external dangers, while the true danger was always within your own borders. The enemy is us. The Constitution is King. The government serves it. It is the People; the Constitution; the Supreme Court; the Senate; the House of Representatives; and then, last but not least, the President, who is “elected” by the People.
The People are America, the Constitution is their crown. The people tell the government what to do, not the other way round. I say to you, that everything the government did on July 4 in your nations capital was “unconstitutional”. Freedom is to be preserved at all costs. The Patriot Act (endorsed by Obama other traitors) was in effect Martial Law. That’s illegal. What Washington DC is doing is a revolutionary offence.
Why would you need to spy on your own citizens , detain your citisens without judicial review permanently, or even assassin them? Freedom is uppermost. Security can not be allowed to undermine freedom. If is allowed to, I say to you, what is the point? You sought independence, and yet Israel would seem to control you. England provided you with the Bill of Rights to help to protect you from those who would seek to exploit you. The Founding Fathers refused to sign the Constitution without it. Why has the US government been allowed to delete it? The Constitution is underpinned by the Bill of Rights. They claim to want to protect you, but then seek to remove your rights, your freedoms. I say unto you, Barak Hussein Obama and the Democratic party are the very people the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect you against.
Wake up and remember what The Fourth of July “really, really” means before it is too late.