Americans Proudly Voting for Evil
ElectionOracle / US Presidential Election 2012 Nov 01, 2012 - 04:06 AM GMTBy: LewRockwell
As our society continues to rapidly decay, we have a presidential election in which the zombies will be out there in droves voting for the two statists, Obama and Romney.
The conservatives continue to support an aggressive and belligerent foreign policy – despite all its blowback – that includes indiscriminate drone bombings and murders of innocent foreigners. So much for being "pro-life."
These days, warmongers who claim to be Christian have lost touch with their Christianity, so it seems. The arrogant and narcissistic attitude of "American Exceptionalism" far supersedes traditional Judeo-Christian moral values with todays conservatives. So despite Romney’s many left-leaning problems, he will probably get the conservatives and the Exceptionalists’ vote.
And the progressives – many of them will vote for Obama, knowing full well about the Obama Administration’s drone-murders of innocents, and other anti-human rights, anti-civil liberties acts of immorality and criminality.
In a recent article on identifying and rejecting evil, Arthur Silber uses two articles, one from the New York Times and another from the Washington Post, to show how the Obama Administration not only wants its murder program known to the American people, but is doing so proudly.
The program in question is the U.S. President’s assassinations of "terrorists," or "terrorist supporters," without due process, and without the President being required to present evidence against the accused.
So really we are talking about suspected terrorists. And worse, most of those who have been murdered overseas by Obama’s drone bombings have been innocent civilians and not actual terrorists [.pdf].
To cover themselves, as noted in the earlier NYT article, the Obama Administration has defined as "militants" (and thus worthy of a U.S. Presidential execution by drone) "all military-age males" who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Silber notes how, while the Obama Administration (through its propaganda organs the Times and the Post) wants the American people to know about its murder program and that these officials are proud of it, most Americans nevertheless remain unaware of the implications of such a program. Silber writes:
Americans cannot legitimately claim ignorance of the immense evil being perpetrated by their government. They will not be able to claim, as others have tried to do in the past: "We never knew about the horrors that were being committed. How can you believe that we knew about that?"
Americans know all about it, in horrifying, endless detail. The State wants them to know. But the State knows that almost all Americans will refuse to admit what it means. Americans have chosen to sleepwalk blindly into the mouth of Hell.
However, while the Times, the Post and many amongst the MSM act as spokesmen for the Obama Administration’s drone-murder program, there are nevertheless many people who still don’t know about them, about Obama’s "kill list" and Obama’s NDAA provision of indefinite detention of Americans, and so forth. In this video, an interviewer talks to Obama supporters who can’t believe that those policies are Obama’s. And in this video, the same ignorance is shown by a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
And in this video, former Homeland Security Sec. Tom Ridge exemplifies many Americans’ cluelessness about the Obama "kill list," and their lack of understanding of the meaning of a government program that administers death arbitrarily without any legality or due process.
But in his aforementioned article, Silber continues with a reference to German political theorist Hannah Arendt, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and how the Post article is describing what could be referred to as the bureaucratization of terror. Silber writes:
Always remember that what these "U.S. officials" and "senior Obama administration officials" are discussing is the murder of human beings, including the murder of entirely innocent human beings. But they speak of a "disposition matrix," and the "accounting of the resources being marshaled," in the manner that might be used to discuss office supplies. "Oh, dear, we need more paperclips. Staplers, too." "Hmm. This group of men – there seem to be about ten or twelve of them – seems to be engaged in a 'suspicious pattern of activity.' We'd better dispose of them."
In his previous essay, Accomplice to Murder, Silber presents a scenario regarding a possible future for the very Americans who currently are knowingly supporting their government’s use of drones and indiscriminate murders of totally innocent human beings overseas. The rationalization by the government, of course, is the accusation of being "material supporters" to terrorism, with the government’s hired guns acting on behalf of the President as judge, jury and executioners. To the bureaucrats, even someone’s leaving comments on a blog that are critical of the government’s foreign policy could be considered "providing material support" to terrorism.
In a more high-profile example, American Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was killed after having been targeted by Obama, without any due process, without Obama presenting any evidence against the accused.
Al-Awlaki had been a harsh critic of U.S. government foreign policy, and had used his religious sermons as a means to express his criticisms, expressions entirely protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In Accomplice to Murder, Silber points out the similarities between Romney and Obama in their support of the indiscriminate drone murders of entirely innocent human beings. Silber notes that, while a vote for Romney or Obama amounts to support for the government’s drone-murder program and the killing of innocent human beings, he describes the people who nevertheless refuse to understand this, citing people such as Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. Silber takes great pains to explain how voting for the lesser of two evils (in the case of his examples, progressives nevertheless voting for Obama), is still a show of support for evil, but states succinctly (his bold):
As I have written before: "the claim of a 'right' to dispense death arbitrarily – the claim that the State may murder anyone it chooses, whenever it desires – constitutes a separate category altogether, a category of which this particular claim is the sole unit. When death is unleashed, all possibility of action is ended forever." For this reason – and it is the only reason required – it is not "perfectly rational and reasonable" to decide that "the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate."
There is no evil beyond the claimed "right" to murder by arbitrary edict, to murder anyone, anywhere, anytime. If you support this particular evil – and if you vote for Obama, you support it – then you will support anything.
I very much recommend those two articles by Arthur Silber, The Refusal to Identify and Reject Evil, and Accomplice to Murder (the latter which may be quite lengthy but well worth your time). And in an even more recent article (NB: some profanity), Silber makes very clear just how deranged and psychopathic our rulers really are.
But regarding the increasingly transparent status of mainstream news media as government spokespeople, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have shown, as I pointed out here and here, these outlets now are not particularly biased to the left or to the right, or liberal or conservative, but mainly are biased toward the State. This authoritarian deference to the State by the news media has grown especially since 9/11. Civil liberties expert Glenn Greenwald expressed just recently,
That is what explains why the US media has been so obsequious first with George Bush and now with his Democratic successor (for those who doubt that "the liberal media" venerated Bush as much as [Michael Lewis and Douglas Brinkley] do Obama, I'll remind you of this still-remarkable, borderline pornographic display of giddy fawning on Mission Accomplished Day, or the fact that Bush's own Press Secretary wrote a book mocking the US media for how "deferential" it was to the Bush White House). It's why journalists joyously dance with top officials, swing on their tires, are creepily grateful when they're sprayed in the face by their squirt guns, and play fun beach games with the very campaign officials they're ostensibly covering.
Just this week, with one nauseating item of misinformation and pro-State propaganda after another in each editorial: The New York Times: "we enthusiastically endorse President Barack Obama for a second term…" The Washington Post: "Four more years for President Obama…"
Hooray! Four more years of drone bombings of innocents that provokes foreigners and makes us less safe, four more years of the drug war, ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, stimulus, illegal warrantless wiretapping, and the TSA and DHS violating the American people!
With a Fourth Estate like this, who needs Goebbels?
But the mainstream news media’s growing subservience to the State merely reflects that of the masochistic American people in general, in my view.
So at the same time that the Times and the Post proudly advertise Obama’s "kill list" and drone-murder policies (as mentioned at the beginning of this article), the American people’s ignorance and infantilism nevertheless grow and grow, particularly their ignorance of the meaning of these policies and of the increasing probability of such policies’ subsequent domestic usage.
Silber points out how during Nazi Germany the Germans actually did know about their government’s policies of murdering innocents. Silber cites the book, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany by Robert Gellately.
As with the rise in authoritarianism and submissiveness toward the State here in the U.S., Gellately discovered how the news media played an active role in promoting the State, and how, like the American DHS program of "If You See Something, Say Something," it was really the German people who willingly and enthusiastically turned in their neighbors (but the Gestapo not as much).
Now, I have described in various articles how totalitarian a police state America has become, with its bureaucratic Berlin Wall, and its being like the Iranian SAVAK, like North Korea, and like Nazi Germany.
I know, a lot of people feel uncomfortable with these assertions. But when things really are happening, and our own government really is doing all these things – and it is getting worse by the day – then it takes some courage to face these realities. Being in denial will not protect you from the State’s evil crimes.
And now, in addition to the many other articles to which I have linked detailing what a police state America has become, there has been yet another article, this one describing how the government intends to treat "doomsday preppers" as terrorists. And this despite the government’s own preparations for various disastrous events, as noted in that article.
Meanwhile, the real terrorists are those who fire drones and indiscriminately bomb and murder totally innocent human beings, targeting rescuers and funerals, and who engage in counter-productive security theater for no good reason, molesting and groping little children and yelling "freeze" to intentionally frighten the public for no damn good reason!
Americans have been letting their government bureaucrats get away with murder, while at the same time the government with all its unjust, intrusive and immoral laws and procedures has been criminally persecuting totally innocent Americans!
Well, I agree with Jacob Hornberger, President of the Future of Freedom Foundation, who believes that we need an "American Spring."
Americans had better wake up and realize that the idea of "limited government" is impossible. They need to recognize the true evils of centralization and central planning, and maybe then will they understand that the way to reverse the evil is to totally decentralize and desocialize America.
But sadly, many Americans are zombies these days, addicted to TV and obsessed with their cell phones and their texting nonsense while compulsively checking emails from nobody. The zombies who vote will proudly vote for The Obomber or his pal Rombo, knowing what their policies are, but not really understanding the real implications of those policies, to our detriment.
Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist at Reasonandjest.com.
© 2012 Copyright Scott Lazarowitz / LewRockwell.com - All Rights Reserved
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