"WHAT IS FREEDOM?
"It's a free country," any American child will say, a comfortable assurance that this same American carries as he or she grows up. We scarcely consider that that sentence descends to that child from arguments for liberty that date back through generations of Enlightenment-era English and French philosophers, who were trying to work out what "a free country" could possibly look like - even as they themselves lived through or looked on reigns of violently abusive and capricious monarchs.
We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults. But the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naive, not to mention lazy, in thinking of democracy in this way. This view - which we see as patriotic - is the very opposite of the view that they held. They would not have considered our attitude patriotic - or even Americans: The Founders thought, in contrast, that it was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile. The Founders did not see Americans as being special in any way: They saw America - that is, the process of liberty - as special.
In fact, the men who risked hanging to found our nation, and the women who risked their own lives to support this experiment in freedom, and who did what they could to advance it, were terrified of exactly what we call dictatorship. They called it "tyranny" or "despotism." It was the specter at their backs - and they all new it - as Americans debated the Constitution and argued about the shape of the Bill of Rights.
The framing of the documents upon which the new national government rested did not take place as we were taught it did - in a sunny glow of confident assertiveness about freedom. That scenario is a Hallmark-card rewrite of the real mood of the era and the tenor that surrounded the discussions of the day. The mood as early Americans debated the proposed Constitution and the Bill of Rights was, rather, one of grave apprehension.
For the founders shared with the rest of the people awaiting the outcome of their labors a dread of what nearly all of them - Federalist of anti-Federalist - saw as the real prospect of a tyrannical force rising up in America. This repressive force could take many forms: the form of a rapacious Congress oppressing the people; the form of an out-of-control executive; or even the form of the people themselves, cruelly oppressing a minority. (Footnote 12) The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were set forth not as a flag flying merrily but as a bulwark: a set of barriers against what the Founders and their fellow countrymen and women sw aas people's natural tendency to oppress others if their power is unchecked.
What recurred regularly in various arguments as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights took shape was the widespread fear of an unchecked executive. (Footnote 13) It's not surprising that these patriots would so deeply fear a single man invested with too much power. They had just freed themselves from being subjugated to George III, an abusive, not to mention mentally ill, monarch.
The Founders had fled repressive societies themselves, or were children or grandchildren of those who had done so. The North American colonies were settled by people - Puritans, Quakers and others - who had fled countries in which they had been imprisoned and even tortured for such acts as assembling in groups to pray; or for attending certain churches; or for publishing pamphlets critical of the King or of Parliament. The Founders knew from their own experience how the Crown treated those who talked about democracy (that is, "sedition"). They knew about criminalized speech, arbitrary arrest, and even show trials. They had personally to recon with the risk of state-sanctioned torture and murder: Each of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence could have been hanged if the colonies had lost the Revolutionary War.
When Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, the little book that helped start the big revolution, he risked being hanged by the British Crown for treason. Indeed, the Crown did charge Paine with sedition for having written another book, The Rights of Man. He was tried by a jury hand-chosen by the government that he had attacked - a jury sure to condemn him. The proceedings were a mockery of the rule of law. In spite of this lawyer's brilliant defense, as one witness put it, "The venal jury...without waiting for any answer, or any summing up by the Judge, pronounced [Paine] guilty. Such an instance of infernal corruption is scarcely upon record" Paine's publisher was dragged off to prison in chains. (Footnote 14)
Arbitrary arrest, state intimidation, and torture were the tactics of the tyrannical monarchs of eighteenth century Europe - tactics that the Founders sought to banish from American soil forever. The Founders' rebellion on this continent intended systematically to open a nation up to freedom - meaning , fundamentally, freedom from these evils.
In colleges with progressive curricula, the Founders are often portrayed as "dead white men," whose vision was imperfect, who denied women and the poor civil rights, and who defined an African slave in America as being three--fifths of a person; old guys in wigs who wrote documents that are now dusty in language that seems to us to be either arcane or to offer sentiments that are so obvious now they have become cliches ("...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...").
Here's what we're not taught: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. These men and the women who supported their work were walking further out intot he unknown - betting on ordinary people's capacities - than anyone had ever walked in the history of the human race. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and they they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.
You weren't taught that the way they brought the freest nation in the world into being was by reading passionately about fledgling democracies of the past; by positioning their imaginations directly against the violent repressions they had fled; and by carefully, delicately crafting a mechanism of checks and balances, and a bill of rights, that would protect these extreme manifestations of freedom. The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could be entrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torture them.
Living against the backdrop of violent repression, these men and women saw the democracy they were seeking to establish, and the checks and balances that protected it, as being in need of continual rededication against potential tyrants in America who would want to subjugate Americans.
Thomas Jefferson's initial reaction to the proposed Constitution was negative, for, as he wrote to James Madison, he feared the possibility of the rise of an American tyrant: "...Roman emperors, popes, German emperors, deys of the Ottoman dependencies, and Polish kings - all were elective in some sense." Indeed, historian Bernard Bailyn sees the "[T]he fear of power - the very heart of the original Revolutionary ideology - was an animating spirit behind all of [Jefferson's} thinking..."(Footnote 15)
Jefferson wasn't alone in the Revolutionary generation in fearing an American despot. After the publication of the proposed Constitution in 1787, critics shared his apprehension. They feared a president's treaty-making power, because they were worried he might make deals in secret. They worried about his power to make certain decisions without a two-thirds majority, because they feared he might do anything he wanted with that power. They argued that an American executive would not be immune to despotic tempations, just as an unchecked Congress would not be immune. [Footnote 16]
The authors of The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay - wrote that series of essays to help reassure their fellow Americans. They did so by explaining that the complex web of tensions they were proposing - these "checks and balances" - would prevent a person or a group united in "a common interest or passion" from depriving others of their rights. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay did not think that this web was self-sustaining. They thought that the delicate mechanism of the interdependent executive, legislative, and judiciary branches was only as reliable as the character of the people who were either protecting or abandoning it. They saw all people as corruptible and so set up the system to keep anyone from having unconfined power. [Footnote 17]
It was a truism to the Revolutionary generation that if the fragile mechanism became unbalanced, American leaders too - of course - would revert to brutality. We are so removed from the tyranny that the nation's first patriots experienced personally that we have not only forgotten this crucial insight, we have even forgotten to consider how obvious it was to the fathers and mothers of our country.
The Founders never expected us to fall asleep or get lazy. They counted on us to keep the web of the precious system intact so that an American despot could never arise. They trusted us to cherish liberty as they did.
The price of liberty, the generation that debated and created the Constitution understood, is eternal vigilance.
Showing posts with label Naomi Wolf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Naomi Wolf. Show all posts
Monday, October 22, 2012
Monday, October 15, 2012
YOU NEED TO READ "THE END OF AMERICA" BY NAOMI WOLF...YEAH, I KNOW. SHE'S A LIBERAL AND JUST WROTE A BOOK CALLED "VAGINA"...
BUT, THERE'S A BIG 'BUT'
So we're going to read an excerpt starting on page 29.
"It was a truism to the Revolutionary generation that if the fragile mechanism became unbalanced, American leaders too - of course - would revert to brutality. we are so removed from the tyranny that the nation's first patriots experienced, personally that we have not only forgotten this crucial insight, we have even forgotten to consider how obvious it was to the fathers and mothers of our country.
The Founders never expected us to fall asleep or get lazy. They counted on us to keep the web of the precious system intact so that an American despot could never arise. They trusted us to cherish liberty as they did.
The price of liberty, the generation that debated and created the Constitution understood, is eternal vigilance.
THE STRENGTH AND EAST OF DICTATORSHIP
There is also a reverse process that systematically closes down freedom.
Many Americans have an impressionistic sense that Mussolini and Hitler came to power through violence alone. But each came to power legally in a working democracy; each made use of the Parliamentary system itself to subvert and reorder the rule of law; and each then, quickly, legally aggregated state power overwhelmingly in his own person. Both leaders were supported by sophisticated intellectuals and political theorists who made the case to the people that democratic processes weakened the nation in a time of crisis.
All dictators: invoke an external and threat; develop a paramilitary force; create a secret prison system; surveill ordinary citizens; arbitrarily detain and release them; harass citizens' group; target writers, entertainers, and other key individuals for dissenting; intimidate the press; recast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage"; and eventually subvert the rule of law.
(My comment - does the above sound too frighteningly FAMILIAR?)
Unfortunately, while it is very difficult to sustain an open society, history shows that it is fairly simple to close one down.
The same ten steps have shut down democracies all over the world at many different times and these steps are no secret: After all, Mussolini studied Lenin; Hitler studied Mussolini; Stalin studied Hitler; and Chinese communist leaders studied Stalin, and so on. Indeed the United States has helped develop a training center, the School of the Americas (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), to train various pro-capitalist Latin American leaders in the theory and practice of violent dictatorship.
Is the United States in 2007 parallel to Italy in 1922 or Germany in 1933, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Chile in 1973, or China in 1989? No. But over the past six years we have been watching the United States move closer to becoming a more closed society.
THE APPEARANCE OF NORMALCY IN AN EARLY FASCIST SHIFT
It's easy to look around at America in 2007 and choose to believe that this warning is overheated: After all, we are for the most part doing what we have routinely done. We are going online into a vibrant Internet world; clicking through hundreds of TV channels; enjoying Hollywood films; reading bestsellers that present views across the political spectrum. The courts are ruling, newspapers are publishing exposes, protest marches are being planned about the war; a presidential race is underway.
But there are plenty of examples of a shift into a dictatorial reality in which, for several years, while the basic institutions of freedom are targeted and rights are eroding, daily life still looks very normal - even, for many people, pleasant.
Americans tend to think of the shift to fascism in scary setpieces: the boots on the stairs, the knock in the middle of the night, the marching columns, the massive banners waving over city streets; a Leni Riefenstahl film all the time, or an unrelieved scene of citizen terror with crematoria smoking in the distance. We are so used to seeing depictions of the most sensational aspects of totalitarian societies - the gulag, the death camps - that we don't pay much attention to the fact that there is often an incremental process that led those societies to become places where such things could happen.
The view that fascism looks from the start like a nationwide prison camp rather than a fairly normal society can be comforting when facing an argument like mine. It's natural to wish that the two realities were so categorically different that, of course, "It couldn't happen here."
But as would-be dictators consolidate power, if they are training their sights on a democracy, rhings proceed fairly routinely in many areas in the earliest years. In the beginning, the horror, as W. H. Auden put it, is usually elsewhere, taking place while other people are going about their normal daily round. Peasants in Italy celebrated their harvest festivals in 1919 in Naples when Mussolini's arditi were beating bloody the local communists in Milan. Journalist Joseph Roth, the star columnist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, files glitzy reports on urban style and nightlife, on architecture and the avant-garde; he and his colleagues dwelt on the latest fashions and described the trendiest watering holes. As Roth rebutted rising anti-Semitism in print, Hitler was consolidating power around himself. Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of French literature who kept a diary throughout the rise and fall of the Third Reich, cared for this garden, did repairs on his car, chatted with his Nazi neighbors, went to the movies with his wife, even as he became increasingly aware of persecution, arrests, theft of property, and new discriminatory laws; even as he was certain of an inevitable catastrophe. That's what people do."
AGAIN: Does this sound familiar?
We have precious little hours to the election, and you need to get this book, buy copies used and distribute them to your liberal friends. Wolf is giving you the roadmap to how this creeping cancer has made this country so vilely different from its intended creation. Apply what I have just typed to us under Bush and Obama. We have let this happen with blinding speed.
Wolf may be known as a liberal, but in this book the roadmap is in your hands. We, as all of us on this planet come into this world but the second our umbilical cords are cut, the governments impose suffocating restrictions on you.
We in America have the Second Amendment. We FOUGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO BE FREE OF THE KING - A DICTATOR ACROSS AN OCEAN, AND WE KILLED OUR ENEMIES FOR THE RIGHTS OF LIBERTY AND FREEDOM. TYRANNY ALWAYS COMES, AS IT DID FOR US WITH THE REDCOATS, AT THE END OF A GUN.
We are outgunned by our own government whose purpose it has become is to control us and kill us if necessary. Your paramilitary police forces, sheriffs, highway and border patrol and the DHS, the TSA and the other rogue agencies, including EPA, the IRS, the Federal Reserve (that private bank you thought was government run), the Forest Service and the rest of those being distributed heavy weaponry to be used against US (and that means YOU), have grown so outlandishly powerful, we had better do some serious thinking before we vote. And do NOT everf accept FEMA camps as "normal".
If you don't believe we are facing a dictator and his big guns, you need to take the power away from him to insure your safety because you haven't been paying attention (the eternal vigilance referred to above). If your elected representatives are running (and running amok) and are ignoring the fact that the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution limits their power and increases ours, vote them out of office. That is the first way to defeat tyranny. The second is to arm ourselves and refuse to submit to the dictator, no matter what. We were given a republic and it is our responsibility and duty to defend it with our lives. If tyranny arrives at our gate or our door, or on our public streets, we were given the remedy.
Read this book before the election. Find it used, buy a bunch and start distributing it. Use Amazon, Alibris, Barnes and Nobel - any way you can, but buy it.
Naomi Wolf's lectures on this subject are stunning in that they will open your eyes to what has been happening for years under both the Democrats and Republicans alike while you were busy watching sports or sitting playing stupid video games on your Xbox or draining your intellect through Facebook.
READ IT!
So we're going to read an excerpt starting on page 29.
"It was a truism to the Revolutionary generation that if the fragile mechanism became unbalanced, American leaders too - of course - would revert to brutality. we are so removed from the tyranny that the nation's first patriots experienced, personally that we have not only forgotten this crucial insight, we have even forgotten to consider how obvious it was to the fathers and mothers of our country.
The Founders never expected us to fall asleep or get lazy. They counted on us to keep the web of the precious system intact so that an American despot could never arise. They trusted us to cherish liberty as they did.
The price of liberty, the generation that debated and created the Constitution understood, is eternal vigilance.
THE STRENGTH AND EAST OF DICTATORSHIP
There is also a reverse process that systematically closes down freedom.
Many Americans have an impressionistic sense that Mussolini and Hitler came to power through violence alone. But each came to power legally in a working democracy; each made use of the Parliamentary system itself to subvert and reorder the rule of law; and each then, quickly, legally aggregated state power overwhelmingly in his own person. Both leaders were supported by sophisticated intellectuals and political theorists who made the case to the people that democratic processes weakened the nation in a time of crisis.
All dictators: invoke an external and threat; develop a paramilitary force; create a secret prison system; surveill ordinary citizens; arbitrarily detain and release them; harass citizens' group; target writers, entertainers, and other key individuals for dissenting; intimidate the press; recast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage"; and eventually subvert the rule of law.
(My comment - does the above sound too frighteningly FAMILIAR?)
Unfortunately, while it is very difficult to sustain an open society, history shows that it is fairly simple to close one down.
The same ten steps have shut down democracies all over the world at many different times and these steps are no secret: After all, Mussolini studied Lenin; Hitler studied Mussolini; Stalin studied Hitler; and Chinese communist leaders studied Stalin, and so on. Indeed the United States has helped develop a training center, the School of the Americas (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), to train various pro-capitalist Latin American leaders in the theory and practice of violent dictatorship.
Is the United States in 2007 parallel to Italy in 1922 or Germany in 1933, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Chile in 1973, or China in 1989? No. But over the past six years we have been watching the United States move closer to becoming a more closed society.
THE APPEARANCE OF NORMALCY IN AN EARLY FASCIST SHIFT
It's easy to look around at America in 2007 and choose to believe that this warning is overheated: After all, we are for the most part doing what we have routinely done. We are going online into a vibrant Internet world; clicking through hundreds of TV channels; enjoying Hollywood films; reading bestsellers that present views across the political spectrum. The courts are ruling, newspapers are publishing exposes, protest marches are being planned about the war; a presidential race is underway.
But there are plenty of examples of a shift into a dictatorial reality in which, for several years, while the basic institutions of freedom are targeted and rights are eroding, daily life still looks very normal - even, for many people, pleasant.
Americans tend to think of the shift to fascism in scary setpieces: the boots on the stairs, the knock in the middle of the night, the marching columns, the massive banners waving over city streets; a Leni Riefenstahl film all the time, or an unrelieved scene of citizen terror with crematoria smoking in the distance. We are so used to seeing depictions of the most sensational aspects of totalitarian societies - the gulag, the death camps - that we don't pay much attention to the fact that there is often an incremental process that led those societies to become places where such things could happen.
The view that fascism looks from the start like a nationwide prison camp rather than a fairly normal society can be comforting when facing an argument like mine. It's natural to wish that the two realities were so categorically different that, of course, "It couldn't happen here."
But as would-be dictators consolidate power, if they are training their sights on a democracy, rhings proceed fairly routinely in many areas in the earliest years. In the beginning, the horror, as W. H. Auden put it, is usually elsewhere, taking place while other people are going about their normal daily round. Peasants in Italy celebrated their harvest festivals in 1919 in Naples when Mussolini's arditi were beating bloody the local communists in Milan. Journalist Joseph Roth, the star columnist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, files glitzy reports on urban style and nightlife, on architecture and the avant-garde; he and his colleagues dwelt on the latest fashions and described the trendiest watering holes. As Roth rebutted rising anti-Semitism in print, Hitler was consolidating power around himself. Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of French literature who kept a diary throughout the rise and fall of the Third Reich, cared for this garden, did repairs on his car, chatted with his Nazi neighbors, went to the movies with his wife, even as he became increasingly aware of persecution, arrests, theft of property, and new discriminatory laws; even as he was certain of an inevitable catastrophe. That's what people do."
AGAIN: Does this sound familiar?
We have precious little hours to the election, and you need to get this book, buy copies used and distribute them to your liberal friends. Wolf is giving you the roadmap to how this creeping cancer has made this country so vilely different from its intended creation. Apply what I have just typed to us under Bush and Obama. We have let this happen with blinding speed.
Wolf may be known as a liberal, but in this book the roadmap is in your hands. We, as all of us on this planet come into this world but the second our umbilical cords are cut, the governments impose suffocating restrictions on you.
We in America have the Second Amendment. We FOUGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO BE FREE OF THE KING - A DICTATOR ACROSS AN OCEAN, AND WE KILLED OUR ENEMIES FOR THE RIGHTS OF LIBERTY AND FREEDOM. TYRANNY ALWAYS COMES, AS IT DID FOR US WITH THE REDCOATS, AT THE END OF A GUN.
We are outgunned by our own government whose purpose it has become is to control us and kill us if necessary. Your paramilitary police forces, sheriffs, highway and border patrol and the DHS, the TSA and the other rogue agencies, including EPA, the IRS, the Federal Reserve (that private bank you thought was government run), the Forest Service and the rest of those being distributed heavy weaponry to be used against US (and that means YOU), have grown so outlandishly powerful, we had better do some serious thinking before we vote. And do NOT everf accept FEMA camps as "normal".
If you don't believe we are facing a dictator and his big guns, you need to take the power away from him to insure your safety because you haven't been paying attention (the eternal vigilance referred to above). If your elected representatives are running (and running amok) and are ignoring the fact that the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution limits their power and increases ours, vote them out of office. That is the first way to defeat tyranny. The second is to arm ourselves and refuse to submit to the dictator, no matter what. We were given a republic and it is our responsibility and duty to defend it with our lives. If tyranny arrives at our gate or our door, or on our public streets, we were given the remedy.
Read this book before the election. Find it used, buy a bunch and start distributing it. Use Amazon, Alibris, Barnes and Nobel - any way you can, but buy it.
Naomi Wolf's lectures on this subject are stunning in that they will open your eyes to what has been happening for years under both the Democrats and Republicans alike while you were busy watching sports or sitting playing stupid video games on your Xbox or draining your intellect through Facebook.
READ IT!
Friday, May 11, 2012
OVERHYPED TERROR PLOTS AND GOVERNMENTent
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31299.htm
The Spectacle of Terror and its vested interests.
The Spectacle of Terror and its vested interests.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
WHAT I'M READING: NAOMI WOLF'S THE END OF AMERICA, LETTER OF WARNING TO A YOUNG PATRIOT, A CITIZEN'S CALL TO ACTION
I think I mentioned this book in the very beginning entries of this blog. I misplaced it, hadn't finished reading it when I did, so I began the re-read it a couple of days ago.
Wow.
Though you might consider this feminist to be a flaming, hard-nose liberal, you're wrong. It was written in 2007, and it was truly the portent of things to come. It could have been called, "The Ten Steps to Tyranny".
It chills me to read it. It belongs next to "1984" and the Declaration of Independence. It is a grave reminder of what was, the prelude to what is our plight in Obama's Amerika today.
Let me give you a couple of highlights from the last day's reading. You will find this on pages 25-29.
From "What is Freedom?"
"We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults. But the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naive, not to mention lazy, in thinking of democracy in this way. This view - which we see as patriotic - is the very opposite of the view that they held. They would not have considered our attitude patriotic - or even American: The Founders thought, in contrast, that it was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile. The Founders did not see Americans as being special in any way: They saw America - that is, the process of liberty - as special.
In fact, the men who risked hanging to found our nation , and the women who risked their own lives to support this experiment in freedom, and who did what they could to advance it, were terrified on exactly what we call dictatorship. They called it "tyranny" or "despotism." It was the spector at their backs - and they all knew it - as Americans debated the Constitution and argued about the shape of the Bill of Rights."
She writes that the Founders and the people of the time, the revolutionaries, "saw as the real prospect of a tyrannical force rising up in America. This repressive force could take many forms: the form of a rapacious Congress oppressing the people; the form of an out-of-control executive; or even the form of the people themselves, cruelly oppressing a minority." The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were set forth not as a flag flying merrily but as a bulwark: a set of barriers against what the Founders and their fellow countrymen and women saw as people's natural tendency to oppress others if their power is unchecked."
If you are old enough, you remember what the taste of liberty and freedom and pride feels like when you bathe in it. We do not have that today.
"Arbitrary arrest, state intimidation, and torture were the tactics of the tyrannical monarchs of eighteenth century Europe - tactics that the Founders sought to banish from American soil forever."
And what do we have today in our country?
Wolf continues:
"Here's what we're not taught: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. These men and women who supported their work were walking further out into the unknown - betting on ordinary people's capacities - than anyone had ever walked in the history of the human race. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.
You weren't taught that the way they brought the freest nation in the world into being was by reading passionately about fledgling democracies of the past; by positioning their imaginations directly against the violent repressions they had fled; and by carefully, delicately crafting a mechanism of checks and balances, and a bill of rights, that would protect these extreme manifestations of freedom. The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could be entrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torture them."
This is a book I hope you will download to your Kindles, buy the book, borrow the book and read the book.
It's required reading for anyone who knows in the pit of the stomach that something has run amok in our government; that freedom and liberty is threatened and/or destroyed bit-by-bit every single day under the regime in Washington, and we need to stop it because we are a unique people, from brave, courageous people. Whether your family came to Plymouth as a Pilgrim; immigrants to Ellis Island, new, legal immigrants, you need to read this book.
Naomi Wolf's lectures using this book (available from Amazon, new and used) and others she has written appear on Youtube.
You will find her fascinating.
Wow.
Though you might consider this feminist to be a flaming, hard-nose liberal, you're wrong. It was written in 2007, and it was truly the portent of things to come. It could have been called, "The Ten Steps to Tyranny".
It chills me to read it. It belongs next to "1984" and the Declaration of Independence. It is a grave reminder of what was, the prelude to what is our plight in Obama's Amerika today.
Let me give you a couple of highlights from the last day's reading. You will find this on pages 25-29.
From "What is Freedom?"
"We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults. But the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naive, not to mention lazy, in thinking of democracy in this way. This view - which we see as patriotic - is the very opposite of the view that they held. They would not have considered our attitude patriotic - or even American: The Founders thought, in contrast, that it was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile. The Founders did not see Americans as being special in any way: They saw America - that is, the process of liberty - as special.
In fact, the men who risked hanging to found our nation , and the women who risked their own lives to support this experiment in freedom, and who did what they could to advance it, were terrified on exactly what we call dictatorship. They called it "tyranny" or "despotism." It was the spector at their backs - and they all knew it - as Americans debated the Constitution and argued about the shape of the Bill of Rights."
She writes that the Founders and the people of the time, the revolutionaries, "saw as the real prospect of a tyrannical force rising up in America. This repressive force could take many forms: the form of a rapacious Congress oppressing the people; the form of an out-of-control executive; or even the form of the people themselves, cruelly oppressing a minority." The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were set forth not as a flag flying merrily but as a bulwark: a set of barriers against what the Founders and their fellow countrymen and women saw as people's natural tendency to oppress others if their power is unchecked."
If you are old enough, you remember what the taste of liberty and freedom and pride feels like when you bathe in it. We do not have that today.
"Arbitrary arrest, state intimidation, and torture were the tactics of the tyrannical monarchs of eighteenth century Europe - tactics that the Founders sought to banish from American soil forever."
And what do we have today in our country?
Wolf continues:
"Here's what we're not taught: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. These men and women who supported their work were walking further out into the unknown - betting on ordinary people's capacities - than anyone had ever walked in the history of the human race. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.
You weren't taught that the way they brought the freest nation in the world into being was by reading passionately about fledgling democracies of the past; by positioning their imaginations directly against the violent repressions they had fled; and by carefully, delicately crafting a mechanism of checks and balances, and a bill of rights, that would protect these extreme manifestations of freedom. The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could be entrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torture them."
This is a book I hope you will download to your Kindles, buy the book, borrow the book and read the book.
It's required reading for anyone who knows in the pit of the stomach that something has run amok in our government; that freedom and liberty is threatened and/or destroyed bit-by-bit every single day under the regime in Washington, and we need to stop it because we are a unique people, from brave, courageous people. Whether your family came to Plymouth as a Pilgrim; immigrants to Ellis Island, new, legal immigrants, you need to read this book.
Naomi Wolf's lectures using this book (available from Amazon, new and used) and others she has written appear on Youtube.
You will find her fascinating.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Naomi Wolf, author interviewed by Alex Jones
If you want to listen to an astounding interview, this is it. Somewhere on the link I'll give you are instructions for iPods, listening by shortwave, listening live on the computer. Try Police State 2000 (installments 1,2,3) by Alex Jones (or just type in Alex Jones). It should be up by tomorrow. The program is being repeated now.
Alex Jones is also found on www.reciva.com (Reciva radio). It is found in the genre called Newstalk.
Naomi is talking now of suppressing news of First Brigade and their mission, who are deployed somewhere in the US on the street. Bush issued directives. Army Times is suppressing information. They are also discussing the use of microwave guns on Americans. Here's what I pulled up: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/10/army-ordering-p.html
There's more information on this on Youtube through Alex Jones.
It's an extraordinary interview and you really need to piece all this information together posted here and come to your own conclusions. It is of utmost concern.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A1EBZN0YXTZLS0
Naomi's blog. Good stuff there.
Don't be complacent.
Be aware, especially since there are ominous rumblings of martial law following another "incident" no matter where you are.
Alex Jones is also found on www.reciva.com (Reciva radio). It is found in the genre called Newstalk.
Naomi is talking now of suppressing news of First Brigade and their mission, who are deployed somewhere in the US on the street. Bush issued directives. Army Times is suppressing information. They are also discussing the use of microwave guns on Americans. Here's what I pulled up: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/10/army-ordering-p.html
There's more information on this on Youtube through Alex Jones.
It's an extraordinary interview and you really need to piece all this information together posted here and come to your own conclusions. It is of utmost concern.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A1EBZN0YXTZLS0
Naomi's blog. Good stuff there.
Don't be complacent.
Be aware, especially since there are ominous rumblings of martial law following another "incident" no matter where you are.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Here's the one that got away yesterday in case you want to read it.
Bulletin: A few minutes ago I...
nearly swallowed a spider. I killed one like it last night. I picked up a book (which I really want you to consider reading) off the small chest by the loveseat and took a mouthful , and then thought, "That the heck was that in the water?" How did it get dirty? I hadn't swallowed. I spat it out and there it was - the identical twin of last night's squashing. EEEEUUUUUUuuuuu!They say that you swallow about eight spiders in a lifetime. I'm going to be watching from now on.
It must have fallen in when I picked up the book. EEEEEEEEEUUUUUUUUUU. That was awful! Had the creeps for a long time after that.
Now, back to the book. If you scroll through the old posts, I had linked a video on our contemporary government and its threat to our liberty. My cousin Tom, a staunch conservative, ex-Air Force captain and Viet Nam vet, was very, very upset when he listened to it, because he believes Naomi Wolf who was pictured giving a lecture to students on how precious our liberty is, and how we have let others govern every aspect of our lives, steal our liberties and our rights is virtually a Communist. The book is "The End of America - Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, a Citizen's Call to Action". Well, I don't agree. Not when you hear her speak, or read the book. What I am getting from it are the "GPS readings" of the warning signs of a disastrous disintegration of our country, and why.
I'm not too far into it. But Wolf has the unique gift of upending the box of the jigsaw puzzle, and show you where the pieces go.
We are here because of the singular courageous acts of our patriots. They were radicals in a time of unease and restraint. Liberty was a radical thought. Whether they were seeking religious freedom as the Pilgrims, or the sweetness of breathing the free air of personal freedom by escaping the rule of a tyrant king, these radical men and women eventually fought an impossible war on soil they claimed as theirs, which of course, displaced our native Americans, but I'm not going to light another fire. King George's fist reached across an ocean, but the blood of the new American patriots boiled and watered and fertilized that fabled tree of liberty. And America was born.
The concept of the founders of this country - that radical thing called FREEDOM - and the carefully crafted Constitution, called for all of us to be engaged in our pursuit of limited government, maximum freedom and the right to privacy. They wanted us to understand, as we walked through our lives to new centuries, that we were given individual responsibility, to protect the preciousness of freedom and liberty and understand the tenets they set down for us.
Today, the Supreme Court has legislated law - not interpreted the Constitution - in the case of the sentencing of rapists, particularly in the case of children, in Louisiana. Rapists, including those who viciously rape children, will only be put to death when they kill their victims. I heard Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana speaking on Glenn Beck's show today, so impassioned, so angry and frustrated that the Justices would disallow the death penalty for rapists of children.
In the case of Heller, a case which decides whether or not residents of Washington, DC are "allowed" to keep and bear arms for hunting and personal protection, they were deciding on OUR RIGHTS, to which we are entitled the moment we are born, if we are free children of a free country. There are, however, restrictions on the types of weapons, and if law enforcement can have them to use at will against free citizens, then we should have them available to us.
The Founders, I'm sure are banging their fists against their coffin lids wherever they are buried, or their ghosts are pacing the cemeteries, forests and fields where they fell birthing America.
This is not really a digression from Naomi Wolf's book. We've been sleeping. And when we awoke, we took liberty and freedom and placed it in the hands of politicians who are mercenaries of corrupt global entities whose sole purpose is the destruction of the concept of freedom and liberty because they don't want us to feel our power. We didn't take the smoldering fire with us as we trekked through those 200+ years from then to now. We didn't teach our children, and we didn't think it was so important that the Constitution be taught and understood in the classroom. Seldom if ever do we hear about it in church, yet it gives us the right to worship as we please.
President Dubya Bush has signed our liberties away with a penstroke many times. And now we are headed into draconian times if we aren't careful...our lives as free men and women are seriously under siege.
Whether you are liberal, conservative, middle of the road, please acknowledge the right to the word "patriot". It is the name proudly worn and earned as a defender of the Constitution in a time where political correctness has sullied its meaning. The rights it denotes, are divinely bestowed to each human being, and not bartered or begged for. It doesn't mean fight and die on foreign soil for a tyrant who made you think it was for the good of America. That war we're fighting, I am convinced is a scam; there is now so much evidence to prove that we have been duped. The forces that control our politicians never sleep.
But neither do patriots.
Read the book for a wake up call.
A Must Read Book by Naomi Wolf
a book (which I really want you to consider reading) off the small chest by the loveseat and took a mouthful, and then thought, "That the heck was that in the water?" How did it get dirty. I hadn't swallowed. I spat it out and there it was - the identical twin of last night's squashing. EEEEUUUUUUuuuuu!
They say that you swallow about eight spiders in a lifetime. I'm going to be watching from now on.
It must have fallen in when I picked up the book. EEEEEEEEEUUUUUUUUUU. That was awful!
Now, back to the book. If you scroll through the old posts, I had linked a video on our contemporary government and its threat to our liberty. My cousin Tom, a staunch conservative, ex-Air Force captain and Viet Nam vet, was very, very upset when he listened to it, because he believes Naomi Wolf who was pictured giving a lecture to students on how precious our liberty is, and how we have let others govern every aspect of our lives, and steal our liberties and our rights. The book is "The End of America - Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, a Citizen's Call to Action".
I'm not too far into it. But Wolf has the unique gift of upending the box of the jigsaw puzzle, and show you where the pieces go.
We are here because of the singular courageous acts of our patriots. They were radicals in a time of unease and restraint. Liberty was a radical thought. Whether they were seeking religious freedom as the Pilgrims, or the sweetness of breathing the free air of personal freedom by escaping the rule of a tyrant king, these radical men and women eventually fought an impossible war on soil they claimed as theirs. George's fist reached across an ocean, but the blood of the new American patriots boiled and watered that fabled tree of liberty. And America was born.
The concept of the founders of this country - that radical thing called FREEDOM - and the carefully crafted Constitution, called for all of us to be engaged in our pursuit of limited government, maximum freedom. They wanted us to understand, as we walked through our lives to new centuries, that we were given responsibility, individually, to protect the preciousness of freedom and liberty and understand the tenets they set down for us.
Today, the Supreme Court has legislated law - not interpreted the Constitution - in the case of the sentencing of rapists, particularly in the case of children, in Louisiana. Rapists, including those who viciously rape children, will only be put to death when they kill their victims. I heard Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana speaking on Glenn Beck's show today, so impassioned, so angry and frustrated that the Justices would disallow the death penalty for rapists of children.
The Founders, I'm sure are banging their fists against their coffin lids wherever they are buried.
This is not really a digression from Naomi Wolf's book. We've been sleeping. And when we awoke, we took liberty and freedom and placed it in the hands of politicians who are mercenaries of corrupt global entities whose sole purpose is the destruction of the concept of freedom and liberty because they don't want us to feel our power. We didn't take the smoldering fire with us as we trekked through those 200+ years. We didn't teach our children, and we didn't think it was so important that the Constitution be taught and understood in the classroom. Seldom if ever do we hear about it in church, yet it gives us the right to worship as we please.
President Dubya Bush has signed our liberties away with a penstroke many times. And now we are headed into draconian times...our lives as free men and women are seriously under siege.
Whether you are liberal, conservative, middle of the road, please acknowledge the right to the word "patriot". It is the name proudly worn and earned as a defender of the Constitution and the rights it denotes, for rights are divinely bestowed to each human being, and not bartered or begged for. It doesn't mean fight and die on foreign soil for a tyrant who made you think it was for the good of American. That war we're fighting, I am convinced is a scam; there is now so much evidence to prove that we have been duped. The forces that control our politicians never sleep.
But neither do patriots.
Read the book for a wake up call. http://www.amazon.com/End-America-Letter-Warning-Patriot/dp/1933392797/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214508708&sr=1-1
They say that you swallow about eight spiders in a lifetime. I'm going to be watching from now on.
It must have fallen in when I picked up the book. EEEEEEEEEUUUUUUUUUU. That was awful!
Now, back to the book. If you scroll through the old posts, I had linked a video on our contemporary government and its threat to our liberty. My cousin Tom, a staunch conservative, ex-Air Force captain and Viet Nam vet, was very, very upset when he listened to it, because he believes Naomi Wolf who was pictured giving a lecture to students on how precious our liberty is, and how we have let others govern every aspect of our lives, and steal our liberties and our rights. The book is "The End of America - Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, a Citizen's Call to Action".
I'm not too far into it. But Wolf has the unique gift of upending the box of the jigsaw puzzle, and show you where the pieces go.
We are here because of the singular courageous acts of our patriots. They were radicals in a time of unease and restraint. Liberty was a radical thought. Whether they were seeking religious freedom as the Pilgrims, or the sweetness of breathing the free air of personal freedom by escaping the rule of a tyrant king, these radical men and women eventually fought an impossible war on soil they claimed as theirs. George's fist reached across an ocean, but the blood of the new American patriots boiled and watered that fabled tree of liberty. And America was born.
The concept of the founders of this country - that radical thing called FREEDOM - and the carefully crafted Constitution, called for all of us to be engaged in our pursuit of limited government, maximum freedom. They wanted us to understand, as we walked through our lives to new centuries, that we were given responsibility, individually, to protect the preciousness of freedom and liberty and understand the tenets they set down for us.
Today, the Supreme Court has legislated law - not interpreted the Constitution - in the case of the sentencing of rapists, particularly in the case of children, in Louisiana. Rapists, including those who viciously rape children, will only be put to death when they kill their victims. I heard Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana speaking on Glenn Beck's show today, so impassioned, so angry and frustrated that the Justices would disallow the death penalty for rapists of children.
The Founders, I'm sure are banging their fists against their coffin lids wherever they are buried.
This is not really a digression from Naomi Wolf's book. We've been sleeping. And when we awoke, we took liberty and freedom and placed it in the hands of politicians who are mercenaries of corrupt global entities whose sole purpose is the destruction of the concept of freedom and liberty because they don't want us to feel our power. We didn't take the smoldering fire with us as we trekked through those 200+ years. We didn't teach our children, and we didn't think it was so important that the Constitution be taught and understood in the classroom. Seldom if ever do we hear about it in church, yet it gives us the right to worship as we please.
President Dubya Bush has signed our liberties away with a penstroke many times. And now we are headed into draconian times...our lives as free men and women are seriously under siege.
Whether you are liberal, conservative, middle of the road, please acknowledge the right to the word "patriot". It is the name proudly worn and earned as a defender of the Constitution and the rights it denotes, for rights are divinely bestowed to each human being, and not bartered or begged for. It doesn't mean fight and die on foreign soil for a tyrant who made you think it was for the good of American. That war we're fighting, I am convinced is a scam; there is now so much evidence to prove that we have been duped. The forces that control our politicians never sleep.
But neither do patriots.
Read the book for a wake up call. http://www.amazon.com/End-America-Letter-Warning-Patriot/dp/1933392797/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214508708&sr=1-1
How weird are posts lost in cyberspace to a perfect stranger...
I wonder if the staff at Blogspot reads each post? Well if you're listening, why, if I used another's laptop computer yesterday and sat here for an hour with a impassioned plea (re Naomi Wolf's recent book - A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot) and a funny incident with me almost swallowing a spider, that had drowned a few seconds before in my glass of water - did it find its way into a strange blog when I saved it?
Naomi Wolf gave a talk to a class about freedom and liberty and how those two states of being, and our rights from God as free men in a free country have been compromised. The video is here if you scroll down far enough. It impacted me profoundly. My cousin Tom, an Air Force captain, conservative Republican, his heart and soul stamped with "USA", tagged her a liberal, and I believe is full of scorn for her. BUT, what she will bring to your attention most of all, is how we came to the shining shores of freedom, how we got to be free, how we have left the responsibility to be engaged in ensuring these rights and freedoms are not infringed in any way. These two states of being - being personally free and having personal liberty - is infringed every time a law is passed or a president decides to bypass Constitutional law and make a decision on a pen stroke, and in recent history, start a war on foreign shores based on lies and fraudulent information, frenzy-fed to us by bombarding media, and economically, bringing us to our knees, and killing innocent people, including our soldiers.
Do I believe the war in Iraq is a cruel boondoggle? Yes I do. You know that already.
Do I believe we have taken "freedom and liberty" for granted? Obviously.
We have given these precious, simple states over to elected officials for safekeeping because we thought they would do the work. They have been bought by the rich and powerful and so sold us out. We have been serenaded by media to believe we still have them when we don't. There really are people in power over our government - they are the global elite, bound to destroy America as we want to know it.
We are many generations away from the wars on our soil that set us free. We think we know what it feels like not to be subjects - but we are; we have become unwitting sheep to the masters with strange names like "The Bilderbergers" and alphabet soup entities like WTO and CFR who pull the strings of our politicians and our media. Freedom feels better than swimming naked in a mountain stream, safe and unfettered. Ever do that?
We need to take the responsibility back for returning the country to it's original glory - full of self-reliant, courageous people who believe something's not right, and who are dedicated to take the reins.
Like the spider I nearly swallowed yesterday, had I not been vigilant and curious about what I saw just before the fluid passed my lips, we need to be every watchful, because our nation deserves our full attention.
No matter what flavor of American politics you are, you deserve to read Naomi's book because it will set up red flags where you didn't see them before. You can get inexpensive copies from Amazon, used. Circulate it. Make your children read it and discuss it over dinner.
I am very impressed.
Naomi Wolf gave a talk to a class about freedom and liberty and how those two states of being, and our rights from God as free men in a free country have been compromised. The video is here if you scroll down far enough. It impacted me profoundly. My cousin Tom, an Air Force captain, conservative Republican, his heart and soul stamped with "USA", tagged her a liberal, and I believe is full of scorn for her. BUT, what she will bring to your attention most of all, is how we came to the shining shores of freedom, how we got to be free, how we have left the responsibility to be engaged in ensuring these rights and freedoms are not infringed in any way. These two states of being - being personally free and having personal liberty - is infringed every time a law is passed or a president decides to bypass Constitutional law and make a decision on a pen stroke, and in recent history, start a war on foreign shores based on lies and fraudulent information, frenzy-fed to us by bombarding media, and economically, bringing us to our knees, and killing innocent people, including our soldiers.
Do I believe the war in Iraq is a cruel boondoggle? Yes I do. You know that already.
Do I believe we have taken "freedom and liberty" for granted? Obviously.
We have given these precious, simple states over to elected officials for safekeeping because we thought they would do the work. They have been bought by the rich and powerful and so sold us out. We have been serenaded by media to believe we still have them when we don't. There really are people in power over our government - they are the global elite, bound to destroy America as we want to know it.
We are many generations away from the wars on our soil that set us free. We think we know what it feels like not to be subjects - but we are; we have become unwitting sheep to the masters with strange names like "The Bilderbergers" and alphabet soup entities like WTO and CFR who pull the strings of our politicians and our media. Freedom feels better than swimming naked in a mountain stream, safe and unfettered. Ever do that?
We need to take the responsibility back for returning the country to it's original glory - full of self-reliant, courageous people who believe something's not right, and who are dedicated to take the reins.
Like the spider I nearly swallowed yesterday, had I not been vigilant and curious about what I saw just before the fluid passed my lips, we need to be every watchful, because our nation deserves our full attention.
No matter what flavor of American politics you are, you deserve to read Naomi's book because it will set up red flags where you didn't see them before. You can get inexpensive copies from Amazon, used. Circulate it. Make your children read it and discuss it over dinner.
I am very impressed.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
I'm asking you for 47 minutes of your time
to view this astoundingly articulate video from Naomi Wolf, who wrote a book called "The End of America - Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjALf12PAWc
Her mentor was a holocaust victim. If you are a writer or any creative person, an educator, a parent, an activist of any kind, a patriot (it is NOT a four letter word) please watch this very important video. I watched it and promptly ordered the book.
It really doesn't matter if you buy the book. What is important that you watch, listen and share this most important video. If you are concerned about what is happening in America today - the economy, the buzzwords, the use of extreme force on citizens who do not submit to requests for silence or submission, the surveillance we are under, what's NOT being taught in our schools on the way government works (or is supposed to work), then it behooves you to watch this video.
I just checked Google, and there are pages of Naomi, but I came across this interview in a liberal
site, and it's a good one. You might like it. http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/077
Don't let labels frighten you away from this: liberal, feminist, patriot. When you read or view
this, it will strike a chord within you. Sometimes, you just have to open your mind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjALf12PAWc
Her mentor was a holocaust victim. If you are a writer or any creative person, an educator, a parent, an activist of any kind, a patriot (it is NOT a four letter word) please watch this very important video. I watched it and promptly ordered the book.
It really doesn't matter if you buy the book. What is important that you watch, listen and share this most important video. If you are concerned about what is happening in America today - the economy, the buzzwords, the use of extreme force on citizens who do not submit to requests for silence or submission, the surveillance we are under, what's NOT being taught in our schools on the way government works (or is supposed to work), then it behooves you to watch this video.
I just checked Google, and there are pages of Naomi, but I came across this interview in a liberal
site, and it's a good one. You might like it. http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/077
Don't let labels frighten you away from this: liberal, feminist, patriot. When you read or view
this, it will strike a chord within you. Sometimes, you just have to open your mind.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)