“Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem… people are obedient, all these herdlike people.” — Howard Zinn
If truth be known, Americans are no more free than were Germans under Gestapo Germany. “Freedom and Democracy America” is the greatest lie in the world.
Countries sink into tyranny easily. Those born today don’t know the freedom of the past and are unaware of what has been taken away. Some American blacks might think that finally after a long civil rights struggle they have gained freedom. But the civil rights that they gained have been taken away from all of us by the “war on terror.” Today black Americans are gratuitously shot down in the streets by police in ways that are worse than in Jim Crow days.
American women might think that finally they have gained equality, and they have—the equality to be abused by police just like men. As John Whitehead reports, women are forced by police to strip naked, often in public, and have their viginas explored as part of a “drug search.”
When I was a young man, society would not have tolerated any such intrusion on a woman. The officer and police chief would have been fired and if not prosecuted for rape, would have been beat into bloody pulps by the enraged men.
Tryanny was brought to Americans intentionally by their government. Perhaps it began in 1992 with the unaccountable use of police power against an American family at Ruby Ridge. Randy Weaver’s 12 or 13 year old son was shot in the back and murdered by federal marshalls. Then his wife was murdered with a shot through her throat while she stood at the door of her home holding a baby in her arms.
There was no justification for this gratuitous violence against a peaceful American family, and the federal marshalls who murdered were not held accountable. The Congress, “the people’s representatives” held a hearing, and those responsible for murdering a family told the representatives that they had “to trust the police”.
A year later, 1993, the Clinton regime murdered, using poison gas as well as gun fire, more than 100 members of the Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas.
Women and children comprised most of the victims of “freedom and democracy America.” The Branch Davidians had done nothing except be different. They were a threat to no one. But the Clinton criminal government knew that it could portray the Branch Davidians, as they were different, in unfavorable lights. They were said to be in possession of, and perhaps manufacturing, illegal machine guns. They were said to be having sex with underage girls in their collective.
When the Branch Davidian compound was attacked by a tank spewing chemical warfare and then burnt to the ground, insouciant Americans were told that justice had been done to child abusers. No one objected that the same “justice” had also been done to the allegedly abused children.
Again the “representatives of the people” held a hearing. The result was that the Clinton criminal regime and Janet Reno got approval for dealing effectively with those who violate gun laws.
Ruby Ridge and Waco established the precedents that the US government could murder large numbers of Americans, and at Waco some foreigners, without consequence. The “representatives of the people” accepted the executive branch’s lies in order to avoid having to hold the executive branch accountable for what were clearly without any doubt capital crimes against American citizens for which the federal perpetrators of these crimes should have been tried and executed.
These two instances established the precedent that the US government could murder US citizens at will.
The next step was to take away the constitutional and legal protections of citizens that are in the Bill of Rights, the amendments to the US Constitution, and are, or were, institutionalized in legal practices.
The false flag attack of September 11, 2001, was the instrument for deep-sixing the bill of rights. The George W. Bush regime made us “safe” by taking away our civil liberties. Habeas corpus, the foundation of liberty, was destroyed by the executive branch’s assertion that the President on his sole authority, the US Constitution notwithstanding, can detain US citizens indefinitely without evidence, without going before a court, without any accountability to law whatsoever.
The Obama regime not only endorsed this murder of the US Constitution, “American’s First Black President” even went further. Obama declared that he had the power to sit in his office and write down names of US citizens whom he could murder at his will without acountability.
Congress did not object. The Supreme Court did not object. The American media did not object. The law schools and bar associations did not object. The Republican Party did not object. The Democratic Party did not object. The American people did not object. Washington’s allies in Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada did not object. The Christian churches did not object.
I objected, and a few others like me, such as John Whitehead.
9/11 clearly, without any doubt, destroyed American liberty. Even if you are so brainwashed as to believe an obviously false story of the event, even if you believe that a few Saudi Arabians without government or intelligence service support outwitted all 16 US intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, all intelligence agencies of Washington’s vassals abroad, outwitted Israel’s Mossad, US Air Traffic Control, caused US Airport Security to fail four times in one hour on the same day, and prevented for the first time in history the US Air Force from sending fighters to intercept off course airliners, the fact remains the same: the US government used 9/11 to destroy the constitutional protections of US liberty.
The raw, ugly, but true fact that “our” government has destroyed American liberty is the reason that everyone of us is subject to experiencing the abuses that John Whitehead describes below.
Who will be next? You? Me? Your Wife? Your Son? Your daughter? Your aged and infirm parents?
When it happens, it was the American people who permitted it.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.