Curiouser and Curiouser! on liberty

Home of the brave certainly...

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 13:59:21 +0000

"Shut your mouth". As radio giants censor antiwar musicians, TV networks bully pro-peace actors, and Attorney General John Ashcroft prepares a new assault on civil liberties, a climate of intimidation creeps over America. [Salon.com]

Life would be much easier if everything was black and white.

I wouldn't trust him to tie his own shoelaces

Fri, 02 May 2003 15:32:04 +0100

Plan to Protect USA Patriot Act. Interesting view, by Andrew Glass of The Hill, on Ashcroft's politically astute plan to keep USA Patriot alive, hidden, and safe from exposure. Hill says Ashcroft, sensing a real problem with his heavy-handed use of USA Patriot, did the following (some background on Sensenbrenner):

Ashcroft has been in Congress and politics a long time. He's a sneaky SOB, grown adept at hiding his political motives and actions from his constituents, and he now has the benefit of an unelected position with no answerability to voters. If Ashcroft gets his way and the (already marginal) sunset provisions of Patriot are killed we are in for a long, sad period in US history.

thehill.com - We're watching you: national security and privacy issues.
[...] Last summer, Sensenbrenner and committee's ranking Democrat, John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, asked the department for basic statistical data about how it was using its powerful new surveillance tools.

The department stalled for so long that Sensenbrenner threatened to subpoena Attorney General John Ashcroft and to oppose renewing the act.

Sensenbrenner reported to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had told Ashcroft: "If you want to play I've got a secret, good luck getting the PATRIOT Act extended. Because if you've got bipartisan anger in the Congress, the sunset will come and go and the PATRIOT Act disappears."

Beating a tactical retreat, Ashcroft thereupon launched a three-pronged damage-control effort.
[Privacy Digest]

[b.cognosco]

If you guys know what's good for you, you'll keep a watchful eye on John Ashcroft and his henchgoons and keep lobbying your representatives to end the Patriot Act as soon as possible.

You get the police state you deserve

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 08:53:20 +0100

Paul Craig Roberts writes:

Police states are easier to acquire than Americans appreciate.

Here in Britain I hope we're not as far down the track but I think we kid ourselves if we think there's no risk. Just ask Benyam Mohammed.

Of course we have something to fear

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 09:32:10 +0100

"By definition, we have something to fear from governments. They're run by human beings, with normal tendencies to use and abuse the tools at their disposal." -- Jean-Louis Gassée

Uncomfortable history

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 17:30:20 +0000

I just read a piece talking about the forgotten legacy of Britains empire:

When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way" {2}. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

Now the question arises for me, as I imagine it did for the generations of Germans growing up in the shadow of the 1939-1945 conflict, how I should react to this?

Since the contention of the article is that Europeans (and in particular the British) ignore a history of genocide it seems that ignoring it is not an option. At the same time I can't take any responsibility for it. I did not counsel Lord Lytton in 1876.

What I can do is to acknowledge that the British have no moral imperative derived from a glorius history of bringing enlightenment to the world. We ran an empire and it's an ugly business.

These are just two examples of at least twenty such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers: they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our "relative lack of interest in Stalin and Mao's crimes". {8} But at least we are aware that they happened.

That's why I side so vehemently against our involvement with the American efforts to build some kind of empire in the middle east. We have no business there. We're creating an ugly mess that it will take years to clean up after we are finally kicked out.

The problem is that it isn't _us_ that are making the decisions. As Michael S. Rozeff points out:

The higher-ups or rulers who have power produce the big crises and wars. Their subjects, few of whom benefit from them, do not. The masses are not irrelevant, but their impact on major events is secondary. The Iranian people are not making the decisions about nuclear power. They are not issuing threats, and neither are the American and European peoples.

Rulers are men accustomed to gaining and using power. This implies they possess an above average dose of certain characteristics. Benign philosopher-kings don’t become rulers. Those who rule tend to be overly aggressive, rapacious, hard-nosed, opportunistic, pragmatic, cruel, violent, and manipulative. Even if these tendencies are not abundantly present, their power allows freer reign to their worse instincts. Rulers are hawks, not doves. Their number includes more than its share of troublemakers.

Rozeff maintains that those greedy for power live in a rarified atmosphere that sustains and feeds their delusions allowing them to gamble with the lives of the rest of us. That sounds about right to me. What bothers me is the number of people that seem to want to go along with it.

Rozeff suggests it is a failure of culture if the mores of the ruling classes seem into the mind of the people:

If and when the average person begins to go in for contests that are like those the rulers play, it will signal a deterioration in society’s ethical standards. If and when they accept and admire those who win by underhanded tactics, it means that middle-class values are losing ground and the values exhibited by rulers are gaining ground. This is perhaps happening. It has been said that on Survivor "lying, cheating, backstabbing, double-crossing, and betraying happen all the time. Its an accepted part of the game." The question is how accepted these behaviors become among the viewers, or whether they still condemn the villains.

We should look not just to a change of government but to a change of governance for the answer. Successive governments have proved that changing the puppet doesn't fix the problem we have to change the hand inside the puppet too.