With the advent of 9/11 and the perpetual War on Terror, that causes more terrorists and is therefore self-perpetuating, the Patriot Act has opened the door once again toward silencing dissent.
I mentioned in my last post:
Words matter. You know, like the “Patriot” Act.
One can’t help but shake one’s head when we see the word “patriot” to describe something that requires one’s mouth to be closed, or face punishment.
The effort to have thirteen colonies separate from the British Empire involved a LOT of criticism, specific criticism at government, even naming names:
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures…
The above list was only HALF of the criticisms. As Thomas Jefferson said:
Yes, not just words, but to consider the next step as well.
So as we saw with the introduction of the Patriot Act, there has been a continual assault on free speech in the history of this country, especially in time of war. No wonder the state loves the perpetual condition of war in their war on terror and war on drugs. Leaders in 2001 seemed to “go back in time” to dictate the new order of things:
Attorney General John Ashcroft has said that critics of the war effort “give aid and comfort to the enemy.”
John Whitehead’s latest column charts this historical path this country has had in attempting to balance this freedom of speech. A few clips follow:
- In 1798, during the presidency of John Adams, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious” statements against the government, Congress or president of the United States. (less than 20 years after rightly criticizing the British Empire, Americans could not criticize the United States general government? )
- President Abraham Lincoln seized telegraph lines, censored mail and newspaper dispatches, and shut down members of the press who criticized his administration. (not to mention sending hundreds of newspaper editors and printing press owners to prison ships)
- President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which made it illegal to criticize the government’s war efforts.
This last one was especially broad in that it outlawed:
Uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language intended to cause contempt, scorn … as regards the form of government of the United States or Constitution, or the flag or the uniform of the Army or Navy … urging any curtailment of the war with intent to hinder its prosecution; advocating, teaching, defending, or acts supporting or favoring the cause of any country at war with the United States, or opposing the cause of the United States.
The fallout from this law shows the extent the paranoid state will go in protecting itself, it is at its core a SNOWFLAKE!
Excess patriotic zeal resulted in a draconian crackdown on free expression, including:
- Authorities in Pittsburgh banned music by the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven during the course of the war.
- The Los Angeles Board of Education prohibited all discussions of peace.
- An Ohio farmer, John White, was imprisoned for stating that soldiers in American camps were “dying off like flies” and that the “murder of innocent women and children by German soldiers was no worse than what the United States’ soldiers did in the Philippines.”
- A Minnesota man was arrested under a state espionage law for criticizing women knitting socks for soldiers, saying: “No soldier ever sees these socks.”
- Twenty-seven South Dakota farmers were convicted for sending a petition to the government objecting to the draft and calling the conflict a “capitalist war.”
With the so-called “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR signed similar legislation:
- The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover emergency authority to censor all news and control all communications in and out of the country.
- FDR proceeded with the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
Even during Vietnam, when the peace protesting gained momentum:
Attorney General John Mitchell sought injunctions to prohibit the newspapers from publishing such information [ articles about some highly classified documents about the U.S. government and the Vietnam War ].
The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1971 ruled 6-3 in favor of the press. In his opinion, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”
Now we have returned to the “Patriot” Act put in place during the Bush II administration:
Part of the Patriot Act signed into law by President George W. Bush made it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful, lawful activity on behalf of any group designated by the government as a terrorist organization. Under this provision, even filing an amicus brief on behalf of an organization the government has labeled as terrorist would constitute breaking the law.
The legacy extended into the “transparent” Obama (Bush III) administration:
President Obama signed into law anti-protest legislation that makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest activities (10 years in prison for protesting anywhere in the vicinity of a Secret Service agent). The Obama Administration also waged a war on whistleblowers, which The Washington Post described as “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” and “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records.”
Nor is Bush IV, Trump, exempt from this attack on free speech:
President Trump, who delights in exercising his right to speak (and tweet) freely about anything and everything that raises his ire, has shown himself to be far less tolerant of those with whom he disagrees, especially when they exercise their right to criticize the government.
In his first few years in office, Trump has declared the media to be “the enemy of the people,” suggested that protesting should be illegal, and that NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.” More recently, Trump lashed out at four Democratic members of Congress—all women of color— who have been particularly critical of his policies, suggesting that they “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
While he probably delights in triggering these snowflakes, he himself comes across as the biggest snowflake and bully of all.
The US Constitution, the piece of paper all presidents have ignored since George Washington from time to time, says this:
Good, bad or ugly, it’s all free speech unless as defined by the government it falls into one of the following categories: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes.
We are no longer in a federated republic, we have not been for some time. The government has morphed step by step closer to the very thing it fought against in the past, national socialism, fascism and communism, all variants of collectivism. All of these entities see individuals as something to be used and then discarded. See for yourself at the local VA hospitals.
Our government is now at this juncture:
This idea of “dangerous” speech, on the other hand, is peculiarly authoritarian in nature. What it amounts to is speech that the government fears could challenge its chokehold on power.
The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.
It goes back to the saying:
We need to return to the character of people that would say the following:
- “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” – Thomas Jefferson
- “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” – Benjamin Franklin
- “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” – Thomas Paine.
- “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”- Marquis De Lafayette
Where we are at in 2019 is here:
… the First Amendment was intended to protect the citizenry from the government’s tendency to censor, silence and control what people say and think. Having lost our tolerance for free speech in its most provocative, irritating and offensive forms, the American people have become easy prey for a police state where only government speech is allowed … We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.
The opposite of this is what we have been sold, as described during the Nuremberg trials:
Beware of tyranny. Beware of those who sound good but lead you to group think, a cult or even the religion of statism or nationalism. It does get ugly.
-SF1