by Carol Warner Christen
(Swans - November 5, 2007)
I renounce and denounce torture against any human and myself.
Can a free and equal human being agree to be tortured by others for their reasons?
Can others deprive a human being of liberty in order to torture that being?
Torture is illegal for parents to practice upon their children; the state sees to that.
Sometimes the state gives the children to worse torturers.
How could torture be legal on adults when done to prisoners, to anyone?
Is torture involuntary servitude?
Is the torturer an elected leader?
Did the legislature raise the torturer to ruling status?
Is the torturer acting a bondage and bloody fantasy of sexuality?
State the law and the legality under the Constitution for torture.
State the treaty permitting torture.
State the rationale for torture.
Follow through and submit yourself to torture if your belief is torture is a public good.
Follow through and denounce torture if you will not be tortured yourself.
Denounce torture for the sake of the Bill of Rights.
Denounce torture as a medieval horror for it is that.
Denounce torture by the religious.
Denounce torture as un-American.
Denounce torture.
If you cannot state the law, the legality, the treaty, or the rationale, forget forever torture.
Join with all our citizens and recant torture.
How did we devolve to such a degree as to permit torture?
I wrote the above lines in 2006 and now it is 2007, almost 2008, and nothing has changed in the realms of the high and mighty and their incessant use of force, on any and all, who may, or do, oppose them. Why? To create shock and fear, as Naomi Klein writes in her wonderful book, The Shock Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. And, then there is the secret Bilderberger group, which wants to erase borders and laws between countries in the pursuit of that disaster. Daniel Estulin tells their secrets in The Truth about the Bilderbergers. They make phone calls and, sometimes, people die, change the political system immediately or else. Do you know who belongs to such a worldwide group in our country? Do you know who runs it? Do you care? Many of those running for the presidency have been invited and sworn to secrecy.
These people have elevated or levitated themselves above the rest of humanity by virtue of birth, money, position, and power. In that realm, they have all decided to dispense with the niceties except to themselves because, People, the oil will run out in twenty short years and there is no replacement. How can they permit you and me to continue on this path when soon their jets will have no fuel, their armies no transportation? Do you care? They do. No, ethanol and hydrogen won't replace what we have all created to avoid work.
Humanity has always had alpha persons at the top of the group. For six thousand years, they have lived, loved, and killed their "inferiors," i.e., the rest of us, to suit their purposes, which are to be found in The Curse of Ignorance by Arthur Findlay. He wrote humanity's history in 2000 pages about 4000 years of horrors on ordinary humans by churches, kings, queens, armies, despots, you name it.
Nothing has changed except that the United States, a beacon of freedom once, has devolved in the past fifty-some years when the group above came into being. Each generation seems to face death from self-appointed leaders with little left over from war, starvation, illness, and poisons to enjoy the marvels of this small planet, unless they are the alpha ones.
Do you think any god would smite and kill part of creation to enrich the rest of it? Why even bacteria and viruses thrive! We do not. Would a god like that even be a god? Or, as I suspect, would this be humans wearing the fabric of godhood to further their personal and abominable ideas? We used to have a Congress to challenge these stupid (and they are stupid) ideas until communications became instantaneous with electronics and the Web. Games against everything teach the young to kill.
Money is now printed almost at the speed of light to "enrich" those who have no ethics, no integrity, and no right to harm others except at their "master's" whim. Congress has stripped the American people of all their rights in collusion with the Executive Branch and, if it comes to that, the Courts.
By February 8, 2008, you all will be told if, and when, you may ride on an airplane by the Transportation Security Administration. One day, I called the Federal Aviation Administration but the TSA answered the local phone and told me they were Lockheed Martin, a gigantic corporation! I yelled, "What?!!!" I did not talk to them. This is how far it has gone.
Is it Lockheed Martin or the TSA or the FAA who will tell you that you were too naughty to ride on an airplane? Is a private corporation the government now? Are roadblocks and access to your home or work next? What if one spouse is denied the ability to come home? Who will be responsible, you or the government, for the care of minor children when a parent is detained from a plane? Will you sue or walk or drive, if you can, to fetch your spouse? Do you care?
Let's get down to the basis of all this. Who owns you? Who owns me? Is it your parents or your spouse? Is it the police or the people elected to state offices who delegate duties to others? Ownership implies many things: if you own an animal, you will have to buy a tag to declare who has the rights to it and inoculate it so that humans are not harmed by diseases. Since the animal cannot speak for itself, this seems reasonable, especially if it bites a human or a protected species. Everyone knows who to sue.
Do you have a "dog tag"? Human "dog tags" are called ID's or passports or driver's licenses or implants or fingerprints. Identification is not wrong except when it allows humans to categorize other humans and exclude them for any one of zillions of reasons. My husband and I own a house and the community needs to rely on us to care for it and to find us if we don't. Our signatures and a credit check were sufficient.
Our signatures are unique to us alone as is our DNA. Unless we died unidentified or committed a crime marked by blood and fingerprints when we can't sign our names as a check and balance to our existence, no one needs to treat us as prisoners in our own country for such purposes since we have not been arraigned before a court or held on bail or been subpoenaed to testify.
Do you think the people we elect or appoint need to overstep the usual bounds in our country and state to have extraordinary abilities to track us, harass us, detain us for political reasons, such as free speech, holding ideas contrary to others' ideas, and so forth? If you do think this, why not emigrate to a more totalitarian or authoritarian country that suits your needs? There are still countries with kings, with queens, with dictators, with juntas who will welcome you into their arms. You have, no doubt, noticed that thousands of humans come here to the United States because we have a Constitutional Republic and a huge amount of freedom (or we did before Congress and the Executive Branch conspired against us and still do to this day.)
Of course, we hate the immigrants for coming here to spoil our fun as our ancestors came to spoil freedom for the Native Americans in the 1700s, or before, fleeing oppressors galore. When we oppressed our own Peoples over slavery and the Union, we went to war with ourselves. Did we win? Mostly, but not exactly, because enmity exists over skin color, beliefs, and politics still.
Into the mix, we have inserted sexual orientation, religion, and abortion as hot spots subject to arcane legalities where freedom reigned or hid. We all want to be Mommy or Daddy to other adults. It is as if this need to tell children what to do has spilled over into our adulthoods. None of it is anyone else's business, is it? If it is, why? Will you let me into your home to tell you what I think you are doing wrong? Why not? Perhaps, you are aware that there is an amendment to the Constitution entitling you to privacy in your home, your papers, and your effects. That amendment, too, is unraveling as the police simply break down doors now without as much as an inquiry.
Do not use the Bible as a source here because we are discussing a country, not a monolithic religion and its beliefs. If you want to see how that once worked out, get The Curse of Ignorance because the entirety of our problems, religiously speaking, are in there as the problems work out into the political realms with torture, death, destroying the human spirit, and other abominations against freedom.
We have been put at the mercy of an oligarchy we didn't elect. Congress has colluded with the Executive Branch for unknown reasons to undermine every freedom our Founders carefully wrote for us. We stopped educating and began teaching how to take tests. This allows us to be tested and ignorant. The young are distracted by violent games and bribed to go to "war" around the planet in order to have more money than they would have made several years ago doing honest, decent work. The taxpayers foot the bills.
Our country is so in debt that the next "shock" will, no doubt, have us on our knees begging for our lives. Privatizing government will be our undoing. Corporations have no loyalty to anything except returns on investment. They pretend they are "persons" but they are not. They have power, money, overseas hideouts, and a working class beholden to them for paychecks and, thus, open to arm-twisting against their better natures. I know; I quit nine jobs for reasons that would have impaired my integrity and stomped on my ethics if I had gone along with these men. It is almost always men who run corporations and who scheme against humanity for money. There are women who may do the same but they are still a minority in running the business world. The Bilderberger group was almost 100% male, except for two queens, and has recently been inviting a few women to its enclaves.
If a person is elected to office in the United States of America can that person be sworn to secrecy by a group of elites who intend to rule the world? If so, to whom and to what are we electing office holders? Their names are in the book and so are some of their deeds for the organization with a whispered word, a phone call, and history changes. Meanwhile, the Congress talks on and on in circles and the Executive has declared itself above itself. Hubris is arrogance now and arrogance is the main "sin" of the white race, I am sorry to say. We have become so self-important to the world that some of us believe we are destined to govern all of humanity for profit. Destroying the Others for standing in our way is of minor consideration as we waste human lives and fill the planet with death.
Today I read that killing the innocent in Iraq is part of doing one's duty rather than the war crime it was sixty years ago. Torturing seems to be a way to employ mercenaries and to shock populations into compliance. Only the human who is broken, wounded, or dead and his family care. Do you? When it comes to your family, you will care. What was that line..."and then they came for me?" All dictatorships die; fascism is not our normal state.
In order to be human, we must play, love, live, laugh. Who except the rulers do that in a fascist state? And, really, do they or are they forever looking over their shoulders for the assassin? What waste, what stupidity, what torture we inflict upon ourselves for a chance to stand on the top of the pyramid for a few moments, a perfect target to the downtrodden? Then it starts all over again for the next five years and, if the Hopi are correct, will end until the new world clears the old once again for the fifth time.
Who owns you? Who is allowed to torture you? Who is allowed to break down your door with impunity? When did all the nastiest of men reincarnate to fill our days with horror once again, over and over and over ad infinitum? And, for heaven's sake, why? Isn't the joy of living enough? Do we love sin more than life itself? Do you feel cheapened? Cheated? Tormented? Tortured? Feel nothing? Who are you? Who and what are your progeny that they live without value now because they are not made of money? Is this a world of spoiled armed cowards forever in thrall?
Take it back. Nothing in the world says that death is the business of the world or of governments. It all depends on who does the defining. Them or the rest of us?
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