No Justice: The Nanny State Becomes the Police State

I recently finished a book by a friend and business associate that discussed his time in jail. He was arrested based on a false accusation and investigation and before the smoke cleared even a little bit, he spent some time in jail. His book was very interesting and it was also revealing. It gives the reader a look into a world that most of us do not know anything about, and one that we all hope to never experience.

One of the most revealing parts of his experience was the attitude of the jailors toward those confined there, and the attitude of the general public toward those who have been arrested. The assumption is one of guilt, even though most of those confined have not yet been charged or gone to trial. The general public has forgotten that in the United States, a person is to be presumed innocent until he is actually convicted of a crime. He does not have to prove his innocence in court, rather the state must prove that the person is guilty using standards of evidence and judgment. But Americans have forgotten about the presumption of innocence and assume that if a person is hassled by the police--even if he is not arrested--that he must have done something to deserve it. In this way, presumably innocent people are deprived of their liberty and dehumanized even though they are often completely innocent of any crime.

This attitude is one of the core components of our rapidly developing police state: a state in which peace officers who have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Sovereign State in which they work have, in the time of a generation, morphed into quasi-militarized "law enforcement officers" who ignore the rights of the citizens whose rights they are purportedly hired to protect. And the rights of the accused are not much understood or honored by either the operatives of the police state itself, nor by citizens, who generally do not realize how much danger they are in of being dragged into its tyranny. Lately, even the Constitutional protections that the accused enjoy have been deliberately removed by the courts.

The sheer number of people who have had their liberty removed for weeks or months before ever going to trial is another sure indication that we are rapidly becoming a police state. In the United States now, most of those so confined are accused of "crimes" determined by fiat, "crimes" in which no one's rights were even remotely close to being violated. Many of these are drug law violations, and often a person's rights are removed for long periods of time due to an accusation of possession of a small amount of an "illegal" substance, which now carries sentences that are often greater than those handed out for severe child abuse. In some ways, the possession or use of an "illegal" substance has become a life sentence, creating a permanent underclass, because the penalties have become so severe, and other sanctions meted out by the federal government have become so limiting that the individual cannot overcome them over a lifetime, even if he is a minor child at the time of arrest. More often than not, an individual's probation is indeterminate and full liberty is only restored if and when a social worker determines that the person has been rehabilitated. In such cases, a court is only peripherally involved, and the case is not determined by any rational standards of evidence judged by a jury at all. This indeterminate "sentencing" is a complete violation of any just standard, and plays havoc with the rights of the accused.

All of this stems from the soft tyranny of the Nanny State, and can always be expected to become the hard tyranny of the Police State. It is injustice pure and simple.

Justice requires that each person is treated as equal under the law. Further, the law itself is unjust if the legislation is intended to limit the freedom of an individual for purposes other than the protection of the rights of all individuals.

The very assumptions of the Nanny State--that there are some people wiser and better than the individual, who therefore should be enabled to control the choices and actions of individuals for their own good--are antithetical to the very concepts of liberty that the United States was founded upon, and fly in the face of the Constitution written to create a government whose sole purpose is to protect those rights. It is up to each competent adult to determine what his or her own good is, and the bar to declaring incompetence should necessarily be very high. No matter how much a person who is different in some way might disturb us, and no matter what we think of his or her decisions, we ought to be very wary of removing liberty for light or transient reasons.

The very concept of a "justice system", which is a product of the Nanny State, is a contradiction in terms. There can be no "system", no collective method of determining innocence or guilt, no "system" of mandatory sentencing, or of required rehabilitation standards that is just. The purpose of justice is not to cure social ills or to rehabilitate individuals. It is to make a judgment about the responsibility of an individual for an action that violates the rights of another, and to exact a penalty upon that action in accordance with the severity of the violation.

Justice must be individual or it is not justice at all. Justice must always refer to the law, which must be applied equally to all, or it is not justice at all. Justice requires that the law be knowable and uncomplicated, and that a person must be able to know ahead of time whether a contemplated action is a violation of the law. Justice requires that the individual merits of the case be considered, and that the evidence be weighed by a jury of peers of the accused; that is those who live in the same community, know its standards, and its weaknesses.

We are seeing a great deal of evidence that the Nanny State that has been established in order to impose the ideas of some of us upon us all, applying a soft tyranny of rules and regulations, is rapidly becoming a police state. Those conservatives who were content to remove the rights of those who ingest socially unapproved substances are now dismayed to watch storm troopers from federal agencies raiding Amish dairy farms to stop us all from ingesting unpasteurized milk or locally produced chickens. Those liberals who have been content to remove the property rights of individuals who disagree with them about diversity, are now dismayed to watch police officers cum storm troopers wrestle individuals to the ground and arrest them for the crime of standing on their own property and observing the actions of the police themselves.

Most of us stand idly by now while our friends and neighbors are presumed guilty for fear of contradicting the monster that we have created,and thereby being subject to the meat grinder of the "justice system". Many of us implicitly favor mob rule over the rule of law, calling for the blood of the innocent when a jury rules that the state has not made its case, because the news media has already tried and convicted the defendant in the court of public opinion. We presume to make judgments based on little evidence, and to condemn people because of the emotional impact of the crime itself, rather than on evidence of guilt or innocence of the accused.

Thus we have come to the place where, as a friend posted to my Facebook Wall:

"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet." - Lyle Myhr

If we treasure our freedom, we need to know our rights, and their basis in the principles of Liberty. We need to understand that the protection afforded to the accused protects us all, and to to remove the rights of accused imperils all of our rights. We need to remember that a little bit of liberty is like being a little bit pregnant--either we act on our rights or we don't have them. And most importantly, we need to understand that justice is a more exacting standard than is goodness, and being "good" in the face of injustice will always turn us to evil.

More on Those E-mail Chains . . .

About a week and half ago, I posted my concerns about one of those chain e-mails that was going around, because I was concerned about what kind of message was being sent. That blog post, Ayekha, can be found by clicking the link. Today, I received another chain e-mail, this time ending with the claim that "the Marines want this to roll" on the internet.

You've got to be kidding. Which marines? I am sure that the contents, anonymous and unsourced did not come from the commander of the United States Marines. But so many people seem to reflexively re-post these things, without giving a thought to what is being said, or the fact that readers really don't know by whom it is being said. In this case, the first three quarters of the post was largely true, and the argument interesting, though unsourced. (It argued that when Islamists become a certain percentage of the population of a Western and relatively free society, they begin agitating for privileges that end up underming the core values of liberty and tolerance that the society has extended to the Islamists). And the overall sentiment of the message was one that I can agree with--that the principles and values of Islamic Totalitarianism are incompatible with those of the United States.

However . . .you knew that a however was coming, didn't you?
However, my concern came with a bit of unreason purported to be by an American who had lived in Saudi Arabia for twenty years, that was completely contrary to the principles of individualism and liberty that we are claiming to defend. The piece called "Can Muslims be Good Americans" has passed through my in-box before, and contains ten arguments all of which contain factual errors, and all of which could be used to argue that Catholics or all Christians or Jews could not be good Americans either. In fact the first time I saw this non-argument, I set about doing exactly that by substituting the word "Christian" and then the word "Jew" into it, and constructing the particular arguments based on what I know about those religions. The one "proving" that Jews cannot be good Americans was particularly devastating, because I know a lot more about Judaism. I just did what the author of this piece did an combined ideas and laws from all over the 5,000 year history of Judaism, without rhyme, reason or qualification, and generalized them to all Jews, and viola! Jews cannot be good Americans.

I am not going to argue the particulars of this piece of badly written propaganda because the fundamental flaw is that it is overgeneralized,and each point can be simply refuted by this argument. If you wish to see the propaganda, it has been published here, and there are numerous rebuttals to each and every point all over the internet.

In this case, what we see is a well-meaning discussion of the very real dangers of Islamic Totalitarianism and its goals combined to which the unknown author appended this piece of drivel, wrote that the marines really want readers to pass it on, and then hit send to several thousand of his or her closest friends and relatives. In this case, it was BCC'ed to me, preventing me from responding to everyone that the person who sent it to me sent it to, so I responded to the person who sent it to me, and the person who sent it to her. After that, the origins are lost in cyberspace.

Here is my reply:

The first three quarters of this message is in great part correct. Islam is a complete system of life just as Christianity was in Europe in the Medieval period (the 5th to 15th Century C.E.) The danger to us is that Western individualism is in conflict with such a complete system (this is why that system ruled by the Roman Catholic Church in Europe did not survive modernity), and the modern Western way of life based on individual liberty cannot coexist with a theocracy. Further, although it is identified as a Western Religion because Mohammed was influenced by Judaism and Christianity, Islam is not at all Western in its thought. Western thought can be identified as thought that was heavily influenced by Greek logic and by the Rule of Law as understood by Greeks, Romans and Jews of the Hellenic period (500 B.C.E. - 400 C.E.). Because Islam is NOT Western, we are making a huge mistake if we believe that we can reason with the rulers of Islam, or if we believe that tolerance extended to them will cause them to be tolerant of us. The idea that we live and let live so long as no ones rights are being violated is a Western idea that took the whole of the Hellenic Period and the Medieval Period to come to full fruit in the West. It took 2000 years of religious development, philosophical development, and many religious wars to move from the concept of the Divine Right of Kings to the concept of Individual Sovereignty.

Islam, isolated in the middle east after the Battle of Vienna, bypassed a good deal of that development, and although Islam--in the form of the Caliphate of Spain--can be credited with preserving certain Greek ideas, it did nothing with them. It was, rather, the careful preservation of Greek writings by the Christian Monastics that led to the Renaissance, and the flowering of modern Western culture.

I agree with you both in that I hardly think it is our duty to allow the world to plunge into the chaos of religious war and theocracy by surrendering our values for the dross of multiculturalism and thereby honoring the barbaric values of a desert culture that wants to take over the world. And multiculturalism is not a modern Western value, it is a post-modernist fantasy. In order to prevent the destruction of the West, we must defend our principles and our values, and understand that no one has the right to destroy the rights of others, and that our Constitution cannot be used to destroy itself.

And that leads me to the last quarter of this e-mail, entitled "Why Muslims Cannot be Good Americans" . . .
I have seen this before, and I have replaced "Muslims" with "Christians" and "Jews" for each of the points and came up with similarly absurd results. Apparently neither Christians nor Jews can be good Americans! This is because the assumption in the piece is based on the collectivist notion that every Muslim, Christian or Jew is exactly the same as any other, and the equally collectivist notion that the United States was built on the principles of a Christian Theocracy. By the time of the Enlightenment, during which the values of individual rights and liberty became fully developed, theocracy had been tried by the West and found wanting.

Here is the crucial piece: Individual Muslims can be good Americans, as can individual Christians and individual Jews, so long as they accept the values of individualism as opposed to those of collectivism. In our system, rights are inherent in each human being, are therefore individual rights. There are no "group rights." Islam as individual religious expression can and should be tolerated, but any demand for collective privileges (a better term than "group rights" which is a contradiction in terms) must be repulsed at once. IOW, we ought to do as MacArthur did with Shinto during the occupation of Japan. As an individual religious expression, he told the Japanese to have at it. But any attempt by an individual or group to form an oligarchy--that is any attempt to gain privileges or power over any individuals sanctioned by government based on Shinto emperor worship--was firmly stopped. MacArthur did this with the blessings of James Byrne, from the US State Department, who wrote to the General in a telegram:

"Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. People would not be taxed to support National Shinto and there will be no place for Shintoism in the schools. Shintoism as a state religion—National Shinto, that is—will go . . . Our policy on this goes beyond Shinto . . . The dissemination of Japanese militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed. And the Japanese Government will be required to cease financial and other support of Shinto establishments." (Quoted in : No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism by John David Lewis in The Objective Standard, Winter 2006-2007)


(By the way, this article is excellent intellectual ammunition for those of us concerned with preserving our values, and can be read for free at the link I put on the title).

What was done in the occupation of another country in order to pacify it, is certainly the proper policy to pursue on our own shores in order to protect the rights of Americans, which is the purpose of our government in the first place. Certainly, Islam as individual religious expression must be left alone according to our own values, but just as certainly Islam as an attempt to dominate our people must be fought according to those very same values. And we must go beyond the vague feel-good statements of the multiculturalists, as well as the diatribes of religious dominionists of the Christian persuasion, to define the difference according to the values of individual liberty enshrined in our founding documents.

Some of my readers may believe that my attempts to fight drivel on the internet are quixotic, and in general, they probably are. But, after all, my replies to to the people I know who send the stuff to me with a flick of the finger. And my goal is to get those people for whom what I say may have some influence to think before they push the "forward" icon. Undoubtedly, I will be unsuccessful in a large number of cases--especially among those who have confused religion with the Constitution. But for those who really do believe in individual liberty, I hope my arguments may cause them to consider what they are supporting when they forward this kind of stuff.

Ayekha? Where Are You?

"Walking hand-in-hand upon the Mountain,

Weighted down by lumber and a knife,

Abraham remembers Sarah's laughter,

And for a moment, he fears for Isaac's life.

But then he shudders with the wind,

And fills his head with faith,

And struggles for a different point of view.

As he reaches deep inside, to find the handle to that flame--

"Abraham!" G-d screams, "Where are you?"

--Rabbi Joe Black, "Ayeka"

from Leave a Little Bit Undone, 1999

Today is the new moon, and as the sun sets, we enter Rosh Chodesh Elul, the beginning of the month preceding the Holy Days, when we stand before the Eternal and listen to the question put to us--Ayekha? Where are you?

As human beings, endowed with reason and with choice, it is our obligation to discover the principles by which our lives can be lived, and to walk in their light. And because we may make errors of knowledge and errors of choice, we are also obligated to ask ourselves: "Where are you?"

As the summer days' heat yields to the cool winds of evening at this time of year, it seems that the season provokes a dream or a thought that makes me pause, to begin to ask this question. This year there was no dream, no vision of fog and cloud, but one of those "pass this on" e-mails that go around the internet from time to time, that gave me pause. And tonight, the question is not only an individual one, but one that many of us in the Liberty Movement might ask ourselves:

After this year or more of petitioning for redress, of watching our federal government pass legislation that violates our liberty on the most basic level; a year or more of being dismissed and sneered at by the media, and ignored and disrespected by our non-representing representatives--where are we? Do we still adhere to the principles that lit the flame of liberty in our hearts, that caused us to carry signs at the tea parties, and write and make phone calls to our representatives? Or have we given way to frustration and anger because we have experienced defeat after defeat after defeat? And are we willing to turn our backs on our founding principles in order to gain the momentary satisfaction of action that rises from our anger and our pain?

In the stages of social movements, now is the place where we find ourselves at the moment of maximum danger; the place where we are tempted to give up on our principles and act out of despair or violence. But just as the night seems all the darker just before the dawn, so we are also at the time just before our Liberty movement experiences a regeneration of purpose; a renewal of hope and determination that can take us though the crisis to come and into the future beyond.

Being here now, is the time to recall our principles and act on them with determination, and to be the watchman for the morning, calling upon those with us to remember them too. And this is the spirit in which I wish to critique that chain e-mail that came to my desktop this morning.

It was sent by a leader in the local patriot movement, and I do not know the origin of it before it came to him. It was a little scenario intended to divide "us" from "them" by characterizing the "them" in the most ridiculous terms. It was also intended to create a bandwagon of very narrow dimensions in that even some of the readers would become the enemy, and one in which the jumpers-on can drink the strong brew of anger and violent ideation made acceptable with a laugh. And though it purported to be a factual story, in my estimation it is very unlikely to be true. Here is the story:

If you don't know God, don't make stupid remarks!!!!!!

A United States Marine was taking some college courses
between assignments. He had completed 20 missions in Iraq
and Afghanistan . One of the courses had a professor who
was an avowed atheist, and a member of the ACLU.
One day the professor shocked the class when he came in.
He looked to the ceiling and flatly stated, "GOD, if you are real, then
I want you to knock me off this platform... I'll give you exactly 15 min."
The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop. Ten minutes
went by and the professor proclaimed, "Here I am GOD, I'm still waiting."
It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got
out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him;
knocking him off the platform. The professor was out cold.
The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently.
The other students were shocked and stunned, and sat there
looking on in silence. The professor eventually came to,
noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked,
"What in the world is the matter with you? Why did you do that?"
The Marine calmly replied,
"God was too busy today protecting America 's
soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid
stuff and act like an idiot. So He sent me."
The classroom erupted in cheers!
THIS IS GOOD, KEEP IT GOING!

This story is no literary masterpiece, and I could go through it line by line, pointing out the logical fallacies, and the contemptuous assumptions within. However, there is a larger point to be made, and a bigger question to be asked: What does this piece tell us about those patriots who would agree with this action? Where are they? Where are we?

I did e-mail the patriot leader who sent this to me, and asked him if he condoned the action described above. He replied that he did. I wrote a longer e-mail back telling him why I disagree, and why the thing concerned me. I don't know what he will reply--and though I left the door open for rapproachment, I know that any reply could be defensive or even offensive, because my critique targeted some cherished falsehoods held by certain members of the Liberty movement, and further, urged a consideration of the story in the light of our bedrock principles of liberty--Individual Rights and the Non-INITIATION of Force Principle (NIP).

With respect to these principles, this story is one of failing.

The Marine--a member of a uniformed service who has taken an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States--initiated force against a civilian who was exercising his freedom of speech. If this story had been true we would have seen it trumpeted in the media, because the marine would have been arrested, handed over to the CO of his duty station, and made an example of at Captain's Mast. For a military member in uniform to violate the rights of a civilian is not only a dishonor to the uniform, it is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). When a person becomes a member of the military, he signs away certain of his civil rights for the duration of the time he wears the uniform. This includes his right to freedom of speech, his liberty (he must obey lawful orders), and his right to a civilian jury trial. IMHO, not only would a marine with such an extensive service record be unlikely to be stupid enough to take the action described in the story, but the person with whom this story originated is ignorant of the role and the honor of our men and women in uniform.

But of ultimate concern to me is what this story is intended to teach those who agree with it. It encourages the idea that it is a good thing to violate the rights of another person, to initiate force against him, because you disagree with his ideas. IOW, it encourages the violation of the rights of those who think differently, who have a different political point of view, and who are exercising their freedom of speech and the freedom of religion. This story encourages the sympathetic reader to deny the principle of Individual Rights, and subtly suggests that if you disagree with that, you are not a member of the club.

If one is defend to Constitution of the United States, one must accept and defend the Principle of Individual Rights upon which that document is based. This means that every person is endowed with the right to life, liberty and property, including atheists and members of the ACLU, and all others with whom one might disagree. The Constitution is a compact by which we agree to not only refuse to initiate force against other individuals, but by which we agree to cede the right to retaliate against one who initiates force against us to the courts unless self-defense is immediately required.

Unlike progressives--for whom the end justifies the means--defenders of liberty cannot use the Alinsky tactics of Rules for Radicals. Liberty cannot be gained by the violation of it; we cannot force people to be free. We cannot violate individual rights in order to restore them.

Further, anyone who has read the MIAC report, or studied the methods of the marxists and progressives currently in power know that they need us to violate our principles, to initiate force, and to give them an excuse to take what little of our liberty is left. They may fabricate such an incident (this is a false-flag), but we should not hand it to them. Surely any one of us is free to tell and distribute such a story as this, but given it's obvious appeal to anger and chauvinism, is it wise to do so? How does it encourage those in the liberty movement who have not been educated in the Principles of Liberty to think about our bedrock principles--Individual Rights and the Non-Initiation of Force Principle?

Where are we? What are we encouraging people to think about and do?

These questions are paramount, especially for those who would be leaders in the Cause of Liberty. We cannot afford to encourage disrespect of our principles within our own movement, and at the same time fight that disrespect from without. We must cling to our principles with the utmost integrity, and be just in our evaluation of those with whom we disagree, and even those who have made themselves the opponents of Liberty.

Every time I receive and e-mail that says: "This is good. Keep it going," it is important that I ask myself: Where am I on this? What principles does this e-mail support? Which of my principles does it violate? What kind of behavior does it encourage? Does it encourage justice and honor? What about respect for the rights of others, even those with whom I disagree? Or does it encourage injustice and the use of force?

I submit that we must be absolutely unyielding in upholding these principles of Liberty, and we must stand firm in encouraging those with whom we work to do so as well. This means respect for the individual rights of every person, in every circumstance, no matter how much we disagree with his ideas or the way he expresses them. And we must not suffer fools who encourage the violation of these principles gladly. We cannot associate ourselves with them, or encourage them lest we lose our stand. In this way we will be worthy of the name "Patriot", and we will uphold the heritage of those great men who pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.