The Myth of Ronald Reagan

I didn't observe the birthday this past Sunday of the greatest fascist leader in all of history.  The record speaks for itself, and I've seen it enough in the last 30 years to know exactly how pernicious this criminally stupid fascist and his legions of minions are.  But if you haven't, I encourage you to take a look at a partial (and impartial) sample of the great dictator's history - before you're no longer able to do so.

"Ronald Reagan must be the nicest president who ever destroyed a union, tried to cut school lunch milk rations from six to four ounces, and compelled families in need of public help to first dispose of household goods in excess of $1,000 . . .  If there is an authoritarian regime in the American future, Ronald Reagan is tailored to the image of a friendly fascist."

Prof. Robert Lekachman
(1920-1989)

The Silence of Our Friends

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

It’s impossible for me not to think of Martin Luther King, Jr., at this time of year. I can’t help thinking that, were he alive today, he’d be as distressed about the enslavement of people now as he was in 1968, 105 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. King knew the reason de facto slavery still existed via civil and human rights abuses wasn’t so much because there weren’t laws prohibiting them; he knew full well that a law is only as good as a person’s ability to enforce it, and poor people – whatever the color of their skin, but especially those who, at that time, were systematically oppressed and had no means to pursue the “American dream” that would give them the ability to enforce their rights, e.g., with disposable income – would never be free unless someone with the ability to make the laws stick did. Hence, then president John F. Kennedy, who had appointed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, attorney general, asked his brother to call out the National Guard not to shoot protesters, as the Guard would do a mere seven years after King's assassination at Kent State, but to protect them. And to make sure that the 13^th amendment, which ended slavery only tacitly, was made more functional, he caved in to pressure to create additional anti-discrimination laws – in the form of the Civil Rights Act, passed after Kennedy's assassination – which is what the writers of the 13^th amendment intended (that is to say, they knew full well if slavery were to be prevented in the future further laws would need to be passed). That's why the brief, last paragraph of the very concise amendment states: "Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

We have a nation of working-class citizens getting poorer and sicker by the generation, thanks to the work of representatives in name only who fashion public health and monetary policy only to benefit an elite few, as Barack Obama’s transfer of public wealth to allegedly failing banks proves, just as does his failed attempt to fix “health care.” It’s hard to believe that King would have seen Obama’s presidential campaign as anything other than an attempt to pander to groups of people who need to believe in the fairy tale they’ve bought into – you know the one; that all is right with America and it’s “democracy” -- because he would have found it impossible to ignore the evolution of the business party that has put into office a puppet in the guise of every president since Carter. And that’s why he was murdered – because he was perceptive, influential and uncompromising. The government knew he’d never stop condemning what is most certainly its complete metamorphosis to fascism. You know who loves slavery more than anything? No one more than a fascist.

What really galled King, though, was how little those who claimed righteous beliefs in God, Christianity and American freedom cared to change the unjust status quo. He must have thought he was truly in the presence of evil incarnate whenever he looked around at the vast majority of his fellow white clergy members, who had stood idly by as ordinary people were routinely lynched for more than 80 years after the civil war, while voting irregularities were anything but irregular, and while churches were being bombed – whenever he saw them doing nothing. It’s harder, though, to know what he would think about the complete closing of American society that we have today – about the secret prisons right here, on American soil, that surround certain political activists whose work threatens the very foundation of the fascist regime that runs our nation, or about that fascist regime – and even more difficult to know what he would have done if he had to work under the circumstances political activists must work under today. Forty-two years ago King’s biggest problem was an FBI whose technologies and strategies for socially exterminating political activists were in their infancy. Today, a Martin Luther King, Jr., would simply not be possible. There can be no doubt that that is precisely what our nation’s government intended because the same human and civil rights abuses that were used on African-Americans to keep them “in their places” are now used on all political activists, regardless of their skin color, and have been enhanced in ways by which Hitler would be awed. I don’t think King would be pleased with that type of equality, not even in a country with an African-American president. I think he would be deeply aggrieved and ashamed.

We may no longer see postcards being sold of “strange fruit,” to use the heart-breaking yet poetic metaphor immortalized by Billie Holiday to refer to the victims of lynching, but when we have political activists who’ve been subjected to political repression by the FBI and the CIA and who are then gunned down in churches on Sunday mornings by local law enforcement, and when members of alleged human rights groups remain silent about such atrocities, though they’ve been apprised of them (and have laughed in the face of this particular political activist when she observed the fact that this act, in particular, represents fascism pure and simple), we know we’re facing the same type of opposition that King faced, multiplied exponentially -- opposition that forced him to the conclusion quoted above. The worst thing about this refusal to acknowledge the beast in our midst is that it spawns a dangerous capitulation by which no one is served.

In her 1963 articles for the New York Times, which were later turned into the book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, philosopher and investigative journalist Hannah Arendt gives us the history of the extent to which Hungarian Jews, in particular, colluded with the Nazis. In, “Chapter XII: Deportations from Central Europe – Hungary and Slovakia” Arendt writes: “On the very evening of their arrival, Eichmann and his men invited the Jewish leaders to a conference, to persuade them to form a Jewish Council, through which they could issue their orders and to which they would give, in return, absolute jurisdiction over all Jews in Hungary. . . . The president of the Jewish community, Hofrat Samuel Stern, a member of [Hungary’s de facto regent, Admiral] Horthy’s Privy Council, was treated with exquisite courtesy and agreed to be head of the Jewish Council. . . . And corruption, first simulated as a trick, soon turned out to be real enough, though it did not take the form the Jews had hoped. Nowhere else did Jews spend so much money without any results whatsoever. . . . and Wislicency [of Budapest local government] brought up again the so-called Europe Plan, which he had proposed in vain in 1942 and according to which Himmler supposedly would be prepared to spare all Jews except those in Poland for a ransom of two or three million dollars. On the strength of this proposal . . . the Jews now started paying installments to Wislicency. . . . The prosecution [Eichmann’s, in Israel, after he was kidnapped from Argentina by Israel’s secret police] could not prove that Eichmann had profited financially while on the job, stressed rightly his high standard of living in Budapest . . . “ And the result of this capitulation? Not the sparing of Hungarian Jews for which the Privy Council had hoped “. . . the number of death commandos manning the gas chambers was increased from 224 to 860, so that everything was ready for killing between six thousand and twelve thousand people a day. . . . The whole operation in Hungary lasted less than two months and came to a sudden stop at the beginning of July. Thanks chiefly to the Zionists, it had been better publicized than any other phase of the Jewish catastrophe, and Horthy had been deluged with protests from neutral countries and from the Vatican. . . . Of an original population of eight hundred thousand, some hundred and sixty thousand must still have remained in the Budapest ghetto – the countryside was judenrein [expunged of Jews] – and of these, tens of thousands became victims of spontaneous pogroms.” When the so-called opposition is controlled by the fascists in power, as it is here, in America, no one is safe – because fascists are liars, as well as murderers, and your turn to be marched off to the gas chamber (well, today’s gas chamber is AIDS) will come eventually.

So today, as I think about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy, and as I wish that it were the legacy he would want it to be, one that inspires others to do the work for justice and equality that he did, I hope for the impossible: I hope, since Martin can’t be raised from the dead, that his true message of justice, equality and freedom for all, finds voice in all those of you who genuinely wish to honor him, and that those of you who collude with the fascists in power here – if there be any among you who do – will stop to think about what it is you are creating with your collusion.

David Gilmore wrote this song about his wife, but if you read the words, they have an eerie poignancy today, on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. You can hear the song at the link on the left. It’s really beautiful.

"Coming Back To Life"

Where were you when I was burned and I was broken

While the days slipped by from my window, watching

Where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless

Because the things you say and the things you do surround me

While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words

Dying to believe in what you heard

I was staring straight into the shining sun

Lost in thought and lost in time

While the seeds of life and the seeds of change were planted

Outside the rain fell dark and slow

While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistible pastime

I took a heavenly ride through our silence

I knew the moment had arrived

For killing the past and coming back to life

[beautiful bridge]

I took a heavenly ride through our silence

I knew the waiting had begun

And I headed straight

into the shining sun

Which way are you heading?

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Uncle Ted Has Died. RIP.

I suppose it’s not prescience that I knew Uncle Ted would die this week. I thought of him Tuesday, just before he did -- about how he hadn’t even gone to his sister, Eunice’s, funeral the week before last. Anyone would have suspected he wasn’t doing well, and, to be honest, I merely suspected it because I didn’t want to think about his impending passing any more than any of his friends, colleagues and family must have wanted to think about it. I’m sure they have nothing but pleasant reminiscences of, and kind tributes for, him, but I’m not sure what I’m feeling today. I am clear, though, on what I think -- what I can only think -- about the man.

Of course, I wish Senator Kennedy an easy transition, and I delight in the joy, love and comfort I know he will find among his beloved family members already on the other side even as I wish there were not so many of them there. Naturally, I hope his judgment isn’t too arduous, and that he remembers to forgive himself when the pain he (like we all) must experience as he adjudicates himself -- pain that mimics that which we have inflicted on others in our lives -- becomes too great to bear. Forgiveness is the only way to end that pain, and one can only know how to forgive one’s self if one realizes that we all need to be forgiven -- that forgiveness is what truly makes the world go ‘round. That we learn to forgive others during our lifetimes is important but still secondary to this truth about the nature of forgiveness, a truth that is prerequisite to learning how to do that. At the heart of it is what makes us moral beings -- our ability to empathize with others, especially in their worst moments; to say, “There but for the grace of G_d go I.” This is a truth I believe Ted Kennedy explored energetically while he was alive -- one, the knowledge of which, I know, will ease his transition. Having said that, I’m still a little ambivalent about Uncle Ted.

Senator Kennedy was elected eight months after I was born to hold the Senate seat his brother had vacated when JFK ran for and was elected president. As we know, he was very much a human being -- flawed in all the ways the privileged and powerful are, but, unlike most of them, he was introspective, empathic and even humble, not merely intelligent. I defy anyone to listen to his passionate speech to Congress in defense of Anita Hill without feeling either gratitude to him for taking on the task of remonstrating his colleagues, or shame for the fact that he had to, or both. I wept when I first heard it, and as I remember it now, I realize that Ted Kennedy’s true legacy isn’t of the reckless young adult who lost his head in a tragic accident that took the life of a young girl, Mary Jo Kopeckne; it isn’t that he lived his life under scrutiny most of us can never imagine simply because of his name and the fact that his three older brothers gave their lives, each of them in his own way, as true American patriots; it’s not even that he was the last, greatest, living liberal in Congress. Ted Kennedy’s actual legacy to us all is the example of a precious and diminishing humanity here in the United States because he endured all these things and more with grace, fighting publicly the inevitable addictions which those burdens provoked -- and conquering them. He could have become the biggest, most arrogant jerk of all time -- just another of the many beltway assholes, like George Bush (or one even greater than George Bush since the dynasty from which he came was so much more authentically American than the Loyalist Bush dynasty). But he wasn’t.  For much of his career, he served the people, not merely his party.  I have to believe that the strength of character he found in middle age to be his own person and accept the unique challenges that he faced throughout his later years with a previously unfamiliar equanimity came from a deep spiritual awareness and not some political advisor.  This fact about Ted Kennedy, more than any other, is what inspires in me a respect for the man, and it is one of the two that I will remember about him until the day I die.

Our country’s system of governance has slid into a repressive military regime in my lifetime that wields power, as all fascist regimes do, through a private-public alliance which takes the majority of the public’s funds and uses it to promote private, mostly military-related enterprises, not the general welfare, as our Constitution stipulates. Ted Kennedy, like the two of his three older brothers who were assassinated, tried to fight that slide, with often little support. Most people don’t see the fascism under which we Americans currently live because they don’t wish to see it and because the few of us who do see the many ways in which it manifests are kept from attaining positions of influence. It’s easy for the world’s greatest military power to deny the right to association to its dissidents, first because there aren’t many of us to challenge it, and second because the fact is that no one has any civil rights if they don't have the ability to enforce them, and that takes money. Senator Kennedy was once the only lion-like voice in our Congress for our country’s increasing population of poor and under-privileged, the chum caught in the maw of this war monster. That singularity, I am convinced, has not been entirely his own making. He tried -- and failed, as anyone can see from popular books such as Barbara Erenrich’s, Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America -- to keep the majority of us from joining their ranks, but since most of his colleagues occupied themselves exclusively with promoting businesses and markets developed within our military-industrial complex, he had to do this work, increasingly, alone.  It couldn’t have been a comfortable existence he lived in the 1970s and 1980s, and when, in the 1990s, George H.W. Bush hailed the advent of “the new world order” and American supremacy, of “law and order” government, instead of one that is of, by and for the people and assures the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” of all American citizens, he must have been completely distraught.  How Ted Kennedy didn’t become schizophrenic during his career is not so much a mystery but a phenomenon in the presence of which we should all feel a sense of humility. Still, this seemingly miraculous imperviousness to a debasement no one in Washington seems able to resist deserves some exploration.

Today, as I struggle to live in the wall-less prison constructed for me by the Pentagon, I find myself asking, “What should we have expected for ourselves when we asked so much from this one, single man; when we asked him to do the work all of us ought to have been doing; when we told him tacitly that it’s fine to play both ends against the middle, trying to uphold the Constitution while simultaneously undermining it by promoting “free” market socioeconomic policies and acquiescing to the private marketeers that have destroyed the public sector; to ask him to do what no person has ever done successfully before -- to serve two masters?” He was one mere mortal who was surrounded by jackals determined to drag this country into an autocratic, even theocratic, military dictatorship and to torture and kill everyone who stands in their way, including a president and presidential hopeful. Another of Ehrenrich’s book, Fear of Falling, explicates vividly how the American middle class has retreated from liberal causes under the growing threat of the fascism in which we now live. We’ve been told, explicitly and implicitly, the only way any of us can be assured of living in a dignified manner is to turn our backs on each other and concern ourselves only with our own interests. And so we have. Instead, we walk, we dine, we run to raise money to charities of whose missions the average donor has no conception, never mind its mandate for self-perpetuation, which contradicts the now merely assumed modus operandi of health charities, which are, in theory, designed to eliminate specific diseases (and, in so doing, their raison d'étre, which, of course, they will never do).  Now we have no public sphere that represents us all -- no common government. It’s Luxembourg, right here. When I reflect on these facts, I realize it’s not fair to subject Senator Kennedy to a more stringent standard of conduct and character than we have ever applied to any of our government officials, or to ourselves, just because he bore a name that has come to symbolize all the most lofty aspirations of the American dream -- especially when very few other Congresspersons have achieved of their own volition the same level of character (excepting, of course, Paul Tsongas, Paul Wellstone and Mel Carnahan).  Even as we have failed Ted by failing to support his more liberal work, he has graciously tried to do for us what we have been unwilling, not just unable, to do for ourselves, when he needn’t have even bothered.  He’s even managed to achieve remarkable things for us, however impermanent they’ve been, such as brief and evaporating public funding for the arts.

He was the face of truth in government, of open government and of government accountability in the 1970s and 1980s even as his high-profile campaigns for the same went nowhere.  He was the senator who formed the committee in 1974 headed by Frank Church and Nelson Rockefeller to investigate evidence of CIA technological abuse of vast populations of the American citizenry’s minds.  He probably thought since his brothers were so loved by Americans many others would be willing to risk their lives, too, to expose the truth about the CIA and force a change or end to it since it had been instrumental in his brothers’ murders. He thought wrongly, as it turned out. The subsequent report on CIA mind control experiments supported civil law suits against the agency by a fraction of those it had harmed, but the success of those suits has never been widely publicized and has been all but forgotten today, their plaintiffs still languishing in torment even as the CIA and the FBI continue to create new victims with their programs, such as the Monarch children. When one considers that Ted Kennedy had to live with the naked lies and myths of the Warren report about the assassination of the elder of his two brothers who were publicly murdered, and the nagging and unanswered questions of CIA involvement in Sirhan Sirhan’s role in his next eldest brother’s assassination, it’s a wonder he never quit public service -- something he had more than enough money to do.  While FOIA is a joke today, who can forget the Bork hearings?  Who among us wouldn’t have been at least jaded by experiences such as Ted Kennedy's, and yet, he genuinely seemed to care about the American people, their freedom and their governmental institutions.  I’m sure he must have at least wondered at times why he should have cared about the many thankless of us he served; he was only human, after all.  Still, for much of his career, Ted Kennedy was there for us -- even when we weren’t here for ourselves. It's impossible to say when the change in him occurred, or whether it was incremental, or at one decisive moment.

I never met Senator Kennedy, though I did write to him -- three times -- when I was growing more sick with non-HIV/AIDS and was being abused by all of the doctors I went to for answers about and treatment for the mysterious disease I had, shunted by them into research programs run by equally abusive scientists. My first two letters were even nice ones. I never had a reply from him, which annoyed me by the time I wrote the third. I called his office, asking if the Senator had received my first letter; I was assured he had and that I would receive a reply. When the promised reply never came, I called his office again and asked if I could have a copy of it, which I was assured the Senator had sent. I asked for it to be faxed to me. I was told that was impossible. When I asked if I could pick up a copy of it, I was again told that would be impossible. No email, either. I was angry for a long time with Senator Kennedy and his minions over their disregard for me and the untold millions of American and other world citizens like me -- until I realized the necessity of this charade.

Senator Kennedy was the Chairman of the HELP Committee -- Congress’s committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. As such, it was his job to oversee the crafting of official federal AIDS policies that would distribute federal monies to former government scientists heading up private institutions and enterprises that would profit from researching the disease in all its many forms. These policies, of course, were based on lies that are still as obvious today as the “lone gunman” theory. Here’s a quick review of some of the facts that contradict the lies our government has told and does tell about AIDS: (1) most of the study subjects (nearly 60%) in which the group of retroviruses the U.S. government has dubbed “HIV” was detected did not have AIDS, leading to the inescapable conclusion that another pathogen, not merely HIV, was at least involved in making the disease fatal; (2) of the original victims of HIV/AIDS all had virulent herpes virus infections which were far more detectable and pernicious than the HIV; (3) all retroviruses, even those in the group that is called HIV, require another virus in which to live and propagate, such as a herpes virus. This suggests that HIV(then AIDS) is a multi-part bioweapon -- one that can be deployed over time with the subsequent administration of its components. When this observation is considered with fact number 5, below, it, too, becomes fact. If you know nothing about our country’s despicable history of bioweapon development, or the state of the science of proteonomics and biotechnology, and you find these facts shocking, then perhaps it’s time you learn such things. It’s all in the public domain; (4) the “HIV” found in the original study samples were inert particles of retroviruses, which is why they were hard to find and had to be “re-grown” with PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, once their detritus were detected. This was one of the reasons the international science community (including Dr. Luc Montagnier, of the Pasteur Institute, the discoverer of HIV) protested the U.S.’s designation of HIV as the cause of AIDS. I’m not suggesting it’s impossible a hybrid -- or several hybrids -- of herpes and retrovirus particles have been genetically combined to create the infectious agents that cause all the AIDS in the world, and I think it’s notable that these epidemics erupted after the 1981 Supreme Court decision granting scientists property rights to those of them who create new organisms, up to and excepting a whole human being. Bioweapons, like all weapons, have huge world-wide markets; (5) another reason the international science community has protested the designation of HIV as the cause of AIDS was and has been because of the simultaneous eruption of other types of AIDS, such as secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, in which a retrovirus, MSRV, is also present; and non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma, diagnosed variously as chronic mono-cum-yuppie flu-cum-chronic fatigue syndrome, which, with the addition of more virulent retroviral/herpes pathogens becomes chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome, or myalgic encephalitis, to cover up this non-HIV/AIDS. All these types of AIDS, in which are seen the same types of pathogens (cancer-causing retroviruses, cancer-causing herpes and hepatic viruses, mycoplasma and yeast parasites) in groups of similar numbers are aberrations that fly in the face of conventional wisdom about the way pathogens evolve. If these unique groups are erupting in epidemics simultaneously, as they have been (even though you, the public, haven’t been told they have been, because these epidemics, like the HIV/AIDS epidemic, have been denied as such and named everything but what they are; our government knows a moving target is harder, but not impossible, to hit, harder for the layperson to recognize), that epidemiological behavior contradicts well-established theories of evolutionary biology -- and that’s why you don’t hear about them, any more than you heard about the original victims of HIV/AIDS, or any other of our government’s bioslaves, such as the Philadelphia Survivors Network and the atomic era vets. It’s why, nearly two decades after mycoplasma infections along with other pathogenic co-factors exhibiting signs similar to the herpes encephalitis seen in both HIV/AIDS and non-HIV/AIDS, George W. Bush bothers himself to publicly deny the existence of Gulf War Syndrome epidemic. Its victims are yet more [veteran] bioslaves. If Uncle Ted had replied to any of my letters, he would have had to acknowledge that I had an AIDS the government has been covering up -- the government of which he has been a part my entire life, the government he already tried and failed to confront and hold accountable for his brothers’ murders. He’d have had to admit he has been in a difficult situation his entire career -- or lie to, and thereby abuse, me further.

The people who’ve promoted these lies benefit in all kinds of ways by doing so: charitable trusts employ other trust fund legatees to manage fund-raising campaigns; investment firms grow and distribute for a profit the money the charitable trusts gather; so-called experts get to create private enterprises with these as well as public funds to research the diseases, often covertly because they are private research facilities, such as Harvard University’s; researchers, scientists, academics and doctors working for both public and private endeavors participate in and promote the lies, and in exchange, they get to live in swank communities, like Wellesley and Lexington, and drive Hummers. And they get to do the one thing they love to do more than anything else -- play god. These G_dless American Mengeles love just as much as their BMWs and Hummers their power to distort the truth about what they do by misnaming and renaming the diseases they create, which demonstrates their culpability because they’re implicitly admitting they are lying to us with their deliberate misdiagnoses.  Syphilis to “bad blood.” Non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma to chronic fatigue syndrome. Non-HIV/AIDS to “chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome.” It makes them feel powerful. They do these things because the fascists they serve have told them to do it in order to get the power they crave, the power over others’ lives and deaths. I know one person -- namely, Senator Kennedy -- doesn’t have the ability to go up against all these influences and markets, especially in a country whose only modus operandi is “markets must be protected.” I guess it takes a strange sort of courage not to participate in the abuse of a person you know is perfectly real, and admit you have no power to stop it, but his staff have always behaved a bit less chivalrous, and not merely with me.

In 2007, Veterans for Peace asked at a peace rally on Boston common for volunteers to join their delegation to Senator Kennedy’s office. They wanted to discuss the toll the invasion and occupation of Iraq was having on American soldiers with the Senator, so I went, in solidarity, to bolster their numbers. My cousin died as a result of the Vietnam invasion and occupation nearly 40 years ago, on October 18, 1969; I still don’t want anyone’s family to be ripped apart the way ours has been by war. My particular concern, though, has been for the children we send to invade and occupy foreign countries that have not offended us, since that’s immoral and unconstitutional. When I mentioned to the Kennedy aide our delegation met with that day that adolescence lasts until age 25 and that, as such, it’s cruel to expect those of them serving in the military to make life-dependent judgments they are not fully developmentally prepared to make, he related with obvious approval the tale of a 15 year-old war hero from the Second World War who had lied about his age to enlist and then distinguished himself in combat, as though we should be routinely enlisting 15 year-olds, instead of adults over 25, and asking them to die. Then he blushed -- as well he should have. How could I expect Uncle Ted, one man, to fight the foes in our government, if he couldn’t even keep track of the ones in his own office?

I realize the majority of Americans today are happy with the Disneyfied lies about our country its leaders have always told about it and themselves, and that the citizens of Massachusetts, in particular, love the lies that enable them to live without scrutinizing their more base, patently unAmerican and unChristian, even inhumane, motivations. Look at the Salem witch trials. Many people today think the trials happened because the victims were proponents of an ancient religion, and that the trials represent what happens when religious intolerance pervades society -- because that’s what some so-called Wiccans have said about the Martyrs for the past two decades. But that’s not why the Salem witch trials happened. The Salem witch trials were not about religious intolerance. All of the victims of the Salem witch trials were Protestant “Puritans” (some, more devout than others and likely the targets of their persecutors because of their piety). That attribute alone is what qualified them and their progenitors for passage on ships to this, the “new world.” They were escaping religious persecution, not sailing to it. Remember “Bloody” Mary, England’s Catholic monarch who persecuted Protestants, and Mary’s dad, Henry Tudor, who had as much compassion for the first Protestants, the Lutherans, as he had had for the Catholics he persecuted after breaking with Rome so he could marry Ann Boleyn (which is to say, not much; he burned them both with equal fervor)? Henry’s other daughter, Elizabeth I, expelled and persecuted Catholics for believing the Pope and only the Pope to be God’s emissary on earth, and James I (who commissioned the first Protestant Bible for the Anglican church, the King James version), as Elizabeth I’s successor, was viewed as being too lenient on the Catholic Church for not making war more strenuously with countries under Rome’s dominion. James’ son, Charles I, whom the Puritans believed was as corrupt as the Pope, married a Catholic and sparked a movement by members of King Henry VIII’s Anglican church who, in the tradition of Martin Luther, wanted to “purify” the church of its resemblances to the Pope’s church -- principally, the legalism that held the reigning monarch to be God’s emissary on earth. These “Puritans” believed God’s word, [His] Bible, was the only embodiment of God on earth and, as such, accessible to each person according to his or her attentiveness to its teachings. Charles I charged his very own Torquemada, Bishop Laud, with arresting, torturing and putting to death the Puritans for their defiance of his law requiring them to acknowledge him as God’s only emissary on earth. The community of Salem Village (now, Danvers, Massachusetts, not the current town of Salem) was established by people who practiced “Antimonianism.” They believed that one’s salvation was predestined and in no way mediated by any human, whether Pope or King, and they refused to follow the laws the King passed which dictated the ways in which they were to worship God. They had been persecuted by their monarch for denying he was God’s emissary just as their monarch had once persecuted Catholics for regarding the Pope, and not the King, as such. Still, the Puritans who settled the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were hardly of one mind on the subjects of who had access to God and in what manner and to what degree that communication with God took place. The governors of the land, who were still King Charles’ subjects and were both magistrates and ministers who made no distinction between the state’s right to administer justice and that of the church fathers, banished those among them who claimed they were both “divinely inspired” by God, as Anne Hutchinson believed herself to be when she preached to her neighbors outside the church, and those who felt they had an ability for direct communication with God, as the Quakers did. After Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was banished from Boston, left and then returned, the magistrates hanged her on Boston Common. Even still, banishment from the colonies, not torture or death at the stake, was the official, universally accepted method of weeding the colony of non-conformists. That’s how the Puritans attempted to maintain the religious homogeneity of their community. Salem Village was more than 60 years old by the time of the witch trials, more than old enough to have its share of divisiveness based on issues other than religious beliefs and practice (of conscience) that had been dividing the Boston colony, issues which without doubt promoted grudges and vendettas. The victims of the Salem witch trials died because their neighbors -- out of greed, jealousy, spite or mob rule -- denounced and martyred their victims for their own petty reasons, and they did so by condemning their victims as the one thing by law their society wouldn’t tolerate: witches.

The Salem witch trials’ victims were administratively murdered by their government not because they actually were witches, but because their persecutors were more than familiar with how to terrorize and eradicate the vulnerable among them, for all their espousals of communitarian ideals. Anyone who didn’t conform strictly to social norms above and beyond lawful behavior, and even those who did but who also happened to have something of value coveted by the rapacious and powerful in Salem Village -- such as Rebecca Nurse her family’s land -- was vulnerable to attack. The victims were merely denounced as the type of social outcast which governments in their day routinely killed on hardly more evidence than mere suspicion, just like the CIA has tortured and killed innocent Iraqis and other Arabs these past six years. That’s how all communities have always gotten rid of innocent people of conscience. In 1692 Salem Village, just as exists today among vigilante gangstalkers trained by the FBI as ‘Neighborhood Watch’ groups, there was no such thing as a difference between actual and circumstantial evidence and gossip, or the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers. Persecution was, and is, based on personal vendetta. The governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, representing the government of England, were the law, and unless the accused falsely admitted consorting with the devil, they were tortured, starved and (19, at least) eventually, hanged. The governors were so vicious, they even let an infant who was born in the jail die of disease and starvation; no such thing as the practical application of the “doctrine of tainted blood,” then, either. They even pressed Giles Corey, an old man, to death under boulders because he wouldn’t falsely confess to being a witch. They even hanged two dogs belonging to the victims. But none of the victims practiced anything like today’s Wicca. Seems that Ninth Commandment was just as necessary to civil society and just as weak in protecting it in 1692 Salem Village as it was when Moses first chiseled it on a tablet, a fact as obvious as the fact that all of the victims of the Salem witch trials were merely vulnerable people who got in the way of the powerful, the powerful who hid behind scared and ethically inexperienced children. This is why the separation of church and state is so important; when your persecutors have God on their side, you have no chance. Thus, the most obvious -- and least often acknowledged -- lesson from the Salem witch trials: as long as there have been people, they’ve been people, and the ones with absolute power -- God’s power -- have always been corrupt absolutely. Those who are our governors today persecute anyone and everyone who gets in their way, just as governors with absolute power everywhere and in all time have done. Pope Gregory IX.  Sheriff Corwin.  Hitler.   Dick Cheney and his cabal. You name it.

We haven’t really learned much since 1692, it seems; like how not to live down to our deepest capacities for ignoring the persecution of the innocents who get in the way of the powerful among us. The victims of McCarthyism. The Anti-war activists victimized by the FBI in the 1960s, 1980s and today. People protesting for civil rights. The current victims of the 35-year campaign of persecution of liberals beginning with the Kennedy brothers’ murders.  Perception management campaigns make us believe that Al Qaeda’s -- and by inference, all Arabs’ -- power is great enough to successfully attack the U.S., unbeknownst to our government (as if that could ever happen, when NOAA has routinely surveilled all our phone, radio and digital communications for decades), and imbue in many Americans a vengeance that blinds them to the fact that none of us is free of the tyranny our military dictators have imposed on us all. The mob rule that killed Salem Village’s martyrs is the same mob rule that killed Jesus, which is the same mob rule that has killed all activists the powerful deem most threatening -- those who speak the truth against these dictators. They kill their martyrs over and over again by killing the influence those martyrs may otherwise have had on their society. They socially exterminate martyrs as much as they physically exterminate them -- by declaring those martyrs as social outcasts, as witches, or terrorists. One would think that after all this time and all our wayward experiences we’d be a nation more, not less, committed to the ideal that we share in one another’s weal and woe, and yet, those who have the best interests of all America’s citizens at heart are usually the ones our military dictatorship persecutes, as Attorney Brian Glick demonstrated in his 1989 book, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It.  Gated communities for the privileged -- who, rightfully, fear the excesses of the vigilantes they have created -- have replaced forever any attempt at truly communitarian, so-called utopian societies such as Amos Alcott’s Fruitlands.

Another thing about the Salem witch trials most people today also don’t know is that every last one of the victims has been officially exonerated by the legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts -- because there were no witches. Not within any timeframe, mind you, to have benefitted either the martyrs families’, or even the Commonwealth. I heard a woman at the Martyrs’ Memorial on Halloween, 2006, ask her husband, “So these were the witches?” It doesn’t profit the tourist industry in Salem for people to know the truth about the Martyrs; Salem must have its witches. Justice delayed is justice denied, for sure, but the Puritan community in Massachusetts suffered from protracted and needless internecine strife because it took so long to officially recognize the martyrs as such. One of the main accusers of the martyrs, Anne Putnam, confessed her part in the “hysteria” as a young adult after many years’ encouragement from the Village’s new minister, the Rev. Greene, because she wished to redeem herself and join the church, but the martyrs’ official records weren’t expunged for centuries. Many of their family members lived under suspicion and in bitterness for generations. Today, many people in the City of Salem earn their livelihoods because of the lie that there were witches, just as loads of people, including JFK, like to claim Massachusetts as birthplace of the separation of church and state. That claim is only credible if we see the Commonwealth as the de facto midwife of this movement. We should remember that it wasn’t the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that gave birth to the movement for the separation of church and state. It was Rhode Island, which was established by a former member of the Boston settlement, Roger Williams, who had been banished even after loyally serving the colony as liaison among the various native tribes in the region. He just thought he had a right to speak his mind about the nature of his relationship with G_d after sailing half-way around the world to this, at the time, inhospitable land. After he founded Providence, he sailed back to England to procure from Charles II a patent for a new colony which became the state of Rhode Island and encouraged the King to pass a law in the new colony specifically prohibiting banishment from it on the basis of religious belief or practice, thereby cleaving the influence of church elders from the affairs of state.

The woman at the martyrs’ memorial in Salem on Halloween, 2006, obviously saw no correlation between the Salem witch trials’ victims and other martyrs -- martyrs, like, say, Jesus, who also died because he chose to tell the truth about the corruption of Rome and its unjust rule over the society that it had created in Judea. Haven’t the Salem Martyrs been used enough? Haven’t we abused the reputations of and used the innocents in our midst enough? Haven’t we lied enough? Haven’t we had enough martyrs?

Well, what of Plymouth and its rock? Every American school child learns that the pilgrims came to this country seeking freedom of religion and landed on this rock, but in reality, Mayflower logs and crew members’ journals demonstrate that the ship was moored off the coast of what is now Truro, at the end of the Cape, not the top, for nearly a month, and that the Pilgrims’ first excursion to land was at what is now Corn Hill in the north of pre-Colonial Truro, and then to what is now “First Encounter” beach in Welfleet, with another stop along the way. First Encounter beach is where the Pilgrims, well, first encountered some of the aboriginal people then living in this country, the Wampanoags. No Plymouth. No rock. Plymouth was the place they eventually founded as a fortification because it was the most protected area they could find, overlying the bay as it does, that wasn’t already inhabited and that had fresh water. But Plymouth must have its tourist industry, too, and therefore, its lies. On Thanksgiving each year the local Wampanoag tribe in Plymouth hold a day of mourning in the town to memorialize their own martyrs -- the native peoples killed by English colonists, principally, in the Pequot massacre and King Phillips’ war since Anglos founded this country. It is their way of honoring those who died for the truth, which is that no one who claims self-righteously to do be doing G_d’s work and then turns around and kills peaceful and innocent babies, children, women and men is at all G_d revering. This is why the separation of church and state is so important; when your persecutors have God on their side, you have no chance.

We do love our lies -- and the money many of us make by putting them about -- we citizens of Massachusetts and America. What was it that Hitler said about lies -- the bigger they are, the more people will believe them?  That maxim, in America, translates into more money for the powerful, who are our military dictators. Arabs decided to start a “symbolic” war with America, according to our leaders, by ploughing planes into impact-resistant skyscrapers and a secure military facility in a no-fly zone.  AIDS occurred naturally.  “Clean” coal. The Salem martyrs were witches.   Haven’t we had enough lies?

It’s a miracle Uncle Ted didn’t go stark raving mad, never mind achieve the personal greatness I believe he did by staying true to his liberal convictions for as long as he really did.  Not two years ago, Senator Kennedy received more than $10 million to write his autobiography.  I suspect that if the truth about his life and career were ever told, the world would be shocked by how many cloak-and-dagger tactics the promotion of each of them involved; you can’t learn that the government you serve was involved in your brothers’ murders and keep your sanity by not doing anything with this knowledge.   I suspect that knowledge was the real reason Senator Kennedy undertook his investigation into the CIA.  It’s an astounding shame today that, contrary to the testimony of insiders, scientific scrutiny and still mounting circumstantial evidence, the United States’ official version of the Kennedy assassinations is that they were both the result of lone, unstable individuals -- both, lies.  Any and every one who espouses the truth about the assassinations is denounced in the most encompassing way as a “conspiracy theorist,” because when our government can’t stop the naked truth from being told about its fascist deeds and structure, it will always seek to supplant that truth with suspicion about its veracity -- suspicion which, by its nature, can neither be proven or denied (because it’s gossip, essentially, like the gossip that killed the Salem martyrs). We Americans do love our lies, in all their forms; we must, or why would we tolerate them? It’s true that a shocking number of the original truth tellers about the assassinations of Senator Kennedy’s brothers have died mysterious deaths, but doesn’t that fact rather indict even more the liars? How Uncle Ted managed to live sanely and productively as long as he did is nothing short of a miracle.

Most people will reflexively think of Uncle Ted this week as the last surviving Kennedy to hold a political office of his generation, but I am left also with the unavoidable and overt impression that he was the one who lived; that he was allowed to live because he was a useful public relations tool from which the fascist military dictatorship under which we now live has benefitted handsomely -- the image of the true liberal who rails against the growing tyranny of what is clearly fascism in America (without noting that it is, curiously), a living symbol of freedom and “democracy.”  He didn’t challenge the status quo too much after America threw him to its wolves when, in 1976, his committee published the Rockefeller Report, and, in return, he was allowed to pursue his interests, however far-ranging and to whatever degree didn’t upset the powers that be (funding for the arts; challenging Supreme Court nominations, helping an immigrant here and there). I can’t help but note that the word, “liberal,” though, is one that derives its meaning from the word, “liberty,” and just as nothing Ted Kennedy ever did in the last 33 of his almost 50 years in Congress to maintain the impetus of liberty with which our country was founded and which is inscribed in our Constitution as sacrosanct has been either sufficient and/or of permanence, so, too, is the sham of our Constitutional Republic patent. It turns out Senator Kennedy’s “liberal” image has been just that -- an image, after all. That is now, sadly, an irrefutable fact and one that calls into question the character and motives of any public official rumored to be even remotely liberal, such as Barack Obama has been merely because of his relationship with the Senator (save for the characterization of him and Michelle by Charles Ogletree, their former law professor, as “conservatives”).  Five months ago, the New York Times reported that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had conveyed the Queen’s knighthood on Senator Kennedy for his service to the cause of peace in Northern Ireland and for his service to U.S.-U.K. relations, in general, which is code for, “his work opening up formerly closed markets for private enterprise and exploitation by global businesses.” There’s something unnerving about a descendant of immigrants from the Emerald Isle bending his knee before the Queen even symbolically, especially when that person was once rumored to have been an IRA sympathizer.  It’s as disturbing as the image of any American bending his knee for the Queen, as former president George H.W. Bush did in 1993. I’m all for world community, but only when that community includes the whole world, not merely its wealthy elites. We -- do -- love -- our -- lies; far more than we love liberty, or the truth, or many of us, each other, including our lions.

Boston’s public radio station, WGBH, began its Classics in the Morning program August 26th with Aaron Copeland’s, Fanfare for the Common Man, a piece that always makes me emotional. I think that’s appropriate. Senator Kennedy did his best to live his liberal convictions in a time in American history when liberal convictions got leaders killed -- which is more than can be said about most Americans, particularly those in his profession. He did it under the constant threat of death, both to himself and to others in his family, when he had only himself and that family to protect him.  When he found he couldn’t live those convictions under that threat, he did what he had to do to protect himself and his loved ones -- particularly, his mother from the premature loss of another son.  He rolled over.   He probably said to himself, 'Well, all these AIDS create markets which create businesses to make treatments for them, such as small-molecule-based HAART (which will never cure any of these AIDS because they’re not designed to), which make many of my constituents rich, and markets must be protected, after all. Never-ending AIDS, like other types of never-ending warfare, is fine, especially since conventional warfare is passé now that it can be waged remotely (and, as such, safely denounced).' Can any of us blame him?  I think not, since to do so without hypocrisy would mean our having exhausted our own energies in the pursuit of our now dead liberty, which is not something any of us today can credibly claim we’ve done.

Citizens of Boston, of Massachusetts and of America -- you who consider yourselves patriots, and you who consider yourselves “liberals” -- if you want to honor Senator Kennedy, I implore you to pick up a book, such as Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (which itself is problematic for its strained avoidance of characterizing the American fascism under which we live as such but is nevertheless informative, just as is preeminent fascist tool John Perkins’s Confessions of An Economic Hit Man).  Open your mind and your eyes. Risk talking the truth with your neighbors, friends, family and colleagues.   Support the Ted Kennedys who are today being, or will soon be, importuned to turn, Senators such as Al Franken. Be a patriot for liberty because if you don’t, you are assuring that Senator Kennedy remains the last liberty-loving patriot to serve our country in its mid-20th century Congress. You are also ensuring that the civil war which is brewing in our country now fulminates.

Rest in peace, Uncle Ted; your slavery is at an end.  If anyone has earned a break, it’s you.

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About Extra-Judicial, State-Sponsored Terrorism

“Curiously, often a classic manifestation of people who are afflicted with certain psychotic disorders is the irrational fear that the CIA and FBI is [sic] conspiring to harm them. In this case, the CIA involvement is real and the covert nature of the involvement is not contested.”

Orlikow v. United States, 682 F. Supp. 77 (D.D.C. 1988)

(Ruling for plaintiff regarding Dr. Ewen Cameron’s MKUltra research for the CIA)

The world (and even some Americans) was horrified in December, 2003 when cell phone pictures of PFC Lynndie England surfaced showing her holding a leash tethered to a naked male Iraqi prisoner’s neck who was lying on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison in the midst of Operation Iraqi Liberation (“OIL”). A firestorm of outrage circled the world in both the mass and other media: text messages appended to copies of the pictures flew around the Middle East among dissenting and defecting soldiers and journalists; bloggers began covering the unfolding scandal and disseminating all its salacious details through RSS feeds; YouTube made available copies of the pictures to the world outside the blogosphere. New outlets such as Al Jazeera and the Associated Press distributed the pictures and stories to the UK’s Guardian and the U.S.’s New York Times. Jihadi had a field day. Activists were moved by the humiliating photos to mobilize and mount protests; America’s Congress was inundated with messages of outrage from constituents, who called for investigations. Bush assembled his legal team and charged them with crafting perversely immoral legal statutes in response to these calls for investigations which exonerated the practices and policies of U.S. torturers in Iraq and elsewhere. We quickly realized that these statutes simply memorialized what U.S. agencies such as the CIA have long been doing to anyone who opposes them, as anyone familiar with the work of the CIA torture school, The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly, the School of the Americas, has known: torture through systematic campaigns of terrorism.

The tactics described below are used by the FBI; the CIA; their subcontractors; federal, state and local agencies; and all military divisions, which are now charged with intelligence work against political dissidents and other law-abiding citizens within the government’s purview which it deems its enemies. These tactics include social extermination through discrediting campaigns of dissidents as either spies for the government, or psychologically unstable and, therefore, not worthy of your attention or assistance in fighting whatever particular oppression with which they may be struggling. People falsely labeled as psychotics and treated as such by mental and other health care professionals in order to remove them from American society, just as “inconvenient” women once were, are victims of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism. These psychological torture tactics have been refined over decades of use by the CIA and FBI working in the community.

In his 1989 activists’ pamphlet, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It, Attorney Brian Glick discovered the FBI waged extensive terrorism campaigns to undermine and dismantle the Women’ movement, the Black Panthers and the Anti-war movement in the 1960s. Their tactics included smear campaigns to discredit the leaders of these groups, who were pitted against one another in controversies contrived by undercover operatives long held in esteem within these groups as trusted members of their communities. Where a target was particularly difficult to discredit, the FBI’s operatives contrived campaigns to get their targets to discredit themselves, sometimes by planting a false rumor within the group and, when the target took up the rumor and promoted it, exposing the rumor as false and casting suspicion among members of the group as to the integrity of the target. This was the most effective way of creating a “snitch” jacket for the target, since regardless of what the rumor was, if it undermined or even deterred a little from the work of the group and caused the group to be viewed with suspicion, it was effective at alienating members of the group from the target. Once isolated, the target was effectively neutralized. This is what was done to American Indian Movement (AIM) activist AnnaMae Aquash, who was subsequently lured to an isolated area on the Pine Ridge Reservation one night and shot to death by the actual snitches in AIM.

These and many other illegal and inhumane terrorism practices were first developed in the CIA’s COINTELPRO program for use against political activists in the 1960s. When this program was exposed in the 1970s, Congress -- led by Sen. Ted Kennedy -- created a committee to investigate it. He appointed Sen. Nelson Rockefeller and Sen. Frank Church to lead the investigation. They held hearings and interviewed agency personnel and then wrote a report, effectively assuring the American people that COINTELPRO had been dismantled. Victims of COINTELPRO began suing the United States government -- and winning their cases. However, in 1981, Ronald Reagan codified the use of COINTELPRO against law-abiding Americans such as political activists (§2.9) in Executive Order No. 12333 (December 4, 1981). This order also grants to the FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines the right to use “counterintelligence activities . . . within the United States” (Glick, Brian: War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It, 1989, South End Press, p. 31). COINTELPRO is still in use today. Clearly, Congress lied. Political activists were routinely subjected to COINTELPRO throughout the 1980s when Reagan’s terrorists were supporting wars throughout central America and doing the same thing to Latinos. The American government tortures Americans just as it funds and promotes terrorism abroad. It has for a long, long time. Systematic torture is terrorism. To be more specific about the particular type of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism practiced by the American government on American citizens who are dissidents of its political policies, consider this:

Torture, an illegal and immoral practice, is extrajudicial when used by government agents and their subcontractors since, when it is used, it is used in the place of judicially imposed measures intended to be rehabilitative against those who are found to be criminals. While they should never be used against anyone, they are particularly onerous when used against those merely alleged to be criminals. When applied systematically in multiple campaigns against a person or a group of people, torture is terrorism. Terrorism promoted by a government is state-sponsored terrorism.

The clear mandates expressed by America’s imperialists to oppress and persecute innocents, as well as the stories of those Americans such as myself who are treated this way, is more than enough evidence to demonstrate we are still being -- and will continue to be -- persecuted.

The persecution liberals experience through social extermination of necessity extends to the workplace, where most individuals spend most of their time. Everyone’s heard of blacklisting. Famous writers, scientists and academics -- particularly, those who were Jewish -- were deemed dangerous, even communist, because of their often liberal beliefs and persecuted as such during the 1950s as “un-American.” The “Red Scare” started with Sen. Eugene McCarthy and his congressional investigations of famous liberals. Fear of liberal intellectuals propelled by ignorance of the difference between totalitarianism and various forms of communism, including socialism, spread throughout America. Any liberal who seemed in the least way stereotypical of those McCarthy was persecuting was fired and discriminated against in seeking employment. McCarthy’s witch hunts were eventually discredited, but not before many lives and careers were ruined. Later, anti-discrimination laws passed in the 1960s gave protections to some of those types of persons formerly persecuted by the prejudices McCarthy’s hearings created based on religious and ethnic characteristics. New opportunities became available for liberals protected by these class distinctions. But persecution of other liberals still continues.

Today, blacklisting has morphed into a practice called “workplace mobbing.” Often instituted by management against employees deemed as threats, it is practiced widely throughout the developed world, research suggests, against as much as 20% of any country’s employees, who include academics as well as others. Mobbing includes the same tactics used by gangstalkers: discrediting targets with their peers using false rumors or set-ups in which the employee discredits him- or herself; isolating the target in other ways such as minimizing his or her responsibility; humiliating the target through various means including group insubordination against targets who hold supervisory positions. The goal is to discredit the target not merely to force him or her out of a particular workplace but out of the entire workforce, thereby achieving the same goal as blacklisting. Research has shown that campaigns follow targets from employer to employer, often causing the target severe mental and physical health problems. Though countries in western Europe have laws expressly prohibiting these well-defined practices, the United States have no such laws. The only recourse an employee has against an employer who instigates workplace mobbing is through anti-discrimination laws or OSHA laws, which necessitate that the target be a member of one of the already protected classes of anti-discrimination laws by virtue of a disability, or his or her race.

This represents fascism.

In a particularly alarming case of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism disguised as ‘excessive police force’ that demonstrates clearly the long-standing collusion between federal police forces such as the FBI and local law enforcement, environmental and peace activist, Robert Woodward was shot 7 times -- at least once in the back -- as he lay unarmed, face down, on the floor of All Souls Church in Brattleboro, Vermont, on Sunday, December 2nd, 2001, after seeking sanctuary there from the FBI. He died several hours later on an unnecessarily lengthy trip to the local hospital. The shooters -- all Brattleboro, Vermont, police -- were exonerated by then Gov. Howard Dean’s attorney general after a biased, closed investigation. When petitioned by Woodward’s family, Dean refused to censure his attorney general. Woodward’s very public, very unnecessary murder was no accident; any number of the “less-than-lethal” weapons the Brattleboro, Vermont, police had in their possession thanks to Janet Reno could have subdued this distraught, unarmed man, but the Brattleboro police were clearly working at the direction of a higher authority.

The city in which I live is very conscious about its reputation as a liberal one and it spends a lot of money to maintain the façade that it is. It has a city agency with the word “peace” in it’s name which holds peace “fairs” each spring; it has all types of commissions whose work is alleged to be ensuring the rights of the oppressed: women, minorities, immigrants, workers. That’s because the most powerful residents of the city are defense contractors who routinely torture and kill the helpless in pursuit of lucrative government research initiatives and who are just as routinely sued in civil court over these abuses. They are the academic institutions within it’s boundaries and their many private institutions and private corporations. These agencies are staffed by the same people who run local peace groups -- groups whose missions are peace and economic justice; peace and justice for women; peace for foreign countries, etc. Their ties are unmistakable in the form of both the personnel who hold multiple positions and play key roles in each and in the initiatives pursued -- or not -- by both municipal agencies and non-profits. Extra-judicial, state-sponsored terrorism is nowhere on the radars of either, just as human trafficking and its more seamy underside, sexual slavery, are not. But the willful ignorance practiced by these people in order to protect the fascists that control the city in which I live is not the only tell-tale sign of their usurpation by those in control of our closed society. Another sign that evinces their participation in the military campaigns designed by the CIA and orchestrated by the FBI here, in my so-called liberal city, is the fact that some of these alleged activists actually do the work of carrying out these discrediting campaigns.

Your home can be invaded, your possessions vandalized and stolen, your life threatened and even taken by SSGs and gangstalkers working for the FBI, or by the FBI themselves, or any other military agency charged with counterintelligence such as local law enforcement and no matter which law enforcement agency from whom you’ve sought help is derelict in its duty to protect you, you -- or your survivors -- have no legal recourse against them -- because you and your possessions are not in their custody and therefore not subject to their protection. What free person lives in police custody? You are not free in this country when law enforcement can kill you with impunity. Even private police forces such as Blackwater operate with impunity to kill people. They just pay fines assessed in civil suits for the privilege of doing so. And this is how they get away with it -- by calling these incidents acts of private violence instead of what they actually are -- administrative murders at the hands of fascists.

Some local law enforcement officers are exposing and speaking out against the Pentagon’s usurpation of local law enforcement agencies, telling us they have been advised to ignore the pleas for help of FBI targets such as Robert Woodward. People like Robert Woodward are terrorized by Bureau subcontractors tracking their movements using cell control techniques, which have been designed and refined through decades of research. Targets such as Robert Woodward are driven crazy with psychological terror tactics which also have been developed by the Pentagon in order to insulate the state from culpability by making it seem the extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism targets experience are private violences. But it’s extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism and you aren’t hearing the stories of people like Robert Woodward in popular books flacked on The Colbert Report, such as Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (in which, curiously, she makes no mention of this well-documented practice by the FBI of implementing the terror campaigns devised by the CIA against American activists) (2007, Chelsea Publishing), or on the evening network news, for a reason. The same people with the power to conduct these terrorism campaigns also have the power to suppress the information you get about them and their anti-American practices. They exert their power everywhere they possibly can, from making corrupt legislation that permits them to terrorize, torture and kill their opponents, to maiming existing constitutional laws with specious case law that subverts the very letter and spirit of our constitutionally guaranteed rights.

As case law currently stands, local law enforcement agencies are not required to protect any of your civil or human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness against these pseudo-private violences/acts of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism. In Retained by the People: The “Silent” Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don’t Know They Have (2007, Basic Books), UC/Berkeley law school Professor Daniel A. Farber provides a history of the philosophical and political issues that prompted our nation’s Founding Fathers to create an amendment in the Constitution that had the utility of protecting those rights they realized future generations of Americans would need protected but which they could not foresee at the time they wrote the original Constitution. For these “unenumerated” rights, they conceived of the protections guaranteed in the Ninth Amendment. But the Ninth Amendment has never been used. Instead, the legal community has pursued the protections of those rights specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights (the first five amendments of the Constitution) and later rights vis-a-vis their Privileges or Immunities clauses (most often, that of the 14th Amendment but also on occasion the P&I clause of the 5th Amendment). In the pursuit of justice when issues concerning these other, unenumerated rights have been brought to the bar -- such as the right to civil protection by one’s police force -- the Judiciary has refused to recognize any other legislation as controlling the legal arguments in such cases, though the Ninth Amendment was created specifically to do so.

The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment was designed, most scholars agree, to protect the fundamental birth rights of all American citizens as they had been designated in the Declaration of Independence -- those rights which colonists viewed as “natural rights,” such as the right to freedom from oppression and to self-governance. Though less specific than the Bill of Rights, which protected individuals from the Federal government, the Privileges or Immunities clause of the 14th Amendment was designed to protect individuals from the actions of the state. But the federal and state government routinely abridge the most fundamental rights of Americans and, when pressed for redress, subvert the intention of founders of this country to protect natural rights by abuse of another clause, the due process clause. They have contended these clauses protect all the natural and other rights both the Ninth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities clause do, but in reality, they do not. Industry has made full use of some peculiar interpretations of and gaps in the due process clause.

Farber writes, “. . . the Supreme Court primarily used the Due Process Clause to protect businesses from economic regulation.” (p. 77) The first such case where it did so was to strike down a law protecting bakers in New York from working excessive (more than 60) hours per week, saying it was a violation of the right of bakers to enter into contracts with their employers for whatever amount of work they chose to provide and was therefore oppressive.

The fight for justice which recognizes the unenumerated rights of individuals continues on the basis that rights must be defined as essential and fundamental -- not an easy thing to do when one is fighting a criminal charge of “sodomy,” for example, by consenting adults who happen to be homosexual, or trying to retain one’s house in an eminent domain case where it’s seized by the government for use by a private development company, as more than 5,700 cases of eminent domain did in 2006 alone. The rights to express oneself freely sexually and to a home -- and even the right to procreate -- are not viewed by today’s guardians of our Constitution as basic rights. But even the enumerated rights -- specifically, the right to life -- has been trampled on by the misuse of the due process clause to the point where the state is now exempt from protecting its most vulnerable citizens.

Farber outlines the case of Joshua DeShaney, who was repeatedly beaten and abused by his father from the time he was three until he was five, when his father succeeded in putting him into a coma which, together with the accumulated head injuries Joshua had sustained, made him profoundly mentally retarded, thereby robbing him of autonomy and freedom. During this time, Joshua’s father was monitored by local child protection officers. These officers had every reason to suspect Joshua’s father continued to beat him since neighbors reported to them that Joshua’s father was abusing him and they were denied access to Joshua on several occasions because, they were told, he was too sick to be interviewed. But they nevertheless left Joshua in his father’s care. In a civil lawsuit against the negligent Department of Social services in which the Supreme Court exonerated the actions of the child protection officers, they wrote in their final ruling, “A State’s failure to protect an individual against a private violence simply does not constitute a violation of the Due Process Clause.” (p. 156) The case hinged on the issue of privacy; in other words, if Joshua had been in the state’s care -- for example, in the foster home in which he should have been placed -- and had been injured or killed there, then, the court ruling implies, he would have been entitled to protection. What does this mean?

In such a situation as exists today in America, where police are excused from performing their basic functions “to protect and serve,” and where they have been legislatively recruited as terrorists no different than Augusto Pinochet’s, when so often their crimes are exonerated by the highest law enforcement officials in the country, the attorneys generals of our states and country, how can we fail to see the obvious -- that America is a closed, military dictatorship run by fascists? The arms’ length covert operations they run are transparent lies evincing their culpability.

Indeed, research has shown that civil and human rights have been gradually disappearing in America. It’s most commonly referred to as violence against women, or racism, but it is a loss that is at least sanctioned -- if not promoted -- by law enforcement. This disappearance of civil and human rights has been parallel to the increase in the use by the state of psychological terrorism -- so-called “mind control” technologies, such as MKUltra and COINTELPRO and directed energy weapons (DEW) technologies. This represents the state application of mass behavior modification technologies. If the state can’t socially exterminate you, they’ll exterminate you in any way they can -- even technologically, if they must, because they can.

How Did This Happen?

Fear motivates. Propaganda works. “The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion,” Edmund Burke once wrote. But the propaganda is far more intense, pernicious and insidious than that used in other countries. For example, our country has experienced numerous coups d’ètat in my life -- one, far from bloodless; another, a so-called “gentleman’s coup” -- and yet, we still don’t speak of them as such. They’re “conspiracy theories” (which by definition can’t be resolved, forever keeping alive the notion that what can be known, can’t), or “voter fraud,” but not what they actually are: coups d’ètat by persons in league with the fascists in control of our country.

Dr. José Delgado, a state-sponsored pioneer of the technology of Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB), memorialized his career-long work developing psychological technologies to remotely control masses of human beings in his 1969 book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. We have an astonishing record of the esteem with which Dr. Delgado’s work was held by the American congress in 1972 that evinces their support of the fascist closing of American society through the mass enslavement of American citizens with what was once called “brain washing” but is now called “mind control” techniques pioneered by Dr. Delgado and proponents of his work. The targets on which Dr. Delgado proposed to use his technologies even he qualified as “normal” people who believe in and work for “liberty,” or liberals. (U.S. Doc. 506, Congressional Record Vol. 118, Part 5, pages 5111 to 6496, 92d. Congress 2d. session, February 23, 1972 to March 1, 1972, deposited by the U.S. government February 11, 1974, in federal depositories. A record of this particular congressional session is contained in pages 5567-5577 of the afore-mentioned Congressional Records, submitted by the “Hon.” Cornelius E. Gallagher, D. NJ.)

Delgado’s research is contained within an exposition and criticism of an alleged world-wide increase in psychosurgery and is presented with a curious absence of the same type of criticism that Rep. Gallagher expresses about that trend, creating the impression of his whole-hearted endorsement of Dr. Delgado’s mass mind control programs. Delgado writes,

‘The individual may think that the most important fact of reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view, a relative frame of reference which is not shared by the rest of the living world. This self-importance also lacks historical perspective, for the brief existence of one person should be considered in the terms of the world population, mankind, and the whole universe.’ p. 236

Delgado dismisses completely the dual subjective-objective nature imbued in all people -- the very nature to which the founding fathers referred as “God-given” -- and evinces not merely the ignorance of his own unexamined life, but of the true nature of humanity: that it is a construct built on morality, which, itself, is built on the individual’s ability to empathize with his or her fellow human beings. People are just objects to Delgado. Not a surprising attitude to find in a fascist, just a shocking one to find in a man of esteemed positions at Yale University and within the psychiatric community. Yet, this criminally stupid and morally decrepit man has had his ideas vetted everywhere in circles of influence, even in Congress. More disturbing still is the fact that what Delgado is justifying is simply Maoist communism -- a complete subversion of the individual for the good of the state, the “psycho-civilized society.” Pretty un-American, especially when one considers on whom Delgado proposes his methods be used: liberals.

Dr. Peter R. Breggin, author of the article that Rep. Gallagher has presented for inclusion in the Congressional Records which reports on Delgado’s work, writes of Delgado,

“He then goes on to attack the notion that man has “the right to develop his own mind,” to develop his own unique potential “while remaining independent and self sufficient.” As he concludes:

‘This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal, but unfortunately its assumptions are not supported by neurophysiological and psychological students of intracerebral mechanisms.’ p. 239’”

What’s new about the U.S. government’s interest in Dr. Delgado’s research (as demonstrated by Rep. Gallagher’s uncritical presentation of it) is Delgado’s proposal for a nation-wide implementation of control measures such as those he has developed in his research. Breggin writes,

“He advocates a complete educational program, from infancy and nursery through adulthood and mass education for the indoctrination of the people into a respect for physical control of the mind:

After pages of documentation about what has already been done by a few investigators working with very little funds, he then proposes a giant billion dollar government investment in mind control:

‘National agencies should be created in order to coordinate plans, budgets, and actions just a NASA in the United States has directed public interest and technology, launching the country into the adventures and accomplishments of outer space.’ p. 259

Along with this evaporation of civil and human rights in America has come a cleverly crafted perception management campaign to make both the citizens of America and the citizens of the world believe that America is still an open and free society when it most certainly is not.

Why Extra-Judicial, State-Sponsored Terrorism Should Matter to You

You’re next.

Or maybe not. Maybe, it’s your turn now. We are all susceptible to the overwhelming influence of popular cultural artifacts, many of which are representations of Dr. Delgado’s work. The popular so-called reality show, Survivor, (http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor/) is exactly the type of popular entertainment Delgado suggested be developed to inculcate the masses with an acceptance of social engineering practices. Survivor’s premise -- to get followers to depose a leader, just as his monkeys did in his experiments -- can be seen as the praxis of his once only dreamed-of social theories. The Sci-Fi Channel’s Mind Control with Derren Brown is yet another example of the type of program he suggested be developed to condition the masses to accept as normal mass control -- in this case, of the mind -- just as The History Channel’s Gangland series has been developed to condition the masses to accept the idea that gangs are an inevitable, eventual, irremedial part of society. After all, if we’re busy fighting each other, we’re not fighting them. But the propaganda factory that has been developed to influence the entire nation has also developed tools to influence and control discrete sectors of the masses, too, and where those tools of propaganda fail, gangstalkers step in to exterminate those who are resistant to their messages.

In 1996, persons with deliberately-misdiagnosed leukemia-cum-Chronic Fatigue Syndrome-cum-Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome learned they actually had a “less virulent form of AIDS” with the publication of Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic, (1996, Crown). The book is a monument to propaganda, creating the false controversy that the research which proves this fact, Nancy Klimas’s study of immune system markers, was outside orthodox research initatives (that is to say, government research initiatives), when, in fact, Dr. Klimas is a university researcher who receives government funding. Other high-profile CFIDS/non-HIV/AIDS researchers are characterized as being outside the mainstream medicoresearch industry, too, like Dr. Paul Cheney, who routinely makes his patients’ blood and other samples available to university researchers funded by the government, most notably, Dr. Anthony Komaroff. I posted a comment in an internet chat room run by an alleged patient advocacy group asking why, then, our doctors continued to tell us that there were no tests available to tell us with what we were sick, or that we weren’t sick at all but crazy (just as the first AIDS victims and the victims of America’s atomic radiation experiments were labeled), and therefore we still couldn’t get appropriate medical care. The next day, I received an email back-channel to the account that I had opened to join this group. It contained the threat that unless I stopped asking such questions the FBI would be investigating me for “hate speech.” I may still have an electronic copy of the email secreted away somewhere, but all my hard copies have been removed from my home, just as has most all of the evidence of my persecution, such as medical records which verify the history I have recounted in these pages. That’s when the campaign to discredit me began.

You see, my story -- the story of my bioslavery -- is relevant not simply to other victims of non-HIV/AIDS, but also to all persons with AIDS: gays, African-Americans, Africans, Asians. The people who have reified me don’t want me anywhere near these groups of people, and they’ve done some pretty incredible things to discredit me within these communities. They know that if these groups of people hear how a former employee of a defense subcontractor admitted to me that they were involved in many contracts to develop the components of AIDS -- even as that person was involved in targeting me for some of the bioassaults that gave me AIDS and the subsequent research that cured it -- people would start to take me seriously because research contracts can be traced -- even those done with “black budgets.” I’m a dangerous threat to the fascists who created and deployed AIDS. That’s why campaigns such as those recalled here are instigated against me -- to discredit me as unlikely to be a champion of the people most affected by AIDS. Here are two anecdotes relating such incidences.

Anecdote No. 1: My Local Garden Center

I like to garden. I don’t have much opportunity to do so because I live in a concrete-and-brick apartment complex, but there are several common areas where my neighbors and I can bring the beauty of nature into our lives with containers of annuals and other plants. Luckily, there’s a garden center just a few blocks away from where we live.

I recently visited my local garden center just as the pansies arrived. I selected seven flats, a 15-quart bag of soil and some other gardening implements I needed to spruce up the courtyard area of my apartment complex. Then I asked the owner of the store if he had a list of taxis service phone numbers that I could use, as is typical of area stores. He rattled off the number of a local service as well as the garden center’s address. He repeated it, waited for me to repeat it, and repeated it again, offering to make the call himself. I held up my cell phone to let him know that wasn’t necessary before I dialed. He smiled. I’ve been shopping at his store for at least a decade and though we’re not on a first-name basis, I’m pleased he greets me with recognition when I come in. He accommodates his customers with red Radio Flyer™ wagons to ease the burden of transporting their sometimes cumbersome purchases to their cars. One day, when I had spent all of my money at his store and had none left to call a taxi, the owner let me borrow a wagon to take my purchases home. He’s very accommodating and I’m pleased to patronize his store. That is, I was pleased when he used to do things like this; lately, he hasn’t, and although I cannot be certain of the reason why -- since I’ve done nothing to offend him -- I suspect he’s been given a reason to shun me.

You see, the last time I was in his store, I needed help to find hangers for plant containers. I was told to ask the owner for his help and directed to his check-out stand in the garden center’s out-door store. I greeted the owner in the same friendly manner I always use, but he didn’t reciprocate, as he usually does. This day, he wouldn’t even look at me. I craned my neck as I made my inquiry, hoping to catch his eye. He turned away as he gave me directions to the product I inquired about. After I retrieved the product, I paid for it at the garden center’s in-store check out stand, manned by the taciturn clerk who had refused to help me except by directing me to the owner for his help, and left, uneasy in the extreme about the cold and rude treatment I was given. I obsessed about it for days, going over everything I had said and done that could have possibly given rise to offense, until I realized that I had done nothing. That’s when I remembered a peculiar thing that had happened on my previous visit to the garden center, the day I had bought my pansies.

After I had made my purchase that day I went to the sidewalk at the front of the store to wait for the taxi I had called. Ten minutes or so had passed when two women walking dogs approached the entrance to the store, the first of whom to reach it bent down and stowed a wadded up bundle of trash behind the flower planter next to which I stood. She handed her dog’s lead to her friend and proceeded into the garden center’s store. I was starting to get angry since I knew the store had wastebaskets, but I couldn’t decide what to do. My taxi would arrive any minute, so I couldn’t pick up after her unless I wanted to take whatever she had disposed of with me. I wanted to say something like, “they have wastebaskets in the store,” to the woman but she had dashed into the store too quickly. I tried to engage her friend in a conversation so I could mention this fact, first talking about her dogs, but she, too, was taciturn and turned her attention to others leaving the store who had stopped to admire their dogs. My taxi arrived and I left -- feeling very uneasy, but not because of any paranoid suspicion. Their arrogance just made me very angry. “I guess they think the world is their trash can,” I ruminated. It wasn’t until after my next visit to the garden center that I thought there may have been a purpose to their behavior that wasn’t simply borne of arrogance.

"Could they have set me up to slander me as an antisocial litterbug to my once-friendly neighborhood merchant,” I wondered? He’s seemed indifferent to me in the past, but on the rare occasion when he has it’s been because he’s been busy. “Everybody has an off day,” I’ve told myself at these times. He’s never treated me as though my patronage were an inconvenience to him. For him to do that, I would imagine I’d have to have given him some offense. Since I hadn’t stolen anything from him, or been rude to him in any way, or given him any cause to be rude to me, the logical explanation for his behavior is that he was turned against me -- just as those who perpetrate character assassination of activists such as myself have been proven to do.

This is what that attack was about: making me appear to those in my neighborhood that I am not only an antisocial litterbug, but I’m also not the environmentalist I claim to be. Would you pay any attention to a self-proclaimed environmentalist who was alleged to litter? Probably not. I’ve been working hard to understand environmental issues and clean energy technologies and initiatives because I’d like to go back to work and to work in a field where I believe my work has intrinsic as well as extrinsic value. That’s going to be hard to do if my potential employer receives character references that make me appear antisocial and callous to the degradation of the environment.

Anecdote No. 2: My Local Thrift Shop

Easter is my favorite time of year. I’m usually melancholy on Maundy Thursday and edgy on Good Friday, but by the next day, I begin to cheer up. Even on a cloudy, rainy Easter weekend, I find the beauty of the flowers that are beginning to bloom and, indeed, the hopefulness expressed in the volume of new life around me, overwhelming and gratifying. Robins become as ubiquitous as pigeons where I live. Toddlers waddling around their yards and church grounds in their little suits and frilly dresses make my heart dance -- I’ll admit it. They’re adorable. And what could be better than being able to experience all this -- plus chocolate?! The day after Good Friday, 2009, I decided to shop at one of my favorite stores, the local thrift shop, to look for kitchen curtains. The ones I had were 25 years old and, basically, rags. New life suggested new kitchen curtains.

I donate to my local thrift shop because they provide a valuable service to people of limited means, like me. They make it affordable for me to have a DVD player, or a window fan in my early 20th century fourth-floor walkup. I’m happy to recycle the serviceable things I have so someone else can use them.

I was in the area of the store’s basement where linens and furniture were stored for ten minutes or so when another woman came into this area at the back of the store. I had made two piles of items: one, items I was considering purchasing; the other, items I intended to purchase. I put one on a side table that was for sale and the other pile on the end of a chaise lounge. As I picked through the items in one bin, the woman picked up a shopping bag of linens that was lying on the floor next to the other bin and dumped it out. Then she took some of the contents of the bag and began spreading them over the two piles of items I was considering purchasing. “Excuse me, I said. “I’m thinking of buying those.” I pointed to the side table. She approached the bin I was sorting through and began picking through it, piling still more things on top of the things I had placed on the side table. “Um -- could I have the things I put there, I sheepishly asked this provocateur, pointing to the side table. She pulled out the bottom two items and, with the greatest disdain, held them in front of me by two fingers as though they were as toxic as nuclear waste and dropped them on the floor. I picked them up. She continued throwing things out of the bin onto the floor.

I turned to the side table and began picking through the pile she had made, looking for the other items I had first placed there. I pulled them from the bottom and put them on the other pile I had made on the chaise lounge. “What is going on here?,” I wondered to myself, turning back to the bin to search for pot holders. “They’re mine,” she screeched, snatching them off the pile on the chaise lounge. “Excuse me, but those were things I placed on that side table myself,” I said. Those are mine, she screamed. “You had nothing there.” I was incredulous. She had made such a show of removing some of the items I had placed on the side table, her blatant lying that I had nothing on the side table when she put stuff on it was the last straw. I flew into a rage.

“You are a fucking liar,” I yelled. And she beamed. It was clear in an instant by her smile that she had wanted to provoke me. Just then, I realized the half dozen middle-aged men swarming around us -- men who had not been there when I first began sifting through the store’s linen items. Men with their cell phones out. “You’re making the world a despicable place, you know,” I chided her. “You think you’re doing ‘God’s work,’ or behaving like everyone else because so many of us persecute others for benefits, but you’re just a pawn,” I observed. She laughed. “No, I’m not.” I should have walked away, but I felt I had to let her know that I knew perfectly well who -- and what -- she was. And then she let me know that, in fact, I was correct. She declared herself to be the wickedly false Christian she was. “I’m sorry,” she feigned, as she put her hand on my arm. “Do you forgive me?”

This is what that attack was about: to provoke me to violence so I don’t look like the peace activist I claim to be, to make me look antisocial, unstable and violent (and, contrary to my behavior, a racist; did I mention this woman was Haitian?) and to make me appear to be the worst thing an American can be these days -- not Christian because I didn’t forgive her. Would you give any of your attention to a self-proclaimed peace and justice activist who flew off the handle and argued with and cursed at a[nother seemingly] poor woman who happened to be a dark-skinned immigrant? Probably not.

Why PSYOP Works

When you’re under siege, your senses are heightened. Primordial survival instincts kick in and you become hyper-alert. You notice everything -- because everything has the potential to harm. The terror created from being under siege modifies your behavior in this way --you become distrustful and withdrawn, not knowing who is trustworthy, or when the next attack will occur. You, yourself, begin to build walls that imprison you. It also makes you paranoid. You begin to see every other person whom you encounter as a player in a psychological terrorism operation. An innocent nudge in the line at the grocery store takes on a sinister meaning after you’ve experienced a nudge in every line you’ve ever filed into for the past six months.

You may tell yourself that you are too smart to “give in” to these primitive instincts, that you are too refined, or too clever, to allow yourself to be controlled by the manipulation of them. You see the pattern, you tell yourself, and you assure yourself you can ignore it. You have free will, right? But these are instincts we all have; they’re instincts that have ensured the survival of the species for millions of years, and you your ability to protect yourself is key to your survival, too. You wouldn’t want it any other way.

Strategies of retreat and retrenchment work when you wish to avoid conflict, and avoiding conflict, you realize, ensures your survival. So you simply stop going out. But these strategies are not good long-term strategies. Isolation is not a normal state in which a human being can exist for very long. That’s why prisons punish inmates with solitary confinement; it drives sane people insane. You steel your nerve and tell yourself you’ll be even more alert -- even more aware -- the next time you go out, which, of course, makes you more wound up than ever and more easily provoked. You successfully negotiate the next setup and the next and the next and all the while, you’re getting more worked up, more anxious waiting for the shoe to drop. You tell yourself you’ve mastered their game, not realizing that simply engaging you in their game, they’ve mastered you; all your energies become consumed with thwarting their tactics and you lose sight of what’s meaningful to you. Defeating them -- defending yourself -- becomes your entire mission, your whole identity. You forget that the waiting for the other shoe to drop is the other shoe dropping. Then, like a windup toy that’s been set to play for as long as possible, you spring into action without thinking the next time you’re provoked. You’ve disgraced yourself by losing control the one time out of 100 you’ve been provoked to do so and it’s out there for the world to see -- that one time (especially if it’s videotaped by “bystanders”). The world doesn’t care about the 99 other times you were in control. It only judges you by he one time it saw you lose it.

You are always at your most vulnerable when the attack occurs -- when you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security -- when the campaign of attacks suddenly stops and you begin to relax. The next time you walk into a trap, you fall apart, you lose control and you discredit yourself by doing so. Then you decide to withdraw. It’s a vicious cycle -- one over which you have no control.

“Lay not wait, O wicked man, against the dwelling of the righteous; spoil not his resting place: for a just man falleth seven times and riseth up again, but the wicked shall fall into mischief.”

Proverbs 24:15-16

Character assassination and mobbing are as old as time, as we can see from prohibitions against them such as the Ninth Commandment. The people who killed Jesus were not the civil authorities in power in ancient Judea; it was the mob who had the choice of crucifying either Jesus or the thief, Barrabbas. Jesus’s community chose to kill him. Today, I routinely return to my apartment to find my furnishings vandalized, my pets made ill and/or dying, my food contaminated, my clothes strategically altered and ruined. When I leave my house, I am subjected to well-known gangstalking surveillance activities. These tactics are used to harass and terrorize targets to force them to seek professional help from, for example, psychologists and law enforcement, who are tasked with documenting targets’ alleged mental instability. Each time I've asked for help from my local law enforcement agency, I've been told there's nothing they can do since my apartment is not broken into; someone who has a key to the apartment must be doing these things (and it's always implied that these things may not be happening) and no investigation is done. These are "private violences" for which the police are not responsible. But my phone calls and letters are documented and this documentation is precisely the type of "evidence" police use to incarcerate targets in institutions under the ruse of “protective custody.” Telling others about our persecution -- particularly, professionals who are supposed to help targets -- only ensures our continued torture. The mob exists as much today as it ever did, even in ancient Judea, and today’s targets are the same type of targets who have always been persecuted -- political activists who seek to change the status quo.

If you are an outsourced bioresearch subject of the United States government -- a bioslave -- (and if you are, you will be prevented at every turn from learning your status; that’s one way you’ll know that you are) you, too, will be subjected to the same extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism when you speak out against your enslavement.

If you have been outraged by the extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism that has taken place at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, where is your outrage for the extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism your law-abiding, patriotic fellow Americans experience at the hands of their government right here in America? Where is the outrage for the systematic, extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism that has been visited for decades upon untold numbers of average, law-abiding American citizens, such as the plaintiff in the above-referenced case and myself, by multiple agencies of the U.S. government, now including our local law enforcement, local municipal agencies and local non-profits? Where is your outrage for my bioenslavement -- and yours?

If you think your life is guaranteed by not speaking out and fighting against my oppression, think again.

“First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Former Moabit prison inmate and (Lutheran) Pastor Martin Niemöller

Post-war Lectures on the Work of Germany’s Pastors’ Emergency League during WWII

1945

THIS IS FASCISM -- IN A CLOSED, MILITARILY RUN, AUTHORITARIAN SOCIETY. No one in America is free today.

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