All Together Now, "Freedom Isn't Free!"

America's television outlets expended many hours of programming on the Fourth of July to celebrate freedom. Effusive expressions of thanks to the brave men and women of our military for their heroic sacrifices filled the airwaves and our minds. This is standard content designed to remind the people on this sacred day of their patriotic duty to support Washington's War on Terror. I say this by way of pointing out that most of it was self-serving crap!

Now before my e-mail server crashes under the weight of an e-mail blizzard from furious members of the Red, White and Blue brigade, take a deep breath and hear me out.

American exceptionalism is very real and the idea is important beyond measure. Over the years its meaning has been deliberately perverted by agenda-driven ideologues. What made America exceptional was not her military power or her economic potential. No, America was exceptional because, of all the nations on earth, only America recognized that rights originated with God and not government. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, all people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". Until the Declaration it was believed that a person had only those rights granted by government. After the Declaration we knew that rights originated with God. That concept was truly revolutionary and it forever changed the world.

Before continuing it should be clearly understood that I am no pacifist. My two eldest sons are retired career military men. I personally spent five years on active duty in the U.S. Army with the 1st Cavalry Division, the 7th Infantry Division, and XVIII Airborne Corps. I love the American Republic of myth and memory. I believe passionately in the founding ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence and swore an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That said, as hard as it is to do, it must now finally be admitted that the Constitution and the American Republic that it created are as dead as Madison. 

Today we are ruled (not represented) by a monstrous centralized governing apparatus that has long since forfeited any claim to constitutional legitimacy or moral authority. It cannot honestly be said that our brave young fighting men and women around the world (and they are brave) are defending our country or our freedom. They are unwittingly fighting to sustain and expand an Empire. The constitutional American republic is a ghost, a persistent illusion that exists only in history. The most important American freedoms no longer exist at all.

If you cling to the belief that you are free, do you understand that Washington now claims that its operatives can:

• Kill you and every member of your family at any time at the sole discretion of the President?
• Secretly arrest, torture and indefinitely imprison you and every member of your family forever?
• Seize and dispose of everything you own?
• Secretly break into and search your home, your car, and your business?
• Secretly intercept all of your personal conversations, letters, e-mail and all other private communications?

These are criminal acts committed in arrogant defiance of the Constitution's plain language. The Obama and Bush administrations (and others before them) paid a great deal in legal fees over the years to construct "a legal framework" justifying Washington's near total refusal to obey the Constitution. The most recent and most sinister work product of that undertaking is contained in the just-released heavily-redacted memorandum used by Obama to justify the extra-judicial killing of two Americans in the Middle East. The memorandum's premise, as simple as it is chilling, reduces to this: Government's need to perform its functions trumps individual rights. Always! Once that "legal principle" was adopted, the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution was a dead letter. There is now literally no act, however heinous, that is forbidden to Washington.

That you and I may not yet have been personally victimized is immaterial. Our turn will come soon enough. What matters is that Washington is now doing these things to others and, importantly, it is being allowed to do so by the American people. The question is, what is to be done about it?

Many Americans are preparing themselves against the day, feared by many to be imminent, when they will have to defend themselves and their families against efforts to disarm them during the imposition of martial law. It is widely believed that this event will trigger the beginning of a popular revolution. Although events could play out in that way, history suggests that a violent revolution may not be necessary.

Established governments almost never fall from power because they are overwhelmed by armed resistance. Throughout Western history, governments fall, regardless of type, when the population withdraws its grant of moral authority and the regime's insiders abandon it. Consider the example of the Soviet Empire. The Soviet Union had 2.7 million men under arms and possessed very advanced military weaponry but when it collapsed in 1991 it was with a whimper, not a bang. The American Empire is travelling toward the same end and for many of the same reasons. Today's unhappy citizens should consider whether it makes sense to divert an existential threat's attention away from the process of destroying itself. The regime is tottering toward its grave. It will collapse under its own rotten weight.

That does not mean that preparing to defend and sustain life, family and community in an environment that is very different from today's is a mistake. Given the current state of affairs, the United States is unlikely to survive as a political entity in its current form. Its implosion and the resulting political, social and economic collapse will almost certainly be accompanied by at least local chaos. Prudent individuals as well as local communities would be well advised to prepare for that eventuality.

FJB

This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. Please bookmark this link, forward it to others, and return often. Thank you for your interest.