[Think] FWD: Pox Americana

[Fen Labalme]

An excellent and important piece of writing - please read.


Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 03:30:06 -0600
To: John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
From: John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
Subject: BarlowFriendz 8.8: Pox Americana



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     /_              _\
                               --------->  B a R L o W F R i e N D Z ----->

<A continuing series of occasional outbursts to about 1070 of my 
dearest friends. Please let me know if you wish to be removed from 
this list. But you'll miss some great parties if you do...

Also, if this broadcast feels as spammish to you as it obviously is, 
I hope you remember that individual responses generally elicit 
personal replies. And whether or not I have time to write back, I 
always read your replies with careful delight.>

------------------------------>  -------------------> -------->

1. What Has Happened.
2. Why This Has Happened.
3. What We Might Do About It Now.

--------------------------------@#%!!**#@@--------------->>>>--->



THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC IS DEAD. HAIL THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. OR ELSE.

My old pal Mitch Kapor said years ago that what I needed was a 
"hyperbolectomy." Were such a procedure to exist, this would probably 
be a good time to get one, since I suddenly find myself incapable of 
discussing the present state of the American Experiment without 
veering off into Very Large Statements.

With that admonition in mind, I hope that you will continue to read 
this rant, adjusting it to your own reality settings. This is just 
how bad it looks to me. From my perspective, this is not hyperbolic 
at all.

I believe that the American Republic died in the U.S. Senate last 
Thursday morning and was buried yesterday morning in the East Room of 
the White House.

Despite a deluge of calls, letters, and e-mails, which Capital Hill 
staffers admitted ran overwhelmingly against the ludicrously-named 
"Resolution Authorizing the President to Use Force, if Necessary, to 
End the Threat to World Peace from Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass 
Destruction," Congress extended to George II the authority to make 
unlimited and preemptive war against another nation that has neither 
attacked us nor shown the ability or inclination to do so.

(Thank you, by the way, for your own contributions to this flood of 
futile dissent. They may have ignored you, but you will sleep better 
for knowing that you were not one of the "silent Germans.")

The resolution was deemed necessary on several grounds.

Iraq possesses and is developing weapons of mass destruction - an 
unquestioned if Orwellian phrase that makes no qualitative 
distinction between a hundred pounds of spoiled hamburger and a 50 
megaton bomb.
Iraq has flouted a number of U.N. resolutions and international 
accords regarding such weapons, many of which the United States has 
also ignored or abrogated.
A member of Al-Queda is thought to have visited Iraq.
Iraq has shown a willingness to use military force in the Middle 
East, again, not unlike ourselves.
Saddam Hussein is a real son-of-a-bitch who is easier to find than 
Osama bin Laden.

Despite the fact that we have been exposed to far worse during our 
history - whether by Bloody Old England, the Kaiser, Nazi Germany, 
Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, or, hell, France on a 
bad day - we have never before declared war without being attacked 
nor have we extended an American President the right to do so at his 
pleasure.

The dangerous possibility of such behavior was explicitly foreseen by 
the architects of the American Republic when they designed the 
Consitution. As James Madison declared in a letter to James Monroe:

The only case in which the Executive can enter on a war, undeclared 
by Congress, is when a state of war has 'been actually' produced by 
the conduct of another power, and then it ought to be made known as 
soon as possible to the Department charged with the war power.

Their reasons were eloquently restated by Abraham Lincoln in an 1848 
letter to his law partner, William H. Herndon. Herndon had suggested 
that the United States would be prudent to attack Mexico before they 
attacked us, as they clearly appeared willing to do. Lincoln replied:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall 
deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so 
whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose 
- - and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you 
can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given 
him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he 
thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from 
invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no 
probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you 'be 
silent; I see it, if you don't.'

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to 
Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. 
Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in 
wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the 
people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most 
oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame 
the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing 
this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and 
places our President where kings have always stood.

Robert Byrd quoted that passage in his brilliantly Quixotic speech to 
the Senate last week. The Senate ignored him as easily as they 
ignored you and millions of others who believe in American principles.

And now we have a King, George II, where presidents have always stood.

Today, as he signed his coronation decree, he lied, "I have not 
ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become 
necessary."

But, folks, he *has* ordered the use of force and began doing so 
shortly after seizing office. Though you'd scarcely know it to read 
the papers, we've been bombing the crap out of Southern Iraq since 
February 16, 2001, when we hit five radar installations in the 
vicinity of Baghdad. Since then, the bombing has been increasing 
steadily. There have been 48 bombing raids south of the "no-fly zone" 
so far this year. Iraq claims that 1300 civilians have been killed in 
these bombings - and, while I doubt that number, many of these 
casualties have been confirmed by international observers. I'll bet 
the last thing those innocent wretches saw looked a lot like force to 
them.

It is not simply that we have made a Caesar of Bush, we have, in 
effect, assented to allowing him the entire world as his Empire.

What this resolution is truly about is the elimination of all 
sovereignty but our own. This is about our becoming the Dad of the 
World. Having declared ourselves immune from international 
prosecution for war crimes, we have proposed our right to disregard 
the sovereignty of any country that, in our opinion, doesn't deserve 
it.

If another country harbors people we regard as terrorists, they have 
forfeited their sovereignty. If they cobble together a few of the 
weapons we possess in stupefying abundance, we will cross their 
borders and disarm them by force. Indeed, if they do anything that 
might eventually, left to develop unchecked, threaten American 
interests, we will stop them as brutally as we must.

These statements are not merely polemical on my part. They are American policy.

On September 20, the Bush Administration released its National 
Security Strategy. You can find it at 
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf. It speaks plainly of American 
"convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign 
responsibilities." According to whom?

In other words, Nations of the World, if you don't make smart 
choices, you will just have to accept that there will be 
consequences. Now go clean your rooms.

Reading this document, which makes ironic use of the word "freedom" 
every third sentence or so, one begins to imagine the United States 
as the jut-jawed marshal, patrolling the world's mean streets, 
showing the lonely courage that is the sinew of virtue.

But as a fellow Wyomingite, Don Cooper, wrote me after my last rant, 
the metaphor is horribly flawed. The Code of the West required proof 
of guilt and threats made bad. The scoundrels actually had to 
actually raise hell before the marshal took up arms against them.

What we are doing in Iraq is more like this, to quote Cooper:

A storekeeper is sweeping the wooden sidewalk in front of his shop 
and sees a rough stranger approaching. He runs across the street to 
the Marshal's office crying out and waving his broom in the air. The 
Marshal comes out, asking what all the fuss is about. 'It's a bad guy 
ridin' into town, Marshal. I can tell he's up to no good. Got that 
look about him. Word is he is planning to rob the bank, steal a 
horse, burn down the church and slap a barmaid.' The Marshal is 
aghast, 'Well, not in my town he ain't!' The Marshal grabs his 
shotgun and waits out in front of the saloon. When the stranger rides 
up, the Marshal levels his shotgun and blows him off his horse.

This isn't American. It's chickenshit.

I feared it would come to this when I realized, ten years ago, that 
we were the last credible superpower left on the planet. But Bill 
Clinton, whatever his manifold weaknesses, knew that if we were were 
to possess such towering power, we would have to wield it with the 
humility necessary to create moral as well as military force.

He might have had a zipper as slick as his tongue, but he was not 
facile when it came to deploying more lethal weapons. Furthermore, 
Bill Clinton knew himself to be an unlikely instrument for Almighty 
God. I suspect Clinton secretly hopes there isn't One.

But George II has been working for the Lord ever since he was 
divinely instructed some years back to stop snorting blow. He knows 
that God wants us to have oil and that the world's second largest 
petroleum reserves are not to be entrusted to a people whose divine 
messenger was, to quote Jerry Falwell, "a terrorist."

I don't think that our new Emperor is an evil man. But he has the 
kind of unquestioning belief in his own virtue that is the richest 
loam for growing evil. He is simply too weak to possess this kind of 
power without misusing it. And now we have removed all the 
Constitutional impediments that might have checked his hubris. We 
have thrown ourselves on the mercy of a conscience too clear to be 
reliable.



--------------------------->>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>



PEACE IS WAR, LOVE IS HATE


How has this tragedy happened?

Why have Americans - whom I still believe are, in their essence, a 
decent people - allowed themselves to become complicit with such 
monstrosity.

It's because the terrorists won. Through incredibly deft manipulation 
of  our media, encouraging that which is worst in our government, 
they have already inflicted astonishing casualties on the American 
mind.

Wherever he may be, I hope the ghost of George Orwell is up to date 
on contemporary American politics. If he is, I'll bet he's having a 
swell time.

I could give you a million examples of what I'm talking about, but 
I'll tell you a story instead.

A couple of weeks back, I was asked to do a brief live interview on 
MSNBC, the result of a piece I wrote which appears in the current 
Forbes ASAP on the irremediable failure of the American intelligence 
system. (You will find it at 
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/042.html and I will spam you the 
longer version sometime soon).

I had misgivings about doing this, since I think television is very 
bad for you, no matter which side of the camera you're on. But, since 
one of my many missions is trying inspire an intelligence system that 
actually increases political understanding, I figured I would seize 
whatever silly pulpit they briefly provided me.

They put me in a dark little room with a huge camera and a monitor 
that was displaying the current out-going feed from MSNBC. They wired 
me up and I waited for my cue, with nothing to do but watch the tube 
and try to keep myself from hallucinating as a result.

There ensued a series of events that compelled me to watch a stream 
of televised news longer than any I've seen since 911. (When it 
became obvious, once and for all, that there was no viewing level 
that wasn't inimical to clear thought.)

Like so many other bad things, it was Bush's fault. After I was all 
wired up and seated in involuntary viewing mode, I was suddenly 
preempted by an informal press briefing from the Cabinet Room.

There, apparently sitting across the desk from me, was our still 
unannointed Monarch. I sat there in speechless awe as he said, among 
other astonishing things, that we might have to attack Iraq in order 
to preserve peace.

That's right. We must start a war that there might have peace.

When the anchors came back on after the press briefing, they made 
absolutely no note of the surreal logic we'd all been exposed to. It 
made sense to them, I guess.

Nor did they make any mention of the the Malaprop Effect, such as 
when the Resident said, "He [Saddam] faces a true threat to the U.S," 
and didn't stop to correct himself. (And, indeed, didn't even appear 
to notice.)

Then we got back to "the news."  All of it was straight out of 1984. 
Saddam Hussein has always been the object of the Two Minute Hate. 
Osama bin Laden was never our Emmanuel Goldstein.

The anchor-bimbo actually hissed whenever she uttered Saddam's name, 
and she did so involuntarily. I remembered the line from Orwell's 
novel, "The horrible thing about the Two Minute Hate was not that one 
was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid 
joining in." I managed not to.

There was plenty more Newspeak to follow. For example, practically 
everyone who spoke, anchor or civilian, used the phrase "weapons of 
mass destruction," as if they knew what they were talking about. I 
don't think they do.

What this insidious phrase does is to equate biological, chemical, 
and nuclear weapons in their degrees of lethality. But, as I said 
before, there is a vast difference between a cylinder of poisonous 
gas and a 5 megaton thermonuclear bomb. The former is easy to make 
but very hard to deliver in any massively destructive way. The latter 
is hard to make and easy to deliver, at least over short distances. 
But when it arrives, it doesn't just kill a few hundred commuters.

(Actually the latter is not terribly hard to make. I could probably 
do it with a good machine shop and a hundred kilos of weapons grade 
Plutonium. Making weapons grade Plutonium is very hard, but 
fortunately for the evil-doers, the U.S. and Russia have already 
manufactured so much of this vile stuff over the last 57 years that 
Iraq could, if it wanted to, probably pick it up from the right 
Russians simply by signing a few subrosa oil contracts.)

Never mind that. My point is, we're not thinking about these things 
to that level of detail. We're thinking things like "Weapons of mass 
destruction, bad. Iraq, bad. America, good." Or Eurasia, bad. 
Oceania, good.

We're also accepting rather blandly American support for a brutal 
military dictatorship in Pakistan which really *does* have nuclear 
weapons as well as the means to deliver them quite a distance. Why 
are we not disarming Pakistan? Why, for that matter, are we not 
disarming France? Or, perish the thought, ourselves?

I observed with mounting anxiety the way in which the "news" I 
watched that morning was subtly but continuously slanted to support 
the war.

For example, while reporting a story regarding considerable Labor 
Party unrest over Blair's support of Bush, one of the anchors 
casually (and rhetorically) asked, "But isn't that just the old 
Socialist wing of Labor coming back to life?" The question hung in 
the air like a mild mind toxin while they rushed off to the next bit 
of gory footage.

This involved a deranged person who had tried to slit the throat of a 
Greyhouse bus driver in California with a pair of scissors, causing 
him to veer off I-5. There were a number of vivid injuries for the 
cameras to feed on. One of the anchors asked about the attacker, a 
Mexican-American, "Do we know if this guy has any terrorist 
connections?"

Now is a time to think clearly. But the government and the media are 
mutilating the very structure of rational thought by attacking the 
language. Noam Chomsky was and is right about this.

Even the more reliable media, like, say, the New York Times, are 
editing reality  in a dangerous way.

For example, somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 people spontaneously 
gathered in Central Park on October 6 and it barely made the papers. 
What few stories did appear placed a distorted emphasis that some of 
the bullhorn wielders had made anti-semitic remarks.

It's no wonder that many of us have been brain-washed into an uneasy 
stupor. You are what you watch.

But what about the millions of us who are agitated as hell about 
this?  I know lots of different people, and they aren't all seditious 
scum like me. Hell, I come from Pinedale, Wyoming, the most 
conservative place in the non-Islamic world. And yet about one in a 
hundred people that I talk to approves of what's going on. Why don't 
we matter anymore?

It pains me deeply to say this, but I think that part of the problem 
may be the Internet.

A lot of what's wrong may be the very sort of thing you're reading right now.

The Internet, has, as expected, provided a global podium to everyone 
with an opinion. Cyberspace has become an infinite set of street 
corners, each with its lonely pamphleteer, howling his rage to a 
multitude all too busy howling their own to listen.

All of our energy goes into things like this BarlowSpam, energies 
that might be better spent in creating traditional blocs like the 
NRA, or the AARP, or some large group capable of either buying 
Congress or scaring the shit out of them. This screed won't scare an 
elected official anywhere. And it wouldn't generate enough money to 
elect or defeat a dogcatcher.

As much as I loathe organizations, we need to organize.

And we'd better start doing it now before the Empire decides it's 
necessary to declare a National Emergency and make it lethally 
illegal to oppose it. It could get that bad.

Or it might get oddly worse than that. The Empire has discovered 
something important. The best way to deal with us is to ignore us 
altogether, as they did last Thursday. Our calls and letters had no 
effect whatever.

But those were the acts of citizens. In an Empire, there are no 
citizens, only subjects.

Empires in the past found it expedient to jail, torture, and execute 
recalcitrant subjects. This one has learned that you can get a lot 
further with less trouble simply by pretending that the opposition 
doesn't exist.

These arrogant bastards are so persuaded of their sublime duties to 
God and Exxon that they no longer need concern themselves with public 
outrage or even, I shudder to say, elections.

Let us prove them wrong. We must make ourselves painfully visible to them.



---------------------??????????------------>>---!!!---->>>


COME TOGETHER WHEREVER, OCTOBER 26, 11:00 AM.


What is to be done?

Well, for a start, I recommend that wherever you are in the world, 
you should pick an arbitrary public location in your area, call or 
e-mail everyone you know who feels as you do about this madness, and 
ask them to meet there at 11:00 am on Saturday, October 26.

Ask them also to call or e-mail everyone *they* know with the same 
message. Thanks to what my friend Howard Rheingold calls "smart 
mobs," a lot of people can gather very quickly this way. The 
microwave threads between cell phones can be like formic acid for 
ants. Make an instant electronic hive of humanity.

Be very peaceable and difficult to provoke, but don't worry about 
getting a permit. If no one's in charge, there's no one to hold 
accountable.

In Washington, DC and San Francisco, those locations have already 
been chosen. They are:

In DC -

Constitution Gardens adjacent to the
Vietnam Veterans War Memorial
21st St. & Constitution Ave. NW

In San Francisco -

Justin Herman Plaza
Market and Embarcadero


Unfortunately, there is a problem. And, as someone who went through 
this in the 60's, it's one I'm very familiar with.

The organization that nominated these two locations, International A.N.S.W.E.R.
(Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), is an honest-to-god Communist 
front. I'm not kidding. It is to the left of Mao. It is also 
virulently anti-semitic, and appears to be saddling up the wild horse 
of war opposition to pursue a lot of causes most you probably don't 
support, like Shining Path in Peru.

It is so radical that I almost wonder if it isn't a set of agents 
provocateurs created by the Empire to discredit the whole peace 
movement.

I also know that, after the poem I asked you all to read aloud, many 
of you concluded that I was also of this general political slant. But 
I am not a leftist propagandist. Hell, I was still a Republican until 
George II forced me to declare myself the obvious, an Independent.

I didn't write that poem. Had I done so, it certainly would have 
included an aeon of silence for the 50 million killed by Communism 
under Stalin and Mao, a millennium of silence for the many millions 
of Jews slaughtered by everyone from Goliath and his Philistines to 
Hezbolleh. I would have mentioned the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan 
Death March, the Hutus and the Tutsis. The poem was clearly leftist 
propaganda. Still, I felt it made a start on it. We could mourn the 
remaining blanks ourselves.

I got a lot of angry mail back regarding precisely these kinds of 
omissions and the rote socialism of its rhetoric.

I am very concerned that people will not engage in these gatherings, 
or that they will be easily misinterpreted, once they perceive these 
same qualities in A.N.S.W.E.R.

But I say it doesn't matter who names the gathering point. Wherever 
we normally reside in the political spectrum, this is not about the 
left wing or the right wing. It's about how to stop these wing-nuts 
from turning the world into a military playground for the Fortune 
500. It's not about ideology. It's about human decency and common 
sense. The important thing is that we all get together in such 
numbers that the ideologues of A.N.S.W.E.R. will be but a small part 
of something so big that neither the media nor the Empire can ignore 
us.

I also recommend against speeches, though I suspect they are 
unavoidable in Washington and San Francisco. The less said the 
better. What do we need to say? We know how we feel. We don't need to 
be told.

So, even though I have grave misgivings about the organizers of the 
gatherings in DC and San Francisco, we can come together in such 
overwhelming diversity that there can be no party line aside from a 
love of peace, liberty, and the right of all nations to determine 
their destinies without American imposition.



The second thing I recommend we all do is vote. I know many of you 
gave up on this a long time ago, for which dereliction of citizen's 
duty you are getting exactly the government you deserve. But there's 
still time. Many states permit registration right down to the wire.

I particularly hope you will vote heavily against everyone who 
supported this treasonous resolution, no matter how enlightened they 
appeared before. Right now, a weakling with good intentions is worse 
than an outright Facist.

They didn't listen to your phone calls or letters. Let them now hear 
your silent voice speaking from the voting booth.

You should also organize on behalf of everyone who had the courage to 
resist it. Give money and time to their campaigns. Write letters to 
their local newspapers, expressing your support for them and praising 
them for their courage on behalf of the Constitution.

Right now, I agree absolutely with George Bush on one thing. One is 
either with him or against him. I am against him. As Jefferson, 
Madison, Monroe, and Lincoln would have been.

And if that makes me a terrorist, I am proud to be one.

Be Free,

Barlow

-- 
*************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School
                      
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

Call me anywhere, anytime: 800/654-4322

Fax me anywhere, anytime:  603/215-1529

Current Cell Phone: 917/863-2037 (AT&T)

Alternative (Inactive) Cell Phone: 646/286-8176 (GSM)


**************************************************************

Barlow in Meatspace Now: Salt Lake City (Until 10/17) 801/582-5035

(Provisional) Trajectory from Here: Steamboat Springs, CO (10/17-19) 
-> Salt Lake City (10/19-20) -> Eugene, OR (10/21-22) -> Down the 
West Coast (10/22-24) -> San Francisco (10/24-28) -> LA (10/28-31) -> 
Las Vegas (11/1-2) -> Salt Lake City (11/3) -> New York City (11/4-5) 
-> London (11/6-9) -> Pinehurst, NC (11/9-12) -> New York City...

**************************************************************

The resolution before us today is not only a product of haste; it is also a
product of presidential hubris.  This resolution is breathtaking in its
scope.  It redefines the nature of defense, and reinterprets the Constitution
to suit the will of the Executive Branch. It would give the President blanket
authority to launch a unilateral preemptive attack on a sovereign nation that
is perceived to be a threat to the United States.  This is an unprecedented
and unfounded interpretation of the President's authority under the
Constitution,  not to mention the fact that it stands the charter of the
United Nations on its head. 

-- Senator Robert Byrd to the Senate, October 3, 2002