The title of this thread was inspired by these words, at the bottom of the last qutoe box, in my last post:
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pro-Yushchenko lawmaker Petro Poroshenko accused the election commission of carrying out a coup d'etat. "Now the streets will speak. Now the people will speak," he said.
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The last time that I was was faced with the perception that my government
was engaged in a massive and criminal course of deception, crimes against the constitution, and in the planning and ordering of war crimes at the level of the federal executive branch, I was much younger and more idealistic, and I faced a deadline to decide whether to voluntarily make myself available to
the government as a complying candidate for participation in the war.
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/</a> is the link to information about the movie, the Fog of War, an excellent film in the way it examines Robert Macnamara's views of the morality of war. He was the secretary of defense who was most responsible officials in the decision making and in the prosecution of the Vietnam war.
The bottom line is that in response to what I perceived to be signifigant crimes committed by the U.S. government, I refused to participate, and I lived an "underground" life for over seven years to avoid arrest and prosecution of a felony punishable by 5 years in federal prison. Hindsight has demonstrated that I probably made the correct moral choice; I had to live with myself then, as I do now. The war was wrong, Nixon was a criminal president on many fronts, as was his atty general John Mitchell, and Nixon's two top assistants, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman, all three convicted of felonies and served time in federal prison. NS Advisor and later Sec'ty of State Henry Kissinger is to this day regarded as a war criminal, unable to be accepted as Bush's appointment as chair of the 9/11 commission.
I intended this thread to evolve into a discussion of when is "enough is enough"? Do we wait until a third presidential election is stolen? Were the last two elections stolen?
daswig seems to be throwing his "weight" around, here. Judge for yourself whether he is communicating a friendly warning because he "knows what he knows" about "big brother's" possible reaction to a discussion like this, because of his position as an "insider" in a state dept. of justice.
Anyway.......whatever his intent, he has achieved the effect of influencing me to "watch what I say", and I think that you know how I feel about that.
Post your thoughts if you think that my disclosed background disqualifies me from initiating a discussion about when the right time might be to decide whether the federal executive branch "fixed" it's election, and if it did, what the average citizen should do in response. Shouldn't the Bush administration be held to the same standard that it held the Ukranians to, last December? Should we demand nothing less than the type of investigation that Powell demanded of the Ukraine, and if the Bush administration refuses, then what?
The challenge is the same one that the founding fathers faced. Now seems to be the time for massive, non-violent protests that demand a transparent, non-partisan investigation of last november's vote in Ohio and in Florida, as a start. Protests in the form of hunger strikes, boycotts of products and services of corporations that signifigantly supported Bush Cheney 2004, and a
media campaign to advertise the inconsistancy of the Bush admin. response to exit poll disparity in the Ukraine, vs. the non-response to the same phenomena in the U.S.
Our founding fathers intended government to be always intimidated by the citizenry, not as daswig seems to project, the other way around.
It seems to me that we must have this discussion to be credible, responsible, measured, patriots.
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<a href="http://www.yale.edu/ypq/articles/dec99/dec99b.html">http://www.yale.edu/ypq/articles/dec99/dec99b.html</a>
Kant vs. Locke on the Right to Rebel
by Daniel O'Connor
In his essay "Theory and Practice," Immanuel Kant argues that citizens must always obey their government and consequently never rebel against it. He defends this absolute prohibition by claiming that rebellion would violate requirements of duty and morality, 1 which theoretically permit only a government to interpret the moral will of a society and obligate citizens to act according only to a priori reason. Despite Kant's objections, Locke's principles of rebellion not only conform to the Kantian categorical imperative and support the right of a collective to determine and execute rebellion for itself, but also demonstrate paradoxes that in general trouble Kantian political theory..............................
...........Consequently, the only legitimate government in a Kantian sense is a government that adheres to and implements the collective moral will. As I have just shown, when a government attempts to destroy the moral will, denies its citizens the ability to create the moral will, or neglects the moral will (thus preventing the moral will from actualizing itself), the government violates the categorical imperative. Therefore, the categorical imperative universalizes the notion that these forms of government are illegitimate. When a government violates the categorical imperative, the government "dissolves" its legitimate claim to govern. 26 As Locke rightly points out, such an illegitimate government is the true rebel force, since it imposes its own will upon the collective, rather than merely implementing the collective moral will, thus "rebelling" against its duty to enforce the collective moral will. 27
Consequently, Kantian citizens have an obligation to restore legitimate rule not only because legitimate rule alone conforms to the categorical imperative, but also because they have a duty to the collective to protect and uphold the moral will. Moreover, if the collective wills the government in the first place, then the collective should have the ability to will another government when the first government fails to uphold the collective's values.
Consequently, there are also many responses to Kant's argument that rebellion requires immoral actions in order to accomplish its purposes. Most importantly, Locke responds with the idea of supreme necessity: in extreme circumstances, a citizen must protect one's own life and the lives of one's fellow citizens. Violence to reinstate a moral government would be a lesser evil than permitting an evil government to reign. A tyranny 28 that destroys the moral innocence of the collective that it is supposed to represent causes far greater, more insidious and more irreparable evils than does the violence that attempts to remedy i
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