American Human Rights
by Allen Barker
[In this article I generalize about filthy pig Americans and ignorant, head-in-the-sand Americans, but as with any generalization this is not descriptive of all Americans. I am appealing to those (few?) Americans to whom these descriptions do not apply, but who are capable of seeing the truth of what I am describing. I hope I can also enlighten any citizen of the world who might need to know the true nature of American society, government, and empire. For the rest it is basically like casting pearls before swine, but with Americans you do not have to actually cast your pearls before them: Their spies will steal your private pearls, harass and taunt you, and then profit from them themselves if they can. I wish this article weren't all true, but given that it is, here it is... --Allen Barker, Mar. 19, 2002.]
!!Please read to the end, and forward to anyone you think might benefit!!
The United States recently came out with its annual human rights report, where
it judges the nations of the world on their human rights records. In principle
this is a good thing, aside from politically influenced decisions of what
countries and abuses to include. The problem is that the US is the biggest
hypocrite on the planet with regard to human rights. I support human rights for
all people of the world, but the United States definitely needs to start at
home. The US always points its finger at everyone but itself. The American
system has evolved precisely to accommodate and facilitate this sort of
deception, both of its own population and of world opinion. If the US is to be
the only superpower, as well as the moral finger-wagger and cop to the world, it
is important for the ordinary citizens of the world to understand American-style
repression, torture, and political imprisonment.
Secret wars, foreign and domestic
At the heart of this deception is secrecy. Open repression is used for as long as possible, but when this becomes politically unsupportable the repression does not end, it "goes black." One example was in the state of Mississippi, when segregation was ordered to end. The state set up a secret group whose job was to continue the practice using deniable methods. This eventually came out, years later, because it was an official operation that finally lost support. But the important point is that THERE IS NO PUNISHMENT FOR THOSE ENGAGING IN EVEN THE WORST OFFICIAL CONSPIRACIES. The rule seems to be that the worse it is the more it is covered up the less the punishment. Got to save face and all. COINTELPRO only came out because some patriotic Americans stole documents from an FBI office, black-bagging the black-baggers. The government thugs who ran it never spent a day in jail or even lost their jobs. These are just the "official" conspiracies. The unofficial conspiracies, the winks and nods, and the good-old-boys networks tend to last even longer and be even more pernicious.A recent example of secrecy being used to commit and conceal abominable crimes against foreign citizens occurred in Guatemala. The US supported and funded a proxy genocide, mostly of the indigenous Indian population. Estimates are that around 200,000 people were killed ("disappeared") from the 1960s to the 1980s. Make no mistake, this blood is on American hands -- there are even documents that indicate some CIA people were concerned about it at time but it still continued. Do Americans know that genocide was committed in their names and with their tax money? No, they are kept ignorant and many prefer it that way. See, it doesn't count if you have your secret pig thugs carry out the activities and leave the ordinary citizens out of the loop. Americans always want to have their cake and eat it too. That is how they do it. They want to have their exploitation, theft, and violence while maintaining the illusion that their profits are clean, that they are just good free-enterprise competitors on the "level playing field."
If any nation or group of people has a moral right to nuke a US city out of existence it is the Mayans of Guatemala. But the incredulous, dunce-cap Americans would say, "why did they do that, we never did anything to them..." The CIA and other secret agencies can make secret war against various opponents, with little oversight. If the "enemies" figure out who is responsible and strike back, they would be painted as irrational, evil terrorists. See how Americans do it? It tends to be the ordinary citizens who are targeted for retaliation, because the cowardly covert "warriors" are hiding at their desks behind layers of security barriers. What if one day these cowardly pigs pick on someone not so helpless as some poverty-stricken Guatemalan Indians? This unaccountable power to make secret war has serious potential for blowback that affects every citizen.
When shown indisputable facts of their nation's secret barbarity, assuming they would listen that long, Americans would typically come out with some platitudes about how these are "not Boy Scouts." When some other nation's non-boy-scouts retaliate for secret atrocities with bioattacks on US cities maybe basic decency and oversight will seem like a good idea in hindsight. It is not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons... Just the barest minimum of basic human decency would be an improvement, like "don't torture people." Even for those inhuman agents who are completely amoral and have no concern for people at all this is still better policy. People never forget being tortured and who tortured them. But torture is an abomination in any situation, regardless of any justifications or policies, in a larger moral sense that too many Americans lack completely.
Such a hypothetical bioattack would actually be taken as a blessing by the secret thugs, since they could further solidify their secret police power, and they never cared about the ordinary citizens anyway. They can have their cake and eat it too; when they fail massively they are given more power, money, and secrecy. Almost a motive for failure. Americans want to feel morally superior to their enemies while fighting dirtier and sinking lower than they do.
Americans always rationalize, that is how they do it. They pretend to be all logical and rational until it starts to go against them. (But they prefer to play-act as good guys and always try to strike that pose at first, at least.) Spies love to spin phony hypotheticals that would never really happen and hope for policy to be made based on such cases. For example, they love to spin the the "ticking bomb" scenario to support torture. This scenario basically never happens in the real world (unless perhaps it is set up as propaganda). When policy is made based on such phony hypotheticals, though, it is then applied to all the actual situations which do occur. Policy sets the tone of what is allowed in the many unwritten situations, and what will and will not be tolerated.
Human rights for real
Americans are kept ignorant and fed a child's history and a child's present, which they swallow with breathtaking gullibility. Many Americans cannot imagine how anyone in the world could hate Americans, who they think are so kind and decent. The truth is that there are many positive aspects of the US, especially its stated creeds and principles. There really are many decent people, which is one small hope for the nation. But the reality behind the rhetoric is that American culture is a gutter culture. It is a culture of exploitation and greed, of the ends always justifying the means. It is a culture of torture, a culture of lies, and a culture of phony morality. The rhetoric is just for the naive and for the children until they are old enough to learn how to whip a slave. Americans care more about their dogs and cats than they do about the many poor and needy US citizens. Foreign citizens do not even reach this level of indifference: Their lives are completely without value. Facilitating all of this is a culture of ignorance, a nonexistent public debate, pervasive propaganda, and the constant threat of and implementation of violence against those whose dissent actually threatens to change something (as opposed to sanctioned or officially tolerated meaningless, distracting "dissent").What are human rights? Basically everyone knows, at least for the most fundamental human rights such as the freedom of religion, speech, association, thought, due process, etc. They only "stop knowing" when they want to violate those rights for someone else. These rights are the law of the world, in treaties going back at least 50 years. They are the principles in the Bill of Rights and of the American Revolution ("live free or die"). So it is not like the rights abusers really do not know. But here is an operational definition. Fundamental human rights are those rights that people are rightly willing to die for. They are rights that we like to think we would die fighting for if someone tried to deny them to us. They are rights that people would be justified in fighting a war for, against those who would take them away.
Was Jefferson a terrorist? To the British of the 1770s he surely was. Perhaps if he were alive today (without slaves) that is how he would be labeled. John Brown was a true American hero, but even today some still consider him a terrorist. His "crime" was telling slaves that they should fight for freedom and kill their masters if that is what it took. He tried to provide them with guns and organization to do just that. If you and your family were held in slavery, wouldn't you hope for someone to do that for you? Why would you not grant other citizens what you presume for yourself and your own family?
Ideas without words to express them
DeTocqueville wrote, paraphrasing, that American society emphasizes rhetoric but diminishes meaning. If there actually is any public debate that cannot be squelched by threats of violence or retaliation, the Orwellized language assures that nothing can really be said meaningfully anyway. Take the phrase, "it is not fair." This phrase is essentially meaningless in American society. The meaning is diminished to a child's complaint deserving of ridicule. Of course that actually is how it is used in many instances, and we all know that life is not fair. But there are degrees of unfairness, and some which need to cause alarm do not because they cannot even be meaningfully expressed. ("Auschwitz was not fair." "Lynching was not fair.") The population is desensitized to language by the assault of its constant hyperbolic and manipulative uses. Citizens eventually do not even differentiate between information from incessant pathological liars and information from people who "cry wolf" only when there truly is one. If anything, they tend to believe the liars and confabulators who tell them the soothing lies they want to hear.Class is another area that is now in what I call an Orwell-space: it cannot be discussed because the language to do so has been so loaded and trivialized. Give the ignorant people some pat phrase to repeat whenever someone talks of class differences: "you are just trying to start a class war," or "another soak the rich plan." Even the fixed notions such as working class, upper class, middle class, and underclass rob us of the ability to meaningfully discuss equitable economic and distribution systems without falling into kneejerk reactions of the past. Some people will just label the whole subject area as "liberal" with a sneer and thus dismiss it entirely. Others may even try to label you a socialist, as if the current system of large-scale market manipulations, subsidies for the wealthy, and indifference to the needs of poor families to survive on low wages has anything to do with true free enterprise. Race is another issue that has been hotbuttoned and Orwellized, but it directly illustrates the character of Americans (really the lack thereof). Race provides a clear example that generalizes to various other sleazy American control techniques. That is the sense in which I bring up racial examples in this essay. They clearly illustrate larger tendencies of American society.
Race has been an American Achilles heel since its founding. The very notion is characteristically American, the classification system of a slaving nation. The whole idea of one drop of black blood making someone black is ridiculous from any scientific and genetic viewpoint, as are the surface variables of skin color, etc. Why doesn't one drop of white blood make you white? From a social viewpoint, though, the distinction is there and makes a huge difference just because it has been there for so long and has made such a huge difference. It is a pernicious societal and cultural software in people's minds. It becomes a social habit for the first thing you notice about someone to be which racial categorization they fall into. This separation then perpetuates the further separation, especially when economic disparities fall disproportionately along such lines and the resulting effects are misattributed to race. Thus the system perpetuates the notion that there was some real difference to begin with, rather than an arbitrary and exploitative one with roots in the most abominable slave system ever in the world. Each new generation that comes along "grows up" to be trained in the caste system and in the knowledge that those who challenge it are made to suffer.
[Of course this cultural separation has some silver linings when ostracized cultures in many areas become more cultured than the ones that spurned them. A policy of forced assimilation into a single "dominant" culture is in many ways worse than an exploitative separation that nonetheless allows distinct cultures to survive. I do not, however, buy the claim that fundamental human rights are a Western idea or a cultural imposition. If human rights were just a cultural thing, almost all nations of the world would not have ratified the treaties on human rights.]
Insult to injury
Americans are like mockingbirds, copying and taunting. That is how they do it. Minstrel shows were the major form of entertainment in America for over a hundred years. They will genocide whole Indian nations for centuries, force the few survivors onto reservations to live in abject poverty, and then dress up like Indians and prance around at sports events. Then they expect the Indians to believe this is flattering or respectful. Many Americans are kept so ignorant they cannot even see what is wrong with this picture. Ask a Native American what treaties are to Americans: They are nothing more than a way to steal with lies, to trade actual things for empty promises they never intended to keep.In a religious example, some Americans want to think that they are Zen masters just because in their arrogance they feel like they should be, even if they know nothing about the religion and have never practiced it. They harass the real practitioners and prance around their own mockingbird zen impostors, trying to turn a major world religion into their own little rigged contest complete with cheerleaders and scorekeepers. They do not do this with certain other religions, which seems to be an unfortunate side effect of Zen being something Americans covet, at least superficially, as valuable or powerful. Some may even take this paragraph as incentive to propagandize more for their cointelpro agents, but it needs to be said, regardless.
Americans have a long history of condemning others for adopting their own cruel practices. The eugenics movement, rather than being a Nazi creation, was in many respects an American idea, preached and implemented for years before WWII. Open anti-semitism was also common in the US before WWII. This served in some ways to inspire Hitler and the Nazis. After the war, the US then imported back some Nazi refinements of those filthy ideas via their Paperclip project and other programs to bring Nazi war criminals here to live and work. This would just be history except that the same trends continue to the present. Americans are completely amoral, but only they are allowed that. Other countries may look at the US and try to emulate them, but that is definitely not allowed. The moral two-way mirror lets Americans see out quite clearly when it suits their needs, but they never can see themselves.
Divide and rule
Divide and conquer is used by the powerful in the US in order to stay in power and to maintain their hold on the political and economic resources. Those who try to build coalitions across the purposely created divisions of the corrupt status quo -- or just those who might do so -- are the prime targets of the secret American repressive machinery. Such leaders tend to die or be otherwise neutralized. It is just those sorts of leaders who are necessary to actually change things. By mainly targeting such leaders, operations like COINTELPRO have huge political consequences while keeping the number of direct victims small enough that typical Americans who even learn of such operations can dismiss them. There is not a large group of direct victims to organize as opposition.As an example of the divide-and-conquer strategy, consider the issue of slave reparations. However you feel about this "issue," politically it is unlikely to yield anything but racial divisions. (The "issue" was given a big boost when a series of ads against reparations were placed in college newspapers. Whatever the intention was, the effect was to increase the visibility and popularity of such drives among blacks, and to increase the backlash among whites.) Such polarizing issues tend to help leaders in both camps, but block larger coalitions from forming. This is a common political situation in the abstract, for instance like the mutually reinforcing love/hate relationship between secret right-wing thugs and terrorists -- with the ordinary citizens always losing out. Back to the reparations issue, if the issues instead were fundamental human rights and justice rather than reparations, then larger coalitions across racial lines could form and have a much better chance of changing things. This would ultimately help the black community more than one-time reparation payments, even if they could be implemented (in my opinion of course). Jesse Jackson did something similar when he campaigned for the Appalachian poor, who are largely white, as part of a campaign for the poor in general.
The problem with such coalitions is, first of all, the tendency to compromise away the real burning issues to form a large but weak coalition of people with correspondingly weak commitment to the cause. It can be difficult to have a tangible common goal to achieve in the real world rather than some abstract goal without a specific focus. There is a tendency for leaders to become mealy-mouthed and no longer speak the difficult truths that need to be spoken. Finally, there is the tendency for certain leaders (or "appointed leaders") to try to take over and co-opt the movement rather than uniting separate groups for a common cause without destroying the component groups. Leaders who can manage to form such coalitions, or who might be able to form them, are fairly rare and are usually unfairly shot down. Because of this, it might even be strategically necessary to form leaderless resistance cells even for issues like poverty and injustice, though such organization is far from optimal. In the absence of unifying leaders, maybe polarization needs to happen, but what axis should it polarize on?
Same old thinking, same old cronies
Today the same old trends discussed here are continuing, with even more secrecy and more concentration of media ownership to a few rich people and corporations. Secrecy never benefits the ordinary citizens, except for a few real national security matters which are a tiny fraction of the nation's secrets. Secrecy serves to cover up the crimes of the state, as well as to perpetuate mediocrity among the bureaucrats. It serves to cover up the use of the nation's police and intelligence forces as taxpayer-funded private armies used by the rich and powerful to maintain the status quo. You can watch TV for days and never see a real dissenting opinion. When they then take polls and advertise the results to reassure the people that everyone else fell for the incessant propaganda message, too, the only surprising thing is how many people's opinions do still differ from the monotone message being drilled into everyone's heads.These trends and patterns do not just apply from within to without, i.e., they are not just the way that "insider" Americans treat "outsiders." It is a larger pattern of filthy sociology ingrained in the American soul. Anyone can find himself or herself an "outsider" to some group of filthy Americans at any moment. It does not depend on race or wealth or any strict criterion. If some American pigs think can they can gain from or will sadistically enjoy your exploitation, and if they think they can get away with it, they will not hesitate. (A good deed especially is unlikely to go unpunished.)
These are the same hateful people doing the same hateful things as they have for years, under cover of the same ignorance and lies. Even the exploited tend to pick up this same hateful culture: Americans are trained to want to be #1 at all costs, when all too often the "contest" is judged by the ability to get away with greedy amoral thievery. It is something like the 3-caste apartheid system in South Africa but more class-mobile; at least you could aspire to be in the middle-caste and piss on someone else even as you accepted some mediocre idiot's presumed perpetual superiority over you. It is particularly sad when the exploited adopt the methods and sick philosophies of their exploiters, but it happens.
Harassment is almost a defining trend of American society (as well as foreign policy). You select your victim and first see if they will be your Quisling and lick your boots at your command. If so you kick them, taunt them, and exploit them and every now and then throw them a bone, and all is fine. If they resist you then the harassment operations begin. These people who did nothing are suddenly the victims of a large-scale harassment operation. They are suddenly thrust into an impossible situation. The goal is to force the victims to fight back and strike out. When they do, they are painted as the aggressor and the harassment is increased. It is like the junior high school bully script, "I heard you were talking about me," "No, I wasn't," "Are you calling me a liar?" It really is that level of pathetic American juvenilia, except that the harassment is as real as a brick to the head. If the victims become bitter, Americans love to cast that as an accusing putdown, as if they had nothing to do with it.
As a major part of the repressive system there are massive societal psychological warfare operations. These operations can function like Chinese water torture, where everywhere you turn there is the steady drip, drip, drip reminder that you are under Stasi-like surveillance. In an intense psyop campaign you could not read the newspaper, listen to the radio, or read the internet without seeing the drip, drip, drip. It is like the old-fashioned American terrorism method where "respectable" white storekeepers would display the knuckles of burned lynching victims in their front windows. Other psyops involve discrediting the the victim and distracting from his or her message -- often prior to when the victim acts, based on surveillance. Other discrediting psyops involve phony "kooks" who suddenly show up with a "similar" message which quickly degenerates into obvious absurdity.
[Most Americans do not know, by the way, that Reagan used Army psychological warfare experts to "perception manage" the domestic American population in the 1980s. COINTELPRO-style harassment was also used, but by then the American "Watergate press" -- to the extent that it ever truly was a real phenomenon -- had been tamed into middle-caste bootlickers rather than journalists who might challenge the state's crimes. The press now is largely composed of collaborators and the term "American journalist" is mostly an oxymoron.]
Mind control victims
As many of you know, I have been working for years for the basic human rights of mind control victims in the United States, along with other activists. Please see the links below if you are unfamiliar with the plight of these ongoing American torture victims. It is not a question of whether I am right about the situation, everyone who has really looked into it at all knows I am; enough of the abuses are documented. It is a question of whether anyone cares at all. That is the pig America of 2002, the same old pig America continuing. Mind control victims have suffered undeniably hideous torture experiences, and the whole machinery of the government has been applied to keep them from publicizing the ongoing crimes against them and to keep them from any legal or other recourse.Mind control victims are a fairly small minority in America, who tend to have no common traits except for the hideous sorts of crimes that have been inflicted on them. (At least those direct mind control victims who have figured out what has been done to them are a small minority, and assuming you do not calculate in any wide-field sorts of EM experiments that have been conducted.) Mind control victims are largely voiceless, both due to their small numbers and due to the hideously destructive effects of ongoing torture on their lives. For this reason, mind control activists need to unite with other groups to work for basic human rights and justice. That is basically the point of this essay, to outline the real situation in the country. Unfortunately, the major American (and world) human rights organizations have tended to ignore mind control abuses and victims, in the same way that they ignored the American radiation experiment victims for decades, insinuating that the victims were crazy.
Other oppressed groups also need to unite in order to have any hope for improving the human rights situation in the US. One can hope for some magic event that will suddenly give the filthy pig Americans some sort of consciences, but hoping is free. The power politics of America are based on harassment and repression, and the only things they understand are numbers, influence, money, and perhaps the barrel of a gun. After they are forced to confront their crimes Americans pontificate about how bad the injustices were and how noble they are for dealing with them, but in reality they will not lift a single finger to stop a fellow citizen from being tortured unless they think they have to. It took serious activism to stop the pig filthy American Tuskegee experiment as late as the 1970s. They were going to continue it for years to come, probably still publishing results in the medical journals about it. The "love it or leave it" apologists, who support blatant violations of the US Constitution against domestic citizens -- not to mention violations of any conception of basic human decency -- are the ones who should have to leave the country. But if some country were to offer mind control victims the chance for political asylum and actual human rights protections many would undoubtedly jump at the chance to live a normal life free from TORTURE.
There is not much left for me to say. I do not know how much longer I will be able to continue this, or for that matter if it is even worth it. Americans resist nothing more than they do being dragged out of their pathetic fantasy delusions that they are so free, kind, and fair. People keep falling for the same lies and the same manipulations, year after year after year. But the victims do not deserve it and the children deserve a better future. I have not lied to you about the situation, nor have I succumbed to the baloney that by being "diplomatic" and mincing words somehow the filthy pigs will listen and actually take action. Please take whatever action you personally can to further human rights and human dignity, and stick with it. I hope any Americans are embarrassed and ashamed, but hoping is free.
END
Evil triumphs when good men do nothing!
Man Complains at Bank, Gets Arrested and Charged with Felony
New York Woman Calls 311 to Gripe, Gets $100 Fine
The Police State is Here Folks!
