LETS GET IT ON IN THE HAGUE JOHN BULL

John Bull was created by Dr. John Arbuthnot, a close friend of Jonathan Swift, Irish author of the satire, 'A Modest Proposal', in 1712. Arbuthnot created John Bull in his pamphlet, "Law is a Bottomless Pit ," in 1712. Arbuthnot gave John Bull a sister named Peg, who was Scottish and a French enemy called Louis Baboon. In those days, long before the internet, this was the basis of British establishment humour and entertainment, which evolved into their infamous satire magazine, called Punch, which created the Irish joke and cartoon, which entertained the elite of merry old England. 

John Bull" from The Sketch Book; "A plain, downright, matter-of-fact fellow, with much less of poetry about him than rich prose. There is little of romance in his nature, but a vast deal of a strong natural feeling. He excels in humour more than in wit; is jolly rather than gay; melancholy rather than morose; can easily be moved to a sudden tear or surprised into a broad laugh; but he loathes sentiment and has no turn for light pleasantry. He is a boon companion, if you allow him to have his humour and to talk about himself; and he will stand by a friend in a quarrel with life and purse, however soundly he may be cudgelled."

A lot of this humour was used for political purposes by all political sides, similar to Charlie Hebdo satire in Paris. However it became mainstream in London, to the point that, The Times could boast in it's editorial, on their Irish Holocaust of six million, with establishment approval, that, "A Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as the red man on the banks of Manhattan." - The London Times, triumphant editorial of 1848. Some Irish, not suffering from Stockholm Syndrome are still a little irritated about this. There was however considerable debate among the British establishment, as to whether it might be better, to ship all of the Irish to America instead and employ them to kill all of the Negros which was commented on by British historian Edward Freeman, writing on his return from America. 'This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a Negro, and be hanged for it. I find this sentiment generally approved - sometimes with the qualification, that they want Irish and Negroes for servants, not being able to get any other.

Now it appears after the "Special Relationship" meeting yesterday, between the two burgers Obama and British PM Cameron, that Obama has not done his research on Perfidious Albion, as the more educated French have, who received further lessons from Charlie Hebdo.  If some of these British had their way, more than half of Obama's ancestors would have been liquidated too, like the Irish and we would have a white woman in the White House. Now I have nothing against Hilary Rodham, unfortunately, other than possible WASP ancestry but Rodham is not of blue blooded stock, so no problem Hilary, you can be on top.

Some people say I have a resentment against the English, which is not true. My best friend is as English as the come and we disagree considerably in political matters. I would say, this is generallytrue of most Irish people. When it comes to Royalty and the City of London elite, yes there are a few issues which enter the realm of Buddha's mosquitos. I was taught, that the process of forgiveness and reconciliation, requires a sincere apology and acknowledgement for harm done and then a form of restitution. Now if you happen to visit the original constituencies of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, just to begin with, which incidentally, suffer even greater deprivation and poverty, since they came to power, you will find thousands of people, who have serious issues with the elite of the City of London.

The subject of holocausts, genocide and ethnic cleansing, is a source of great amusement and entertainment to the British elite, to this day, to the point, that they have with perfidious black humour, commissioned a writer of Anglo-Irish stock, fattened on the vacant lands of the Irish Holocaust victims, to produce a comedy series, on one of their principal channels. Now being a little mosquito bitten myself, I took it upon myself, to start a petition on the very empowering Care2 Network, to have the International Criminal Court, adjudicate this matter, and deal with it, in a civilized way. The first day, there were 59 good people who signed and one on each two days subsequently, there after none.

I have proposed this course of action to try to achieve justice, and I have proposed it as an alternative, to more militant forms of achieving social justice. Last time I checked there was not a single signatory in Ireland. Frankly I was not surprised from a lifetimes' experience of both British and west British censorship, to find this to be the case. I am seeking a peaceful resolution of these outstanding issues, as I believe there is clear evidence, that violence is self-defeating. So either all of the island of Ireland has Stockholm Syndrome or British censorship is extremely effective but guarantees even more violence. You see there is no money in the truth or peacefully resolving issues related to both state counter gang terrorism or the causes of violence. It's like ancient medicine, using leeches to heal the anaemico or bloodletting for varicose veins.

Obama and Cameron there is one minor problem with Genocide. It is carried in the bloodstream DNA of generations thereafter, like some mosquito-borne malaria or dengue fever, and has consequence like, these never ending wars in your terrorist narrative of yesterday. I was reared on your expensive diet of the Cold War and subsequently your Terrorist Wars, which conveniently keep your prefix of United attached to Kingdom and States behind never eternal wars that generate trillions from your taxpayers, for your, oh so profitable war complex industries.The collective memory of your genocide, simply doesn't go away you know.

If you cannot see the ICC Petition above this article, in your respective country, then it is censored. Are there any sisters and brothers of Hilary out there, who might Care2 help?

ICC opens initial probe into possible war crimes in Palestinian territories

Step could lead to charges against Israeli and Palestinian officials; FM Lieberman calls to dismantle International Criminal Court.

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court says she has opened a preliminary probe into possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories.

Fatou Bensouda said in a statement Friday she will conduct the preliminary examination in "full independence and impartiality."

The announcement comes after the Palestinian Authority acceded to the court's founding treaty and recognized its jurisdiction dating back to the eve of last summer's Gaza war.

Potential cases Bensouda could take on include allegations of war crimes by Israel during last summer's Gaza war where the Palestinians suffered heavy civilian casualties. Israel's settlement construction on occupied Palestinian lands could also be examined.

The cases could also include alleged war crimes by Hamas, which controls Gaza, including the firing of thousands of rockets at Israeli residential areas from crowded neighborhoods.

The prosecutor's announcement comes after the Palestinian Authority acceded to The Hague-based court's founding treaty and recognized its jurisdiction dating back to July, the eve of the last Gaza war.

Israel is not a member of the court.

A preliminary examination is not an investigation, but weighs information about possible crimes and jurisdiction issues to establish whether a full investigation is merited. It is unclear how long the preliminary examination might take. Bensouda said "there are no timelines" set in the court's founding treaty.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki welcomed the move and said the Palestinian Authority would cooperate.

"The Palestinian people called upon us to go to court and ask for an investigation and therefore we consider the announcement today as a historic event," he said.

Netanyahu: PA cooperates with terror organization Hamas

"Israel categorically rejects the statement by the ICC prosecutor" a statement issue by the bureau of Prime Minister Netanyahu said in response, adding that "The Palestinian Authority is not a state and therefore there is no place, also according to the ICC's own regulations, for such a probe."

"The absurdity of the decision is even greater since the PA is cooperating with Hamas, a terrorist organization that commits war crimes," the statement said, adding that unlike Hamas, "Israel is fighting terrorism while upholding international law and has an independent judiciary."

The decision by the ICC, the prime minister said, was a "complete reversal of the original objectives that were at the basis of the founding of the ICC," which was also founded "following the mass killing of six million Jews by the Nazis." Now, Netanyahu said, there are those who "wish to use this court against the Jewish state, which is defending itself from murderous terror that attack it as well as the entire world."

Netanyahu also said that, "unfortunately, the move turns the court into part of the problem, rather than part of the solution," Netanyahu concluded. "It's a scandalous that only days after terrorists slaughtered Jews in Paris ... the ICC opens an inquiry against the Jewish state, and only because it defends its citizens against Hamas, a terrorist organization that is partnered with the Palestinian Authority."

Lieberman: Israel will seek ICC's dismantle

Describing the court's statement as hypocritical and supportive of terror, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman the decision was "scandalous," stemmed political and anti-Israel motives and was an attempt to "harm Israel's right to defend itself against terror." He added that Israel would take international action to have the ICC dismantled.

He said that the fact the court had not found it necessary to intervene in Syria, despite the over 200,000 deaths in that country's civil war, but sees a need to "examine the most moral in the world" proves the decision was motivated by "political and anti-Israel considerations."

Lieberman said that it was impossible to compare the Israel Defense Forces, which "does everything possible to avoid harming innocents," with "terror organizations which fire from areas populated by civilians against areas populated by other civilians."

"We won't accept it and I will recommend that we don't cooperate with it," Lieberman said.

The Palestinian Authority two weeks ago officially submitted to the United Nations the request to join 22 international treaties, including the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the ICC.

The applications were signed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas following the failure of a Palestinian statehood bid at the UN Security Council.

In response to the Palestinian request to join the court at The Hague, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel expects the ICC to reject the Palestinian application due to the fact that it is not a state.

Israel retaliated to the Palestinian move to join the ICC by freezing the transfer of more than $100 million a month in taxes it collects for the Palestinians.

The prosecutor is currently conducting eight preliminary examinations in Honduras, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Georgia, Guinea and Nigeria. Some have been going on for years.

Judges at the court must approve any request by the prosecution office for a full investigation.

Established in 2002, the court has struggled to live up to high expectations that it would end impunity for high-ranking perpetrators of atrocities in conflicts around the globe.

It has completed only three trials, ending in two convictions and an acquittal, all of rebel leaders from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The court has no police force to secure crime scenes, gather evidence and arrest suspects and has repeatedly had trouble gaining custody of indicted suspects such as Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has been charged with genocide in the conflict-torn Darfur region of his country.

To get the latest from Haaretz  
Like us on Facebook and get articles directly in your news feed

2016 IRISH CITIZEN ARMY DIRECT DEMOCRACY

I am not by nature a violent man, in fact I abhor it to the point of carrying insects out of my home, rather than kill them. Having said that, there is something lying around strictly for self-defensive purposes, should someone enter the boundaries of our home, in today's lawless corporate society. I have witnessed more than my fair share of violence in my lifetime and I certainly do not condone rape of any kind but I am also full of contradictions between my head and my heart.The following experience is a good example of this.

I was staying in a four-star hotel at the time in Bangkok, and unlike most hotels, on this particular night, there was no protection on the windows, against mosquitos entering my bedroom. Now when I am awakened by something like that, I am not a cosmopolitan man, so I phoned reception and asked them to send up something, to get rid of the mosquitos, that were plaguing me, but they had nothing in their arsenal. I was enraged with the bastards who were bloodsucking my arse, testicles and any flesh they could find all phukin night, while I tried to sleep, for some important business, I needed  to do next day.

Anyway, after I returned to my bedroom from business next day, there was an attractive chief housekeeper, standing at the foot of the bed, who asked me what my problem was. After I explained to her explicitly, in a rather emotional way and asked her to please get an aerosol or something, she stood at the foot of my bed, as bould as brass, sneering at me, with a glint in her eye. She said, "this is a buddhist culture and mosquitos have to live too".Well I was incensed and I just wanted to slam her on the bed and give her the hardest phuck, she ever had in her life. By the grace of the star dust and experience I did not. I am not respsonsible for what comes into my head, only what I do with it. So please forgive me sisters and brothers but there's a dark dog lurking in these savage veins,  especially when aroused by some creature drawing blood, from this thin skin or someone provoking my sensitive veneer of civility.

Violence is not smart, particularly reactionary violence and as Mairead Farrell said,  "our head is our best weapon". She too however was martyred by political violence, which is part of the many contradictions of Irish political reality.The big question however, is what does a wee country like Ireland do, when you have had mosquitos torturing you for eight hundred years or a dirty war of British counter gangs, lurking on your doorstep, under the false flag of sectarianism or political counter gangs, like the one who murdered Charlie Hebdo? I have scripted in a petition from Care2 for the Irish Holocaust to be taken to the ICC for adjudication but It has been censored since day one? 

How do we achieve justice intelligently, without unnecessary violence, with such a perfidious enemy? Young, impetuous  revolutionaries are not going to listen to the counsel of experience or excess, unless they are presented with a better way. The reality is that our so called present Democracy, is not a facilitator of genuine change or social justice.Technology has advanced considerably since the guerilla days of Tom Barry. It brings with it, a considerable upside and downside to the traditional tactics of revolution, indeed if not, it makes it next to impossible, without overwhelming citizen support and solidarity. While the internet holds considerable potential, surveillance technology, leaves little privacy, if any, to ordinary citizens. This must be factored into any resistance leadership choices and decisions. Youth are impatient by nature and are not going to hang around, while we are pensive about it.

I am not a born-again virgin, as anyone who knows me well, will testify. I have known poverty of the worst kind, which often includes poverty of the Spirit of Freedom, as Bobby Sands called it. It is the worst poverty of all, and many have it stolen by our present, education system of censorship and ignorance. Case in point being, that almost all students of third level education in Ireland, are not aware, that the greatest crime against humanity on earth, i.e the Irish Holocaust, was committed by the British Government and cost more than 6 million lives, not the one million famine, they are brainwashed with. Now I have been in prison, but the worst prison of all, from my own experience, is extreme self-centeredness, something the Irish education system cultivates. I have also tasted my own personal freedom, which is conditional on your freedom. Yes, the truth really did set me free, but it is also conditional on passing it on. So my reasons for writing are not entirely altruistic. I know from experience, that freedom starts with the truth and as a result, I detest masks of any kind, whether it be a fake or condescending smile, a patronizing one, talking out of the side of the mouth, censorship of any kind, astroturf societies, poser  balaclavas and hypocritical establishment concern for Charlie Hebdo.

The Charlie Hebdo affair, clearly demonstrates, that any citizen army, wearing masks, in the age of the terrorist narrative, leaves itself wide open, for serious abuse and discredit of the Cause, for which we claim justice. From my own experience, and reading Craig Robert's analysis yesterday, I would guess, there was considerable British involvement in the matter and that volunteers, on orders from what was formerly British Aden, now known as Yemen, were waiting for the car used in the attack, at a predetermined venue, while the real murders made their excape, as the two brothers, paid the price with their lives, case closed. I could be wrong, i have no evidence, other than very similar experiences in Ireland, directed by British intelligence, which is still on going. The two young innocent boys in the picture, at the top of this page, are in fact victims of quite similar activity, with critical recorded transcripts, edited for the trial, in the same manner, as the unedited video released of the Charlie Hebdo attack.

We simply need to find a more intelligent way, in this time and cyberspace. Those who fail to grasp this, are failing their citizens, with unnecessary bloodshed and decades of incarceration of volunteers, with the highest ideals, coupled with bravery. Their release needs to be negotiated, and a new, more intelligent form of resistance to imperialism and corporatism, needs to be found sooner rather than later. So to any potential militant, I call on them, to consider this, and either lead, follow or get out of the way, intelligently. The island is full of headless chickens, flapping around aimlessly and it needs unity, direction with solidarity, for the sake of it's long tortured people. I learned in the process of being forced to get honest with myself first, that ego and foolish pride, pre-empt downfall and we simply cannot afford this any longer. This is not to be confused with the humility and pride, that comes with serving and making sacrifices like those made in 1916 and the Hunger Strike, for our communal identity and liberation. Too much ego is a terrible thing as I know from personal experience. I don't have all the anwers, no more than I have a monopoly on the truth. This can only be arrived at, in the dialectic of materialism, in an unfettered, uncensored, discourse.

The tricolour was taken from the Revolution in Paris by Irish Protestants, to become an emblem of the the Irish Republic. Alongside it in Irish Republican tradition, the Starry Plough and flags of the four Provinces have always flown. It appears, that right now, little unity can be found within or without that tradition, behind the tricolour, but surely all of the Irish working class, can find common purpose and Unity for now, behind the Starry Plough. Until we are materially free, we cannot realize our aspiration for the visionary unity of the 1916 leadership, because of British divide and rule tactics in the the dsicourse 

All traditions which survive the test of time, pay good heed to it's elders. Only they have the true wisdom, that can only be forged in the cauldron of experience and excess. Heaven knows, for a small island, we have experienced more than our fair share of violence, only to be sold out, time and time again, that has taken us backward not forward. Only the people of no property, without vested interest other than it's class consciousness, can guarantee and protect the gains and progress of revolution. No one else can be trusted, human nature is greedy and selfish, without, transparent, guarantees of protection. The political violence, since the massed ranks of the Civil Rights protests were massacred on January 30, 1972, 42 years ago, has not progressed Ireland one iota. Working people have been sold out and it will continue that way, until Irish people, empower themselves and regulate themselves, on a day to day basis. The armalite did not win equality. Anything that traspired in that direction, was a consequence of the Civil Rights campaign, which would have happened anyway.

We have plenty of people, with  a proven track record of integrity in the north, who have not sold out, like Bernadette McAliskey, Eamon McCann, Martin Corey, Marian Price, Francie Mackie, that can be trusted, to counsel a younger generation of people, serving a united leadership of working people, as opposed to the present self serving one, that cannot be trusted, which along with the Right2Water movement in the south, can lead and liberate. We already have had more than enough cannon fodder of Irish men and women dying for the sellouts, the captains and the kings of exploitation. We are living in an internet age, where direct working class democracy is possible. I am not so naive as to believe it can be entirely achieved in cyberspace. No one has a monopoly on the Truth. The Solidarity and Unity of the people of no property, behind ethical leadership of Principles, not Personalities, is a necessity. We have to work for it as persistently, intelligently and as transparently, as did our comrades of the past on the battle field, to overcome censorship, masks, disinformation and tyranny.

Those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it, the voice of experience tells us. We have been sold out time and again by those whom we have delegated with our own empowerment. This is irresponsible, it does not fit with the Protestant ethic of taking responsibilty for ourselves and our children's future. You don't have to be particularly bright, at reading the political tea leaves of the island, to see that it's a horrific future, with bank debt and sectarianism, little wonder we have the fourth highest rate of suicide in the world among our male teens. Direct, Transparent, Uncensored, Democracy is the way of the future. We have to make it happen now as an alternative to political violence. We must occupy it. The only credible, realistic way to occupy and honour 1916, is to unite behind the Starry Plough, until our Republic is realized. Like the epitaph of Robert Emmet, the 1916 Republic can only be honoured properly, by uniting and achieving our place among the Nation's of the World with nonour, with the Starry Plough on our mast. Again I call on all progressive leadership on the island, to consider this, and either lead, follow or get out of the way, under the flag of the Starry Plough, with the tools of direct democracy. Please if you are an activist, bring this to their attention, as it is censored and make it happen.

The Secret History of Guns

The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership—and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.ADAM WINKLER

Joseph Durning/Durning 3D

THE EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.



The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must
take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.

THE TEXT OF the Second Amendment is maddeningly ambiguous. It merely says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Yet to each side in the gun debate, those words are absolutely clear.It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.

Gun-rights supporters believe the amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms and outlaws most gun control. Hard-line gun-rights advocates portray even modest gun laws as infringements on that right and oppose widely popular proposals—such as background checks for all gun purchasers—on the ground that any gun-control measure, no matter how seemingly reasonable, puts us on the slippery slope toward total civilian disarmament.

This attitude was displayed on the side of the National Rifle Association’s former headquarters: THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. The first clause of the Second Amendment, the part about “a well regulated Militia,” was conveniently omitted. To the gun lobby, the Second Amendment is all rights and no regulation.

Although decades of electoral defeats have moderated the gun-control movement’s stated goals, advocates still deny that individual Americans have any constitutional right to own guns. The Second Amendment, in their view, protects only state militias. Too politically weak to force disarmament on the nation, gun-control hard-liners support any new law that has a chance to be enacted, however unlikely that law is to reduce gun violence. For them, the Second Amendment is all regulation and no rights.

While the two sides disagree on the meaning of the Second Amendment, they share a similar view of the right to bear arms: both see such a right as fundamentally inconsistent with gun control, and believe we must choose one or the other. Gun rights and gun control, however, have lived together since the birth of the country. Americans have always had the right to keep and bear arms as a matter of state constitutional law. Today, 43 of the 50 state constitutions clearly protect an individual’s right to own guns, apart from militia service.

Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.

Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”

Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.

Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.

Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.

The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.

Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.


THE PANTHERS’ METHODS provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.

A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”

Political will in Congress reached the critical point around this time. In April of 1968, James Earl Ray, a virulent racist, used a Remington Gamemaster deer rifle to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s assassination—and the sniper fire faced by police trying to quell the resulting riots—gave gun-control advocates a vivid argument. Two months later, a man wielding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver shot Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. The very next day, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.

Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

INDISPUTABLY, FOR MUCH of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

IN RESPONSE TO the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.” In December of 1865, Bingham had proposed what would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Among its provisions was a guarantee that all citizens would be secure in their fundamental rights:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The key phrase, in Bingham’s view, was privileges or immunities of citizens—and those “privileges or immunities,” he said, were “chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution.” Jacob Howard of Michigan, the principal sponsor of Bingham’s amendment in the Senate, reminded his colleagues that these amendments guaranteed “the freedom of speech and of the press,” “the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures,” and “the right to keep and bear arms.”

Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.


TODAY, THE NRA is the unquestioned leader in the fight against gun control. Yet the organization didn’t always oppose gun regulation. Founded in 1871 by George Wingate and William Church—the latter a former reporter for a newspaper now known for hostility to gun rights, The New York Times—the group first set out to improve American soldiers’ marksmanship. Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. The new measure imposed more order—and, in most cases, far more restrictions.)

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.” According to Frederick, the NRA “sponsored” the Uniform Firearms Act and promoted it nationwide. Highlighting the political strength of the NRA even back then, a 1932Virginia Law Review article reported that laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon were already “in effect in practically every jurisdiction.”

When Congress was considering the first significant federal gun law of the 20th century—the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a steep tax and registration requirements on “gangster guns” like machine guns and sawed-off shotguns—the NRA endorsed the law. Karl Frederick and the NRA did not blindly support gun control; indeed, they successfully pushed to have similar prohibitive taxes on handguns stripped from the final bill, arguing that people needed such weapons to protect their homes. Yet the organization stood firmly behind what Frederick called “reasonable, sensible, and fair legislation.”

One thing conspicuously missing from Frederick’s comments about gun control was the Second Amendment. When asked during his testimony on the National Firearms Act whether the proposed law violated “any constitutional provision,” he responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” In other words, the president of the NRA hadn’t even considered whether the most far-reaching federal gun-control legislation in history conflicted with the Second Amendment. Preserving the ability of law-abiding people to have guns, Frederick would write elsewhere, “lies in an enlightened public sentiment and in intelligent legislative action. It is not to be found in the Constitution.”

In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” Orth and the NRA didn’t favor stricter proposals, like national gun registration, but when the final version of the Gun Control Act was adopted in 1968, Orth stood behind the legislation. While certain features of the law, he said, “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

A GROWING GROUP OF rank-and-file NRA members disagreed. In an era of rising crime rates, fewer people were buying guns for hunting, and more were buying them for protection. The NRA leadership didn’t fully grasp the importance of this shift. In 1976, Maxwell Rich, the executive vice president, announced that the NRA would sell its building in Washington, D.C., and relocate the headquarters to Colorado Springs, retreating from political lobbying and expanding its outdoor and environmental activities.

Rich’s plan sparked outrage among the new breed of staunch, hard-line gun-rights advocates. The dissidents were led by a bald, blue-eyed bulldog of a man named Harlon Carter, who ran the NRA’s recently formed lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.

The new NRA was not only responding to the wave of gun-control laws enacted to disarm black radicals; it also shared some of the Panthers’ views about firearms. Both groups valued guns primarily as a means of self-defense. Both thought people had a right to carry guns in public places, where a person was easily victimized, and not just in the privacy of the home. They also shared a profound mistrust of law enforcement. (For years, the NRA has demonized government agents, like those in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency that enforces gun laws, as “jack-booted government thugs.” Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”) For both the Panthers in 1967 and the new NRA after 1977, law-enforcement officers were too often representatives of an uncaring government bent on disarming ordinary citizens.

A sign of the NRA’s new determination to influence electoral politics was the 1980 decision to endorse, for the first time in the organization’s 100 years, a presidential candidate. Their chosen candidate was none other than Ronald Reagan, who more than a decade earlier had endorsed Don Mulford’s law to disarm the Black Panthers—a law that had helped give Reagan’s California one of the strictest gun-control regimes in the nation. Reagan’s views had changed considerably since then, and the NRA evidently had forgiven his previous support of vigorous gun control.

IN 2008, IN A LANDMARK ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.

So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.

The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from theHeller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, should
be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

THE IRA IS NOT ON FACEBOOK STUPID

Lonesome Yanks
Postcards from the End of America 
By Linh Dinh

January 14, 2015 "ICH" -  I was sitting in the Friendly Lounge, one block from my Philly apartment. Next to me was a 59-year-old man, Robert. Seeing my wedding band, he confided, “You’re lucky to have somebody to go home to. I always had a lover, a boyfriend, but I haven’t had anybody in ten years. And it’s not the,” and he suddenly dipped his head down near my crotch, “but the support, you know. I can’t just go home and say to somebody, ‘Bitch, I love you!’”

I was getting buzzed in Dirty Frank’s, downtown Philly’s second cheapest bar, when an old friend proposed, “You should come over some time. I’ll make you dinner.” She knew I was married. On another occasion, this lovely woman moaned, “I just want somebody to love.” On a third, she called me after 2AM, “Motherfucker, where are you?!”

Sitting home, I received an email from a Vietnamese poet who lives in a sunshiny state. Though I’ve known this unhappily married 40-year-old for more than a decade, we’ve never met face-to-face. In Vietnamese, she wrote, “Crazy teacher, please help me to translate: I’m aroused. I’m horny. I’m a whore. I’m an aroused whore. I’m an extremely horny whore. Thank you very much.”

I cite these handy examples not to embarrass anybody or to, God forbid, present my splotchy carcass as somehow in demand, but simply to point out the loneliness that afflicts this society is so appallingly pervasive and, I suspect, unprecedented. Our infants are immediately removed from their moms, our toddlers are parked in front of blathering televisions when not institutionalized, our dating millennials stare at separate iPads, our married couples hide their sexting and porn habits from each other, our old people blunder down a dark hallway or endless sidewalk alone. Else, they lie unvisited, waiting for death, and when kaput, may not be discovered for a week, as happened to my friend Lee Goldston. Yo, Lee!

In 1970, only 17% American households had but a single person, but it’s up to 27.5% now. Moreover, many of those who live with others may be sharing a dwelling with annoying strangers, or curled up in their parents’ basement. Take Robert’s situation. In a house with four other people, he has a room “the size of a napkin.” Each time he uses the bathroom, he’s “afraid to step on the floor. The ceiling tiles are falling down. The wall tiles are falling out. It’s gross in there!” And Robert never uses the kitchen because that’s filthy too. No one ever washes the dishes. In short, it’s not a home, but then most Americans don’t really have one anyway.

For many, it’s merely a spot to lie down after the long commute. For others, it’s a nest that can be blown away after the next missed rent or mortgage check. Made of sheetrocks, marathon loan payments and always rising taxes, an American home is about as permanent as a bad sitcom. To have no true home is to be constantly anxious, if not panic stricken, and since many of us are also isolated, physically and psychologically, what you have, then, is a society of frustrated, angry, ashamed and nervous wrecks. No wonder we take more drugs than anybody else!

One man who still has his family home is my acquaintance, Bill. For a decade, Bill made beaucoup bucks as a computer technician but, at age 44, had to switch career to become a transit policeman. (He even applied to Homeland Security, but wasn’t hired.) Assigned to a shopping mall, Bill had to occasionally arrest shoplifters or break up fights among unruly teens, but mostly he just strolled around to flirt with selected cashiers. Fresh from Lindenwold, New Jersey, 18-year-old Chelsea with her bleached blonde hair and rose and vine tattoo climbing up one pale arm was particularly enticing. For a few seconds, Bill fantasized about rescuing her from Starbucks. A playa, in short, he doesn’t mind living alone in his eight-bedroom, inherited house, though his winter heating bills are a real bitch. Though a teenager at heart, Bill has also just turned 50, so most nights find him eating turkey, his favorite, while watching Netflix next a huge dalmatian, Myer. Unlike humans, dogs don’t experience drawn out illnesses that may last decades. Bill likes it that way.

Thanks to a large inheritance, Jim also has his own house and, unlike Bill, doesn’t even have to work. A typical day finds him listening to Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra and Abbey Lincoln while browsing Rolling Stone and CounterPunch. After a leisurely porn pause, he might check in on National Public Radio. At 53-years-old, Jim has never had to take care of anyone save a series of tabbies, and his biggest exertion in life, his greatest achievement ever, was his escape from a decade-long crack habit. Further, Jim considers himself a “revolutionary,” though the only people he’s ever fought were his neighbors. With a shovel, Jim shattered a bar window, then hit a homeless man with a rebar, but it wasn’t until he threatened someone with a grass trimmer that he ended up in a psychiatric ward for three days. Out, Jim’s back to his half-listening, half-reading and half-masturbating routine, and he’ll maintain this progressive regiment until social justice is tightly entwined in a 69, yin yang fashion, with equitable wealth distribution. Actually, forget the second part, for there’s no way Jim will share one square inch of his two-story house with anything larger than a slim cat. Jim likes it that way.

In downtown Camden, I heard a street preacher holler, “We are a relational people!” and he certainly got that right. Further, I ardently believe that human bodies are really one continuum that has been tragically yet mercifully broken up. If you’re cut, I should feel pain, and vice versa, and when we’re at our best, that’s exactly what happens. Too often, though, people derive an orgasmic pleasure from watching someone being blown up. Excited, they cheer.

Elias Canetti talks about how instinctively humans laugh at seeing a person falling, and he traces this to our days as flesh hunters. Since a fallen body represents meat, we laugh out of joy. Beside this atavistic impulse, however, we also rush to help the fallen because we recognize the body in distress as our own. Our entertainment industry, though, is relentless in pushing the fantasy of the super predator, somebody who’s capable of destroying countless bodies “of the bad guys.” With its mesmerizing war and “action” films, Hollywood has amplified, to an insane degree, all of our worst sadistic tendencies. Sex, too, has become a matter of body count, but this is perfectly in line with our obsession with numbers. Ain’t that right, Bill? How many have you scored?

The American porch shrank, then disappeared. Sidewalks emptied or became overgrown with weeds. Behind closed doors, an unending cacophony of disembodied voices hyperventilate over nothing or sing the same old songs. Making duck faces or pulling their pants down, a little lower, yeah, like that, Americans snap selfies compulsively to make sure nothing of their noisily desperate lives is lost to eternity. We’ve all become famous to ourselves, and that’s good enough, somehow.

Say, what are the political ramifications of having a nation of inattentive, narcissistic jerk offs? Well, me, myself and I think it’s way beyond divide and conquer, for what it is is rule by fragmentation into 320,159,176 pieces, and counting. Yes, we have this, that and that camp but each takes its cues from the right or left hand of our ruling apparatus. To know what to do, say or even dress, we look towards Midtown Manhattan, Hollywood and Northwest DC. Talk about a disastrous recipe! Unwilling or unable to deal with each other in the flesh, we must plug in to even squeak a dissident note, so it’s no surprise our feeble rebellion remains virtual.

While the internet allows many fringe voices to find their miniscule audiences, its dominant aim is to tease, tickle and titillate the mind into numbness. With multiple windows and everything flickering by, nothing matters. Skimming over bullshit and insights alike, we forget a minute later what we’ve just glimpsed. Swarming with words, the internet desensitizes us to language.

After that last paragraph, my phone rang, so I picked it up to hear Casey, someone I hadn’t heard from for over two years. After the briefest of chit chat, middle-aged Casey spilled that her wife had left her, “I was crazy, she was crazy, but she was even crazier than I was!” Later, her upstairs neighbor, a crackhead, punched Casey so hard, “my brain moved to the other side! After I maced the bitch, I was dragged to court, can you believe it?!” Concluding, Casey said I should come over soon to catch up. “I always have beer in the fridge.”

“How are you making money these days?” I asked.

“Oh, I do freelance art works,” Casey answered rather defensively, “and I get food stamps.”

For a while, the smirking mainstream media celebrated social media as a tool for rebellions or even revolutions, but let’s get real here. If that shit’s effective, the people of Iraq, Libya and Ukraine, etc., wouldn’t have had their countries wrecked by this empire. FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and the rest are no more than means for the masses to report themselves, minutely and in real time, to the authorities.

Faced with an ultra violent enemy with its kill lists, bombs, missiles, bullets, black sites and torture, we bark abstractions or demand nothing as our demand, such is our feebleness and nihilism. Giving up on reality, we claim a speck sized corner of the internet as our free speech zone. Impotent, we wave virtual fists in the direction of Wall Street or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

To make more concrete statements, true rebels won’t be so vaguely semaphoric. Whether lone wolves or in roving bands, they’ll have to dodge the best technology ruthlessness can buy, however. No pixelated posers, they won’t telegraph their moves in advance but simply act, and though their successes will likely be merely symbolic, at least they won’t be surfing on fantasies.Linh Dinh http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.comThe 



Charlie Hebdo Story Simply Doesn’t Wash


By Paul Craig Roberts
January 14, 2015 "ICH" - The Charlie Hebdo affair has many of the characteristics of a false flag operation. The attack on the cartoonists’ office was a disciplined professional attack of the kind associated with highly trained special forces; yet the suspects who were later corralled and killed seemed bumbling and unprofessional. It is like two different sets of people.
Usually Muslim terrorists are prepared to die in the attack; yet the two professionals who hit Charlie Hebdo were determined to escape and succeeded, an amazing feat. Their identity was allegedly established by the claim that they conveniently left for the authorities their ID in the getaway car. Such a mistake is inconsistent with the professionalism of the attack and reminds me of the undamaged passport found miraculously among the ruins of the two WTC towers that served to establish the identity of the alleged 9/11 hijackers.
It is a plausible inference that the ID left behind in the getaway car was the ID of the two Kouachi brothers, convenient patsies, later killed by police, and from whom we will never hear anything, and not the ID of the professionals who attacked Charlie Hebdo. An important fact that supports this inference is the report that the third suspect in the attack, Hamyd Mourad, the alleged driver of the getaway car, when seeing his name circulating on social media as a suspect realized the danger he was in and quickly turned himself into the police for protection against being murdered by security forces as a terrorist.
Hamyd Mourad says he has an iron-clad alibi. If so, this makes him the despoiler of a false flag attack. Authorities will have to say that despite being wrong about Mourad, they were right about the Kouachi brothers. Alternatively, Mourad could be coerced or tortured into some sort of confession that supports the official story.https://www.intellihub.com/18-year-old-charlie-hebdo-suspect-surrenders-police-claims-alibi/
The American and European media have ignored the fact that Mourad turned himself in for protection from being killed as a terrorist as he has an alibi. I googled Hamid Mourad and all I found (January 12) was the main US and European media reporting that the third suspect had turned himself in. The reason for his surrender was left out of the reports. The news was reported in a way that gave credence to the accusation that the suspect who turned himself in was part of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Not a single US mainstream media source reported that the alleged suspect turned himself in because he has an ironclad alibi.
Some media merely reported Mourad’s surrender in a headline with no coverage in the report. The list that I googled includes the Washington Post (January 7 by Griff Witte and Anthony Faiola); Die Welt (Germany) “One suspect has turned himself in to police in connection with Wednesday’s massacre at the offices of Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo;” ABC News (January 7) “Youngest suspect in Charlie Hebdo Attack turns himself in;” CNN (January 8) “Citing sources, the Agence France Presse news agency reported that an 18-year-old suspect in the attack had surrendered to police.”
Another puzzle in the official story that remains unreported by the presstitute media is the alleged suicide of a high ranking member of the French Judicial Police who had an important role in the Charlie Hebdo investigation. For unknown reasons, Helric Fredou, a police official involved in the most important investigation of a lifetime, decided to kill himself in his police office on January 7 or January 8 (both dates are reported in the foreign media) in the middle of the night while writing his report on his investigation. A google search as of 6pm EST January 13 turns up no mainstream US media report of this event. The alternative media reports it, as do some UK newspapers, but without suspicion or mention whether his report has disappeared. The official story is that Fredou was suffering from “depression” and “burnout,” but no evidence is provided. Depression and burnout are the standard explanations of mysterious deaths that have unsettling implications.
Once again we see the US print and TV media serving as a ministry of propaganda for Washington. In place of investigation, the media repeats the government’s implausible story.
It behoves us all to think. Why would Muslims be more outraged by cartoons in a Paris magazine than by hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by Washington and its French and NATO vassals in seven countries during the past 14 years?
If Muslims wanted to make a point of the cartoons, why not bring a hate crime charge or lawsuit? Imagine what would happen to a European magazine that dared to satirize Jews in the way Charlie Hebdo satirized Muslims. Indeed, in Europe people are imprisoned for investigating the holocaust without entirely confirming every aspect of it.
If a Muslim lawsuit was deep-sixed by French authorities, the Muslims would have made their point. Killing people merely contributes to the demonization of Muslims, a result that only serves Washington’s wars against Muslim countries.
If Muslims are responsible for the attack on Charlie Hebdo, what Muslim goal did they achieve? None whatsoever. Indeed, the attack attributed to Muslims has ended French and European sympathy and support for Palestine and European opposition to more US wars against Muslims. Just recently France had voted in the UN with Palestine against the US-Israeli position. This assertion of an independent French foreign policy was reinforced by the recent statement by the President of France that the economic sanctions against Russia should be terminated.
Clearly, France was showing too much foreign policy independence. The attack on Charlie Hebdo serves to cow France and place France back under Washington’s thumb.
Some will contend that Muslims are sufficiently stupid to shoot themselves in the head in this way. But how do we reconcile such alleged stupidity with the alleged Muslim 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo professional attacks?
If we believe the official story, the 9/11 attack on the US shows that 19 Muslims, largely Saudis, without any government or intelligence service support, outwitted not only all 16 US intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, Dick Cheney and all the neoconservatives in high positions throughout the US government, and airport security, but also the intelligence services of NATO and Israel’s Mossad. How can such intelligent and capable people, who delivered the most humiliating blow in world history to an alleged Superpower with no difficulty whatsoever despite giving every indication of their intentions, possibly be so stupid as to shoot themselves in the head when they could have thrown France into turmoil with a mere lawsuit?
The Charlie Hebdo story simply doesn’t wash. If you believe it, you are no match for a Muslim.
Some who think that they are experts will say that a false flag attack in France would be impossible without the cooperation of French intelligence. To this I say that it is practically a certainty that the CIA has more control over French intelligence than does the President of France. Operation Gladio proves this. The largest part of the government of Italy was ignorant of the bombings conducted by the CIA and Italian Intelligence against European women and children and blamed on communists in order to diminish the communist vote in elections.
Americans are a pitifully misinformed people. All of history is a history of false flag operations. Yet Americans dismiss such proven operations as “conspiracy theories,” which merely proves that government has successfully brainwashed insouciant Americans and deprived them of the ability to recognize the truth.
Americans are the foremost among the captive nations.
Who will liberate them?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

BYJASUIS CHARLIE HEBDO ITS REVISIONISM & CENSORSHIT

It is over fifty years ago now, since I won a prize for an article I wrote as a young boy, in the Farmers Journal, about my favourite hero, who was Padraig Pearse. It was more love of the subject than writing skills, that won it, but then that was before I found uisce beatha.I'm not sure much has changed, in how I see the subject since. The first obvious thing for me about Padraig, was his love of the Irish countryside and it's people, rather than resentment or ego. He had a little cottage, which is called Pearse's Cottage today, where he spent his summers in Conamara, which he loved.

You can imagine my shock recently, when I read that the spokesperson for the 1916 societies from Omagh, was on about the backwoods of Conamara and the 'security forces' while crying about losing the welfare state and wants devomax instead to save it, following his master's revisionist fascism, censoring everyone who disagreed, with a passion usually reserved for the likes of Charlie Hebdo. Something seriously wrong there, must be some more, cerebral masturbation, from within the red, white and blue kerbstones of Omagh. There will not be much honour brought to 2016, with that sort of hatred, ego and ignorance, from within the ranks of 1916 societies. Love is patient, we will have our Irish Republic, fit for free women and men to live and prosper as equals.
An Phoblacht Abu!

Padraic Pearse (b. Nov. 10,(?) 1879 - d. May 3, 1916)

The son of an Irish mother and an English father, he was born at 27 Gt. Brunswick St., (now Pearse St.) in Dublin and educated at the Christian Brothers' School. He graduated from the Royal University and became a barrister, but he was an enthusiastic student of the Irish language. He became a writer in both English and Gaelic. Pearse envisioned a free Gaelic Ireland and founded St. Enda's College, a school for boys.
After visiting the United States he joined the Irish Volunteers and was commander-in-chief of the Irish rebel forces in the Easter Rebellion of 1916. He realised the rebel situation was hopeless and ordered his troops to surrender to the British. He was arrested with several other leaders (including his brother) and shot.
Too often, we discover that one of Irelands timelessly well known writers was part of the rebellion. Of course, too often, they were executed. What works may have been created that would delight us today; had they only lived to write them.

The Wayfarer
by Padraic Pearse

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening,
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy.
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.

1916 Proclamation needs to be

Realised not rewritten!

With the Centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising fast approaching the 32 County Sovereignty Movement welcomes all genuine efforts to both mark and progress the core message of that seminal event. We are also mindful that there will be those who will seek to bury and distort that core message because it does not dovetail into present political positions.

The recent promotional video released by the Dublin Government ranks at the extreme end of the revisionist spectrum. Rightly castigated by their own historical adviser on the project the video nonetheless gave us an insight as to how the political establishment in the Twenty Six Counties State plans to mark the occasion.

More recently it has emerged that a group comprising of relatives of those who participated in 1916, along with artists and academics, has been formed with the stated aim of ‘Reclaiming the Vision of 1916’. At a recent press conference, chaired by artist Robert Ballagh, the group stated that it had ‘drafted a modern version of the Proclamation’. On what basis would it seek to do this? What is wrong with the draft as is written? What agenda requires interfering with the 1916 Proclamation?

These questions are salient because the Proclamation is the bedrock document upon which the insurgents instigated their rebellion in pursuit of its realisation. Their actions were invoked by the Declaration of Independence in Dáil Eireann, democratically ratified by the Irish people in the 1918 General Election. The Proclamation is also the cornerstone of the legal challenge currently lodged with the United Nations challenging Britain’s continuing violation of Irish sovereignty.

As National Chairperson of the 32CSM it is incumbent upon me to ask of this group; are your efforts to draft a new proclamation an attempt to reconcile the Good Friday Agreement with the existing draft or are they an attempt to diffuse or divert from the basic fact that Partition and the Proclamation cannot be reconciled?

I openly invite Mr Ballagh and any other representatives of this group to meet with me and explain their thinking because given the level of revisionist din that will no doubt surround the Centenary clear voices are essential to honour those of Easter Week with the same clarity by which they spoke to us.

Francie Mackey

-------------------------------------------------------------
OTR  Inquiry

Q: The other key player in this, Sinn Fein’s Gerry Kelly, has refused to come along to give evidence. Why do you think that is?

Blair says the committee will have to ask Kelly.

But of course they didn't

What Would It Be Like?

By Arthur D. Robbins

January 13, 2015 "ICH" - What would it be like if we really lived in a democracy? These days just about everybody seems to be enjoying the benefits democratic government, that is if you believe government propaganda and you are one of the credulous many who are eager for a sense of well being at any price. But what is usually called democracy is in fact an oligarchy of elected representatives responsible to the business interests who bankrolled their campaign. If people were actually given the opportunity to choose democracy, they might do so, provided they understood what the word actually means. Our one uncontested example is ancient Athens.
Ancient Athens was a citizen-state. It was the political center for the larger landmass known as Attica, a peninsula extending southward into the Aegean Sea. At 9,000-10000 square miles Attica is roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. Attica’s population during the height of Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C.E. was between 300,000-350,000. Of that number some 30,000-40,000, or about ten percent, were citizens. Only adult males over the age of eighteen years who served in the military qualified for citizenship. Women were denied political rights as were slaves, about 20,000 of them, and metics, or foreigners.
What made ancient Athens a citizen-state? It was self-governing. That is to say the citizens themselves ran the government on a day-to-day basis. The citizens—not their representatives— gathered in the Assembly at least once a month and more frequently as required. There, citizens debated and voted on the issues that affected their community and their nation as a whole. By a show of hands and sometimes by casting a black (no) or white (yes) ball into a clay jar, they voted to go to war or not, to receive ambassadors or not, to grant a certain individual citizenship or not.
Athenians voted on which projects to fund and which not to fund. They voted on laws regulating the exportation of grain, which was in short supply. They decided how much should be charged for leasing a temple’s land. They decided how many and who should be the envoys representing Athens in foreign lands. The week-by-week conduct of a war had to go before the Assembly week by week.
The Ekklesia (Assembly) met at the Pnyx, an amphitheater located about one half mile outside of Athens, itself. At the front end of the Pnyx was the bema, or stepping stone, where a citizen would rise to address the Assembly. As many as six thousand would be in attendance on a given day. The presiding officer would begin each session with the question, “Who wishes to speak?” Any one in attendance had the right to address the assembly.
The bema was the material embodiment of “equal speech” — isēgoría —i.e. the equal right of every Athenian citizen to debate matters of policy. Note the difference between “equal speech,” or “political speech,” the right to debate and legislate, and what today we call “free speech,” the prohibition against being denied the right to speak. We could be speaking on a street corner or marching in a protest. “Free speech” says we have the right to do that. It says the right cannot be taken away. “Free speech” has no particular context. We are granted the right to say what we want, provided, it turns out, we do not threaten the governing powers. “Free speech” is a civil right. It is not a political right. It does not give us the right to set national policy. “Equal speech” in ancient Athens did.
Haranguing some passerby to vote for a certain candidate is not political speech nor is voting in an election. “What about writing a letter to my congressman? Isn’t that political speech?” No. It is complaining or pleading. Most of the time it changes nothing. It has no real power. It is not constitutive. It does not have the power to bring something into existence. Only political speech does.
In 1789, the year the Constitution was ratified, the United States covered a landmass of over 500,000 square miles and had a population in excess of 3,000,000. As was the case in ancient Athens, women and slaves, about 200,000 were denied political rights. In the House of Representatives, made up of sixty-five members, thirty-three individuals would constitute a quorum. Of these, seventeen would constitute a majority, the sense of the House.
There were twenty-six members of the Senate, two for each state, of which fourteen would constitute a quorum, eight of whom would make a majority, or the sense of the Senate. Seventeen in the House plus eight in the Senate equals twenty-five. Thus it appears that the liberties, happiness, interests, and great concerns of the whole United States were dependent upon the integrity, virtue, wisdom, and knowledge of 25 or 26 men.
If one rounds off the numbers and does a comparison, ancient Athens with a population of 300,000, was governed by 30,000 men. The United States in 1790 with a population ten times that of ancient Athens or 3,000,000 was governed by 91 men. 30,000 vs. 91 describes the difference, numerically speaking, between a democracy and an oligarchy.
In the year 2015, combining the Senate and the House, there is a governing body comprised of 535 men and women for a country with a population in excess of 300,000, 000, or 10,000 times that of ancient Athens. Thus there is roughly one voice for every 600, 000 Americans, hardly what one would call a democracy.
Can we even conceive of transposing the benefits of ancient Athenian democracy onto the United States of America, a country covering a landmass of approximately 3,500,000 million square miles, with a population of over 300,000,000? If we start on a small scale and use our imagination, perhaps we can.
If we return to the concept of “equal speech,” “political speech” or isēgoría, and apply it to our current situation in the year 2015, we realize that, in the United States, political speech is reserved for the governing oligarchy. The 435 men and women who sit on the floor of the House of Representatives have the right to speak. They can debate and legislate, set policy. 623 of us sit in the gallery observing and listening to what takes place on the floor. We cannot speak. We can only listen and observe. We are politically powerless. We lack political speech. We are “speechless.”
Well just suppose that the 623 of us in the gallery decide to descend on to the House floor and enter the debate. We now have a political voice. We are no longer “speechless.” There are now 1058 of us on the floor, instead of 435. 623, the majority of us, are free spirits. We didn’t get to the floor by soliciting millions from corporate donors to whom we then owe our allegiance. We are “walk-ons,” “free agents” with a political voice. We simply speak our minds and vote what makes sense to us based on our various backgrounds and interests. Such an assemblage is a lot more likely to speak for the common good than Lockheed Martin.
Let us imagine that as citizens with political speech, on the floor of the House of Representatives, in the year 2015, we have the same rights as the ancient Athenians gathered in the Pnyx, in the 5th century B.C.E., more the 2,500 years ago. In ancient Athens anyone could declare before the assembly that a law was unconstitutional or at odds with the common good. If a majority agreed, the law was null and void and the proposer of said law was penalized This right was known as graphe paranomon. Now we have that right, those of us on the floor of the House of Representatives in the year 2015. Anyone one of us can declare a law unconstitutional or at odds with the common good. If a majority of us on the House floor agree, that law is null and void. We could start with the “Patriot Act” and then pass on to the “National Defense Authorization Act of 2014,” both of which violate the Constitution. Now they are out the door.
And further we have the right of eisangelia or denunciation. Anyone of us can charge a citizen with treason, the attempt to overthrow our democracy, or corruption, taking payment to make a proposal before the Assembly, in this case the House of Representatives. What is jubilantly known as “Obamacare” was proposed by the insurance companies who stand to gain the most from its enactment and dutifully inscribed by the congressmen who, undoubtedly were duly rewarded for their efforts. Once again, out the door, if a majority of us are convinced of the justice of the accusation. Anyone of us can charge an office holder with malfeasance or incompetence. If the majority agrees that individual is removed from office.
In ancient Athens there was a monthly inspection of those magistrates who were entrusted with public funds. Also, on a monthly basis, the assembly would call a vote on the magistrates. At this time any government official could receive a vote of no confidence and be dismissed. Such accusations were not uncommon. “Ancient democracy was as a rule characterized by frequency of political prosecutions, whereas oligarchies suffered from the opposite defect, that leaders hardly ever called to account at all.” (Hansen, 218) Wouldn’t it be nice if we in the 21st century had that same power? If only we could weed our garden, we could make room for healthy growth.
In ancient Athens, in the 5th century, B.C.E., there was no written constitution. There were no written laws. There was no codification of the laws. The ekklesia in session was the government. It evolved organically over the generations in response to changing conditions and the emotional and intellectual makeup of those who attended. In the United States we have a written Constitution. Fifty-five men — landed aristocrats, speculators, merchants, attorneys — now dead for more than two hundred years, determine the government we live under. In ancient Athens the living governed themselves.
In addition to participating in the debates occurring in the Assembly, the Athenian citizen might serve on the Council of five hundred (the boule). The boule was responsible for drafting preparatory legislation for consideration by the Assembly, overseeing the meetings of the Assembly, and in certain cases executing legislation as directed by the Assembly.
The members of the boule were selected by a lottery held each year among male citizens over thirty years of age. Fifty men would be chosen from each of the ten Athenian tribes, with service limited to twice in a lifetime. There were ten months in the Athenian calendar, and one of the ten tribes was in ascendancy each month.
The fifty citizen councilors (prytanies) of the dominant tribe each month served in an executive function over the boule and the ekklesia. From that group of fifty, one individual (the epistates) would be selected each day to preside over the boule and, if it met in session that day, the ekklesia. The epistates held the keys to the treasury and the seal to the city, and he welcomed foreign ambassadors. It has been calculated that one-quarter of all citizens must at one time in their lives have held the post, which could be held only once in a lifetime. Meetings of the boule might occur on as many as 260 days in the course of a year.
Suppose we wanted to set up a democracy in the United States. It would be easy enough to do so by simply multiplying sufficiently the number of assemblies. How does the number 18,000 sound? Sounds like a lot? That is the number of school districts in the United States. Each school district could have an assembly that debated and voted on national legislation and policy. Votes could be tabulated on a national basis and thus would the citizens govern themselves. Extrapolating somewhat to the larger scale, we could have a boule of 2,000 selected by lot from around the country. This council of 2,000 would set the agenda for the various local assemblies.
Let us imagine that the assemblies meet forty times a year as they did in Athens and that they are sitting three or four days a week. Let us imagine that some meetings are held in the evenings and over the weekends. Maybe 500 citizens would attend a given assembly, with different citizens in attendance from one session to the next based on interest and availability. If you do the arithmetic you will learn that on a given day 9,000,000 Americans are actively involved in governing themselves, determining how monies should be spent, whether or not to wage war or peace. That is democracy at work.
Yes, you might lose some television time but just think, you and your friends and neighbors would be running the show. You wouldn’t have to sit by, leading a life of quiet desperation, passively enduring the depredation of the economy, the ecology, foreign lands and cultures all to serve the predator class in control. Such participation would be uplifting and invigorating. Yes there would be the stress of disagreement and debate and division of opinion. But you would get better at expressing your thoughts and winning others to your side. And you, yourself, might grow and learn from what others have to say. You might find yourself with a sense of pride for being an American.
The third element of the Athenian Democracy — the Ekklesia and the boule are the first two — was the system of jury courts known as the dikasteria. Jurors were selected by lot from an annual pool of 6,000 citizens (600 from each of the ten tribes) over the age of thirty. There were both private suits and public suits. For private suits the minimum jury size was 201; it was increased to 401 if a sum of more than 1,000 drachmas was at issue.
For public suits there was a jury of 501. On occasion a jury of 1,001 or 1,501 would be selected. Rarely, the entire pool of 6,000 would be put on a case. No Athenian juror was ever subjected to compulsory empanelment, voir dire, or sequestration, nor was any magistrate empowered to decide what evidence the jury could or could not be allowed to see. It was forbidden by law to pay anyone to represent you in court.
Jurors could not be penalized for their vote—unless it could be shown that they had accepted bribes. But the practice of selecting juries randomly on the morning of the trial and the sheer size of the juries served to limit the effectiveness of bribery. The Athenian court system did not operate according to precedent. No jury was bound by the decisions of previous juries in previous cases. This is a striking difference between Athenian law and more familiar systems such as Roman law or English common law. The Athenian system of justice was consistent with the prevailing opposition to elitism and the oppressive effects of received wisdom in matters of justice. Each citizen used his own common sense to make judgments based on personal belief and prevailing mores.
Private cases were put forward by the litigants themselves, and single speeches on each side were timed by water clock. In a public suit the litigants each had three hours to speak. Much less time was allotted in private suits, the time proportional to the amount of money at stake. Justice was rapid, because a case could last no longer than one day. There were no lawyers. There were no judges, only juries of the litigants’ peers. This was amateur justice—perhaps the best kind.
There were about eleven hundred magistrates or administrators in Athens whose job it was to oversee the day-to-day responsibilities of a complex communal life. There was water supply and grain supply to attend to. There were building projects. There were issues of trade. There were religious festivals to organize and oversee. Of these eleven hundred administrators, all but one hundred were chosen by allotment. An individual would put his name forward to hold a certain office in the year prior to his desired tenure. He had to be at least thirty years of age, or in some cases forty. His name was chosen at random from the pool of nominees, and he held office for a year. Generals and those in charge of large sums of money were elected.
It was assumed that magistrates had no special expertise. The lack of expertise was mitigated by the fact that magistrates served as part of a panel overseeing a certain function, and that what one lacked in knowledge another might have. A magistrate could hold his position only once in a lifetime, another way of minimizing the amount of harm any individual could cause. As a further precaution, all magistrates were subject to a review beforehand that might disqualify them for office. Any citizen could challenge a magistrate for his conduct, leading to a trial that could result in his being removed from office and possibly penalized. Thus, accountability to the citizenry was built into the system at the most fundamental level. Even Pericles, the most esteemed figure in Athenian life, could be chastised and fined for his conduct of the war with Sparta.
If we consider broadly the form of government in ancient Athens and its system of justice, one overriding dynamic becomes evident: fear of power, fear of the concentration of power, fear of the abuse of power. This was reflected in the use of large juries (thus making bribery and manipulation more difficult), the absence of lawyers, the absence of a police force, the wide use of arbitration, reliance on current values and common sense for passing judgment (rather than the intricacies of common law), the use of a citizen army rather than a standing professional army controlled by the state, and the use of sortition (lottery) rather than election as a means of choosing magistrates and members of the boule, brief tenure in office.
Ancient Athens was not a perfect government, but it was a functioning political democracy. The people of Attica governed themselves. The wealthiest aristocrat and the humblest artisan stood on equal footing in meetings of the Assembly, as participants in the Council, as jurors, and as magistrates. There were no representatives. There was no monarch. There were no oligarchs.
Athenians of all classes were the state. They debated on equal footing the issues of the day, passed laws, ran the city on a day-to-day basis, filled the juries, and held all magistrates and even generals accountable for their conduct. There was no privileged class safe from public scrutiny and accountability.
These were a dynamic and self-confident people. Their intellectual and artistic achievements provide the foundation for Western civilization. Basically, they invented democracy. They were our first and remain our enduring philosophers, many of whose ideas are as valid today as when they were uttered some twenty-five hundred years ago. Greek architecture inspires us still. The vibrancy and richness of Greek dramatic writing from this era have yet to be equaled.
It is highly unlikely that a different form of government could ever have produced such riches, certainly not the one proposed by Plato in his Republic or the one that existed in Sparta. It was the democratic governing process itself—the pride it inspired, the intellectual and oratorical skills it required—that produced a public capable of creating and appreciating such a rich cultural life. One can wonder what America might become under similar circumstances.
Recommended reading
There are many excellent sources on the subject of ancient Athens. I recommend as a starting point: H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks; R.K. Sinclair, Democracy and Participation in Athens; I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates; and Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes. Hansen’s is the definitive text. It is comprehensive. It is detailed. Its only drawback is that it covers 4th century Athens when Athenian society was depleted by the war with Sparta and democracy was in decline.
Arthur D. Robbins is the author of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: The True Meaning of Democracy, referred to by Ralph Nader as “An eye-opening, earth-shaking book… a fresh, torrential shower of revealing insights and vibrant lessons…”