-William Adama (...so say we all)
Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law yesterday. The NDAA is passed once a year to help fund the military. This year, a provision was attached that would allow the military to detain American citizens indefinitely with no trial. The wording is vague, and it doesn't say that directly, but there is plenty of room for interpretation, and that is exactly what our government is best at. It should be noted, as Glenn Greenwald has been pointing out, that this changes absolutely nothing about what the government has already been doing for the past ten years. The Bush Administration and the Obama Administration have both been illegally detaining citizens indefinitely already, and even assassinating them. This bill adds nothing new except for immunity for the president from U.S. courts. As if those cowards would prosecute war criminals anyway.
The sixth amendment of the Bill of Rights says:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
The Patriot Act effectively destroyed the fourth amendment, and thanks to the NDAA, these words are now meaningless as well. The military can now kidnap you, and there's nothing you can do about it. The Bill of Rights is traditionally used only to protect U.S. citizens, but that was not the intention when it was written. These are unalienable rights, relevant to all human beings, regardless of which invisible line you happened to be born behind. They are always in effect, for all people, whether a government recognizes them or not. This was one of the main ideas championed by John Locke, which propelled the Enlightenment, and the American and French revolutions. You have rights that no manmade institution of government can take away. As soon as your country's government tries to take away your rights as a human being, that government is no longer legitimate, and you no longer have any obligation to recognize its authority over you.
A hundred years after Locke, Thomas Paine said in his Rights of Man:
There is a single idea, which, if it strikes rightly upon the mind either in a legal or a religious sense, will prevent any man, or any body of men, or any government, from going wrong on the subject of religion; which is, that before any human institution of government were known in the world, there existed, if I may so express it, a compact between God and Man, from the beginning of time: and that as the relation and condition which man in his individual person stands in towards his Maker, cannot be changed, or any ways altered, by any human laws or human authority, that religious devotion, which is a part of this compact, cannot so much as be made a subject of human laws; and that all laws must conform themselves to this prior existing compact, and not assume to make the compact conform to the laws, which, besides being human, are subsequent thereto. The first act of man, when he looked and saw himself a creature which he did not make, and a world furnished for his reception, must have been devotion, and devotion must ever continue sacred to every individual man, as it appears to him; and governments do mischief by interfering.
All this talk of "God" could seem a little confusing to 21st century atheist revolutionaries, but the main idea is still valid. Paine was not a Christian, and he was not talking about Yahweh of the Bible; whenever deists of this era mention "God," they are talking about what they see as the "natural order," seen through scientific observation, and this could easily be translated into secular humanism.
I'm not even making my own arguments here, I'm simply reciting philosophers from 300 years ago. If you disagree with this and you start to think of me as some pissy privileged white boy angry at THE MAN, then you'll likely find more comfort with the bourgeois fucks like Hobbes and Burke who argued against these guys. Go read their stuff and take the coward's way out, favoring security and "order" at the cost of enslavement.
On the issues that really matter, on the questions of state-sanctioned imprisonment, wage slavery, and murder, there is absolutely no difference whatsoever between the Democratic and Republican parties. If you are still in a mindset contrary to this, then you are a slave. America is a one-party state, and that party is corporatism. In 1774, the richest one percent in Philadelphia owned 50% of the wealth. Right now they own 40%. Mussolini said, "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." America is a fascist state.
We should've been talking about this stuff when George Bush passed the Patriot Act. We should've talked about this when Obama renewed it. Fuck me for not getting as angry then as I am now. It is no exaggeration to say that under an NDAA-empowered America, concentration camps are now theoretically legal. Barack Obama is a traitor. Do not recognize this law, and do not recognize this government. Chomsky said the other day that the Occupy movement needs to proceed to "the next step." If OWS doesn't grow a fucking backbone and escalate into something like the Arab Spring -- if the passage of the NDAA does not spark nationwide protests in which people are no longer afraid to fight back against the state, with the goal of severely altering or even abolishing this government -- then we'll deserve everything that's coming to us.
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