OBSERVATIONS OF TYRANNY
From Ancient Rome to OKC
By William F. Jasper
From antiquity to modern times, history is replete with examples of ruthless and corrupt politicians who have shamelessly exploited and manipulated tragic events and the criminal acts of a few to advance their own lust for power. In cases too numerous to mention, tyrants and aspiring despots have gone even further, engaging agents provocateur to carry out assassinations, foment riots and rebellion, precipitate financial panics, attempt palace coups, feign foreign invasion, initiate acts of terrorism, and perform other infamous acts - all for the purpose of establishing a mass psychology of fear, a sense of "crisis," of imminent danger requiring the government to suspend normal liberties and seize vast new powers to deal with the "emergency." History records that, far too often, these "temporary" assumptions of power have given way to permanent brutal oppression, and to terror and mass murder by the saviors who promised deliverance from the "crisis."
Yes, as all would-be dictators know, the action is in the reaction. And as James Madison observed, "the people never give up their freedom except under some delusion."
Considering the current gadarene stampede into dictatorship by the American public as a result of the demagogic exploitation of the recent wave of terrorist acts, we would do well to reflect on a few relevant historical precedents. A calm consideration of our present situation in the context of previous human experience may help us avoid delusional flights into bondage and the pessimistic predictions that we "are doomed to repeat" the tragic mistakes of the past.
Enemies of Mankind
On July 19, AD 64, a terrible fire began near Rome's Circus Maximus, and when the fierce conflagration ended days later, most of the great city lay in ashes. Whether or not the fire was actually started by the Emperor Nero, as many have maintained over the centuries, there is no question that the Christians were unjustly blamed for the disaster. Although holding all members of the new sect responsible for the blaze would have too greatly stretched credulity, the megalomaniacal potentate nonetheless found a pretext for condemning them en masse by claiming that the followers of Christ were "enemies of mankind." Tacitus records that the Christians "were convicted, not so much on the charge of burning the city, as of hating the human race." Tacitus also records the incredibly cruel tortures and deaths to which these innocent scapegoats were subjected.
In England, controversy has raged over the infamous Gunpowder Plot for nearly 400 years. When Guy Fawkes was arrested on November 5, 1605 with barrels of gunpowder in a tunnel under the House of Lords, it seemed apparent that a conspiracy of Catholics against the government had been thwarted. Some historians, however, have argued (some more, some less persuasively) that the evidence points instead to a plot by Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, against the Catholics. The hand of Salisbury, the most powerful political figure in England under Elizabeth I and James I, is seen also, say some scholars, in the Babington Plot and Squire's Plot, which preceded the Gunpowder Plot and fed the growing anti-Catholic fervor. The recent publication of books by two historians arguing opposite sides of this controversy will not settle this aspect of the dispute, but there is a consensus among many scholars of the period that Salisbury's forces, at the very least, ruthlessly exploited and exaggerated the plots to launch a new wave of brutal persecution and to provide a pretext for confiscation of monastic lands.
Staged Provocations
Hitler's rise and reign in Germany provide many examples both of the use of agents provocateur and the opportunistic exploitation of events to further evil objectives. Of these, the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933 is easily the most famous example. Although it has never been definitively settled whether the fire was set by a communist saboteur or by a Nazi agent provocateur, it is beyond debate that the Nazis capitalized on the event with a vengeance. Insisting that the Reichstag fire prefigured a communist onslaught against the German state, Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree "for the Protection of the People and the State," suspending constitutional liberties and allowing the state to exercise extraordinary powers in the name of "public safety." The death sentence was expanded to cover a number of crimes. Sound familiar?
As a remedy for the presumed "crisis" facing Germany, Hitler proposed a program of Gleichschaltung (coordination) through which the central government would absorb the power and political functions of the German states. On March 23, 1933, the Reichstag, succumbing to the Nazis' conspiratorial maneuvers, passed the "Enabling Act," which made the central government responsible for all law enforcement and conferred on Hitler's cabinet exclusive legislative powers for four years. This one act provided the legal basis for the transformation of Hitler from chancellor to dictator. It did not take long to prove how empty and completely disingenuous were Hitler's promises that "the government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures." Following close on the heels of the Reichstag fire came the "Night of the Long Knives" of June 30, 1934, an assassination blitzkrieg in which Hitler wiped out his old friend Ernst Roehm and the top leadership of the brownshirted SA. Roehm and his Storm Troopers had become troublesome competitors and had to be eliminated, but a plausible pretext for the purge was needed. No problem: A coup "plot" by Roehm was fabricated which served the additional purpose of providing further justification for legalized government terror. Hitler's one-paragraph law read: "The measures taken on June 30 and July 1 and 2 to strike down the treasonous attacks are justifiable acts of self-defense by the state." Many more equally fraudulent "justifiable acts of self-defense" would follow.
On November 7, 1938, a Jewish refugee from Germany, Herschel Grynszpan, shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris. This was exactly the incident the Nazi regime needed to fully unleash its attack on the Jews. On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazi-orchestrated mobs "spontaneously" rioted in retaliation, destroying Jewish shops and synagogues, beating and killing Jewish residents. It is remembered as the "Night of Shattered Glass," or "Krystall nacht", and thereafter all opponents of the Nazis would be demonized as Jewish sympathizers and related "criminal elements."
Stalin's Purge
Stalin, who had studied closely Hitler's purge of Roehm, had his own "night of the long knives" with a twist. His onetime friend and trusted aide, Sergei Kirov, had become a potential rival for Communist Party leadership and had to be eliminated. Stalin, the ultimate "conspirator from above," arranged for Kirov's assassination, with the murder to be blamed on the Zinoviev faction. Under Stalin's direction, following the assassination, writes Robert Tucker in Stalin in Power, "the floodgates of official adulation for Kirov opened wide. He was the "Soviet people's 'favorite' and 'our Kirov.'" Tucker records that "the instant Kirov cult was blended into the Stalin cult, which took on added lustre, Kirov became 'Comrade Stalin's best comrade-in-arms and friend.' Stalin was shown in the honor guard, with Kirov in old photos, and as the first mourner at the Red Square funeral."
But Kirov's murder in December 1934 served a design much larger than the mere elimination of a single competitor. Tucker writes: "For the conspirator from above, the prime purpose of Kirov's murder was to make possible an official finding that Soviet Russia was beset by a conspiracy that had done away with Kirov as part of a larger plan of terrorist action against the regime." Thus, Stalin had his excuse to begin the Great Purge, which, ultimately, would claim millions of victims. Stalin had already arranged to have issued, a month before the murder, a statute empowering the newly created Special Board (headed by Stalin) to pass administrative sentence on "persons deemed socially dangerous." No definition of "socially dangerous" was given, allowing for the widest possible "discretion" in the exercise of this formidable power.
Plot Against the Pope
When Pope John Paul II was shot and very nearly killed in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981, it was instantly hailed worldwide as the work of a lone fanatic, even though Italian authorities revealed iron-clad evidence of a larger conspiracy. When U.S. mediameisters and officials were finally forced to concede the obvious, they insisted that, yes, Mehmet Ah Agca was indeed part of a conspiracy - a rightwing, Turkish, Islamic fundamentalist conspiracy! Even after terrorism expert Claire Sterling's masterfully detailed expose', The Time of the Assassins, unequivocally demonstrated (and was later backed up by the Italian judiciary investigators) that Agca was a paid Soviet assassin, the U.S. State Department, the White House, the CIA, and the Western press largely ignored the indisputable evidence. That evidence showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Soviet KGB, operating through the secret police of its communist proxy regime in Bulgaria and the Turkish Mafia (which was headquartered in Bulgaria), had sprung Agca from a Turkish jail, trained him, provided him with weapons and false travel documents, and fabricated a false "right-wing" identity for him before the assassination attempt. Although the plot to kill the Pope failed, the secondary objective, to provoke a widespread public reaction against "right-wing terrorism" and "religious fundamentalism," worked marvelously - it worked because the Soviet agents, dupes, and sympathizers in the West could count on the ruling elites in our government and the media to cover up the Kremlin's role in this heinous act.
Throughout the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and '80s, Germany was plagued by recurring rashes of anti-Jewish vandalism and neo-Nazi activities: desecrated Jewish cemeteries, swastikas painted on synagogues, and threatening calls and letters to Jewish leaders. In a number of important cases, when the perpetrators were caught they turned out not to be neo-Nazis after all, but Soviet agents provocateur. Soviet defectors, likewise, have repeatedly confirmed the importance that the Soviet strategists place on provocations of this sort aimed at manipulating public emotions and eliciting hatred not only for the neo-Nazis, but primarily for the conservatives, Christians, and anti-communists whom they falsely lump together with the Hitlerites under the expedient "right-wing" label.
Rabin Assassination
The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995 provided another glorious opportunity for global "right-wing" demonizing. The alleged gunman, Yigal Amir, was said to be a "fanatic Jewish fundamentalist." What's more, we were told repeatedly, he was part of a conspiracy of "religious extremists" - a conspiracy so nefarious and immense, mind you, that it had achieved meteorological significance, creating a "climate of hate" and an "atmosphere of violence." According to Time magazine, Rabin's 5 opponents had created climatologically "the equivalent of the right-wing milieu that led to the Oklahoma City bombing." In fact, said Time, even if Amir had acted alone, "he had many ideational conspirators." (Emphasis added.) Yes, the Insider opinion cartel was only too willing to howl "conspiracy" when it served their transparent purposes. But when it came out that Amir was actually an agent of Israel's General Security Service (also known as Shin Bet), and that he had inexplicably been allowed through the security perimeter, Amir began to look more like a classic agent provocateur. That perception only deepened when a suspected accomplice, the notorious "rightwing" leader, Avishni Raviv, also turned out to be a Shin Bet operative. As Shimon Peres and the Labor government rushed to cover up these and other untidy facts, the evidence pointed more and more toward the likelihood that Rabin had been assassinated by those in his own government (who controlled Shin Bet) in a desperate effort to save the phony CFR-made "Mideast Peace Plan."
Oklahoma City Bombing
In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, the American people have been subjected to a sustained propaganda barrage that may come as close to approximating the vicious and thoroughly dishonest campaign of lies and distortion worthy of Nero, Hitler, and Stalin as this country has ever witnessed. The Clinton Administration and its political allies, fully aided and abetted by the establishment media cartel, have relentlessly sought to ascribe blame for the deadly Oklahoma bombing to the entire "American right wing." At the same time, the Clinton Justice Department and the FBI have gone to fantastic lengths to obstruct justice by covering up and destroying extremely important evidence in the case.
In the week following the bombing, President Clinton cleverly structured his attack on "purveyors of hatred and division, the promoters of paranoia" so as to broadly include virtually all of his conservative opponents in the condemnation. "They spread hate," he said. '"They leave the impression ... by their very words, that violence is acceptable." In a subsequent speech, he denounced the bombing as an act by "the forces of organized evil" who, he insinuated, are linked to mainstream conservative and constitutionalist forces. This is so, he averred, because "they do practice and they do preach violence against those who are of a different color, a different background, or who worship a different God. They do feed on fear and uncertainty. They do promote paranoia ...." Even worse, charged the President, "these people attack our government and the citizens who work for it who actually guarantee the freedoms they abuse.... They can certainly snuff out innocent lives and sow fear in our hearts. They are indifferent to the slaughter of children. They threaten our freedoms and our way of life, and we must stop them."
It was an insidious attack clearly calculated to smear principled opponents of socialist government by falsely associating them with the perpetrators of vile terrorist acts. And it was the same base tactic to which he returned on May 1, 1995 in another disgraceful attempt to identify his critics with those responsible for the deadly bombing: " ... we must also stand up against those who say that somehow this is alright, this is somehow a political act - people who say, I love my country but I hate my government."
Mr. Clinton's harangues were so transparently deceitful that even liberal columnist Charles Krauthamrner (CFR) was moved to remark that the President had "repeatedly charged dark and unseen forces, a shadowy unnamed 'they,' with spreading paranoia - a classic of the very paranoid style of politics Clinton is ostensibly decrying." Unfortunately, Krauthammer's cogent observation was drowned out by the CFR-dominated media echo chamber which amplified and intensified the Clinton defamation campaign, and, borrowing a page from Nero's handbook, virtually branded all their opposition as guilty of "hating the human race."
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The Price of Losing
By William P. Hoar
"We shall have a world government, whether or not we like it, "declared international banker James P. Warburg (CFR) in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1950. "The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest." In 1994, Shridath Ramphal, co-chairman of the Commission on Global Governance, proudly declared that the era of world government had already begun, "because there are no sanctuaries left, there's no place to run to."
"More Lethal Than War"
What would be the consequences if the world government sought by Insiders like Warburg and Ramphal came to pass? Terror and oppression without precedent, warns Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, a renowned expert on "democide" - the systematic mass-murder by governments. In this century, warns Rummel, "government has been truly a mass murderer, a global plague of man's own making." Where "absolute Power reigns," Rummel observes, government is more lethal than war: ... even without the excuse of combat, Power also massacres in cold blood those helpless people it controls-- in fact, several times more of them."
In George Orwell's novel 1984, Big Brother's agent O'Brien explains to his victim Winston Smith that "the Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.... One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." Orwell's fiction was a mirror of Soviet reality: Lenin explained that "the scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing else but this: power without limit. resting directly upon force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules."
History tells us what life was like when the communists, or their national socialist cousins, or their forebears in the French Revolution, took control. Can the mind fathom what might happen if such dominion were global? Could we expect to fare better than those who lost their liberty to communist totalitarians - especially when the communist menace was nurtured and sustained by the West? In "Death by Government", Professor Rummel estimates those murdered at the hands of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union over six decades at nearly 62 million human beings. That is, as Rummel puts it, more than four times the battle dead for all nations during the Second World War.
In The God of the Machine, Isabel Paterson recalls: "The Communist regime in Russia gained power by promising the peasants land, in terms the promisers knew to be a lie. Having gained power, the Communists took from the peasants the land they already owned and exterminated those who resisted. This was done by plan and intention; and the lie was praised as 'social engineering' by socialist admirers in America...." Soviet "social engineering" included such grotesque campaigns as the forced collectivization and man-made "terror-famine" in the Ukraine, which resulted in at least seven million deaths. At the root of this atrocity was the denial of basic property rights: Starving subjects were imprisoned for harvesting food from what had been their own land. In "Harvest of Sorrow", Robert Conquest writes: "A woman was sentenced to ten years for cutting a hundred ears of ripening corn, from her own plot, two weeks after her husband had died of starvation.... Another woman was sentenced to ten years for picking ten onions from collective land. A Soviet scholar quotes a sentence of ten years forced labor without the right to amnesty, and confiscation of all property, for gathering seventy pounds of wheat stalk to feed the family."
Mass Murder in Red China
Mao Tse-tung' s campaign to create a "New Man" in Communist China caused, at the very least, more than 35 million deaths, according to Professor Rummel. While this figure is the most modest scholarly estimate, it represents the killing of approximately one of every 20 men, women, and children. Mao was nearly whimsical about his murderous policies, telling his Communist Party cadre in 1958: "What's so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the Chin Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars .... We are 100 times ahead of the Emperor Shih .... in repression of counter-revolutionary scholars."
Where early Red Chinese efforts focused on collectivizing property and reconstructing the family, the Cultural Revolution was a campaign against "thought crime." As Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times, the Cultural Revolution "was a revolution of illiterates and semi-literates against intellectuals, the 'spectacle-wearers' as they were called. It was xenophobic, aimed at those who 'think the moon is rounder abroad.' The Red Guards had a great deal in common with [Nazi leader Ernst] Roehm's Brownshirts, and the entire movement with Hitler's campaign against cosmopolitan civilization.' It was the greatest witch-hunt in history...."
But globalist-minded Insiders in the West never lost their enthusiasm for Communist China. "Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded," enthused David Rockefeller in 1973. "The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history." Even today, under a supposedly "moderate" regime, the tortures continue in China: forced abortions, infanticide and sterilization; religious persecution; and repressive labor camps which produce cheap goods sold to the West, including the U.S., where our government abets the regime in power.
French Revolution: A Pattern
Soviet and Maoist abominations have been cloned elsewhere: Vietnam, Cambodia. North Korea, throughout Africa, Eastern and Central Europe, Cuba, and Central and South America. In Romania, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu long enjoyed Washington's favors. Former U.S. Ambassador to Romania David Funderburk has described how Ceausesco oversaw everything from how far apart corn rows should be planted, to the execution "of workers and peasants for stealing meat from packing plants and grains of wheat from local cooperative farms, the pulling of plugs in hospitals killing babies in incubators for energy-saving reasons, and the crackdown on religious figures ."
Castro's war against the Cuban people is vividly related in the harrowing account of Armando Valladares, who spent 22 years in the Cuban gulag. Valladares recalls the brave patriots who were gagged before execution to muffle their shouts of "Long live Christ the King! Down with Communism!" Valladares recounts "baths" of feces and urine, and recalls merciless beatings by jailers using truncheons, electrical cables, and bayonets. In "Against All Hope", Valladares observes that when the guards saw what terror they inspired, it "spurred them to greater and greater violence. They were drunk with it, it became a means of pleasure for them."
Such has been the course of power-intoxicated utopians since the French Revolution, the progenitor of all modern totalitarian regimes. The revolutionaries in France sought to remake society entirely a new calendar, new money, the banning of private schools and the creation of a centralized, secular school system, government regulation of the Church, and much more. First, though, came destruction. Barbarism was both systematic and commonplace during the French Revolution. Consider accounts from one history: "A murderer played the violin beside the corpses, and thieves, with their pockets full of gold, hanged other thieves on the banisters." Still worse horrors took place that cannot be written, nameless indecencies, hideous debaucheries, ghastly mutilations of the dead, and again, as after the siege of the Bastille, cannibal orgies. Before great fires, hastily kindled in the apartment, "cutlets of Swiss [Guards] were grilled and eaten...."
The revolutionaries vented their murderous furies most memorably in La Vendee, a region of France inhabited by devout traditional Christians who opposed the new order. Historian John Wilson recalls that 250,000 people were liquidated in the Vendee between 1793 and 1799. General Westermana, who presided over the campaign, proudly informed the revolutionary government that the Vendee' s "women and children ... died under our sabers.... As you ordered, the children were trampled to death by our horses, the women butchered so that they no longer give birth to little brigands. The streets are littered with corpses which sometimes are stacked in pyramids."
Terror by Design
Anarchist Prince Kropotkin acknowledged in 1909 that "the French Revolution ... was the source of all the present communist, anarchist, and socialist conceptions." Indeed, Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, who maintained that bloodyhanded National Socialism was an "authoritarian democracy," stated without equivocation that he "paid homage to the French Revolution for all the possibilities of life and development which it had brought to the people. In this sense, if you like, I am a democrat."
The French Revolution was the ancestor of all modern experiments in terror-by-design: The atrocities committed by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Ceausescu, and the rest were planned, not incidental. The same was true of the French Revolution, as Lord Acton observed in his Lectures on the French Revolution: "The appalling thing in the French Revolution is not the tumult, but the design. Through all the fire and smoke we perceive the evidence of calculating organization. The managers remain studiously concealed and masked; but there is no doubt about their presence from the first." The same is true of the modern drive for total power under a new world order: It is the product of "calculated organization" by "studiously concealed and masked" figures whose actions we can identify through the fire and smoke of disinformation.
Those who would rule the world have a large appetite indeed. Similar proclivities were commented on by the torturer in 1984, who gloried to his victim about the "intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever."
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A view from another post - another person ..........
Do Americans really know what's going on, and just to apathetic to care? Is it easier to say that the alarm sounders (patriots) are conspiracy nuts? That way they don't have to accept reality and maybe leave their TVs, popcorn, ball games and beer? They might get mad when they lose those .... but, hell, it's too late then. I don't think they wanna know. This grand country was established by patriots that were willing to give every last drop of their blood to fight tyranny.
Well, folks, while the lights are dazzling and the market soaring, down in the pit, the orchestra is tuning up. Behind the curtain, a group of men is preparing to bounce on stage and perform the ultimate tragic act to murder and enslave all mankind. But I tell you this ..... If ya wanna know what the world is gonna be like...picture this: A jack boot stomping on the face of man forever!!
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Yet another view.............A VISITOR FROM THE PAST
The End.
This poem written by Thelen Paulk. His book, "Poems For Patriots Pilgrims & Pioneers," contains 40 other interesting poems. If you would like his work, send $5 postpaid to:
Smith Paulk Publishing
P.O. Box 149
Watervliet, Michigan 49098