By John W. Whitehead
April 03, 2017
April 03, 2017
“Government is said to
be a necessary evil. The saying appears to be without merit. For can anything
be at once necessary and evil? True, all governments have had a history of
evil-doing, more or less. However, it does not follow from this experience that
their good is indistinguishable from their evil. Governments—assuming a proper
limitation of their activities—are necessary and not evil. Their evil begins when they step out
of bounds.”—Economist
Leonard Read
It is often said that
if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
Unfortunately, the
American government has been the opposite of good for too long now.
In fact, the American
government has been very, very, very bad: so bad, in fact, as to be almost
indistinguishable at times from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that
evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking,
murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other
diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
Philosopher Susan
Neiman suggests that referring to something as “evil is a way of marking the fact
that it shatters our trust in the world.”
It’s an apt
description for a government that keeps violating the sacred trust of its
citizenry.
“We the people” should
have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals,
spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and
abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.
We haven’t learned.
We didn’t learn this
lesson under George W. Bush. We didn’t learn it under Barack Obama. Although it
has become fashionable among the media elite to
blame the Trump Administration for all that is wrong with the country,
where Americans go wrong is in becoming so fixated on a particular politician
that they fail to understand that the fault rests with the Government: the
permanent, entrenched Deep State that continues to call the shots in the halls
of power.
Indeed, the evils
perpetrated by the U.S. government have been going on for some time now.
Consider just a few of
the ways in which the government—in a misguided, ill-conceived, flawed,
bureaucratic and downright Orwellian attempt to fight evil with evil—continues
to inflict evil on the citizenry.
Peddling child
pornography to catch child porn consumers: As part of an effort to crack
down on child porn consumers and traffickers, for two weeks in 2015, the FBI secretly hijacked a child porn
website, improved the technical functionality of the site, and uploaded tens of
thousands of images of child pornography to the site. In doing so, the government not only became the
largest distributor of child pornography, but it also became the largest
exploiter of children. All told, the FBI was accused of hosting an estimated
22,000 images, videos and links of child pornography that more than 100,000
people accessed.
This is what Douglas
Anderson, chair of the University of North Texas' philosophy and religion
department, refers to as a cost-benefit analysis. In this instance, the government weighed the
cost of inflicting damage on innocent children who were being victimized and
preyed upon against the benefits of catching people who download child porn.
“It’s a moral conundrum for anyone who takes the view that we are committed to
protecting them in all ways,” Anderson said in an interview with the Dallas
Morning News.
“They're weighing it against these kids’ lives. World opinion says we have a
basic duty to protect children. You’d have to have something pretty
overwhelming to offset damaging more people. It would have to be awfully
extreme to allow even one child to be harmed.”
Incredibly, after
going to such morally questionable depths to catch child porn consumers, the government chose to drop its case
rather than be forced to reveal the surveillance and hacking tools it used to set its trap.
Trafficking weapons to
catch drug traffickers. They referred to it as Operation Fast and Furious: a 15-month sting operation carried out by the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives aimed at dismantling
Mexican drug cartels and disrupting drug trafficking routes within the United
States. Only it didn’t quite work out that way. As the National Review reports,
“Under ‘Operation Fast & Furious,’ the U.S. government became a de facto
arms dealer to
Mexican drug cartels and Islamist criminals.”
The concept was
straight-forward enough: the U.S. government allowed gun sellers and informants
to sell approximately 2,000 weapons to gun traffickers in the hopes that the
weapons would be tracked to the drug cartels, which would then be targeted and
disrupted. Although it appears that the weapons did make it into the hands of
the drug cartels, government agents lost track of an
estimated 1,400 weapons, many of which were linked to crimes, including the fatal shooting of a
Border Patrol agent in 2010.
Dealing drugs to catch
drug dealers. Taking advantage of federal and state asset forfeiture laws
that allow police to seize and keep money if they suspect it may be related to
criminal activities, law enforcement agencies have been raking in millions of
dollars in entrapment schemes in which they sell cocaine to drug users and then
bust them for buying it, or lure big-city drug dealers to suburban towns with promises of big
sales and then bust them in the act.
As the Sun
Sentinel reports:
Police in this suburban town best
known for its sprawling outlet mall have hit upon a surefire way to make
millions. They sell cocaine. Undercover detectives and their army of
informants lure big-money drug buyers into the city from across the United
States, and from as far north as Canada and as far south as Peru. They
negotiate the sale of kilos of cocaine in popular family restaurants, then bust
the buyers and seize their cash and cars. Police confiscate millions from these
deals, money that fuels huge overtime payments for the undercover officers who
conduct the drug stings and cash rewards for the confidential informants who
help detectives entice faraway buyers… Undercover officers tempt these distant
buyers with special discounts, even offering cocaine on consignment and the
keys to cars with hidden compartments for easy transport. In some deals,
they’ve provided rides and directions to these strangers... Many of the drug
negotiations and busts have taken place at restaurants around the city’s main
attraction, Sawgrass Mills mall, including such everyday dining spots as TGI
Fridays, Panera Bread and the Don Pan International Bakery.
Fighting wars abroad
by fueling wars abroad. The United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world for too
long now. Controlling more than 50 percent of the global weaponry market, the
U.S. has sold or donated weapons to at least
96 countries in
the past five years, including the Middle East.
Some of these weapons
inevitably end up in our enemies’ hands, as well as those of terrorists. For instance,
the Pentagon’s efforts to train Syrian fighters ended with most of the
infantrymen voluntarily surrendering their
U.S.-provided equipment to extremist groups. These weapons—precision guided weapons or smart
bombs, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium shells, among others—are
also responsible for the deaths of
innocent civilians in
Yemen, Syria and elsewhere.
As Mother
Jones reports:
Arms deals are a way
of life in Washington. From the president on down,
significant parts of the government are intent on ensuring that American arms
will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed and Boeing will
live the good life. From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied
world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of US
embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms.
And the Pentagon is their enabler. From brokering, facilitating, and literally
banking the money from arms deals to transferring weapons to favored allies on
the taxpayers' dime, it is in essence the world's largest arms dealer.
Creating terrorists in
order to snare terrorists. The FBI has a long, sordid history of inventing
crimes, breeding criminals and helping to hatch and then foil
terrorist plots in
order to advance its own sordid agenda: namely, amassing greater powers under
the guise of fighting the war on terrorism.
Investigative
journalist Trevor Aaronson argues convincingly that “the FBI is much better at creating
terrorists than
it is at catching terrorists.” According to Aaronson’s calculations, the FBI is responsible for more
terrorism plots in the United States than al Qaeda, al Shabaab and the Islamic
State combined.
One of the
government’s tactics involves radicalizing impressionable young
men in order to create and then “catch” terrorists. Under the guise of rooting out terrorists
before they strike, the FBI targets mentally ill or impressionable individuals
(many of whom are young and have no prior connection to terrorism),
indoctrinates them with anti-American propaganda, pays criminals $100,000 per case to
act as informants and
help these would-be terrorists formulate terror plots against American targets, provides them with weapons and
training,
and then arrests them for being would-be terrorists. This is entrapment, plain and simple, or what former FBI director
Robert Mueller referred to as a policy of “forward leaning – preventative –
prosecutions.”
Spreading disease in
order to cure disease. For years, the American government conducted secret experiments on an
unsuspecting populace—citizens
and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with
chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to
airborne toxins. The government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment
on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental
patients, and poor blacks.
The mindset driving
these programs has, appropriately, been likened to the unethical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors. In Alabama,
for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper
medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated
syphilis. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis. In
Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses.
In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria
pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were
exposed to the flu after
first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public
service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five
days. In New York, dying patients had cancer cells introduced into their
systems. And in Staten Island, children with mental retardation
were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured.
These incidents are
just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has
inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.
For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard
gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of
unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped
into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants.
Are you starting to
notice a pattern here?
For too long now, the
American people have been persuaded to barter their freedoms for phantom
promises of security and, in the process, have rationalized turning a blind eye
to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption,
surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven
private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.
No matter how you
rationalize it, the lesser of two evils is still evil.
There’s a scene
in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring
Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in which a rogue war profiteer (Harry Lime)
views human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted
penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured
deaths of young children.
Challenged by his old
friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime
responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings.
Governments don’t, so why should we?”
“Have you ever seen
any of your victims?” asks Martins.
“Victims?” responds
Lime, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced
to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel
any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty
thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me
to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to
spare?”
Lime’s callous
indifference is no different from the U.S. government’s calculating
cost-benefit analyses. After all, to the government, “we the people” are little
more than faceless numbers, statistics and economic units to be bought, sold,
bartered, traded, tracked, tortured, spied upon, caged like animals, treated
like slaves, experimented upon, and then discarded and left to suffer from the
after-effects.
As John Lennon summed
it up, “We’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”
Is the government
evil? You tell me.
The same government
that laced the fog over San Francisco
with bioweapons, sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off
the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents,
and staged “mock” anthrax attacks covering territory as wide-ranging as Ohio
to Texas and Michigan to Kansas has also taken every bit of technology sold to
us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, behavioral methods, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control
and trap us.
The same government
that propelled us into endless oil-fueled wars and military occupations in the
Middle East that wreaked havoc on our economy, stretched thin our military
resources and subjected us to horrific blowback has also turned America into a
battlefield, transforming law enforcement agencies into extensions of the
military, conducting military drills on domestic soil, distributing “free”
military equipment and weaponry to local police, and desensitizing Americans to
the menace of the police state with active shooter drills, color-coded terror
alerts, and randomly conducted security checkpoints at “soft” targets such as
shopping malls and sports arenas.
Likewise, the same
government that—as part of its so-called “war on terror”—passed laws subjecting
us to all manner of invasive searches and surveillance, censoring our speech
and stifling our expression, rendering us anti-government extremists for daring
to disagree with its dictates, locking us up for criticizing government
policies on social media, encouraging Americans to spy and snitch on their
fellow citizens, and allowing government agents to grope, strip, search, taser,
shoot and kill us has also—in a so-called effort to keep the schools safe—
locked down the schools by installing metal detectors and surveillance cameras,
adopting zero tolerance policies that punish childish behavior as harshly as
criminal actions, and teaching our young people that they have no rights, that
being force-fed facts is education rather than indoctrination, that they are
not to question governmental authority, that they must meekly accept a life of
censorship, round-the-clock surveillance, roadside blood draws, SWAT team raids
and other indignities.
How can you ever trust
the government again?
As I make clear in my
book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People, you shouldn’t have trusted the government
in the first place. It was Thomas Jefferson who warned, “In questions of power
then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from
mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
Unfortunately, as Carl
Sagan recognized, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any
evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.
The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to
ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you
almost never get it back.”
How do you fight evil?
Start by recognizing it. Talk about it. Refuse to play politics with your
principles. Don’t settle for the lesser of two evils. Stop being apathetic.
As British statesman
Edmund Burke warned, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for
good men [and women] to do nothing.”
WC: 2702
ABOUT JOHN W.
WHITEHEAD
Constitutional
attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People (SelectBooks,
2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted
at johnw@rutherford.org.
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