“Democracy doesn’t just mean public participation in making decisions. It presumes that all power and legitimacy is vested in one decision-making structure, and it requires a way to impose those decisions. As long as anyone might defy them, there have to be armed personnel to regulate and discipline, to control.”
In my opinion, government is at best, tolerated because there is no other recognizable option available at the time. At worst, it is an evil and tyrannical overlord of the individual, never ceasing in its desire for power, money, total control, brutality, war, and imperialism. This opinion obviously does not serve as a recommendation for any governing system, with the one exception of peaceful anarchy, or a society without the State.
Government is always an instrument of force, as government has nothing, creates nothing, and produces nothing; it only steals from those who do. Therefore, politically based government should be avoided at all cost. Unfortunately, this has rarely happened in history.
Although government is controlling and brutal in its efforts to remain in power, it can only retain that power over the rest of society given that the majority consents to be ruled. In many instances, this consent is simply implied.
(Source: anti-propaganda)
Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.
Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn’t stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. “My left eye was closed when the tape was applied,” she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. “But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony.” The journey would last around 17 hours.
Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinary rendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar’s case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.
Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar’s husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.
Bodies lay in the road leading from the village of My Lai, South Vietnam, following the massacre of civilians on March 16,1968. Within four hours, 504 men, women and children were killed. (AP photo/FILE/Ronald L. Haeberle, Life Magazine)
(Source: satans-advocate)
To everyone so outraged about Trayvon Martin, please meet Abdul al-Awlaki. Notice his birth certificate, he’s an American, born in Colorado.
Abdul was a 16 year old American citizen that was murdered on orders of our very own President. His crime? That his father was a suspected Al Qaida member.
Unlike the Trayvon Martin situation there is no grey area here. This teenager was specifically targeted and killed because of his religious and ethnic background and who his family was.
He committed no crime, he was guilty of nothing yet he was murdered by a drone strike.
WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU PEOPLE WHEN THIS TEENAGER WAS MURDERED?
WHERE WERE YOU PEOPLE WHEN THE SAME PRESIDENT WHO SCORED POLITICAL POINTS COMMENTING ON ONE TEENAGERS DEATH ORDERED THE DEATH OF ANOTHER AMERICAN TEEN?
You look foolish. You look uniformed, you look ignorant because you are. In one situation we have
what appears to bean extremely unfortunate, tragicmistake[incident] and we have Congressmen on the house floor wearing hoodies and thousands protesting and screaming for justice.On the other hand you have a child who was intentionally targeted and assassinated on the orders of the President yet you turn a blind eye. This country makes my stomach turn.
Neither situation is more or less tragic than the other. However, as long as folk are going to be outraged by and demonstrate against racial profiling resulting in cold-blooded murder….
(via statehate)
