Terrorism: A History of Violence

Terrorism: A History of Violence

Terrorisme international
Few concepts are as muddled as terrorism but David Anderson, the UK’s outgoing terrorism legislation watchdog, has brought insight and scrutiny to bear on one of the defining issues of our age, writes Peter Oborne

Politicians of all parties and many countries have sought to persuade their societies that terrorism is a unique and special form of crime.

They place terrorists in a category of psychopathic evil, marked out by their capacity for inhuman violence. They place terrorists beyond the pale of civilised society and, therefore, beyond the reach of negotiation and settlement. They say that terrorism is the most dangerous and gravest problem of our time.

Most of this political narrative is self-seeking nonsense. It allows politicians to strike resolute poses. It allows them to seek and obtain special powers and to expend huge sums on combatting terrorist threats, to the great benefit of defence and security interests, both public and private.

Few concepts are more widely discussed than terrorism, and few as poorly understood

Few concepts are more widely discussed than terrorism, and few as poorly understood. The idea is constantly reinvented, reshaped and distorted to fit transient political agendas.

As a result it has become muddled. There is no accepted definition. Many authoritarian regimes use the term to disparage legitimate opponents. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and most of the Gulf States describe political parties which advocate peaceful democratic change as ‘terrorist’.

Meanwhile in Britain the concept has been reshaped so that it does not apply only to acts of violence, but also to a range of activities which fall well short of violence. Terrorists are defined not only as men of violence, but also those whose views can be depicted as threats to the British state or the values and way of life of the majority of its people. In this way the concept has become part of the apparatus of state harassment.

The terror of a government

The word “terrorism” was invented after the French Revolution. Following the fall of the Bourbon dynasty in 1793, the government of the new French Republic fell into more and more radical and extreme hands, each with an increasingly shallow political base. The last of these, headed by Robespierre, applied a special regime of executions of its opponents, based on denunciation without trial. They described this themselves as the “Terror” and their policy entered the dictionary as “Terrorism”.


The execution of Robespierre and his supporters in Paris on 28 July 1794 (Bibliotheque Nationale de France)


Significantly, the word began its life with a capital T as a proper noun  – and it described a policy adopted by an organised government, not an insurrectionary group.

The Oxford English Dictionary recognised this when it defined terrorism as “government by intimidation as directed and carried out by the party in power” [my italics]. If that usage had survived, most of the governments in the world today would be defined as terrorist.

Instead it fell into disuse, only reappearing again in the mid 19th-century. This time, it was a way of getting to grips with anarchist violence, particularly that directed against the Tsarist regime in Russia. The term “terrorism”, without a capital letter, gained currency in the 50 years before World War One as the result of high-profile attacks on ruling dynasties and government ministers in Europe and on American presidents James A Garfield and William McKinley.

Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, concerns one such group, while Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Devils places terrorism in a Russian context. The term covered a wide variety of perpetrators of violence, some isolated and self-directed assassins, others in well-organised movements with clear political objectives, such as the Irish Fenians.

It is worth noting that many terrorist movements of that period, particularly in Russia, were thoroughly infiltrated, and even sponsored, by governments.

The word almost vanished again after the outbreak of World War One for around half a century.

The disappearance is instructive. World war and totalitarianism changed the perspective. The years 1914-45 saw bloodshed and horror on a scale that makes the assassinations and other outrages committed by anarchists and nationalists in the west before 1914 – or for that matter Islamic terrorists after 2001 – inconsequential.

What makes a terrorist?

But we should notice something else. Terrorism in its original sense – the use of violence by a government for political purposes against its internal enemies – describes a great deal of what happened after 1914 with stunning accuracy. The assaults on the Russian population by Stalin, the atrocities of Mao’s communists, the assaults by Hitler’s armies on the civilian populations of Europe (though not the Holocaust, which was genocide) all fit into the original Oxford English Dictionary definition.

But these governments were rarely described as terrorist.



The King David Hotel in Jerusalem, bombed by the Irgun in 1946, while under the British mandate (Jerusalem Post)


George Orwell, that attentive student of political language, went to Spain in the late 1930s and described the atrocities carried out by Franco’s army and its communist opponents during the Spanish civil war. Not once, as far as I can discover, did he use the word “terrorism”.

Yet a great deal of what he reported would today be regarded as exactly that. Indeed, Orwell himself could have been classified as a terrorist under contemporary British law as a consequence of fighting with an anarchist militia in the civil war.

Immediately following the Second World War, Britain faced violent uprisings in Kenya, Aden, Malaysia, Palestine and elsewhere. There is no doubt that these would have been labelled terrorist movements today.

However, the British rarely used this term – largely because these uprisings took place in distant colonies which they intended ultimately to abandon. Moreover, there was widespread international sympathy, especially in the United States, for the anti-colonial movements against the British.

Other imperial powers, particularly the French in Algeria, were more determined to hold on to their possessions and identified them as part of their state. They characterised their opponents as terrorists and often used terrorist methods (in the original sense) against them.

How 9/11 changed the definition

Terrorism came back into extensive use in the late 1960s and 1970s. This time it was largely associated with nationalist groups, above all the IRA, PLO and ETA, as well as the urban guerrilla movements which briefly gained traction in Europe and South America, the most notorious of which was Baader Meinhof. All of these movements were identified as threats to the security, even existence, of the host state.

Fear of terror has recast the way we live together as society, causing us repeatedly to change the law

In Britain the IRA’s activities differed from the anti-colonial uprisings the British had faced after the war because the IRA demanded a transfer of territory from the state of the United Kingdom, and even more because they caused civilian deaths on the British mainland. They inspired a range of measures previously thought unthinkable in peacetime (such as preventive arrest and internment), all based on the premise that the IRA’s crimes were in the special category of “terrorism.” Significantly, the British government had regular difficulty enlisting the support of the United States, where the IRA attracted a wide measure of sympathy.

Moreover, even at the height of the IRA offensives, the British governments concerned never closed the door to negotiation.

Aftermath of an IRA bomb attack on a street near Whitehall, London on 8 March 1973 (AFP)


Only since the  al-Qaeda attackon America on 11 September 2001 have western leaders identified terrorism as the most serious problem of our time. George W Bush launched his “war on terror” while Tony Blair, in 2004, thought that Islamic terror was an “existential” problem which would take a “generation” to solve.

Fear of terror has recast the way we live together as society, causing us repeatedly to change the law. In Britain new anti-terrorism laws have awarded fresh powers to the state. They include the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001, which was put on the statute book immediately after 9/11; the Criminal Justice (International Cooperation ) Act 2003; the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005; the Terrorism Act 2006; the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, the Terrorist Asset-Freezing Act 2010; the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011; and the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.

A voice of reason on terror

Such was the environment inherited by David Anderson when he was appointed Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation in February 2011. Anderson was a successful commercial barrister. He had no pre-conceived ideas or even experience in the field, although his clients included members of the Bin Laden family business. He had no known political allegiances.

Nevertheless, he has redefined the job of Terrorism Reviewer. His predecessor Alex Carlile, a former Lib Dem MP, had won the trust of the security services. However, Carlile is thought to have had less success at engaging with Muslim communities, which were most viscerally affected by the new terrorism legislation.      
                                                                                                                                                                                                           David Anderson, Independent                                                                                                            Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation                                  
                                                                                                                                                                   Anderson set out on a mission of open-minded enquiry. He made it known that he was keen to meet not just the intelligence services but everyone. He listened to Cage, the controversial advocacy group which describes its mission as “working to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror”, and the former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg. He also dealt with the government-sponsored Quilliam Foundation, viewed with suspicion by many Muslims.

He soon wondered whether the word “terrorism” was an obstacle. Anderson wrote in 2013:

Many advanced countries managed until recently without special terrorism laws of any kind. The terror label – evocative as it is – risks distorting a thing to which it is attached by its sheer emotional power. Terrorism stands for everything that is extreme, dangerous, frightening and secret – qualities which render it glamorous to all who associate with it.

Seasoned criminals in Northern Ireland, chiefly concerned with enriching themselves by the smuggling of tobacco or of diesel, may profit from the status of terrorist to improve their standing in the sub-communities of sympathisers – thankfully now small and local ones – to which they belong. British Muslims travel to lawless parts of the world, seduced as young men have always been by the certainties of strong belief and the romance of hardship, comradeship and conflict.

The terror label – evocative as it is – risks distorting a thing to which it is attached by its sheer emotional power

- David Anderson, Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation

Terrorism can make the careers of political leaders, prosecutors, journalists, lawyers and activists. It swells the budgets of military and intelligence services, publishers, universities and film studios. The police officer transferred to a counter-terrorism unit walks that bit taller. The provider of security fences or CCTV profits from the stardust that comes from appearing with 400 other exhibitors and 8,000 delegates at ‘an operationally critical two day event’.

All these people are, by the mere use of the T-word, taken out of the normal vocabulary of crime, government, commerce or academe into a mental space that is inhabited by Robespierre, Irish dynamiters, Russian anarchists, Olympic hostage-takers, mujahideen, desert emirs and, on the other side of the fence, Special Branch, undercover agents, Navy seals and drones. All have a shared interest in the problem being a serious and frightening one.

The very word has such magnetic qualities that ordinary compasses are not to be trusted anywhere near it. It might have been preferable if it had never found its way into the law. For our more sober juridical purposes, something more prosaic – politically motivated violent crime, perhaps – might have been more suitable.

But it is too late for that. The concept is now considered to be a legal one, for better or worse. We need to shield our compasses and try to work out how (if at all) these special laws are to be justified.

Anderson then went further. He questioned whether terrorism was such a big deal. He poured cold water on the idea that terrorism presents a “uniquely great threat to our lives and well-being”. He noted that “the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, with their 2,800 dead, is inescapable.”

The cockpit of Pan Am 103 after it exploded and crashed over Lockerbie,
Scotland in December 1988, killing all 270 people on board (AFP)
However he added: “It is no disrespect to those victims to point out that 180,000 Americans have been murdered other than by terrorists in the years since 9/11 and that the 7/7 victims [of the 7 July 2005 London bombings] remained, at least until May 2013, the only people ever to have been killed by al-Qaeda on United Kingdom soil.”

He soon challenged the fallacy that the only kind of terrorism is Islamic. He reported that there had been 15 acts of terrorism in Northern Ireland in 2015 (22 the year before) – but no Islamic terrorism attacks in Britain at all.

Suppressing free speech

Anderson retained – and this is rare – a historical perspective. It was not long before he rubbished the idea that al-Qaeda’s international networks marked the emergence of a new form of terrorism. He pointed out that Fenian bombing campaigns in London during the 1880s depended on foreign training camps in New York, that the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605 were educated by foreign Jesuits, that explosive expert Guy Fawkes was recruited in Flanders.

He noted that there was nothing new about suicide bombings: “They have a long history in warfare, have accounted for many world leaders in the past, including Alexander II of Russia in 1881, the Tsar who freed the serfs, and [suicide attacks] were much practised during the late 20th century in the Lebanese Civil War and by the Tamil Tigers [in Sri Lanka]“.

The aftermath of a suicide car bomb attack in Shayyah, Beirut in June 2014 (AFP)


He further observed that al-Qaeda were “certainly not the first to aim for mass civilian casualties, as the Air India bombing of 1985 and the Lockerbie bombing of 1988 bear witness”.

Most heretical of all, Anderson questioned the need for terrorist laws, at any event as a means of expressing special public revulsion, pointing out that the common law was often enough:

James McArdle, the Canary Wharf bomber, was charged with murder and convicted of conspiracy to cause explosion. The four men whose rucksacks failed to explode in London two weeks after the 7/7 bomb were convicted of conspiracy to murder, as were the eight men accused of the airline liquid bomb plot of 2006. That plot was described by one of the trial judges as the ‘most grave and wicked conspiracy ever proved within the jurisdiction’. It is the origin of the continuing requirement to empty water bottles before getting on a plane. In none of those cases was it suggested that a specialist terrorist offence would more effectively have marked the public mood.

As terrorism reviewer, Anderson has consistently highlighted the danger of using the spectre of terrorism in order to suppress social protest. The classic case concerns David Miranda, detained at Heathrow under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in 2013 for carrying files related to information obtained by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Anderson wrote:

By holding (with faultless logic) that the politically motivated publication of material endangering life or seriously endangering our lives, health or safety can constitute terrorism, the court admitted the possibility that journalists, bloggers and those associated with them could, as a consequence of their writing, be branded as terrorists and subjected to a wide range of penal and executive constraints. The consequences for free speech were very grave.

Anderson is a withering critic of the idea of non-violent extremism (a core part of Theresa May’s Prevent Duty Guidance, which decrees that “being drawn into terrorism includes not just violent extremism, but also non-violent extremism, which can create an atmosphere conducive to terrorism and can popularise views which terrorists exploit”.)

Anderson rubbished the idea that al-Qaeda’s international networks marked the emergence of a new form of terrorism

He warned this means that people who are “miles away” from terror, risk being investigated simply because of their religion, rather than any intent or desire to commit a violent offence.

He has stopped short of calling for Prevent to be scrapped, but he has urged a review of the Prevent strategy and suggested there should be an assessment of Prevent comparable in some ways to his own role as terrorism reviewer.

Armed British police officers patrol central London in September 2010 (AFP)
But Anderson is not a reliable Guardian-reading leftie. He sided with the government on the Investigative Powers Act. To the despair of libertarians, he declared that he had not the “slightest doubt that bulk interception, as it is currently practised, has a valuable role to play in protecting national security”.

His recommendation that this practice should continue subject to “additional safeguards” was denounced by Liberty as “unlawful, unnecessary and disproportionate“.

The need for moral courage

The post of intelligence reviewer dates back more than 40 years, ever since the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act became law in the wake of the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974. Mervyn Rees, the home secretary at the time, also announced the creation of an independent reviewer of legislation.

The Prevent strategy sails on, despite Anderson’s criticisms, and the government seems to be on course to press forward with counter-extremism legislation

The first reviewer was Lord Shackleton, son of the famous Antarctic explorer, while the second, Lord Jellicoe, was the son of a World War One admiral. Anderson was approached in the old Whitehall fashion.

“I was offered the part time post of Independent Reviewer by three strangers,” he recalls. “They gained access to my Chambers by subterfuge, having told my clerks that their employer, the Home Office, sought my legal advice. Once in the conference room, they revealed their identities and conveyed the wish of the Home Secretary – to whom I had no connection or political affiliation – that I should accept the job”.

One of Anderson’s achievements has been to update the method of appointment. The next reviewer has come through a formal appointment process, rather than a quiet tap on the shoulders behind the scenes.

Anderson is due to step down shortly. He will leave office in some ways a disappointed man. His recommendations to reduce the scope of the terrorism acts have been systematically ignored by ministers. The Prevent strategy sails on, despite Anderson’s criticisms, and the government seems to be on course to press forward with counter-extremism legislation.

Terrorism remains an offence which governments, however many innocent civilians they slaughter in pursuit of political ends, are unable to commit.

Nevertheless, for six years, David Anderson has been a voice of sanity and a force for good. He has brought intellectual clarity, moral courage, a sense of perspective and, perhaps above all, earned the trust of all sides.

Peter Oborne was named freelancer of the year 2016 by the Online Media Awards for an article he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was British Press Awards Columnist of the Year 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, and Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran.

The original source of this article is Middle East Eye

Peter Oborne

The Free Thought Project,The Daily Sheeple, FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience & Global Research are dedicated to holding those who claim authority over our lives accountable.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience

We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos

It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on FREEDOM OR ANARCHY,Campaign of Conscience. .
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.


Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber

Who Rules the United States?

Who Rules the United States?

Column: How bureaucrats are fighting the voters for control of our country

Donald Trump was elected president last November by winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation’s capital and major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country mired in stagnation and decay. “What truly matters,” he said in his Inaugural Address, “is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.”

Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, “the people” elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government—that happened last year—but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.

President Donald Trump pauses while speaking during a news conference, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
President Donald Trump pauses while speaking during a news conference, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren’t supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.

Here was a case of current and former national security officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be disturbed. Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive, nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the voters.

But why should we believe that? And who elected these officials to make this judgment for us?

Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year’s election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.

How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. “I can’t think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this,” a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.

Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women’s March.

But here’s the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the “least dangerous branch,” now presume to think they know more about America’s national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.

For some time, especially during Democratic presidencies, the second system of government was able to live with the first one. But that time has ended. The two systems are now in competition. And the contest is all the more vicious and frightening because more than offices are at stake. This fight is not about policy. It is about wealth, status, the privileges of an exclusive class.

“In our time, as in [Andrew] Jackson’s, the ruling classes claim a monopoly not just on the economy and society but also on the legitimate authority to regulate and restrain it, and even on the language in which such matters are discussed,” writes Christopher Caldwell in a brilliant essay in the Winter 2016/17 Claremont Review of Books.

Elites have full-spectrum dominance of a whole semiotic system. What has just happened in American politics is outside the system of meanings elites usually rely upon. Mike Pence’s neighbors on Tennyson street not only cannot accept their election loss; they cannot fathom it. They are reaching for their old prerogatives in much the way that recent amputees are said to feel an urge to scratch itches on limbs that are no longer there. Their instincts tell them to disbelieve what they rationally know. Their arguments have focused not on the new administration’s policies or its competence but on its very legitimacy.

Donald Trump did not cause the divergence between government of, by, and for the people and government, of, by, and for the residents of Cleveland Park and Arlington and Montgomery and Fairfax counties. But he did exacerbate it. He forced the winners of the global economy and the members of the D.C. establishment to reckon with the fact that they are resented, envied, opposed, and despised by about half the country. But this recognition did not humble the entrenched incumbents of the administrative state. It radicalized them to the point where they are readily accepting, even cheering on, the existence of a “deep state” beyond the control of the people and elected officials.

 Matthew Continetti

Who rules the United States? The simple and terrible answer is we do not know. But we are about to find out.

The original source of this article is The Washington Free Beacon



The Free Thought Project,The Daily Sheeple & FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience are dedicated to holding those who claim authority over our lives accountable.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience

We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos

It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on FREEDOM OR ANARCHY,Campaign of Conscience. .
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.


Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber

The Trump Presidency: RIP

The Trump Presidency: RIP

Trump overestimated his presidential power? The answer is yes.
Is Steve Bannon, Trump’s main advisor, politically inexperienced? The answer is yes.

We can conclude from the answers to these two questions that Trump is in over his head and will pay a big price.
How large will the price be?

The New York Times reports that US “intelligence agencies…sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.”

Former National Security Agency (NSA) spy John Schindler tweeted on Twitter that a senior intelligence community colleague sent him an email stating that the deep state had declared nuclear war on Trump and that “He will die in jail.”

It is possible that this will be the case.

At the end of World War II, the military/security complex decided that the flow of profits and power from war and threats of war were too great to be relinquished to an era of peace. This complex manipulated a weak and inexperienced President Truman into a gratuitous Cold War with the Soviet Union. The lie was created, and accepted by the gullible American people, that International Communism intended world conquest. This lie was transparant, because Stalin had purged and murdered Leon Trotsky and all communists who believed in world revolution. “Socialism in one country,” declared Stalin.

Academic experts, knowing where their bread was buttered, went along with and contributed to the deceit. By 1961 the overarching power of the military/security complex was apparent to President Eisenhower, a five star general in charge of the US invasion of German occupied Western Europe during the Second World War. The private power that the military/security complex (Eisenhower called it the military-industrial complex) exercised disturbed Ike so much that in his last address to the American people he said we must guard against its subversion of democracy:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Eisenhower’s warning was to the point. However, it relied on “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” which the US does not have. The American population is largely insouciant, and is heading, across the ideological spectrum from left to right, to self-destruction.

The print and TV media, which serve as propagandists for the ruling military/security complex and Wall Street elites, make certain that Americans have nothing but bogus orchestrated information. Every household and person who turns on TV or reads a newspaper is programed to live in a false orchestrated reality that serves the tiny few who comprise the ruling Establishment.
Trump challenged this Establishment without realizing that it is more powerful than a mere President of the United States.
This is what has happened: During Obama’s second term, Russia and its president were demonized by the military/security complex and the neoconservatives using the presstitute media. The demonization has facilitated the ability of the controlled presstitute media, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest, to associate contact with Russia and articles questioning the orchestrated tensions between the US and Russia with suspicious activity, possibly even treason. Trump and his advisors were too inexperienced to realize that the consequence of Flynn’s dismissal was to validate this orchestrated association of the Trump presidency with Russian intelligence.

Now we have the media whores and the political whores asking the question used to blacken President Nixon and to force his resignation: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Did Trump know that Gen. Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador weeks before Trump said he did? Did Flynn do the unspeakable—speak to a Russian—because Trump told him to do so?

The purveyors of fake news—the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the despicable liars are using irresponsible innuendo to entangle President Trump in a web of treason. Here is the New York Times headline: “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” What we are witnessing is a campaign by the deep state using their media whores to set up Trump for impeachment.

Those at work overturning the 2016 presidential election are so confident of their success that they publicly declare their preference for coup over democracy. The zionist neoconservative warmonger Bill Kristol has expressed his preference for a deep state coup  over democratically elected President Trump.
The liberal/progressive/left has aligned with the One Percent against the “racist, misogynist, homophobic” working class—the “Trump deplorables”—who elected Trump. Even the uninformed muscian, Moby, felt compelled to post ignorant nonsense on Facebook:
“1-the russian dossier on trump is real. 100% real. he’s being blackmailed by the russian government, not just for being peed on by russian hookers, but for much more nefarious things.
2-the trump administration is in collusion with the russian government, and has been since day one.”
Now that Trump has been tainted with “associations with Russian intelligence,” the idiot Republicans, according to Bloomberg, have “joined calls by Democrats for a deeper look at contacts between President Donald Trump’s team and Russian intelligence agents Wednesday [Feb. 15], indicating a growing sense of political peril within the party as new reports surfaced of extensive contacts between the two.” 

Of course, there is no evidence of such contacts, but facts are not part of the campaign to depose Trump.

Trump’s sacking of Flynn is being used as vindication by his opponents of their false charges that the President of the United States is compromised by Russian intelligence. Realizing the mistake, the White House has tried to counter its blunder by saying that Flynn was dismissed because Trump lost confidence in him, not because he did anything illegal or had connections to Russian intelligence. But none of Trump’s opponents are listening. And the CIA keeps feeding fake news to the presstitutes.

From the very beginning I warned that Trump lacked the experience and the knowledge to pick a government that would stand by him and serve his agenda. Trump has now fired the one person on whom he could have counted. The most obvious conclusion is that Trump is dead meat.

The effort of the American people to bring government back under their control via Trump has been defeated by the deep state.
Chris Hedges argument that revolution is the only way that Americans can reclaim their country continues to gain credibility.
The words that doomed Trump when he declared war before he had his army assembled:

“There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense. The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exists for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government. The political establishment that is trying everything to stop us, is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and foreign policies that have bled this country dry.
“The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs, as they flee to Mexico, China and other countries throughout the world. It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

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.


The Free Thought Project,The Daily Sheeple & FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience are dedicated to holding those who claim authority over our lives accountable.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience

We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos

It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on FREEDOM OR ANARCHY,Campaign of Conscience. .
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.

Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber

You Are Not In Control

You Are Not In Control

 -  My recent book tour was very valuable, among other things, in gauging audience response to the various topics related to the technosphere and its control over us. Specifically, what seems to be generally missing is an understanding that the technosphere doesn’t just control technology; it controls our minds as well. The technosphere doesn’t just prevent us from choosing technologies that we think may be appropriate and rejecting the ones that aren’t. It controls our tastes, making us prefer things that it prefers for its own reasons. It also controls our values, aligning them with its own. And it controls our bodies, causing us to treat ourselves as if we were mechanisms rather than symbiotic communities of living cells (human and otherwise).

None of this invalidates the approach I proposed for shrinking the technosphere which is based on a harm/benefit analysis and allows us to ratchet down our technology choices by always picking technologies with the least harm and the greatest benefit. But this approach only works if the analysis is informed by our own tastes, not the tastes imposed on us by the technosphere, by our values, not the technosphere’s values, and by our rejection of a mechanistic conception of our selves. These choices are implicit in the 32 criteria used in harm/benefit analysis, favoring local over global, group interests over individual interests, artisanal over industrial and so on. But I think it would be helpful to make these choices explicit, by working through an example of each of the three types of control listed above. This week I'll tackle the first of these.

A good example of how the technosphere controls our tastes is the personal automobile. Many people regard it as a symbol of freedom and see their car as an extension of their personalities. The freedom to be car-free is not generally regarded as important, while the freedoms bestowed by car ownership are rather questionable. It is the freedom to make car payments, pay for repairs, insurance, parking, towing and gasoline. It is the freedom to pay tolls, traffic tickets, title fees and excise taxes. It is the freedom to spend countless hours stuck in traffic jams and to suffer injuries in car accidents. It is the freedom to bring up neurologically damaged children by subjecting them to unsafe carbon monoxide levels (you are encouraged to have a CO detector in your house, but not in your car—because it would be going off all the time). It is the freedom to suffer indignities when pulled over by police, especially if you’ve been drinking. In terms of a harm/benefit analysis, private car ownership makes no sense at all.

It is often argued that a car is a necessity, although the facts tell a different story. Worldwide, there are 1.2 billion vehicles on the road. The population of the planet is over 7 billion. Therefore, there are at least 5.8 billion people alive in the world who don’t own a car. How can something be considered a necessity if 82% of us don’t seem to need it? In fact, owning a car becomes necessary only in a certain specific set of circumstances. Here are some of the key ingredients: a landscape that is impassable except by motor vehicle, single-use zoning that segregates land by residential, commercial, agricultural and industrial uses, a lifestyle that requires a daily commute, and a deficit of public transportation. In turn, widespread private car ownership is what enables these key ingredients: without it, situations in which private car ownership becomes a necessity simply would not arise.

Now, moving people about the landscape is not a productive activity: it is a waste of time and energy. If you can live, send your children to school, shop and work all without leaving the confines of a small neighborhood, you are bound to be more efficient than someone who has to drive between these four locations on a daily basis. But the technosphere is rational to a fault and is all about achieving efficiencies. And so, an obvious question to ask is, What is it about the car-dependent living arrangement, and the landscape it enables, that the technosphere finds to be efficient? The surprising answer is that the technosphere strives to optimize the burning of gasoline; everything else is just a byproduct of this optimization.

 

It turns out that the fact that so many people are forced to own a car has nothing to do with transportation and everything to do with petroleum chemistry. About half of what can be usefully extracted from a barrel of crude oil is in the form of gasoline. It is possible to boost the fraction of other, more useful products, such as kerosene, diesel fuel, jet fuel and heating oil, but not by much and at a cost of reduced net energy. But gasoline is not very useful at all. It is volatile (quite a lot of it evaporates, especially in the summer); it is chemically unstable and doesn’t keep for long; it is toxic and carcinogenic. It has a rather low flash point, limiting the compression ratio that can be achieved by gasoline-fueled engines, making them thermodynamically less efficient. It is useless for large engines, and is basically a small-engine fuel. Gasoline-powered engines don’t last very long because gasoline-air mixture is detonated (using an electric spark) rather than burned, and the shock waves from the detonations cause components to wear out quickly. They have few industrial uses; all of the serious transportation infrastructure, including locomotives, ships, jet aircraft, tractor-trailers, construction equipment and electrical generators run on petroleum distillates such as kerosene, jet fuel, diesel oil and bunker fuel.

If it weren’t for widespread private car ownership, gasoline would have to be flared off at refineries, at a loss. In turn, the cost of petroleum distillates—which are all of the industrial fuels—would double, and this would curtail the technosphere’s global expansion by making long-distance freight much more expensive. The technosphere’s goal, then, is to make us pay for the gasoline by forcing us to drive. To this end, the landscape is structured in a way that makes driving necessary. The fact that to get from a Motel 8 on one side of the road to the McDonalds on the other requires you to drive two miles, navigate a cloverleaf, and drive two miles back is not a bug; it's a feature. When James Kunstler calls suburban sprawl “the greatest misallocation of resources in human history” he is only partly right. It is also the greatest optimization in exploiting every part of the crude oil barrel in the history of the technosphere.

The proliferation of small gasoline-burning engines in the form of cars enables another optimization, forcing us to pay for another generally useless fraction of the crude oil barrel: road tar. Lots of cars require lots of paved roadways and parking lots. Thus, the technosphere wins twice, first by making us pay for the privilege of disposing of what is essentially toxic waste at our own risk and expense, then by making us pay for spreading another form of toxic waste all over the ground. Suburban sprawl is not a failure of urban planning; it is a success story in enslaving humans and making them toil on behalf of the technosphere while causing great damage to themselves and to the environment. Needless to say, you have absolutely no control over any of this. You. Are. Not. In. Control. You can vote, you can protest, you can lobby, donate to environmentalist groups, attend conferences on urban planning… and you would just be wasting your time, because you can't change petroleum chemistry.

That the need to make people buy gasoline trumps all other considerations becomes obvious if we observe how the technosphere reacts whenever gasoline demand falters. When rampant wealth inequality started making owning a car unaffordable for more and more people, the solution was to introduce larger cars for those who could still afford one: minivans for the mommies, pickup trucks for the daddies, and for everyone the now common SUV. And now that gasoline demand is dropping again because of falling labor participation rate and an increase in the number of people who telecommute, the solution will no doubt be driverless cars which will cruise around aimlessly burning gasoline. Mommies may think that a minivan will keep their kiddies safer than a compact would (not true unless they have 8-9 kids). Daddies may think that the pickup truck is a sign of manliness (true if you are some sort of gofer/roustabout; pickup trucks are driven by picker-uppers, a subspecies of gofer/roustabout). But all they are doing is obeying “The Third Law of the Technosphere,” if you will: “For every improvement in the efficiency of gasoline-fired engines, there must be an equal and opposite improvement in inefficiency.”

 

So, perhaps you should just relax and go with the flow. After all, being a slave in the service of the technosphere is not immediately life-threatening… unless you crash into a tree or get run over by a drunk. But there is another problem: this arrangement isn’t going to last. The net energy that can be extracted out of a barrel of oil is quickly shrinking. In less then a decade the energy surplus required to maintain a car-centric lifestyle will no longer exist. If private car ownership and daily driving are required of you in order to survive, then you won’t survive. There goes at least 18% of the world’s population, which will find itself stranded in the middle of an impassable landscape. Oops!

Given that you are not in control, and given that the car-centric lifestyle is an evolutionary dead end for your subspecies, what can you do? The answer is obvious: you can plan your escape, then join the other 82% of the world’s population, which is able to live car-free. Some of them even manage to live entirely outside of the reach of the technosphere. Let their example be your inspiration.   -

The Free Thought Project,The Daily Sheeple & FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience are dedicated to holding those who claim authority over our lives accountable.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience

We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos

It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on FREEDOM OR ANARCHY,Campaign of Conscience. .
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.

Dmitry Orlov

Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber

SHOCK REPORT: FBI ARRESTING FAR MORE AMERICANS TARGETING MUSLIMS, THAN MUSLIMS TARGETING AMERICANS

SHOCK REPORT: FBI ARRESTING FAR MORE AMERICANS TARGETING MUSLIMS, THAN MUSLIMS TARGETING AMERICANS

As President Trump and supporters continue the push to levy an arbitrary travel ban from a smattering of predominantly Muslim countries, a debate rages in the United States about the validity — and effectiveness — of preventing terrorism by strangling immigration.
Now, simple data can put that debate to rest.

“Since January 2015, the FBI has also arrested more anti-immigrant American citizens plotting violent attacks on Muslims within the U.S. than it has refugees, or former refugees, from any banned country,” writes Nora Ellingsen for Lawfare.

Ellingsen would know, too, after having worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterterrorism Division for five years, she left for Harvard Law School — but has tracked statistics closely for Lawfare since. And Ellingsen remains cagey to unreported information — she knows what is likely taking place behind the scenes, even when it either isn’t or hasn’t been disclosed to the public.

In a recent article titled, “It’s Not Foreigners Who are Plotting Here: What the Data Really Show,” Ellingsen explains,

“The Program on Extremism at George Washington University has routinely published statistics indicating that the ‘vast majority’ of individuals charged in the U.S. with offenses related to ISIL are U.S. citizens. When considering all terrorism offenses, that claim holds up—80 of the 97 suspects arrested in the past two years, or more than 82 percent, are American citizens.
“Most of those, notably, are not naturalized citizens. Of the U.S. citizens, only six were naturalized. In other words, more than 76 percent of individuals arrested by the FBI over the past two years for terrorism-related offenses were U.S. citizens as a result of having been born in the United States.”

Americans present a far greater threat to Americans than immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, or Somalia — the named countries in Trump’s disputatious ban.
But even naturalized U.S. citizens haven’t committed or plotted to commit acts of terrorism on American soil. According to the aforementioned statistics, two of six naturalized citizens emigrated from Bosnia, which didn’t make the list — nor did Israel, staunch U.S. government policy driver, and original home of the third naturalized citizen, who had been convicted on charges of terrorism previously.

“Nihad Rosic and Mediha Medy Salkicevic,” Ellingsen continues, “emigrated to the U.S. from Bosnia, a country not on Trump’s list. While in the United States, the government alleges that Rosic and Salkicevic raised and sent money to individuals fighting with ISIL in Syria and Iraq. Both men contributed money from their personal savings, while other members of the conspiracy sent supplies including tactical gear. At one point, Rosic attempted to leave the country to join ISIL as a fighter overseas. Neither subject plotted an attack in the United States.

“Another naturalized citizen, Rasmieh Yousef Odeh came to the United States from Israel—a country that’s really not on Trump’s list. Odeh’s case is unique; she was charged with immigration violations for failing to disclose a previous terrorism conviction in Israel. Now 68 years old, Odeh was convicted in Israel for her role in the 1969 bombings of a supermarket and the British Consulate in Jerusalem, which were carried out on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP.) In the past two years, Odeh is the only convicted terrorist to slip through the cracks and immigrate to the United States. However, the indictment makes no charges that she was engaged in any sort of terrorist activity while living in the Chicago area.”

Here’s where the statistics get really interesting. While the remaining three naturalized citizens did, indeed, emigrate from nations Trump takes issue with, but not for anything pertaining to his ostensible terrorism concerns.

Two men — one from Iraq, the other, Syria — “were not charged with material support to terrorism, but with making false statements to law enforcement,” and “nothing in the public court documents suggests that either subject engaged in attack plotting in the United States.”

Exactly one naturalized citizen from the travel blacklist engaged in activity related to terrorism, as Ellingsen explains,

“Of the six naturalized citizens on our list, there is exactly one from a newly banned country who was charged with material support to terrorism. Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud emigrated to the U.S. from Somalia. In April 2014, Mohamud traveled from Ohio to Istanbul and onward to Syria, where he received weapons and explosives training. In June 2014, Mohamud returned to the U.S., where he told an acquaintance that he wanted to attack a military facility or a prison, killing U.S. military members.”

So, if perpetually-paranoid Americans aren’t threatened by immigrants from the apparently Sinful Seven countries, who should they fear?
Techdirt turned to an article from Slate, which explains the ‘real terrorists’ truly are closer to home than nervous, law-abiding Americans might think.

“Our politicians say they’ll stop these killers. They talk about building walls and vetting refugees. If we were serious, we would do it. We would seal our borders against North Carolina,” Slate’s William Saletan implored.

“North Carolina? It sounds absurd. When we think about immigration and terrorism, we think of Syria. But that’s not where our casualties are coming from. On Friday, a gunman killed three people and wounded nine more at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. The suspect is white American Robert Lewis Dear. When police apprehended Dear, he uttered one telltale phrase: ‘no more baby parts.’ People who have known or met Dear say he wasn’t a regular churchgoer. But they also report that he believed devoutly in the Bible and that he claimed to have read it ‘cover to cover.’ In an online forum, Dear apparently spoke of Jesus and the ‘end times.’ He painted or posted crosses on at least three of his homes.

“Dear moved to Colorado last year from North Carolina, where he had been living. For two decades, the Tar Heel State has been a hotbed of religious extremism, fueled by clerics who preach holy war. The result is a stream of interstate terrorism.”

Saletan, of course, speaks tongue-in-cheek, yet keenly encapsulates — through a list of domestic terror attacks carried out by North and South Carolinians — how immigration restrictions of any variety serve only to placate xenophobes.

After all, Saudi Arabia didn’t make the list; Israel didn’t make the list; Afghanistan didn’t make the list.

Terrorism doesn’t practice one religion, or have a single nationality. It doesn’t have a specific appearance, gender, motivation, cause, or mindset.

You can’t fight terrorism by ignoring facts — and the fact is, we have our own terrorists. No matter how constrictive the restrictions on our borders get — even if Trump shut down immigration, entirely — the United States creates terrorists at home and abroad at an alarming rate.

A closed border won’t change that. Indeed, the only way to lessen the chances a terrorist will attack on U.S. soil is for the U.S. to rein in belligerent, imperialist foreign policy, bring the military home, and use its bloated budget to begin patching the physical and emotional holes in this country.
Banning legal immigrants only deepens those wounds.

Claire Bernish

Delivered by The Daily Sheeple

The Free Thought Project,The Daily Sheeple & FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience are dedicated to holding those who claim authority over our lives accountable.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience

We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos

It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on FREEDOM OR ANARCHY,Campaign of Conscience. .
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.


Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber

“THE WORLD IS RUN BY INSANE PEOPLE.

“THE WORLD IS RUN BY INSANE PEOPLE.” A POWERFUL VIDEO OF JOHN LENNON THAT STILL APPLIES TO TODAY

“I think our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. And I think that’s what I sussed when I was sixteen and twelve, way down the line. But I expressed it differently all through my life. It’s the same thing I’m expressing all the time. But now I can put it into that sentence that I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends, you know. If anybody can put on paper what our government, and the American government, and the Russian, Chinese… what they are actually trying to do, and how and what they think they’re doing, I’d be very pleased to know what they think they’re doing. I think they’re all insane. But I am liable to be put away as insane for expressing that, you know. That’s what is insane about it.” — John Lennon Interview 6/6/1968

  We're creating a positive news network. We need your help. Donate 

The war on terror, economic disasters, racial wars, big pharma and food quality/modification. When you look at our world today you have to wonder how we got here.

It was in my later years of high school that I began to feel relief about something that bothered me for a long time: I started to realize how the world really works. Now at 29 years old, I’ve interviewed, met with and worked with many of the top researchers in the field of truth seeking and several conclusions are clear, but one more than others: our world is run by psychopaths.

I want to be very clear here, this is not meant to be a judgment, to rile up our emotions and call these people evil, no. This is about coming to a stark realization about what’s really going on in our world so that we can actually change it.

“As difficult as it was for me, I’ve come to an inescapable and profoundly disturbing conclusion. I believe that an elite group of people and the corporations they run have gained control over not just our energy, food supply, education, and healthcare, but over virtually every aspect of our lives; and they do it by controlling the world of finance. Not by creating more value, but by actually controlling the source of money.” – Foster Gamble

Why It’s Important

You know it, you feel it. Something is not quite right with our world and as each day goes by, more and more people are realizing this in a big way. In 2016 we witnessed millions begin to realize how elections are rigged and that we truly have no choice.

We began to learn on a wider level that our world leaders are closely involved with companies who fund terror and that the war on terror is fabricated to justify certain actions.

Coming to understandings like this shows a shift in our overall consciousness as a planet and helps us to realize how we can move forward. Should we keep voting expecting to see change when that’s not how our world actually works? Should we spend money supporting companies who are harming us and our environment? Should we support the medical system blindly vs working to create better health and wellness so illness doesn’t happen?

The more we understand how the game works, the more we know how to change it. Think of it this way, imagine you are playing a game and you find out someone is cheating and rigging the rules so you can never win. You may get up and just walk away and say I’m not playing anymore. Since that person can’t play with no one, they just stop. In a sense this is exactly what we need to work towards.

A transformation in consciousness comes from understanding, which leads to taking new actions, which helps to create a different world and bring solutions. But it starts with knowledge and consciousness.

John Lennon Speaks Truth

John Lennon’s is synonymous with peace and political activism. He was always a bit of a rebel, even early in life, and helped millions to think differently about their world. His song “Give Peace a Chance” is an anthem for the anti-war movement and is still heard today during peace marches around the world.

Best known for his time with the Beatles, John has always had strong views about politics and today might be equally as known for his activism and wisdom.

EVOLVE 

‘Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.‘

‘You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!’

‘My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. ‘

Lennon had a deep sense of wisdom about him and even to this day his words contain a power that can affect millions, which is why this piece is being written. With the upcoming elections gaining great attention, I felt it was a good time to remind the world who is really in control of our world.

On June 6th 1968, Peter Lewis chatted with Lennon and Spinetti about a new play they were working on. The filmed interview would air on BBC-2 as part of the arts program ‘Release.’ This is a clip from that interview.



Lennon goes on to call out the insanity of the British, American, Chinese, and Russian governments. He says he’s been attempting to express this in different ways all of his life ever since he figured it out, but he thinks we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal means.
And, really, that about sums it up.


JOE MARTINO

Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber

"The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them."There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience. "Human Rights, Democracy and Freedom

Trump Plan For 100K Anti-Illegal Immigration Enforcement Force, Trump Denies

Trump Plan For 100K Anti-Illegal Immigration Enforcement Force, Trump Denies

Fake News Or White House Manipulation? 

In yet another blow to the media’s credibility, the Associated Press ran with a story on Friday morning that the Trump administration had circulated a draft memo that would delegate 100,000 National Guard members for rounding up illegal immigrants.
Here’s the AP report:

The Trump administration is considering a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border, according to a draft memo obtained by The Associated Press. The 11-page document calls for the unprecedented militarization of immigration enforcement as far north as Portland, Oregon, and as far east as New Orleans, Louisiana….Governors in the 11 states would have a choice whether to have their guard troops participate, according to the memo, written by U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general.

It’s worth noting that this was a draft memo, according to the AP.
The report was quickly and strenuously denied by multiple members of the administration:

But the Associated Press story openly states that “requests to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment and a status report on the proposal were not answered.”
So is the AP lying? Why didn’t the White House just disown the proposal immediately upon request for comment?
Nate Silver has a theory:

If the AP reported this story without actually seeking comment, that’s fake news, obviously. But if the White House is manipulating the news – if the memo is real, and if the AP sought comment and was denied – then that’s egregious stuff. There’s no excuse for going silent with the media simply in order to castigate their credibility for issuing factually true reports. No wonder nobody knows what to believe anymore.
As far as the content of the memo, Trump went back and forth on the notion of a deportation force during the campaign. He’s been unclear on how he plans to expand enforcement against illegal immigration – just yesterday, he said he would use “heart” to deal with so-called DREAMers. This latest story just throws more confusion on top of policy chaos.

 Ben Shapiro

Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience


 Please read our  Comment Policy before posting -
It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on FREEDOM OR ANARCHY Campaign of Conscience
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.

Here Is The "Leaked" Memo Directing The National Guard To Arrest Illegal Immigrants: PDF: Here Is The "Leaked" Memo Directing The National Guard To Arrest Illegal Immigrants