From the show announcement:

On Todays Show We Have Jeff Nabers & Phoebe Chongchua Authors of 5 Steps To Freedom. How To Cut Your Dependence On Institutions And Escape Financial Slavery. Also On The Show: Mike Gogulski Who Has Renounced His American Citizenship And Is Now Living In Bratislava, Slovakia. Hosts James Cox, Michael Shanklin & Todd Barnett will be discussing The Movement’s articles on current.com, and the weekly news events. Please Call In To The Show On (347) 633-9636

I’ve clipped out my segment and provide it here as a podcast.

Listen below, or download. 26m59s, 12.3MB MP3.

One might respond to [a certain discourse] by noting that we are all already, in fact, free.

That the state exists only in our minds and the minds of billions.

And that if defending one’s free life in a crisis against one of the state’s brainwashed minions might mean – gasp – violence, and violence is kinda “off the table” now because there’s “so much else to be done” or “education is the key” or one’s philosophy speaks (rightly) to “peace and trade” as desirable while downplaying (imho, wrongly) the role of self-defense in preserving and seizing one’s liberty, well, one’s not really acting like a free person.

And that if one is in that spot, dithering about whether or not it’s the right time to defend oneself, then one is not really free yet. That the state still exists in one’s mind, binding and constraining one, contrary to one’s true nature.

And may one’s chains rest lightly upon one, should one find oneself there.

I was very stressed and exhausted the first 2 days of Liberty Camp here in Martin, Slovakia, because I was trying to do this and support a number of online projects at the same time and keep up with my email and keep up with my usual copious intake of alcohol, etc.

Then yesterday, my laptop broke.

I didn’t panic. I felt relief. There are a few important things I must do while I’m on the road, the rest is gonna have to slide until I return home, around 8 July. Meanwhile, my energy and my attention are being extremely well employed here, in teaching, learning from and building community with the extraordinary people around me.

So, if your email or other contact goes unanswered for a long while, please know that it’s not because I don’t love you. It’s because I’m busy working to build a better world for you and for me and for all of our conspecifics right this very second.

Peace,

Mike

Why?

Dunno. It occurred to me. I used to have this “friend”, see, who in between loading the three-foot “weed eater” for the next bong hit would occasionally belt this one out. An odd thing, perhaps, for a Jew to sing.

And no, we really didn’t have any good friends who just happened to be black… or communists… or Christians.

Let’s hope he got it from someplace… someplace pure. Someplace like The Doctor Demento Show, for instance.

Anyone know who wrote this piece of Ameri-horror-cana?

Speaking of random thoughts which crawl out of the depths of one’s mind late at night… anyone remember the scene from Airplane! where the well-dressed, polite boy comes to sit next to the well-dressed, aristocratic little girl on the plane, bearing a tray of beverages?

“Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“Milk?”

“No, thank you. I take it black. Like my men.”

Yeah, I thought you did.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

We are a sacred brotherhood, who love our country true
We always can be counted on, when there’s a job to do
We serve our homeland day and night, to keep it always free
And proudly wear our robes of white, protecting liberty.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

[trumpet solo]

The Bible, cross, Old Glory, too, our symbols of a man
A sword and water, robe and hood portray our noble Klan
In search of peace and liberty, we pledge our hearts and hands
We must defeat the communists to save our Christian land

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

I will not vote in this election.

I will not participate in this distraction and sham, and neither laziness nor apathy is among my reasons behind my choice.

I think most of the possible voting choices are unethical. Specifically, I believe it is unethical to vote to place another human being in a position of power over a peaceful person who cannot opt out of that system if there is a reasonably realistic chance your choice might prevail. I believe it is unethical to vote to steal a peaceful person’s property- be that theft in the form of taxation, eminent domain, zoning, gun control, the drug war, fines or penalties for victimless activities, or any of a bazillion other activities I could list. I believe it is unethical to vote to take away any peaceful choice a person could make- be that choice to carry arms either openly or concealed in public, to fuck bicycle parts, to wear clothing with distasteful graphics, to speak, publish or read offensive material, or again any of a bazillion other things that do not violate anyone else’s right to their own equally individual choices.

It is a very specific strategic choice for me not to vote. The system we have- no matter who is in charge- is fundamentally flawed and needs to be supplanted by individual freedom as soon as possible. It is predicated on the flawed notion that some men may dictate the details of the lives others. It is my desire to see such a system widely regarded as a joke.

I want holding a government job to be considered an embarassment by most people. I want the idea that we should obey arbitrarily meaninglessly selected other people to seem ludicrous to us all.

As Fred Rogers used to ask every day, please won’t you be my neighbor?

Thanks to all the people who have stopped by here, read things and reacted. Thanks for contributing to a more interesting life. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and your perspectives. And thanks for being true to yourselves.

Please keep coming back. I have more stories to tell, and I’d like to hear yours too.

Peace,

Mike

“Oppose the war; support the troops.”

The idea had a certain strategic logic to it. Our opinion was a minority one, and offending the millions with military members in their families or otherwise close to them didn’t seem like a terribly bright way of getting the peace message across. We also somewhat accepted the logic that the people in the military had signed up to defend America; that they were being sent to a criminal war for profit on the other side of the globe wasn’t really their fault, they’d been hoodwinked.

So, all of those well thought out banner ideas like “US Military: Millions of Murderers in Uniform” were left aside so that we might more effectively get the peace message across and avoid offending anyone’s precious sensibilities. We stuck instead to our peace signs and our rainbows and our doves and our “No blood for oil” lines. We endured the taunts from the counter-protests: “My country, right or wrong!” “America, love it or leave it!” “Traitors!” and so on. And we gingerly protested in our carefully cordoned-off free speech zones or under city permit permission, got ourselves in the papers and all cried together and lit candles as the radio reports started coming in of the missiles and bombs striking Baghdad. And, of course, none of it made a damned bit of difference.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

It always bothered me, though, this “support the troops” idea. Sure, it was a smart strategic play, but in stark conflict to the rest of what we thought we were doing. We were here to bring the truth to an ignorant, deluded or sleeping public, and the whole truth, nothing but. That truth must have necessarily included the realization that these amorphous “troops” we were enjoined to support were actually individual, thinking, morally responsible men and women. It must have included the knowledge that each and every “troop” currently engaged in mass murder in our names had volunteered. And we knew, as they should have, that the murderous, destructive, obscene organization they volunteered to serve, hadn’t conducted a legitimate “defense of America” since at least WWII, and maybe as far back as the War of 1812, depending on whose Pearl Harbor narrative you believe.

They weren’t conscripted, they weren’t shanghaied, they weren’t tricked into signing up and donning the uniform and picking up the gun. They sought out the role, they agreed to follow orders, they signed the papers, and nowhere along the way did they somehow become transformed from individual human beings, morally responsible for their individual acts of violence and destruction into those collectively romanticized “troops”. Some small number said, “I didn’t sign up for this,” and did the only moral thing possible, which was to desert. The rest marched freely onto the planes and ships and deployed, the willing agents of empire. Certainly in many, the thought was there afterward: “We didn’t sign up for that,” but still they went, perhaps finding their own moral cover in the notion they’d been tricked. Likely, most found no moral problem with going at all.

Even today, the “support the troops” mentality is embedded in the tactics and rhetoric of the organized anti-war movement, implicitly or explicitly. It’s considered bad form to condemn the American armed services en masse for their self-subjugation to the American empire’s war machine.

another victim of empire

Unlike Gulf War I, though, Gulf War II, freshly turned five years old, is an occupation. It is an obviously immoral war launched on the flimsiest of concocted excuses and conducted with the most sinister of aims. The history of Gulf War I, the suffering inflicted on Iraq by a decade of sanctions, the horror of depleted uranium weapons residues and unexploded landmines and other ordnance from the first attack should have made it obvious to anyone that a crime had been committed there. A massive, inexcusable, inhuman, monstrous, treasonous crime.

And yet, most of the military personnel that have served in the current conflict up to the present weren’t in the military for the first. They signed up, willingly. If they didn’t know the history of what the US military actually did for the prior fifty years, flag-waving nonsense and Cold War turned War on Terror hysteria aside, their foolishness should not excuse them. If they learned nothing from the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon or other places that the empire had been sticking its nose and its guns into, well, we should let neither ignorance nor willful blindness be an excuse. Unjust, illegal wars do not just happen by themselves. They are the sum total of millions of individual decisions by millions of individually responsible people to obey, topped by whatever dark cabal is giving the orders for the week.

Further, probably close to half or more of those still in Iraq today signed up after the war’s justifications had evaporated, after the stories of casual murder, collective punishment and institutionalized torture were already splashed on television screens and across newspaper headlines worldwide. They, especially, should have known better.

So, I will not support the troops. In fact, fuck the troops! Each and every US serviceperson today who is not deserting, refusing to follow orders or turning their weapons on their commanders is, in fact, a criminal, and one for whom we should feel neither sympathy nor pity, let alone the specious solidarity of “support the troops” when it’s those same “troops” who are carrying out slaughter, destruction and torture in our name.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

At the same time, fuck all those who support the troops! If history, recent or ancient, hasn’t been sufficient to educate you on the true nature of war and the true nature of the predatory, inhuman power you seem so eager to serve, then damn you for your stupidity, damn you for your ignorance, damn you for your blindness, damn you for your fallacious morality. And this goes not only for every family member or friend of someone serving in the US military today who is NOT insistently urging their child or husband or wife or friend to desert or disobey, it goes also for every federal employee and for every shareholder and employee from janitor to CEO of the military-industrial-terrorism complex and the companies that comprise it: Blackwater, Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Allied-Signal, Unisys, Westinghouse, DynCorp, Exxon, Hewlett-Packard, EDS, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM, Hughes, KBR, Kearfott, Lockheed-Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Shell, AT&T, Sikorsky, United Technologies and all the rest. There is blood on your hands, real human blood — lives taken, families shattered, homes destroyed, crops ruined, populations displaced, tortures committed, atrocities sanctioned, all facilitated by your unthinking, odious, ignorant, unconscionable support.

This essay is in part a response to the writings of Arthur Silber, in a piece entitled “The Honor of Being Human: Why Do You Support?“

credit: vredevanutrecht @ flickr

In concluding, he states:

The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for.

I repeat once more: these horrors are now what the United States stands for. Thus, for every adult American, the question is not, “Why do you obey?” but:

Why do you support?

Or will you refuse to give your support? Will you say, “No”? These are the paramount questions at this moment in history, and in the life of the United States. We all must answer them. Our honor, our humanity, and our souls lie in the balance.

No, Arthur, I will not support.

March to War in Lebanon?

Statement on H Res 1194, “Reaffirming the support of the House of Representatives for the legitimate, democratically-elected Government of Lebanon under Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.”

May 20, 2008

Ron Paul

Madam Speaker I rise in opposition to H. Res. 1194 because it is dangerously interventionist and will likely lead to more rather than less violence in the Middle East.

I have noticed that this legislation reads eerily similar to a key clause in the 2002 Iraq war bill, H J Res 114, which authorized the use of force.

The key resolved clause in H. Res. 1194 before us today reads:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(6) urges–

(A) the United States Government and the international community to immediately take all appropriate actions to support and strengthen the legitimate Government of Lebanon under Prime Minister Fouad Siniora;

The Iraq war authorization language from 2002 is strikingly similar, as you can see here:

(a) AUTHORIZATION- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to–

(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq ;

I am concerned that this kind of similarity is intentional and will inevitably result in US military action in Lebanon , or against Syria or Iran .

I am also concerned over the process of bringing this resolution to the Floor for a vote. I find it outrageous that H. Res. 1194, which calls for more risky US interventionism in the Middle East , is judged sufficiently “non-controversial” to be placed on the suspension calendar for consideration on the House Floor outside of normal order. Have we reached the point where it is no longer controversial to urge the president to use “all appropriate actions” — with the unmistakable implication that force may be used — to intervene in the domestic affairs of a foreign country?

Mr. Speaker, the Arab League has been mediating the conflict between rival political factions in Lebanon and has had some success in halting the recent violence. Currently, negotiations are taking place in Qatar between the Lebanese factions and some slow but encouraging progress is being made. Regional actors – who do have an interest in the conflict – have stepped up in attempt to diffuse the crisis and reach a peaceful solution, and press reports today suggest that a deal between the rival factions may have been reached. Yet at this delicate stage of negotiations the US House is preparing to pass a very confrontational resolution pledging strong support for one side and condemning competing factions. US threats in this resolution to use “all appropriate actions” to support one faction are in fact a strong disincentive for factions to continue peaceful negotiations and could undermine the successes thus far under Arab League moderation.

This legislation strongly condemns Iranian and Syrian support to one faction in Lebanon while pledging to involve the United States on the other side. Wouldn’t it be better to be involved on neither side and instead encourage the negotiations that have already begun to resolve the conflict?

Afghanistan continues to sink toward chaos with no end in sight. The war in Iraq , launched on lies and deceptions, has cost nearly a trillion dollars and more than 4,000 lives with no end in sight. Saber rattling toward Iran and Syria increases daily, including in this very legislation. Yet we are committing ourselves to intervene in a domestic political dispute that has nothing to do with the United States .

This resolution leads us closer to a wider war in the Middle East . It involves the United States unnecessarily in an internal conflict between competing Lebanese political factions and will increase rather than decrease the chance for an increase in violence. The Lebanese should work out political disputes on their own or with the assistance of regional organizations like the Arab League. I urge my colleagues to reject this march to war and to reject H. Res. 1194.

From The Jerusalem Post:

US denies report on plan to attack Iran

The White House on Tuesday flatly denied an Army Radio report that claimed US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his term. It said that while the military option had not been taken off the table, the Administration preferred to resolve concerns about Iran’s push for a nuclear weapon “through peaceful diplomatic means.”

Army Radio had quoted a top official in Jerusalem claiming that a senior member in the entourage of President Bush, who concluded a trip to Israel last week, had said in a closed meeting here that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action against Iran was called for.

The official reportedly went on to say that “the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice” was preventing the administration from deciding to launch such an attack on the Islamic Republic for the time being.

From the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran:

Bush’s Iran diplomacy is a sham; admits US Defence Secretary

CASMII Press Release

17 May 2008

In a moment of candour, Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary has admitted albeit implicitly that the Bush administration’s diplomacy towards Iran has long been a sham: “If there is going to be a discussion, then they need something, too. We can’t go to a discussion and be completely the demander, with them not feeling that they need anything from us,” he stated in his address to a group of retired American diplomats on May 14.

Lamenting also that the US may have squandered an opportunity to engage with Iran under President Khatami’s government, Gates’ striking assertion echoes the confession of several European diplomats to Asia Times Online on 7th September 2005. For the first time, they admitted that the package offered by the EU-3 in their so-called negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme was “an empty box of chocolate” and that “there is nothing else we can offer.” The diplomats went on to say: “The Americans simply wouldn’t let us.”

In 2004, Gates co-authored the Council of Foreign Relations’ report “Iran: Time for a New Approach,” which rejected that Iran is on the verge of another revolution and called for the United States to reassess its long-standing policy of non-engagement with the current Iranian government. He was later a member of the Iraq study Group, the US Congress’ bipartisan panel, whose report in December 2006 strongly recommended direct dialogue with Iran.

The tacit but honest admission of the insincere nature of the US stance on Iran in Gates’ speech on Wednesday was once again confirmed on the same day by the US response to the Russian Foreign Minister’s statement on how to tackle effectively the conflicts in the Middle East. Sergei Lavrov called on international powers to offer security guarantees for Iran in order to help resolve all problems in the region and the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The White House immediately rejected this call. Spokesman Gordon Johndroe simply retorted: “Security guarantees are not something we are looking at the moment,” exposing yet one more time the administration’s unwillingness to change its failing agenda for regime change and instead pursue a sincere path for peace.

President Bush’s highly inflammatory, threatening and hypocritical rhetoric against Iran in his address to the Israeli Knesset on May 16 provides the strongest evidence yet for his real objective. By making a comparison with the Nazi Germany and warning against appeasement, his speech was designed to destroy peace efforts and justify military action against Iran.

Ironically termed “diplomacy”, the US instigated sanctions against Iran are part of a plan to frustrate meaningful negotiations in order to portray violent aggression as a viable alternative to the public.

The Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) calls on the European Union, Russia and China to resist the Bush Administration’s war drive through the United Nations Security Council.

CASMII echoes the appeals of the international community and leading experts in demanding immediate and unconditional US negotiations with Iran.

For more information or to contact us please visit http://www.campaigniran.org