After The War, one of Hitler's generals said of the dictator that his decisions "ceased to have anything in common with the principles of strategy and operations as they have been recognized for generations past. They were the product of a violent nature following its momentary impulses, which recognized no limits to possibility and which made its wishdreams the father of its acts."
This is simply a well-worded iteration of a common flaw; we become so invested in our own intelligence that we stop testing ourselves, we stop asking for advice, and we drift further and further from reality on the tide of our own ego.
When we cease to dissect our decisions and our motives, we fall into this trap.
Ask any student in my school what they think of snitches, and the answer is invariably the same. They are the lowest form of life, snitches get stitches, etc, etc. Such deeply held beliefs may lead us to think that the issue has been thought about widely and deeply, but of course it has not.
Ask the very same students the definition of a snitch, and you'll get looks that betray an anger at this metaphysical nonsense. It's obvious what a snitch is, these looks tell you. Except it's not obvious what a snitch is, especially to people who devote so much energy to hating them.
Just as Hitler became so delusional that he invaded the Soviet Union and declared war on the United States within months of each other, many urban youths today blindly sweat loyalty to the premise that snitches deserve death that they no longer commit the only act necessary to those who claim to hold this belief: define snitches.
These people are so busy hating snitches that they don't even bother to define the word. Just as Hitler grew too self-righteous to pay attention to the proper definitions of "economics" or "justice" or "logic" or "history" or anything else, for that matter.
So what is a snitch? A snitch is someone who cooperates with the police. That's the truth, but it's not the whole truth. And the truth without the whole truth is often worse than a lie. For example, Hitler would have define "Jews" as "against the German people". And that was the truth.
But the whole truth was that the Jews were against the German people because the German people were exterminating them from the face of the earth. Quite a bit of daylight between the truth and the whole truth, no?
The whole truth about snitches is that they cooperate with the police AND they benefit from that cooperation.
Some examples: Let's say I witness a man shoot an 80 year old woman in the face. If I cooperate with the police in getting this man off the street, am I a snitch? No. Here's why.
I did not sell my "cooperation". I did not benefit from it. I was not forgiven for any crime I may have committed, and I received no money. If anything, I willingly put myself in danger from the idiots who ignore this distinction and who would target me for death for the sin of "snitching".
Another example: Let's say I sell cocaine. I get caught. The police tell me I have two choices: 10 years in prison or I can cooperate with the police in locking up my business partners. Am I a snitch? Yes. Here's why.
I sold my cooperation. I benefit from it by escaping the consequences of my own crimes. There is an enormous moral chasm between these two scenarios.
Even further down the moral plane are people who get paid either in money or reduced sentences by fabricating information or planting evidence. These tactics have been used by our own government against civil rights and anti-war groups.
There is no virtue in profiting by the incarceration of another person. Whether you are paid in time, coin, or paper, the corruption is the same. A free society is not possible when criminals can be forgiven of their crimes by spying on and betraying others, innocent or not.
A free society is also not possible when it is taboo to condemn the animals among us and to help the police imprison them. That is the whole truth. It doesn't fit on a t-shirt or a bumper sticker, but it is what civilization is based on. So help me God.
The criminal justice system in America is, like many American institutions, viewed with an ignorant arrogance by many Americans and condescension or contempt by much of the rest of the world.
Our system has many flaws. Despite its professed blindness, for example, the system moves swifter and more forgivingly for those with money. Despite our professed "freedom", for another example, so many things are illegal in this country that our courts are correspondingly clogged. We're all criminals; it's just a matter of whether we're caught.
But the biggest flaws are these: our system is institutionally founded on two absurd premises. The first is that evidence of guilt is irrelevant in convictions. The second is that evidence of innocence is irrelevant in overturning convictions.
How can evidence of guilt be irrelevant when a jury decides whether to convict? The O.J. Simpson murder trial was the perfect example. The system is tasked with judging whether or not the state proves guilt. That makes sense. But the verdict is based not on whether guilt was proved, but rather on whether all of the proper forms, rules, and etiquettes were followed perfectly.
Because of this loophole (or black hole), which is the expensive expertise on sale from high-priced defense attorneys, O.J. Simpson walked free. Instead of explaining how a glove with the victims' blood was found at Simpson's house, for example, the defense instead concerned itself with establishing that the detective who found the glove had used the word "nigger" in the preceding decade.
Whenever a conviction is overturned on a "technicality", this same dynamic is at work. The issue is not the truth, but rather the protocol. If any part of that protocol is violated, the guilty walk free.
Ask yourself this: what if Mark Fuhrman, the racist detective, had planted that glove? What should the result have been? Should O.J. have walked free? Most people would say yes. The justice system certainly would. But believers in "The Truth Theory", as its called in legal circles. would say no.
Believers in this theory, and I am certainly one, would say that attempting to frame a guilty man should NOT result in that guilty man going free. The corrupt detective in question should be fined, fired, perhaps imprisoned. But the guilty should not go free. Verdicts should be about truth, not about human corruptibility.
In many cases, however, the flaws, mistakes, and corruption of police are paid for by society as a whole and by victims' families in particular. The Simpson murder case was only the most extreme and absurd example of this rejection of truth in favor of form.
As for the second major flaw, how can evidence of innocence not be relevant to securing release from wrongful imprisonment? For the same reason that the first flaw exists; the system is directed to prize form over truth.
If, for example, a DNA test proves that a convicted murderer was actually innocent, most rational people would swing the doors open and dig into the general coffers to atone for this monstrous mistake. The system does not. Ironclad evidence of innocence means nothing; Again, only form is relevant to the system.
Therefore, to overturn a conviction, the system requires proof not of innocence, but rather proof that the original trial was unfair. Again, most of us simpletons would say that whenever an innocent person is convicted of a crime, the trial was unfair by definition. But lady justice would dissent.
To the system, a person is not guaranteed an accurate verdict; they are guaranteed a fair trial. So even if a trial results in a wrong verdict, that is irrelevant as long as the trial was fair.
For example, if a defendant's lawyer was later found to not have a law licence, or to have slept through large portions of the trial, or to have been drunk, then the trial may be considered unfair. But if these things did not happen, then the conviction stands, regardless of ironclad evidence of innocence.
An old adage has it that "innocence is the best defense". In most walks of life, those are wise words to live by. If you are in a situation where you pre-emptively ask yourself "how will I defend myself if someone finds out about this?", that is your conscience telling you not to do it, so that if anyone ever confronts you about it you can simply and authoritatively say "I didn't do it".
But in the "justice" system, innocence is no defense at all. And that's indefensible.
In a country that reflexively and self-righteously describes itself as "free" (and not just "free", but the freest, indeed the leader of the "free world") Americans have a depressingly juvenile understanding of the word. Simply put, most Americans wouldn't recognize freedom if it bit them in the ass.
In order for people to be free, they must enjoy certain rights. We can all agree on this. If I have no inalienable "rights", then I am not "free". Simple enough. But what is less simple is the task of defining what those rights are.
The source of Americans' ignorance of how un-free they really are comes from their ignorance of what the different types of rights are and what their sources are. Broadly speaking, there are two types of rights. There are natural rights and there are civil rights. Every drug law in the United States, or in any single state therein, is a clear violation of both natural and civil rights.
First, for natural rights. Natural rights predate all governments. They existed before states, before nations, before cities, before all trappings of civilization. Natural rights are given by God or, if one prefers, by nature. Whether one is religious or not is beside the point. The point is that we ALL have rights that we enjoy by the simple virtue of being alive.
Since these are natural rights (Thomas Jefferson termed them inalienable rights), and their source is nature itself, no earthly authority can deprive us of these rights. For example, every person has the right to live. Governments, of course, kill people the way most people throw out used coffee filters. But that sad truth does not change the fact that every person has the natural right to their own life, as often violated as that rights sadly is.
We also have the natural rights to own and promote our own ideas, beliefs, and consumptions. Put much more simply, every single person owns his or her own body, mind, and soul. Unless that person violates the body, mind, or soul of another person, it is entirely illegitimate for any government to exercise any control over one's body, mind, or soul.
For example, I can believe in whatever I want to believe unless or until my beliefs deprive others of their natural rights. The most well-known example of this premise is that I can say whatever I want, no matter how hateful or vulgar, but I can NOT shout "fire!" in a crowded theater.
According to natural law, I own my body and I have the right to use it as I see fit. Ask yourself, if someone does not have freedom over their own body, do they have any freedom at all? The question answers itself.
Any law, therefore, that restricts or regulates what I put into my body is a clear violation of my natural rights. Unless my consumption deprives others of their rights, no limitations can be put on what I choose to put into my own body. The best example of this caveat is that I have the natural right to drink alcohol, but I do NOT have the natural right to drive drunk because that behavior may deprive others of their natural right to life.
The most insulting ignorance that Americans show about rights is evident in our drug laws. Most Americans think drugs should be illegal. I do not. Most Americans would think that I am advocating drug use. I am not. I am advocating freedom.
If heroin were legalized tomorrow, how many of us would start using heroin? If this questions seems absurd, that only betrays the absurdity of our drug laws. I do not need the government to forbid me to use heroin; I need my own common sense to do that.
Drug laws are based upon this premise: the government needs to "take care" of people by restricting their freedoms because if people were truly free they would degenerate into heroin addicts. This concept of benevolent tyranny is so antithetical to what the American Revolution was supposed to be about that we may as well have never had a revolution.
All of the wrangling between the federal government and the states over medical marijuana laws, for example, are a charade and a distraction from the true matter at hand here, which is that no government has any right to regulate what plants we eat, drink, or smoke. Any restriction on our personal use of our own body violates natural law.
For the people who think that government does have the right to outlaw certain drugs, our drug laws are still a deep violation of the American system.
The federal government supposedly only has the powers specifically enumerated to it in the Constitution. Of course, the history of American government is largely the history of the federal government inventing all sorts of new authorities for itself. It has tyrannically insinuated itself so far into our lives that is lies lodged somewhere in between our lips and our lungs.
The Constitution does not say "We, the people, in order to prevent people from getting high....". That's not in there. Trust me. Nowhere in that document is the government given the authority to regulate any food, drug, medicine, etc. That doesn't stop them, of course.
What the Constitution says (in the 10th amendment, the most ignored element of the Bill of Rights) is that any power not explicitly granted to the federal government goes to the states or the people. The federal government can legally do very little. Most powers (in theory, if not in practice) go to the states or the people.
So when Rhode Island passed a medical marijuana law, two things should have been clear. Firstly, that law violated our natural rights to our own body, as explained above. Secondly, if we accept the premise that the government can regulate what we ingest (which I do NOT) then that power should rightly go to the states. The federal government has no role in this issue whichever way you slice it.
Now Rhode Islanders are being doubly tyrannized. We are tyrannized by our state, which violates our natural rights by telling us what, when, and how we can use our own bodies. We are also tyrannized by the federal government, which tels our state that it has no right to even partially lessen or rationalize these tyrannical infringements.
What is left to us when every level of government fails us by insisting it has the right to take our rights in the interest of "protecting" us against ourselves? All that is left to us is where this whole issue should have ended in the first place. With We. The People.
Like most of us, I assume, I was surprised by President Obama's announcement last Sunday night. The hunt for bin Laden had simply been off my radar. And unlike millions of us, I felt no surge of satiated bloodlust, no urge to run out into the streets beating my chest or chanting the name of my country.
My first thoughts:
1. Pakistan is a problem. Perhaps the problem. Obama made a wise decision in not notifying our "ally" of our plans. Bin Laden was living unmolested for 5 years in a city in Pakistan. Not a cave in Afghanistan, but a garrison town in Pakistan. That Pakistan is far more dangerous and treacherous than Afghanistan is self-evident. That we should probably stop giving them money and weapons is equally clear.
2. Since bin Laden was found and killed in Pakistan, the entire premise of the American war in Afghanistan, the longest in our history, is so profoundly flawed as to be entirely nonsensical. The war in Afghanistan has degenerated into an abattoir fueled by inertia rather than interest. Perhaps the most profound silence this week has been the silence created by the lack of voice urging President Obama to declare victory and leave Afghanistan.
3. It seems clear that the mission was to kill bin Laden rather than to capture him. This was necessary partly because of the staggering logistics involved in invading Pakistan, raiding the compound, and returning safely. It was also necessary, in the government's mind, to prevent bin Laden from having any sort of platform that a trial may ensure or the potential outrage that would ensue if bin Laden were not given a trial.
4. Obama's decision not to release the death photos is understandable, but also based on the profoundly counterrevolutionary (the American revolution being the revolution in question here) premise that the photographs in question are somehow the personal property of the president. This is just one of many elements of the bin Laden killing that resemble the Roman Empire more than the American Republic.
5. The burial at sea in particular was a deeply Roman thing to do. It was as if Caesar had slain the charismatic leader of a barbarian tribe and scattered his ashes to the winds so as to dispirit the slain leader's followers and to erase his very physical memory from the earth. This was a logical decision, but a weirdly ancient and superstitious one.
6. While I do not believe in killing, and while I was deeply ashamed and disgusted by the street carnivals which broke out upon news of bin Laden's death, I cannot argue against the premise of killing him. It stands in stark and ethically appealing contrast to George W. Bush's strategy of invading whole nations of unoffending peoples.
7. Aside from the classless, tasteless, and barbaric nature of them, the most profound reason that the celebrations upon the news were pathetic and disturbing, is that bin Laden probably would not have objected to the outcome. It seems to me that bin Laden would have taken the deal.
Imagine that bin Laden had been offered this deal 10 years ago: You will achieve the most physically and economically devastating attack in the history of the United States. In response, the United States will invade two Muslim nations, spend 2 trillion dollars, lose 6,000 soldiers, kill 1 million Muslims, and eviscerate its reputation and economy. You will then be shot dead by an American soldier.
I feel like he would have taken that deal. Enthusiastically. So while we accomplished something, we should not celebrate the death of this man, especially in light of the awful cost. And we must recognize that our wars still continue and will do so indefinitely. As Churchill said, This is not the end. Nor is it the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
After The War, one of Hitler's generals said of the dictator that his decisions "ceased to have anything in common with the principles of strategy and operations as they have been recognized for generations past. They were the product of a violent nature following its momentary impulses, which recognized no limits to possibility and which made its wishdreams the father of its acts."
