“Laws are rules, made by people who govern by means of organized violence, for non-compliance with which the non-complier is subjected to blows, to loss of liberty, or even to being murdered.”
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828 – 1910.
When governments suppress individual freedom they virtually guarantee mass revolt, as we witnessed in Myanmar in September 2007, where initially peaceful marches through Yangon were led by Buddhist warrior monks, at least three of whom were killed in violent clashes started by the military police to justify the harshness of the State’s retribution.
If totalitarian regimes react to peaceful protest marches with efforts to impose yet more violent control, as the Burmese and Chinese juntas have, they simply drive public resistence underground where it is much more difficult to control. When faced with the grim realities of enslavement, the people will more easily risk almost certain death to fight for their freedom.
China arrests civil rights activist
Until every blessed living soul right across the globe lives freely in a peaceful, debt-free society, there is no such thing as a ‘Free World’. Almost identical social, cultural and economic policies, as well as politicians, are programming us all to believe that we must sacrifice our birthrights in order for the State to keep us safe and secure, when in reality, the State is creating every one of our fears, controlling our reactions to them, then rolling out their long-planned solutions to our seemingly immediate problems. This is also known as the Hegelian Dialectic – problem, reaction, solution.
Western governments that shroud themselves in the moral appeasement of capitalism to justify the loss of innocent life or environmental sustainability, will inevitably lose their mandate to appear to be governing. Provided that those quasi-regimes are removed from office before their corporate puppetmasters impose a more aggressively open military dictatorship, under the auspices of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force.
As the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine proved during the freezing winter of 2005, if the will of the people is strong enough then any political decision can be overturned, even a rigged election result. Murdoch’s Sky News repeatedly insisted at the beginning of the entirely peaceful demonstrations that the country was on the verge of civil war. Meanwhile, so-called ‘political enemies’ stood side by side in orange, yellow and blue, united in their opposition to corruption, singing songs and sharing food, until the Supreme Court ruled the election result invalid.
While the Ukraine has since descended into yet more political turmoil and allegations of corruption, the Orange Revolution still represents a non-violent victory for peaceful non-compliance and an inspiration to us all. The last thing the controllers of the planet want is for the masses to realise is that it is possible to bring about progressive change through peaceful means. But for change to be permanent rather than transient, Mankind must unite in mutual co-operation for the benefit of the entire universe. There is nothing that unites us more than our desire to live freely in peace, regardless of our race, colour, creed or politics.
However, as long as we turn a blind eye to barbaric degradations like the abuse and murder of Iraqi civilians by coalition soldiers and private security firms such as Blackwater, the Extraordinary Rendition and torture of Muslims by the CIA, and the continued incarceration of the innocent at Guantanamo, we are passively complicit in the crimes of the governments we pay our taxes to.
It is abject hypocrisy to condemn the human rights abuses of other nations when we do not have the courage to hold our own corporatist government to account. That Britain has been desensitised to acts of cruelty and injustice is no longer in question, otherwise we would not have accepted Blair’s refusal to listen to the vociferous protests against the war in Iraq. “Not in our name… unless you really insist”, doesn’t tend to reverse government policy.
If two million people refused to go back to work until the troops pull out of Iraq, perhaps our unelected governors would be forced to capitulate; the amount of money lost by the military-industrial-complex during one week of general strikes might render another war in the Middle East an easy sacrifice to make.
