Inquisition 21
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State intervention
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We are moving towards a society where the state tries to legislate for appropriate behavouir
The iron fist of the state
Here is author David Calderwood replying to Jack, who included him in the list of people he appealed to for assistance after his savage treatment by his employers and the US government.
Hi (Jack’s real name)
It was quite a welcome to America you received. You are in a difficult situation for two reasons that are probably obvious to you:
1. Prosecutors in the United States are like trophy hunters. They are judged (and judge themselves) by how many successful convictions they get, and the concept of punishing people who have harmed others has long since been forgotten.
2. People in the US are afraid to confront the fact that the government is completely out of control. Just like in Germany under the Nazis, when they came for the gypsies, those who weren't gypsy shrugged their shoulders and said "Oh, well." Then they came for the Jews, and the Protestants said, "Oh, well." By the time they came for the Protestants, there was no one to care. People think that as long as it's someone else whose life is ruined, it doesn't matter. They don't realize that today's injustice against a stranger is tomorrow's injustice against themselves. Instead they lie to themselves that the people working for the government are wise and caring, and are just doing their jobs.
I'm sad to say that I do not know personally of anyone who can assist you. You might contact the editors of Reason Magazine (www.reason.com) to see if your story would interest them. It is the kind of thing they used to pay attention to.
I'm not well informed about the criminal law system. I'm assuming you'd need help from someone who is licensed to practice in the state in which you were tried. One place you might check would be any law schools in your state. I've heard of law schools where students undertake projects to clear the wrongly convicted and that sort of thing. It's sadly possible, though, that such organizations are already busy dealing with the thousands of people sentenced to long, long prison terms or even the death penalty in cases where prosecutors were just as callous as those who targeted you. As horrible as your case is (and I agree it's horrible), there are sadly many even worse.
The United States is not what its citizens (and many of its admirers abroad) think it is. I was born here and have lived nowhere else. Yet it terrifies me to know how simply bad luck can cause the iron fist of the state to smash any of our lives.
I truly wish you luck in trying to clear your good name.
David
PS: Yes, the US is so much like Orwell's ‘Airstrip One’ in 1984 that few can face the truth.
Read also David Calderwood’s excellent Winning or Losing the Lottery.
Commentary
This is a truly depressing and even frightening verdict from an American author, but it merely confirms a dreadful realization that has come from the mounting evidence of the totalitarianism that has re-emerged throughout the Western world. At the heart of this totalitarianism are rigid social dogmas that attempt to define and legislate ‘appropriate social behavouir’, that now extends to human thought. While this dreadful process is underway internally, the West is faced with the dangerous external (and increasingly internal) threat of religious fundamentalism. Despite these two great threats, or one might say because of the first, the West is engaged in moral wars against child prostitution in many Third World countries, in which they should have no business.
In his article above ‘Winning or Losing the Lottery’, David Calderwood confirms what most of us already know that being caught breaking the law is a result of a lottery for most of us. Whether it be I, who first dated my wife, now a grandmother, when she was 16, and I was 17, or you whose son is smoking pot, or he who looked at something on the Internet, or little she who downloaded a song, we are all in a new version of Nazi Germany or US McCarthyism.
Calderwood has added two Commandments to the Ten, the twelfth being ‘getting caught’, but the most depressing is his number eleven – ‘Keep a Low Profile’. This explains the generation of cowards that has taken over society today, afraid to speak out, allowing the growing Inquisition to overwhelm us. He describes the ‘lawmakers and their gutless, herding-animal constituents, who are our neighbours’.
He makes this fascinating point: “It seems that as science conquers the arbitrary dangers of nature, humans will replace nature’s horrors like polio and periodic starvation with man-made alternatives. As we know, the institution best constituted to breathe life into these lunatic fantasies is government.” So, as we conquer natural enemies, the state and we create new social repressions.
(David Calderwood is author of the novel Revolutionary Language, selected as January 2000 Freedom Book of the Month at Free-market.net.
State intervention
The iron fist of the state
We are cowed
The blacklist expands
Internet - tool of repression
The story of a ‘lucky family’
The grotesque new world of fostering
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