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For Bush, the "State" is Absolute

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Behind Bush's defense of the "war of choice" against Iraq, behind his unfair tax cuts, behind his claims to be above both the Fourth Amendment and statutory laws prohibiting widespread domestic surveillance is a single discredited Germanic concept: Hegelianism. Hegelianism, for one Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, is the belief that the "state" is absolute; one is "free" only by worshipping the state and obeying the state. The "state" is "God".

This is most certainly the model of the state Orwell described in 1984. It is most certainly the source of Orwellian slogans like ignorance is strength, war is peace, slavery is freedom.

Hegel claimed that the "...final end [the state] has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state."

So when Bush says that the "Constitution is just a Goddamned piece of paper", he means it. It also means that Bush is on the wrong side of history, legal precedent, and, in fact, everything that we call American, everything that we hold dear, everything that makes this nation what it is!

The Constitution is, after all, the antithesis of the Skull and Bones belief in the superiority of the State over the individual.

What are the implications of the concept: "state" as "absolute"? Simply, it flies in the face of the Magna Carta, the English Petition of Right, the Mayflower Compact, The Virginia Declaration of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, The Nuremberg Principles, and every Supreme Court decision that has upheld the right of persons to be secure in their homes.

Significantly, totalitarian states have their philosophical roots in Hegelianism, a straight road to both Nazism and Stalinism. There is, by contrast, another road that runs straight from Magna Carta to our own Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

If the Magna Carta is not the birth certificate of Democracy, it is the death certificate of despotism. It spells out for the first time the fundamental principle that the law is not simply the whim of the king. The law is an independent power unto itself. And the King could be brought to book for violating it!"

""Simon Schama, History of Britain

The Constitution itself is explicit when it establishes the sovereignty of the people. But, if that were not enough to dispel notions of the "state as absolute", a Bill of Rights was insisted upon and ratified by the people. In the 1960's Justice William O. Douglas believed that the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights are absolute --beyond the power of Congress or the executive to modify or infringe in any way.

Also in the 60s, the high court expanded the protections given individuals who found themselves accused of crimes; the decisions especially affected the issue of search and seizures (Mapp v. Ohio), confessions (Miranda v. Arizona), and the right to an attorney (Gideon v. Wainwright). Later, Roe v. Wade would uphold a woman's right to privacy. Clearly, then, Bush by advocating doctrines associated with Nazism and Stalinism has found himself an enemy of basic individual rights, most prominently privacy and, by implication, that most basic of American rights: the right of the people to be secure in their homes and in their possessions.

Let's make it simple. If Bush can spy on you, in secret, without a court order, he can, likewise arrest you in secret, imprison you without charges, and, in other ways, deny you "due process of law". He could even have you executed in secret.
(1) The President is now claiming, and is aggressively exercising, the right to use any and all war powers against American citizens even within the United States, and he insists that neither Congress nor the courts can do anything to stop him or even restrict him.

""Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Fight Begins - Strategies for Moving Forward, The Huffington Post


This is simply intolerable! This scandal, if mere scandal it is, is about nothing if not about the rule of law. It's not merely about whether the President has the right to break the law; it has become about how Bush will use the power that he now claims by fait accompli; it is about whether Bush has the power to harm and even murder U.S. citizens upon his mere decree.

It's about something greater still. Bush claims that not only does he have the power to make war on U.S. citizens in violation of Due Process of Law, he claims that he may do so even if the Congress and the courts say he may not. In fact, the Bush administration has already waged such war against an American citizen --Jose Padilla. He was deprived of Due Process of Law, detained, thrown into a military prison without charges, denied access to a lawyer. Given the scope of these state crimes against humanity, it matters little than it was all done on American soil.

This is about whether the fait accompli can be undone before America is irretrievably lost. This is about whether America is already lost.

Having the law on our side is not enough. We are surrounded on all sides by intrusive technologies, a hypnotic and irresponsible mass media, the demands of an insatiable Military/Industrial Complex and a Pentagon budget rightly called a black hole. The flower of freedom is all but crushed beneath an iron boot.
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."

""Aldous Huxley's lecture to The California Medical School in San Francisco in 1961

Hegelian philosophy is most probably central to the Skull and Bones society. In 1832, General William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft put together a super secret society for the elite children of the Anglo-American Wall Street banking establishment. William Huntington Russell's step-brother Samuel Russell ran "Russell & Co.", the world's largest opium smuggling operation in the world at the time. The link between Yale's "Secret Society" and Hegal is most certainly Samuel Russell whose cousin William Huntington Russell studied in Germany from 1831-32. He may have known Hegel personally.

In October of 1873, a New Haven magazine called The Iconoclast published its first and only issue. In it was one of very few published articles about the Order of Skull and Bones:
"We speak through a new publication. because the college press is closed to those who dare to openly mention 'Bones'....

Out of every class Skull and Bones takes its men. They have gone out into the world and have become, in many instances, leaders in society. They have obtained control of Yale. Its business is performed by them. Money paid to the college must pass into their hands, and be subject to their will. ... 'Few will give but Bones men and they care far more for their society than they do for the college....'

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Len Hart is a Houston based film/video producer specializing in shorts and full-length documentaries. He is a former major market and network correspondent; credits include CBS, ABC-TV and UPI. He maintains the progressive blog: The (more...)
 

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