Jared Emry

Online piracy has been a subject of heated debate throughout the world for the past several years.  Governments around the world have attempted to legislate against online piracy with little success.  The most famous legislation in the United States was the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, but it failed after a widespread protest from many major corporations.  Wikipedia even went so far as to temporarily blackout the English version of their site in protest to the legislation.  The legislation is meant to be greater enforcement of the copyright law.  The government views copyright infringement as a serious crime punishable to twenty years in prison, but millions of people worldwide continue to pirate.  Even with the mass proliferation of copyrighted material, serious critiques of the law as a whole are scarce.  It is time for a critique of the copyright law.

Copyright was first instituted in 1710 in Britain in order to protect authors from having the content in their books stolen without being paid royalties, and it has since come to cover almost any form of expression or media.  Copyright law makes the most sense for reference books, like dictionaries or concordances.  The reason is these reference books often could not be produced if they would later be able to be reproduced freely.  However, copyright only makes sense for reference books, and these reference books are the only significant justification for the law.  Copyright law didn’t enter the United States of America until 1890s.  The idea of copyright is a relatively recent phenomenon.  The right over how one’s work is copied is a recently invented right and is not directly protected under the Constitution.

Sometimes it is assumed copyright is a moral issue and breaking the law is piracy, plagiarism, or theft; however, this is not the case.  When the copyright law is broken, it is not broken for a profit.  A modern definition of piracy is to infringe on copyright law, but the word piracy has a connotation of stealing and reselling something for a profit.  Online piracy does not have the same connotation, because it rarely involves reselling or profit making.  While it may still be considered piracy, it is not the same, and it seems it is only wrong if copyright is moral.  The distributers of the pirated material aren’t pirating for money, just reputation.  When people say online piracy is wrong, they meant to say it is theft.  Online piracy isn’t theft.  It isn’t theft, because it isn’t taking money from the copyright owner’s pockets.  Hypothetically, if I pirate something online, it probably means I would go without it if I couldn’t pirate it.  If someone does not want to spend money on something, they probably won’t.  Whether or not it is available for piracy they wouldn’t be getting their money, because the pirate wouldn’t see it as worth the money.  Online piracy is also used by potential buyers to see whether or not they like what it is they might buy.  Many potential buyers will illegally try the product to test its worth.  In this case, online piracy merely acts like quality check.  If the product is worth the price, it is bought.  Scenarios like this also have a secondary effect on the wallet of the person who created the pirated item, or the originator.  Many pirates are also potential buyers who wouldn’t buy the program if they couldn’t test it out.  This concept can best be seen in the recent shutdown of one of the Internet’s most popular sites, Megaupload.  After Megaupload was shutdown by the government, box office revenues declined.  In the end, piracy generated more income for the originators.  Theft normally doesn’t give profit to the victim, which by itself implies online piracy isn’t theft!  The copyright law is shown here to be harmful to the originators.  Also, online piracy isn’t plagiarism, because it rarely involves claiming that someone else’s work is one’s own.  Online plagiarism is a completely different topic, but many people mix it in when arguing for copyright laws.

Copyright law harms both parties most of the time and is often the essence of the law being divided against itself.  Firstly, it allows for unnaturally high prices of goods which in turn cause fewer consumers.  Fewer consumers mean the person’s ideas do not travel around as far or as fast.  An artificial bubble occurs that allows second-hand dealers in ideas to exist and prosper.  Economically speaking, a forced scarcity is imposed by the copyright law.  F. A. Hayek stated, “I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it.”  Quite simply, the copyright law does not provide any incentive for original work.  There often arises cases in which the original writer too often be forgotten as a footnote, especially in nonfiction.  The forced scarcity has never been shown by any study to benefit society as a whole.

There is a simple illustration between forced scarcity and real scarcity.  Imagine a typical candy store.  It has a certain and definite amount of candy in it, and once the candy is eaten, it cannot be replaced until the next shipment.  In this candy store, if one was to take a piece of candy without paying, it would be theft.  In this candy store there is real scarcity, so it costs the owner of the store to replace it, and it deprives him of what he deserves for the candy.  Now imagine another candy store almost identical to the previous one; however, now all the consumers have the ability to infinitely duplicate each piece of candy after purchase and do what they want with those duplicates.  In this second store, the only scarcity is in the human imagination.  Several customers would buy some candy, copy it, and hand out duplicates in a variety of ways.  Unfortunately, a third party called a government steps in and legislates duplication is illegal without a license from the shop owner.  The owner sees less people copying and  more of those previous copiers buying and assumes his business is doing better in this false scarcity.  However, his candy is reaching a smaller crowd of people, and thus he is actually having less customers than what he could have, and he receives less of a profit from them.  This illustration may have a few shortcomings, but it does provide an adequate view of the economics behind the false scarcity.  The false scarcity not only causes the shopkeeper to lose profit, it causes the entire society to be impoverished.  Copyright law is not about candy, though; it is about ideas.  Copyright law keeps society intellectually impoverished.  Also, wouldn’t the originator who really cares about the ideas he or she is proposing in their work want their ideas proliferated?  Even if they make less virtual money through proliferation, their ideas would reach more people.  It is only virtual money, because it is merely a theoretical sum based off flawed assumptions.

There are also great flaws in the copyright law.  In America, the copyrights prior to 1972 on music won’t expire until 2065, long after the creators and their children are dead.  That means it will take 177 years for the earliest American copyrights to expire.  Not only will the copyrights keep the music out of the public domain, it causes a greater chance much of the music will be forgotten and possibly even lost.  The 1972 copyrights were only given 95-year copyrights.  Copyright law prohibits all audio preservation as illegal.  Preservation only happens because the law is not strictly enforced and people are breaking the law.  Also, the audio preservation laws apply to more than just music, such as speeches and everything else audio-recorded.  This potentially means one might not be able to listen to a J. F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. speech, because one would need a license to listen.  In essence, the copyright law has the ability to censor almost all forms of expression.  The only thing copyright needs to control speech and thought is stricter enforcement.  The copyright pirates deserve quite a bit of thanks for helping to preserve media (whether or not it is their intention).  The piracy often allows originator’s legacies to be formed by the proliferation of their ideas and preservation of those ideas.  Which is better for the artist?  To have a little extra temporary pocket money that in itself is just virtual numbers based off flawed assumptions?  Or to have a greater chance of impacting more people, having their product last longer and be remembered longer, and possibly create a bigger legacy for themselves?

The infringement of copyright law is probably the hardest so-called “crime” governments face in the realm of enforcement.  Online piracy is by nature nearly impossible to eradicate.  The current idea behind stopping online piracy is by having the Internet service providers, like Cox or Verizon, to block pirate sites with their proxies.  SOPA was meant to legislate this concept and was rejected by major corporations because of how a strictly-enforced copyright law could be used.  Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and many other companies rejected the legislation because it would allow all their sites to be potentially blocked if any of their users posted copyrighted material without a license.  The corporations lobbied Congress to keep it from passing.  However, if new legislation exempts their companies, they will gladly accept, because it would bring them all closer to monopoly.  New legislation is reappearing even though the majority of Americans disapprove of this entire genre of legislation.  The U. N. even has a resolution meant to do the exact same thing as SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and other legislation.  Even though many governments attempt to pass this legislation, the efficacy of such legislation has never been proven.  The United Kingdom passed legislation that forced ISPs to block the notorious Pirate Bay.  However, the day after the ISPs blocked the site, Pirate Bay had a massive increase of traffic from the United Kingdom.  Approximately two million more UK users accessed the Pirate Bay by bypassing the proxies; the problem still has not been resolved.  Also, whenever a piracy site is taken down by a government, a backlash occurs.  These backlashes are typically denial of service attacks on government websites.  After Megaupload was shutdown, Anonymous launched massive attacks against many government sites and all major media corporations who badmouthed Megaupload.  Also, in response to their own shutdown, Megaupload ironically hired actors from Universal Studios to create a video defending them.  The cost of these backlashes and lawsuits must be large, which shows yet another flaw in the copyright law.  The copyright law is almost exclusively enforced for the people with the money, and the average Joe can’t afford to protect against lawsuits from large corporations.

The copyright law is inherently flawed, and enforcement always has lead to more trouble.  It also is unpopular and causes many economic problems in any developing society.  It continues to impoverish all people and reduce profits.  Regardless, copyright law is a dangerous weapon that opens up many excuses for frivolous lawsuits.

Sources

Hayek, F. A. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago, 1948, pp. 113-14.

Hayek, F. A. Fatal Conceit, 1988, p. 35.

Peukert, Christian and Jörg Claussen. Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload. 22 Oct. 2012.  Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2176246 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2176246

Jared Emry

It all started on November 7^th in Louisiana where a man named Michael E. published a petition asking for Louisiana to be given the chance to peacefully secede from the United States.  It was followed by other states.  It was followed by other states, Texas being the first to reach the twenty-five thousand signatures needed to be considered by President Obama.  There are two sides that need to be addressed regarding this occurrence.  The first is a discussion on how these various petitions will probably affect the world.  The second is a discussion on whether or not secession is an ideologically plausible form of redress to the grievances of the federal government.

There are various outcomes to what these petitions will bring.  Some of the more popular thoughts about them include a second American civil war or simply letting Texas and other states to go their own way.  Both of those are not very likely.  Firstly, a second American Civil War would be shut down before it really gained momentum.  Let’s face it; there are only a few tens of thousands of signatures, hardly enough to stand against the American military.  Also, not everyone who signed would be really willing to fight for independence if it came down to such drastic measures.  Anyways, the government has the signers’ names and could just assassinate them, because America was unfortunately determined to be a battlefield by the NDAA.  It is doubtful that another civil war would be caused by a mere petition.  Civil war is not upon America as a direct result of the petitions.  On the other hand, there is no way Obama is going to let a state go.  Ever since Abraham Lincoln made preserving the Union a rallying cry to be echoed throughout the textbooks and hearts of children, anyone threatening the Federal Governments control over the states, Obama would actually feel obligated to start a second civil war if secession actually did happen, regardless of what these petitions say.  Based on the fact Obama is not going to submit to the demands of the petition, no matter how strong, it can be safely assumed no secession will happen as a result of these petitions.  Power isn’t something easy for someone to give up; the government will not just allow a state to go.

Regardless of the near impossibility of secession, there will still be some tangible and significant result of these petitions.  Firstly, the petitions tell the government a lot of people have a strong dislike for the current Federal Government.  In essence these petitions can be viewed as a mass showing of general disapproval.  Seen this way, the petitions are a stimulant to many grassroots groups and the Occupy Movements throughout the nation.  The “hactivist” group, Anonymous, is sure to use these petitions to fuel their war on the Federal Government.  These petitions are probably going to help fuel protests around the country, including the upcoming January 21^st inauguration protest.  There is no reason to assume the petitions won’t have a large effect, but it won’t produce secession.  Slaves aren’t freed by petitioning their masters, at least not initially.  These petitions are just little steps in a growing snowball effect.  These petitions are dangerous for the Federal Government, just not immediately.  The larger consequences of these petitions will probably be in the future.  A petition like this probably will have the numbers exaggerated in the years to come.

Considering the groups that gain from the petitions, there will be a worldwide repercussion.  The leaderless collective known as Anonymous already openly declared a propaganda war against America’s Federal Government.  It would not be surprising if Anonymous uses the petition as proof for the people’s support of their collective.  They claim to support the people in everything they do.  Anonymous already has one of the world’s best pubic relation operations; additional justification is exactly what they would want to increase their numbers.  The Occupy Movement would also gain a significant boost from the petitions for two separate reasons.  The first is the petitions themselves will generate new protestors because they will not and cannot be fulfilled.  The second reason is Anonymous has allied themselves to the Occupy Movement and that alone means that the more supporters Anonymous gets, the more Occupiers there will be.  Other grassroots movements will share a similar benefit.  As the petitions are denied, there will be disillusioned people who will turn to any number of grassroots groups.  Beyond just population numbers, the Occupiers and Anonymous of the EU will also likely be fueled by the petition, because it will tell them they have continued support from some of America’s people.  The many diverse consequences of these petitions are unimaginable but very real.

Secession itself is of another character entirely.  Whether or not it will actual happen, secession is a strong action and ideologically has a great effect on the people.  Secession is simply the formal leaving a group, but it carries more weight than that.  Secession is asking for unconditional separation; in that aspect, it is a lot like a divorce.  To attempt to secede is to claim reconciliation is impossible.  The War of Northern Aggression was all the more violent because of this simple principle.  By seceding, the South claimed the North was so terrible it was worth dying to stay separated, and the South continued to prove the concept by fighting until there was very little left of them.  The North paralleled the South by not willing reconciliation after the secession.  The North looted almost everything the South had, killed most of the working class, and in turn also proved the South’s cause for secession.  In fact, when secession is mentioned nowadays, the American Civil War is almost always thought of.  History aside, secession is often considered the ultimate form of civil disobedience to a government.  Secession is telling the government it is an illegitimate institution and its laws don’t apply.  The significance of such a declaration is astounding.  In essence, the petitions are directly stating the signers’ believe themselves to be victims of an abusive relationship between them and the Federal Government.  They are ending a harmful relationship.

Secession also happens to have always been a part of America; the American Revolutionary war was also a war of secession.  However, it should be noted secession and revolution are not the same.  To secede is not necessarily to rebel.  To rebel is not necessarily to secede.  In the American Revolution, the patriots fought to create and promote a government necessarily opposed to what was their current government.  Secession is taking an already existing government or community and claiming it is equal to the governing body of a federation of governments or communities.  In essence, rebellion does not have to take place in secession because it is merely invalidating the superiority of another government.  Historically, secession is a form of redress against grievances.  If one’s friends disregard a member of a circle of friends, does not that member have a right to leave behind those friends in search of new ones?  Or maybe even to become a recluse?  A state always retains the right to leave an alliance when the alliance is not being honored.  It is for this reason secession was legal up until the War of Northern Aggression where the governing body of the alliance violently forced members to stay in the alliance.  Essentially, the governing body of the alliance violently rebelled against members of the alliance.  It could be considered a coup d’état, except that the military force was technically external instead of internal.  Secession is a reasonable form of redress in the American Tradition.

Today there are many reasons motivating a petition for secession.  The first and most important reason is human rights are being trampled on, and the government refuses to accept other petitions for redress.  That is, however, an extremely broad claim, but there are a few main specificities commonly referenced.  The first major issue deserving redress is the national debt and deficit.  The national debt reduces the people to the state of slavery; the deficit constantly makes it worse by spending more than we have.  The American Dollar is backed by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  In other words, it is based on the income of the citizens.  Essentially, the American people are the collateral behind the money.  The citizen loses the rights of life, liberty, and property to the owner of the dollar.  The second great trampling comes from the Obamacare law.  The people and the states rejected the law with numerous law suits and protests.  Every single petition by the states was denied by the Federal Government.  This is essential, because it clearly shows the governing body does not care about the members of the alliance.  The states were denied their right and duty to redress the federal government as they were meant to be able to do by the Constitution.  Essentially, the contract between the states and the Federal Government was shown to have been broken.  The states are left trying to uphold only the ghost of the Constitution, while the Federal Government exercises power beyond the binding mandates.  The third top issue is probably the NDAA itself.  This law gave the Federal Government the right of life and death over every single citizen in America.  The Federal Government had decided to finally revoke the right of life.  The NDAA also included the suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus, essentially imposing a weaker form of martial law.  The president has signed a bill giving the Federal Government the right to indefinitely detain anyone for any reason without a charge, lawyer, or a trial.  Just the fact the NDAA got that far is a shocking sign of how tyrannical the Federal Government has become.  The fourth major issue is over the right to property.  This is found in a private company known as the IRS.  The income tax is nothing short of theft.  There is no law mandating the paying of the income tax.  About forty percent of the tax goes into the hands of private bankers at the Federal Reserve.  This is a clear violation of the right to property.  In addition to these main four points are additional grievances too numerous to count.

The petitions to secede from the Federal government may indeed be futile, but they are made of the same essence that made this country.  Maybe it won’t be this batch of petitions, but each ignored petition stacks heavily against the oppressor.  Each small step affects the country and the world as a whole.  It would be ignorant to just write off these petitions as unimportant.  As for secession itself, it is just over the horizon.  Either the Federal Government will allow for reconciliation, or it will find itself without the members that compose it.

Jared Emry

Many historians of today make the absurd claim the Civil War was about the institution of slavery.  However, they are wrong.  The true reasons behind the illegal war concerned fiscal policies and the very concepts of the original American Revolution.  The issue of slavery was only to cover for the illegal and immoral economic reasons that were really the center of the war.  The war was a war for Freedom and the preservation of the rights of Nations and People.

Firstly, the South may have fired the first shot, but they did not start the war.  After the succession, each State had reaffirmed their positions as free nations(note they had not ceased to be sovereign States prior to the Civil War).  Upon throwing off the tyrannical General Government, the Southern States formed a New Union (which was called the Confederacy) under the original principles of the Revolution.  Upon the succession, the Union troops in the South’s territory were stationed illegally on another State’s soil.  When Lincoln refused to withdraw his troops from Southern land, he committed an act of war.  The South responded with a show of force by firing on Fort Sumter.  It would be no different if France told the European Union France was succeeding from the Union and all EU troops and officials must get off French territory.  If the EU refused to get out, France would have the right to use lethal force to remove the EU.  The South’s secession was entirely legal in the same way.  The General Government (and Lincoln) were committing an illegal act in attempting to force the Southern Nations to stay in the Union through force.  Secession was a right ensured to the states by the Constitution and reaffirmed by the Kentucky Resolve of 1798.  The Kentucky Resolve was penned by Thomas Jefferson and goes as follows:

Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government; but by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each state to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self Government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: That to this compact each state acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming as to itself, the other party:  That the government created by the compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that as in all cases of compact among parties having no common Judge, each party has an right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

As can be seen by the Kentucky Resolve, the General Government was a union, or alliance, of Sovereign Nations designed to give the several Republics more leverage in international diplomacy and to settle disputes between the Nations in peaceful manners.  Each State of the Union had the right to decide for itself whether or not the General Government had infringed upon the delegated powers.  Prior to the Civil War, each State had the ability to nullify anything the General Government did if the State decided the General Government had overstepped their bounds.

The Southern secession was entirely legal, but was the war about slavery?  No.  The war had nothing to do with slavery and was not caused even by fears surrounding slavery.  The majority of the North hated blacks and the only reason why they would care about getting rid of slavery would be to deport them and create an all-white nation.  Indiana, Illinois, and Oregon even amended their State’s constitutions to make it illegal for blacks to immigrate to those States.  General Ulysses S. Grant even stated, “If the war was about slavery, I would have joined the South.”  That statement is probably the most ironic quotation from the war.  If the war really was about slavery, like how it is often thought to be, then the only general in the Union who wasn’t afraid of General Lee would have joined the South, and the war would probably have been won by the South.  Likewise, since the war wasn’t about slavery, the South lost.  Also, Charles Dickens, an extremely famous author and a supporter of abolition said,

I take the facts of the American slave quarrel to stand thus.  Slavery has in reality nothing to do with it….  Every reasonable person may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and that it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the war; it hated the abolitionists and derided them uphill and down dale.

The cause of the war obviously could not be based on slavery, because the war itself was entirely unnecessary if it was merely over freeing the slaves.  Only six percent of free Southerners even owned slaves.  And not all slave owners were Caucasian; there were some very wealthy African Americans who owned hundreds of slaves themselves.  That shows slavery had more to do with economics than race.  If the war really was entirely about white supremacy, then such wealthy African Americans would not be allowed to reach such a high social standing.  Would the remaining ninety-four percent of the free population fight and die for something that had no personal economical value to them?  The slaves could have been freed peacefully, yet Lincoln and his fellow party members decided to wage a war instead.  But maybe the war wasn’t about slavery and thus comes the need for the war.

The South could, consistently with honor, and probably would, long before this time, and without a conflict, have surrendered their slavery to the demand of the constitution (if that had been pressed upon them), and to the moral senti­ment of the world; while they could not with honor, or at least certainly would not, surrender anything to a confessedly unconstitutional demand, especially when coining from mere demagogues, who were so openly unprincipled as to profess the greatest moral abhorrence of slavery, and at time same time, for the sake of office, swear to support it., by swearing to support a constitution which they declared to be its bulwark….  You, and others like you have done more, according to your abilities, to prevent the peaceful abolition of slavery, than any other men in the nation; for while honest men were explaining the true character of the constitution, as an instrument giving freedom to all, you were continually denying it, and doing your utmost (and far more than any avowed pro slavery man could do) to defeat their efforts.  And it now appears that all this was done by you in violation of your own conviction of truth.

The truth remains it was the North who were guilty of prolonging slavery for personal gain.  Lincoln and his fellow party members were guilty of supporting slavery more than the slaveholders.  Lincoln used slavery as nothing more than as a scapegoat for his actions.  Since California had joined the Union, an imbalance had appeared in the Congress between the Southern States and the Northern States.  This imbalance was in favor of the North’s politics and directly resulted in the Morrill Tariff.  Tariffs are always economically destroying to agricultural societies.  The Morrill Tariff caused the South to pay eighty percent of the Union’s taxes and forced it to buy primarily from Northern industry.  The resulting effect on the South was a more limited market for selling their products and the available markets would be almost unprofitable to the Southerners.  The high price for selling resulted in destroying any incentive for freeing slaves because paying wages would mean no profit from any of the South’s agriculture.  The Northern States took advantage of their Congressional monopoly and spent most of the money from the tariffs on the South to their exclusive advantage.  The South realized they were being taxed without proper representation, so they legally withdrew from the Union.  When the source of the North’s spending money had stopped paying, the North could no longer maintain its spending and went into debt.  The North initiated the War of Northern Aggression.

The only reason slavery ever became an issue was Abraham Lincoln needed to use it for foreign propaganda to keep Great Britain out of the war.  Abraham Lincoln was like many of his Northern brethren by being a white supremacist.  The philosopher behind the American abolitionist movement, Lysander Spooner, said to Senator Charles Sumner in 1864,

Upon yourself, and others like you, professed friends of freedom, who, instead of promulgating what you believed to be the truth, have, for selfish purposes, denied it, and thus conceded to the slaveholders the benefit of an argument to which they had no claim, — upon your heads, more even, if possible, than upon the slaveholders themselves, (who have acted only in accordance with their associations, interests, and avowed principles as slaveholders) rests the blood of this horrible, unnecessary, and therefore guilty, war.

Note Mr. Spooner blames the war on Northern heads and says the war was one hundred percent uncalled for.  Regardless, there was not sufficient support in the North for a war on slavery.  The war wasn’t over slavery, and thus the moral support the North had for the war also falls to Hell.  Disregarding what Lincoln falsely postulated, the North had no legal basis for the war.  The war also lacked a moral support because it had nothing to do with freeing anyone.

Still some might say regardless of these arguments Lincoln still preserved the Union and that justifies the war.  As if preserving the Union was actually a moral!  The cause for preserving the Union is entirely legal, having absolutely nothing to do with morality.  Beyond that, he actually did the exact opposite of saving the Union, at least if one refers to the original Union designed by the Founding Fathers.  In his war, Lincoln tore up and disregarded the Constitution that binds the government under the governed.  Lincoln also changed the very foundations of the Republic in another very fundamental way.  Lincoln caused the voluntary Union of the several States to no longer be voluntary.  At this point, the country became a militaristic despotism forcing States to become slaves to an abusive relationship with the General Government.  By declaring war on the secessionist states, Lincoln showed the world the Union was no longer voluntary, but the States would be forced at gunpoint to stay in the Union regardless of the infractions against the Great Compact the General Government could, did, and would inflict.  It is no different than if one’s employer forced one to follow his or her work contract at gunpoint regardless of whether or not the employer was breaking his side of the contract.  Lysander Spooner stated,

Abraham Lincoln did not cause the death of so many people from a mere love of slaughter, but only to bring about a state of consent that could not otherwise be secured for the government he had undertaken to administer.  When a government has once reduced its people to a state of consent (that is, of submission to its will) it can put them to a much better use than to kill them; for it can then plunder them, enslave them, and use them as tools for plundering and enslaving others.  And these are the uses to which most governments, our own among the rest, do put their people, whenever they have once reduced them to a state of consent to its will….  The idea that, although government should rest on the consent of the governed, yet so much force may nevertheless be employed as may be necessary to produce that consent, embodies everything that was ever exhibited in the shape of usurpation and tyranny in any country on earth.  It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty.  It can have no place except as a part of a system of absolute military despotism.  And it means nothing else either in this country, or in any other.  There is no half-way house between a government depending wholly on voluntary support, and one depending wholly on military compulsion….  Such is the state of things now in this country, and in every other in which government does not depend wholly upon voluntary support.  There never was and there never will be, a more gross, self-evident, and inexcusable violation of the principle that government should rest on the consent of the governed, than was the late war, as carried on by the North.  There never was, and there never will be, a more palpable case of purely military despotism than is the government we now have.

And there is the true cause of the American Civil War.  It has the same cause as almost every other war in the history of mankind.  The origin of the Civil War was lust for power.  Lincoln wanted to seize absolute power.  This can be clearly seen as the only and most obvious cause of the war.  The only excuses ever given by the Lincolnite cultists are merely lame excuses based off of a small group of Lincoln’s speeches that ignore Lincoln’s behaviors before and during the war.  Lincoln was not the herald of liberty so often claimed by mainstream historians; he was a tyrant on par with Hitler and Stalin, because he had no qualms on waging total war on the people who he claimed were “his own citizens.”  Also, the Constitution blatantly called such a war an act of treason under Article 3, Section 3, if Lincoln were right about his idea of preserving the Union.  He fought a war on the sole purpose of forcing government and enslaving the population.

…And the government, so called, becomes their tool, their servile, slavish, villainous tool, to extort it from the labor of the enslaved people both of the North and the South.  It is to be extorted by every form of direct, and indirect, and unequal taxation.  Not only the nominal debt and interest — enormous as the latter was — are to be paid in full; but these holders of the debt are to be paid still further — and perhaps doubly, triply, or quadruply paid….  In short, the industrial and commercial slavery of the great body of the people, North and South, black and white, is the price….

If viewed this way, the slaves never were freed.  The entire population of America was enslaved to the holders of the debt.  The South was pillaged, raped, and plundered.  Human Rights were trampled on, and crimes against humanity committed.  The South still has not recovered from the war and is a dying nation.  General Sherman killed one out of every four male civilians of working age and permanently maimed another half, leaving a mere twenty-five percent remnant.  Beyond that, the soldiers destroyed everything and looted the valuables.  Sherman’s men went so far as to dig up graves for valuables.  The already war-weakened regions were economically destroyed and remain in poverty.  The Union fought to fill its banks even at the costs of hundreds of thousands of lives and centuries of poverty for millions.

The origins of the American Civil war are obvious and largely ignored.  Firstly, the United States Federal Government had become tyrannical.  Lincoln was a power hungry tyrant bent on enslaving all the people of America in a militaristic despotism that continues to exist to this day.  Secondly, the war was fought over the principles of the original Revolution and those principles were forever lost in a sick twist of fate.  The fundamentals of the Union were forsaken, the Constitution’s authority lost forever, and the Republic descended into an empire.  The emancipation of the slaves came at the price of enslaving entire nations and a million deaths.  The once free peoples of America became property to be profited from.  The moral reason behind the preservation of the Union as a reason for war is unreal, because the preservation of the Union is not a moral.  It is instead a legal argument warped by ignorance.  The legal reason behind the preservation of the Union is also lacking on a dilemma: either the secession was legal, which would mean the Union had no legal right to wage a war against the South, or it was illegal which means the North waging the war would have been high treason against the Constitution.  And finally, the war was never about the peculiar institution of slavery, and thus had no moral basis either.  The North could have had the entire population of slaves freed in an entirely peaceful manner, but chose not to.  The North was to be blamed for war and the blood of the millions who died in the war is on their hands.  The war was started by the North out of the sickest and most perverted form of greed.

References

The Constitution of the United States of America.

Dickens, Charles. “Letter to W.F. De Cerjat.” 1 Oct. 1850. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. 183-84.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Section One of the Kentucky Resolve of 1798.” The Kentucky Resolve of 1798. 10 Nov. 1798.

Spooner, Lysander. “Letter to Senator Charles Sumner.” 1864.

—. “No Consent.” December 1873.

—. “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.” 1870.

Jared Emry

After World War II, the USA initiated Project Paperclip in order to keep Nazi scientists out of Soviet hands, so that America could maintain a technological advantage.  Project Paperclip is known for bringing over about six hundred rocket scientists to America, but what is not as well known is that several hundred scientists that worked in the Nazis’ mind control program were also brought over.  These mind control scientists were recruited by the CIA for a top-secret program called MK-Ultra in the early 1950s.

The semi-synthetic drug LSD had been invented in 1938, and it would later attract the attention of several major superpowers for its strange properties.  In the early 1950s, the CIA came to believe the Soviet Union was developing a truth serum.  In response to the perceived threat, the CIA decided to hire scientists to search for and experiment with psycho-active drugs.  Originally the program only experimented on people with their consent.  The CIA finally had MK-Ultra officially established in 1953 and started broadening its scope of research.  MK-Ultra grew and had operations in about 80 universities that served as fronts for the project.  Unfortunately, the CIA decided they didn’t have enough test subjects and began to experiment on American and Canadian citizens without their consent.

Shortly after its official sanctioning and establishment in 1953, MK-Ultra began to pick subjects for unwilling experimentation.  The project began to choose citizens in situations where they could be drugged, tortured, observed, and would be unwilling to tell the tale.  The project would even hire prostitutes to drug their clients who would be embarrassed by their actions.  The victims would often illegally go through several kinds of tortures.  These tortures could be physical, verbal, sexual, or emotional.  The tortures were severe enough to cause permanent damage to the victim’s psyche.  The person was damaged in an attempt to see if it was possible for someone to become like a Manchurian Candidate.  These weren’t terrorists or traitors.  These were ordinary people who were often just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The project took a darker turn when a Canadian psychologist named Donald Ewen Cameron was hired to practice concepts like “psychic driving.”  In psychic driving, first he would talk with the patients and find out their fears and what they felt guilty over.  Later, he would lock his victims in isolation, often on a psychoactive drug and have the worst parts of the confession replayed to them extremely loudly.  These experiments of his were the basis for the invention of the two-stage torture.  Dr. Cameron often would take his patients, some of whom suffered from nothing more than a mild depression, label them as schizophrenic, and then hospitalize them so he could perform his government sanctioned experiments.  Dr. Cameron would take normal shock therapy and increase the shock by up to fifty percent.  The doctor would also occasionally put his patients into drug-induced comas.  Some of his victims forgot everything, including how to eat or speak.  Dr. Cameron was paid to develop methods designed to destroy a person’s mind, and he was very good at it.

The entire project was about six percent of the CIA’s budget but remained a secret until 1975, when Congress informed the people of the project after the Church Committee’s investigation.  MK-Ultra was not the only illegal experimentation the United States Federal Government has committed against its own citizens.  It is also known the U.S. Army during the MK-Ultra time period experimented with biological weapons on the citizens of Savannah, Georgia and caused serious medical conditions across the city, including stillbirths, encephalitis, respiratory problems, and typhoid.  The U.S. Government has a record of illegal experimentation on its own citizens.

MK-Ultra has often been cited in many conspiracy theories since it is such an obvious show of government powers being abused.  Many conspiracy theorists of today believe the government has continued illegal mind control experiments under another name.  One of these supposed projects is thought to be called Project Monarch, but the only support for its existence is the word of a psychic.  That fact rightly causes Project Monarch’s existence to be doubted.  But is it really unimaginable the government is conducting some nightmarish experiment now?  It is very possible.  In this day and age, with new technologies and with information being carried around the world in a faster and easily accessible way, many postulate that such a project’s existence would be found on the ’nets.  It would only be found if people happened to be looking for it.  About 91,000 terabytes of information exist on the Internet, but Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines only retrieve the same 167 terabytes of the Internet.  The remaining leftover information is called the Deep Web.  Most people will only check the first ten or twenty results on the search engine of their choice.  However, despite that, a new mind control conspiracy theory arose from the primordial depths of the Deep Web.  The conspiracy theory dragged up something that might have been a long-forgotten operation of MK-Ultra.

The new theory stems from an experiment from the same time period, but instead of illegal experimentation of drugs on people, this other line of research dealt with electromagnetic low frequency (E.L.F.) microwave radiation.  The concept first reached public attention on March 21, 1979, in the Los Angeles Times article entitled “Man Hallucinates, Says Microwaves Are Murdering Him.”  The story was about a man named Kille who previously had brain surgery (without his consent) that involved him getting 20 electrodes implanted in his head for experimentation, and later was known to wear an aluminum foil hat to try to stop the signal reaching the electrodes and shocking him.  The psychologists who said he was hallucinating had not been told about the electrodes in his head.  The story had been brought back up when people started to report they were being gang stalked with the addition of several types of technological harassment including the use of E.L.F. microwave to torture them from a distance.  The FBI has stated they have begun a search for these gang stalkers but still haven’t made any progress in the investigation.  The E.L.F. is supposedly used on the targeted individuals from a distance and can supposedly torture them by causing involuntary movement, electroshock, and just plain old pain.  Although these claims are disputed, it should be noted that E.L.F. microwaves have been studied and have been shown able to drastically change people’s moods.  Depending on the frequency, the person under the influence of the E.L.F. can be made to hallucinate and show signs of a major psychotic breakdown, simply feel depressed, or act like someone with a mania.  The E.L.F.s have also been shown able to have an effect on weather if it is broadcasted into the sky.  One targeted family used common scientific instruments to search for the microwave radiation and found it came from their neighbors’ house.  In an attempt to block the radiation, they put sheets of aluminum between the two houses and found an immediate improvement to both their mental and physical health.

The FBI’s inability to track down the supposed gang stalkers has sparked some more controversy.  Some people have begun to think maybe the FBI isn’t really investigating the source of these reports and is actually just covering up for another MK-Ultra-type project.  There is always the possibility that might be the case.  MK-Ultra sets up a perfect example of how the government has done similar things in the past.  Also, to support the idea of a modern-day government conspiracy to control people’s minds is the fact there is never any trail left behind by the gang stalking.  One instance of gang stalking reported and investigated by Federal agents involved a break-in at the targeted individual’s house.  Inside the house, the dishwasher had been reduced to its core pieces, the safe was drilled into and opened, all the clothes were out of the drawers, and the doorknobs were taken apart.  Several witnesses claimed it could not have been a hoax because the house was untouched just before the victim left to go to the grocery store.  No one saw anyone enter or exit the house.  Even with all of that, there were no fingerprints, nothing was stolen, and law enforcement officers remained baffled.  Another family daily experienced threatening calls on their phones that would tell the victims what every single member of the family was doing at the moment, even after they moved and changed all their phone numbers.  Again, the gang stalkers still haven’t been found.  Maybe that is because the government does not want them to be found.  The family histories of targeted individuals have been studied, and in many cases their families have all had grandfathers who were openly against programs like the Manhattan Project.  Although the correlation does not necessarily indicate a similar cause for the targeting, it should be noted coincidences tend to be just pieces of a bigger picture left behind because they either conflict with one’s beliefs or because one is simply too lazy to try to look at the bigger picture.  Pawns in the game are not victims of chance.  The evidence in these cases lacks a trail, but that in itself just points back to the Federal Government.  Prior to the hearings that exposed MK-Ultra to the Congress, the director of the CIA ordered the destruction of all MK-Ultra documents in an attempt to destroy the trail.  Even though he failed, almost 90% of the MK-Ultra data was destroyed.  The CIA had made the mistake of holding on to most of the paper trail until the last minute … would they make the same mistake twice?  Probably not.  The almost perfect lack of evidence seems to point to experience and power.

Overall, it is known the United States Federal Government does have a criminal record when it comes to human experimentation.  It is always a good idea to be cautious and pray you won’t be added to the list of victims.  And if MK-Ultra could stay a secret for so long and after being declassified still is widely unknown….  The atrocities of another nation are an outrage, but the atrocities of “our” side often go unheard of and are dismissed by many who hear of them.  The history surrounding MK-Ultra should cause one to pause and consider that maybe your government is not as benevolent as it seems.  Although the theories are not “proven,” maybe it would be best to be on the safe side and make oneself a nice sturdy aluminum foil hat, because tin foil doesn’t work.