Undermining their efforts...

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sara Robinson has a must-read post over at Orcinus today.

This past Tuesday, Bush signed another of his infamous below-the-radar executive orders again, without much fanfare, but with many potentially toxic effects to the remaining vestiges of freedom we have left in this country.

The order, Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq appears to deal primarily with anyone giving material support to the enemies of the U.S. installed regime in Iraq:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

Wait for it...

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

This is the clause of the order that has Robinson (as well as myself) a little concerned. Undermining efforts is a little vague, perhaps purposefully vague, and potentially encompasses a vast array of political activity, from staging a protest against the war, to something as seemingly innocent as, say, blogging about your anger at the administration's policies overseas.

For those who think such thoughts are a tad bit alarmist, Robinson quotes from Milton Mayer's study of the tunnel vision of the average German under the Nazi regime, They Thought They Were Free:

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

But perhaps this isn't the last straw, perhaps it will never be employed against the folks slandered as "traitors" by Fox News, but I firmly believe that anyone interested in preserving or furthering the interests of liberty in this country should be alarmed at Bush's penchant for silently signing away so many of our rights in the name of protecting the fatherland homeland.

Case in point, from the same Executive Order:

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.

If you're wondering what happened to due process, you're not alone. And even if such an action by the Department of Treasury is potentially subject to judicial review, once your assets have been seized, how exactly does one mount any sort of effective legal challenge?

So, while this may not exactly be a surprising move by the White House in the President's mad rush for more and more unchecked executive power, this latest move, coupled with other similarly unnerving orders, does paint a rather bleak picture.

But bleak as it may seem, I don't think it's hopeless. This country may be divided right now, with far too many Americans (including those in office) frothing at the mouth for some sort of proto-fascist curtailing of the Constitution, but at the moment it does seem to be pretty evenly divided. And it's never too late for a little resistance, Die Weisse Rose style...

Incarcerex*

Side effects may include loss of civil liberties, racial injustice and bloated prisons...



*Courtesy of the Drug Policy Alliance.

Links

Added some links. Figure I'll add some more as I go along. Any suggestions? Plugs?

To walk with third-world legs...

I was determined to share what I felt because I didn't think up the idea of Vietnam. It was a policy of the whole nation, and we all have to face the responsibility of why we keep killing people. We've got to learn why, since our origins in the 1600s and 1700s to the present day, we continue to kill so many people. What is it about us that makes us such marauders? We're good people, aren't we? We don't believe in killing people. But we keep doing it as a nation. Why? What is it about us that destroys water, trees, topsoil, air and human beings as if they don't count? Do we kill because of our obsession with profits? with consumption? I wasn't an ideological person. I didn't have any political ideology in particular. I wasn't a Marxist; I didn't even know what that meant. I was interested in life, in justice. It was inconceivable to me that we had been killing people for hundreds of years as if it were just a normal part of life. --S. Brian Willson



On July 4, 1941, in upstate New York, just a few years before the well-known Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, another man whose life bears many striking similarities to Kovic’s was born. Not the household name that the focus of Tom Cruise’s star-powered Oliver Stone biopic has become, another man has also devoted himself in the years since his experiences as a soldier to waging peace and speaking out against the forces of oppression that govern our world. A man by the name of S. Brian Willson.

Like Kovic, Willson grew up in conservative, white, working class middle America. He describes himself as a good student in his youth who played baseball, attended Baptist church every Sunday, and influenced by the anti-communist sentiments of his father, wanted to be a FBI agent when he grew up.

In 1966, Willson was drafted into the armed forces and joined the Air Force. By this time Willson had already begun to question some of the values of his fundamentalist reactionary upbringing and quickly gained a reputation as a troublemaker during his training stateside. When he was finally deployed to Vietnam, he openly spoke out against the war that he witnessed killing so many innocent civilians.

After being honorably discharged and finishing his law degree, Willson began on his journey as a self-described “recovering white male.” He went on to educate himself about history, nonviolence and the rational economic philosophy of E.F. Schumacher and gradually found himself growing more and more radical.

By the 1980s, Willson was organizing his fellow veterans for action against war and advocating mutual aid and began to organize nonviolent Veterans Peace Action Teams that traveled to Nicaragua. The Peace Action Teams marched through war zones and landmine-strewn roads against the CIA-sponsored contra forces and worked in solidarity with the locals who were victims of the contras’ brutal tactics.

But nearly two decades after his experience in the Vietnam and in the wake of the dangers he faced in Central America, Willson’s life was permanently altered in an instant in the country of his birth. Although he never directly saw combat in the military, and was lucky not to have been too far into harm’s way in Nicaragua, on September 1, 1987*, Brian Willson was to receive his own scars of battle, courtesy of the very government he wore a uniform in service of so many years before.

That summer, Willson and fellow members of the Veterans Peace Action Teams had been waging a campaign of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience against U.S. arms shipments to El Salvador, and planned to blockade a munitions train outside of the Concord Naval Weapons Station in California. They announced their intentions well in advance with the knowledge that their actions would most likely result in arrest, and Willson and two other veterans placed themselves on the train tracks in order to force the train to halt. But unbeknownst to the protestors, the train’s crew was under orders not to stop.

The train did not stop, and two of the protestors managed to scramble to safety out of the way of the passing train. Willson was not so fortunate. He lost both of legs below the knee and suffered severe head trauma, but he survived.

In the twenty years since the incident that cost Willson his legs, he has been more active than ever in the peace movement, speaking out and organizing against U.S. foreign policy, writing, and living his life with the undying tenacity of those who refuse to rest while injustice is being perpetuated around the world. In Willson’s mind he did not merely lose part of his own body on that day, he gained what he calls his “third-world legs,” that put him in direct solidarity with so many other victims of imperialism worldwide.

In 1987, I was only eleven years old but I remember very clearly learning about what happened to S. Brian Willson by chance while watching the news that night. I remember it so well because it was one of the first moments that I actually found myself questioning my country’s government.

Like many boys growing up in middle class American homes in the 80s, I was easily drawn in to the excitement of jingoist Reagan-era Cold War cultural relics like G.I. Joe, Rambo and Red Dawn. I didn’t know anything about the realities of the rest of the world outside of my own other than that the Soviets seemed to “suck” and the U.S. military “kicked ass.” But watching the news as they reported about the carnage of some guy in California’s poor legs, I wondered how anything could possibly be right about rolling a train right over the body of a nonviolent, unarmed protestor like that.

That vision was swiftly swept into the recesses of my memories, and although I never really thought about Willson after that or even learned his name until many years later, the alternative ideal that he represented stuck with me after that. The courage of men like that, willing to stand up against the brute aggression of the world’s most powerful military force, to stand up for poor people around the world who the richer nations consider to be in the way of progress, made a much deeper impression on me than the two-dimensional “heroes” of so many cornball 80s action epics.

To me the true revolutionary spirit of America, the spirit we should be seeking to preserve is best represented by this country’s rebels, people unafraid to go against the tide of public opinion, people willing to stick their neck out for anyone around who is lacking the same liberty that gets paid lip service every year on the 4th. That isn’t to suggest that we should enshrine folk heroes like Willson and Kovic as alternatives to the usual patriotic icons, but rather to perpetuate the idea that what we really need, what really serves humanity best is more of the courage, more of the selflessness that winds up looking so conspicuous among men like those and absent from the rest of us.

So I hope you will allow me the chance to try and tell more stories like that of Willson, speak from my heart and mind about what I feel is wrong, and maybe start a conversation or two. With this blog I hope to add my voice to many others who want to heal, not harm. And with that, I close with more of Willson’s words from his out of print autobiography, On Third World Legs:

Healing requires an honesty, a brutal honesty, and an atonement. It means dealing with having been complicit in marauding a whole nation. It means developing an understanding that the marauding of the earth in the end is the marauding of ourselves, the destruction of our own souls, the destruction of our essence as human beings. It's painful dealing with these issues. To take justice seriously requires major changes in the way we think and feel and experience life. It means saying of other human beings on this planet that we are all equal. "We are not worth more, and they are not worth less.”


*FYI: On September 1, 2007, the Nevada Shakespeare Company will be premiering an original work, On Track, based on the life of S. Brian Willson. The play will be performed at Dell'Arte's Carlo Theatre in Blue Lake, California and the audience will have a chance to participate in a forum with Willson and the cast after the play.