INTRODUCTION

It is your moral choice. It is on you weather I be granted to live as a dignified human being dedicated to the cause of peace and brotherhood, or else to die as a hunted slave or in jail. ~ Jeff Knaebel, letter to the National Human Rights Commission, 6 DEC, 2009

19 JUN, 2009. In the evening, I destroyed my passport and renounced U.S. Citizenship in an action of Satyagraha at New Delhi, India. This action of sedition and rebellion comprised a public statement of civil disobedience against lawless and corrupt governments. My Declaration of Renunciation and Severance was posted on LewRockwell.com on 29 JUNE, 2009.

By this action — sited at the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat, out of reverence and respect for the Mahatma’s inspiration — I courted arrest and imprisonment in India. My calculation was to demonstrate to the world the truth of Mahatma Gandhi’s statement: "The State is a soulless machine that can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence."

The State’s Divorce from Ethics and Conscience

Also sought was to point out by direct physical action the ethical linkages that State propaganda attempts ceaselessly to obscure from our perception. The first link was clearly stated by Mahatma Gandhi in 1930. Speaking in Madras, he said, "The highest moral law is, we should work unremittingly for the good of mankind." The manner of his living demonstrated what he meant by the good.

The second link is the foundation precept of all the great wisdom teachings: that our first duty is to do no harm — to do unto others as we would be done by.

The third link is the obviousness of the fact that we cannot follow these precepts of eternal wisdom so long as we vote for and pay taxes to a government which engages in criminal activities against mankind as does the United States.

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it." ~ Frdric Bastiat, The Law

[and the intrinsic compulsions of the Corporate State predict that it can do no other than plunder]

The State tries to convince us that it is exempt from the Laws of God and Nature — in other words, to the effect that IT is the God which we must obey, and not the God which speaks to us through our personal conscience. In this attempted divorce of man from conscience lies proof that the State is a non-human machine-entity, and thus truly beyond the influence of the human conscience.

Thus, we who vote and pay taxes are in fact mere slaves to the mindless, soulless, conscienceless machine whose genetic compulsion is to control and to exploit. It is our mind that is enslaved, to wit:

"The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." ~Stephen Biko, South African Freedom Fighter, & Derrick Jensen, End Game.

Humane India May Yet Stumble

As it happened, my calculation of arrest did not work out as planned. The deeply humane character of the Indian ethos generated an unexpected outcome. After reading my Declaration and interviewing me at the Delhi police station, the Supervising Officer, (S.O.), refused arrest. He told me, "Jail is for criminals, and you are not a criminal. You are free to go anywhere in India." I took the Delhi police at their word, and went about my work. The Rajkot police later adopted the same position as Delhi. Now, however, after more than 210 days of website and media documented Stateless Freedom, I am faced with a direct threat of imprisonment by local authorities. Upon their demand for a specific avenue of legal procedure or else be immediately imprisoned, I have, by their instruction, written to the National Human Rights Commission to request intervention so that I may be permitted Indian domicile as a Stateless person.

My hand-written to the NHRC — with minor editing for hopefully publishable quality and to delete individual names for privacy — has been transcribed below. It describes my continuing Satyagraha since 19 JUNE, 2009 and presents my current position vis–vis the authorities. This letter, of 6 December, 2009, has been followed by 7 others in which the Argument from Morality is presented to the NHRC.

To:The Honorable Chairperson, National Human Rights Commission
From:Jeff Knaebel, Stateless Person
Date:6 December 2009
Subject:Request for Grant of India Residency

Table of Contents

Introduction

My Vows

My Vows Versus Political Reality

Situations, Facts, and Request

The Gandhi Swaraj Padyatra

Subsequent to Sarahan Conference

My Request

No Safety in Any Other Country

Historical Background

Deciding Moment

Dhamma Seva

INTRODUCTION

I am an apostle of Mahatma Gandhi and a stateless person in my 71st year of life. My life purpose is to work for peace on earth and to help save humanity from self-destruction.

In the manner of a Shanti Sainik, (peace volunteer), as conceived and demonstrated by Mahatma Gandhi, I have pledged to strive for peace and be prepared to lay down my life in the attempt.

I have lived in India continuously since 1995. I have never been affiliated with any organization except Vipassana Meditation as taught by Acharya Ven. S.N. Goenka of Igatpuri.

This letter is being handwritten by candle light in a room where temperature is about 5 deg. C. As called for by Mahatma Gandhi, I have renounced both my home and the former amenities of technology in favor of a simple chop wood—carry water lifestyle.

The writing is in haste due to the deadline imposed by local authorities. It is based upon unaided memory because none of my archives are with me. I apologize for the lack of professionalism — this is the best I can do under the circumstances, with cold and numb fingers.

As Mahatma Gandhi is the Father of your nation, so he is the Father of my inspiration to come to India to learn and to carry on his work within my own capacity. I carry his teachings in my heart. I live to carry the essential message of love through my words and deeds.

Everything I have done or will do in India is inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Buddha. Only by the Light of these two great Indians and their Followers like Vinoba Bhave can humanity be saved from self-destruction.

War — especially aggressive acquisitive war as engaged by the United States — is a total failure of the human spirit. To kill another is suicide, for the other and me are One.

We can have no friend so long as we count a single man as enemy. Love is now more than a Virtue — it is a Necessity. Without love, we all perish. We must love our Earth and all her creatures as we would love ourselves.

MY VOWS

I have vowed to strive for Satyagraha, (strong adherence to truth), and Ahimsa, (non-violence), in the sense of the Buddhist Precepts which operate on three levels.

• To abstain from violence.
• To not condone violence.
• To not support violence.

In the Christian sense this is expressed as “Do unto others as you would be done by.” All the rest is commentary.

Mahatma Gandhi taught that thought, word and deed must be congruent, for otherwise one’s life becomes a lie. He taught that we must ourselves do, and not rely upon the other fellow to act.

On this basis, my Secondary Sacred Vow is never again to ride in a motor vehicle. This is what one man can do to help save the Earth from the destruction of a petroleum-based economy. Gandhiji said that we should walk to our work on our own legs.

So far, in keeping this Vow I have walked 1,389 km in the past 111 days, crossing India from Jaipur to Sarahan and beyond. A significant portion of this walk has been on Himalaya Footpaths with back packs and tent camps.

My Vows Versus Political Reality

Ahimsa in its true sense requires not only personal abstention from violence — it also requires the Satyagrahi not to condone violence and not to support violence.

After years of research, study, practice, and writing, I concluded that the only way to be an apostle of Ahimsa at any level approaching the benchmark set by Mahatma Gandhi was to renounce my U.S. Citizenship. This act was one I could do with my own hands, as taught by the Mahatma.

By this severance of all relations with the government of this rogue nation which is the most destructive terrorist in human history did I gain the personal freedom which is pre-requisite to the clear conscience required for inner peace. No longer am I an accomplice, guilty by association and acquiescence.

To the extent that I retain any connection with the U.S. economy of tax-financed endless war, I abdicate my own moral conscience. I become an accomplice to mass murder and heinous crimes against humanity — a material accomplice to obscene and mindless wastage of life, human and other.

By renouncing my citizenship I have made a public statement that the American war machine does not act in my name, nor with my tax payments, because I am no longer an American.

Situation, Facts, Request

On the evening of 19 June 2009, by my Satyagraha conducted at the Samadhi, (monument), of Mahatma Gandhi, Rajghat, New Delhi, I renounced physically and directly my U.S. Citizenship. Passport, birth certificate and all identification documents were destroyed.

I chose this monument — and acted with great respect in my heart — because it is a symbol that all mankind can recognize: of nonviolent resistance to immoral, corrupt, and violent governments.

I read out to the assembled public and security guards my Declaration of Renunciation and Severance which is attached hereto. Its Accompanying Statement of Philosophy and Precepts is also attached.

I then took up a sitting position of Satyagraha next to the Samadhi until nightfall and closing time, when the police removed me from Rajghat and escorted me to the Darya Ganj Thana, (police station).

These actions were partially filmed by a local Delhi TV station, and thoroughly video-documented by international journalists. These videos have been shown worldwide on U Tube, and are carried on a number of international websites. By telephone to me and others on 20 June, the U.S. Embassy indicated contemporaneous knowledge of events.

Pursuant to advice from private attorneys, government officials, and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, I had expectations of arrest and imprisonment. I had prepared by donating all of my assets, down to only the set of clothes I was wearing. Several of my references attached hereto can bear witness.

I had courted arrest in order to bring world attention to the insane, depraved and human species suicidal crimes of the United States government.

However, after reading my Declaration and interviewing me, the Superintending Officer of Darya Ganj Thana refused to arrest. He said, “Jail is for criminals, and you are not a criminal.” The S.O. further stated that I was free to move anywhere in India. When I protested about the difficulty of travel without I.D. papers, he said, “Don’t worry. Bharat Mata, (Mother India), will take care of you. If you encounter any trouble, dial 100 and we will help you. Now go back to your hotel.”

On 20 June 2009, I returned to the Thana along with a journalist. Again I protested that it was their duty to arrest. The inspector on duty reiterated the S.O. position and repeated that I was free to move about anywhere in India. These statements were video-recorded by the accompanying journalist and have been uploaded on U Tube.

The actions of 19 June 2009 and the video within the Thana of 20 June 2009 are attached herewith as DVD entitled “Jeff Knaebel in New Delhi 19 and 20 June 2009 — Raw Footage.” International Journalists continue to maintain contact and monitor my situation.

I took the police authorities at their word, and accepted the invitation of engineer-industrialist Sri V.K. Desai to stay at his home in Rajkot. There I responded to invitations to give public speeches as well as press interviews, some of which are attached hereto. The letter of congratulation from Sri V.K. Desai to the S.O. Darya Ganj is attached, as well as my own later letter to the S.O.

By word and deed, the police had made it very clear that an apostle of Mahatma Gandhi is free to live in India, that my actions were not an offense, that I was not a security risk, and that far from being a threat, I was here to carry on the sacred work of Mahatma Gandhi within my own limited capacity. Therefore my arrest would have been an insult to the Father of the Nation. See the DVD.

My Indian Friends have said that arrest would prove absurd as viewed through the eyes of humanitarian India. The Rajkot police have subsequently confirmed this position by telephone inquiry to Sri V.K. Desai about me, upon which they said, “No problem, just keep us advised of his activities.”

However, make no mistake — I am prepared to be arrested at any time, as will be shown in what follows.

Living and moving among the devout Gandhians of Rajkot, I became more and more inspired to give back to Bharat Mata whatever I could to express my gratitude and love.

I have long believed that the future of the human race rests with Village India. If Hind Swaraj cannot be made a reality in India, and Universal Swaraj a world reality, I believe we face extinction through planetary destruction. For non-Indian readers, Swaraj translates to self-governing village republics features consensus decision-making by all adults of the village, male and female.

As Sri R.S. Negi told me after the Sarahan Conference (Proclamation attached), “If we cannot elevate our consciousness and stop the ecological and cultural destruction, we are doomed.”

The Gandhi Swaraj Padyatra, (Padyatra means journey on foot)

Seeing that 2009 is the centenary anniversary of Hind Swaraj, (Gandhiji’s revolutionary book of 1909), being celebrated throughout India, my friends and I conceived the Gandhi Swaraj Padyatra as a means through which I could give of myself and my experience something useful to the villagers.

The statement of Darya Ganj S.O. that “Bharat Mata will take care of you” turned out to be prophetic. The respect, support, generosity, hospitality and compassion that poured forth during our village walk across India was simply overwhelming.

The Padyatra covered 1,108 km from Jaipur to Sarahan, where an International Conference on World Village Swaraj was held. Its Proclamation and partial proceedings are attached.

We were directly supported and hosted by more than 600 people. Our team spoke to an estimated 20,000 people, ranging from groups of Village Elders to assemblies of more than 3,000 University Students. We gave more than 150 public addresses as well as a number of press conferences. We were filmed for local TV.

Our hosts included householders, Sarpanch, (presiding officer of village council), VIP industrialists, ex-Ministers and MLAs, retired military officers and University Chancellors, as well as Khadi Ashrams, (Gandhian cottage industry campus), and schools.

There was not one instance of violence. Expressions of gratitude and outpourings of goodwill were almost universal. Occasionally there were long queues of students seeking autographs on the copies of Hind Swarj which we distributed.

Our Core Message was to revere and respect the culture and values of India as expounded by Mahatma Gandhi, and to turn away from the wanton waste and destructiveness of the Western Corporate State model.

We expressed the view that India must become the Light of the World if our planet’s life support is to be saved from total destruction. The India dreamt by Mahatma Gandhi is the last best chance to save humanity from self-annihilation.

We urged students to turn off the TV, and imbibe the great teachings of Dhyan, (meditation), and Yog, (unity), by which India has taught mankind for millennial the techniques of mental discipline and self-restraint. We recommended the Anuvrat Movement of the Jains, (see Wikipedia). We pointed out that survival of the human species depends upon elevating our level of consciousness toward the great values of the Buddha, the Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, and the great Saints of India.

Jeff described from his experience as a US Navy officer, government planner, and business executive how the institutional corporate structure of Western civilization is a non-human machine that has no conscience, cannot feel pain, cannot pray or meditate, cannot feel empathy, and cannot love. The corporation exists and is legally chartered only to make money profit. This generates its compulsion to exploit both nature and people.

An abstract mortal legal construct, the corporation has neither soul nor body, so it does as it pleases. You can neither reason nor negotiate with it because it is a non-human machine, incapable of human empathy. Most, of not all, governments of the world are now effectively corporate entities. Political elections amount only to changing the driver of a pre-destination train. Against the corporate state, a person’s right to life does not count.

I describe how a young man, once initiated into the life of a corporate employee, is compelled to surrender his moral conscience to the corporate interest in furtherance of his own self-interest and professional advancement. He becomes a member of the company tribe. Job security and company loyalty trump personal conscience.

I asked young people, who are the future of humanity, "What is civilization? Is it space satellites? Is it the nuclear bomb? What is the mythical ethos of Western civilization? Was it encapsulated at Hiroshima? Is it currently promulgated by the horrible birth defects factored into the human genome by depleted uranium?"

I quoted a child survivor of Hiroshima, now a Buddhist monk in saying, "Civilization is not electricity. It is not the atomic bomb. Civilization is not killing people."

I asked if peace could ever be realized through a system of massively centralized institutions of the Money Power — non-human institutions whose framework is designed to support endlessly escalating structural violence. How can peace arise through geo-political institutions that are organized for war — war on each other, war on nature, war on the poor who must watch helplessly the land and water base of their lives being destroyed by the corporate machine of mindless greed as it smashes down mountains, shreds forests, and poisons air and water, chewing through Village India like a cloud of locusts? How are 500 million rural Indians going to live when the Ganges drainage has been destroyed by the 287 hydroelectric projects now under construction? Will they eat money and drink petrol?

I pointed out that the most powerful weapon of the organized propaganda of this out-of-control non-human machine is our own mind that we have surrendered to the TV, corporate media, and State-manufactured consent. Are we not insane to support this depraved automaton with our votes and taxes? I asked students, "Are your studies training you to become a corporate warrior, or a messenger of brotherhood? With which is the soul of India?"

A print-out of the Gandhi Swaraj Padyatra Website is attached. The entire site can be viewed at www.gandhipadyatra.com . Please review the website itself if you wish to gain insight into this writer’s words and deeds.

Additional and more primary of my writings can be viewed at the following sites:

• www.thetreeoftomorrow.org
• www.freeofstate.org
• archive.lewrockwell.com

Subsequent To Sarahan Conference

Upon conclusion of the Conference on 5 Nov 2009, we walked for eleven days to convey my wish to study Ahimsa with my Buddhist Acharya, (teacher). He graciously accepted me until February, 2010.

Immediately, I then walked for two days back to the District Office and presented myself and my declaration to the District Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police on 19 Nov 2009. Four witnesses, including a journalist, were with me in front of the officials. At this point, I had walked 1,296 km from Jaipur.

The DC and SP were courteous and kind, but not sympathetic. As I had done at Darya Ganj in New Delhi, I told the SP that I was ready to be arrested on the spot, and to do with me as he willed. He declined arrest, but said that he would have to act if any government agency required.

On 26 November, 2009, my host delivered written notice to the SP that I was a temporary guest in his house. He attached a packet of information that included my Declaration and the Padyatra information attached hereto.

On 4 December, 2009 the Station House Officer along with three other police officers interviewed me at my temporary residence. In an earlier visit I had provided the local Chief with the complete data package of my situation.

I stated to the SHO that I was prepared to be arrested as I sat before him — it would further my mission of exposing the Truth. He very kindly deferred arrest, sternly demanding instead that I seek permission from the National Human Rights Commission to remain in India as a Stateless Person.

He further stated that if NHRC permission is denied, he will immediately imprison me.

My Request To The Commission

I am prepared to face arrest and imprisonment, or to lay down my life for the cause of freedom and peace, for peace is not possible without freedom.

I aspire to the standard set by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the methods of Ahimsa and Satyagraha.

My life work is a walking meditation prayer for peace. My life is not about providing tax finance for the United State Government to blow up women and children in its economy of blood for oil.

I sold everything at great loss, left family and friends and the land of my birth, and came to India in order not to be on the one hand a material accomplice to murder, or on the other hand a slave — a mere automaton of a human being. I seek to be a refugee from the endless wars of the United States Government.

The deciding moment of expatriation is described under the heading Historical Background and Dhamma Service.

No Safety In Any Other Country

My life and liberty are at risk in any other country because all will deem me as an illegal human being who must be persecuted under their law. I would be most vulnerable to persecution in the U.S. for my acts of rebellion and sedition if forceably remanded to that country, of which I am not a citizen.

I have not a single document that portrays my identity. I can live only by the compassionate grace and generosity of humane India. See the attached letter from Sri V.K. Desai to the Darya Ganj S.O.

I deem it my right as a simple human being to be able to live as do so many tribals of India and elsewhere — without the documentation of even a birth certificate.

I deem it a core human right not to be invalidated and reduced to the condition of a dead piece of State property, branded and tracked like a farm animal.

Only a culture of some kind of subhuman consciousness brands and tracks its members and takes by force their earnings to be used to make bombs and desecrate our earth. Where blind rule supersedes reason and love, humanity is nullified by machine, and no man is safe.

My request to the humane traditions of India is for you to intervene with the Ministries of Home and External Affairs that I may be granted the right to live in India as a Stateless Person — a Refugee if you will.

It is your moral choice. It is on you whether I be granted to live as a dignified human being dedicated to the cause of peace and brotherhood, or else to die as a hunted slave or in jail, because I don’t have a piece of paper.

If my brother humans wish to treat this man of peace as a threat who must be jailed, then so be it. I wonder what the Bodhisattvas and the Deities would say about this level of human consciousness.

You need not be concerned that I may become a burden on Indian society. I am self-supporting. Far from burden, I have proactively supported Indian society since my first visit in 1989. I have attempted to follow Gandhiji’s precept of a Constructive Program as essential to Satyagraha. My activities in this regard are presented in the Bio Data attachment.

By whose ethical standards will I be judged? The blind laws of institutionalized structural violence on a scale so vast that can only show humanity as depraved and pathologically insane? Or, as chosen by Socrates, Jesus Christ, and Mahatma Gandhi, the Law of God as heard by the human conscience — the small still voice within?

The Law of God is Love and not war. Every human being has the right to strive for Self-Realization — for achieving the deathless. No man can realize Ultimate Reality while financing the murder of his brothers.

Why should any human being have to beg from others his permission to exist?

Historical Background, Deciding Moment and Dhamma Service

As can be seen in the attached CV, as I studied more and more of Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Buddha, my consciousness slowly changed to the point I could no longer remain as manager of the several enterprises that I had successfully created and operated. I disengaged from business and devoted my life to humanitarian service through Hospice patient care and the defense of human rights of Native Americans — the Indian equivalent approximately of Adivasis — tribal peoples.

The deciding moment of my expatriation came when I was flying missions in Mexico for Lighthawk — the Wings of Conservation. An Elder of the Tarahumara Tribe spoke to an international conference about the destruction of tribal forest lands envisioned for a World Bank and American financed pulp paper mill.

Holding aloft in his left hand a trashy paper magazine, he addressed this conference of suited industrialists, financiers and government officials at the University of Chihuahua. He said, “You people are cutting our trees in order to make this — pointing to the magazine. The forest is the life of my people. When you have cut the last of our trees, we will die, and you people will read this.” My heart trembled with this Truth.

I have been telling Village India — We Are All Tarahumara Now.

That same day in Chihuahua City the TV was carrying images of proud American bombs raining death from the sky upon Iraqi women and children and kittens and chickens and goats.

These two juxtaposed events pierced my heart. These were American operations. Both brought death to others. I was an American citizen. My tax money built the bombs and missiles and aircraft carriers. My flying an expensive aircraft — even if in resistance — made me a part of the blood for oil economy.

It was all too clear now: I was living a lie. My government — with my earnings — was destroying our earth and all her living creatures.

That very day I made my decision. I would sell out and move to India. I would seek wisdom and peace in the land of Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Buddha. I would seek the India of Mahatma Gandhi’s dreams — the India that is repository of the ancient Dharma of all mankind.

Several years were required to unload my businesses — even at great loss. I moved permanently to India in 1995.

My apologies that this is not more professional in appearance. It is my best effort by candle light with numb-cold fingers and limited time.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

The Best of Jeff Knaebel

The following three quotations summarize the situation we face, and provide the commandments of two great men for what we must do to save ourselves.

The State can only survive as long as a majority [of the citizenry] is mentally programmed to believe that theft is not wrong if it is called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping is not wrong if it is called arrest, that mass murder is not wrong if it is called war. ~ Bill St. Clair

It is time for people to understand that governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions, in which a self-respecting honest man cannot and must not take part, and the advantages of which he cannot and should not enjoy. ~ Leo Tolstoy

And from your own Mohandas Gandhi, who attended the Alfred School not far from where I am now standing:

He or she who supports a State organized in a military way — whether directly or indirectly — participates in sin. Each man takes part in the sin by contributing to the maintenance of the State by paying taxes. ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

The Corporate Warfare State

In the global war zone of the modern Corporate Warfare State — which has murdered an estimated 230 million people in the past century — please tell me which State is not organized in a military way, if only of necessity for self-defense against rogue nations like the USA? The economy of which major power today is not substantially driven by the armaments industry?

In my youth of 45 years ago, faced with immediate conscription for the Vietnam War, I chose the Navy and was commissioned as an officer in its Civil Engineer Corps. I served as a company commander in a Seabee outfit that worked as combat engineers for the Marine Corps in the vicinity of Da Nang and Chu Lai.

I saw too much, and heard of even worse depravities after my release from active duty — the My Lai Massacre, the secret and devastating fire bombing of non-combatant Cambodia which destroyed a nation and a culture based upon life in grass hut villages, and much more.

In my later work with Hospice, veteran’s groups, and Kubler-Ross Life Death and Transition, I participated in efforts to heal the minds and hearts of GI’s who had seen and done things which push a human being beyond the edge of sanity.

A Malaysian friend provided this eyewitness account of post-war naval actions at sea. The U.S. Navy was moving American war machines out of Vietnam after suffering defeat there. Vietnamese boat people were struggling in the open sea with their overloaded wooden vessels. One of them tried to wave down a U.S. destroyer for help. It steamed toward them, rammed and sank the vessel, and then turned away. Families of children and parents — more than 300 human beings — were thus drowned by the U.S. Navy, after the cease fire had been negotiated and the war was over.

Under the standards of the USA Patriot Acts and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, American legislation pretends to bind us to the notion that this kind of thing — as well as depraved acts of assassination and torture — is normal, circumstantially ethical and sane human behavior which we should dutifully finance with taxes on our bread labor.

Three Foundation Stones of State Evil

1.) Sovereign Immunity, Taxation, and Mind Conditioning

Out of sovereign immunity grows the power to impose legalized theft by taxation up to the point of outright insurrection of the citizenry. Most populations will suffer almost unbearable oppression before rebellion.

We are rendered doubly vulnerable to Power by the artificial “legal” construct of sovereign immunity which protects the wielders of power from the consequences of their actions. These men can execute the most heinous of crimes without fear of retribution — without fear, even, of being identified with the crime.

Thus it is that we face double vulnerability: once to the forceful application of raw power itself, and doubled because we cannot demand accountability of the sovereign as an individual person without resorting to violence. The sovereign is legally immune behind the shield of "Executive Privilege" and other euphemisms for tyranny. The whole game is run under a cloak of anonymity, secrecy, and lies.

The main tools with which the Establishment maintains its oppression are subtle methods of mind control and manufactured consent. Most of the public has been so brainwashed that most people don’t recognize State actions as crimes. In the words of George Orwell, slavery becomes freedom and war becomes peace.

Their other tool of people control is fear. A nation of 300 millions is held in quaking fear, its great traditions of civil rights are stripped away, and a pre-meditated world war is started on the basis of government edicts in response to the actions of 19 men armed only with box cutters. (Nine-one-one may have been merely a target of opportunity for the Project for A New American Century, but there is convincing evidence that the whole event was cunningly orchestrated from inside the government.)

I cannot believe that this fear psychosis could have been inculcated without the many preceding generations having been "educated" — means trained to respond to control stimuli — in a system of compulsory attendance in government schools. The award-winning New York school teacher John Taylor Gatto is a fearless writer and Truth warrior on this subject.

The temptations of money, power, prestige, and sex — all being among the political culture’s expectations of accepted “look the other way” perquisites of high government office — to be enjoyed irresponsibly is too great for the most greedy, psychopathic and evil among us to resist.

This explains why the worst and most immoral men of this character rise to the upper reaches of the power structure. What honest man would want to be involved in politics?

Are we ourselves not irresponsible to permit ourselves to be ruled by the depraved?

2.) Corporate Limited Liability & Wealth Transfer

Like sovereign immunity, this legal construct shields corporate owners and managers from the consequences of their actions. Look at the great death-dealing crimes of Union Carbide-Dow Chemical in Bhopal. No one responsible for this mass death will ever be brought to book.

The Corporation is a creature of the State, licensed and protected by the government. Most U.S. law is designed to benefit corporations and not human beings.

The corporation ends up both controlling the State and being its operating arm that is connected to the corruption known as Central Banking. Through the double bind of taxation and currency debauchment, we are now experiencing the greatest transfer of wealth from the people to the Power Structure in all of history.

Wendell Berry has defined in one line the whole truth of the corporation. It is a pile of money to which its owners and managers surrender their moral conscience. I would add that its employees are robot servo-mechanisms whose humanity has been lobotomized by corporate-controlled government compulsory public education.

3.) Secret Ballot Voting

The system of secret ballot voting means that no one is accountable to anyone. There is no “Face Shame” in this anonymous game. There is no agency and no responsibility.

Gullible people who vote do not understand that the “democracy” in which they are participating is only a front for the Establishment Power Structure, which wins every election no matter who is elected. The Americans Carl Watner and Butler Shaeffer, and the Canadian Wendy McElroy have written excellently on this subject.

There can be no contract of agency between parties unknown and unknowable to each other. This means that no one can be held accountable for actions of a government established by secret ballot. This structural irresponsibility is reinforced by the shield of sovereign immunity.

• The Ultimate Effect of Structural Evil

Protected from the consequences of their actions by these three “legal” constructs, evil people attracted by power will do anything for more power and more wealth.

The few people attracted by power in order to "do good" fail to understand that power itself — no matter in whose hands — is intrinsically evil, and will always become more evil through corruption.

Abstract legal constructs of social relations — such as constitutions and parliamentary laws imposed by representatives from outside the local community — become instruments of exploitation and oppression in the hands of the Money Power. A quick look at the death-dealing effects of Eminent Domain against indigenous peoples everywhere is sufficient proof.

Any law imposed by anyone who does not deal as a peer on a face-to-face daily basis with those affected by the law will become an instrument of domination. Thus any law imposed by any means other than the consensus of all concerned will end up causing violence.

The well-informed know that Statist democracy rides on a wave propagated by lies. Still, in order to protect their property and livelihoods, they choose to game the system. This leaves humanity in a situation pursuant to which it is subject to the rule of an inhuman machine which directs human affairs through institutionalized structural violence.

After many years of experience as CEO of a firm that contracted with the world’s major mining and oil companies — where I negotiated and worked with their top executives and board members — I came to understand corporate business as a cutthroat hybrid of war and sport. It is a merciless game that leaves only the quick and the dead in its wake.

Mixed with these human actions is no respect for human values or cultures, no love, no compassion, no even sympathy for the lives that are crushed in the endless grasping for profit.

The point is made by the following glimpse of the current situation of Indian villagers who are being forced off their traditional and legally entitled land to make way for big industrial developers, who buy off the land rights laws with bribes and political muscle. Many of the shattered and now homeless, landless villagers wind up dead, or forced to migrate to the horrible lives awaiting them in big urban slums.

• You start with coal mining, then you move to steel plants, then you drink the river dry, all in the name of profit. It’s costing people their lives. ~ Ramkumar Aggarwall, Truth Force, New Delhi, 2003.

• “Khareed Lo, Hatta Do, Mitta Do, Phasaa Do” — in English, this published creed and policy of U.K. based Jindal Power & Steel, one of the great despoilers of Chattisgarh and Jharkhand, reads: “Buy, Remove, Eliminate, or Trap.” ~ Helena Drakakis and Simon Williams, Truth Force, New Delhi, 2003 (www.actionvillageindia.org.uk).

• You saw today how the State surrounded us. You saw how they wanted to suppress our peaceful action with violence. ~ Rajgopal Veetil, President of Ekta Parishad, a land rights movement which employs Gandhi’s method of Satyagraha and negotiation (www.ektaparishad.org).

The entire and sole reason for existence of this corporate economic machine is money profit for its owners. It is absolutely unnecessary for the fulfillment of human needs by people who are willing to undertake bread labor. It is devoid of all respect for life.

Continuing on this path of destruction will spell biological extinction of the human species. I carry the personal burden of the karma of having participated in this destruction. The work now is to correct myself.

Corporate industrial “civilization” is eating the sustenance of coming generations and destroying the physical basis of life on earth. This “civilization” is in fact cannibalism.

For just a few examples of past civilizations which have suffered massive die-offs because of environmental degradation, read Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse, and T.N. Khoshoo, Mahatma Gandhi, Apostle of Applied Human Ecology.

There is solid concern for the actual and the concrete in Gandhi’s saying that the sword is not the sign of strength, but the symbol of fear and weakness. Fear generates suspicion and sometimes even arrogance. The accumulation of fear results in the formation of complexes. Sometimes it may produce aggressiveness.

A greatly disturbing situation of our times is the growth of perverted and maladjusted personalities who are prone to being exploited by demagogues who raise bogeys and scares of different kinds and play upon the fear of the people. Gandhi teaches the psychological efficacy of fearlessness based on spiritual faith as the way to counteract the blighting influences of political coercion, group jealousies and rivalries, and individual appetites.

Gandhi wrote, “The truth is that cowardice itself is violence of a subtle and therefore dangerous type, and far more difficult to eradicate than the habit of physical violence. A coward never risks his life. A man who would kill often risks it. A nonviolent person’s life is always at the disposal of him who would take it. For he knows that the soul within never dies. The encasing body is ever perishing. The more a man gives his life, the more he saves it. Thus nonviolence requires more than the courage of the soldier of war. The Gita definition of a soldier is one who does not know what it is to run away from danger.

~ From Journal of Gandhian Studies, Vol IV, 2006
Mahatma Gandhi On Peace and Nonviolence, by Ashu Pasricha

An Obvious Situation, Patriotism, & Severance

If we care to look deeply — back then in history, and right now via the internet — we can see the obviousness of the truth of the State, and we begin slowly and slowly to perceive the obviousness of anarchy. See the essays of John Hasnas and others at the website of The Voluntaryist, and also at LewRockwell.com and FreeOfState.org.

Blind and dead laws made for the benefit of corporations, and constitutions imposed upon us by Power established outside and above, are the legalized tools of oppression.

This abstract institutional construct is the design drawing for a process of conditioning us to accept our status as prey for the Corporate Predator State.

It is not the power of the companies, but the power of concepts of an adverse nature, that is destroying the foundation of freedom. ~ Wilhelm Schmundt, 1972

We hide our personal responsibility for predations of the State behind words like "patriotism" and "protection of the general welfare." Patriotism is the scapegoat upon which we hang our moral conscience so that we can have plausible denial of our true responsibility.

The ground zero true meaning of patriotism is the legalized murder of women and children, and other unspeakable atrocities which turn us into some kind of cruel and mindless subhuman creature.

Finally, patriotism is the shield for liars and cowards who from the comfort of offices in ostentatious buildings direct others to die for their profit. See Marine Corps General Smedley Butler’s book War Is A Racket.

There is only one nonviolent way to deal with an abusive relationship in which you are the victim. And that one way is to leave it. Give up all hope that you can change the system toward justice and peace. When we participate in these efforts at change — for example by voting — we are acting in the role of enablers of a power-mad pathological abuser.

Seeing after a long time the only way open to me, I severed my relationship with the most destructive rogue abuser on the planet — the United States Government. It can no longer do anything in my name, because I have renounced my citizenship.

Your poster of the Serenity Prayer — attached to the wall over here on my left — describes both my choice and my decision:

The courage to change the things I can…

The one actual, real and direct action that I could take was to break the paper chains that were holding me as a slave to the Empire. I tore up my U.S. passport at the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat, New Delhi. Rather than arrest me, the Indian police told me that I was free to roam anywhere in India, and to call them for help if I ran into any trouble.

The great Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Man is moral choice.” This is what I have been calling the Law of Moral Causation. By unilateral renunciation of my citizenship, I chose to assert my responsibility by denying that the U.S. government could act in my name and on my behalf.

For primitive man, the Universe as a whole is a moral and social order, governed not by what we might call natural law, but rather by what we might call moral law. [emphasis added] ~ A.R. Radcliffe Brown.

It is obvious that the Laws and Constitutions of the Corporate Warfare State are far, far away from moral law, natural law, or any system of thought and philosophy that promotes a moral and social order.

Questions of Relevance & Example

An immediate question perhaps arises for you. Of what relevance is the United States Government to the 700 million people of village India?

I answer that the USA is both the power and the symbol of the corporate globalization which is systematically destroying the earth’s ecology and its indigenous cultures. Its Central Bankers — with collaboration of client governments — determine the price of onions in the third-world. See Confessions of An Economic Hit Man by John Perkins.

Here is the quotation of a freedom fighter in Mexico which seems equally relevant to the India of today:

“Why is it necessary to kill and to die so that you should listen to Ramona, seated here beside me, tell you that Indian women want to live, want to study, want hospitals, want medicines, want schools, want food, want respect, want justice, want dignity? ~ Insurgente Marcos to President of Mexico Salinas after the cease fire in Chiapas, San Cristobal de las Casas, February 1994 (Our Word Is Our Weapon, Seven Stories Press).

I plan to continue to present to the State and to humanity the question of whether we are ready to permit a peace-loving man to exist and to move about freely, without tracking tags and permission-to-exist documents. Or have we been so thoroughly conditioned that everyone except third world villagers and tribal people is destined to live in the big surveillance sheep pens constructed by states all over the world.

I conceive that the only “walk the talk” example that I can now attempt — in order to put my words into action — is try to live in the manner suggested by the Ancient Futures Way: chop my own wood, carry my own water, eschew electricity and the internal combustion engine, move about on my own legs, eschew telephone and internet (the mining of mineral elements contained in every computer stain the device with the blood of African women). It may not be possible for me to achieve all of this, but I am called to do my best, so that even in failure of result I will have succeeded in preservation of my own integrity.

Here is the relevance of Mahatma Gandhi, in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru,

5 October 1945.

“I believe that if India, and through India the world, is to achieve real freedom, then sooner or later we shall have to go and live in the villages — in huts, not in palaces. Millions of people can never live in cities and palaces in comfort and peace. Nor can they do so by killing one another, that is, by resorting to violence and untruth. I have not the slightest doubt that, but for the pair truth and nonviolence, mankind will be doomed. We can have the vision of that truth and nonviolence only in the simplicity of the villages.” [emphasis added]

It is the complexity of an artificially constructed industrial “civilization” that is the breeding ground of lies through an anonymous hierarchical power structure. Lies arise from abstractions and arbitrary legal constructs.

As Gwich’in Elder Lincoln Tritt has written, living in raw nature leaves no room for BS. Your true human relationships are sustained on respect and truth, or you are out of the tribe. Lincoln further expounds: “Open your minds. Think beyond civilization.” (personal communication, June 2009)

The Future of mankind is with the Ancient Futures Way of indigenous peoples, or else there is no future for mankind.

The great land rights protests currently arising in your country are forcing the government of India, acting in the name of industrial development for the benefit of giant foreign corporations, to murder large numbers of its own citizens — tribal people that industrial civilization considers to be superfluous and expendable, fit only to be wasted — in order to force them off the land that has supported their lives since time immemorial.

These oppressive practices are stoking the fires of a huge social volcano that cannot be contained. This volcanic magma is heating up all over the world wherever traditional cultures still occupy land. Either the meek will inherit the earth, or there will be no earth to inherit.

…The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. We are many and they are few. They need us more than we need them. ~ Arundhati Roy, 2003

My recent experiences are teaching me that Satyagraha — strong adherence to truth — cuts like a sword through much of the rubbish which surrounds our lives. And further, that one’s property, honor, and body-itself-at-risk must be the sword, and not just words. This seems to invoke a Grace of Providence that serendipitously arises from unknown and unexpected sources, and which operates on a just-in-time system of Deliverance.

What Must Be Done

However insignificant Simplicity seems,
the whole world cannot make it submissive.
If princes and kings could keep to it,
all things in the world would of themselves pay homage.
Heaven and earth would unite to send down sweet dew.
The people with no one to command them
would of themselves become harmonious.

~ Lao Tzu

For a long time have we been violating the laws of nature, of ethics, of morality, of common decency, of respect. Whole generations are coming up without awareness that Man is governed by the Laws of Nature. We are well and truly lost.

We are not facing a crisis of climate change, or peak oil shock, or economic chaos, or social upheaval, or terrorism, or geo-politics. These are but symptoms of a disease which has much deeper roots. The vector of this disease is the Corporate Warfare State.

We are facing a spiritual and moral crisis. It is the culminating effect of manifold causes that go far back into human history.

We cannot go on like this and expect to survive. Our problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.

The great writer Eckhart Tolle points out that the modern State, were it an individual person, would be clinically diagnosed by its murderously violent behavior as pathologically criminally insane.

Tolle and other advanced beings such as Gopi Krishna and Ven. Thich Nhat Hahn flatly state that we must evolve to a higher level of consciousness, or face premature extinction as a species.

Ages of human experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the method of each one doing his best to improve one’s self. This is the quiet or patient way of changing society because it concentrates upon bettering the character of men and women as individuals.

As individual members become morally fit, the fabric of society is woven with strong threads of ethics. Just as a good fabric requires good quality individual strands, so a good society requires morally fit individual members.

One of the great movements of India that is worthy of world attention in this regard is the Anuvrat Movement. Its Acharyas emphasize the importance of individual character in bettering the world. Information about its preksha meditation technique can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acharya_Tulsi.

The answers, my friend, are written deep within.

The Truth spoken of so often by Mahatma Gandhi is deep within every one of us. It is within ourselves that we must search. And as Truth flowers within us one by one, the society automatically will be transformed.

The linchpin is to Know Thyself, to be true to thyself. And then, as Shakespeare said, in being true to thyself one is bound to be true to others. This search for Self Knowledge requires quotidian introspection.

What one does with his body begins to count more than his words. One works to preserve integrity by making one’s thoughts, words and deeds become congruent. The inner work is crucial, and must be done first.

What Are We Here For?

Kurt Vonnegut’s line in Man Without A Country says it for me. We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.

For what do we live, if not to love and be loved? How many SUV’s, power mowers, snow machines, motor boats, TV’s, I-pods, and Play Stations does it take to be a lover and to be loved in return? A walk through the villages of India will show anyone that the answer is NONE.

In my deeply conditioned drive for American "success" — defined in purely material terms — I missed too many chances to love, too many walks in the woods with my kids, too much quality time with my siblings who were also caught up in the same rat race.

As a patient care volunteer in Hospice, I never once heard a dying man say that he regretted having not spent enough time at the office. But many and many at the end of their lives wept bitterly for the lost chances to love, for the absence of deep human relationships, for the alienation from their kids and their "ex’s," for the terrible loneliness of wandering the vast wasteland created by what we call "civilization."

No group or government can be a moral agent. Individuals alone have the capacity of moral agency. Thus only individuals can "help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." This help can arise only among free individuals acting in the absence of State coercion.

Compare the feelings associated with receiving in the mail an institutional check — one that you know was drawn on funds coerced from others by threat of State force — to the feelings of a helping hand from your neighbor, along with a smile and a hug.

Your moral conscience is inalienable from your being. You cannot assign it. Let no other pretend that he can represent you, or speak for you, or murder children in your name and financed with your money.

Whatever I have done by my act of renunciation and severance of citizenship, doesn’t matter. What you will do is what counts.

May you live long, live free. Love is the Law of God. Strive to be happy.

Namasteji.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

The Best of Jeff Knaebel

This Declaration, made at New Delhi, India on 19 June 2009, WITNESSETH:

To the people of this Earth, my fellow human beings, my brothers and sisters, in memory of Black Elk and Chief Joseph, and with special respect to the Grandmothers and Elders of all indigenous communities,

I, Jeff Knaebel, hereby make this Declaration of Severance and Dissolution of all bonds between myself and the Government of the United States of America. I renounce my birth certificate — I renounce my citizenship — and reject all claims of whatsoever nature made by the United States against me. I am not government property, and I am not a criminal. I am a peace-loving human being who is finished with being a slave to the Corporate Warfare State. I am not a citizen of any Government. I renounce all of them.

I hereby destroy my United States passport by which the United States government claims control of my movement upon this earth, and thus lays claim upon my right to exist. I will place the shredded remains of my passport upon the monument of Mahatma Gandhi. I have chosen this monument because it is a symbol that all mankind can recognize: of nonviolent resistance to immoral, corrupt, and violent Governments.

By this deliberate act of rebellion and sedition, I hope to free myself and alert mankind to the dangers it has created by obeying Governments of the world. My refusal to remain a tax-compliant accomplice to State murder will be considered treason against the United States. The choice is this, or treason against human life itself. My life is not about supporting the cold-blooded murder of women and children.

No permission is required to renounce that which I never sought in the first place, for which I never entered a contract, and which is imposed upon me against my will. Having declared myself not a citizen, I am therefore not a citizen. Citizenship is either voluntary, or it is forcible slavery.

The United States government is incomprehensibly malevolent and destructive. It takes our money, our identities, and our lives. It gives us back corruption, war, heinous crime, and lies. This government has no moral right to exist. It ought to be abolished without further human bloodshed.

The Nation State is a criminal organization which must be opposed in its very concept. It is impossible to reform a system that is built upon a foundation of lies and violence — one whose health and continuance depends upon endless war. The system must be altogether abolished. It is irredeemably evil.

The State represents a terminal disease of human consciousness that is anti-life, anti-ethics, and suicidal for the human species. It is a sick addictive co-dependency between its citizens and parasitic lying murdering psychopathic politicians.

Blind obedience to incompetent, deceitful, violent and morally depraved authority is a clear case of mental disease. Eckhart Tolle, Gopi Krishna and other morally advanced beings have diagnosed the United States government as pathologically criminally insane.

All political authority is arbitrary: arbitrary as to the form it takes; arbitrary as to the boundaries it establishes; arbitrary as to the limits of its jurisdiction; and arbitrary as to the taxation it collects. If one refuses to bow, to obey, to pay one’s taxes, to use Government travel documents, one will ultimately be placed in jail, or die resisting arrest.

Even in its most equitable form, it is impossible for government to disassociate itself from evil. The State has been conceived in violence and is maintained by lies and violence. Its every act can only be criminal. Unless the right to ignore the State is recognized, its citizens become tainted accomplices in its deeds.

From the most democratic to the most totalitarian form of government there is ultimately no difference among the powers they exercise. The essence of the State is the threat and use of deadly force against those who choose not to comply with its edicts.

No Government rightfully owns the territory it monopolizes. It has stolen possession of whatever land it lays claims to. Everything it has, the State has stolen or plundered. It prevents peaceful people from establishing their own voluntary cooperative economic and social relationships. The purpose of assigning nationality is to control a mass of captive taxpayers in order to maintain the large military establishment required to keep a citizenry in a state of fearful submission to the Power Structure of money.

Why should a system of structurally compulsively violent political authority be preferred to a cooperative system in which human beings live according to the Natural Law of equal liberty? A coercive government has no legitimate authority over me. None. Its only authority comes through the barrel of a gun.

Is the arbitrary "legal" construct of the Corporate State more precious than life? Is this guns-and-steel lifeless structure more precious than living, breathing beings? This killing machine fabricated of cunning deceitful words of legally piggily on corporate parchment… Are we living beings or abstract symbols to be manipulated by the Money Power? What is the "National Interest," other than the transfer of wealth and influence to the power elite? What about humanity’s interest?

I write against the oblivion of humanity. I act in quest of goodness, beauty and truth, that we may yet live.

I am not Government property. I bid farewell to the United States Government and to the citizenship it has imposed upon me against my will. I love life too much to be forced to participate in its murder.

The United States government is a stain upon humanity. It is a grotesque distortion of human relations and the human conscience. It is ugly beyond the power of words to describe. Only its end product speaks clearly for what it is and what it does. "Shock and Awe" death raining from the sky. Children’s blood flowing in the streets. Body parts strewn across wedding festival grounds. A human genome corrupted by depleted uranium and Agent Orange. Hiroshima. Los Alamos Lab. The science of death versus the art of life. Torture. Rape. Ecocide. Endless heinous crime. The most terrible Merchant of Death in human history. Human species suicidal.

If you, people of the world, wish to support Government, then so be it. But leave me alone. As a peaceful individual I reject your authority imposed by violence. I reject all Government claims of legitimacy. You and your Government do not have the right to do the things that you do. Foremost among these tax-and-public debt financed activities are the waging of war; the conscription of soldiers; and the expenditure of citizens bread labor upon armaments which by now can destroy our earth many times over. I call for an end to these activities. I will not support such activities with my life, my money, or my energy.

The laws of our natural world, the laws of the Great Spirit, the five precepts of the Buddha, are morally and practically superior to political laws. You must not kill and I must not kill. We must not support killing. We must love our neighbors as we love ourselves. As the Hopi have said, "From this one commandment, to respect and revere life, come all the other commandments: to tell the truth, to share with others, to life together in mutual support, to take care of our children and old people, the sick and strangers, friends and enemies, to abstain from intoxicants and adultery, not to cheat, steal, or covet."

It is up to the individual to discern his duty to his fellowmen and to act accordingly. No other can know my moral conscience, let alone "represent" it in decisions of war and peace. How can another "represent" me in voting to murder children? The first duty of love is to do no harm. Therefore my duty of love is to renounce the State, to withdraw from it, to quit it, to abandon it, to refuse to pay its taxes, to refuse participation in its charade of corporate money controlled elections, and to live my own life in search of truth and righteousness.

What do you do when you awaken to the awfulness of the lies of the State and the State of the lie? How does one negotiate with pathological liars? How does one come to peace with his tax payment hiring of cold-blooded murder for oil and money?

Against whom, then, shall I commit treason? The brotherhood of man? My rational mind and common sense? My moral conscience? Or the United States government? I prefer treason against the arbitrarily imposed rule of an organized crime syndicate to treason against humanity. To suffer in tax compliant silence the heinous crimes against humanity perpetrated by the United States would be to negate whatever is within me that can be called human.

The shredding of my government permission-to-exist documents is offered as a prayer that the government of the United States — perceived to be a criminal organization of incomprehensible scope — may be without bloodshed dissolved and abolished from this earth forever.

I no longer have a Government name; I have no country, no travel papers, no passport, and no Government identification. Under the law of every Government, I am an illegal human being. Against this arbitrary "illegality" I claim my right to exist as a free and sovereign individual.

What man — or group of men — can declare another to be "illegal?" Such men, who cannot give life, would yet take it, as lying murderers in God’s own temple. For Power, there is no tomorrow. There are no grandchildren. Of the good earth, there is none. There is only Power. Persons who aspire to this are degraded, deranged, diseased. We are insane to submit to rule by the depraved.

What shall be done with me?

If deported to the United States, the Government will subject me to draconian penalties. Having destroyed my passport, having renounced my citizenship, having made this Declaration, I have become a seditious rebel to the United States Government. The United States will have no choice but to harass, persecute, and ultimately jail me for speaking truth to power.

On the one hand, the natural wish to live, to grow, to move about, to be free, to act as a man. On the other hand, in order to live in this manner with the ordinary amenities of livelihood, I am forced by taxation to finance the murder of children who have a sacred right to life — innocent small children who cannot conceive of the wish to harm me.

There comes a time when the abuses are so great, the mindless destruction so wanton, the suffering so stupidly unnecessary, that one must resist the Power of rulership with his life. I love Life too much to participate in its murder.

I bid you farewell, those who would remain in voluntary bondage. Go about your life peacefully, respecting yourself, all others, and the earth upon which we live. Remember that means is to end as seed is to tree. A violent means can never produce a good end. The truth shall set us free. My efforts shall not have been in vain. Right always overcomes might, even though I may not live to see the day.

Whatever happens to me, may you remember my message: Awaken from your slumber. Realize that Government depends upon your consent. You control yourself. You can withdraw your consent.

We must recover Respect — for life, and for each other. Civilizations that get off the Path of Respect do not last, because when a people get off the path, they also remove themselves from the circle of life.

My prayer is to love and to serve. From my heart I seek to act in a good way, in a sacred way, for the benefit of many, in support of life, that the seventh generation of children may yet live and be happy.

The "why" of what I do is put completely to rest by the statement, "I love." The final answer to any question about my actions is "I love." What is the value of human life — this is the real question.

Executed at New Delhi this 19th day of June 2009
Jeff Knaebel

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

Jeff Knaebel Archives

DIGG THIS

“Government is now a political anarchy, an anarchy inside power”
~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy, the God that Failed.

MY BRIEF

My life is not about being a corporate biological robot servomechanism whose mind is stored in a computer disk, waiting to be told by The Machine how to live, what to fear, and whom to kill. I am here to become a man, alive and free to love and be loved.

THE LAWS OF LIFE

“Mind precedes all phenomena;
mind is their chief, all phenomena are mind-made.”

~ The Dhammapada

The greatest wealth is a deep understanding of the Laws of Nature.

~ Eskimo

A look at biology shows the unitary independent nature of the human organism. We are born as separate units, one at a time. Likewise we die as separate entities one at a time. All our acts in between are separate units as well, even in cooperative endeavors. An aggregation of any sort into any form of organized group fails to blend even two persons into one unit, so long as there is life in each.

Even in a panic where the herd seems to operate as a unit, it is entirely individual persons who do all the acting. Every collective is an illusory construction. Biologists are helping us to see the concept of the social collective as an empty meaningless shell of imaginary form.

Liberty is the absence of coercion of a human being by any other human being. To have liberty means to be free without modification or qualification so far as social relationships are concerned. This is apparent when you consider the alternatives for any one social act. There are two possibilities: (1) you determine what you shall do; (2) you are prohibited from determining what you shall do. The second means that some other person or persons will decide what you shall do, and force you to do it. This defines slavery rather than liberty.

Man is a social being. The above-described liberty is not confined to self-willed conduct operating in isolation. All the forces of social cooperation operate to influence one’s actions as a free man. I believe that such influences operate at their best and come to full fruition of nobility among men only under liberty.

Moral considerations have no place except where liberty exists. A person cannot do “right” except where there is option to do “wrong.” No problem of morals can be resolved in absence of liberty. All that can be done by enslavement is to remove moral choice from the enslaved. As per Thomas Davidson, “That which is not free is not responsible, and that which is not responsible is not moral. Freedom is the condition of morality.“

If we are alive in an ordered universe, the existence of universal, unchanging eternal truths follows from the premise. If these eternal truths and unchanging principles exist, then one may hypothesize the existence of moral truths — moral law if you wish, as part of the universe in which we live. This moral law would then be higher than, and rule over, our social, statutory laws of society, custom and tradition.

It would remain man’s job to discover these laws by search, analogous to discovering the laws of physical science. We would deny as moral truth any prescription by majority rule, or kingly decree, or Executive Order. All these prescriptions would be denied as invalid sources per se.

Since the end is embodied in the means, no freedom-loving person can employ other than purely voluntary means. Liberty cannot be institutionalized. Only encroachments of liberty can be institutionalized. Liberty cannot be legislated, adjudicated, constituted, democratized or decreed. Liberty is liberty by law of nature.

We must never give up. If we should ever give up and say that liberty is dead, we have pronounced that human life no longer exists. The urge to be free is embodied within and intrinsic to human consciousness itself.

~ Adapted from F.A. Harper, 1957.

SERFDOM IS BY OUR OWN CONSENT ONLY

“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place bands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer. Then you will behold him, like a great colossus whose pedestals have been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

~ tienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

It would be good to absorb into our consciousness the insight of La Boétie that any State, no matter how ruthless and despotic, rests on the consent of the majority of the public. La Boétie observed that this consent of despotism is engineered, largely by propaganda beamed at the populace by rulers and their intellectual apologists. The devices — of bread and circuses, ideological mystification, exaggerated threats to security — remain today the same as in La Boétie’s time.

“Gandhi saw that the power of any tyrant depends entirely on people willing to obey. The tyrant may get people to obey by threatening to throw them in prison, or by holding guns to their heads. But the power still resides in the obedience, not in the prison or the guns.”

~ Mark Shepard, Civil Disobedience, Nonviolence and Satyagraha in the Real World, 1990

Leo Tolstoy’s Letter to a Hindu was an important influence on Ghandi’s thinking about mass nonviolent action. This letter in turn was heavily influenced by La Boétie. In The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, Tolstoy quoted at length from La Boétie, and summed up,

“It would seem that the [citizens], not gaining any advantage from the restraint that is exercised on them, should at last realize the lie in which they are living and free themselves in the simplest and easiest way: by abstaining from taking part in the violence that is only possible with their cooperation.”

Two centuries after La Boétie, David Hume writes, Of the First Principles of Government,

“We shall find that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore on opinion only that government is founded; this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments, as well as to the most free and popular.”

~ Both quotations above are taken from Ending Tyranny Without Violence by Murray Rothbard

HAPPINESS RESTS ON TRUTH ALONE

Edmund Burke said in 1756, as did Gandhi in our time, “Happiness in the long run rests on truth alone, and that truth is the natural law of human activity and human relations.”

He goes on to say that States violate the Law of Nature. In a nearly perfect match of the earlier quote of Gandhi, he says that injustice is grounded in the very nature of the State itself, because the State is necessarily supported by violence.

“To prove that these sorts of political societies are a violation of nature and a constraint upon the human mind, one need only look upon the instruments of violence which are everywhere used to support them. Review the dungeons, whips, chains, racks, gibbets with which every society is abundantly stored …. I acknowledge indeed, the necessity of such a proceeding in such institutions; but I must have a very mean opinion of institutions where such proceedings are necessary.” (Works, 1900).

Look, now, at how far we have progressed since 1756. Look at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, rendition, water-boarding, rape rooms and a proud nation’s legislation to legalize torture.

How is it that our state of denial — our absence of shame — is so profound that we can even discuss our relationship to “civilization,” when we have so clearly devolved to lawfully incorporated industrialized barbarianism? Again Burke, “In proportion as we have deviated from the plain rule of our nature, and turned our reason against itself, in that proportion have we increased the follies and miseries of mankind.”

It seems to me that in the realm of social organization, mankind is at the point of a profound choice. It will be worked out to success or failure over a long time period — unless we earlier blow ourselves to kingdom come. Yet, the direction of intellectual and practical work I feel must be determined now itself.

The great divide is between a stateless society of free people in voluntary associations freely entered — Carl Watner calls it the voluntaryist society — or a statist society. Gene Callahan puts it succinctly in his essay, The Most Crucial Gap in Politics:

“Once one accepts the notion that initiating aggression is OK under any circumstances whatsoever — then the case for human liberty has been abandoned, and all that remains is to argue over what degree of enslavement is acceptable.” (LewRockwell.com, 11 April 2005)

A SELF-REGULATING HUMAN COMMUNITY

As guides to the way out, as well as the proven designs for a self-regulating human community of love and reason, I am drawn to Hind Swaraj by Mohandas Gandhi, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, Basic Call to Consciousness by John Mohawk, the Tao Te Ching, and socially engaged Buddhism, together with the village self-rule traditions of India.

Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.
The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people will be.
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have
the less self-reliant people will be.
Let go of the law,
and people become honest.
Let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
Let go of religion,
and people become serene.
Let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes common as grass.

~ Tao Te Ching

Lao Tzu figured that the individual and his happiness was the key unit of society. If institutions hampered individual flowering and happiness, then they should be abolished. For Lao Tzu, the government — with its “laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox” — was a vicious oppressor, “more to be feared than fierce tigers.”

“Take Care, Lest They Realize That They Can Do Without Rules”

Tracing our present sorry situation back to the time when the Constitution was imposed upon a free people by the manufactured consent of a few dozen powerful men, take note of the words of one the founding fathers to get a feel of “where they were coming from,” and where they intended to put their less arrogant fellowmen.

“Gentlemen [of the Constitutional convention] you see that in the anarchy in which we live, society manages much as before. Take care, if our disputes last too long, that the people will come to think they can just as easily do without us.”

~ Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Rebirth of Liberty, Carl Watner, 11 July 2005

ANCIENT THINKERS: THE SYSTEM ITSELF IS THE PROBLEM

Two centuries later Chuang Tzu reiterated Lao Tzu’s opposition to State rule. He said,

“There has been such a thing as letting mankind alone, with success. Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone. The common people have a constant nature. They spin and are clothed, till and are fed. It is what may be called their natural freedom. These people of natural freedom are born and die themselves, suffer from no restrictions or restraints, and are neither quarrelsome nor disorderly.

If rulers were to establish laws to govern the people, it would be no different from stretching the short legs of the duck and trimming off the long legs of the heron — or haltering a horse. Such rules would not only be of no benefit, but would work great harm. The world simply does not need governing — in fact it should not be governed.”

Chuang Tzu may have been the first theorist to see the State as brigand writ large, saying,

“A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes ruler of a State.”

There Is No Ruler Comparable In Virtue To Non-Rule

Pao Ching-yen was the culmination of these anarchistic thinkers and lived in fourth century AD.

He contrasted earlier days of stateless society with his current times. “There were no rulers and no officials. People dug wells and drank, tilled fields and ate. They went to work at sunrise and rested at sunset. Placidly going their ways without encumbrance, they achieved their own fulfillment.” In the stateless age there was no warfare. “Where knights and hosts could not be assembled, there was no battlefield … ideas of using power for advantage had not yet taken root. Into this condition of peace there came violence and deceit instituted by the State. The history of government is the history of violence, of the strong plundering the weak.”

Pao wrote that the system itself is the problem. The object of government is not to benefit the people, but to control and plunder them. There is no ruler who can compare in virtue with a condition of non-rule. He also demonstrated that the very existence of institutionalized violence by the State generates imitative violence among the people.

The common idea that strong government is needed to combat disorder among the people commits the error of confusing cause and effect.

~ Quotes of the three Chinese theorists are from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Mises Institute).

The American Experience Cut to the Chase

“Whenever a people… entrust the defence of their country to a regular, standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens."

~ A Framer — Anonymous u2018framer’ of the US Constitution — Source: Independent Gazetteer, January 29, 1791 (here sourced from Information Clearing House). See also Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, and When Corporations Rule the World by David Korten

"I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher- ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service." [and also of a populace brainwashed by the compulsory public education system of the State. ~ Ed]

~ General Smedley Butler. USMC (Ret.), War Is A Racket

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based upon five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals and county commissioners.”

~ Edward Abbey

“Liberty is the mother, not the daughter of order.”

~ Llewellyn H. Rockwell, The Impossibility of Imposed Freedom, 8 December 2005

SITUATION AND PROSPECTS

“Humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve, or die.”

~ Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 2005

Through my small window on the world, I see in the scientific and industrial revolutions a convoluted, enigmatic process of growth-decay-new growth pursuant to which mankind has constructed an institutional machine. To this machine he has become totally subservient. The machine has taken over. It is carrying humanity mindlessly along a road to self-destruction. I call this machine the Corporate Warfare State.

It is made of all cold metallic machine parts, like a machine. Its command and control center is mechanically intelligent far beyond the capacity of the individual human mind. It is self-replicating and operates continuously through the cycles of human generations. The human tools for its construction have been primarily ignorance, fear, greed, domination, exploitation, deceit and violence.

Like a computer, it has a programmed operating system. Its program is utterly malevolent and purely evil. It mechanically devours all creatures great and small. Its preferred flavor is human flesh. Its program code is for the cannibalization of all living beings.

At the present moment, The Machine is in near-total domination of humanity. It is gaining.

As its operating technicians it attracts the most evil members of the human species. Men who are corruptible and who live by power and domination. To these temporary employees it offers the most sought emoluments of money, power, sex, public honors and total control. The men drawn to its service are those in whose heart the fire of love — while still existing — has been nearly extinguished by fear and greed. Measured by the standard of deeds, some of these men appear to be darkly evil to the core.

Our Work Is to Break the Egoic Pattern

“The moment is arising when you must find a basis of unity which is not political … There is only one history — the history of Man. All national histories are chapters in the larger one.”

~ Rabindranath Tagore (writing four generations ago)

Measured by the parameters of clinical psychology, the men in offices of the Power Structure suffer from chronic paranoid delusions, kleptomania, a pathological tendency to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty, an obsessive acting out of ruthless domination. Diagnosis: criminally insane.

The Machine cannot be “fixed” or reprogrammed. Any attempt to replace its operators will prove fruitless. Any new hires will be men of the same character, for no other type of man wants the job. We have granted power of life or death to a machine whose only moral code is force.

I see our hope as being simply to abandon The Machine. Let it fall in a heap of irrelevance and disuse until finally it has rusted into the dustbin of history. The work demanded of us requires an ethical life of nonviolence and peace. This in turn requires withdrawal from the system and creation of a new human culture. Let this culture arise the way new grass springs up through the hulks of machines rusting in the world’s junkyards. It is slow and organic. It is Life.

Our work is to break the egoic patterns that hold us in thrall of fear and greed. We must abandon ideologies and belief systems. Each must come home to the truth of self. We must abandon the lucre on offer by The Machine and tread the independent path of self-reliance, self respect and human dignity.

We must seek a transformation of our individual consciousness as contribution toward transformation of human consciousness. I feel it begins with reclaiming our integrity.

But first, we must ask — and answer — the question: do we really want peace? If we really do want peace, it is not difficult of achievement. Simply cease making war. Begin spreading compassion.

CONSUMING ANOTHER’S LIFE — THE PSYCHOSIS OF CANNIBALISM

“Civilization does not mean electric lights. It does not mean producing atomic bombs, either. Civilization means not killing people.”

~ Nichidatsu Fujii, Hiroshima survivor, in “Columbus and Other Cannibals” by Prof. Emeritus (UCal) J.D. Forbes, PhD., 1992

All around us are examples of insane persons acting through the power of the State, killers and cannibals of the earth, users and abusers of fellow human beings.

The ethos of modern Western civilization seems to be satiation of material and sensual desire. The ethos of India — until quite recently — was restraint and control of the senses and material desires. The theme of a conference styled “Dhamma-Based Cultures Meet” highlights the concern of Indian elders. “Dhamma” here means laws of nature. I feel this theme also points the way out, as proposed in this present writing.

Background of the conference was concern for threats to human civilization posed by intolerant, illogical and violent thought patterns presently dominating.

For Us the World Is One Family and Not A Market

“Consumerism has spread. Materialism is gripping humanity. Our Indian value system is at stake. Permissiveness has become dominant. Terrorism has become global.”

“Struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, exploitation of nature, struggle for individual rights seem to be guiding principles. This has led to two world wars, unthought-of terrorism and dehumanizing lifestyle. The danger is awful.

“Dharma is basis of cosmic and individual existence. Dharma principles are universal and eternal. They are nature-and-life friendly. Not struggle, but harmony has been our attitude. Serving those in need was natural. That fittest would ensure survival of others was an inbuilt feeling. Uniformity is neither desirable nor feasible. Diversity ensures richness and beauty. Nature was revered as Mother. Man could “milk” her as would a child suckle its mother, but could never think of exploiting her. Duty consciousness rather than rights consciousness has been our ethos. Everyone doing one’s own duty implies fulfillment of one another’s rights.

“We have been attacked, enslaved and exploited during the last ten centuries. In 20th century we became politically free. Now we must get rid of mental shackles. Legacy of enslavement still lingers. We are enamored by the consumerist glamour of the West. We are not conscious of our cultural potentialities. We have deeper value systems. They are inclusive, holistic and eco-friendly. For us, the world is one family and not a market.

“Evolution implies involution. Man’s journey is from gross to subtlest to Beyond to Immanent.

Oneness exists at the deepest innermost level. This is not some intellectual belief, but is based upon invaluable sublime experiences termed by various names such as Nibbana, Moksha, Divine Light, Shunya, Universal Spirit. We don’t enforce our views. What is important is that an elevating life spring flow through our traditions for the integral holistic growth of whole of humanity.”

Our First Task Is Liberty

I believe that this conference theme represents the way out and the key to human survival.

It cannot be accomplished in the present regime of the Corporate Warfare State. It can only be accomplished through voluntary cooperation of free men living in a condition of liberty. Our first task is liberty.

The workshop of liberty is the mind. It is there we must begin. The political goal is a stateless society. We begin with our own mind. Then will we build a new earth from the grass. With Satyagraha — the force of nonviolence and love — with strong adherence to truth.

WHAT ONE CAN DO : If it is to be, it is up to me.

The path is made by walking ~ African proverb

A definition to keep in mind for part of what follows: pro-government teachers, preachers, journalists, and intellectual apologists for the State tell us that “anarchist” means one who favors “chaos” and “violence.” This is not true.

In the common experience of humanity over several thousand years, it is the opposite of truth. In actual, observable fact and history, it is government that causes chaos and violence. Anarchism in fact means “absence of a ruler.” The prefix “an” means negation and the suffix “archy” means rule, hence anarchy means rule by no persons.

Thus the original anarchist is one who believes that a society of self-governing members, in free and voluntary association, without coercion or force, provides the best chance for peace.

An Ethos of Dominate — Exploit — Kill — Hurt — Destroy Is Bound to End Badly

A Machiavellian mass society valuing wealth acquisition and characterized by exploitative relationships must inevitably be a violent society, using force to protect the “haves” from the “have nots” and outsiders. Such a society will destroy itself because its greed will cause it to consume its own resources and even its own people. Self-restraints cannot be effectively imposed because the very nature of the society — its internal dynamic — is to consume [which means to destroy]. Its voracious appetite will cause it literally to eat itself.

~ JDForbes 1973

We — each of us — are the co-creators of a peaceful humanity. As you live peacefully in your daily life, so does almost all of humanity. Who wants this war? It is not wanted by we common people.

It is the System of institutionalized structural violence that creates war. It is the very nature of the State to be at war. We do not want this horrible suffering of our children dying. We do not make war. States only make war. It is the System which must be changed to match us. We will either govern ourselves — responsibly and well — or we will be governed by others. What if we just laid down the State, as a warrior lays down his sword?

Note this fact: whenever you call upon the government to do something for you, the call you make is the bread and butter of the bureaucracy. On your calls and demands, it is nourished. Without that nourishment it could not grow. What you focus upon, increases. If you love your business and work and devote yourself to them, do they not flourish? And if you turn away and shirk your work, does it not wither and die? Likewise, if we can ignore the government, it will shrink.

The idea is to create a parallel economy with community justice based upon nonviolent voluntary mutual cooperation. Slowly we detach ourselves from dependence upon and involvement with the State, until it becomes irrelevant to our peaceful lives. When a sufficient number have achieved independent self-reliance, the State will go out of business for lack of customers.

If we can be strong, the future is ours. If we cannot discipline ourselves, the future belongs to the State. This requires serious introspection. Can we obtain the necessary mental objectivity and strength to devise a way — other than the State — to govern ourselves in voluntary mutual cooperation? Or, are we yet so fearful that we are addicted to the use of compulsion beyond the possibility of change?

Are we still at the level of clubs and axes — now become nuclear bombs — or can we use our tool-making ability to devise a better way?

Deeply Entrenched Power Will Not Voluntarily Abdicate

It will take long and be difficult. We are dealing with power deeply entrenched in every aspect of life and economy, connected to every chance for employment. The military-industrial complex is a massive network of defense contractors, politicians, lobbyists, manufacturers and suppliers which has a deeply rooted institutional priority in continuing the destructive foreign policies of the US. This is now being rapidly imported by India. These entities are not simply going to “bow out gracefully” in the name of peace. And this is only one of the “complexes.”

The social welfare complex is a gigantic network of social workers, bureaucrats, NGO’s and huge foundations whose raison d’être is poverty or recovering from war. They live by hustling the latest crisis. This complex oversees the distribution of multi-billion dollar programs which function to keep its recipients in a permanent state of dependency, while serving as a cash cow for administrators and managers. See the big bungalows and fancy cars of NGO managers hustling the poor of India.

This NGO-ism is an extension of the Corporate Warfare State, part of the payoff. “You bend ‘em, we mend ‘em.” These entities will protect their self-interest. If there were no Total War Everywhere of the Corporate State, there would be no need of the Red Cross.

The following is taken partly from What Is To Be Done, Steven LaTulippe (LewRockwell.com 20 January 2006). His essay corroborates my sad personal experience. The public infrastructure complex is a web of slum lords, agencies, bureaucrats, construction companies, politicians and finance Mafia who manage public works projects. This complex consumes astronomical sums of public money and is highly motivated to keep the scams going.

All of these games are interconnected and interlinked. A grim statistic from my former home state provides a sense of scale: more than half of the jobs there are in the government or directly connected to the government. This was fifteen years ago — it is bound to be much worse now.

None of these scam-complexes is simply going to dry up and blow away. Preaching limited government to these people will simply not connect. They have no intellectual framework to understand the concepts. It would be like trying to explain calculus to a frog.

There is worse. The Corporate Total State has developed sophisticated methods of manipulation to continue its rule indefinitely. This establishment has co-opted the media (or simply bought it), captured the education system, and designed sophisticated, powerful, clandestine propaganda techniques to influence the masses, and to keep them simply distracted. The whole purpose of these operations is to ensure that the game will continue without effective opposition.

Eventually, like the old Soviet Union, it will collapse. It will run out of time, victims and money. Its fiat currency will collapse and the game will be called. Recent events in the great financial train wreck indicate that this process has already reached the end of the beginning.

For this we prepare ourselves mentally and physically to be self-reliant survivors. Our own work — to wean ourselves from State dependency, so as to starve it — serves the dual purpose of preparing for its inevitable self-destruction. The urgency of the time is to preclude it taking us down with it.

THE OBVIOUSNESS OF ANARCHY — SOME EXAMPLES PAST AND PRESENT

“Social institutions are but the projection or external manifestation of ideas and attitudes existing in people’s minds. Change the ideas, and the institutions instantly undergo a corresponding change.”

~ Edmund Quincy, 1841

From the Mises Institute we learned that Chuang Tzu (369—286 BC) was the first known to us to work out the idea of spontaneous order, “Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone.”

Proudhon worked on these ideas in 19th century and F.A. von Hayek of the Austrian School in 20th. Norman Barry wrote The Tradition of Spontaneous Order in 1982. Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs (Perseus, 2003) offers hope for the present day, along with many references. He quotes Kropotkin, “Humans are predisposed to help one another without authoritarian coercion. A centralized government is not needed to set an example or to make people do the right thing. People were doing so before the rise of the State. In fact, it is government that represses our natural tendency for cooperation.” (Kropotkin lived in former Soviet Union).

The redoubtable Murray Rothbard discusses early American experiences in The Origins of Individualist Anarchism in the US (from Libertarian Analysis, 1970: posted on Mises.org, 17 January 2006). He mentions Albemarle, Rogue’s Island, and the “Holy Experiment” of Quakers in Pennsylvania. He reports that the Quaker minister George Keith had concluded logically from the Quaker creed that all participation in government ran counter to Quaker principles.

Rothbard asked: how could anyone professing in nonviolence serve a government in any capacity, since the essence of government was the use of violence? He saw that Quaker nonviolence logically implied not only refusal to bear arms, but complete individualistic anarchism.

As a consequence of their nonviolence, peace with indigenous Indians was preserved for more than half a century. There was no bloodshed. Voltaire wrote of the Quaker achievement, “It was truly a sight to see a government without priests, a people without arms, citizens as magistrates, and neighbors without jealousy.”

According to Peter Dillard (Voluntaryist No.129), the oldest voluntaryist society existing in the US is that of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. They have developed a peaceful, nonviolent, anarchistic society that has endured for at least a millennium. I have worked with these people on their “Planting Stick Project.” I found them to be a truly remarkable people.

Dillard continues, “The native system of government is in effect a practical system of anarchy. Hopi unity is expressed not in allegiance to a monolithic Hopi “state,” but through a voluntary commitment to what is known as the Hopi Way. The structure ensures that authority cannot become concentrated in one person or group. Initiation is not forced — it is only offered. ‘This is the very basis of our life, we must not force other people to change their ways.’ (Yamada, Hopi Anthology, 1957).

Decisions are made without “arm twisting” (coercion). No votes are taken (no majority rule). The group attempts to find voluntary unanimity. The principled dissent of even one member prevents the proceedings from moving forward on a given issue. Faced by irreconcilable disagreements, Hopi go their separate ways without violence.”

It Was Discovered That Man Could Live Without A State

Moving forward in time — to events that were told to me by mining camp friends only one generation removed from eyewitness — here reported by Carl Watner in The Voluntaryist, September 2006: Westward on the Overland Trail and in California during the gold rush, there was no government, no established law, no protection. Throughout the mining districts, the people met and adopted rules for their mutual security. In all the large diggings the established regulations were faithfully observed.

When a new area was opened up, the first thing done was to choose officers and extend the zone of order. “The result was that in a district five hundred miles long, inhabited by 100,000 people, who had neither government, regular laws, military protection, nor even locks or bolts, and a great part of whom possessed wealth enough to tempt the vicious, there was as much security to life and property as in any part of the Union, and a smaller proportion of crime.”

“At other times on the American frontier, there was inadequate supply of government circulating currency. So businessmen set up their own mints and provided coined money that effectively competed with government coinage. While the western frontier was stateless, it was not lawless.

As Carroll Quigley observed, when public authority in the western world disappeared around 900 AD, society continued. It was discovered that man can live without a State. Economic life, religious life, law, and property rights can all exist and function effectively.”

SURVIVING DESPITE GOVERNMENT

I think with people starting to take another look at the concept of money and feeling helpless, this would be a good time to teach people that there are other ways to live or survive. People have been told all their lives that they need money to live. Believing this statement has led many people to the addiction of money. Someone has to tell them about other possibilities. Like any other instructions you believe in, this habit is hard to break.

~ Lincoln Tritt, Gwich’in Elder, personal communication

I now turn briefly to India, where anarchy thrives within a power structure which itself is anarchic. This country is vast and tumultuous such as to defy description. I can offer only a tiny glimpse. One thing is very clear to me. Only through the order and web-like strength of successful anarchy do the people of India manage to survive, because they must do so despite their government.

The following is taken from Essays on Tradition, Recovery and Freedom by Darampal, Other India Press, 2000. The entire catalog of Other India Bookstore is a worthy resource for finding our way out of the present crisis.

“We have lost our identity, our anchorage in our civilization. This loss of identity afflicts us all. This is a pain that practically all Indians, including the Christians, the Muslims, and the others have to bear in common. We have to find some way out of such a state of rootless-ness. We have to somehow find an anchor again in our civilisational consciousness, in our innate chitta (the perceiving intellect) and kala (cyclical time under law of nature)…. According to our traditional wisdom and understanding of Universal Law, the spirit is the deciding factor in fulfillment of a goal, not the tools.”

“It is only because of the ingenuity, the perseverance, and the robustness of our ordinary people, many of whom somehow make do without adequate shelter, or clothing, or even water, that we still survive as a people and as a civilization. We educated Indians do not seem to like what they do: the festivals and the fire-walking that they celebrate — and the various other things which unknown to us, are intimate parts of their lives. Despite all the obstacles which we elite put in their way, they still remain grounded in the soil of India. Our own alienation, indifference and high-handedness notwithstanding, a more worthwhile future can be expected to emerge [from this spirit].”

“Simply because our people by temperament were mild and tolerant, and did not throw stones at us, or murder us in our beds — even when they went without food, clothes and shelter — we had thought that they were nearly dead, or wholly inarticulate and assumed that it was for us to determine their future and to initiate them into prescribed activity. While we believed this to be the state of our people, we who had been left in positions of power, authority, and what we called knowledge, did not even know or certainly did not comprehend, the laws, regulations, procedures and plans which we administered and believed would herald this new India.”

“In the period between about 1919—1947, and again briefly in 1977 under the inspiration of Jayaprakash Narayan, large sections of the Indian people began to believe that they could at least build a world of their own, a world constructed according to their own concepts and ideas — that perhaps they may then even be able to help the rest of the world return to sanity. It is possible that many of the more reflective and imaginative types in the West also at times felt that India may have a relevant message, and perhaps could serve as a world model. But the habits and assumptions of the past, built over several generations, asserted themselves and India reverted to its unthinking imitative role. This role benefits not even half percent of Indian people, the political class. It maintains their privileges, but is certainly ruinous to the social and private lives of at least 80% of India’s people. The initiative of freedom was snatched away form them after 1947, and what remained was allowed to erode in the flow of time.”

“Freedom — or the relaxation of long imposed control leads to flowering of body and mind. It also results in re-manifestation of oppressed emotions and practices. It is possible that the percolating of the sense of freedom amongst the peasantry and rural folk may lead in time to rejection of the hideous and oppressive administrative structures built by the British. The need is that we the elite give up our rigid and frozen postures, achieve some appreciation of social urges, and prepare for change. The change, when it comes, will have its own logic and not be governed by our preconceived notions of it.”

“We face two entirely different concepts of society. One is that put forward by Dr. Ambedkar and accepted as basis of the Constitution — the atomized and inorganic view of society which governs political theory and practice in the West. Political democracy is reduced to counting of heads. This gives rise to competing power groups, leading to government not by people but by money power.

“The other is the organic or communitarian view. This view treats of man not as a particle of sand in an inorganic heap, but as a living cell in a larger organic entity. It is natural that in this view the emphasis is more on responsibility than right, just as in the inorganic view it is natural to be the opposite. When the individual lives in community with others, his rights flow from his responsibilities. That is why, in Gandhiji’s sociological thought, the emphasis is always laid on responsibility.”

“A major aspect of the ahimsak (nonviolent) way of life is to minimize one’s needs and to fulfill these as far as possible from within one’s immediate neighborhood. His practice of relying on local availability is as important a part of the principle of ahimsa as the doctrine of non-killing. Thus for Gandhi, ahimsa and swadesi (of one’s own locality) were not two different principles.”

The preceding tour through part of India’s philosophy (it is highly diverse, not a singularity) and its social reality provides some background for the situation facing the majority of the population, which is rural. The common people must push against the overwhelming weight of the political class, which inherited its power structure from the British. That they yet live is — to me — a testimony of the strength of anarchy. For the reality, as I see it, is an anarchy of the oppressed struggling under a corrupt power structure which is itself anarchic.

COMMUNITARIAN (VOLUNTARYIST) ANARCHY

What we would deduce is that “civilization” means something terrible indeed: a society in which there are so many evil or violent or dishonest people that massive deployments of armed force and unspeakable weapons of mass destruction acting through armies and police are required for control.

~ Modified after JD Forbes, 1992

For those with a serious interest in community level anarchy, check the publications of the Center for Science and Environment (Delhi) and the magazine Down to Earth (Society for Environmental Communications, Delhi). A few glimpses from my own observation and experience follow.

• “Irrigation projects are a major scam involving political parties in competition to corner public funds. The only solution is to initiate community based water-harvesting techniques …” [This is what happens. The people quit relying on government and provide for themselves, often against resistance of local political "Mafia."]
• “Village has withdrawn all disputes from courts, settles them locally.”
• “Self-help groups formed, community agriculture undertaken.”
• “Kids manage herbal garden.”
• “Women market village garden products and share profits.”
• “Our communal achievements have come with difficulty. We will not let them be undone easily.”
• “Local law develops spontaneously out of natural law and need to cooperate.”
• “I saw the villagers dig wells and tanks worth crores (one crore = ten million rupees) in a matter of days. The government takes a year to install a percolation tank.”
• “Cooperative teams of five families work together on each other’s fields and the landowner keeps the harvest.”

These and similar communitarian projects occur in countless frequency throughout India. I have watched — and participated in — trail and bridge-building projects in which men of two nearby villages worked together voluntarily to connect the villages by a path that had to cross a gorge. They worked together in harmonious anarchy: there was no “boss.” As each new challenge was faced, the man with the most suitable skills for that situation was spontaneously self-selected by the group. Among Native American people I have seen this happen without a word spoken.

There are some large-scale projects as well. In Sri Lanka the Sarvodaya Shramadana (shared work) Society organized by Buddhist monk A.T. Ariyaratne has created self-government and locally based economies in about 11,300 villages. These function as almost autonomous “village republics” or mini city-states.

The key to success is moral leadership, embodied in adherence to ten precepts: (1) Sharing — of wealth, knowledge, skills, power, authority; (2) Morality; (3) Beneficence, often as recognition and promotion of talent; (4) Straightforwardness; (5) Impartiality of judgment; (6) Composure in conduct (7) Non-hatred; (8) Nonviolence; (9) Patience; (10) Non-revenge.

At Ralegan Siddhi, the famous program of crusader Anna Hazare has completely transformed a poverty-stricken village into a model of sustainable development and healthy society. This has spread to other villages, selected on the basis of Shramdan (voluntary contribution of labor) and moral standards. Anna’s message is to work selflessly without hope of fame or fortune. “Success comes naturally to those who are not greedy for it.”

“In a nation where collective finger pointing at politicians and grieving at the slowness of democracy is the style, Rangaswamy Elango is an object lesson. He has chosen to evangelize village-centered development. He lives for his cause, Gram Swaraj — the Autonomous Village. He realized there can be no individual happiness if there is misery all around. He got elected head of his village, removed the outside contractor-political Mafia and embarked on village self-development.

Elango says that he has been deeply influenced by J.C. Kamaruppa’s An Economy of Permanence. Now he is forming “village clusters” along the lines of Gandhi’s “village republics.” He says, “There is an emerging force not visible to the media and most people. It is at work changing India from below. This force cannot be stemmed.”

~ Rediff.com News, 2004

Let us hope — for the sake of entire humanity — that Elango is correct in his assessment.

Indigenous people have demonstrated their aspiration to live in a direct relationship with the land, in a healthy community within a healthy environment, free of all outside domination and control, and with full right of self-determination in all aspects of human social function. ~ Victoria Tauli-Corpuz (Paradigm Wars, 2006)

This is perfectly congruent with M.K. Gandhi’s vision of Village Swaraj — a vision of self-governing Village Republics.

THE WAY OUT: MIND MATTERS MOST

Though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle,
yet he indeed is the noblest victor who conquers himself.

~ Dhammapada 103

“We must be the change we wish to see.”

~ M.K. Gandhi

The First Step Is Emotional

The whole secret of existence is to have no fear.
Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one.
Only the moment you reject all help are you freed.

~ Buddha

I am grateful to Derrick Jensen (A Language Older Than Words; Endgame; Strangely Like War) for these insights. The first step is to give up all hope.

Give up all hope

• That the system will change
• That “they” will change
• That we can bring legal action
• That technology will save us
• That God will save us
• That those who exploit will “see the light” and stop on their own
• That the next election will be different
• That there will be a great uprising of civil disobedience against violence
• That there will be a sudden awakening and shift of consciousness
• That Bush will be impeached and Sir Galahad will replace him
• That mother nature will forgive us
• That we can negotiate with melting glaciers
• That anyone other than you will do anything

Accept the fact that the State is beyond redemption. It is a reflection of us. It cannot change until we change.

Hope, as per Derrick Jensen (Orion Magazine, 2006) is longing for a future condition over which we have no agency. It means we are powerless. To hope for some result means we have given away our power to do act, we have given up any agency concerning it. The use of any excuse to justify inaction reveals our incapacity of love. If we love, we act in defense of the beloved.

False hope keeps us chained to the system. One example: we can bring legal action in hope of forcing some change. But legal action works only with the tools which those in power grant us the right to use. Which means tools deliberately intended to be ineffective. We cannot prevail within the same framework of law whose design purpose is to oppress us. False hope binds us to unlivable situations and blinds us to creative possibilities — real, actual possibilities within our own power.

When you give up hope, you realize you never needed it in the first place. You become more effective because you cease relying on someone else to solve your problem. Since you died to the hope of rescue, those in power cannot touch you any longer. Not with empty promises, not through threats, not even through violence. You have become free. This makes you more alive, more powerful. You are no longer dependent upon those who exploit you. You no longer believe in the mythologies they use to facilitate their exploitation.

What can happen by this shift is that you let go of being the victim. You die to the conditioned, fabricated, molded, educated you. You reclaim yourself from the State system that taught what to think, what to feel. You think for yourself, search your own truth. You feel your own real feelings. You face yourself directly. You become stronger.

Don’t Wait For Permission

That which is not free is not responsible, and that which is not responsible is not moral. Freedom is the condition of morality.

~ Thomas Davidson

You don’t wait for anyone’s permission. You begin now with your own hands. You accept the fact that the State is beyond redemption. Because it is a reflection of ourselves, it will never change until we change. You reclaim your morality from what was taught by the culture that is killing the planet.

When you come home to your own true self, when you center yourself in the love that is your core being, you become no longer vulnerable to the co-option of fear and rationality that Hitler inflicted on Jews, that Lenin inflicted on kulaks, that Bush inflicts on Americans, that the Project For A New American Century inflicts on the planet. You shift the paradigm of physical -social — emotional circumstances framed by these exploiters.

You break the exploiter-victim chain. You become like the Jews who created the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, like the Essenes who left none to be taken alive, you become like the Indians who marched with Gandhi to harvest salt from the beach at Dandi.

You turn away from fear. Once you have died to their emoluments, power cannot touch you. You begin to protect the people, the places, and the creatures that you love. You command the liberty in which alone love can flower. That liberty in which alone it is possible to love and be loved in free and voluntary mutual exchange of energy — without coercion, without violence, without compulsion.

PEACE THE PRODUCT OF LIBERTY. MIND THE WORKSHOP OF LIBERTY.

“Peace is the inner harmony which dwells in truth, and not outer adjustments. Man will become extinct if he does not make a conscious effort to regenerate his mind and spirit.”

~ Rabindranath Tagore (writing four generations ago)

“Until now, human intelligence, which is no more than a minute aspect of universal intelligence, has been distorted and misused by the ego. Call it ‘intelligence in the service of madness.’ Splitting the atom requires great intelligence. Using that intelligence for building and stockpiling atom bombs is insane or at best extremely unintelligent. Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous. This intelligent stupidity, for which one could find countless examples, is threatening our survival as a species.

“The force behind the ego’s wanting creates ‘enemies,’ that is to say, reaction in the form of an opposing force of equal intensity. The stronger the ego, the stronger is the sense of separateness between people. The only actions that do not cause opposing reactions are those that are aimed at the good of all. They are inclusive, not exclusive. They are not for ‘my’ country, but for all humanity, not for ‘my’ species, but for all sentient beings and all of nature.

“We are learning that action, although necessary, is a secondary factor in manifesting our external reality. The primary factor is consciousness. No matter how active we are, how much effort we make, our state of consciousness creates our world. If there is no change on that inner level, no amount of action will make any difference.”

~ Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 2005

The Battle Is For the Mind of Man

“Final freedom is achieved in a silence beyond all words, and rests on the realization that we are One.”

~ Mansoor Abdullah, Yoga Teacher, personal communication

War is caused by ignorance of our own true nature, which is peace. When we let go of grasping, we can experience an insight of that true nature of peace. This can be done by introspection: mental purification through self-observation. From this comes the realization that war is something we create. When anger ceases, what remains? Peace.

Consciousness is not a culturally conditioned phenomenon. It begins at birth and is experienced through our bodies. When we are born, we don’t see ourselves as Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, male, female, and so on. We acquire perceptions of ourselves later. If we judge another culture, it is through the values of our own culture — values which are relative. Consciousness is that which remains when there are no attachments of any kind. Consciousness is not cultural — it is the point where we all merge. To experience this unity of consciousness is the way out of humanity’s crisis.

~ Adapted from Ajahn Sumedho, Abbot of Amravati Buddhist Monastery

From Ajahn Sumedho above, we can see that the real work is within and must be done by each one of us. Ultimately, it comes to this. Yet, for me, our current crisis requires that we also simultaneously engage with work in the world. This is where we build the foundation of morality upon which must stand future generations. This morality is the foundation of peace. The work immediately in front of us is to spread peace and nonviolence. Now is the time.

The battle is for the mind of man. The prize is not in vanquishing some “other.” The battle is either all against all, or all for all. There can be no “other.” We are all in it together. We either grow a garden together, or we cannibalize each other in the process of turning the earth into desert. We can either plant trees together, or race to be the last person standing as he cuts down the last tree.

THE WAY OUT: ABANDON THE STATE

Freedom is not an ideal located outside the individual person. It is rather the indispensable condition for which the human being quests for completion.

~ Paulo Freire

When faced with an irresistible corporate force, imbued with an irredeemable malevolent intent demonstrated across a span of centuries, to exploit and destroy preceding cultures across all areas of politics, economics, law, tradition, and spiritual practice — and with clear evidence that its cumulative actions are destroying the land base which provides us with life — and whose products are poisoning our bodies, minds and souls — what then does a rational human being do?

What does one do when faced with a huge, ravenous, rabid dog, coming at you with its foaming mouth and fearsome jaws click-click-clicking?

To get out of the Destroyer’s way and build up a wholesome life requires a life of voluntary simplicity in direct relationship with the land, as exemplified by indigenous people around the world. Living in this simple way, one is not involuntarily contributing to planetary destruction by paying taxes. Likewise, one is not living at the expense of others.

Build a Moral Safe Harbor

When human beings embark upon this shift in sufficient numbers, forming an archipelago of light within the ocean of darkness, they will then embody themselves as the irresistible force of good, and of life — in the manner of grass that springs back even after the Nice Government Men have walked over it with their jackboots.

As Paulo Freire (1971) notes, oppressors cannot exist without their host’s consent. The oppressed internalize the image of the oppressor, and adopt his rules, becoming fearful of freedom. Freedom requires of them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.

WHY THIS GREAT AND ARDUOUS STRUGGLE?

What we have seen from past millennia is not a rise in civilization, but the rise of brutality and barbarism overcoming resistance movements led by such as Buddha, Tecumseh, Chitto Harjo, Sarah Winnemucca, Handsome Lake, and Emiliano Zapata.

~ JD Forbes 1973

First, it is because we would live, and not die killed by the State Power Machine.

Asked why the attempt to climb Mt. Everest, the pioneering mountaineer George Mallory said, “Because it’s there.” Thus does freedom’s quest beckon the human spirit — because it’s there — planted within our breasts by the Great Beneficence which has ordered this Universe in the harmonics of the spheres.

The quest for freedom is also the quest for beauty, and from this quest there can be no turning back. The realization of beauty is the touchstone of our humanity.

Freedom’s beauty is akin to the beauty of love, accompanied by its nigh unbearable ecstatic pain. The exalted beauty of the flower is in its gift freely given.

The beauty of freedom is so great that one cannot contemplate it without the pain of great longing to merge with it forever, and thus achieve Self Realization.

As in these lines modified from the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa di Avila, one’s body becomes itself the burning torch of freedom…

“An angel very beautiful
and so aflame he seemed to be all on fire…
and left me utterly consumed
by the great love of God…
The sweetness of this intense pain
so extreme that one cannot
wish it to cease
nor is one’s soul content with anything else…”

Carrying this mind, we won’t be able to kill anyone, because we will recognize them as ourselves (T. Thalya, personal communication).

This freedom can be won only from a state of deep humility, accepting that I don’t know who I am, where I came from, where going, and therefore certainly possessing no right to tell another who he is.

“I am made wise by the knowledge that I am a fool.”

~ Dhammapada

CLOSING LINES OF AN AMERICAN WAR RESISTER IN EXILE

Camped at Dhangu Kharak ~ Jeff Knaebel, 2002

I once wore a three-piece suit
and bid for contracts
at the feet of Multinational Power
and visited Washington
and swam there
in the sea of lies
my dignity far beneath
Himalaya’s simple shepherd
as he offered in his work-worn hands
a cup of tea for me
his uninvited guest.

Eyes direct and honest
broad smile beaming friendship
sincere
"Auram se" quietly said,
"Take rest, brother."

I know what I know
from my own direct experience
the change can happen
only from the inside
from quotidian introspection.
It must be done
one by one
no other can do it for me
nor I for any other.

Only this carnage
may cause me to turn away
in disgust
at what we have become
and thus to begin again
the long inward journey
to the One Source
of all Compassion.

Our ultimate power is the profound legitimacy of our cause, the strength of our struggles, and the foundation of our organized communities.

~ Victoria Tauli-Corpuz (2006)

May you walk in beauty,

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

Jeff Knaebel Archives

DIGG THIS

That Our Days May Be Long on the Earth

“Wars, revolutions and riots mark the ravages of a mental plague as effectively controllable as any other epidemic when the cause is known and understood. They are not accidental episodes, brought about by a chance combination of circumstances, but a foreseeable outcome of a prolonged violation of evolutionary laws [of consciousness].”

~ Gopi Krishna (1968)

INTRODUCTION — A RECONNAISSANCE FOR SERENITY

The human mind is becoming ever more brutalized by an escalating cycle of institutionalized structural violence. Extrapolation of present systemic tendencies demonstrates the clear and present danger of destruction of our planetary ecological life support. It becomes important for more and more people to contribute to the pool of quiet in human consciousness.

Natural beauty elevates the mind. The grand and the beautiful motivate simplicity, goodness and truth. Outer stillness and peace support inner calm and equanimity. Simplicity supports inward focus. A place of beauty reminds us to hold Nature as our sacred gift. It is good for people to know that unspoiled places for retreat and meditation yet exist. A place where one can stand at night in silent awe and actually see our celestial canopy of stars.

World peace can arise only from individual peace. It would be good to preserve in human consciousness a remembrance of our blue-green planetary jewel, that we may not mindlessly destroy her. Thus the “Dhamma Himgiri” dream arose in my mind. I would try to help create a place in Grand Himalaya for contemplation and meditation in surroundings of beauty, stillness, peace. It should be a place beyond roads and the unremitting noise of modern life.

I set up a base in Kausani, Uttaranchal from which to make this attempt. I lived in a dirt-floor stone hut of two small rooms with outside latrine. Water was hand carried from a nearby spring. I took two meals per day on hire from my landlord, sharing their daily fare of rice, dal, chapatti and occasional vegetable.

Between explorations into the hills, I attempted to learn Hindi. Trying to follow the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, various one-man proactive service projects were initiated: village school construction, establishment of school libraries across Kumaon District, English tutoring of local schoolteachers, village drinking water project, assist local designer of farm implements, support local Gandhi Ashram, initiation of weekly group meditation.

The “Himgiri” reconnaissance stretched from Chamoli District of eastern Garhwal into the Pithoragarh District of eastern Kumaon. Transport was bus, jeep, horse and on foot. We slept on floors of homes and schoolrooms. We ranged up to three days walk from road-head and crested ridges above 4,000 meters.

Subsistence was frequently cold chapattis with salt. Some of the moves — up to twelve hours continuous walking in steep terrain — taxed my mid-sixties age frame to its limit. Chronic amoebic dysentery and recurring respiratory infections became part of my life routine.

Hearts and hearths were everywhere opened to us. Pure grace was the hospitality, generosity and kindness of our village hosts. They shared all of whatever they had, no matter how little. Nonetheless, barriers of language and culture proved daunting. Accurate information is hard to come by. One learns to deal with continuous ambiguity and uncertainty. Progressively constructive accomplishment is difficult because support arrangements keep on dissolving and corruption is rampant, pervasive, and deeply embedded.

No matter what is said of India, the opposite is also true — a cultural reflection of the duality of consciousness. For the seeker of Truth, the Dharma of India, the Grace of India is manifold.

Her great jewel is acceptance and respect for all serious seekers of ultimate reality. One’s outer circumstances support the inner quest to realize by direct insight the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha: the truths of misery, the origin of misery, the eradication of misery, the scientific method of its eradication.

VIGNETTES OF A PILGRIM

“Human love could not exist if the Universe, of which humans are a part, were not capable of love.”

~ Paul Fleischman, Cultivating Inner Peace

Our jam-packed bus careens for long hours on twisty mountain roads. People somehow maneuver for those with motion sickness to be at a window. There are no complaints. Everyone is accepting, calmly enduring. Sometimes the women sing.

Wearing good trekking shoes, I struggle for footing on steep rocky trails. Old women tread barefoot, bent under heavy loads of cattle fodder. Their feet are deeply cracked and coated with muck and grime. It is a heart-wrenching scene. Nearly all are smiling, cheerful.

I am reminded of Mohandas Gandhi speaking of the Champaran villagers: “They received me as though we had been age-old friends. It is no exaggeration, but the literal truth, to say that in this meeting with the peasant I was face to face with God, Ahimsa and Truth.”

As for me, I cannot but question my former profligate lifestyle. It was as if by acquiring more things and “power” experiences I could fill the empty void of loneliness within. May I learn fewness of wishes and generosity from these mountain villagers. May I learn to nourish the life of our shared Earth.

Our camp in the high alpine meadow is overlooked by Trisul Massif, Mrigthuni, Devistan, Nanda Khat, Nanda Kot and sacred Nanda Devi. Visible far to the southeast, 8100-meter Annapurna and Dhaulgiri rise into the cerulean blue of a Nepal sky.

Three days ago I had crouched shivering under a rock ledge taken as night shelter from wind-driven rain and hail. Today we sit at the threshold of the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, bathed in sunshine. The moving hand tries to catch the mind …

Awesome beauty
timeless mountain majesty
grandeur enrobed
in shrouds of cloud

A distant eagle soars
grace rising higher and higher
now on white, now on blue
My eyes track toward heaven

Spontaneously arising compassion
simpatico and peace
radiating to all
that live and breathe

O’ Peace!
Thou art so great
may all beings
come to know thee

May all find the way
that leads to beyond
Yes, beyond even this pass
of majestic splendour
to that eternal state
of infinite peace

Wasted the life
lived for me alone
a speck in the galaxy
of all that is

A way must be made
to share this peace and beauty
else like love not given away
it shall not exist

May the son of man have a place to dwell
in sacred silence
May beauty and stillness
awaken the highest beatitudes

May remembrance of untrammeled wilderness
with all creatures born free
not vanish from the mind of man
that he may abide in love of life

May beauty and the mystery
raise questions beyond all answers
Who am I? From where have I come?
Where am I going? How may I understand, penetrate
the cause of birth, old age, decay and death?
How shall I live?

Blessed be this awesome grandeur
by its light one sees his sacred duty —
a duty of moral responsibility
universal kindness toward all beings
turn toward the pole star beckoning
of truth and peace
heed not the drums of war
commune with a cow.

Every religion and worthy philosophy teaches that durable happiness requires the moral life, a disciplined mind and mental purity, out of which flows compassion. Simple precepts difficult of practice. They are taught in all great traditions at intellectual level. Yet, these truths do not incline toward actuality until reaching a level of experiential understanding deeper than intellect. Many great teachers knew what had to be done. Few have been able to teach how to do it. Here does the Buddha excel, great super scientist of India.

TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE

Every day that I deny the Powers That Be of the Corporate Warfare State their hold on me — every little self-denial of the comforts and entertainments offered by Power to keep me bemused and unquestioning of their murderous atrocities — brings me one tiny step closer to freedom. It is mind that matters.

“To thine own self be true, and then as surely as night follows day, will you be true to others.” This does not apply to political groupthink. It applies only to thinking individuals. And no one can “represent” another in this. Only each one can represent his or her own conscience. Only individuals possess moral agency. Therefore, it is impossible that a “representative” democracy can be moral.

I had looked at the world around me for ways that I might help alleviate suffering. I hoped to contribute to development of a new social paradigm, a re-design of our institutional architecture. I found myself too limited, with few friends, and none “willing” — not many wish to speak truth to power. I thought — how can I contribute to world change if I cannot change even myself? All the players are acting their own parts according to the laws of karma.

At the least, I must not contribute to the violence. And perhaps I might stir the pot with a few ideas written for peace. Ideas of liberty and spirit. Ideas for a community of love and reason.

The Way has been lost. We stand on the brink of a maniacal holocaust. How shall we live?

“The path is made by walking.”
~ African proverb

Part of my former livelihood depended upon a modest skill as an aviator. This much I learned: that one will not long survive without a reliable compass and unless he calculates and flies within the envelope of certain essentials: time to destination, fuel quantity, rate of burn, time to point of no return. Presently, as pilots and crew of spaceship earth, we are attempting to navigate based upon charts that have been deliberately falsified (lies of the State).

In addition, the politically motivated fear inculcated by the State is equivalent to having our compass knocked off its gimbals. We also don’t know our fuel load or the rate of burn as we destroy the ecological system that supports all life, ours included. In short, we are well and truly lost.

Borrowing from Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth, 2005), one observes that the history of the State since the industrial revolution is a history of madness. If the manifestations of insanity of the Political Establishment were the clinical case history of an individual person, the diagnosis would be chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty — criminally insane.

The history of Statism — allegedly inspired by the noble ideals promulgated in all manner of international charters — is clear evidence of what happens when a Power Structure attempts to change external reality without a prior change of the inner reality of the power holders. Without changing the state of inner consciousness to free it from ego, there can only be destruction.

The Power to Plunder

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

~ Frdric Bastiat, The Law

I sit at my keyboard pondering an institutionalized system of structural violence whose “managers” are of, by and for power only — who use the “constituted authority” vested in a fractional reserve-central bank-printed fiat currency regime for their selfish benefit. The main job of policymakers of the Federal Reserve, IMF, World Bank and other Central Banks is never discussed. It is to transfer wealth to the State through currency depreciation.

As of 2006, the US dollar had lost 93% of purchasing power since creation of Federal Reserve in 1913. By this legalized thievery are the people made poor. To this financial power is added the power to tax and to control trade. To ensure ultimate compliance, overwhelming military power is used at will. Thus does power maintain its grip.

I see clearly that in the hands of power we all of us are mere pawns for their self- aggrandizement. All of the civic issues for which we pay taxes — health, education, welfare, security, infrastructure, communications, scientific research, environment — all of these are mere chips to be gamed by power to multiply and increase itself without end.

For power, there is no tomorrow. There are no grandchildren. Even of earth there is none. There is only power.

* * *

Ethics of Respect

“To avoid all evil, to cultivate good and to cleanse one’s own mind — this is the teaching of the Buddhas.”

~ Dhammapada

A few feet to the south of my desk is an open window. Between the outer grille and inner mesh a pair of munias deftly weave their tight round nest of long-bladed grass. They flutter and chirp, oblivious to human madness. They live as nature intended. We live in denial of our cannibalism.

These wild creatures born free — they live and bring into being the next generation, and then die in their natural term. They do not self-destruct by poisoning their own nest. Perhaps we have something to learn from munias. And from wolves, elephants, ants, worms, bumblebees and buffalo and whales. Perhaps we must unlearn everything we have been taught, in order to relearn how to live.

Ecologists Bateson and Whitehead taught that any physical being which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide. The activity of an organism in any living system must favor both the environment and the organism itself. This is not rocket science. It is simple common sense. Maybe that is the problem: it is too simple for an over developed intellect inclined to abstractions.

The Buddha taught that sila (morality) in respect of non-killing is on three levels:

• Abstain yourself from killing
• Do not support others engaged in killing
• Do not approve of others engaged in killing

It is clear to me that paying taxes to any government on this earth in present times amounts to direct finance of murder. It violates directly and implicitly the Buddha’s precepts. Paying taxes makes of one a material accomplice to murder.

How can I escape my derivative responsibility as an accomplice in finance of war when the whole economy is geared to war? Simply to participate voluntarily as an “upwardly mobile” member of a mindlessly destructive culture is, at the least, acquiescence to mass murder.

I live on savings and try to contribute to society as a one-way flow. I am aware of how fortunate I have been to enable this manner of living. I was a moderately successful rat in the race who took his chance to jump off the treadmill. I am not a highly evolved moral being. Along with moderate success has come immense failure, primarily caused by my own flaws of character.

I am a learner. I take solace in the perception that all of life is an experiment, and that there can be no failed experiment — only collection of more data.

It is not necessary to be a student of the Buddha — or of any religion, or of any tradition — to understand these things. It is self-evident to anyone who loves life.

The human mind is diseased, as if by a metastasizing cancer poisoning every fiber of the social fabric, as if by an epidemic sweeping through city and village. And the relation of the Corporate Warfare State to this epidemic is the relation of mosquito to malaria.

This warfare state demands of me “show your papers.” As if it is my owner and I am its property. It feels like I am one of a herd of sheep being pressed and hemmed from all sides into a cave which will then be sealed and smoked until we are all dead, to be eaten by corporate cannibals — the last remaining fodder after all else has been laid waste. Enough of this.

We Must Look at this Horror and Yet Still Love

“Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be concerned. They therefore do as they like.”

~ Edward Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, (1731—1806)

We have lost control of our lives to a force we cannot see, cannot reckon with and have no influence over. It is far away while simultaneously all-pervasive. We must take back control of our lives. To do this we must take back personal responsibility for our human duties to family and community. We must not abrogate our responsibilities to faceless unaccountable institutions.

The creative spirit of the human being cannot operate from the imprisonment of a bureaucratic box. No being who dwells within a physical body can survive without attentiveness to self-interest. If it is to be, it is up to me. Only individuals can be moral agents.

Groups and incorporated organizations cannot be moral agents. These entities are abstractions which cannot feel pain and cannot love. They are not alive in facing the consequences. Therefore, they make decisions and undertake actions which an individual living being would not do. An individual who must carry the full burden of personal liability behaves differently than an organization or group in which liability is abstract and impersonal.

When we address these issues only at intellectual level, we miss a subtle and paramount characteristic of our interconnection with the living system of which we are an integral biological part.

We must educate our own children, personally care for our own health, and establish our own local markets. We must withdraw from the system-structure-machine in order to regain dignity, self-respect, independence and self-sufficiency. When we offload our responsibilities we also waive our rights and become dependent upon outside forces.

The Present Civilization Is Chronic War

“What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.”

~ Mohandas Gandhi

The following excerpt of a recent email received from John Zerzan (author of Running on Emptiness) provides an overview of our situation.

Not only is our Mother Earth very gravely imperiled,but social existence and our very souls are as well. We have progressively lost wholeness, community, direct experience, healthiness, and a sense of meaning or purpose in our lives. The most industrialized, high-tech cultures are beset by ever more pathological phenomena, such as outbreaks of mass homicides, parents killing their children, and epidemic drug use.

We see what complex society brings, we see that civilization is chronic war, that mass society is desolate, cynical, anxious, depressed.

None of this is inevitable, much less natural. We must struggle for simplicity, for a face-to-face world, a non-standardized, non-globalized world.

Symbolic culture itself is proving empty, a voyage away from a sensual connection to the earth, away from real spirituality.

We need to begin to move away from the death march of modernity, to combat it with actual alternatives, and by changing the discourse in society in a fundamental way. It is time to think and act in the profoundly different ways that reality is strongly prompting. This includes, for example, taking Gandhi and indigenous wisdom seriously, not merely as objects of non-practical veneration.

Some Roots of the Problem

“We live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

~ Walker Percy, circa 1961

Gopi Krishna (1968) says that the reason for the current confusion about the real nature of consciousness is the overemphasis of scientists on purely physical phenomena, and the skeptical attitude of many gifted individuals in this fertile field. Mind and consciousness has been relegated to the background.

The secrets of the brain and the nature of consciousness are unsolved riddles, yet the so-called rationalist and positivist idealogues generate mental chaos about the real nature of spiritual experience. For the materialist, mind is no more than a product of biochemical activity of the brain.

Our brinkmanship on the edge of oblivion can in part be attributed to the failure of humanity’s most gifted minds to assess which of the two constituents of the human personality merited the greater attention. The one is matter, which caters to the needs of our perishable flesh. The other is mind, the source of our being, the magical vibrations of an intelligence through which alone we know ourselves and the universe within which we have taken our being.

It is a tragic paradox. Our leading minds, giants of intellect on the one side, behave like children on the other, attaching greater value to emoluments of power, wealth, office, and public praise than to the principles of truth, justice and harmony.

A Comanche Elder named Edgar Monathatchee once told me that the longest journey for the white man is from here — pointing to his forehead — to here — pointing to his heart.

Mankind is on the verge of disaster because the minds at the top lack the spiritual insight to make right use of their intellect. The answer to the problem of our survival is beyond the present capacity of science, or technology, or politics. It requires a moral awakening.

Teetering Toward Oblivion

Our aim has been to surround mankind with every comfort, every facility, and every luxury, leaving the souls out of count. The plan of nature, on the contrary, is to evolve the brain in order to embellish the mind, and to confer a supersensory channel of perception on the race. Since the two aims collide, disaster threatens.

~ Gopi Krishna

The most powerful nations of earth, possessed of staggering technological prowess, malevolently prowl the ring of an arena of planetary incineration, courting Total War because the spiritual capacity of the top minds is obscured by an intellect disconnected from the heart. And these top minds control the levers of an institutional power structure which has grown into a colossus beyond the scale of human comprehension. No one can know where we are. We are lost.

Gopi Krishna writes that man is not born to exhaust his intellectual and material resources on devising ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction, or exploring outer space while millions die of malnutrition, or turning the good green earth into a refuse heap of plastic and toxic waste. Man is born to find a solution to the problem of his own existence.

As Kurt Vonnegut says in Man Without a Country, “We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.”

If We Would Save Ourselves

You see things with your own eyes. You hear things with your own ears. Therefore, you should use your own mind to tell yourself what you are seeing or hearing. If others interpret things for you, they will be doing it for their own benefit and not yours. The humanity in all of us knows who we are, and who gave us the Earth to give us life.

~ Lincoln Tritt, Gwich’in Elder, personal communication September 2008

Although knowing full well that I am among the lost, there is a feeling of confidence behind this guarantee: Nice Government Men are not morally fit for the task we face. They are but servants of the philosophy that is killing us. Leave them.

What does a physically fit and rational man do when faced with a malevolent, voracious, man-eating monster that is poised to pounce at any moment? He removes himself from harm’s way.

Get out from the State. Find your tribe. Get on the land. Form a small community of the ethically like-minded and become self-sufficient. Learn how to live long and live free.

Eckhart Tolle writes that the first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans to the beauty that is an essential part of their own true innermost being. In more ways than one, the recommended way to save ourselves is to grow a garden. And don’t open any mail that comes from the government.

The meek are the egoless. They are evolving toward an awakening consciousness (see Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken) that is changing all aspects of life on our earth, including nature, because life on earth is inseparable from the human consciousness with which it interacts. This is the sense in which the meek will inherit the earth.

And these meek avoid power, going instead by the code of live and let live. If we are to survive as a species, it will be because sufficient numbers of us have abandoned the State and left it to collapse of its own internal rot.

These ideas are further discussed in my book, Experiments in Moral Sovereignty, but for superior workmanship and guidance, read Wendell Berry, starting with The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. Practice resurrection.

May you walk in beauty.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

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DIGG THIS

“Communism is power based upon force and limited to nothing, by no kind of law and by absolutely no set rule.”

~ Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, page 361

The (American) “security organs” can designate and kill as they see fit

“Solicitor General Ted Olson has described the process: ‘There is no requirement for the executive branch to spell out its criteria for who qualifies as an illegal combatant. There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations made by the executive that are going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.’”

“In other words, what is safe to say today, might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the ‘law’ is merely whim of the leader and his minions: their ‘instincts’ determine your guilt or innocence, and these gut ‘feelings’ can change from day to day. This is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government. And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder.”

“Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people. But that is our reality. To overcome what seems to be widespread cognitive dissonance, we need only examine the publicly available record. There is nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know — if they choose to know it.”

“Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval. Nor is it necessary any longer for the president to approve new names added to the target list…the ‘security organs’ can designate and kill as they see fit. There is no way of knowing how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally… the death squads are able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to enter countries surreptitiously.” — Chris Floyd, truthout.org, 2 October 2006

“Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice. Nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity.”

~ Lord Acton

“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”

~ Patrick Henry

George W. Bush: “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck at them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did …” — as reported by Palestinian leaders to whom Bush spoke after the Iraq invasion.

There you have it, folks. In a nutshell, the quotes above tell us our place in the system: do as you are told, or we will kill you. The rest is all detail. One nuance of history might be highighted for the reader. The men who possess these powers of life and death have rather consistently exhibited patterns of psychopathic behavior in the form of mass murder and torture. In addition to Bush, Hitler and Lenin quoted above, you might consider, among recent others, Mussolini, Stalin, Truman, Mao, Suharto. The list continues ad nauseam throughout history. Hierarchical power structures appear to be an evolutionary dead end for humanity.

My Experiential Observations of Power (abridged)

I’ve served my country in foreign war zones and returned to face the derision of protestors whom I was supposedly “protecting.” I rotated myself from resentment to an understanding that they were correct. My friend who had chained himself to other war protestors while they burned their draft cards was a braver man than I.

For them it had worked. Neither conscripted nor prosecuted, they were too hot to handle. I have arrived at a deep respect for the moral competence and physical courage of my young friend. Nonviolence is not for cowards.

I saw “over there” some of the same big construction contractors who, after merger and consolidation, are now gorging on Iraq war profits. I recall a naval leadership journal which carried photos of a French tank mired in a rice paddy circa 1948, alongside a photo of an American tank mired in a rice paddy circa 1968. Paired images of a killing field, stalked hyena-like by cold-blooded central bankers and their political consorts. The dead are but abstractions reported to a balance sheet as corporate dividends. Political payoffs are footnoted as “other expenses.”

Today we are viewing the updated remix as “Shock and Awe” murder-of-every-living-thing-from-a-safe-distance. It would pound the earth itself into submissive dust on the Emperor’s shoes. An imperialist gone mad in its greed for oil, for corporate dividends, for unlimited power, its mass murder spares not woman nor child nor cow. The revolving door of power brokers rotating between government-defense contracting-banking leads to the same bloody dead end, generation after generation.

Of Power, this much I know from experience both over and under:

• It aggrandizes itself, feeding upon everything in its path
• It comes as corporate CEO and abusive husband, as admiral and chairman, as dictator and patriarch
• Greed is its energy and cowards it crushes, although itself cowardly
• Courage it cannot withstand, especially moral
• It corrupts absolutely kindness into cruelty
• It knows no limit of acquisitiveness
• It attracts the corruptible and the corrupt
• It is pure evil in the hands of no matter whom
• It usually wears a mask
• In the five generations with which I have had direct contact it has brought misery, murder, rape and pillage
• And the nuclear bomb

The battle is for the mind of man. The prize is no longer in vanquishing some “other.” The battle is either all against all or all for all. There is no “other” to conquer. We are all in it together. We either grow a garden together or we cannibalize each other in the course of turning the earth into a desert. We can either plant trees together, or race to be the last person standing to cut down the last tree.

ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS OF THE STATE

“Total war is the invention of the modern State.”

~ Michael Rozeff, 2 August 2005

“Since a human being has no power to create life, he has, therefore, no right to destroy life.”

~ T. N. Khoshoo, 1995

The State as an organization keeps on running with periodic changes of management called elections. Because of its ability to make laws and impose taxes, its power is limited only by the tolerance of the people for their exploitation. The State can coerce its members without reciprocal consequences. It operates without fear of reprisal. It can use aggressive force to make others do things against their will. Its “managers” are protected by sovereign immunity. Because it both rules and taxes, it suffers no agency costs for its errors: it simply shifts the cost to taxpayers.

“To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed adding insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State does. Read the Congressional Record; follow the proceedings of the State legislatures; examine our statute books. Testing each Act separately by the law of equal liberty, you will find that a good nine tenths of existing legislation serves not to that fundamental social law, but either to prescribe the individual’s personal habits, or worse, to create and sustain commercial, industrial, financial and proprietary monopolies which deprive labor of a large part of the reward that it would receive in a true free market.”

~ Benjamin Tucker, 1890

The US is not a contractual State in the sense of an organization owned by its principals, the citizens. It has become a predatory State in the sense of a corporation owned and operated by a small group. This evolution was made inevitable by the weaknesses of the Constitution and actions of the power brokers and legislature. Rozeff (3 August 2006) estimates that the top management group of USA comprises between 15 and 60 members. These members rotate in revolving door fashion between and among various centers of social and political power. The figureheads and mouthpieces — the Kennedys, Nixons, Clintons, Bushes — are all fungible, each can be replaced by another without perturbing the system. In this manner do elections always come to a choice between two morally indistinguishable candidates. Likewise, no matter who you vote for, the political establishment always gets elected.

A few dozen people control the vast bureaucracies. The State’s power depends upon holding the loyalty and obedience of these career employees within the power structure. This is done by passing out special privileges and emoluments. Napoleon noted the amazing lust of men for awards and decorations. The final tool in the arsenal of control is to heap honors upon those who have been corrupted.

M.S. Rozeff (see Lew Rockwell website) argues that the State lowers the cost of immorality, and people subsequently demand more State. Those who do occasionally resist face an “immortal” foe that owns the law-making power. People will rationalize their greater demand for immorality with new ideas of right and wrong. Giving up liberty in exchange, they will come to worship authority, equality, the use of force, and power. They will move away from self-reliance, responsibility, obligation to elders and the disadvantaged of society. They will accept, even enjoy their new situation. The State corrupts social morals and human beings.

“Buy the law-makers, buy the laws, and you become the law itself. That is the definition of corporate freedom.”

~ William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org, 2 July 2006

The State Corrodes the Moral Fabric of Society

Rozeff continues with a logical listing of how the State weakens society.

• The State’s power is desirable to many in itself and for what it can enable. It is a focal point for any group that wishes to gain at the expense of others by using State power. The State’s existence arouses political competition for power that diverts people from productive activity to theft from others.
• The State’s existence provides incentive for expansion of power that can be used for one group’s gain at expense of another.
• The State is an endorsement of immoral behavior (theft) that is declared legal. This encourages similar behavior within society.
• State monopoly over law and justice in itself weakens society. Individuals must use the State to settle disputes, thus losing the remedy of private institutions to mediate justice. They lose pathways of communication, consort and cooperation with each other. They can no longer forgive trespass in a regime of State prosecution. Compassion is sacrificed at the altar of greed.
• State-made law displaces deeper and more permanent sources of natural law, thus cutting ancient roots and destabilizing society.
• The State offers opportunities for gain available to its “management class.” This not only fosters immorality, but provides incentive to keep on increasing the State’s power.
• The State leverages its power by exploiting the natural weakness of mankind. In order to increase its domination, the State makes immoral behavior acceptable by making it officially legal. It fosters immorality by making it a group action for which the individual is no longer held accountable.
• States, being immortal, can wait indefinitely for its opportunity, always ready to amplify any lack of virtue or weakness in society. Such weaknesses include failing to take responsibility for one’s own life, shifting burdens to others, extracting un-earned benefits from others, excessive fear or greed, desires for revenge or domination, communal rivalries with friction and hatred, exacerbating racial or class prejudice.

He discusses how the State maintains power. Although the rulers make some attempt to rationalize their costs of dominating society, given the Central Bank’s power to print money, there is little incentive for cost control. Furthermore, it is always other people’s money. Need more money for more bombs? Just crank up the printing press — and rob the people with the silent tax of inflation. Some of the means in current practice are here excerpted and adapted from M.S. Rozeff:

• Removing constitutional checks and balances
• Subverting the Bill of Rights
• Abrogation of Habeas Corpus
• Secret police and spying on citizens
• National identification cards
• Manipulation through tax incentives
• Creating and exacerbating fears of terrorism
• Ballot access control
• Rigging of electronic voting machines
• Public smear of dissidents (e.g., “they are soft on terrorism”)
• Creating error of psychological identification. Merging of one’s native cultural identity into identity with the State, e.g., patriotism
• Promote the error of attributing economic or social progress to the State
• Illusion of order, playing on the fear of anarchy. Fear of one’s fellow man fosters support for the State
• Illusion of security. State has no resources other than what it takes from the people, thus actually increasing their insecurity. Aggressive foreign policy further reduces objective security, although propaganda makes it subjectively appear the opposite.
• Feeding the lust for power and wealth through emoluments granted by the State to its loyal agents
• Propaganda and encouragement of gullibility and ignorance.
• Classifying government documents as “secret,” beyond view of the people
• Falsification government statistics on employment, commerce, money supply, debt, balance of payments, inflation, mortgage-lending funds
• As per Representative Jim Cooper’s new book (August 2006), keep two sets of books — a private citizen would go to jail for these and many other routine government abuses.
• Diversion of Social Security Trust funds to general operating budget
• Creating and financing sub-rosa “off-budget” government operations
• Printing press expansion of money supply through the Federal Reserve
• Direct State intervention in the market through the “plunge protection team” and the “market stabilization fund”
• Innumerable laws and regulations to create economic incentives and disincentives in order to channelize subjects’ efforts to the State’s ends: “social engineering.”
• Money and banking regulations that place the citizen under surveillance and control the movement of money
• Offloading agency and overhead costs onto the private economy, such as for collection of sales taxes, deduction of payroll taxes and social security contributions
• Making spies of private citizens through banking regulations that require surveillance of customers and filing “Suspicious Activity Reports” for any “unusual” transaction

  It will be of little avail to the people, even that laws be made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood… if they undergo such incessant changes that no man knowing what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow …Public instability gives unreasonable advantage to the sagacious, the clever, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or affecting the value of different species of property presents a new harvest to those who watch for change and can trace its consequences. A harvest raised not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of their fellow citizens. Thus are laws made for the few, not for the many.”

~ James Madison, Federalist 62

The Methods of Domination

The goal of power acting through the State is to increase its domination of society. This requires aggression against society which the citizens may at some point resist, often because of the economic burdens imposed to support power. Power does nothing economically productive — it is a parasite. There is an incentive to fool the people, who greatly outnumber the power elite. There are incentives to improve the technology of domination and to raise the costs for citizens to mobilize any resistance. A few of the many means of domination are listed:

• Direct, raw violence perpetrated by the State
• Onerous laws and laws so complex that no one can understand — you are never safe from “breaking” the laws, so numerous you cannot possibly be cognizant of them
• Inculcate “ignorance of the law is no excuse”
• Make public examples of lawbreakers by delay of justice or by issuing long sentences
• Arbitrary imprisonment of innocents to make people afraid of power
• Random and capricious police violence to induce fear in the people
• Propaganda, lies and censorship
• Concealment of true aims, actions and results thereof
• Control of education to mold the minds of youth
• Break up families by creating dependency on State welfare and public education
• Spy on dissidents — install nationwide surveillance
• Inculcate obedience as a primary virtue
• Raise false fears and pretend to mitigate them (e.g., color-coded “alerts”)
• Conflate the State with country and love of country
• Appeal to popular values like equality, universal health care, “no child left behind”
• Make side payments to key individuals or segments of population to create belief in a “free lunch”
• Spread the false belief that the subjects control the State, own it or are the State, and that the president or leader is hired by the voters
• Pursuant to existing statutory National Emergency Powers of the President, delegate to him the authority to seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, restrict travel, take control of the stock exchange and more ….
• Take control of necessary goods and services that empower the State to deliver essential needs
• Rely on public apathy to maintain obedience
• Use compulsory public education as tool of conditioning
• Exaggerate government role in fulfilling needs of individuals and society
• Disarm the populace
• Increase ignorance and gullibility of the citizenry
• Portray State as crucial to society and order and security
• Conceal the costs of government
• Conceal the facts and effects of government interventions
• Portray State as an up-lifter of mankind, savior of the masses and downtrodden
• Spread false belief that State speaks and acts on behalf of and for the people
• Spread belief that State agents have been hired by the people to do a job
• Absorb or co-opt creative power centers in society
• Divide and rule — create factions and communal disharmony
• Use payoffs and favors of all sorts to keep people quiet, to create obligations, to blackmail (see, e.g., Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man)
• Inculcate the conditioning that it is social duty to accept State dictates even when you disagree, that majority rules — sometimes you get your way, sometimes the other guy gets his way — but we’re all one country, all in it together
• Suppress speech and communication (partly through threat of pervasive surveillance)
• Enlist, co-opt and corrupt the press — buy them if necessary
• Bestow public honors on those who serve the State agenda
• Distract public attention with falsified reports of external threat
• Distract the public with a culture of “bread and circuses”
• Bureaucratic impediments of access to the truth
• Executive orders that allow State seizure of private property
• Executive Orders that legalize corporate collusion with government and concealment of records thereof
• The catalog of evil is so long, all-pervasive and continuous, one could not finish it by writing to the end of his days…

The Mind Game of Sovereign Immunity

In a Parliamentary or Congressional legislative system, the real goal of its members is to enrich themselves and their clients. Our human energy applied to natural resources produces “income.” Congress imposes taxes to take as much as the people will tolerate without revolt. Owning the income stream is tantamount to owning the person. In this way, it can be said that Congress owns us.

The State declares war against people with whom we have no quarrel and who are no threat. It enters international trade agreements, imposes economic sanctions on selected self-created “enemies,” it regulates labor, commerce, the content of our food, the materials in our homes, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the education of our children, the price of milk, the crops we grow and the fields we lie fallow. After deduction for the part of our labor owned by the government, there is very little left over for ourselves.

“Our electoral system is nothing less than a massive influence peddling scheme where both parties conspire to sell the country to the highest bidder.”

~ Senator John McCain, 7 July 2006

“The Senate is a brothel. Access is sold to special interests. They write the bills and we vote for them.”

~ Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC), after retirement

The constitution bequeathed monopoly powers to the central government. The powers to tax and regulate can destroy any citizen opposition. The people were enslaved right from the start. The practical reality is that we the people are ruled through a revolving door of power relations among individuals. The executive branch possesses the power to act and command. It is smaller and more united than the legislative. It will gradually assume dictatorial power, with legislative in the role of rubber stamp. When the chief executive issues orders, what can Congress do? What would it want to do, since its members are being fed from the same trough, profiting from the same wars?

Organizations built solely on power relationships have great scope for destruction. Those who aspire to power tend to be overly aggressive, rapacious, cruel, opportunistic, manipulative and violent. They are willing to gamble the lives and fortunes of those whom they rule. They exhibit an attenuated moral conscience.

The trail toward progressively increasing power leads ultimately to the person who regulates others, but is not himself regulated. The fatal design error is monopoly of force acting from behind the shield of Sovereign Immunity. The following observations are drawn from the works of Michael Rozeff published by LewRockwell.com.

The political game is a game of power relations among individuals. Politics is about getting and using power. Power deals with force and taking. Like other human drives, power is motivated by personal gain. Gain is measured by increase of power and wealth. Politics is always about taking from some and giving to others. Politics leads to theft. Politics becomes theft itself.

Those who have power seek more power. Once a power structure is created, such as a State, it will tend to increase its power through the cumulative power drive of its agents. Power corrupts and will increase the desire for more. Since power corrupts, it tends to attract the corruptible. Even if one or a few men near the top become satisfied, there are many men in the State clawing for more power, so the game will not change.

Any balance of power in the competitive situation will be only temporary. Individual power-seekers will be constantly using every advantage and opportunity to move toward the dominant position. Therefore, politics generates concentrated centralization of power.

“Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it…Every dictator plans to rear, feed and train his fellow men as the breeder does his cattle.”

~ Ludwig von Mises

The American presidency has such immense concentrated power — of destruction — as to be almost incomprehensible. He has nuclear weaponry sufficient to destroy vast stretches of earth and perhaps mankind itself. In this sense, the president owns us, or at least has an option on our lives. It is his choice we live or die.

Given the demonstrated psychopathic tendencies of these men, we face a terrifying situation. These men have proven themselves to be far more destructive, and hence far more dangerous than all the “terrorists” put together. It amazes me that our psychological state of denial is so deeply conditioned that we do not forthwith change our system.

The State has monopoly of power, which means it has control. Ordinary citizens have no control. Operating the machinery of State as it commits atrocious crimes are people who have names and addresses. They operate from behind the shield of sovereign immunity, which is only an abstract legal fiction in which we have placed our belief. It is amazing how few are the men who control the destiny of our planet, compared to how many are we.

The State is a mind game. Our survival requires that we wake up to it and come out of it.

The United States Is of No Authority Except Through Naked Force

The following is abstracted from The Voluntaryist, No.129 and extended to my arguments. The traditional Hopi argue that the US government has no authority over them because the Hopi never signed a treaty “acknowledging the US government’s right of existence.” The traditionalists refuse to file any land claims with the government because “we will not ask a white man, who came to us recently, for a piece of land that is already ours and has been ours since time immemorial.” Dan Katchongva in 1951, “We want a right to live as we please, as human beings. We want a right to worship as we please and have our own land. We don’t want someone to plan our lives for us, issue us rations, social security or any other dole.”

George Yamada wrote, “Self-determination is sovereignty of self-rule. Self-determination means that a people have the sovereign right tom determine and carry out their own destiny without any authority to say whether their acts are good for them or not. Under self-determination a people have the right to make their own mistakes and be accounted for them. The US cannot give self-determination to the Hopi. All it can do is get out of the way. For the truth is, the Hopi want to run their own lives.”

A meeting of Elders (August 1955) recorded, “The laws of the Great Spirit must be followed even though they might conflict with other political laws. All instructions of the Great Spirit come from the seed of one basic instruction: You must not kill. You must love your neighbor as yourself. From this one commandment, to respect and revere life, come all the other commandments: to tell the truth, to share with others, to live together in mutual support, to take care of our children and old people, the sick and strangers, friends and enemies, to abstain from intoxicants and adultery, not to cheat, steal or covet.” In this way the Hopi strive to live according to ideals of peace and cooperation.

Years ago I worked briefly with the Hopi on an agricultural program called The Planting Stick Project. I felt a deep respect for them and I admire their spirit of peaceful resistance.

Like the Hopi, I have not freely entered into a contract granting the American State any authority over my life whatsoever.

A thought experiment: suppose I had been born into a family of slaves. By that accident of birth, have I assigned my right to life and my free will to the slave master? If not, then he holds me by force only. Is this morally valid? Is it not my right to try to escape at first chance? Must I ask his permission to escape, and get my documents stamped? Or, suppose I had been born into a family whose profession was robbery and murder. By this birth have I committed myself to support robbery and murder? Is there any moral or contractual obligation to remain with that family and suffer the consequences of a life of crime? Must I seek permission of the patriarch to make my escape? Can he rightfully demand identification and travel documents before I am free to move away?

It Is Impossible for the State to Disassociate from Evil

Even in its most equitable form, it is impossible for government to disassociate itself from evil. Furthermore, unless the right to ignore the State is recognized, its acts make of citizens accessories to crime.

The greatest danger to our liberty comes from the lawmakers. Every possible law that can be made by lawmakers must give to some more liberty than the law of nature (the law of equal justice) gives them — and more liberty than is consistent with the natural and equal liberty of other persons — or else such law must take from some persons some portion of that liberty which the law of nature gives to every human being.

Therefore, every law that can be made by lawmakers must be a violation of the natural rights and liberty of one or more persons.

Thus the very concept of a law-making government is in direct conflict with our liberty. The only way men can preserve their liberty is not to have any law-making government at all.

• Individual liberty is the only human liberty. “National / Political / Democratic” liberties are not liberty at all except as they preserve individual liberty.
• Individual liberty means freedom from all compulsions to do anything whatever. It means freedom from all coercion whatsoever so long as we harm no other.
• There is a science of liberty which every man may learn, and by which he may know what is and is not his own and every man’s liberty.
• Right of individual liberty rests upon immutable Natural Law which no human being can make, unmake or alter. Any human authority that claims to set aside or modify Natural Law is a tyranny and a crime.
• Individual liberty is a natural, inherent and inalienable right that no man can part with, nor delegate to another.
• All human law making — all commands, either by one man or any number of men calling themselves a government — demanding or forbidding anything of any individual, so long as he is not harming others, are false and tyrannical assumptions of authority and dominion. All such are violations of his inherent individual liberty, which must be resisted by anyone who would not be a slave.
• All law-making governments whatsoever — whether called monarchies, aristocracies, republics or democracies — are violations of man’s natural and rightful liberty.

The State Does Not Recognize the Natural Right of a Man to His Own Life

Once it is conceded that any man or body of men have any right to make laws of their own invention — and compel other men to obey them — then every vestige of man’s natural an rightful liberty is denied.

If any of these natural rights may be taken from him by other men, all of them may be taken. Unless all a man’s natural rights are inviolable by lawmakers, none of them are. There is not one single human right which the US government recognizes as inviolable. It takes men’s lives, liberty and property whenever its own purpose is thereby served. All this goes to prove that the government is not voluntarily established by the people for protection of their rights. It is rather a government of robbers and tyrants who claim to own the right to dispose of the people at the usurper’s pleasure.

• The State does not recognize the natural right of a man to his own life.
• The State not only denies a mans’ right — as a moral being — to express will or conscience of his own as to whether he himself will be killed in battle: it also denies his right to express will or conscience as a moral human being as to whether he shall be used as a mere instrument for killing other men.
• Is it possible to conceive of a more complete denial of all a man’s natural human rights than the denial of his right of conscience either as to being killed himself or being used as an instrument to kill others?
• The State denies the natural rights of human beings to live and move about on this planet — by the fact of its requiring licenses, fees, identification documents, passports, ration cards, building permits, land use permits, property transfer permits, tolls and such a list of restrictions of liberty as to be innumerable. The State asserts that it owns the planet and men may live upon it only by paying the State rent.
• The State denies the natural right of individuals to make their own contracts for buying, selling, borrowing, lending and trading with or marrying each other. The laws arbitrarily prohibiting or qualifying contracts that are natural and just are too numerous to list. All such prohibitions and qualifications deny men’s natural right to make their own contracts. It is by this arbitrary power over contracts that a monopoly of money is sustained.
• All taxes levied without consent are mere robbery, a violation of the natural right to the product of one’s own labor.
• The State claims the right to kill, and is always ready to kill, and esteems it the highest glory to kill, all who do not submit to its authority.
• The Supreme Court has said that Congress has power to carry on war for any reason, to any extent, against any people it pleases. Thus it says that the natural rights of mankind impose no constitutional restraints whatever upon Congress in the exercise of their lawmaking powers.
• The Court’s underlying assumption is false and tyrannical: that by a certain paper called a Constitution, which nobody ever signed, which few have read, which the great body of people have never seen, that by this document the people have all consented to the abolition of justice itself, the highest moral law of the Universe. And further, all their own natural, inherent, inalienable rights to the beneficence of that law shall be annulled, and that they themselves and everything that is theirs shall be given over to the irresponsible custody of a cabal of villains called lawmakers — who care only for gratification of their own avarice and ambition. And further, that this cabal shall be invested with the right to dispose of the lives, liberty and property of all the rest of the people, at their discretion and pleasure.

A Shameful Disgrace Upon Each Other

“The law becomes the weapon of every kind of greed. Instead of checking crime, the law itself is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.”

~ Frdric Bastiat, The Law

The following is adapted from Carl Watner, who says better than I can,

“Government is the only institution in our civilized society that is able to cover its coercion and use of threats of force in a shroud of mystique and legitimacy. Government is the institutionalization of conquest over people and property. The stated purpose of government is protection. In reality, its purpose is exploitation to extract resources. Governments excel in the use of force and threat — the political means of survival — by combining forceful conquest with ideology. Governing requires that those who govern authorize or commit criminal acts. Through education and propaganda the people are conditioned to accept government as a natural part of their environment. Their demand for government services is what fuels the State. So long as the criminality is veiled by the political process, people accept it without seeing that it conflicts with their basic values. It is concealment of government criminality that is the tragedy.

“Perhaps the tragedy can be made more plain. Look at the daily news. It reports one group or another appealing to the government for its special agenda. The tragedy is that people do not realize it is their own neighbors from whom they are stealing in order to support their special program. The political process is purposefully impersonal. The secret ballot and the use of majority vote obscure the fact that it is our neighbor — perhaps the struggling widow — who is being threatened at gunpoint if they do not fill the government coffers or follow its mandates.

“Few people would directly confront their neighbors with a demand of “Your money or your life!” The structure of politics allows the supporters and perpetrators to conceal — even from themselves — the evil reality of what they are doing. Such is the real tragedy of political government.”

~ The Voluntaryist No.79

“The State is that great fiction by everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”

~ Frdric Bastiat

Historical Perspective in Support of Stateless Society

Let’s see if things have changed since the times of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the French anarchist writing at about the same time as America’s Henry David Thoreau.

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. [emphasis added]

To be governed is to beat every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the public interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; and then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.

That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.” (from www.bind.org)

I ask you, does this not describe the present day America of the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act and warrantless surveillance without probable cause and suspension of habeas corpus? Some may argue that it is “voluntary servitude,” but it is not voluntary with me.

We Cannot Escape Our Responsibility

As noted in Proudhon, and extending further back — at least to the ancient Egyptians — the nature, character, volition, intent and morality of government does not change across time. Only the tools and techniques adapt to changing circumstance and capability.

The State is no more than the mechanism through which cycles of violence are perpetuated by individual persons whose corrupted minds are drawn to Power and domination.

The tools and techniques now in play are of such awesome power as to call into question the continued existence of the human species. I have heard of no weapon designed by man that has never been employed. So-called decent, civilized democracies fire-bombed Dresden, atom-bombed Hiroshima, napalmed millions of civilians in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The weaponry now available to the mindless madness of Power freezes the imagination into apathetic fear. And we who participate in democracies approve of this by our votes — all candidates are meaningless choices from the Establishment. And after we have voted for it, we democratic citizens pay for it. It is us. We cannot escape our responsibility.

The revolution we now face is not of a society, or a government, or a State — it is a planetary revolution of survival of the human race. If we do not abolish or abandon the State as a human institution, it will destroy us.

For further discussion of these ideas, see www.freeofstate.org, where the emphasis is on anarchy. Which simply means self-rule and not rule by a central outside authority. Depending upon the moral fabric of its participants, it could bring to an end the organized criminal violence of the Corporate Warfare State.

“Non cooperation with evil is as much our duty as is cooperation with the good.”

~ Mohandas Gandhi

Since the State is intrinsically evil due to the ethical flaw of its intention, design and as-built structure, it seems to me that the only way to be non-cooperative with it is to abandon it altogether. Certainly, the State is utterly irredeemable.

Although this job of reclaiming self-ownership and self-rule is difficult, it can be done. Guidance — and perhaps inspiration — can be found in Voluntary Simplicity (Elgin); Forest Farming (Douglas and Hart); The One Straw Revolution (Fukuoka); Blessed Unrest (Hawken); Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (Ananthu); The Way (Goldsmith), plus nearly all of the works of E.F. Schumacher, Thich Naht Hanh, and Wendell Berry.

May you live long, live free.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

Jeff Knaebel Archives

DIGG THIS

Excerpted from his book Experiments in Moral Sovereignty.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda that Harold Pinter quoted in his Nobel Lecture in December 2005. Pinter made profoundly disturbing remarks about American and British conduct in the Iraq War. He quoted Neruda’s poem about Spain to make an image of the deliberate bombing of civilians by States as has been their characteristic throughout the past century.

“And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

From every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which one day will find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.

This poem — I’m Explaining a Few Things — was written at about the midpoint of the bloodiest century in known human history. Much more blood would be spilled before century’s end. This was the so-called “American Century.” The century of the Nuclear Nation State. The century when the power of science and technology began to double at the rate of geometric progression. In the womb of this century was conceived the current American policy of “Full Spectrum Dominance,” to be imposed upon others by “Shock and Awe” of death raining from the sky.

“Force is that which turns a person into a thing — either a corpse or slave.”

~ Simone Weil

Gandhi wrote, “The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence.” Others have noted, “War is the health of the State.”

“States are not agents of morality and peace. They are instruments of force, disruption, disorder, death, dismemberment, and war instigated by those who rule them and command others. Peace is not brought by bombardment, shock and awe, and machine guns.”

~ M.S. Rozeff, 29 October 2005

War Is The Ultimate Profession of Nice Government Men

War is the ultimate profession of government. War is always debt financed. To find the ultimate “beneficiaries” of war, follow the money trail to its creditors. If a State can successfully involve itself in war, it will survive. If it cannot, it will perish. The sanctity of law, the well-being of citizens, and the solvency of its treasury will be sacrificed by any government in its primal struggle for survival. It is therefore in the self-interest of politicians and financiers to involve the State in war, or to create perceived threat of war. The greater the threat, the more massive the war preparation, the greater the need for debt finance.

To involve the State in war, it is necessary to have an enemy. If such already exist, provoke. If not existing, create one by financing the rise of a hostile regime or non-state hostile actor.

The best assurance of peace, as also the greatest obstacle to those who would profit from war, is a government which refuses to finance war via debt. When this occurs, it is in the interest of world debt financiers to encourage regime change in such State so as to install a government more compliant to their goals. This game has been made evident by the American game of overt or covert overthrow of foreign governments (sometimes for “captive oil” in lieu of outright war).

A global condition of perpetual war is the best assurance of continual profit for the financiers thereof. Since they profit from financing both (or all) sides, their interest is in a balance of power, pursuant to which no participant gains a decisive victory. If through exhaustion or victory there is a temporary peace, there will be a reduction of debt. Reduction of debt results in loss of profit form the military-industrial complex and its financiers.

It can be seen from the foregoing that the “War on Terror” is perfectly elegant in its design to accomplish the goal of Everywhere Forever War. There cannot be a decisive victory. It is perpetual. It is very profitable for a few.

The success of its methodology is documented by US Department of Defense studies pointed out by Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute. These studies show that the presence of heavy concentrations of US troops, positions or activity in some part of the world is closely correlated with increased terrorist activity. It is obvious that the presence of a foreign power, even if “benevolent,” will breed local resentment. (Tim Case, 16 December 2005).

“They have always taught and trained you to believe it will be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war.”

~ Eugene Debs

The State Monopoly on the Use of Force

The overt power of the State is its monopoly on the use of force within a given territorial area. This monopoly is ostensibly to provide for the safety and security of its citizens. Leaving aside the historical fact that this set-up amounts to a legalized protection racket, how did States perform in the twentieth century on their responsibility to protect citizens? Please note that I am not embarking upon an argument from efficiency. The concern is with moral issues.

“The State lies in all the tongues of good and evil, and whatever it says is lies, and whatever it has, it has stolen, everything it is, is false, it bites with stolen teeth, and it bites often, it is false down to its bowels.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1896

Partial reports of the blood-soaked ledger are presented in two recent monographs cited and abstracted in the following. In considering the background and motivation of these conflicts, note that war is always tax and debt financed. Note who benefits from tax and debt finance: power brokers in government, central and commercial bankers, the military-industrial complex. Consider who it is that has the power of war and peace in a sham democracy controlled by corporations. Note the immutable linkage of means to end discussed elsewhere in this booklet. War can never bring peace, or prosperity, or any good outcome. War is murder.

War results in immense transfers of wealth from the many to a few powerful decision-makers, financiers, industrialists and bankers. Other than this massive transfer of wealth and power, one is confronted with the question: what did these conflicts accomplish, and for whom?

Title: Deaths in Wars and Conflicts in the 20th Century / Netherlands Institute of International Relations / Leitenberg, M. / 1 August 2006.

“An itemized sum for deaths in wars and conflicts ‘killed or allowed to die by human decision’ of approximately 231 million for the 20th Century. Some of the components are:

• World war I, between 13 and 15 million
• Armenian Genocide of 1915, 1 million
• Russian Civil War of 1918-1922, over 12.5 million
• Mexican Revolution of 1909-1916, 1 million
• Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, 600,000
• Various colonial and other wars pre-1914, approximately 1.5 million
• World War II, between 65 and 75 million
• Conflicts between 1945-2000, 41 million

“Additional components include politically caused deaths of the USSR from the forced starvation in Ukraine and among “kulaks” in the 1930′s and the forced deaths of the gulag labor camps during various Soviet purges reported at 35 million killed by political terror or deliberate starvation. The starvation program was intended to destroy the independent Russian peasantry and replace them with agricultural collectives. In 1990, Antonov-Ovseenko estimated starvation deaths at 22 million during 1932-33 alone. In 1986, M. Walker reported Soviet figures of 18,840,000 arrested in political purges between 1935-41, with 7 million shot directly. In 1990 and 1994 Rummel published estimates of 61,911,000 Soviet genocides and mass murders between 1917-1987. In 1983 Dr. Alex Inkles attributed the loss of 100 million Russian lives to Lenin and Stalin.

“For China, detailed figures of mortality during successive “rectification campaigns” have been published by the Chinese government. These campaigns include the land reform movement (1949-54) / “suppression of counterrevolutionaries” (1949-54) / “Anti-Rightists Campaign” (1959) / Great Leap Forward starvation (1959-61) / “Cultural revolution” (1965-75) / Additional deaths in labor camps during Cultural Revolution. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences reports 80 million ‘killed or allowed to die by human decision’ for this period.

“For the regimes of USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, and East European states under communist rule between 1950 and 1990, an estimated up to 100 million people were killed by these governments collectively. In addition, the North Korean gulags killed 400,000 between 1970 and 2000, and the government-induced famines of late 1990′s resulted in up to 2,650,000 deaths.

“Cambodian conflicts between 1975 and 1978 killed 2 million.

“The next significant category is ‘the great domestic slaughters,’ tabulated from 1955. For these the total is 15 million, with 13 out of 19 events taking place in Africa. Other significant events were in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Iraq-Kurds, Bosnia-Yugoslavia.

“The widely-invoked phrase of ‘Never Again’ following the WWII Holocaust — which could be considered an historic vow — proved to be empty rhetoric and bankrupt as a policy upon which any State was prepared to act.”

Table 2 of the report tabulates deaths in wars and conflicts for 1945-2000. Some extracts are noted in following quotations:

• Dominican Republic 1965, US intervention: 3,000
• El Salvador, US intervention 1979-89: 73,000
• Guatemala, US intervention 1954-95: 223,500
• Nicaragua, US intervention 1978-79: 35,000
• Iran in war with Iraq, US complicity 1979-89: 1,017,000
• Iraq in war with Iran, US complicity 1980-89: 967,000
• Iraq in Gulf War 1991, US: 75,000
• Political killings by Iraq government 1982-2002: 350,000
• Lebanon civil war, US-Israel interventions 1975-89: 131,000
• Afghanistan civil-Soviet war 1978-89: 1,000,000
• India partition 1946-48: 800,000
• India (vs Pakistan Rann of Kutch) 1965: 20,000
• India (vs Pakistan 1971): 11,000
• India Kasmir conflicts 1990-2000: 29,000
• India Sikh autonomy campaign 1983-2000: 25,200
• Indonesia Communists vs government 1956-66: 530,000
• Vietnam (vs France) 1945-54: 600,000
• Vietnam (vs USA): 2,358,000
• Algeria (vs France) 1954-62: 1,000,000

— — — END OF REPORT — — —

“In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but wars were raised to carry on taxes.”

~ Thomas Paine

Title: Development, Democracy and Mass Killings / World Bank and New York University / William Easterly, 1 August 2006.

“Abstract: The 20th Century closed with many lamenting civilian killings by the State as its greatest evil. By one estimate, governments killed as many as 170 million civilians from 1900-1987, more than all the soldiers killed in wars of the 20th Century. The century closed with a new euphemism for killing and deportation: ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Freedom from risk of being killed by the state, and freedom from having your ‘group’ being the target of violence is surely an important component of social well-being. Power kills — absolute power kills absolutely. Democracies can also engage in massacre and genocide. A majority may agree on the killing of an unpopular minority. Famous examples are the democratic governments of Australia, Canada and the United States who killed indigenous peoples. It is an open empirical question whether democracy turns economic development toward benevolent ends.” (my emphasis)

Appendix 2 List of Mass Killing Episodes. From a list of 174 episodes, only a few are noted below:

• Bangladesh 1979-99, massacre of tribals
• Brazil 1988-92, massacre of tribals
• Chile 1986, massacre of tribals
• China 1959-79, occupation of Tibet (1,200,000 deaths)
• Columbia, 1991, mass killings of tribals
• Guatemala 1960-96, mass murder of indigenous groups (200,000)
• India 1992-93, Hindu-Muslim riots
• Indonesia 1976-87, East Timor massacres (230,000)
• Papua New Guinea 1988-91, massacre of indigenous groups
• Paraguay 1990-91, massacre of indigenous groups
• Romania 1989-93, ethnic cleansing
• USA and Canada, pre twentieth century genocide of indigenous population

— — — END OF REPORT — — —

War Consumes Civilians

“Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.”

~ W.H. Seward in Eulogy on John Quincy Adams (1848)

“Half a century has shown that exaggerated nationalism is so perilous as to place in question man’s very survival.”

~ Albert Einstein in Man and His Gods, 1952

Attention is invited to the death ratio of civilians versus military. One hundred seventy million of the total 231 million are civilian non-combatants, leaving 61 million as military casualties. Civilian casualties were nearly three times that of the military. Leave aside the moral obscenity of these State-sponsored conflicts, the figures provide a stark measure of the efficacy of the State in carrying out its supposedly primary function of providing security for its citizens.

The following statistics for India have come from internet sources. Their reliability cannot be vouchsafed. Nonetheless, from my sixteen years of reading the daily Indian press, I think the trend and the political realities are not misrepresented.

“Mortalities at hands of Indian government include over 250,000 Sikh men, women and children since 1984; 300,000 Christians in Nagaland and elsewhere; 90,000 Muslims in Kashmir; tens of thousands of Assamese, Bodos, Dalits, Manipuris, Tamils and other minorities. It is reported that more than 52,000 Sikhs remain imprisoned without charge or trial under TADA, an Act which expired in 1995. According to Amnesty International, tens of thousands of other minorities are also being held as political prisoners.”

The purpose of presenting these disturbing statistics of State action is to help awaken us from what I perceive to be mass psychological denial of the facts of our situation. Based upon the facts of its record of action and upon perceptions of its real driving forces, I would raise questions about the moral validity of the State as an institutional frame upon which to organize a civil human society.

“Money rules the world. With power to control the money supply, you control the world. That’s just reality. Politicians all succumb to the powers that be. Once initiated, their options become clear. Either expose the ruse and commit political suicide while potentially collapsing the economy, or play the banker’s game by the banker’s rules. Politicians are the puppets, not the puppet masters.”

~ Chuhran, 26 April 2004

What is the moral justification for the existence, let alone the tolerance, of an institution which not only cannot protect women and children, but oppresses and murders selectively those within its own borders?

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is has international scope. It is the only one in which profits are reckoned in dollars and losses in lives. A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the vary many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”

~ twice decorated Congressional Medal of Honor Marine Major General Smedley Butler,
War Is A Racket, 1935

Here are some glimpses of American action while “conquering” the peaceful people of the Philippines in March, 1906. Six hundred US soldiers with artillery massacred more than six hundred Moro men, women and children who had taken shelter in a volcanic crater. The Americans fired into the bowl of the crater from protected positions at the lip above. A few Moro had knives and sticks. Excerpts from US newspapers of the day: “Women Slain In Moro Slaughter” / “With Children They Mixed in Mob in Crater, and All Died Together” / “Death List Is Now 900.”

“They were mere naked savages, and yet there is a sort of pathos about it when that word children falls under your eye, for it always brings before us our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness; and by help of its deathless eloquence color, creed and nationality vanish away and we see only that they are children — merely children. We see a picture. We see they are frightened and crying and in trouble, our pity goes out to them by natural impulse. We see the small forms. We see terrified faces. We see the tears. We see small hands clinging in supplication to the mother.”

~ Voices of a People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Old News in a Continuing Tragedy

12 October 2006. Just released from John’s Hopkins University, a report estimates that between 420,000 to 790,000 Iraqis have died as result of war since US invasion in March 2003. Almost a million have been displaced or have fled the country. Add to this the earlier deaths of 500,000 children caused by sanctions — which US Secretary of State brazenly stated in public “Is worth the price” — and you have a feel for the “benevolence” of democracy.

Juan Cole (Informed Comment) notes that this report will have a “hard ride” because a significant portion of the US business elite is very invested in the Iraq War. He asks, “Can you imagine the profits of the military-industrial complex from all of this? Do they really want the US public to know the truth about what the weapons they produce have done to Iraqis? Who is really benefiting from this?”

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

~ Benjamin Disraeli

“The question of power, and consequently of war, is little else than a question of money. Those who stand ready to furnish this money are the real rulers. The so-called sovereigns of States are nothing more than tools employed by the wealthy. They are simply the chiefs of different bands of robbers and murderers. And these chiefs are dependent upon the lenders of blood-money for the means to carry on their robberies and murders.”

~ Lysander Spooner, 1870

A report by Dr. Javed Jamil, Who Is Bigger Threat to World Peace: Iran or Big Five?, February 2006, offers statistical precedent on the behavior of powerful central governments, quoted roughly as follows. His list of wars of the past 150 years indicates that 84% of mortalities have been at the hands of five of today’s major military powers: China, USA, Russia, UK and France. The biggest pogroms of history have taken place in Germany and Russia — both Christian — and China, of mixed religions and communist atheism. Two of the biggest killers of all time, Stalin and Hitler, were Christians. The largest number of murders within their own countries for political ends was carried out by governments of China and Russia. The shame of killing the most people abroad goes to USA, especially during the past 60 years. Apart from WWII battlefield deaths, it murdered about 500,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, almost three million in Vietnam, and up to now an estimated up to 790,000 in Iraq. Dr. Jamil notes that Iran, presently in the nuclear bomb sights of USA, appears only once in his list of ninety one wars, and has never waged a war of aggressive invasion against another. He does not mention the Nixon-Kissinger murder of hundreds of thousands women and children incinerated by US napalm bombs in non-combatant Cambodia.

“Take not life, which God has made sacred.”

~ The Qur’an

“The highest charity is refraining from violence.”

~ Srimad Bhagavatam

Dr. Jamil does not directly mention the absurdity of the world’s most rampant terrorist organization — the US government — conducting a “war on terror.” Since 1946, the USG has overthrown some 50 governments, often by terrorist means, sometimes by a clandestine assassination.

“US forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990′s. As a result, it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.”

~ Noam Chomsky Amnesty International Lecture, 18 January 2006

The Federation of American Scientists has compiled a list of over 201 overseas military operations from end of WWII to 11 September 2001 in which the USG was involved and normally struck the first blow. He list is reprinted by Gore Vidal in Perpetual War for Perpetual peace: How We Got To Be So Hated. The USG helped install and then supported such dictators as the Shah of Iran, General Suharto in Indonesia, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Sese Mobutu in Congo-Zaire, as well as a series of American-backed militarists in Vietnam and Cambodia until finally expelled from Indochina. (Chalmers Johnson, On Peddling Democracy)

Reckless in Washington

The US has been capable of both Hiroshima and Vietnam. Which one will it be this time?

Indian Express 19 August 2005

For me, what this headline does not say is a devastating critique of our sorry situation. It asks, “Which one will it be this time?” Which modality of death will America choose with which to murder women and children? It does not ask might there be restraint of greed, respect for the rights and lives of others, goodwill in voluntary exchange, peaceful relations among neighbors. It holds no hope for peace. It asks only what will be the style of war, what is the weapon of choice this time with which to destroy the lives of innocent people who pose no threat.

“Nevertheless, the first task of the Iraqi occupation remains the first task of government — to establish a monopoly on violence.”

~ George Will, Washington Post, April 2004

What man would voluntarily provide 40% of his earnings to support such obscene atrocities as mentioned so far? The sweat of my labor is not meant to become shards of depleted uranium in the mangled body of an infant crying for its dead mother. If not voluntary, then taxes are coercion, violence. Is this not slavery?

“The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.”

~ Thomas Paine (1737-1849)

I am reminded, ruefully and too often, of humorist Will Rogers, “Good that we don’t get all the government that we pay for.” It looks to me that if the governments of 21st Century actually deliver all that we have paid for, surely we will all be killed.

“If the government can take a man’s money without his consent, there is no limit to the additional tyranny it may impose upon him. With his money, it can hire soldiers to keep him in subjection, plunder him at discretion and kill him if he resists.”

~ Lysander Spooner, 1852

The financial function of the State is clear. This is to coerce money and resources from people that could not have been obtained by voluntary exchange in the marketplace. The end of Power is to exercise authority over others concerning money and resources that can be exploited for monetary benefit. Calls of “democracy-freedom-patriotism-proletariat-general welfare-the constitution-fatherland-war on terror,” are all intended as propaganda to extract money or labor from a conditioned people. The aim of power is control. The aim of control is power.

“In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power. Love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities that are opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty.”

~ Leo Tolstoy

“Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover. But when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.”

~ James F. Byrnes

“Power is the greatest aphrodisiac.”

~ Henry Kissinger

Next after the family, perhaps the most fundamental social institution is the market — the meeting ground of human beings in voluntary exchange of goods and services. The weakness of the market is the presence of people willing to use violence rather than voluntary exchange, and those who are willing to breach their exchange agreements. Governments are called upon to use their monopoly of force to settle market disputes. The mistaken perception arises that this institution which employs violence is a good thing, whereas the market — the system of voluntary social cooperation — although necessary, is perhaps not good.

What has evolved out of this is the system of fiat currency in which the government has the right to declare what is money and to manufacture this money. This allows the government to debase its currency through printing press inflation. This leads to destruction of the currency’s utility and to its eventual repudiation as a medium of exchange. The money power also means the government determines the meaning of private contracts.

A government which manufactures and owns money and forces it to be the only legal tender can remove all rights of the people simply by inflation through printing press additions to the money supply. In this way it can expand government spending to do whatever it wishes, for example invade a foreign country, without the consent of the people. Money earned is one index by which to measure the amount of my life expended. Therefore, inflation is tantamount to loss of life, starvation-by-embezzlement. It also breeds the moral hazard of excessive debt, knowing that dollars when repaid will be of less value than at the time of loan initiation.

If inflation is an incremental starvation of the individual, it is tantamount to gasoline on the fire of worldwide ecological destruction. Major central banks such as the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan — often working in concert — depress the interest rate below the natural risk premium in order to stimulate the economy. Even when they raise interest rates in response to public perception of inflation, they print more money and flood the economy with “new money.” This results in serious distortions and irrational investments. It encourages huge, chaotic and wild speculation and waste. The vast pool of paper liquidity stimulates business far beyond normal, actual, rational demand. It permits the so-called “carry trade,” pursuant to which funds can be borrowed at a negative real rate of interest, that is a rate below the actual rate of inflation. This in turn results in burning our ecology in a fire of greed.

“The few who understand the system…will either be so interested in its profits or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending…will bear its burden without complaint.”

~ A communique from Rothschilds in England to associates
in New York regarding the Federal Reserve System

Every kind of human arrangement is connected in some way or other to money payments. If the monetary system is destroyed, the basis of all human relations is also in some sense destroyed. When governments destroy the market, they in turn destroy human cooperation and peaceful human relations. Currency depreciation enriches the State and those who control it. It allows the State to finance foreign interventions and all manner of mischief without imposing new taxes. This is theft on a grand scale. It destroys human relations through The Lie. War ensues. By a series of emergency proclamations, the government becomes a dictatorship.

Pursuant to the system of manufactured money, it becomes itself an “asset” rather than a temporary unit as medium of exchange. This creates mischief in the function of the market as a natural venue of exchange An “asset” that itself can be bought and sold in speculation, it is divorced from the work product of the human body and leads to divorce from nature as source of our sustenance. Alienation from nature results in psychic disconnection from our own self and from others, disrupting our interdependency and leading to the anomie so evident in society.

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens … and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some … The hidden process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million will be able to diagnose.”

~ The Economic Consequences of Peace, John M. Keynes, 1919

All protection given to individuals by constitutions and bills of rights is extinguished when the State has power to destroy the meaning of inter-human relations by undermining the system of money and exchange which is called the market. This is violence. The perpetrators sitting in legislative halls are immunized from consequences of their actions, protected by sovereign immunity. Thus the nominal function of State — to provide security to citizens — is violated by the State itself. A prime example of this is the confiscation of all private citizen gold by President Roosevelt in 1933, followed by an immediate government-decreed increase in price of gold amounting to about 20% reduction in purchasing power of the dollar. There was no way for the citizen to protect himself against this grand theft.

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.”

~ Mayer Rothschild

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

~ Lenin

“The power to tax involves the power to destroy.”

~ Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall

My personal experience is that being forced to rely on a man-made system — arbitrary and gorged on corruption as it is — generates anxiety, frustration and resentment. The more distant and tenuous is one’s connection to earth and the web of life, the greater is the tendency to insecurity.

From the premise that an individual has an inalienable right to life, it follows that he must have an indisputable right to the product of his labor. This is the most basic property right. The absolute right to the product of one’s labor follows from the right to life because one without the other is meaningless. The means to stay alive must be identified with life itself. If the State has a prior right to the product of my labor, it has usurped my right to life. In addition to this, if the State uses my taxes for war, it has robbed me of my moral agency. It has violated my soul.

“Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

~ John Adams, 15 April, 1814

Borrowing from the work of Frank Chodorov (Taxation Is Robbery, 1962), I add his thoughts to my personal experience. But first, Gandhi: any end is determined by its means. A historical study of taxation leads to a mess of iniquity. The practice originated as looting, tribute, ransom — the economic purposes of conquest. The barons who put up toll gates along the Rhine were tax-collectors. So were the gangs who “protected,” for a forced fee, the caravans on their way to market. These taxations served only to keep a privileged class in comfort and finance their internecine wars. These, like all taxes, amount to a permission-to-live price.

As between indirect tax (attached to goods before they reach the consumer) and direct taxes, the latter is most vicious, for it is a direct taking of one’s labor product. The direct tax proclaims the prior right of the State to all private property. Private property becomes a temporary and revocable stewardship. The Jeffersonian ideal of inalienable rights is thus extinguished. Substituted for it is the Marxist concept of State supremacy.

“All politics is grounded in lies, deceits, cover-ups and distortions of reality.”

~ Butler Shaffer, 2 November 2005

A Vortex of Immorality

A basic immorality becomes the center of a vortex of immoralities. When the State abolishes the right of the individual to the product of his labor, it appropriates an authority which is contrary to the natural man. It thus establishes an unethical pattern of behavior, both for itself and those upon whom it exerts its coercion. The denial of ownership of one’s labor — tantamount to denial of self-ownership — arouses a resentment which manifests as perjury and dishonesty. Who among us has been totally sincere and enthusiastic in filling up an income tax form? Men who in their personal affairs would never condone such methods are proud of and are complimented for evasion of income tax laws. It is considered proper to engage the shrewdest minds for the purpose. More degrading is the encouragement by bribes of mutual spying. No other measure in the history of the country has caused such a complete disregard of principle in public affairs, or has had such a deteriorating effect on morals.

The evolution of political exploitation has followed a general pattern: hit-and-run robbery, regular tribute, slavery, rent-collections. In the final stage, rent collections become the primary proceeds of exploitation. The political power is supported by levies on production. The citizen lives for the State which nurtured him. He belongs to the State by right of purchase. Natural man knows by conscience and intuition that he has right of free and unencumbered ownership of the product of his efforts. Observe any family member when another snatches what is “mine.”

There cannot be a good tax, or a just tax. Every tax is a compulsion, a violation of person.

Through a process of continuous propaganda beginning in very early childhood and extending with great intensity through twelve years of compulsory public education, we are brainwashed to the point that many cannot see these fundamental relationships.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.”

~ Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928
(nephew of Sigmund Freud, assistant to Wm. Paley)

“To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.”

~ George Orwell

The ethics scandals that continuously roil all three branches of the US and Indian governments, as well as scandals of the corporate-government nexus involving war profiteering, adulteration of products, destruction of environment, misappropriation of land, embezzlement and breach of contract are simply too numerous to catalog. There are large numbers of legislators under indictment in both USA and India. Since I am discussing the State in generic form, I’ll use some of the data from India because it is more accessible. Data from internet news sources regarding presently sitting members of Parliament of India indicate that 29 have been accused of spousal abuse, 7 have been arrested for fraud, 19 have more than three criminal cases pending, 117 have been charged and are under investigation for murder, rape, assault, extortion or robbery, 71 are in default of loans, 21 are current defendants in various lawsuits and 84 have been involved in offenses for which they paid fines.

“It is the big bureaucrats and the corporates who are more corrupt than the poorest of the poor. Corruption has nothing to do with poverty. It has everything to do with greed.”

~ N.R. Narayana Murthy, Founding Chairman Infosys,
Times of India, 19 October 2006

“A Q Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear black market, will remain off-limits to the Americans. That’s because Khan has Musharraf by the short hairs, having hidden evidence of Musharraf’s complicity in nuclear deals with Iran, North Korea and Khan alone knows who else.”

~ Ramananda Sengupta, rediff news, April 2005

As will be discussed in material to follow, this all-too-typical game of political blackmail shows how national and world events are shaped by power relations among individuals. We are at their mercy. Similarly-situated counterparts in America are the people who sweat us at law to keep themselves in power, to send our children off to be killed in some atrocious war whose purpose is to enrich bankers and defense industrialists and politicians. These are the people who regulate our lives to the smallest detail, who in many cases decide whether a child far away will eat rice, or wheat, or nothing at all. It is amazing that we buy into it.

Gurcharan Das (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006) says, “The Indian State no longer generates public goods. Instead, it creates private benefits for those who control it. Consequently, the Indian State has become so riddled with perverse incentives … that accountability is almost impossible.”

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — to ourselves — that we’ve been so credulous.”

~ Carl Sagan

It’s just as difficult to detect an official’s dishonesty as it is to discover how much water is drunk by the swimming fish.”

~ Chanakya

It is my perception that if you follow the money, you’ll find that the game is to generate war, finance both sides at interest (all war is debt financed), then finance reconstruction at interest. Using the model of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI, the seeds of the next war and the next financial cycle are carefully planted in the “peace plan” that is promulgated for public consumption after the war. It is an endless circle of cannibalization, using human beings as cannon fodder in wars whose purpose is massive transfers of wealth to the already-powerful.

“The tradition among financiers of profiting from both sides of armed conflict; the formula by which war is converted into debt and debt converted back into war.”

~ Griffin, The Creature From Jekyll Island, 1994

It seems to me that our so-called “lawmakers” are in fact a gang of thieves and murderers who meet in congress to fight over division of spoils and to perpetuate the system of “sweat them at law” in order to keep the public trough full. At this trough they feed on the social body like so many leeches. The only difference is that “lawmakers” have the power of selective mass murder of their intended victims.

“It is nonsensical to consider the institution of a State as a solution to the problem of possible conflict, because it is precisely the institution of a State which first makes conflict unavoidable and permanent.”

~ Hans Hermann-Hoppe, 16 March 2006

Since the advent of settled agriculture, men have fought over the means of production, beginning with land. Control of the minds of others was a tool of the ruler-priesthood alliance to facilitate control of production. We have now evolved to a “knowledge” economy. “Things” are represented by symbols, and knowledge workers manipulate symbols. The battle has become for control of information, perception and knowledge. The ultimate means of production being the mind, the battle is for control of the mind itself. The mind is the ultimate “property right” which must be defended against the powers of the Corporate State.

I believe our situation is much more dangerous than most — or even perhaps any of us — can understand. Powerful men are planning to manipulate consciousness itself. We face a direct confrontation with the “Dark Side” of human consciousness. Individuals who have enlisted with the dark side now have under their control weapons with power of annihilation, both quick and slow. Quick is represented by nuclear-biological-chemical. Slow is represented by control of the genetic material of the world’s food supply. Genetically modified “designer-human” cloned for particular purposes such as war is not far below the horizon of future. Mental conditioning via mass media is the anesthesia by which we are benumbed to the future being planned for us.

If we have not the will to revolution of consciousness itself, how can this end?

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

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This document is comprised of three sections. The first is an abridged list of the violations of my humanity perpetrated against me by the United States. The second is my personal declaration of independence. The third calls upon the legal precedent of the Wisconsin legislature to support my defiance of the constitution. However, at the end of the day, I need no "legal" support for my actions of moral conscience, and I believe, as Lysander Spooner, that the constitution is of no authority over anyone.

INTRODUCTION

It has been more than forty years since my outfit shipped out to the Vietnam war zone. When I read out the orders to the detachment of which I had charge, one of the seamen asked, "Why are we going?"

Taken aback, I had no intelligent answer for him. If asked now, I would say, "Because this uniform is a costume that has cast us in the role of murderers on hire to the Money Power, to carry on its alchemy of blood into money for the Power Structure."

Young, naive, brainwashed, deceived and patriotically duped did I ship out to Vietnam. After service with minor distinction, and many years and many tax returns later, I now see patriotism as a mental disease. Not only have I come to understand it as a diseased conditioning of the mind, but I have come to realize that the Power Structure which is the vector of the disease — in addition to being without conscience — is utterly ruthless.

There is something wrong with the internal guidance mechanism of the Money Power as human beings — something deranged.

Now old, not much wise but waking up, I write from exile to speak truths that would put me on FBI-CIA watch lists. So convinced am I of the urgent need for peace that I have refused to continue as a tax-paying accomplice to murder, and have become a man without a country. The war in which I served — like every one of the forever wars of aggression of the USA — is a shame and a stain and a disgrace upon the human race.

I pray to become worthy of the following words of Mohandas Gandhi:

I must not suppress the voice within, call it conscience… that something in me which never deceives me tells me now: u2018forsake friends, wife, and all; but testify to that for which you have lived, and for which you have to die.’

STATEMENT OF ABUSES AND VIOLATIONS OF MY HUMANITY AND NATURAL RIGHTS PERPETRATED AGAINST ME BY THE UNITED STATES

by Jeff Knaebel, 20 October 2006

"Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless and corrupt."
~ Mohandas Gandhi

• The United States has forcibly taken from me, under penalty of my liberty, the product of my labor.
• It has used this product of my labor, taken from me by force, to execute massive crimes against humanity in my name usurped from me. These crimes are too numerous to account. A few of them include deliberate, calculated, cold-blooded mass murder of innocent, non-combatant civilians including women and children; massive destruction of the infrastructure of civilized societies, resulting in untold suffering and death; long term poisoning of earth’s ecosystem and food-water supply with effluence of war, such as depleted uranium and Agent Orange; massive destruction of local ecologies upon which civilians depend for life and livelihood; massive direct destruction of livestock and crops, leading to suffering and death of human beings; deliberately fomented and supported war, revolution and genocide in foreign lands for its own purposes of domination. Other abuses are discussed elsewhere in the text of the booklet of which this is part.
• It has used this product of my labor, forcibly removed from me, to undertake assassinations and murder in the course of overthrowing foreign governments. It has further employed these funds for the illegal imprisonment, torture, degradation and murder of innocent civilians, without charge, and without habeas corpus.
• It has used my taxes paid under coercion of threat of force to conduct weapons experiments with poisonous chemical and radioactive substances on its own unwitting citizens, some of whom died as a result. This is premeditated murder.
• It has used my taxes paid under threat to my liberty to experiment with pesticides on pregnant women, resulting in damage and death to the unborn.
• It has conscripted me to military service and dispatched me as a participant in an aggressive war against a foreign country of no palpable threat to the United States — a war in which millions of people were murdered. This violates my right not to kill and not to support killing.
• It has used the product of my labor forcibly taken from me under penalty of liberty to manufacture, deploy and drop napalm bombs upon innocent women and children living in grass huts in non-combatant Cambodia, dispatching hundreds of thousands of souls to an incendiary death. This is a grotesque crime against humanity.
• It has used tax payments forcibly extracted from me to build, maintain and operate a reported seven hundred military bases around the world, doing thereby immense ecological damage, disturbing the peace, destabilizing societies and causing the flames of hatred against America to burn ever hotter in more and more places.
• It has used the product of my labor taken from me under palpable threat of force to execute certain specific "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" as defined by the UN, including but not limited to the following:
  • Targeting of foreign leaders in "decapitation" strikes
  • Targeting civilian populations and civilian infrastructure with by intentionally directing attacks upon civilians and hospitals, medical centers, residential neighborhoods, electricity stations, water purification facilities, and intense indiscriminate military operations against cities and towns which resulted in many civilian casualties.
  • Using disproportionate force and weapons systems with indiscriminate effects, such as cluster munitions, incendiary bombs, depleted uranium and chemical weapons.
  • Using depleted uranium munitions with devastating long term effects upon human beings and the environment.
  • Extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly (Geneva Convention).
  • Seizure of, destruction of and willful damage done to religious institutions, charity and education, the arts and sciences, historic documents and archeological treasures of humanity.
  • Attack and bombardment of undefended towns, villages, dwellings and buildings.
  • Wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages with devastation not justified by military necessity, for example the wanton destruction of ancient Babylon.
  • Imposition of interim government over a foreign people with practices of managed elections and violation of right of self-determination.
  • Unlawful attacks, including assassinations, summary executions, murders, disappearances, kidnapping and torture, use of deadly violence against peaceful protestors, imposition of punishment without charge or trial, including collective punishment.
  • Unlawful detention and torture, including by US military personnel and paramilitary forces operating anonymously, including widespread, repeated and systematic use of torture and degrading treatment of civilians as well as military personnel detained in prison facilities or covertly transferred for torture in foreign countries, practices which are unconditionally prohibited by international law.
  • Willfully devastating the environment, including through the use of depleted uranium.
  • Systematically utilizing, controlling, directing, manipulating, misinforming and restricting press and media coverage and deliberately presenting false and misleading reports to obtain support for US military and political actions; and to deprive the American people of knowledge essential to develop an informed public opinion essential to democratic processes and public justice.
  • Ordering young Americans, soldiers and others, to commit terrible acts that will aunt them, their families and their communities. Their acts of torture and the killing of women, children, injured people, doctors, nurses, and the bombing of places of worship and hospitals will not only brutalize these soldiers individually, but will increase te violence and militarization of American culture.
  • Indefinite detention of persons seized far from any combat zone while denying protection of the Geneva Conventions and US Constitution.
  • The use of military force to seize and detain indefinitely without charges US citizens, denying right of habeas corpus.
  • Committing murder by authorizing the CIA to kill people designated by the President anywhere in the world.
• It has not only taken from me by force the product of my labor and thereafter employed it in the execution of crimes against humanity, but it has also violated my human rights and my conscience as being done in my name and with my money, in ways listed below, among events too numerous to account. The overwhelming force of government being beyond my capacity to resist, this is a clear violation of my person, as well as utter degradation of humanity itself.
  • Lying to the people of the US, the UN and people of the world to provide false and deceptive rationale for war.
  • Instituting secret and illegal wiretapping and spying operations against people of the US.
  • Violation of the rights of US individuals under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
  • Making, ordering and condoning false statements and propaganda about the conduct of foreign governments and individuals and acts by US government personnel; manipulating the media and foreign governments with false information; concealing information vital to public discussion and informed judgment concerning acts, intentions and possession of weapons of mass destruction in order falsely to create a climate of fear so as to destroy opposition to US wars of aggression and first strike attacks.
  • Violations and subversions of the Charter of the UN and international law, both a part of the "Supreme Law of the Land" under Article VI of the Constitution, in an attempt to commit with impunity crimes against humanity and war crimes, and usurping powers of the UN and the people of its nations by bribery, coercion and other corrupt acts and by rejecting treaties, committing treaty violations and frustrating compliance with treaties in order to destroy any means by which international law and institutions can prevent, affect, or adjudicate the exercise of US military and economic power against the international community.
  • Acting to strip US citizens of their constitutional and human rights, ordering indefinite detention of citizens without access to counsel, without charge, and without opportunity to appear before a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention, based solely on the discretionary designation of the Executive of a citizen as a suspected "threat" to the US.
  • Ordering and authorizing the Attorney General to override judicial orders of release of detainees, even where the judicial officer after full hearing determines a detainee is wrongfully held by the government.
  • Ordering indefinite detention of non-citizens in the US and elsewhere, without charge, at discretion of the Attorney General or Secretary of Defense.
  • Authorizing secret military tribunals and summary execution of persons who are not citizens, designated solely at discretion of the Executive who acts as indicting official, prosecutor and as the only avenue of appellate relief.
  • Refusing to provide disclosure of identities and locations of persons who have been arrested, detained and imprisoned by the US government in the US.
  • Use of secret arrests of persons within the US and elsewhere and denial f right to public trial.
  • Authorizing the monitoring of confidential attorney-client privileged communications by the government, even in absence of court order and even where incarcerated persons have not been charged with a crime.
  • Ordering the seizure of assets of persons in the US, prior to hearing or trial, for having had lawful or innocent association with any entity that at discretion of the Executive has been deemed a "terrorist."
  • Institutionalizing racial and religious profiling and domestic spying by federal law enforcement officials on persons based on their engagement in non-criminal religious and political activity.
  • Development of diverse nuclear weaponry in direct violation of the UN Charter even as it decries other nations for attempting to acquire their own nuclear weaponry in order to defend themselves from pre-emptive strike by the US.
  • Issuing Executive Orders that legalize criminal corporate collusion with the government in war crimes and finance of war crimes and concealment of the records thereof.
  • Employing vast sums of money and large numbers of people to conduct research and development of weapons of mass destruction, and to create a stockpile thereof sufficient to destroy all of humanity.

By forcibly taking from me the product of my labor, under penalty of loss of liberty and confiscation of property, and employing these funds in execution of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the government has made it impossible for me to earn my livelihood without thereby becoming an accomplice to murder. This is an abomination, a violation of life itself.

In addition to these violations of humanity and of conscience the government has violated my natural and human rights in other ways too numerous to account. A few incidents are listed below as "tip of the iceberg" examples.

• Classifying documents as "secret" to remove them from public view, their contents and actions described therein having been financed by the public notwithstanding.
• Manipulation and falsification of government statistics on employment, commerce, money supply, public debt.
• Keeping a double set of accounts for government financial operations, one being obscured from public view
• Diversion of the Social Security Trust Fund to general government operating expenses.
• Creating and operating sub-rosa "off-budget" government operations.
• Using the monetary authority of the Federal Reserve to print new money which depreciates the currency and robs the people of their savings, as well as permitting war finance without taxes.
• Using banking regulations to prevent the free movement of capital and to spy on people.
• Issue Executive Orders to authorize the President — at his sole recognizance of "National Emergency" — to seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, restrict travel, take control of the stock market, institute rationing, and more …
• Using the powers of Eminent Domain to transfer property to the hands of favored insiders.
• Using the powers of regulation and monopoly to advance the business interests of large corporate contributors at the expense of the public welfare.
• Denying by law and regulation my freedom to contract; defining the terms thereof as legal only in Federal Reserve Notes, a medium of depreciating value; and imposing other strictures on the freedom to contract on mutually agreeable terms in free and voluntary exchange .
• Obstructing my right to free and peaceful enjoyment of my property by imposing ubiquitous and onerous regulation of nonsensical building codes, ridiculous and counter-productive safety regulations, and everywhere posting regulations and limits of action under the guise of health and welfare.
• By operation of the "Plunge Protection Team" and "Economic Stabilization Fund," intervene directly in stock and commodity markets to favor the government agenda and favored clients.
• Using government (public) funds to finance huge developments that profit a few at the cost of massive destruction of the ecology of the human commons.
• In an act of outright theft, confiscating all the privately held gold of US citizens in 1933, which included the property of my parents’ generation, and maintaining to this day the executive authority to repeat this grand larceny.
• In an act of outright chicanery and breach of faith, abrogating the redemption of dollars into gold by foreign governments, thereby initiating world wide economic instability and loss of faith in the US since the order by Nixon in 1971, with effect upon my personal livelihood.
• Forced payroll deductions for Social Security, a trust now on the road to bankruptcy.
• Obstructing my right to educate my children as I see fit; instead, subjecting them to government brainwashing and outright falsification and censorship of textbooks.
• Made it quite impossible to lead a decent, quiet, productive life in any ordinary sense. Any person of integrity must devote most of his energy to protecting himself from direct predation of the State upon his property and common facilities of life — and if be of morally compassionate character, he must devote whole of life work to resisting the State’s lust for its hideous foreign wars and exploitations of the rest of humanity.
• Breach and violation of my substantive rights to control my own life and property, to wit:
1. Unimpeded right to life, liberty and property
2. Freedom of speech and press
3. Right of Habeas Corpus
4. Right to trial by jury
5. Freedom to travel
6. Freedom to educate my children as I see fit
7. Unimpeded right to own and operate my own business
8. Right to defend myself, including the right to bear arms
9. Right to security of my home and papers against government intrusion
10. Right not to be spied upon.

The government has perverted justice and the public morality into such grotesque forms as to be unrecognizable by a rational man with a conscience. The preceding list is by no means exhaustive. I doubt that I would live long enough to complete a full tabulation.

This government is an abomination so vile, corrupt, vicious, destructive and murderous that it is unfit to exist. It has become the single greatest threat to survival of the human species. As will be set forth, I renounce it.

MY PERSONAL DECLARATION OF SEVERANCE AND INDEPENDENCE

(In practical effect since 1996)

by Jeff Knaebel

"Conscience does not exist if not exercised"

For a time beyond memory of people now living, the government of the United States has committed a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing the object of reducing to absolute subordination and servitude the individuals subject to its power. It has methodically undermined and abrogated its foundation documents, comprising the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It has systematically violated established and long standing principles of the international community of nations. It has committed heinous crimes against humanity and its own citizens as partially listed in my Statement of Abuses and Violations. It has so perverted the precepts of justice, liberty, public morality and human rights as to make them unrecognizable to a rational man with a conscience.

Sincere respect for my fellow human beings — brothers and sisters during this earthly sojourn — demands that I declare the causes which impel my severance of relations with the government of United States, and my assumption of an equal and independent station free from the domination and subordination to which I have been subjected. These causes are enumerated as Statement of Abuses and Violations in that certain booklet authored by me under the title Experiments in Moral Sovereignty — Notes of an American Exile, by this reference incorporated herein and made a part hereof.

I hold these to be self evident truths: that all people are endowed at birth with equal, inalienable and independent rights, among which are sole possession of their own life, liberty and the seeking of happiness in their own way. That to secure these rights, associations may be formed among humans, deriving their just delegations of responsibility from the full consensus of their members; that it is the right of any member to secede from any such association without reason given, to cease all relations of any nature whatsoever, and either to abstain from or to create or join different associations which adopt such precepts and principles, and organize their responsibilities in such form, as to their members shall seem most likely to effect their safety, enterprise and happiness.

The Remedy of Wisconsin Is Also Remedy of Jeff

The Constitution has no inherent authority unless as a contract between man and man. It does not purport to be an agreement among persons now living. Those persons, if any, who gave their consent, are all long since dead. The Constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural right or legal power to make it binding upon posterity. The instrument does not purport to be an agreement between anyone except "We the people of the United States" then existing. It cannot be said that the Constitution formed "the people of the United States" into a corporation extending to perpetuity. No assemblage of men — existing at any one time — has the power to create a legal perpetuity. As a matter of law and reason, this instrument cannot bind its posterity.

Furthermore, according to the present writer, "We the people" is a legal non-entity with respect to making a contract or entering any binding agreement whatsoever. "We the people" is no more than an abstract term for a loose conglomeration of independently acting individuals. It has no intrinsic reality. It is merely a slogan devoid of content. Exactly who is "we the people?" Who signs for and assumes the responsibility and liability of "We the people?" Who steps up and bears the burden of accountability for actions of "We the people?" Where is there any accountable, responsible, liable individual or group of individuals who physically signed or co-signed an instrument and took upon themselves the burdens of its performance?

And still further, in the particular events under discussion, those men who allegedly established an agreement binding upon not only several millions unknown to them (those millions having had no voice or participation whatsoever), but also upon their unborn posterity for all time to come — met and negotiated on behalf of their unknowable clients in secret, and made an oath of secrecy. They left no record of their proceedings, and they signed no document purporting to be an agreement even among themselves, let alone millions of unknowable others and posterity for all time to come.

That "We the people" have put up with this nonsense for so long is truly an absurdity that boggles my mind.

Referring now to The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, by Tom Woods:

• A statement by the Wisconsin legislature in 1859 said, "Resolved, that the government formed by the Constitution of the United States was not the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself (I ask, delegated by whom?); but that, as in all other cases of a compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions, as of the mode and measure of redress. The individual states, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of the Constitution’s infractions; and that a positive defiance of those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done or attempted to be done under color of that instrument, is the rightful remedy."

Thus I conclude that the maximum possible validity of the Constitution — notwithstanding my understanding and belief that it has no validity whatsoever — is that of a compact among parties having no common judge.

Therefore, just as the state of Wisconsin is an independent sovereignty in relation to the United States, so also am I as an individual. If I am not recognized as an individual sovereignty, then I am a nullity — for all purposes of law and reason a non-living being, an entity to be dealt with as an object or a piece of inanimate property.

And therefore, just as the remedy of Wisconsin is "positive defiance," so also is positive defiance my remedy as a sovereign individual.

The foregoing notwithstanding, my understanding and belief is that the Constitution is of no authority over me, or anyone.

At the end of the day, I return to thesis of Michael S.Rozeff published by Lew Rockwell: the whole game finally comes down to power relations among individuals. Constitutions, legislatures, parliaments and all such are merely facades to create an aura of legitimacy. This comports with my personal experience across a span of years and roles in society including compulsory education, university, military conscription, corporate employee, political party worker, government employee, citizen’s commission member, husband, independent entrepreneur, licensed professional, father, private school executive trustee, professional institute office-bearer, registered lobbyist, cofounder of 501c (3) tax-exempt charitable foundation, community volunteer worker and office-holder, co-petitioner for secession from the union (we came close to a ballot), and emigrant-immigrant.

Anyone wishing to read more about the quest for individual moral sovereignty is invited to check my website at www.freeofstate.org.

THE TRUTHS OF A PROPHETIC PETITION CONTINUE TO UNFOLD

Act Now, Before It Is Too Late

Almost sixty three years ago, on 17 July 1945, twelve of the most senior scientists on the Manhattan Project — who had been responsible for development of the atom bomb — delivered an appeal in the form of a petition to the President of the United States not to employ the atomic bomb against Hiroshima. One of the most familiar names on the petition is Leo Szilard.

We know — from documentation provided on Lew Rockwell.com, Antiwar.com, freeofstate.org and other sources — that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not militarily necessary to bring the war to a rapid close. Japan had already prior delivered a petition for surrender. Nonetheless, the horror that may haunt mankind to its grave was unleashed.

Now Hear These Excerpts from the Petition, and ask if a system of rogue Nation States is a proper way to organize a human society that will provide for the peace and prosperity of coming generations:

“The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power [emphasis added] that will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purpose of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale [emphasis added].

If after this war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrollable possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the citizens of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation….”

My fellow sojourners on this small planet, we now face the situation foretold by the petition-signers, yet incalculably magnified in scope and danger, because these weapons are now in the hands of men who are moral midgets and certifiably insane by clinical standards (Tolle and Pinter, 2005, 2007).

Come out of denial: our situation is continuous danger of sudden annihilation at the hands of mad men.

What Action?

Only individuals possess moral agency. Only individuals can act. Here are a few ideas:

• Keep this in mind: what we vote for, and what we pay for, we are responsible for. It is us.
• The only ways to have clean hands are not to participate, or actively resist.
• Quit tax payments, and thus quit supporting organized crime.
• Boycott the State. Do not vote. Do not ask it for anything. Do not petition it. Give it no energy.
• To extent possible, abstain from all interaction with the State. Try to become self employed so you are out of the paper trail corporate-State surveillance net.
• Quit credit cards and all financial operations that are easy for the State to surveil.
• Avoid doing business with banks to the extent possible. They are spies and bag men of the State.
• One cannot be free so long as he uses credit cards and banks.
• To extent possible, create a livelihood based upon work trade and barter exchange.
• Look for a piece of land in a wholesome and supportive community and nourish yourself from a garden.
• If there is a secessionist movement in your state or nearby, join it. Check the website of The Middlebury Institute.
• In every way possible, become a moral sovereign and join in voluntary cooperation with like minded others.
• Educate and promulgate the ethics, values, and truths of Liberty.
• Read The Mad Farmers Liberation Front by Wendell Berry, a great poet. Practice resurrection.

May you live long, live free.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

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"When your premise is u2018Thou shalt not kill,’ you can skip a lot of distractions and just get to work." ~ Alia Johnson

Introduction

This short essay on a long subject was brought to mind by an editorial from The Economic Times (Mumbai) of 10 April 2008 by Paramahamsa Nithyananda. I am grateful to the Swami and to Mother India for their presence that keeps on reminding me of my real work of Self Realization, the ultimate goal of the human being on this earth.

The issues of ethics and morality are only "big" in an industrial and alienated civilization; in a properly humane culture, ethical values are simply natural. In such a culture, these values are obvious and real, rather than intellectual abstractions.

I have lived among "underdeveloped" peoples for whom what we now call "high" ethical values are simply "the way it is — the way it is done around here." People respect life, and thus they respect each other. The truth is automatically spoken, even by those who have made an infraction.

There are no high-powered lawyers paid to lie and to get their client off on legal technicalities. There is no "Fifth Amendment Defense." People are expected to tell the truth, and they do. It is culturally ingrained. They would not think of doing otherwise.

There is no institutionalized "judicial system." There is common law justice arrived at by the assembled people themselves in a process of discovery. They confer together and reach a consensus discovery of what is the natural law in a given case. Discovery is very far away from dogma.

The rule of law is possibly the single most dangerous idea ever imposed upon mankind.

A law is a lie that creates slavery. Imposed ethics is no ethics. Law is made by the powerful to manipulate the meek.

I once asked a Zuni elder about the "old ways" in respect of a trial for murder. "What if the accused lies?" He looked at me incredulously — "We don’t lie."

Our "advanced" industrialized civilization has made men into sharp dealers and liars and cheats. When a people deals directly with raw nature for its sustenance, there is no scope for the lie. There are no money games to play, and everyone knows everyone else. Much of the source of our degenerate culture is due to its capacity for anonymity in the big city. A person can live in modern society with very few real, face-to-face relations.

Morality Must Arise From Consciousness

What immediately follows is quoted from Paramahamsa Sri Nithyananda: Freedom is our true nature. We are totally and completely free from everything that binds us. Please understand this. When we express this freedom we enter the spiritual path. Rules and regulations are only superficial, artificial and imposed by the society. Societal and religious morality binds us. They limit our freedom. They do not lead to spirituality.

People tell me, "What is this Master? You are breaking all the basic laws. You are pulling down the whole social structure. You are breaking the entire structure, the nuts and bolts, the rules and regulations of society. How will people live without morality? What are you doing?"

I tell them: Be very clear. You need forced morality only for kids. You can tell a kid, "If you keep quiet, and you are good I will give you a candy." Of course, nowadays kids say, "I am happy as I am. I don’t need your candy. I am happy jumping around. Who cares for your candy?" To a kid you can say I will give a candy or I will beat you. You can impose morality based on fear or greed on kids.

We are not kids anymore. It is time to act now. It is time to stand up and be aware of our understanding. Our morality should not be based on fear and greed. As long as our morality is based on fear and greed, we can be certain that it is only skin deep. It is very impermanent.

We can never be moral based on fear and greed. If fear and greed form the basis for our morality, we will definitely try all possible ways to escape from it. For instance, we will speed just ten miles over the local speed limit. We think, "As soon as I see a cop, I can step on the break and slow down."

As long as our morality is based on fear and greed, we are undoubtedly immature. We are not adults. If we are truly grown up, our morality should be based on understanding and not on injunctions of society or religion.

Be clear: a truly mature adult is a person who lives a happy, blissful, and quiet life without being ruled by fear and greed. When we develop the inner awareness about the way we should live without being told by anyone else, we can operate without fear and greed.

When we drop our fear and greed, a new kind of morality arises in our being. It is not the shallow, social morality. This morality arises from our consciousness and provides our whole being with a different kind of well-being. This consciousness brings freedom. Choose it all the time. It leads to eternal bliss, nithyananda.

Intellectual and Moral Servility Versus Freedom

This author posts almost daily at www.freeofstate.org about the role of the State in human culture, and in the following he is "looking" at the relation of the State to Nithyananda’s thesis through the "eyes" of that website.

We can begin with the axiom that the State is organized violence and that it operates through the medium of lies. "Once violence is chosen as method, falsehood becomes principle," said Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Power — of one man, or a group of men — over others, is evil, no matter in whose hands.

Blind obedience to authority is insanity. Authority is no accident. It is specifically created by intelligent people to control you.

"Freedom is our true nature," says Nithyananda. The State is the antithesis of freedom. It makes slaves of all of us — through its power to tax and thus to destroy, its power to make war (means power to make us finance murder), its power to enforce the arbitrary and self-serving "laws" made by one group of men against all other men, its power to abrogate the natural right of men to contract with one another on their own free terms, its power to control domicile and freedom of movement — on and on goes the list of Natural Freedoms usurped by the State.

Has not the Money Power — acting through the Central Banks and the State, and employing lies, deceit, propaganda and war as from time to time currently expedient — subjugated the American people politically?

Any well-informed person knows by now that the "democracy" voting game is a rigged corporate sham. To say nothing of the moral flaw of majority rule and anonymous so-called "representative" government at its foundation.

Are we not subjugated when our "votes" are employed as "political capital" to propagate genocidal global warfare and massive ecological destruction that are opposed by a clear majority of the public?

Has the Money Power not constructed an entrenched Domestic Empire with close to the same grip of all-pervasive authoritarian control — (think surveillance systems; IRS-BATF thugs; war on drugs SWAT; Janet Reno’s scorched earth at Waco, Texas; biometric scans; suspension of habeas corpus; on and on) — as the European fascists before WW II, and the Soviet communists during the Cold War?

Has this political subjugation not been permitted and reinforced by intellectual and moral servility?

Politically Imposed "Morality" Versus the Discovery of Natural Law

"The law is to do unto others as you would be done by. All the rest is commentary."

Nithyananda speaks of enforced morality as "being only for kids." Enforced morality also violates the truth of man in his native environment as a natural man — a natural and rational biological being.

Mohandas Gandhi said that no act which is not voluntary can be said to be moral. We all know through common human experience that morality cannot be legislated — least of all by that body of men and women who have proven by their long track record to comprise the most immoral among human beings.

In a nature-based life, morality is discovered, and not handed down through institutional dogma. It is discovered because morality is itself a Law of Nature, existing to be discovered by the mind and conscience of man, just as the law of gravity exists and can be discovered.

Let us look through he words of Alice Miller (The Untouched Key, 1988) at what happens to man — seen through Germanic eyes — when an institutionalized code is imposed upon him like a straitjacket while he is yet a child.

"I can’t bear the chains that shackle me day after day; my creative powers are in danger of being destroyed. I need all my energies to rescue them and to assert myself in your midst. There is nothing I can confront you with that you would understand.

I can’t live in this narrow, untruthful world. And yet I can’t leave you. I can’t get along without you because I’m still a child and I’m dependent on you. That’s why you have so much power although you are essentially weak.

It takes heroic courage, superhuman qualities, and superhuman strength to crush this world that is interfering with my life. I don’t have that much strength; I am too weak and afraid of hurting you, but I despise the weakness in me and the weakness in you, which forces me to pity you.

You have surrounded me with restrictions, prisoner that I am of school and home. There is no free space for me. Your morality and your reason are a prison for me in which I am smothering to death — and this at the beginning of my life when I would have so much to say."

"Civilization" As Neurotic Predation

Is it any wonder that modern "civilization" is a neurotic culture, the chief instrumentality of which is the Corporate Warfare State — dominated by neurotics — who by their egomania have reached positions of power that enable them to shout out and act out their neuroses, imposing their paranoia on the rest of us, even at the cost of a holocaust?

What if we treated consciousness as a human commons that should not be polluted, simply out of mutual respect? Yet, the Corporate Warfare State is all-pervasive, invading every nook and cranny of our physical and mental commons.

In a natural world, these political neuroses don’t get you very far before nature herself corrects you — there are no money games to play and no institutional power levers to pull — one must simply work and earn bread.

It is the corporate world of industrial civilization that facilitates the corruption of spirit and robs conscience from human relationships. It becomes a game of predation in which man the predator prowls within a corporate system of structural violence for his prey, in which money — a purely abstract symbol — is the reward.

And the prey is other human beings. Thus does the Corporate Warfare State make of man a cannibal.

It is a coerced and mentally conditioned cannibalism that requires awareness and vigorous effort if one is to break out of it. Simply by being under the jurisdiction of a State, we become participants in organized criminal violence.

We cannot — as a rule — earn our livelihood without paying some form of tax. This tax is in fact nothing more then a tribute to our rulers, who then use it to employ a standing armed force to continue their oppression. They also use the product of our labors to murder people in distant lands in order to gain forms of tribute not available locally.

The truth of the matter is that we live as a subjugated people in an occupied territory. We are not necessarily subjugated by individuals who have physically overpowered us. We are subjugated by a system-structure of industrial civilization in which morally autistic, ego-driven psychopaths rise to positions of power in control of the machinery of State.

We then live as subjects of an occupying force within what was once a natural human commons, but is now an occupied territory of the State.

A Few Simple Questions

We face some very basic questions, here modified from Derrick Jensen (Strangely Like War) and E.F. Schumacher (This I Believe).

• What is real? One must decide between the True and the false. One must distinguish with regard to the only question which we cannot side-step, and about which we cannot be agnostic: the question of what to do with our lives. The question of How Shall We Live. The question of What One Can Do.
• What do you love?
• What do you fear?
• What do you — really — need?

Do you love life, or do you love money? This is a collective choice with which we are faced now — perhaps already too late — as we more and more rapidly, more and more "efficiently" destroy the land base (means entire living ecology) which supports life on this earth.

Do you contemplate dying with a large and impressive inventory of all that you have (you thought it was required in order that you might be), or would you die with the knowledge that you did your best to ensure a livable planet for your grandchildren and for their children’s children?

With your life, would you choose to devote it to having more, or to being more?

The "have more" choice is to be a subject who life is "secured" in the mental shackles of the authoritarian State. The "be more" choice is to claim your individual moral sovereignty and resist the Money Power that is killing the planet.

The Emptiness of Contrived Symbolic Thought

The problem we face as a "civilized," industrialized species seems to me to be reasonably hypothesized by John Zerzan (Running on Emptiness, 2002): the failure of symbolic thought.

When we removed ourselves from the direct experience of the sensual world, we became immersed in a world of objectification and abstraction in which symbols trump reality. Thus we move away from being a natural creature within a biosphere, to being disembodied abstractions within a technosphere.

When life is no longer "real" to us, then paying for the murder of another, and even watching it happen on a screen, is equally unreal. If by this process of industrialization of the "living," we become to one another only symbols, then there is no longer a basis for a code of ethics among embodied, incarnate beings.

Upon introspection, one comes to realize that all violence arises first in the mind of the perpetrator, and that the first one to be hurt is the perpetrator himself. His violent thought forms keep him thrashing about in a state of intense misery — the autonomic nervous system triggers the "fight or flight" reaction, and glandular secretions are released in toxic quantity. The mental suffering becomes physical suffering also. The violent person has hurt himself long before he strikes another.

We have become lost in the vast desert of the ego. We must find the path with a heart, or we will become prematurely extinct.

Self-Realization

To me, the freedom to work toward Self-Realization, toward transcendence of ego and entry into the realm of non-duality — of Unity with all that is — must be considered the most precious freedom in all the realm of human rights, because only by this Self-Realization can we break our own individual chain of suffering through endless being-becomings that would otherwise be eternal.

Self-Realization cannot be achieved in the absence of the purest ethical life. There is no possibility of an ethical life if, by the mere act of earning one’s daily bread, he becomes an accomplice to murder. Thus does the State, by its mere existence, abrogate the ultimate right of the human being.

The mind of man is diseased. It is our duty to try to come out of it — to try to heal our mind. I feel that the most readily available — as well as the most powerful — prescription is resistance against the Money Power, the Central Bankers, and the Merchants of Death, whose tool is the State.

The simplest form of resistance is refusal of taxes. It is also the most effective. All war is tax-and-debt financed. The common man pays in blood and sweat. The parasitic Central Banker and his mouthpiece "Statesman" live well, in air-conditioned suites, enjoying the emoluments of those who are high on the predator food chain.

The fact that refusal of taxes may require a simplification and moderation of lifestyle has the double ethical benefit of helping to save our ecological commons from destruction.

It is the medical doctor’s duty to heal, regardless of risk to himself. In this world now, we are all the doctors of our own healing, and we must be willing to risk in order to live.

Breaking the Double Bind

As long as I am the subject of a State under a rule of violence — and participating in violence through my bread labor — I cannot be free to work toward Self-Realization. This sets up a double bind.

If I submit as a servile subject to the State’s coercion imposed upon me, I become a coward — particularly in my own eyes — where it matters most. If I resist with aggressive (rather than defensive) violence, or in a mental condition of fear, I have allowed the System to defeat my ethical values. I have permitted myself to become intellectually and morally servile. I am bound by the State’s chains of mental conditioning.

The very first step toward freedom is emotional: abandon all hope. Abandon all blind and irrational hope that anyone else will free you — that anyone else will awaken to the reality of our collective fate if we remain on the Ship of State, captained by the Merchants of Death.

The second step is mental. Deconstruct the conditioning of your mind that has been constructed with malice aforethought by the State’s coerced compulsory public education system that takes in wild and free children of human beings — precious living expressions of a Great and Beneficent Creation — and imprisons them for 12 years of "education" in how to become a mindless servo-mechanism of the Machine.

Tear down the mental walls built by the bureaucracy. You paid for it — every single board and nail of it — you should be able to walk away from an unwanted mental structure that would mortgage the fate of the earth itself to a vast epoch of suffering and death in exchange for one more sip of the ambrosia of Power.

The only way out of a double bind is to smash it. The simple and best way to survive an abusive relationship is to leave it. Because one cannot control others, but can control himself — at least as to intentions, if not outcomes. How can you negotiate with depraved insanity which is holding a gun to your head?

Abandon the State. Help starve it of cash. Let it die in a manner that the falling colossus does not hit your head on the way down. Stand clear of falling debris. Build your own self-reliant life of a freeman. Help others: so long as one of us is a slave, we are all co-dependents in slavery.

Is Liberty not the mother of peace, and peace the path of human survival?

It is often said that we are all "interdependent." This is true — and we are interdependent either as servile subjects within a system-structure of institutionalized violence — or as free men in a peaceful and decentralized, stateless society of mutual respect and voluntary cooperation.

May you live long, earn your freedom, and experience the beatitudes of a natural humane life.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

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Mohandas Gandhi Versus Moral Servility

When Mahatma Gandhi was born, British rule had been well established in India. After the uprising of 1857 had been dealt with, the British managed to turn the course of events in the country, and consolidate it into an empire.

India had so effectively passed under British tutelage, that instead of resenting alien rule, the generation of educated Indians were eager to submit to the "civilizing mission" of their foreign masters.

Political subjection had been reinforced by intellectual and moral servility. It seemed then that the British Empire in India was safe for centuries.

When Gandhiji died, it was India, a free nation that mourned his loss. The disinherited had recovered their heritage and the "dumb millions" had found their voice. The disarmed had won a great battle, and had in the process evolved a moral force such as to compel the attention, and to some degree, the admiration of the world.

The story of this miracle is also the story of Gandhiji’s life, for he more than any other, was the architect of this miracle. [Vinish Gupta at Society for Integrated Development of Himalya is gratefully acknowledged for these historical insights.]

Industrialized Corporate Warfare Versus Planet Earth — Which Shall Prevail?

… Are we looking now at the beginning of the end, or are we now reaching the end of the beginning of an epochal moral struggle? Keep in mind the historical words above: political subjection had been reinforced by intellectual and moral servility.

Ask some questions:

• Has not the Money Power — acting through the Central Banks and the State, and employing lies, deceit, propaganda and war as from time to time currently expedient — subjugated the American people politically?
• I mean, are we not subjugated when our "votes" are employed as "political capital" to propagate genocidal global warfare and massive ecological destruction that are opposed by a clear majority of the public?
• Any well-informed person knows by now that the "democracy" voting game is a rigged corporate sham. To say nothing of the moral flaw of majority rule and anonymous so-called "representative" government at its foundation.
• Has this political subjection not been reinforced by intellectual and moral servility?
• Has the Money Power not constructed an entrenched Domestic Empire with virtually the same grip of authoritarian control — (think surveillance systems; IRS-BATF thugs; war on drugs SWAT; Janet Reno’s scorched earth at Waco, Texas; biometric scans; suspension of habeas corpus — on and on) — as the British control over colonial India? I dare say that the average Indian had more freedom under the British than the average American has under the Cheney-Bush-DOD-CIA-FBI-Homeland Security Complex.
• Are we a morally and intellectually servile people?
• Or, are we somehow reaching the end of the beginning of the age-old struggle for universal freedom of humanity?
• This time around, there is no Gandhi, no Mohammed, no Christ, no Moses, no Buddha, to help us.
• The enemy — or the friend — of life — is us.

May you live long, live free, and walk in beauty.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

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"The law is to do unto others as you would be done by. All the rest is commentary."

Introduction

The purpose of this brief essay is to explore how the State violates the most fundamental precepts of the all the great religious and wisdom teachings of humanity. The State systematically and structurally violates the basic precepts of morality which every family attempts to inculcate in the coming generation. This particular writing will be based mainly upon "Socially Engaged Buddhism" as promulgated by Thich Nhat Hahn, the famous Vietnamese monk nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King.

This vehicle of exposition was chosen not because of any false idea about the superiority of one ethical teaching over another, but only because of its accessibility to me as a student of Eastern thought, and because Thich Naht Hahn has formulated the principles in terms so cogently useful for ordinary persons. The principles are the same in all the great traditions of mankind.

Thich Nhat Hahn is an expatriate Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, author and peace activist. He has studied and taught at Princeton, Cornell and Columbia Universities. He has published more than 100 books, including more than 40 in English. He was instrumental in ending the Vietnam War and led the Buddhist delegation to the Paris Peace Talks. He has established monastic and practice centers around the world and is a leading advocate of nonviolence and peace, presently residing at his teaching center in Plum Village, France. Information about his work and his worldwide centers can be found at Wikipedia.

Thich Nhat Hahn has formulated the basic Five Precepts developed during the time of the Buddha into Five Mindfulness Trainings that are easily accessible to all of us. He says, "The Five Mindfulness Trainings protect out freedom and make life beautiful. As guidelines for our daily lives, they are the basis of happiness for individuals, couples, families and society." The Five Trainings are shown verbatim below as downloaded from the Plum Village website.

The First Training: Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compassion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking and in my way of life.

The Second Training: Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing and oppression, I vow to cultivate loving kindness and learn ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants and minerals. I vow to practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those in real need. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on earth.

The Third Training: Aware of the suffering caused by sexual misconduct, I vow to cultivate responsibility and learn ways to protect the safety and integrity of individuals, couples, families and society. I am determined not to engage in sexual relations without love and a long-term commitment. To preserve the happiness of myself and others, I am determined to respect my commitments and the commitments of others. I will do everything in my power to protect children from sexual abuse and to prevent couples and families from being broken by sexual misconduct.

The Fourth Training: Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I vow to cultivate loving speech and deep listening in order to bring joy and happiness to others and relieve others of suffering. Knowing that words can create happiness or suffering, I vow to learn to speak truthfully, with words that inspire self-confidence, joy and hope. I am determined not to spread news that I do not know to be certain and not to criticize or condemn things of which I am not sure. I will refrain from uttering words that can cause division or discord; or words that can cause the family or the community to break. I will make all efforts to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small.

The Fifth Training: Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I vow to cultivate good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking and consuming. I vow to ingest only items that preserve peace, well being, and joy in my body, in my consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family and society. I am determined not to use alcohol or any other intoxicant or to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs, magazines, books, films and conversations. I am aware that to damage my body and my consciousness with these poisons is to betray my ancestors, my parents, my society and future generations. I will work to transform violence, fear, anger and confusion in myself and in society by practicing a diet for myself and for society. I understand that a proper diet is crucial for self transformation and the transformation of society.

Considerations and Discussion

Let us examine the relationship between these Five Precepts and the intrinsic, structural compulsions of the State. First, a brief working definition of the State: it is the "organization of the political means of livelihood." The "economic means of livelihood" is to work and earn. The "political means" is to take by force the labor product of others, thus dividing men into two classes — those who work and pay taxes and those who consume and live upon taxes.

The State is a recently conceived institution, an artificial construct that arose not from a natural progression of human society, but from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. It is a product of political expediency for a Power Structure to maintain control over an arbitrarily defined territory. The goal of this control structure is to maintain Power and to increase the wealth of Power. It is not a humane institution. Its politics have long been divorced from ethics.

The State Versus The First Training

"I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking and in my way of life."

Mohandas Gandhi is a good place to start. He said that the State is conceived in violence and can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence. Randolph Bourne’s famous quote is the foundation of many books: "War is the health of the State." One need only survey the bloody genocide and ecocide of the last 100 years to see the obvious truth of this statement. As Howard Zinn has said, people do not spontaneously rise up and rush off to kill one another in large numbers. War is the deliberately designed product of the Money Power which controls every State. To reach the roots of war, follow the money. Read Brig. General Smedley Butler’s book, War Is a Racket.

The State turns neighbors and natural friends into warring enemies.

"The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for." ~ Arthur Silbur (Lew Rockwell.com., 2007)

We support this because we pay for it. We are responsible for the actions of our government because we pay for them, and we vote for the perpetrators thereof. The Iraq war, the Vietnam War (during which I trod on the homeland of Thich Nhat Hahn as a foreign aggressor) — these wars represent us. We must remember this, and withdraw our tax support.

I do not see how it is possible to adhere to the First Precept without a refusal of taxes. In my book, Experiments in Moral Sovereignty – Notes of an American Exile, I have written about trying to exercise of the right of secession which is the birthright of every individual. This right was also protected on behalf of the several states by the original intent of the US Constitution.

Mohandas Gandhi: "It is a sin to pay taxes, directly or indirectly, to a State organized in a military way."

We must also desist from voting, for when we vote we give our implied consent to a system that is and must remain corrupt. If we wish not to be accomplices to systematic genocide and ecocide, we must withdraw from every form of participation in an organization of society which is based upon coercion and violence. These ideas are explored almost daily on my website at www.freeofstate.org.

A headline written by Johan Galtung in the JUST Newsletter summarizes: "To End Terrorism, End State Terrorism."

The State Versus The Second Training

"Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing and oppression, I vow to cultivate loving kindness… I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on earth."

To tackle this is a real grown up’s job. Simply put, our economic, military and political institutions and activities are destroying the planet at an ever-accelerating pace. Practically every human economic activity or product is supported in some way by State subsidies. The awesome global transportation, communications, health, education, agriculture, scientific and technological infrastructure is substantially built, operated and maintained by direct and indirect government subsidy.

One of the State’s most terrible powers in regard to exploitation is the power of Eminent Domain — the power to "condemn" land that is supporting living beings, and convert it into The Machine.

As the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC) has written, "Small is beautiful, big is subsidized." To which I would add, "or condemned." We pay for these subsidies with our taxes. Thus are we conned into our own self destruction.

The perpetrators of this planetary destruction are acting from behind the shields of State Sovereign Immunity and Corporate Limited Liability, without responsibility or accountability. Corporations are creatures of the State. They are abstract legal constructs with the deemed rights of persons. They are killing us slowly, but the death process of the planet is accelerating.

We pay for all of this with our taxes. It is a slow-motion suicide, the death of a thousand cuts.

We can read about it in Jared Diamond, Winin Pereira, Derrick Jensen, T.N. Khoshoo, Rachel Carson, Mohandas Gandhi, Kirkpatrick Sale, Sunita Narain, Jerry Mander, Vandana Shiva, Chellis Glendinning, Arundhati Roy, gloomy statistical reports, and the daily news. But we don’t need science or statistics. Just look around and see the destruction of life in your own neighborhood. The ecology that is being consumed and destroyed is our life. The child who imbibes toxins from his mother’s breast milk might be our child. The food chain has become poison. Every well informed person knows this. And then?

As for government stealing, it is rampant and pervasive. Thousands of books have been written about it. The most sophisticated theft operation known to me is that of the US Federal Reserve. An excellent and superbly documented book on the Fed is The Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin (American Media, 2007, www.realityzone.com).

There are many books on international economic exploitation by the US government. One of the most informative is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. Simply by virtue of our citizenship, we are accomplices to this oppression. Derrick Jensen (Walking on Water, 2004) points to our complicity: "The fact that industrial civilization murders souls instead of bodies doesn’t reduce my culpability. I am participating in the larger processes that destroy or deform humanity. By simply doing my [industrial] job well, I am committing genocide and eviscerating what remains of the natural world."

"I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering…" Who are these others, if not the Corporations (legally determined to be "persons") and the Money Power Structure?

How to go about prevention of suffering that is directly caused by the Money Power acting behind the sovereign immunity of the State?

The State Versus The Third Training

"Aware of the suffering caused by sexual misconduct… I vow to learn ways to protect the safety and integrity of individuals, couples, families and society."

According to quotations of Money Power Insiders that I have read — and that I believe, because of what I have seen, and because of my experience in the health and human services establishment through Hospice — it is the intention of the Power Structure to break down the family, so that the populace becomes dependent upon government subsidized programs. Aaron Russo (From Freedom to Fascism, and other works) has helped us to see some of these operations. During community service volunteer work, and on the reservations of Native Americans, I have seen enough of State interference in the lives of families and children to make me sick.

An apathetic and helpless populace is easy to control and to keep sending off to the factory for their eight hour grind of drudgery every day. It is easy to propagandize them into believing that harmless people are enemies who must be destroyed with financing from the Central Banks — the great alchemy of converting blood to money.

The family is foundation of society. It is, biologically, the "organization" of human sexuality. By breaking the family and creating a society of alienated and lonely individuals who are dependent upon government programs, or subsidies, or even "jobs" (the "all-volunteer" army could not exist in a healthy society), the State gains control and becomes an all-pervasive presence in society.

The whole health and welfare mess can in many ways be attributed to our abdication to the State of our procreative responsibilities. This is what the State wants: total abdication of individual responsibility.

How are we going to "learn to protect the safety and integrity of individuals, families," unless we ignore the State and do it ourselves? Whose responsibility is it, anyway?

The State Versus The Fourth Training

"Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech, I vow to cultivate loving speech… in order to relieve others of suffering… I vow to learn to speak truthfully… I am determined not to spread news that I do not know to be certain… I will make all efforts to reconcile and resolve all conflicts."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, writing out of his experience in the gulags of Russia (we have the American Gulag just offshore, and Nice Government Men are constructing domestic models now itself), says it all in one line:

"When violence is adopted as method, falsehood becomes principle." Since the State is violence, falsehood must be its principle.

The title of Noam Chomsky’s speech given in Calcutta about two years back is another succinct guide: "The Lies of the State and the State of the Lie." We live in a sea of lies and propaganda and corporate media spin in every area of human action: economics, education, health, justice, "security," politics, diplomacy, warfare.

Since war is the health of the State, truth is abandoned in order to promulgate lies and propaganda that will ferment and foster warfare. We are living in an era of "Endless War." People in the right positions are making a great deal of money.

The "speech" of the State is also aimed to generate and foster endless economic growth in support of a corporate — rather than human — based economy. This growth cannot continue endlessly for the simple reason that it is destroying the web of life upon which we all depend for survival.

Since the judicial system is closely related to the "Right Speech" precept, it must be noted that the administrative and judicial systems are rigged in favor of the corporations, and thus in favor of destruction of the planet’s life supporting ecology.

In my personal experience with the judicial system, I learned that there is no "justice." There is only a war, fought with money and lies and manipulation and bribes. I recommend Adventures in Legal Land by Marc Stevens.

The duty of man is to love. Mohandas Gandhi and others have said, "Truth is God; God is Love." Therefore, Truth is Love. If I would live by love, then I must live by truth. The State is a lie. I must not support it, lest I become a lie.

The State Versus The Fifth Training

"Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption… I vow to ingest only items that preserve peace… in my consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of… society. I am determined not to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs… I will work to transform violence, fear, anger and confusion in society…"

For the purposes of this writing, there is a direct connection between this Fifth and the Second Precept above. As noted above, the State directly and indirectly supports our wanton waste of this planet, our cannibalization of life. In my view, the State is the vector of our disease of mindlessly violent greed.

It seems self evident that a species which destroys its environment cannot survive. It is equally obvious that in order to thrive, a species must enhance both itself and its environment. The two are not separate. By their mutual support, they form a single organically integrated system.

The roots of both war and environmental calamity are in greed. The State is the instrument of greed, the tool of the Power Structure. Follow the money, and if you pierce the veil of Sovereign Immunity, you will find standing behind it the Corporate Complex. Pierce the veil of anonymity and Limited Liability, and you will find individuals who comprise the Money Power.

The merchants of death now comprise the wealthiest class in the world. They engage either in merchandizing the machinery of war, or in merchandizing a raped earth ecological destruction in order to maintain a consumerist economy gone mad with its insatiable greed and utter disrespect for life.

We are leaving behind such a wasteland of destruction that science can begin to calculate the "drop dead" date when life will not be sustainable on the planet. Our educational system is intended to produce more and more participants in this dance of death. We teach a philosophy of consume and destroy, along with the technical training in design and use of machines to accomplish the purpose.

Thich Nhat Hanh has told a Buddhist story of a couple who were forced to cross a desert with their young son and, running out of food, killed and ate the child, whose diminishing corpse they carried with them, constantly apologizing to it. “After the Buddha told that story, he asked the monks, ‘Do you think the couple enjoyed eating the flesh of their own son?’” Nhat Hanh recounted. “The monks said ‘no, impossible.’ The Buddha said, let us eat in such a way that will retain compassion in our heart. Otherwise we will be eating the flesh of our son and grandson.”

What is the wanton waste of a planet, if not cannibalism?

Taxation Is the Essence of the State — And Its First Violence

The following is from Carl Watner (www.voluntaryist.com) and printed here with permission.

What would the State be without taxes?

It would be like every other institution and organization in society (except those engaged in crime). It would have to raise its income on a voluntary basis, taking what people would willingly pay for its services. I seriously doubt it would be able to raise enough money to go to war, because many people would not be willing to spend their money in that manner.

It is my contention that taxation is theft because the State threatens imprisonment and/or confiscation of our property if we refuse to pay.

In the Five Traditional Buddhist Precepts we find: Do not kill. Do not let others kill. Do not steal. Respect the rightly owned property of others.

I find these admonitions applicable to two situations.

One: in supporting government we are saying it is morally right to use violence to threaten those peaceful people who refuse to pay their taxes. We are accomplices, and we are aiding and abetting the theft of their property. Therefore we should stop supporting our government’s collection of involuntary taxes.

Two: Governments use the tax money they collect from us for the engagement in wars with other countries. Therefore we should stop aiding and abetting this engagement by calling for a cessation of taxation.

To me, this is a serious moral issue.

Is taxation stealing?

Really it doesn’t matter whether the government spends the taxes it collects on fighting or something we both might consider constructive (such as health care or schools). If it is stealing. It doesn’t matter how the thief spends the proceeds, even if he gives it to charity.

It is the stealing that is wrong.

How would civil society exist if government were not funded by taxes? This is a practical question, which I am sure could be answered once we agreed that taxation is stealing

There are many scenarios which describe the thriving of civil society without government. One I would like to call to your attention was penned by Pearl Buck in her 1953 book, The Man Who Changed China:

“[China (1916)] was now divided between the Southern Republic and the war lords who were the rulers in the provinces. How were the people ever to be gathered together again under one flag?

“Any other nation would have been destroyed by such civil wars. But the Chinese people are old and their country is vast. While wars were fought in one place and another between different war lords, yet the good common people in villages and towns and cities went on living decently and working hard. They were civilized people and they had through the centuries learned that if people live decently and work hard and respect each other, then it is quite possible to live for a while without government and even without police. Policeman, after all, are needed only to protect people from each other, and if there is mutual respect and good behavior people can manage themselves. The Chinese had long ago learned this lesson.”

Politics As an Ideology — A Contradictory Moral Code

"The law becomes the weapon of every kind of greed. Instead of checking crime, the law itself is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish." ~ Frederick Bastiat, The Law

The following is excerpted from an essay by Lew Rockwell on LewRockwell.com, 12 February 2008.

People who believe that politics as an ideology is an excellent mechanism for the management of society end up adopting a moral code that contradicts the teachings of all the world’s religious and ethical systems. Neither Aristotle, nor Moses, nor Jesus, nor Confucius, nor Mohammed, nor Buddha, nor Gandhi, nor any other revered figure in history conditioned moral teachings with majority rule (or rule by well organized factions). — end of excerpt —

The third precept of the Order of Interbeing — founded by Thich Nhat Hahn during the Vietnam War and now (year 2000) reporting thousands of members — reads in part:

"Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda or education." (Queen, 2000, Engaged Buddhism in the West).

Stephen Batchelor (Buddhism Without Beliefs, 1997) quotes the Buddha’s advice to the Kalamas:

Do not be satisfied with hearsay or with tradition or with legendary lore or with what has come down in scriptures or with conjecture or with logical inference or with weighing evidence or with someone else’s ability or with the thought "the monk is our teacher." When you know in yourselves, "These things are wholesome, blameless, commended by the wise, and, being adopted and put into effect, they lead to welfare and happiness," then you should practice and abide in them.

Considerations for an Ideology

Keeping in mind the three preceding quotations, along with the Five Precepts, I ask:

• What is it that we don’t understand about the connection between paying taxes and becoming accomplices to murder?
• What is it that we don’t understand about the direct connection between giving money to our "representatives" — which they will use for the hire of soldiers to go and murder women and children — and executing the murder with our own hands?
• What is it that we don’t understand about the consequences to ourselves of hiring — again and again, cycle after cycle — people to "represent" us who are known to us in advance to be liars?
• Is there a contract of agency between us and these "representatives?" If so, please show me the specific performance provisions and the ratifying signatures.
• If there is no contract of agency, and if the elections are by secret ballot without signature of the voters, then just who do these people "represent?" To whom are they personally accountable and responsible?
• Since the "representative" cannot actually know the persons whom he pretends to represent, does it not follow that in fact he represents nobody — except his own self interest?
• Who, even by pretence, represents those whose candidate lost, or those who did not vote?
• What is the meaning of "representation" when you vote only against someone who is worse than the other fellow? What if you feel none of the candidates are worthy?
• If there is a power structure in which the possessors of power owe no responsibility to the dispossessed (there is no contract of agency), and in which that Power Establishment can by "laws" of its own invention define the limits of its own power, and if there are mind-boggling quantities of money flowing every which way, then what outcome can we really expect, at the end of the day?
• It is not possible for one person to know the moral conscience of another. At times it is difficult for us to know our own conscience. Therefore it is impossible for one person to represent the conscience of another. What then, really, is this so-called "representative" government?
• Although we may vote against those "representatives" who vote for war, and we may demonstrate in protest, we will go to jail if we refuse to pay for the war. Is this not tantamount to conscription (at least of our labor), or perhaps even slavery to psychopathic warmongers?
• A currently relevant quote: "Our electoral system is nothing less than a massive influence peddling scheme where both parties conspire to sell the country to the highest bidder." ~ Senator John McCain, 7 July 2006.
• Is it worth the effort to imagine an organization of responsible self government to replace this "voluntary servitude" in a condition of endless war? Imagination is far more powerful than intelligence. What we can conceive, we can achieve. Together.

The Engaged Action of Thich Nhat Hahn

“Meditation is to get insight, to get understanding and compassion, and when you have them,

you are compelled to act. The Buddha, after enlightenment, went out to help people. Meditation is not to avoid society; it is to look deep to have the kind of insight you need to take action. To think that it is just to sit down and enjoy the calm and peace, is wrong.” ~ Thich Nhat Hahn (quoted in TIME magazine by Sister Uppallavana, 2007).

The Peacemaker Order founded by Dr. Bernie Glassman (www.peacemakercommunity.org) parallels much of the work of Thich Nhat Hahn. Bernie’s idea of service is here paraphrased from Engaged Buddhism (Queen, 2000):

"When we realize the Oneness of life and become involved in service, each person is serving every other person and is reducing suffering. It’s easy to get angry at people who are messing us up. But when I cut my hand and it’s bleeding, I take care of it instead of being angry with it, because it is part of me. Like this, if I am part of humanity and humanity is part me, I must take care."

How To Manage the Gut Wrenching Polarity — Each According to His Own Lights

(further ideas are explored at www.freeeofstate.org)

I only wanted to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult? ~ Hermann Hesse (quoted in Jensen, Walking on Water, 2004).

When thought, word and deed are congruent, we are whole and integrated. When there is dissonance, the reverberations have profound effect upon our lives. Knowing deep within that by our taxes, we are sponsoring the actions of the State in mass murder — becoming accomplices in crimes against life — generates subtle emotional vibrations in a cycle that produces anxiety, tension, fear, inner conflict. We know it is wrong, but we fail to stand for what is right. This is emotionally and spiritually crippling.

I wanted only to serve. My first Indian guru had said, "Go and live among the poor," and I did. And I kept on doing my best, until the highest service became resistance. Nonviolence is not pacifism. When your child needs protection — or rescue — you act. When your Mother needs protection, you act. The earth is our Mother.

Rare is the human being who would not sacrifice his life for his beloved. There have been too many acts of heroism to deny this.

Now, instead of sacrificing life for our beloved earth and the many human souls that it supports, what if we just sacrificed a little greed, a little selfishness, a bit of aggressiveness?

If we quit our consumerist addiction, it will turn out finally not to be a sacrifice, but a door to the joy of simple living and noble thinking. A "sacrifice" only of the dysfunctional tension of a mindless rat race in favor of harmonious living. A "sacrifice" of hot pollution for cool water.

A "sacrifice" of stress-induced disease for health.

Two things that we — even as passive, unarmed, peaceful citizens — do that directly promote war, more than any vote we may ever cast, and despite any protest in which we may march:

1. Pay the taxes to make the bombs
2. Put our savings into banking institutions which then lend our money to the corporate-military complex to design ever more efficient killing platforms.

We kill by inaction as surely as by action.

"We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction, or infamy. We kill when, because it is easier, we countenance or pretend to approve of atrophied social, political, educational, and religious institutions, instead of resolutely combating them." ~ Hermann Hesse

(Jensen, 2004, Walking on Water)

Think about human consciousness as an energy commons — a pool of energy — that we have no right to pollute. Every dollar that we spend is a vote, a casting into the pool of common human values. With our dollars, we vote for Goodness, Beauty and Truth, or we vote for destruction. We guard the pristine original mind that is our birthright, or we pollute it.

It is Man’s duty to love. Absent this love, we must surely perish in the stinking swamp of our own waste, or through endless wars that are genocidal in sense of eventual destruction of the entire natural genome of the human species.

This love must be of the "tough love" variety that is bestowed upon addicts by those who love enough to try to save them. We must see clearly and face bravely the reality of what we have created and continue to create for ourselves. We must take up tough ethical positions.

A Unilateral Declaration of Peaceful Divorce

"Once it is conceded that any man, or body of men, have any right to make laws of their own invention — and compel other men to obey them — then every vestige of man’s natural and rightful liberty is denied." ~ Lysander Spooner

I have been associated with healing and treatment centers both formal and informal. The best advice to someone in an abusive relationship is to leave it, get out from it.

I have been in — and to the extent of official identification tracking documents, remain in — an abusive relationship with psychopathic egomaniacs (exemplified by, but not limited to, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld) at the head of the US government. They have been destroying my world, and their successors will continue. No vote will change this destiny of a democracy. At some point, when the public is hooked on the notion that everybody can live at somebody else’s expense, democracy degrades into a sham, a game of power, played in the present day by corporations. Even if a few good men were elected, the system cannot be changed, because the fatal moral hazard is structural. No matter who wins an election, the Establishment gets re-elected.

In accordance with the declarative statement below, I have left this abusive relationship. And I have provided a generous settlement to my former co-dependent: many years of many taxes; military service; community service; productive enterprises; progeny who have elected to stay and work for the machine; nonprofit charitable foundations (small and now expired); co-founding of a parent-created Montessori school. Having left these and more, I claim secession as my human birthright, declared as follows:

I maintain that it is the right of any individual person to reject and renounce a government which violates his moral conscience. I maintain that it is my personal right, in this very body, here and now, to ignore the State, and to refuse participation in its actions which violate humanity and life itself. I also declare that the same is my intention insofar as refusal to pay direct tax to any nation-state. There can be no treason if one’s first loyalty is to humanity and to life itself. Human life is above Nation-State. Personal conscience and individual moral sovereignty is above State sovereignty. How can the question of treason arise when one refuses to murder helpless women and children? He who claims self ownership can never commit treason because the State cannot own him. He is not the property of the State.

In Closing

On August 6, 1945, the day that the US rained nuclear hellfire upon Hiroshima, the Venerable Nichidatsu Fujii, founder of the Myohoji order of Japanese Buddhism, turned sixty. From that day of conflagration, he determined to devote his life to the abolition of nuclear weapons. He carried a profound connection with Mahatma Gandhi as he asserted his belief that human survival depends on the ability to turn away from materialistic civilizations that have caused so much destruction, war and misery:

"Civilization has nothing to do with having electric lights, airplanes, or manufacturing nuclear bombs. It has nothing to do with killing human beings, destroying things or waging war. Civilization is to hold one another in mutual affection and respect. What constitutes its foundation is not the establishment of a judicial system, but religious faith that seeks gentleness, peace, simplicity and righteousness." ~ Nichidatsu Fujii

May you live long, live free, and find peace.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines. Visit his website.

DIGG THIS

Civilization Means Not Killing People

"Grandfather, look at our brokenness. We have forgotten who we are."

My own days are short now — in a dim light, not knowing if dusk or dawn, I write in search of the beautiful trail.

~ Jeff Knaebel

I write as the seeker of a vision. Spinning and lost in the dense fog of a concrete jungle industrial wasteland, I write as if my pen is a machete, to cut away the underbrush of abstract obfuscation, to recover a path. A path away from oblivion and toward the light of compassion, respect, and reason informed by love.

The intention of the following excerpts is to lay a foundation, to smoothen a patch of earth on which to place some ceremonial artifacts. These extracts are like signs as I hunt for a path. I write between the marks made by predecessors, like a compass needle swinging in its aim to settle on North.

It is your choice to look — with curiosity or hope, or perhaps expectancy — or else to click and surf away. In this, at least, you are free, although as long as the State exists, you will never be free of the war tax, by which the merchants of death exchange blood for money profits.

With words I seek a path of redemption, of resurrection of our lives and the life of this earth.

***

"My name is Chellis, and I’m in recovery from western civilization." Thus does Chellis Glendinning begin her book of the same title (1994, New Catalyst). She continues:

The truth is that just about everybody I know who is serious about personal healing, social change, and ecological rebalancing is in recovery: from personal addiction, childhood abuse, childhood deprivation, the nuclear family, sexism, racism, urban alienation, combat service in the trenches of the gender wars, the threat of extinction, linear thinking, the mind/body split, technological progress, and the mechanistic worldview.

In the face of this overwhelming onslaught, an equally overwhelming question arises: what on Earth is wrong with us?…

[Ed. — I have had long and direct personal experience with most of the above list of afflictions. Of the last two — which are not the most important in terms of personal dysfunction — the memory of a corporate mine management meeting provides a glimpse. At issue was the size of trucks and shovels for an open pit copper mine. Larger trucks would provide the same haulage with fewer drivers. The senior executive prevailed in deciding for larger trucks with correspondingly fewer employees, because, in his words, "Trucks don't argue with management."]

Mental Pathology

Lost with the advance of civilization was our long-standing ability to enter into nature-induced nonordinary states of consciousness for the purpose of healing, revelation, and connectedness with the natural world. With ever-decreasing contact with birds, animals, and the seasons, we had less opportunity to work out our psychological conflicts by communion with natural forces. Over the generations we came to forget the healing process with its mysterious unfolding of experience and essence, and this ancient knowledge lost its place at the center of human culture.

Instead, we came to view psychological and physical imbalances in the same way we were coming to perceive all other external problems — as solvable only by knee-jerk technological fixes like synthetic pills, by mechanistic forms of social control like behavior modification and mental institutions, and by wholesale eradication with shock therapy and lobotomies.

Not surprisingly, as the human psyche came to lose trust, integrity, and communion, as intergenerational abuse became more commonplace, and as the inevitable injuries of an increasingly technological world added to the overall stress, the task of healing grew into something more complex than it had ever been.

Traumatic Stress

The experience of trauma has become all too commonplace — today we live almost entirely apart from natural rhythms, encased in technological environments and mechanistic social forms, subject to an entire system caught in a seemingly unending cycle of abuse. As the aftershocks of our collective trauma have become "normal" fare for our psyches, healing ourselves has become a lifelong task.

Any one of us, you or I, may be harboring the psychic burdens of alcoholic parents, childhood violence, the loss of a sibling, combat service, divorce, rape, illness, drug-addicted children, plus robberies, muggings, and car accidents. Add to these the constant violence of racism and sexism, the constant threat of murder in the streets, the unrelenting demise of the ecosphere. Chernobyl. Desert Storm. Bosnia. South Africa. [Emphasis indicates direct personal experience of this editor].

Given this horrific situation, it is not trauma that has come to exist outside the range of usual human experience. The traumatizing process is constant and chronic in mass technological society; it is our knowledge of healing and the means to heal from the onslaught that have become nearly lost.

This is certainly a perspective that goes against our sunny ethic of progress which insists that we are consistently growing smarter, stronger, healthier and more evolved. As a lifelong participant in a civilization marked by wanton ecological destruction with endemic psychological tendencies toward abuse and addiction, I have come to question the cynical assumption that such contemporary behaviors are "normal" expressions of "human nature."

Native and indigenous peoples have long wondered at the western way of being and seen it as, if not pathological, bizarre. Choctaw-Cree Gerald Haslam describes this way of being as "feeling a strange kind of pity for these hopeless creatures who possessed no magic, no union with earth or sky, only the ability to hurt and to kill… sad and dangerous, like a broken rattlesnake."

Apart from unrecorded commentary on the western personality made by indigenous people, Sigmund Freud was one of the first to raise the possibility that civilization itself may be psychopathological. In 1939 he wrote, "May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations have become neurotic?" Philosopher Lewis Mumford spoke of "mad rationality," while R.D. Laing asserted that our "socially shared hallucinations, our collusive madness is what we call sanity." Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm observed "That millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make those people sane."

Symptoms of Trauma

Trauma has distinct and identifiable psychological symptoms… the subject engages in protective devices… among which we find the following:

Hyperactivity — chronic anxiety, jumpiness, tendency to knee-jerk reactions…men quick to use violence against women…the rush to litigation…the assumption that a class of persons are hooligans… An institutional example is the Cold war practice of deterrence [Mutually Assured Destruction]…

Recurrent intrusive recollections of trauma, flashbacks, and nightmares. Projections of past trauma into the present or future.

Psychic numbing, constriction of feeling, warding off such intrusions, a diminished capacity or inclination to feel. A dead approach has become the modus operandi of most people living in mass technological society.

A sense of powerlessness over one’s destiny, a sense of futurelessness, a surrender of patterns. These signal the triumph of victimization in the survivor’s psyche — the belief rooted in original experience that nothing can be done to stop the onslaught. We witness this in passive witnessing of violence against individuals and corporate destruction of the earth. We sense that there is no future in an age of mass society, multinational takeover, military dominance, unrelenting development, and ecological disaster.

Arrested genetic and psychosocial development. Social dislocations broke the ancient way of raising children, causing disjunction in the built-in synchronicity between the child’s expectations for development and the cultural supports provided for it.

Narcissism. Everybody and everything that does not form part of the individual’s needs is not fully real and is perceived only by intellectual recognition. As an outgrowth of traumatic experience, the satisfactions of one’s needs for security, integrity and communion is truncated, leaving the individual in such a needy state that she can only survive by u2018looking out for number one.’ The result is a plethora of raving egotists among us.

Thinking disorders. Those that typically accompany the traumatized mind stem from a constant intra-psychic pressure to maintain vigilance, ward off unbearable memories, numb one’s heart, bolster a chronic sense of powerlessness, and forge recognition in the outside world. The traumatized mentality often includes rigid, overly rationalistic, either/or logic, and grandiose strategizing.

Having lost our place in the natural world, we began to formulate a new perceptual context for ourselves. We create linear perspective, the modern scientific paradigm, and techno-utopia. Trauma is the freeway to addiction. The main feature of technological society is not merely the rapid change — it is the destruction of things past, the rendering irrelevant of practices, values, connections, and memory inherited from tradition.

[Ed. My experience with acharyas (spiritual teachers) in several Indian ashrams has demonstrated to me that the west is farther down the road of psychopathology than the east (figure of speech admittedly an excessive generalization), although India is rapidly u2018catching up' with the advent of nuclear families in urban areas. In attempting to counsel western seekers through the sudden release of suppressed childhood trauma, the Indian mentors simply could not relate to the nature of these afflictions. Assault on the child from within the family was outside their experience. I was called to serve as a "facilitator-translator" between Indian teacher and western student.]

Psychological Dysfunction — Ecological Crisis

I set out to draw a relationship between the deluge of psychological dysfunctions among us and the ecological crisis besieging our planet. This linkage requires diagnosing the fundamental pathologies of our western world. To counter this, I offered a glimpse of sanity in nature-based culture.

Our lives upon this earth are part of a vast, magnificent, and unfathomable whole. Man is inextricably intertwined with his communion on the mountain of his ancestors. If you chase him from the mountain, you tamper with his mind. [emphasis added]

When the patterns of livelihood connecting our nomadic ancestors to the web of life were broken in one seemingly minor way — domestication — the whole was shattered into a thousand pieces.

[Ed. With an unfathomable sorrow, Black Elk spoke of the hoop of his people having been broken by Hotchkiss guns at Wounded Knee — beyond any conception of mending. Looking back on my days as a field geologist, I can see the inchoate urge to connect with the old nomadic pattern. Professor Folinsbee (U Alberta) said that geologists were the last of the nomadic spear-chuckers.

I can see it now, and feel the tragedy in the way that we tried unconsciously to "return" to that which had been lost, using helicopters and drilling machines and dynamite…

We had already made the wrong turn long ago, when we invented a god made in our likeness and began the attempt to harness divine energy through technology].

The question I hope to have raised is this: what does it mean to be a human being? This question has been asked throughout history. Originally nature-based people answered it by living as humble participants in the embracing cycle of sycamore, blueberry, rainfall and spirit. About ten thousand years ago, western peoples began to answer the question with an unprecedented dedication to managed fecundity.

[This may be the point where we made the wrong turn. In The Ringing Cedars of Russia (Vladimir Megre), Anastasia says it was at this point in history that the vision — and the responsibility — of the wisdom keepers became corrupted].

I offer a personal challenge to embark upon this process of recovery from western civilization, to begin to reclaim those parts of yourself and the earth that have been lost. Turn over in your mind the "nagging fact of Euro-American and native relations" (Kolodny): on the whole, the native peoples of this earth have never longed to join the dominant civilization. They have preferred to be left alone to live their own ways.

Native Messages of Warning

The Kogi are an indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada of Columbia, the last intact population of preconquest Mesoamericans. More than four centuries ago, the Spanish conquistadores slaughtered their ancestors, gunning them down, setting vicious dogs upon them, cutting off ears to get gold jewelry.

The Kogi Nation of today was pieced together by survivors who fled into the mountains to form a subsistence society. They call themselves the Elder Brothers. They call all the conquerors who came with and after Columbus — armies, gold diggers, bankers, guerillas, tomb looters, bureaucrats, miners, drug lords, prostitutes, archeologists, anthropologists, and tourists — the Younger Brother.

In 1988 they made a decision to speak to the Younger Brother about the fate of the Earth just once, and then return to hiding. They did this through historian and journalist Alan Ereira and a BBC film crew that was allowed to enter their land. This is what their oracle said:

"From the beginning in Columbia
everything, everything remained as it always was
among us,
the native people;
the same belief,
the same mask,
the same dance.
Everything well organized,
In order, a terrace for every animal…
But Younger brother came from another country
and immediately he saw gold
and immediately he began to rob.
There were golden images,
golden oracles.
The Mama prophesied with golden bowls,
he had a golden tuma,
he had everything
and younger Brother took it all to another country.
Now the Mama grows sad,
he feel weak.
He says that the earth is decaying.
The earth is losing its strength
because they have taken away much petrol,
coal,
many minerals…
So the earth today catches disease of all kinds.
The animals die.
The trees dry up.
People fall ill.
Many illnesses will appear,
and there will be no cure for them.
Why?
Because Younger Brother is among us,
Younger Brother is violating
the basic foundation of the world’s law.
A total violation.
Robbing.
Ransacking.
Building highways,
extracting petrol,
minerals…
so the Mamas say,
Please BBC
no one else should come here,
no more ransacking
because the earth wants to collapse,
the earth grows weak,
we must protect it,
we must respect it,
because he does not respect the earth,
because he does not respect it.
The earth feels.
They take out the petrol,
it feels pain there.
So the earth sends out sickness.
There will be many medicines,
drugs,
but in the end the drugs will not be of any use,
neither will the medicine be of any use.
The Mamas say that this tale must be learnt
by the Younger Brother."

[During my stay among the Zuni and Hopi, I was told of similar prophesies. Elders of the Tarahumara told me, "The white man will destroy himself." In 1908, Gandhi's writings in Hind Swaraj foretold this same crisis to be faced by European civilization. See also Columbus and Other Cannibals by Professor J.D. Forbes, (U Cal). He calls the affliction of civilization "wetiko," an infectious mental disease of cannibalism].

THE INCENTIVE FOR RECOVERY

The incentive for recovery from Western "civilization" seems obvious. It is our will to survive.

"Civilization does not mean electric lights. It does not mean producing atomic bombs, either. Civilization means not killing people." ~ Nichidatsu Fujii, Buddhist Nihonzan Miyohoji Temple

The proof that we are not civilized is everywhere around us — endless war surrounds us — and we murder for hire. Our behavior is lower than the brutes, because we have conscious self-awareness that life is precious to ourselves, and thus to all others. Our behavior since the industrial revolution is not worthy of the human being.

Take a look at two of the five basic precepts taught by the Buddha, as modified by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn for residents of his teaching center at Plum Village, France. Then glance back at the message from the Kogi on the preceding page and compare.

"The First Training: Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compassion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking and in my way of life."

Emphasis was added in the above to call attention to the moral hazard: when I pay taxes, I not only let others kill, I finance it, and thus become an accomplice in it. This also points the moral flaw of "representative government." It is not possible for one person to represent the conscience of another, because one cannot know the conscience of another. Certainly the decision of war versus peace — since the twentieth century a decision of mass murder — is a decision of conscience. This responsibility is beyond the capacity of one person to assign to another.

"The Second Training: Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing and oppression, I vow to cultivate loving kindness and learn ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants and minerals. I vow to practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those in real need. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on earth."

I submit that we — as laypersons who hold in our hearts a respect for life — must examine the implications of the second training with respect to the profligate and destructive consumerism all around. Much of what we consume has in effect been stolen from the indigenous and rural poor by Multi National Corporations acting with State support. Much of corporate profit comes at a terrible cost of environmental destruction and human suffering.

If we are "not to possess anything that should belong to others," then how can we purchase corporate products which were manufactured with resources taken by force from their rightful original owners — the people of the land who were there first and living on the land until "civilization" forcibly displaced them?

How can I enjoy my refrigerator when I know it was made by a corporation whose facilities occupy land taken by coercion under the laws of Eminent Domain in a third world country? The manufacture of my refrigerator is at the cost of children who go to bed hungry because their family has been made landless. How to have guilt-free enjoyment of these amenities? Only by complete denial of the humanity of others, and total alienation of myself.

For most of the last fifteen years I lived without these things. I came down from Himalaya with failing health, and my use of this desktop PC to fight the system is fraught with inner conflict about where, actually, is the right place to work.

***

The incentive for change of behavior is the wish to live, the will to survive. For any species to survive, it must enhance both itself and its environment. Upon reflection, does this not seem almost self-evident? As Chellis Glendinning asks above, "what on earth is wrong with us?"

HOW TO DIRECT THIS AWARENESS AGAINST THE POWER THAT IS KILLING US

"You call it wild, but it wasn’t really wild. It was free." ~ Leon Shenandoah

The Corporate Warfare State is killing the planet, and thus it is killing us also. Industrial "civilization" has made us dependent upon inhuman institutions instead of other people. We no longer live in a society of human beings. We live in an economy of morally lobotomized consumer robots.

A mindless meaningless mechanized economy is not a civilization. It is not a culture. It is an abstract, lifeless, irresponsible machine — irresponsible to humanity, and to life on this earth.

Are we collectively insane? Chellis Glendinning and others of high stature make a point of the scientific and psychological validity of this question. It cannot be lightly dismissed.

However, I would place before you the notion of a sick, co-dependent relationship with a smaller group of sociopathic egomaniacs who are in fact insane — in the sense that sanity implies a love and respect for human life as well as the lives of other sentient beings. This small group comprises a cabal that can be called the Establishment of Mass Destruction. It is the Power Structure of a world ruled by money, acting through corporations.

This Enemy Is Armed, Ruthless, and Dangerous

The existence and the modus operandi of this Power Structure are set forth in a vast body of documentation that is partially referenced on the websites listed below, as well as by this author at www.freeofstate.org. A few that come to mind at the moment are Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Perkins); The Creature From Jekyll Island (Griffin); The Sorrows of Empire (Johnson); War Is A Racket (Butler); websites such as truthout.org; LewRockwell.com; AntiWar.com; jsmineset.com; International Clearing House; striketheroot.com; TomDispatch; enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx; enlacecivil.org.mx, and many others.

The works of John Zerzan, Davison Budhoo, Derrick Jensen, John Pilger, Ward Churchill, Vine Deloria, Howard Zinn, Jack Forbes, Jerry Mander, Vinoba Bhave, William Rivers Pitt, Sunita Narain, Carl Watner, Dharampal Thich Nhat Hahn, Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Vladimir Megre, and Subcomandante Marcos are recommended. This website also features a small bibliography.

Some of the murderous operations of this Power Structure were noted recently by John Pilger, in his report about the death of the Indonesian dictator Suharto which appeared in The Guardian. If there should remain any doubt in the reader’s mind, let him or her read about the US Government involvement in Suharto’s mass genocide and subsequent US operations elsewhere on the same model. The Power Structure — whose reward from Suharto was access to an incalculable wealth of natural resources — included major US corporations and individuals of the elite such as David Rockefeller, who were direct participants in orchestrating events.

Time magazine described the horrors: "The killings have been on such a scale the disposal of corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in east Java and northern Sumatra, where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travelers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies." At least 500,000 Indonesians died violently in the months following the takeover, but studies suggest the figure might have been between a million and two million.

The preceding is a vignette of history. Service in the Viet Nam war put history in my face. French tanks mired in rice paddies in 1947 didn’t look much different than ours mired in rice paddies twenty years later. Via TV, the abominable depravity of the Iraq war is in our collective living room daily. The contractors have many of the same names as those in Viet Nam forty years earlier. The beneficiaries of war are the same. "When will they ever learn?"

This all works out as the Mamas of the Kogi people described in their 1988 message to Elder Brother. The Buddha warned us. We have been warned by St Francis of Assisi, the Iroquois, Thoreau, Black Elk, Chief Joseph, Mohandas Gandhi, Rachel Carson, the Mamas of the Kogi people, and many others in a long line of sages. So far, we have heeded not.

If We Are Not Collectively Insane, What To Do?

The website at www.freeofstate.org discusses hopes, dreams, and action ideas on its homepage and subsections thereof, as well as in essays and subsidiary postings. The most recent, for which this is now being written as a companion piece, is posted under title Mohandas Gandhi Points A Better Way.

We face a daunting moral and spiritual crisis. We must evolve to a higher level of consciousness — to a way of being in the world that is manifested as a human community of love and reason — or else continue to face the clear and present danger of extinction.

Our species is in jeopardy, and no legislature will ever put it on the "endangered" list. We must seek non-political solutions. Solutions that grow from below, like the grass — not "final solutions" dropped from above, like bombs.

Our enemies are both internal and external. The internal enemy is the accumulation of mental impurities that express as greed and fear. Each must deal with this in their own way. No one can do the inner work of another. The external enemy is the Power Structure that is also motivated by fear and greed.

We cannot acquiesce to this war against life without immense consequences to ourselves. We cannot support this war against life and reason and compassion without immeasurable consequences to ourselves. If we do nothing to change this system, we are accomplices to it.

Direct Action Is There, and It Can Work

In present time, the Power Structure is institutionalized as Central Bankers and the "iron triangle" of military-industrial-political complex through which the financial cartel imposes its rule. They rule us only because we volunteer for the servitude. They cannot rule without our cooperation. Even coerced cooperation is cooperation.

The establishment is helpless without "us." The approach of nonviolent direct action is to deny the enemy the human assistance and cooperation which are necessary if he is to exercise control over the population. Power rests upon the cooperation and assistance of other people.

If we believe that the Corporate Warfare State is messing with our minds as one of its methods in its assault (with our cooperation) upon the earth’s capacity to support life, then one of the simplest means to take our lives back is to quit supporting corporations with our purchase dollars, and start supporting real people.

The next step up the ladder of courage is to quit paying income tax. Next thereafter might be a Direct Action Defense committee which physically intervenes to prevent corporate destruction. The actions of Greenpeace to prevent whale killing is a type example. We are the only species known to take concrete steps (pun intended) to destroy our own life support.

The best current examples of on-the-ground Direct Action known to me are:

1. The farmers at Nandigram and elsewhere in India who are resisting the government’s seizure of their land in order that it can be granted to corporations with major tax incentives in Special Economic Zones. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand who is "Special." Parliamentary laws of Eminent Domain in India, and Supreme Court decisions in America reflect the Tyrannical Eminence of money over life.

2. The Zapatistas of the State of Chiapas, Mexico. Here below are some words of Subcomandante Marcos for your consideration (The Speed of Dreams, 2007)

March 11, 2001, Zocalo in Mexico City

Mexico City:

We have arrived.
We are here.
We are the National Indigenous Congress and Zapatistas who are,
together, greeting you.

It is not accidental that the grandstand where we meet is located where it is. It is because, from the very beginning, the government has been at our backs.

Sometimes with artillery helicopters, sometimes with paramilitaries, sometimes with war tanks, sometimes with soldiers, sometimes with the police, sometimes with offers for the buying and selling of consciences, sometimes with offers for surrender, sometimes with strident statements, sometimes with forgetting, sometimes with expectant silences. Sometimes, like today, with impotent silences.

That is why the government never sees us, why it does not listen to us.

If they quickened the pace a bit, they might catch up with us.

They could see us then, and listen to us.

They could understand the long and firm perspective of the one who is persecuted and who, nonetheless, is not worried, because he knows that it is the steps that follow which requires attention and determination.

The Zapatista people. The men, children, women, and old ones, support bases of the Zapatista Army of the National Liberation, who are the feet that walk us, the voice that speaks us, the looking that makes us visible, the ear that makes us heard.

We should not have been here.

And nonetheless, we are.

***

Civilization means not killing people. We should not have been here. Nonetheless, we are.

The Corporate Warfare State is killing the earth. We are all dying. The Corporate State must go.

It must go into the dustbin of human history, a brief and tragic interlude when biological man forgot who he is, and created an industrial petroleum-based economy and called it a civilization.

If we do nothing to change this system, we become accomplices to it. If we do not repudiate lies, we become liars. We must challenge the corporate Power Structure and the political class that lives off and with it.

Shall we sow fear, and reap servitude and the sorrows of the oppressed —

Or, shall we sow seeds of righteous indignation at the destruction of our world,

cultivate the seeds with direct action, and reap courage, strength and freedom?

We are all indigenous now — there is only one earth.
We are all Zapatistas now — there is only one revolution.

We must free ourselves, in order that we may live. We have not much of time.

Quit war. Repudiate taxation. Ignore the State. Live long, live free. Seek the peace of the brave.

May goodness, beauty and truth prevail in your life and extend to all,

~ Jeff Knaebel

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

DIGG THIS

Gandhi Sixtieth Memorial 30 January 2008

Gandhi National Memorial, Agakhan Palace, Pune

This report of proceedings is offered as a contribution toward the goal of a voluntary free society without the state

Seminar On Gram Swaraj (Village Republics)

Report and Commentary by Jeff Knaebel, 31 January 2008

The writer of this report was among the seminar presenters. He was the last speaker at the Plenary Session. Excerpts from four of the prior speakers are woven into his prepared remarks which are presented in the following commentary.

Thematic Note by the Convener [abridged]

The Surest and Perhaps the Only Solution to Our Impending Catastrophic Global Ecological Crises: Village Swaraj of Gandhi, the Apostle of Truth and Non-violence of our Age.

Neither Gandhiji nor the seers of various great religions would approve the present culture of development of modern western civilization, which has caused disappearance of tens of thousands of plant and animal species and continues to cause greater and greater violence to our life-sustaining natural systems, (in the form of pollution of air, water, land, global warming and climate change, depletion of natural resources (including energy), depletion of ozone layer etc. This has devastating implications for our future generations as well as for entire planetary life in the long run.

Gandhi would not support a culture of development which consumes natural resources for luxuries faster than the earth can replace them, and produces harmful waste material beyond the capacity of man and nature to convert it into useful or harmless material.

Polluting the essential requirements of life such as air, water and land, and destroying forests on which the very survival of biological life depends, and which is the natural storehouse of our invaluable water, topsoil and medicinal plants, for the sake of luxuries is highly immoral. All religions directly or indirectly accept non-violence to be the root of morality and violence to be the root of immorality. They all consider the natural system, which sustains healthy life to be sacred and invaluable. Today science also accepts this, and what we know from science so far only our planet earth has such a natural system.

Gandhi’s alternative to modern western form of development is his Village Swaraj, a non-violent form of development, the core of which essentially consists of villages with a critical ethical culture of Truth and non-violence.

"My idea of Village Swaraj is that it is a complete republic, independent of its neighbors for its vital wants, and yet interdependent for many others in which dependence is a necessity…..The government of the village will be conducted by the Panchayat of five persons, annually elected by the adult villagers, male and female, possessing minimum prescribed qualifications… Since there will be no system of punishments in the accepted sense, this panchayat will be the legislature, judiciary and executive combined to operate for its year of office…..

"Here there is perfect democracy based on individual freedom. The individual is the architect of his own government. The law of non-violence rules him and his government. He and his village are able to defy the might of a world. For the law governing every villager is that he will suffer death in the defense of his and his village’s honor.

"The contrast between the rich and the poor today is a painful sight. The poor villagers are exploited by the foreign government and also by their own countrymen- city-dwellers. They produce the food and go hungry. They produce milk and their children have to go without it. It is disgraceful.

"A violent and bloody revolution is a certainty one day unless there is a voluntary abdication of riches and the power that riches give, and sharing them for the common good."

It is surely highly deplorable that even sixty years after our country’ independence even when our GDP growth is very high, our farmers are committing suicide in large numbers…Although India is a land of morality and religions and of many great moral and spiritual teachers, under the influence of modern western civilization, they have even excluded ethics education from our education curricula.

How could people build ethically good life and good society without critical study of ethics?

Even if it would be possible to have an affluent, eco-friendly technological society with, Gandhiji would not consider such a society to be ideal. It is his firm conviction that willing obedience to the law of body-labor brings contentment and health.

Although Gandhiji’s ideal life is an enlightened unselfish ethical life of plain living and high thinking, it is absolutely voluntary. He would not approve anyone to be forced to lead a simple life.

"Man’s happiness really lies in contentment. He who is discontented, however much he possesses, becomes a slave to his desires….. The incessant search for material comforts and their multiplication is an evil. I make bold to say that the Europeans will have to remodel their outlook, if they are not to perish under the weight of the comforts to which they are becoming slaves…

"A time is coming when those who are in mad rush today of multiplying their wants, will retrace their steps and say; what we have done?…. A certain degree of physical harmony and comfort is necessary, but above a certain level it becomes hindrance instead of help. Therefore the ideal of creating an unlimited number of wants and satisfying them seems to be a delusion and snare."

It was his firm conviction that in the materialization of his vision lay the true freedom of India, and through India of the world at large.

Unlike the explicit human-centric ethics of modern western civilization, the ethics of classical Indian civilization has been explicitly life-centric. [Emphasis added. This ethics is also found among indigenous peoples in many other cultures — Ed.]

The great teachers and seers of our ancient Indian civilization explicitly accept universal non-violence, i.e. non-violence to both human and non-human life, to be the foundation of ethics. They see clearly that enlightened selfless ethical life of love constitutes the core of Truth, and pursuit of selfless ethical life of universal love constitutes the core of its means.

"It is arrogant to say that human beings are lords and masters of the lower creatures. On the contrary, being endowed with great things in life, they are the trustees of the lower animal kingdom."

Gandhiji sees clearly that Western industrialism has two choices: "First it can wait until catastrophic failures expose systematic deficiencies, distortion and self-deception….Secondly, a culture can provide social checks and balances to correct for systematic distortion prior to catastrophic failures…"

[Editor: it is obvious that we have chosen a path which leads not only to socio-economic catastrophe, but also to ecological cataclysm. Perhaps they will occur together].

Is not the Gandhian alternative the surest and perhaps the only solution to save our planet earth from its Impending Catastrophic Global Ecological Crisis? Let us examine it deeply before it is too late.

Smt. Rama Rauta

Convener, Save Ganga Movement

President, National Women’s Organization, Pune

Presentation of Jeff Knaebel, with excerpts from others

The purpose of this commentary is to offer a written summary of the presentation made by me at the Seminar on Village Swaraj (Village Self-Rule), together with excerpts of other presentations that are relevant to the aim of establishing a Society without State. The full list of speakers is shown following the text. I was the last speaker during the Plenary Session.

The problems faced by humanity — ranging from hunger, poverty, an epidemic of Indian farmer suicides, ecological destruction, pervasive pollution, systemic corruption, unsafe food, communal violence, endless war, the imminent extinction of plants and animals that have been our cohorts across untold millennia— indeed an endless list of travails — have been skillfully stated by speakers more astute than me. The solution of Village Swaraj — independent self-sufficient Village Republics in lieu of the present international structure — has been clearly propounded.

It seems akin to a team of doctors describing symptoms of a terminal disease and offering a material level treatment. All have agreed that a mark of the human is to rise above the brutal.

Long ago in my life, a Comanche medicine man told me that "the longest journey for the white man is from the head to the heart." He meant, in part, the difficulty of integrating wisdom into the heart of compassionate action. I ask you to examine whether — these excellent presentations notwithstanding — the work of Anna Hazare is most exemplary for leaving footprints on the path of action. Across a span of decades of hard work, Anna Hazare has built up at Ralgaon Siddhi a model village of international reputation. Theorists write papers about those who have acted. Example is the first and last precept of leadership.

I submit that our problem is:

• Either too simple for technically educated, media-conditioned minds to understand,
• Or, we willfully refuse to understand,
• Or, science has made us so arrogant that we think we don’t need to understand.

It is obvious that industrial civilization is destroying the planet. A food chain so polluted, so poisoned that mother’s breast milk is labeled as toxic, suffices as a tragic summary.

A human species in possession of its senses would not deliberately destroy its own biological life supporting ecology. We are suffering from an infectious disease of the mind that has become pandemic. Professor Jack Forbes (UCal) has called it "wetiko," the disease of cannibalism.

Anna Hazare: To implement Swaraj (self rule), we must build self-reliant, self-sufficient, and self-sustainable villages. To develop the villages, we must develop the mind. We cannot develop the mind by sending our children to government schools. They return to us without common sense. Public education promotes competition instead of cooperation, and technology instead of wisdom. We must impart vidyan (knowledge) and gyan (wisdom) together. [Editor: I have noticed that "uneducated" rural Indians have better memories and extemporaneous speaking abilities than those of us educated through books and machines]. The village must be our Mandir (temple of worship). We must serve and respect it. To change the village, we must change the man.

Dr. Narendra Jadav: We are forgetting that a code of ethics was foundation and frame of Mahatma Gandhi’s thought, and his models. His model of Village Republic was based upon a unitary Legislative-Executive-Judicial function in the hands of elected village elders who were known to have committed their lives to the defense of sacred honor even unto death. A far cry from the festering swamp of corruption that is national politics today. Although India is ranked as the second fastest growing economy in the world, we are in the bottom ten percent of the United Nations Human Development Index. Corruption in government is the major culprit.

Anna Hazare: Leadership must be based upon pure thinking, the moral life, and sacrifice. "At the age of 24 I was considering suicide. Only after I committed my life to the service of others did it acquire meaning." A seed must die in the earth before it comes to life. Real charity is to give of ourselves.

It is no use to talk of India’s achievement as the second fastest growing economy in the world [referring to remarks of Narendra Jadav]. We should speak of human happiness, not statistics of economic growth. Our village people are hungry — children go to sleep hungry — how to talk of educating a hungry man? First let him have the means to grow food. Our buildings are growing higher and higher, all the while our minds sink lower.

We sons of the soil must be like the grass, bending when the river floods over us, and standing again when the storm has passed. The only constant is change. This too shall pass.

Dr. Kumar Saptrishi: Globalization and its fall-out have made urgent the necessary adoption of Gandhi’s ideas of decentralization. Corruption is reduced in small social units. There is no brotherhood in large, anonymous organizations. However, it is useless to speak of the empowerment of villages unless the caste system [social violence] is eradicated.

The western religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam are based upon a philosophy of man’s domination over nature. These structures evolve from the perceived need to control nature. [From this alienated construct arises a mind prone to violence]. Indian religions and philosophies are grounded in Ahimsa, nonviolence.

Knaebel continues…

We are being killed by allowing corporations and the State to kill our planet. Corporate State Fascism is killing the earth. It Must Go. The Nation State system is beyond reform. It Must Go.

The Mere Existence of the Nation State — conceived in and maintained by violence — is an assault on the human spirit.

Seventeen years ago years ago, at a conference similar to this in Northern Mexico, I made a decision of permanent exile from my nation. A Tarahumara elder from the Sierra Occidental had spoken to this conference on a project financed by the World Bank to cut the last virgin old growth forest of his tribe’s mountain homeland. He had held up a trash magazine and said that when you have cut all our trees to make this, my people will die, and your people will read these things.

The Gulf war of Bush the Elder was raining death from the sky. Everywhere industrial civilization was killing and destroying, consuming and exploiting.

I asked myself: does my government murder? Do I finance its murder? Answers: Yes, and yes, my taxes finance murder. Am I therefore an accomplice to murder?

I chose exile, sold everything, and left.

I am not American. Not Indian. Not Mexican, nor Russian. I am a human being.

Owe no loyalty to any Nation State. All are criminal political operations. They bomb, murder, destroy, oppress and exploit. I submit that the Indian State is a British abstraction which bears no resemblance to India as a human civilization.

The best hope for human species survival is worldwide Village Swaraj — the independent self-sufficient Village Republics envisioned by Mohandas Gandhi. Without this, or something close, we will destroy the earth and humanity. If the villages of India cannot survive, humanity cannot survive.

How Did We Get Here?

Biological man must work with the natural resources of earth to sustain his life. Direct work is termed the "economic means." Taking the produce of others by force has been termed the "political means." The State is the organization of the political means, by which violence and force are given the cloak of moral legitimacy.

The modern State is controlled by corporations. Corporations are inhuman legal constructs whose design code is to generate monetary profit for its owning shareholders. For the corporation there is no humanity and no society, except as they provide an arena or means for profit.

The Powers That Be who control both Corporation and State are shielded from the consequences of their actions by the legal constructs of limited liability and Sovereign Immunity. These people remain largely anonymous and essentially unaccountable. They are protected from retribution of even heinous crimes against humanity by the power the gun, wielded by agents of the State, who are accepted by society as "legalized" murderers. The real decision-makers of world affairs are behind the scenes, unknown and unknowable to the public.

Shielded by sovereign immunity, these men are allowed act out their drives for power and domination in an irresponsible manner, without concern for personal accountability.

Through complex psychological and social dynamics that I have yet to understand, we have placed ourselves in voluntary servitude to this institutional system. Which means — in a nutshell — that we have surrendered control over our own lives, and the destiny of this planet, into the hands of perhaps a few hundred sociopathic egomaniacs.

Somehow we allowed ourselves to become mentally and morally numbed by the unending barrage of symbols, propaganda and spin promulgated by the Established Money Power.

There is now erupting an exponentially exploding and intertwined virus of mindlessly used technology, industrialization, and population growth which will soon u2018go critical.’ Globalization has operated to substitute economic activity and its relentless and directionless growth for any other measure of human dignity, purpose, and happiness. (Cruttwell, 1995).

We have it upside down and backwards. Far from being our savior, technology is our mortal enemy, acting as a graveyard spiral with never-ending promises to save us from the never-ending problems that it has itself created. Technology simply puts ever-more powerful tools and weapons into the hands of the egomaniacs that control human affairs.

The Consequences

I want to share with you the following communication which has come from V.K. Desai for contribution to this seminar.

I live in Rajkot, a city of Mahatma Gandhi, but now nothing special and turned into highly industrialized city with nowhere Gandhi except his home as monument in busy business street.

In radius of around 200km from Rajkot, 5000 villages are situated in which life style still exists somewhat similar to what you want to create. Seventy five percent of the village people are farmers having their own land, cultivating groundnut, cotton, wheat, pulses, grain etc but never tobacco or harmful crop, not even exception in one acre. Village structure is more or less the skeleton of a moral, cooperative, self-reliant, self-employed society, but villagers do not know its significance. Here I can see your concept materialized to some extent.

But Government is breaking it very fast by heavily taxing it, exploiting it, snatching away their lands forcefully and illegally, whenever and wherever required by big industrialists, forcing them to tempt for city life through TV, making them into addict for tobacco vices for the interests of tobacco industries and spoiling them by every possible way. Almost entire population (10 million) is vegetarian with a few exceptions. Small farmers till their land by bullocks and big ones by tractors. Cows are vanishing very fast due to slaughter houses for meat export. Our people have never seen meat. So much merciful are they, if women just happen to see meat, many of them become unconscious by shock. This year, rainfall was very much and so everywhere there is widespread happiness, no poverty, no hunger anywhere. There is prohibition by law. So no alcoholic drinks anywhere.

We are very much concerned how to save our villages, how to make better living conditions, how to rid them of fertilizers and pesticides and stop their exploitation which Government is heavily promoting as our biggest enemy. Many people are trying, but rush and attraction for modern life style is so much presented in TV that our efforts are of no use. Yesterday I was in a village in public meeting for such purpose. [END OF EMAIL]. ///

We have ended up in the situation foretold by Gandhi, and against which he devoted his life. Our land base is rapidly nearing total destruction. Without a land base — fertile soil, vegetation, forest, water and clean air — we cannot survive. Any species, in order to survive, must enhance both itself and its environment. No species is independent of its ecology. They are bound together.

The Solution

There are two clearly definable and interconnected "enemies."

• External: The Money Power, acting through the Central Bankers and using the "iron triangle" of military-industrial-political complex.
• Internal: Our own mind. The frontier of the battle for human survival is consciousness itself.
• The interconnection: much of human consciousness is now manipulated or outright controlled by the Money Power acting through corporations, media and State.

I conceptualize Gandhiji’s method as a cart with two wheels, pulled by the power of Ahimsa and Truth. One wheel is Resistance and the other is a Positive Constructive Program. It has been my personal experience as an activist that without both wheels, one loses his mental balance. An unbroken regime of resistance leads to the burn out which results from dryness and lack of loving expression. A Constructive Program without resistance leads to a sense of futility and resignation that no amount of effort will change the system.

"Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless and corrupt."

~ MK Gandhi (DG Tendulkar, 1960, Publications Division, Government of India)

"Individual civil disobedience is everybody’s inherent right, like the right of self-defense in normal life." ~ MK Gandhi (Epigrams From Gandhiji, 1971, Publications Division, Government of India)

Are we there yet — that is, into lawlessness and corruption? We can read the answer every day in the newspapers, endlessly. It churns the guts with shame to be human.

Resistance

• Fight to defend our land base from corporate exploitation. Form Direct Action Defense committees (DAD).
• Treat corporate land expropriation — acting behind the State’s shield of Eminent Domain — as you would a foreign invading enemy taking your land, and thus your life.
• Defend your land as you would life, by whatever means necessary.
• Help others to defend their land.
• Boycott corporate products, especially non-essential luxuries. Support local artisans.
• Refusal of taxes. Refusal of voting. Withdraw from institutional participation.
• Ignore the State. Become self-sufficient. Refuse its services. Don’t give it energy.
• We need not bow down to these forces of destruction and death.

Constructive

• Moral education. Gandhi said it is necessary to defend honor unto death.
• Ecological education by right livelihood example.
• The Anna Hazare model demonstrated by his work at Ralgaon Siddhi. There are others also.
• Self Restraint and Self-Reliance.
• Selfless service to others without expectation of reward or results.

Personal choice

• Be part of the problem: support corporations with purchases of fancy things at the malls of mindlessness. Things designed in the wake of artificially created "needs" in order to temporarily satisfy desires that the advertising media intends to make insatiable.
• Be part of the solution: by self-restraint, self-denial, boycott, resistance, tax refusal, and protest.
• Village Swaraj is the last best chance for the survival of humanity. Support it with actions.

WE NEED NOT QUIETLY ACCEPT THIS VIOLATION OF OUR HUMANITY

Complete non-violence today would mean acquiescence in systematic destruction of the whole earth, and thus all of humanity with it. Some situations demand that we defend our land, our right to livelihood, and our lives with violent defensive action.

Direct Action Today, I feel, however, is best expressed in self-restraint, in the quiet refusal to buy corporate products, in boycott, in self-reliance and in tax refusal, in refusal to report for combat in aggressive war, in refusal to accept corporate and government media propaganda as truth.

Direct Action Today is in cleansing our minds of the falsehoods that have led us to believe that money, and position, and power have any meaning whatsoever. We are committing suicide because we have given meaning to these falsehoods and are allowing them to control our lives.

For Nonviolent Direct Action Today to succeed, I feel that there must be some among us who have the courage and the will for violent defense of their rights, such as those at Nandigram and Sirur, and the heroic women of Chiapas, and the bravest of Seattle 1999. These brave ones among us must have not only the will, but the means and the proven ability to execute. Nonviolence cannot succeed where the Money Power thinks that it can walk over us with consequence no greater than muddy feet.

Unfortunately, for nonviolence to succeed in the political arena, there must be blood on the hands of the guilty — blood that the nonviolent can point to, and that may prick the conscience of the aggressor.

Gandhi on 22 March 1922: "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still small voice within. And even though I have to face the prospect to a minority of one, I humbly believe I have the courage to be in such a hopeless minority that to me is the only truthful position."

~ Romain Rolland (Mahatma Gandhi — The Man Who Became One With The Universal)

The last quote of Mohandas Gandhi above is a theme that this website at www.freeofstate.org has been emphasizing again and again:

That representative "liberal democracy" is a falsehood and a sham. It is simply not possible for one person to u2018represent’ the conscience of another. Gandhi will accept only the authority of the "still small voice" within himself.

The Money Power, bloated as they are on blood money, must not be permitted to cast secret ballots from safe positions and comfortable seats in controlled environment buildings. Those who would make war must not be allowed to do so by vote to spill another’s blood. They must put themselves in harm’s way and meet their so-called enemy face to face in mortal combat. Among those who may return, few will be inclined to give great orations on the consecration of the corpses littering a trampled field of mayhem and death.

May you live long and live free and succeed in the quest for peace.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

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INTRODUCTION

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed HR 1955, titled the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. It was passed with 404 votes in favor.

A close reading within an historical context — keeping especially in mind the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and Presidential Executive Orders, pursuant to which the government has engaged in massive surveillance of its own citizens, as well as detentions, extraordinary renditions, assassinations, and torture — leads me to the following conclusions:

• This is a "Thought Crime" bill of the type so often discussed in an Orwellian context.
• It specifically targets the civilian population of the United States.
• It defines "Violent Radicalization" as promoting any belief system that the government considers to be extremist.
• "Homegrown Terrorism" and "Violent Radicalization" are defined as thought crimes.
• Since the bill does not provide a specific definition of extremist belief system, it will be whatever the government at any given time deems it to be.

A few extracts of the Bill are presented below to show you its tone or "flavor."

"(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term `violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system… to advance political, religious, or social change."

SECTION 899B. FINDINGS.

"(3) The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens."

"(6) The potential rise of self radicalized, unaffiliated terrorists domestically cannot be easily prevented through traditional Federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts, and requires the incorporation of State and local solutions."

Section 899D of the bill establishes a Center for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States. This will be an institution affiliated with the Department of Homeland Security. It will study and determine how to detain thought criminals.

THIS LEGISLATION ENDS THE POSSIBILITY OF A CULTURE OF REASON.

It is an attempt at legislative lobotomy of conscience. It aims to eviscerate ethical sensibilities of an entire culture.

Having usurped the power of war and peace, life and death, the Corporatocracy now bludgeons even the thought of speaking for conscience. This is State murder of the mind.

It is just too awesomely obscene for words. It exceeds not only the scope of my vocabulary, but my imagination as well.

The minions and hired agents of politicians are free to murder, rape and pillage on government hire using our money, but to imagine alternatives to them and the degraded, psychopathic political "leaders" who design and perpetrate these atrocities is legislated as a thought crime!

This is the legislated, politically promulgated end of man as a thinking, self-directed being. Surely this must be the outer limit of "positive law," that is, statutory laws passed by "Lawmakers."

It further entrenches the Power Elite as separate from and above their "subjects." It clearly demonstrates the paranoid delusions of the Establishment, pursuant to which it legislates a massive defense mechanism to protect itself from the populace that it subjugates.

I use these terms deliberately, because the so-called freedom of the vote has turned out to be a big con game. It is only the "freedom" to choose one set of thieves over the other. The blue suits or the red suits… all of them manufactured suits of the corporations.

Following in the train of this legislation will doubtless be internal travel documents, neighborhood snoops and spies, rewards granted for turning in politically incorrect thought criminals, mass civilian detention centers — in short, the whole totalitarian control mechanism that we associate with the SS, KGB and other code words of criminal regimes. There will be "re-programming / rehabilitation" centers to correct errant free thinkers.

Take note that the Department of Homeland Security already has more than 750,000 persons on its watch list. For a glimpse of past as prologue, read Solzhenitsyn.

Who Will Be Thought Police and Under What Standards?

Who will define radical thought, and by what standards? For example, how about the reported millions who believe that 9-11 was an inside job, citing a mass of evidence from eye witnesses, physicists, engineers, and recorded statements such as "We pulled it," essentially a confession by the building’s owner of the planned demolition of Building 7?

Will the writings of John Perkins in Confessions of An Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of The American Empire be thought crimes? Will this very essay be a thought crime?

What about Operation Northwoods, pursuant to which the Joint Chiefs of the United States planned for innocent people to be shot on American streets, for boats carrying passengers to be sunk on the high seas, for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched within the country, and for other depraved acts conceived in the minds of government-hired psychopaths? Previously top-secret documents about this were released on 18 November 1997 and can be researched at www.wikipedia.org. Evidently, members of the Establishment will be permitted to engage in thought crime.

Soon enough, we will all be killing each other, and the statement of Mohandas Gandhi will be borne out: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

Will thinking about cleansing the national soul of our atrocities — of Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, the advanced plans underway to nuke Iran, the crimes of Blackwater murderers, the government’s domestic coercion and violence — be "Thought Crimes?"

Will it be thought crime to conceive of a domestic Truth and Reconciliation Commission pursuant to which high government officials are brought to book for crimes against humanity?

Will it be "radicalization" to think of alternatives to a government of, by, and for the Corporatocracy, which accumulates its vast wealth through the blood money of endless war?

What about imagination-consideration of a non-coercive society of free individuals acting in voluntary cooperation, what is commonly referred to as anarchy?

Will it be radical to conceive of preventing the Cheney-Bush cabal from launching WWIII and the incineration of earth through a false flag operation against Iran?

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS OF OUR GOVERNMENT

BECAUSE WE PAY FOR IT

It has taken me too many years — and too much income tax — to come to the awful realization that these "public servants" are only hired mouthpieces and puppets of the Money Powers who operate behind the scenes to orchestrate war, to coordinate the Military Industrial Complex, the Homeland Security Complex, the NGO Help-The-Poor Complex, the "Third World Corporate Development" Complex. In short, the Exploitation Complex.

The roaring inside me is about the self-disgust at living by the whims of Nice Government Men and their intellectual and financial pimps — men who, for just one example, can force starvation upon Indian farmers by their money printing press maneuvers to save their own hides from the overreach of blind greed. Men like those in Goldman Sachs who have the power to bail out their own companies and pay billions in bonuses while manipulating currencies such that basic food staples become priced out of reach of the rural Indian poor.

Let our excuse for the sorry state in which we find ourselves be not ignorance, for history is quite clear to those who would study. I quote founding father James Madison, "History records that money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible, to maintain their control over governments, by controlling money and its issuance." A more honest excuse would be our own greed and laziness. The quick buck. Buy now, pay later.

Statement of Conscientious Objection

HR 1955 as recently passed by the House of Representatives is in effect a Thought Crime Prevention Bill. This action simply stops my mind. It cannot be absorbed. This ultimate Police State freezes my imagination.

This newest version of draconian legislation on thought control is where Jeff Knaebel says enough is enough. Speaking truth to Power, I say, I am not your puppet. I declare my self-ownership. Come and get me if you wish. If you wish to own my body, you will have to imprison it. I am breaking the paper chains by which I have allowed you to enslave me.

Imagine with me for a moment (it may not yet be a thought crime). I say to Dick Cheney, "I refuse to obey. Come and get me, boss. Come alone — I’ll not run, and I am unarmed and harmless. Meet me in yonder open field." Standing in front of him, I remove my shirt, challenging him to do likewise. To prove his manhood equal, he follows along until we stand facing each other naked in the open field. I ask, "Now, what is your business with me?"

You see, it is all a mind game. The government is powerless before our non-cooperation. Of course, although an abstraction, it is a heavily armed abstraction. This argues for the right to bear arms and a well-armed citizenry in the American tradition. But if the mind behind the gun is cowardly and subdued, the gun is of no use. I suggest that nonviolent civil disobedience has proven to be a more effective method of regaining control of our lives. There would be significant loss of life, but much less than with an armed struggle.

Is murder an act that involves the human conscience? Can any other hear the voice of my inner conscience? Then, how can any such other claim the power to "represent" me in choosing to kill? How can such other "represent" me in determining which of my thoughts is criminal?

To say, or even to imply, that these people "represent" me cannot be described as an obscenity. It is an absurdity. Really, I should laugh. Instead it generates a roaring inside me — the inner roar of a man who would be free.

THIS IS MY PLACE OF "LIVE FREE OR DIE."

One cannot deal with this except to speak out and be willing to put his life on the line. One must resist this legislation and this government, or else surrender his humanity and become a dead thing.

This is the place where the soles of my feet meet the path of Liberty. This is where Jeff Knaebel refuses to renew his "permission to live" identification documents pursuant to which Big Brother tracks him like an owned domestic animal. Any situation in which I am not free to leave means that my presence is by coercion or threat of coercion. If one cannot leave some "place" except by permission of the "owners" (passport), then he is a slave. To learn more about issues of expatriation and "man without a country," visit my website at www.statelessfreedom.org.

I was never the property even of my biological father, leave aside the absurdly stupid abstract concept of Nations — bounded by arbitrary lines drawn on maps — across which opposing armies of blood relations gun down the other.

My body is not the property of the U.S. Government. I will challenge the U.S. Government for ownership of my body, with my body itself. My mind will be forever free.

I did not ask for US citizenship, and I will not accept its rules even if forced upon me.

Any situation in which I am not free to leave means that my presence is by coercion or threat of coercion. If I cannot leave some "place" except by permission of the "owners" (passport), then I am a slave.

The US State does not own the land called America, and it does not own anybody who was born there or lives there.

No bureaucrat has the right to define who I am — and the murder of which other person I may be forced to finance — by his stamp upon some arbitrary piece of paper.

I belong to none, other than Almighty Creation.

I claim my freedom to respect the lives of others, as I would be respected. Freedom to do no harm, and to eschew violence. Freedom to express compassion in action. Freedom to support life. Freedom not to finance murder.

No other can hear the voice of my conscience, let alone "represent" it, or speak for it. My conscience will be muffled by no person and by no law. Nor will I ever knowingly aggress against another.

It Is Man’s Duty To Love.

It now must be of the "tough love" variety. We must see clearly and face bravely the reality of what we continue to create for ourselves. We must take up tough ethical positions.

We have proved again and again, over spans of millennia, that any kind of violent revolution will only turn the wheel of violence another revolution, around and around.

If we will but cease to destroy, we may live. We cannot negotiate with melting glaciers. Perhaps we can negotiate with the storms of insatiable greed and desire raging within our own minds. Perhaps we can come out of our addiction to more, more and faster, faster.

The revolution we must undertake to save ourselves is a revolution within our own minds toward loving kindness, truth, and respect for life.

To those who would accept a legislated statutory slavery, I say — may your shackles bind you without too much pain. May you go quietly into oblivion, and may you not burden me with the memory that you ever stood a watch with me on Spaceship Earth.

If you are interested in further exploration of personal statelessness, stop by and visit www.statelessfreedom.org.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

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Introduction

(This essay has been delayed due to load shedding by the government power company)

Who am I, to write this appeal to friends, known and unknown, of the country which hosts my exile from the American Empire? Were not the issue both burning and urgent, I would not do.

I am an American-born war resistor, living in a self-imposed exile that began with the Gulf War of Bush the Elder. I had served the US Government as a Naval officer in Vietnam during that war. I had seen first hand the effects of Lies of the State and States of the Lie.

The State bodes ill for survival prospects of the human species.

I also once served as CEO of a small consultancy company that worked with major MNC clients at CEO and Board level, and with the Executive and Legislative branches of the US Government. Here I heard, saw, and learnt some facts of life.

The upper levels of Corporate business practice and the conduct of State War are both games of greed and domination, one a more subtle version of the other. This have I seen. Truth is the first casualty of both. Secrecy, concealment, deceit, anonymity, and taking advantage comprise the lexicon of both. Both are guided by the self interests of men in power. Both are inhuman abstract legal constructs, behind the shields of which their agents can act ruthlessly without fear of retribution.

The lives of ordinary human beings — Indian, American and others — are about to be crushed between the steel jaws of this pending US-India Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, so called as "123 Agreement," or "US-India Nuclear Deal." Political power brokers and bankers and the elite class of both countries will reap obscene profits from years of careful planning — plans which have been cunningly concealed behind alphabet soup labels on the closed doors of international institutions.

The consequences are unknowable, yet a sane person must tremble before the clear probabilities of mind-boggling destruction.

This much I do understand. When ordinary persons think that he or she is living under a "democracy," they are deluded by the game of smoke and mirrors. Citizens on both sides of this deal are being treated as vassals of the Corporatocracy, an apt name used by John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man) for the merger of Corporation and State. This merger invites immense fraud with extreme defense establishment and banker profiteering. It holds open the gate of totalitarianism.

Realizing that appeals to reason or conscience of the psychopathic murderers in charge of the State would be hopeless, I decided on a simple and more direct action. Just quit paying for it — by refusal of taxation. I would try to follow the paths of the greatest teachers known to me: Buddha (India), Christ (Middle East), Spinoza (Europe), Thoreau (America), Tolstoy (Russia),

Mohandas Gandhi (India). I make no claim to progress — this statement is only to point a direction.

"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

~ Nuremburg War Crime Tribunal, 1950

Not believing for a moment that the above statement would serve as a legal defense against "tax evasion," I left the country in order to quit paying.

After much research and travel, I chose India as domicile. I came not to enjoy the fruits of an exotic land of staggering complexity, but to elevate my consciousness by getting closer to the roots of human spirituality that has sustained mankind throughout the ages. I looked to her sacred Dharma. On my first trip, and many thereafter, I came for the teachings of her spiritual masters. At first I was shocked to hear a Spiritual Master refer to America as the "culture of the gun," but after some time I could see the truth of it.

I could not then have foreseen how much further humanity would sink into barbarian depravity, thrust by lies into the pathological insanity of State Terrorism through a Corporatocracy administered by the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld cabal.

No American can trust his own government. Certainly no self-respecting Indian should trust this American government. My aim is to work toward a Stateless Society. Never again will I pay to finance State murder.

What Is The 123 Nuclear Deal?

On the surface, it is an international treaty between the US and India for the exchange of nuclear technology, materials, and services. Beneath the surface lurks a hidden agenda of monstrous proportions that places the survival of humanity at risk. The American objective is to co-opt India for the New World Order of the Project For A New American Century. The PNAC aims for "full spectrum domination" of the world.

Some Indian Commentary

(From Times of India and Indian Express, late August-early Sept 2007)

• "[British] Raj used Indian soldiers as guinea pigs to test poison gas…"
• "US wanted India to carry out nuclear test before China …"
• "Scientists support 123 deal — it doesn’t curtail making of weapons…"
• "Times-TNS survey: 58% Indians think 123 is good, 34% think it is bad, 8% can’t say."
• "China, Pak to counter 123 deal. Pak pushing to add to nuclear sting with China’s help."
• "The US and India will not renegotiate the nuclear deal under any circumstances…"
• "N-deal against India’s interests … a majority in Parliament do not support …"
• "Malabar 07 is not a war plan … India not planning military alliance against China …"
• "The US-India nuclear deal is about an emerging US-led security alliance …"
• "Appeal to back nuclear deal — India faces Pakistan on west and a rising China…"
• "India is interested in securing energy imports from the Gulf; China’s navy can thwart…"
• "Meanwhile, China, Pak fast forward on N-supplies. Recent events alter strategic balance…"
• "Airbase in Tajikistan … India readies its first real military outpost on foreign shores…"
• "Deep disquiet with politicos… poll’s overwhelming response is one of disgust at politicos supposed to lead the country…"

Sukla Sen

Speaking as a representative of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP).

"India has steadfastly emerged as a significant destabilizing force in the arena of global nuclear danger. It has torpedoed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Together with Pakistan, it has turned South Asia into a sort of live nuclear volcano ready to erupt at any moment. This is the more shocking as it amounts to complete negation of India’s traditional claim to being a pioneering pacifist force. The political class became completely obsessed with the idea of "nuclear sovereignty." In pursuit of this goal, it develops closer and closer relationships with the US and Israel, the two most aggressive forces in the present global order. The ongoing Indo-US nuclear deal (123) is the most visible manifestation of these disturbing developments. The deal would further cement the growing strategic ties between India and US and set a very negative example before the nuclear threshold states, prodding them to cross the Rubicon.

"The US concessions are intended to draw India closer to the US and make it operate as a junior partner to counter actual and potential challenges to the US in the region. The deal would reinforce the US bid to establish unfettered domination over the world in pursuance of the Project for the New American Century. It would aggravate tensions and thereby set up an arms race in the region. It subverts the prospects for global nuclear disarmament. It distorts India’s energy options in favor of nuclear power, which is currently uneconomic, intrinsically hazardous, potentially catastrophic, and has strong technological and political links to nuclear weapons."

Praful Bidwai of CNDP

"Criticism of the US-India Nuclear Cooperation Agreement ("123 Agreement") focuses in part on objections to India’s embrace of "strategic partnership" with the US, as well as abandonment of India’s earlier advocacy of universal disarmament. The deal will increase India’s capacity to make nuclear weapons, and this cannot give us more security. On the contrary, it will fuel a nuclear arms race with both Pakistan and India. The deal allows India to produce and stockpile enough plutonium for more than 300 Nagasaki-type bombs each year."

Siddharth Varadarajan, writing in The Hindu

"India’s choice has been to use its nuclear weapons status as a lever for multi-polar world order as well as for global restraints on development of weapons of mass destruction — OR — to use its status as an instrument to perpetuate an order based on the production of insecurity and violence in which it hopes to be accommodated as a junior partner. The Vajpayee government desperately longed for the latter.

"The sudden shift of US from 40 years of non-proliferation policy is the result of increasing fears in US business and strategic circles about China. Washington neo-cons believe India must be armed to offset China’s threat. Former Ambassador Blackwill says frankly that different countries "should be treated in accordance with their friendship and value to the US."

"The development of deadly new nuclear weapons by the US should be a matter of great concern to India, for their eventual deployment will degrade the security environment in the world and Asia. The hidden agenda is somewhat exposed by the remarks of Mr.Tellis – formerly of RAND Corporation – who is quoted "Allowing India access to US nuclear material and equipment would make New Delhi more likely to help further American strategic goals in the region."

"All told, the deal raises a number of questions about the Government’s policies in the fields of nuclear energy, disarmament, promotion of democracy, energy security and strategic stability in Asia. Spinning euphoric reports in the mass media is not the way to answer these questions."

ABOLITION 2000

(Over 2000 organizations in more than 90 countries working for nuclear disarmament)

"On 14 August, this organization urged the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to reject the US-India nuclear deal. Philip White, coordinator, says "The agreement will fuel an arms race in South Asia. Pakistan is already taking steps to expand its nuclear weapons program. The deal marks a fundamental shift in the international non-proliferation regime."

These news reports and many high level official pronouncements confirm a psychosis, a diseased mind which can suggest that controlling the power to destroy all life on earth is the way to peace. This disease is in the minds of the Powers That Be, who use propaganda to play upon mass fear and mask their true agenda of endless war for endless profit. Among some, a disease of delusion, fear and denial, and among others, a psychosis of paranoia, domination and egomania. How to recover from these afflictions, these cankers of the mind?

In all this, one is compelled to ask, what do the people long for? How to remove the lives of ordinary people from the crushing effects of the disease of power?

It Looks Like Imperialism… Who Gains, Who Loses?
(Hint: follow the money)

A glimpse at history may help our understanding of the present. There is a back trail that leads to here and now. The following vignettes are based mostly upon The Merchant of Death (John Flynn, 1941, courtesy of Mises Institute); The Myth of the Innocent Civilian (Harold Thomas, 2003, www.themythoftheonnocentcivilian.com); War Is a Racket (Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, courtesy www.lexrex.com). With States and guns, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The mixture always results in death. First, Mr. Flynn –

In the years before the horror of WWI, British arms maker Vickers grew until it had plants all over the world, "from Ireland to Japan, and from the North Sea to the antipodes."

"It was done with the aid of British-government backing and pressure, the immense financial resources of British finance; by means of bribery and chicanery, by the purchase of military and naval authorities and the press wherever newspapers could be bought. It is a dark, sordid story of ruthless money getting without regard for honor, morals, and either national or humane considerations, while the Europe which they upset with their conspiracies and terrorized with their war scares, and to which they sold hatred as the indispensable condition of marketing guns, slid along with the certainty of doom into the chasm of fire and death in 1914.

"On March 18, 1914, on the very brink of the coming disaster, Philip Snowden, disease-wracked, crippled socialist labor leader rose in Commons to make a speech. When he had done, he had rocked the British Empire with his disclosures. One by one he pointed out cabinet ministers, members of the House, and named high-ranking officials in army and navy circles, persons of royal position, who were large holders of shares in Vickers and Armstrong, in John Brown and Beardmore, shipbuilders. The profits of Vickers and Armstrong had been enormous, and the most powerful persons in the state and the church and the nobility had bought into them to share in the profits. Vickers had among its directors two dukes, two marquis, and family members of fifty earls, fifteen baronets, and five knights, twenty-one naval officers, two naval government architects, and many journalists. Armstrong had even more u2014 sixty earls or their wives, fifteen baronets, twenty knights, and twenty military or naval architects and officers, while there were thirteen members of the House of Commons on the directorates of Vickers, Armstrong, or John Brown. “It would be impossible,” said Snowden, “to throw a handful of pebbles anywhere upon the opposition benches without hitting members interested in these arms firms.”

"Ministers, officers, technical experts moved out of the government, out of the cabinet, the navy, the army, the war office, the admiralty, into the employ of the munitions manufacturers. Snowden quoted Lord Welby, head of the Civil Service, who only a few weeks before had denounced the arms conspirators. “We are in the hands of an organization of crooks,” said Lord Welby. “They are politicians, generals, manufacturers of armaments and journalists. All of them are anxious for unlimited expenditure, and go on inventing scares to terrify the public and to terrify the Ministers of the Crown."

"The trail of that vast armament effort between 1877 and 1914 is stained by a record of bribery of admirals and generals, civil servants of all degrees ranging from cabinet ministers to messengers."

"The whole excuse of this industry was national defense. Yet these enterprises were as busy supplying the armies of their enemies as the armies of their own countries. Up to the time of Alfred Krupp’s death in 1887 he had made 24,576 cannon of which only 10,666, or less than half, were sold to the fatherland for national defense. The rest went to Germany’s enemies and neighbors.

"Krupp’s mills, shipyards, and docks became indispensable to Germany. A vast industry employed many men and provided still more employment among all the raw-material industries upon which it drew. When the Hague conference was discussed in Germany, looking toward disarmament, the militarist ministers asked what would become of Krupp’s business if Germany disarmed. They put that in writing, and the Kaiser wrote upon the memorandum the question, “How will Krupp pay his men?” Armament had become a cornerstone of the German internal economic policy.

"Seemingly the war had brought a magnificent harvest for the war profiteers. In America firms like Calumet and Hecla Copper had had, at the peak, as much as 800 per cent profit on their capital stock. In the two years of 1916 and 1917 the United States Steel Corporation showed a profit of $1,100,000,000. The Bethlehem Steel Company averaged profits of $48,000,000 a year during the four years of the war. In the year before the war Vickers had a profit of roughly $5,000,000." End Quote.

The munitions industry differs from others in that its direct customers are governments. It must find its clients among public officials. It uses bribery of officers, penetration of cabinets and bureaus, and influence among the powerful.

Some of the rich and famous in this ancient game are names familiar to us yet today: Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Kennedy, du Pont, Kuhn, Loeb, Warburg, Remington, Roosevelt, Snowden, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kissinger, Nixon, Johnson, Blair, Clinton, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet, Hussein, bin Laden. Currently familiar corporate players include Halliburton, Carlyle, KBR, Blackwater, Bechtel, Parsons, Blackstone, GE, Boeing, Alliant Techsystems, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Lehman, Citibank, together with all of Big Oil and all of the world Central Bankers. Resume quote below.

"It is this side of the munitions business that brings it into disfavor. For it is not content to corrupt officials as public contractors do, but mixes up in state policy to create disturbance. It flourishes only in a world where hatreds and controversies, dynastic and economic and racial and religious differences between peoples flourish. Hence it has spared no pains to keep these mortal quarrels alive, to alarm peoples and ministers with war scares, to breed suspicion and distrust."

Certainly, any informed person can but see the 21st century as extending the twentieth’s sordid history to even more insane levels of organized industrial scale global destruction.

*

Now, a voice from the actual field of battle, General Smedley Butler, USMC, writing as the clouds of WWII gather.

"War is a racket. It is easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one in which profits are reckoned in dollars and losses in lives.

"In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

"Yes, they are getting ready for another war [WWII]. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.

"Fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

"Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.

"And let us not forget the bankers who financed the Great War. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public — even before a Senate investigatory body.

"Who provides the profits — these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them — in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us — the people — got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par — and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.

"Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had u2018kept us out of war’ and on the implied promise that he would u2018keep us out of war.’ Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

"In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.

"Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

"Money.

"An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

u2018There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.

u2018If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money…and Germany won’t… So…’

"Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a u2018war to make the world safe for democracy’ and a “war to end all wars.” End Quote.

*

Who will gain from the US – India 123 Nuclear Deal? Follow the money.

Who will lose? Many human beings will lose their lives. India will lose its soul.

Know Your Partner

When any organization — in this case the Government of India — is about to enter a major Joint Venture (in this case a "Strategic Partnership") with another, it must check the credentials of its prospective partner. Let us check the sordid record of the American Empire, now operating under aegis of the so called "Project For A New American Century."

American history demonstrates a warlike people. It has from beginning been the culture of the gun. Although the Founding fathers declared their intention to avoid the endless wars of Europe, before George Washington’s first term was over, he had deployed Federal troops against his own countrymen, over an issue of taxation. There followed a long genocide of indigenous inhabitants, the war of 1812, The Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War…

"Between 1898 and 1934, the Marines invaded Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5 times, Honduras 7 times, Dominican Republic 4 times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico 3 times and Columbia 4 times. Washington has intervened militarily in foreign countries more than 200 times." ~ Information Clearing House 19 Aug 2007.

The "American Experiment" has left a long track record of violence, in my day including Hiroshima-Nagasaki, Vietnam-Cambodia (several millions killed), Kosovo, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, the current grim total of more than one million killed in Iraq as of last month, and the shameful atrocities of torture at Guantanamo and Abu Gharib.

Habeas corpus suspended. Internment camps completed on US soil. Torture is justified in public debate. Pre-emptive attack, even nuclear is justified. Confiscation of personal assets in response to resistance to a war based on lies and fakes. Unending flow of Executive Decrees. Access to government documents denied. Government lies running in every direction. All historical precedent points toward the Fascist Business Model, leading to a veiled military dictatorship.

An example of the depths of depravity to which the American military has sunk is that of soldiers selling images and video clips of gruesome war pictures — such as the "pink mist" of a human being exploding — in exchange for subscription fees to porno websites. This military is accountable to Congress, and Congress to the people, so where does that place American "values?" And what can be said of a culture in which there is a market for this stuff?

*

"Never in my life of 44 years would I have imagined that this great country could be lied into a war so blatantly, yet there is so little power in we the people to stop the death and destruction and torture and misery and mayhem and hatred and economic peril that war represents. And we pay for it through taxes, inflated fiat currency, the limbs and lives of our citizens, and our collective reputation worldwide whether we consent to it or not

"The road of critical thinking on these issues leads to only one place: our government is a cruel monster that destroys lives and property and absolutely cannot be trusted with any power, let alone the power to kill millions with the literal press of a button. Yet here we are in late 2007 and we are witnesses of and conspirators to the very death, destruction, and mayhem that we supposedly oppose at all costs.

"What have we become, sitting idly in front of our big-screen propaganda boxes while many thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians die from our collective actions? Let there be no mistake whatsoever: the greatest threat to our collective safety and security is our own corrupt, evil, soulless federal government to which we are connected like Siamese twins. By extension, our complacence makes us equally guilty. We the people have the blood on our collective hands. Perhaps the real tyrant resides in us; it resides in our collective disinterest and ignorance as a citizenry to stand up and say that we have had enough death and destruction. We have become our own tyrants. We have become our own jailers.

"What exactly does Mr. Ferencz mean by “rise up”? Because of the substantial momentum of our nationalistic-corporate-military-government-propaganda-hate machine, it would seem that the awakening must occur at the individual and at the collective level with a focused energy."

~ John Smalanskas, 30 August 2007, LewRockwell.com

*

I offer for your consideration a few more government character traits of India’s proposed "strategic partner," as published in truthout.org and excerpted from my book Experiments in Moral Sovereignty — Notes of an American Exile, October 2006.

• "There is a far more sinister imperial right that Bush has claimed — and used — without demur from Congress: ordering the u2018extrajudicial killing’ of anyone on earth that he or his deputies decide — arbitrarily, without charges, court hearing, formal evidence, or appeal — is an u2018illegal combatant.’ Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death over the entire world."
• "This is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government. And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder."
• "Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people. But that is our reality. To overcome what seems to be widespread cognitive dissonance, we need only examine the publicly available record. There is nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know — if they choose to know it."
• "Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval. Nor is it necessary any longer for the president to approve new names added to the target list…the u2018security organs’ can designate and kill as they see fit. There is no way of knowing how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally… the death squads are able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to enter countries surreptitiously."
• "Suspects — and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects — have been murdered. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance, and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass
• "It is hard to believe that any adult with the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and the good in America have done."

*

Know Thyself… "My" India, Your India

With this essay, I ask my Indian brothers and sisters, and all other fellow human beings with whom I sojourn on this lonely planet: awaken to the reality and the motivation of events unfolding before your eyes. Ask yourselves — in the name of India’s greatest spiritual traditions, whose potential has been to guide the whole of humanity — do we sincerely wish a partnership in this sacrilegious mass murder? Do we really wish to co-create the potentiality of a nuclear holocaust that destroys all of humanity? Participation in this madness seems unthinkable.

Do you really want the karma of nuclear proliferation with the government that atomized the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The actions of the Bush Administration and the US government are outrageous psychopathically depraved crimes against humanity. Measured against the standards of the wisdom teachings and great spiritual traditions of India, it is an unspeakable desecration of Goodness, Beauty and Truth.

How, now, the India known for timeless aphorisms such as

• Love all, serve all;
• There is only one race —the race of humanity;
• There is only one language — the language of the heart;
• We are One.

Will this be anything other than a great hypocrisy after your "strategic partner" has bombed the parents of another million homeless children?

Our great challenge is to respond nonviolently to this crisis which threatens our very survival. The dysfunction of the ego mind — long recognized by ancient wisdom teachers — has now been magnified by science and technology to an incomprehensible power. This power, under the direction of egomania, is threatening survival of all living beings. We must realize that we — as a species — are faced with a stark choice: evolve or die. We must rise above the limitations of our condition through an evolutionary leap to a consciousness of respect for life.

To point a direction of the great evolutionary turn required for our survival, permit me to quote India’s Nobel Laureate of Literature, Rabindranath Tagore, found in Poetry and Community (Radice, 2003) and The English Writings of Tagore (Sahitya Akademi, 1996).

Creative Unity, Rabindranath Tagore(1922)

"The view of this world which India has taken is summed up in one compound Sanskrit word, Sacchidananda. The meaning is that Reality, which is essentially one, has three phases. The first is Sat; it is the simple fact that things are, the fact which relates us to all things through the relationship of common existence. The second is Chit; it is the fact that we know, which relates us to all things through the relationship of knowledge. The third is Ananda: it is the fact that we enjoy, which unites us with all things through the relationship of love.

"According to the true Indian view, our consciousness of the world, merely as the sum total of things that exist, and as governed by laws, is imperfect. But it is perfect when our consciousness realizes all things as spiritually one with it, and therefore capable of giving us joy. For us the highest purpose of this world is not merely living in it, knowing it and making use of it, but realizing our own selves in it through extension of sympathy; not alienating ourselves from it and dominating it, but comprehending and uniting it with ourselves in perfect union.

"… Nature stands on her own right, proving that she has her great function, to impart the peace of the eternal to human emotions.

" … The terribly efficient method of repressing personality of individuals and races who have failed to resist it, has, in the present scientific age, spread all over the world … in consequence there are signs of a universal disruption which seems not far off (the reader is reminded that Tagore was writing in 1922). Faced with possibility of such a disaster, which is sure to affect the intemperate prosperity of successful peoples of the world, the great powers of the West are seeking peace not by curbing their greed, or by giving up unjustly acquired advantages, but by concentrating their forces for mutual security …

" … My experience of the West, where I have realized the immense power of money and of organized propaganda — working everywhere behind screens of camouflage, creating atmosphere of distrust, timidity and antipathy — has deeply impressed me with the truth that real freedom is of the mind and spirit. It can never come to us from outside.

"He only has freedom who ideally loves freedom himself and is glad to extend it to others. He who builds walls to exclude others builds walls across his own freedom. He who distrusts freedom in others loses his moral right to it. Sooner or later he is lured into physical and moral servility.

"Therefore I would urge my own countrymen to ask themselves if the freedom to which they aspire is one of external conditions. Is it merely a transferable commodity? Have they acquired a true love of freedom? Have they faith in it? Are they ready to make space in their society for the minds of their children to grow up in the ideal of human dignity, unhindered by restrictions that are unjust and irrational?" (End of Tagore quote)

*

The following is taken from Essays on Tradition, Recovery and Freedom by Darampal, Other India Press, 2000. The entire catalog of Other India Bookstore is a worthy resource for finding our way out of the present crisis.

"We have lost our identity, our anchorage in our civilization. This loss of identity afflicts us all. This is a pain that practically all Indians, including the Christians, the Muslims, and the others have to bear in common. We have to find some way out of such a state of rootless-ness. We have to somehow find an anchor again in our civilizational consciousness, in our innate chitta (the perceiving intellect) and kala (cyclical time under law of nature)…. According to our traditional wisdom and understanding of Universal

"A major aspect of the ahimsak (nonviolent) way of life is to minimize one’s needs and to fulfill these as far as possible from within one’s immediate neighborhood. His practice of relying on local availability is as important a part of the principle of ahimsa as the doctrine of non-killing. Thus for Gandhi, ahimsa and swadesi (of one’s own locality) were not two different principles."

*

The ethos of modern Western civilization seems to be satiation of material and sensual desire. The ethos of India — until quite recently — was restraint and control of the senses and material desires. Having been invited to speak at a conference in Varanasi, I share from the Conference Theme document quoted below.

"We have concern for threats to human civilization posed by intolerant, illogical and violent thought patterns presently dominating. Consumerism has spread. Materialism is gripping humanity. Our value system is at stake. Permissiveness has become dominant. Terrorism has become global.

"Struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, exploitation of nature, struggle for individual rights seem to be guiding principles. This has led to two world wars, unthought-of terrorism and dehumanizing lifestyle. The danger is awful.

"Dharma is basis of cosmic and individual existence. Dharma principles are universal and eternal. They are nature-and-life friendly. Not struggle, but harmony has been our attitude. Serving those in need was natural. That fittest would ensure survival of others was an inbuilt feeling. Uniformity is neither desirable nor feasible. Diversity ensures richness and beauty. Nature was revered as Mother. Man could never think of exploiting her. Duty consciousness rather than rights consciousness has been our ethos.

"We have been attacked, enslaved and exploited during the last ten centuries. In 20th century we became politically free. Now we must get rid of mental shackles. Legacy of enslavement still lingers. We are enamored by the consumerist glamour of the West. We are not conscious of our cultural potentialities. We have deeper value systems. They are inclusive, holistic and eco-friendly. For us, the world is one family and not a market."

"Evolution implies involution. Man’s journey is from gross to subtlest to Beyond to Immanent.

Oneness exists at the deepest innermost level. This is not some intellectual belief, but is based upon invaluable sublime experiences termed by various names such as Nibbana, Moksha, Divine Light, Shunya, Universal Spirit. We don’t enforce our views. What is important is that an elevating life spring flow through our traditions for the integral holistic growth of whole of humanity."

*

Know Thyself. It has been said that Mohandas Gandhi understood the genius of India better than any other. We must hope that what he could see within the heart of India’s people is still alive today. I offer some quotes that are directly on point for considerations of the 123 Nuclear Deal presently on the desktops of Indian leadership.

These are from Hind Swaraj and Young India.

• "So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages. There used to be the so-called laws of war which made it tolerable. Now we know the naked truth …"
• "The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence …
• "The sum and substance of what I want to say is that the individual should over the things that are necessary for the sustenance of life. If he cannot have such control, the individual cannot survive. Ultimately, the world is made up only of individuals…
• "I embarked upon the fast in the name of truth whose familiar names is God… In the name of God we have indulged in lies, massacres of people, without caring if they were innocent or guilty, men or women, children or infants… I am not aware if anybody has done these things in the name of Truth…"
• "It is to this Truth that is God, non-violence and morality that man owes his first allegiance. This loyalty, this devotion, this consecration is higher than that owed to any institution of man."
• "The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence."
• "He or she who supports a State organized in a military way — whether directly or indirectly — participates in sin. Each man takes part in the sin by contributing to the maintenance of the State by paying taxes."
• "Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless and corrupt."

*

"Gandhi saw that the power of any tyrant depends entirely on people willing to obey. Te tyrant may get people to obey by threatening to throw them in prison, or by holding guns to their heads. But the power still resides in the obedience, not in the prison or the guns."

— Mark Shepard, Civil Disobedience, Nonviolence and Satyagraha in the Real World, 1990

Writing of Gandhi in his book "Mohandas, A True story of a Man, his People, and an Empire," Rajmohan Gandhi notes, "Gandhi’s theory was that violence and a diseased Western civilization went together, as did Satyagraha and Indian civilization, which though corrupted was sound at its core. The theory would strengthen Indians in their fight against Western domination… the strategy was to ask India, in the name of her soul and her past, to reject the imported mix of violence and Western civilization. In its place, India should pit soul force against brute force, for Satyagraha was not only the right way — it was also the Indian way. Rejecting Western/modern civilization and its inseparable component, brute force, Indians must embrace the simple life, swadeshi (local production), and Satyagraha. Only nonviolence suits the genius of India — violence is futile, Western and destructive of India’s future."

An Exile’s View of the Responsibilities of Indian Citizens as Citizens of One World

• Wake up
• Come out of delusion
• Come out of willful ignorance
• Come out of denial
• Ask more questions
• Demand answers
• Demand accountability

Pursuant to the 123 Nuclear Deal, this malevolent Presence of Empire, of impending death raining from the night sky — from which no brown skin infant, child or young mother is safe anywhere on this earth — this Evil would be your "Strategic Partner."

This is not the Dharma of the India to which I migrated in search of the holy path of Self Realization. I cannot believe that this is the true nature of India. Certainly it is not the Truth of My India, the one I carry in my heart.

O’ India, is it perhaps not too late? Can you yet recover your senses, your cultural moorings, and your values?

I offer some questions you might consider for yourselves, each other, and your leaders. For many of these questions and insights, I am grateful to Harold Thomas, The Myth of the Innocent Civilian, 2003. His work was primarily addressed to Americans. Since "Birds of a feather flock together," let us see if these questions fit India today.

• Centuries of atrocities by governments result from action or inaction of citizens. At what point do citizens become accomplices? Are citizens with a ballot box accountable? What is a citizen’s moral duty with respect to behavior of his government?
• Is patriotism defensible in a morally corrupt society?
• What if your government sends you to kill other people’s friends and family and then you find it was all based on lies?
• What if one’s own experience has repeatedly demonstrated that the most powerful institutions of his State are utterly self-serving, dishonest and predatory?
• Who owned and financed munitions factories that made possible 20th century war? What were their personal and political connections? Does anyone think Hitler rose to power without support? Who bankrolled his rise to power? What were their names? Why are these names not in school texts?
• Who is the enemy, the cold and hungry soldier shooting at you, or the bankers and industrialists who set it all up?
• Do people have a responsibility to know before they go off and shoot others?
• Is it morally justifiable to support government violence against any person anywhere when: (1) You are not in immediate physical danger?

(2) You feel strongly that you cannot trust your government?

(3) You have no way to verify what the government is telling you?

• Do citizens have a moral responsibility to be informed? To act?
• How long can people fail to recognize that that which sounds, looks, smells, and figures to be gross evil, is just that?
• When fruits of one’s labor build the economic engine that powers the State, can we be blameless for the actions of that State?
• Is it crime to kill when out of uniform, but not when in uniform?
• Is the trigger-puller any more responsible than the munitions-maker, or the mechanic who services the weapons system, or the delivery truck driver, or the "civilian" taxpayer?
• Who makes the rules and appoints the rule-makers?
• Who is accomplice, who is innocent?
• Where to draw the line between the guilty and the innocent?
• Is it "patriotic" to defend corrupt principles and selfish dishonest policies?
• Can one behave morally AND ignore the situation? Condone it? Support it?
• Does anyone believe a bunch of penniless Russian potato farmers overthrew the Czar in 1917?
• What are the names of the people who authorized foreign money support of the Bolsheviks? Does no one know? Or, are they afraid to say?
• What was the agenda of the specific people who got resources to the Bolsheviks to topple the Russian Government? For what organization did they work? Are these organizations still extant? If so, what their agenda today?
• How Many Russians died between 1917-1945 in conflicts promoted and started by the Government? Over 100 million? Of which Stalin alone murdered 30 million? Did outside interests prop up the infant Soviet regime? Did these same financial interests pull the plug on the Soviet experiment 80 years later when it had served their purpose?
• What multi-national bankers and industrialists had intimate dealings with Soviets from 1917 to the late 1980′s? Why? Why shouldn’t we know?
• Where did dirt-poor Jihadists get modern weapons to fight the Russian Army? And then later fight the British and US with the same weapons?
• Who is providing arms? Whence the customer’s money to pay? Do you know? Why shouldn’t your Government Intelligence find out and let you know? Why won’t the Government tell you? Is this information not crucial to people who profess to value truth and freedom?
• Many conclude the answer to be, that the international banking establishment is comprised of the same people who own and/or finance weapons industries, oil industry, and most of international trade. These people and their families have through the centuries become fabulously wealthy, while sending common folk to slaughter.
• Is there NOTHING these giants of banking and commerce could have done to make aggressor nations go bust financially before the necessity to invade them? What evidence is there to belie that the Powers That Be enrich themselves on all sides? That they encourage the conflicts and fund the invasions?
• This is all "legal" and in "national interest." Is it moral? What consequences? If consequences, who is accountable? Who makes the rules of this game?
• Who is your enemy? The person demonized by your Government who now allegedly threatens you, or the politicians who set it all up, and lied to you, and made you believe these people are a threat?
• Do people have a responsibility to know what is really going on before marching off to kill others?
• Can war ever be justified by the lies of self-serving politicians and corporate interests that people could and should know are lying?
• Ask — who is running the show? Setting it up?
• Who is financing it with money that Central Banks create out of thin air, so that at one stroke the war is financed, and your savings are embezzled by inflation?
• What if you kill, later to learn that your "cause" is politically dishonest, legally indefensible, and morally wrong? Your emotions won’t alter the facts.
• When we decide on the basis of corporate propaganda and media spin, have we met our responsibilities to:
• Acquire facts?
• Make moral decision?
• Consider the real need for action in light of actual personal risk?
• What is the relation between the US Military and Western MNC capitalism-corporatocracy? What does President mean when says "our national interests?"
• "National interests" are never defined. What, exactly, are they? Who decides? Are they worth mass murder? Always they are concealed behind "classified for national security." The Government — and the elite powers that the Government is protecting — simply do not want us to know. Do not "National Interests" represent our interests? Is it not our money being spent to "protect" them? Then why do we not have the right to know? Promoting catch phrases such as "National Interest" is the tactic of politicians to manipulate the public mind.
• Power brokers of the US Government are found among corporate lobbyists. Corporate stakeholders represent the "actual" interests of the US, always backed ultimately by threatened or actual application of military force.
• In all of human behavior, what can be more serious than supporting the murder of people in a faraway place?
• Is there not a profound moral responsibility to be absolutely certain of the accuracy and urgency of a situation before killing other peoples and destroying their cultures?
• Does a citizen have any legal or moral duty with respect to the behavior of his Government? What is that duty? How is it to be carried out?
• Major wars cannot begin without support of the only people who have the money, influence, and power to make it happen. They know that war is immensely profitable and that it crushes competition while expanding their sphere of influence. This is the reality of organized Government crime. These are the people who buy and sell, make or break politicians and generals. War and organized violence by government can only occur because people support government. But Government is only a legal fiction. It is people who make it run.
• Only people can reason, act, and take responsibility. Coerced or not, every person has a choice over his participation. In my observation, the upper class of India is embracing Western "values."
• Government leaders not only lie about the war, but usually their own selfish, evil agenda set it up in first place. War is invention of Government and economic special interests.
• The lies go in every direction and are protected by all those upon whom governments confer honors. Many people are simply ignorant of the nature of politics and big business — banking, energy, and weapons. The leaders keep them ignorant. Leaders thus maintain "plausible deniability," a phrase frequently heard from Pervez Musharraf, America’s favorite dictator.
• International banking and MNC interests invade and conquer in subtle ways more efficiently and effectively than military invasion. Effective ownership of an entire country can be transferred permanently and irrevocably out of local hands and into foreign corporations. It is hard to rebel when the upper class elites have been seduced and bought off. Property and business interests are transferred to multinational banks and the local "elite" who cooperate.
• If there is resistance, CIA and "black operations" overthrow it. (John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man).
• People are deceived that they are free because they "elect" their "leaders." Ask somebody in Latin America or SE Asia how many names and faces actually changed in the real power positions during rotation from imperialist or dictatorship or colony to "democracy." Did the ruling classes change? Imperialism is only partially military. Mostly it comes through imposition of economic systems that benefit the elite of both oppressor and oppressed.
• How does one know what is REALLY behind any war? Does anyone believe that a Government tells the truth of it?
• What if a demographically dominant culture realizes that hundreds of millions of its members are feeding and being fed to a military industrial machine that has bought off their leaders and their elite class, and is steering their culture to oblivion?
• What if they see no chance of competing, compromising or communicating with this machine? Is not their violence understandable? What are their choices? Sit quiet and die? Watch their children starve?
• Is there not a striking similarity between the British Empire and the New World Order? When one examines the roster of historical "power families" who are extant and operating today, is it perhaps naïve to assume this is coincidence?
• Billions of kind and loving people share the fate of being brainwashed, befuddled, terrorized, and manipulated by Governments and Corporations run by egomaniacs and sociopaths. Political governance is not self governance — it is domination.
• Who is behind all the chaos? Only one Superpower remains. There is only one nation fomenting or inventing reasons to blow up anyone who stands in its way.
• How can we avoid responsibility for our submissiveness? Can it be true that we want our modern comforts more than we want truth, honor, and nonviolence?
• Is India actually joining this? There are some who would rather die than become corporate serfs — policed by the US Military — while watching their own culture sink into the cesspool of Western "values." What will "Super Power Status" do for the man that Mohandas Gandhi said we should attend by our own self-restraint? What does "Super Power" mean to the farmer who has lost his land and livelihood to the Special Economic Zone on behalf of a foreign corporation?
• Who will India destroy — if not her own people — to gain "Super Power Status?

In closing my questionnaire, I ask — is there a political theory that can explain all this mayhem and chaos? Submitted for your consideration is the working hypothesis that it is because modern political governance is based upon:

• Fear and not love
• Lies and not truth
• Power and not ethics
• Violence and not peace
• Greed and not generosity
• Money and not compassion
• Corruption and not morality
• Foolishness and not wisdom
• An economy and not a society
• An economy by which the duty of man is no longer to discern truth and act ethically.

We forget that a man can rule only himself — and then only marginally — and no other.

Humanity stands at an epic crossroads of evolve or die. It is amazing how well foretold by Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. Perhaps our final denouement is arriving sooner than expected.

HOW SHALL WE LIVE?

"Civilization does not mean electric lights. It does not mean producing atomic bombs, either. Civilization means not killing people." ~ Nichidatsu Fujii, Buddhist Nihonzan Miyohoji Temple

Shall we live by love, that our species may survive —
or shall we live in fear, and suffer premature extinction.
This is the root question.

"Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world; by non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is an eternal law." ~ The Buddha

"They hate us for our freedoms," lies the President of all the liars, as he unleashes a "War on Terror" that now threatens the very survival of humanity…

Did the Buddha ever receive a greater confirmation?

"Human intelligence has been distorted and misused by the ego. I call that intelligence in the service of madness. Splitting the atom requires great intelligence. Utilizing that intelligence for building and stockpiling atom bombs is insane. Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous. This intelligent stupidity, for which one could find countless examples, is threatening our survival as a species." ~ Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 2005.

Now, forty some years after leaving the Vietnam combat zones, with the help of Indian teachers, I am beginning to see glimmers of the light of Truth. Had I been more aware in 1963, I would have resisted. Friends that I met later in life had chained themselves together and burnt their draft cards. Too hot to handle as a result of their nonviolent civil disobedience, they went free. Nonviolence requires a special kind of courage that I lacked at the time.

I have written elsewhere about moral invalidity of the State as an institution of human society. Some of these ideas are discussed in my book Experiments In Moral Sovereignty, available at www.otherindiabookstore.com. More recent work is posted at www.statelessfreedom.org.

Closing

Citizens of India, I make this appeal to you as a simple human being, a fellow sojourner on this lonely planet. For your own sake, for the sake of your children and mine, for the sake of every living being, examine yourselves.

Look within. Ask, who am I? From where did I come? What is my purpose here? Where am I going? What is the ultimate value of another person’s life?

We are all in this together. We all live on one tiny round ball suspended in endless space. We all breathe the same air. We are all connected.

Does India want to build a civilization, or be in partnership with mass murder, rape, torture and degradation of humanity to lower than any animal?

We had better stop killing each other, and trashing our planetary home. When it becomes unlivable, where will we go? Look now to the seventh generation. Take care.

I appeal to you — India, do not abdicate your role as the Keeper of the Circle of the Energy of the Vision of an Enlightened Humankind.

Namaste India, I bow to your ancient Divinity. My first living Indian Guru said to me, "Go and live among the poor." It is from these poor, and the indigenous Native American, that I have learned the most of whatever humanity I may possess. I pray from depths of my heart that India may rise to its sacred destiny of guiding mankind to unfolding a new era of peace on earth.

That we may save our souls. May you live long, live free.

Jeff Knaebel [send him mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995. He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

DIGG THIS

Before
A Man Can Become Free, He Must First Choose Freedom
(He begins by de-conditioning his own mind)

"The
most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of
the oppressed."

~ Stephen Biko, anti-apartheid activist tortured to death by State
police (D. Jensen, 2006)

If I lose my
mind in love of life, how will they employ it to kill?

If I don't
pay taxes, then I am not an accomplice to the murdering State. I
have become free to respect the lives of others, and to love.

Earth — And
All Beings — how do I love Thee? Fiercely, with all of my heart
and mind. With my body, should the occasion arise, and until then
with whatever words and action I can muster, I will try to protect
and nurture and conserve Thee, knowing full well my shortcomings.

I write out
of my longing for relatedness and meaning, and that I may contribute
something to prevent the suicidal self-destruction upon which our
human species is embarked.

No species
which destroys its ecological life support system can survive long
term. To survive, a species must enhance both itself and its environment.

Two roads lay
before us. The one we are now upon, which leads to selfishness,
greed, war and destruction. And the one less traveled, the path
of love, which beckons to generosity, kindness, compassion, peace
and survival.

We have lost
control of our lives, our liberties, our labor, and our destiny.
We have indentured ourselves to the Corporatocracy — the Corporate
Warfare State (as coined by John Perkins, Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man). We have allowed ourselves to degenerate
into cannibals, consuming the lives of others. Rapidly now, we kill
off and consume whole species of animals, birds, fishes, trees and
plants. We are shredding every living being in the way of our greed.
Coerced and manipulated by the Corporatocracy, we are killing ourselves
in a mad scramble for diminishing resources, instead of learning
to share. The life of our own human species has now become "the
tragedy of the commons."

The corporations
make more money designing, building and employing the machinery
of murder than they can by enhancing the true beatitudes of life
such as wisdom, restraint, compassion, kindness, respect, and nurturance.
We are the market to whom they sell. Our young are the cannon fodder
sent to die, presently as volunteers openly recruited on the steps
of our schools. The market for murder is there, and we are selling
ourselves into it. On the scale of the Corporate State, murder is
no crime, it is just another business deal. Life itself has become
a consumable, bought and sold in the marketplace.

Mindlessly,
as programmed machine robots, 24×7 we kill, moving to the war drum's
dirge of death. The dead eat the living. We leave behind rivers
of blood and poison as our effluent. As the inheritance of our grandchildren,
we leave these.

We must evolve
to a higher level of consciousness. Change begins in the mind. In
complex human societies, institutions such as corporations and State
are tools employed by the minds of the powerful to maintain power
and its emoluments at any cost, including unspeakable atrocities
against humanity.

The battleground
of our struggle for survival is the mind of man. Nothing about ourselves
can be changed unless it is first accepted. In an alleged democracy
— where voting can supposedly stop this carnage — where does the
buck stop, if not with us?

My suggestion
is that corporate-controlled democracy doesn't work. This essay
hopes to make a small contribution to conceive and persuade
the peaceful deconstruction of the Nation-State Corporatocracy which
is destroying us. The following perceptions of fact, moral
hypotheses, and actionable suggestions are placed before the reader,
with an important caveat as introduction.

I draw attention
to the fact that I write as a person with at least some access to
modern facilities.

My suggestions
are likely far too mild for those savagely oppressed people of the
"third" and "fourth" worlds from whose bent
backs and starving children my writing equipment is extracted. Readers
in circumstances similar to mine, gentle and nice people, may refer
to Subcomandante Marcos in his Declaration of 1994, responding
to an offer of amnesty by President Salinas de Gortari: "And
what are they going to forgives us for? For not dying of hunger?
For not keeping quiet in our misery? For not accepting quietly the
gigantic historic burden of contempt and abandonment? For not rising
up in arms when all other roads were closed to us?" The
armed protestors of Nandigram, India, recently defending their ancestral
lands from government confiscation — intended to create a "Special
Economic Zone" in which MNC manufacturers would be granted
tax exemptions — is another example.

First Premise.
The Nation-State is the sword over our collective heads. This system
of organizing a society of six billion human beings doesn't work.
Its institutionalized structural violence is destroying humanity
and the earth. States have murdered more than 230 million human
beings in the past 100 years. A system that places the power of
planetary incineration into the hands of a few psychopathically
aggressive tyrants is clearly insane. It is impossible to reform
a system whose very foundation is organized criminal violence, lies
and deceit. It must be abandoned, as a sinking ship. Don't fight
it. Just quit supporting it, quit cooperating with it, quit paying
taxes to it. Simply leave it. Build your own ark, or look for like-minded
others to join, forming islands of light in a sea of darkness.

Second Premise.
Origin of the problem is fear caused by the paradoxical, ambiguous,
unsolvable inevitability of the human condition. Institutions such
as State arise in response to fear.

Third Premise.
A solution exists. All beings love life and fear death just
as I do. Therefore it is good that respect for life guide my actions,
that I should take not life, but that I should nurture and enhance
life, if only for my own self-interest. If the precept is not to
kill, and the means employed is always nonviolent, the end must
be peace. Let go of fear in order to love.

That said,
now that our actual situation is that of pilgrims lost among fearsome
killing fields, what to do? I am unable to propose a solution as
a "roadmap." However, it seems obvious that the road we
are upon leads deeper into darkness. If we can recognize and admit
that much, then we can try to find the way together. Rather than
a "solution," I offer my one-step-at-a-time actions. Like
a man on the road in the dark of night, I walk to the edge of the
light cast by my lantern, and then again, and again to the edge
of the light, keeping faith in reaching the goal.

Fourth Premise.
The means of solution. Here I offer myself (value unknown, and without
warranty), in the form of a few footprints on my own path of civil
disobedience, and in my stated intentions. I have chosen tax refusal
and exile in a foreign land, together with a radical renunciation
of rules and laws — a renunciation that is escalating with time.
I have set myself against blind obedience to traditional authority
of patriarchal domination, as well as bureaucratic legalistic usurpation
of individual rights. I renounce the State and declare my right
to ignore it. I renounce any "authority" that demands
violation of my conscience.

In a culture
where true madness masquerades as sanity, my public denunciations
in a foreign nation of the U.S. war are likely to be labeled as
"treason" by the State, and "crazy" by the Establishment.
Against whom shall I commit treason? The brotherhood of man? My
own rational mind and conscience? The universal commandment against
murder? Or the State?

Why should
I have more faith in war criminals — like George Bush and Dick Cheney
— than in my own conscience, to make life and death decisions? Why
should my life, and yours, and uncountable others, be subject to
the decisions of money power, of who to kill and who to let live?
Who is criminally insane — these psychotic nuclear-weapon-brandishing
tyrants, or us?

If I voluntarily
violate my personal integrity and abdicate my conscience to these
war criminals, and keep on financing their mass murders and torture
by paying my taxes, what does that say about me? And if I participate
in a sham election — by secret ballot, so there can be no contract,
no acknowledgement of responsibility — to pick one of the next two
carefully groomed war criminals-to-be, put up and financed by the
Corporate Establishment, what kind of fool am I?

How does one
come to peace with his hiring of murder? How does one negotiate
with liars?

How does one
find truth from the propaganda spun by corporate media as "journalism?"

Is it the angst
of facing ourselves that forces us to sit in front of the TV every
night? Does this mental-moral anesthesia help maintain the denial
of my own complicity? Or, does it just make endless mass murder
"normal?"

To work against
the State, one must begin with himself and his local sphere of influence.
Nonviolent methods include tax refusal, boycott of State services,
withdrawing to the extent possible from participation in all functions
of the State. Become independent and self-reliant. Avoid identification
documents, work for barter or cash, shun credit cards and banks.
Convert depreciating fiat currency into physical gold in personal
possession: quit letting the State embezzle your savings with its
printing press inflation. Form local service organizations, community
support groups, and local direct unregulated exchange markets. And,
importantly, educate others. Spread the word. Return self-government
control to the local level, beginning at home. Ignore the State.
Live by your own lights and your own wits, and face the consequences.
You will enjoy the happiness and freedom of the brave.

Each must work
out his own destiny if he is to reclaim his personal identity. One
must never give in to power. Walk the talk.

"Once
the people have made up their minds to be free, there is nothing
that can stop them."

~
Desmond Tutu, in the video A Force More Powerful

In my case,
the next point of intersection with Power is the expiry of passport,
which I will not renew, foreign domicile notwithstanding. Since
freedom of movement (a basic human right) is required to maintain
a livelihood, these are tantamount to permission-to-live documents.
Without them, in many ways your life is at risk. The State has usurped
my right to life itself, and placed it in the hands of some faceless
bureaucrat.

I don't know
what the Nice Government Men will do, but my working hypothesis
is this: if they detain me, imprison me, harm me, or kill me — any
or all of which are possible if as planned, I put up unarmed, unaided
physical resistance — then they will have advanced my cause.

The face-off
amounts to this test. Does a physically more powerful individual
have the right to put a collar on me, track me, restrict my movements
except by his permission, and extract from me the product of my
labor? Does a group of thugs have this right? Does a group of "lawmakers"
(a significant number under indictment for major crimes), placed
in power over me, against my will, have this right?

Paraphrasing
Lysander Spooner (circa 1882), a Constitution has no inherent authority
unless as a contract between man and man, and obviously can be binding
only upon those then living who acknowledged it. No man can give
to another any right of arbitrary dominion over himself, for that
would be giving himself away as a slave. No man can give to another
any right of arbitrary dominion over a third person, for that would
indicate a right in the first person to make the third person his
slave. The fact that no man can delegate or give away his own
natural right of liberty, nor any other person's natural right of
liberty, proves that he can delegate no legislative power whatever
— over himself or anybody else — to any man or body of men.
Each man owns only himself — he owns no other. Nor can any other,
or group of others calling themselves a "constituted authority,"
own him.

Maybe it is
time to stop being nice to these thugs who rule us. "Nice people"
have fomented two World Wars, built a nuclear arsenal that threatens
planetary incineration (quite possibly by accident or technical
failure), created corporations that are devouring the earth, and
launched a world-wide "war on terror," more accurately
described as a war on life.

These monstrous
atrocities are not possible because of the evil of a few, but the
weakness of the many. Because so many will not face the darkness
of their own hearts, a few can destroy all of us. We must come out
of denial.

Partly borrowing
in broad terms from Professor J.D. Forbes (University of California,
1972): imperialists, rapists, exploiters and warmongers are not
just on the wrong road. They are diseased, insane, mentally unclean,
deranged. It is a soul sickness that is communicable and has become
global. People like Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Ferdinand
Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, Richard Nixon, George Bush — mass murderers
all — cannot stay in power without public acquiescence, and cannot
operate the machinery of power without technocrats and civil servants
who collect revenues and maintain the government. Henry David Thoreau
said he had no quarrel with a piece of parchment (the law), but
with the man he faced (the tax collector).

Well educated,
"civilized" people in power arrange for land confiscations
— such as "Special Economic Zones" — in Brazil, Columbia,
India, and elsewhere, the development of which annihilates the lives
of countless tribals and villagers. Although these "refined"
gentlemen of the elite do not personally point a gun and pull the
trigger, the effect is the same, and they know it.

Behind them
is the Corporate Warfare State, operating through MNC's and Central
Banks. But, and note well, they are using — and destroying — our
land, our water, our forests, our wild creatures, our ecology, our
human commons, and they are doing it with our labor, our money,
and our acquiescence. We succumb to the media propaganda and buy
their rubbish and finance their wars and send our children into
their man-made inferno.

Forbes points
out that the disease of exploitation has been spreading for several
thousand years. It gets worse across time. As people catch it, they
pass it to the young, who are taught more by immediate relatives,
peers, internet games, movies and TV than by schools.

Exploitation
is thriving — of children, of love, of women, old people, the weak,
the poor. Different body parts, odors, illnesses, insecurities,
desires, fears, religion, the desire for enlightenment, our DNA
genetic code, consciousness itself, all are exploited. Everything
is for sale, including the life of every creature, and every woman,
child and man. In the "free world," the buying and selling
is carried on through the inhuman agency of the corporation, an
abstract legal construct excreted from the legislative bowels of
the State.

With blood
have we built the heartless, bloodless corporate machine which now
enslaves us. Life itself, the whole of the human species, is at
risk of extinction by the machine's inhuman, electronically controlled,
metallic cutter-crusher-pincers. By this machine does life get converted
to ciphers reporting to the bottom line of a balance sheet. Wasted
human lives — when flesh meets steel — do not report to this ledger.

The legal construct
of Limited Liability of corporate owners and managers, and the raw
power-of-the-gun protection of Sovereign Immunity granted to agents
of the State, are the shields that protect these malefactors from
accountability for their heinous actions. So long as they are thus
free of responsibility, they will continue, protected by "law"
from retribution. What "law," this?

We don't know
who, or what, created this Universe, what Intelligence connected
Spirit to breath and flesh. But we do know that its physical manifestation
on our behalf is this precious blue-green planet that allows us
to play in the Fields of the Lord.

We might be
wise to consider some attempt at gratitude and respect for this
Great Benevolence that supports us, rather than tearing it apart
and smashing it to the last atom in a vain and arrogant attempt
to gain control over life and the Mystery. To what end our mad destruction?
Why not live, and let live, and love?

Said Mohandas
Gandhi,

"Parliaments
are really emblems of slavery…
…civilization is that mode of conduct which points to the path
of duty." (Hind Swaraj, 1908)

And what is
duty, if not to serve and nurture life?

"Anarchy
could never get a man to the moon, but it may be the only way
we can survive on earth."

~
Sheldon Kopp (1972)

We will need
some well-controlled, highly focused righteous anger in order to
survive. Since the present course, unabated, clearly risks suicidal
extinction, we must risk "unknown" cut and try solutions,
as many as we must, for as long as we live, until we get it right.
Some of these ideas are further developed at my website, www.statelessfreedom.org.

"Civilization
does not mean electric lights. It does not mean producing atomic
bombs, either. Civilization means not killing people."

~
Nichidatsu Fujii, Buddhist Nihonzan Miyoji Temple,
quoted by J.D. Forbes, PhD (Professor Emeritus, University of California),
1992

We must let
go of fear in order to love. It has been done. It can be done. Let
us do it.

May you live
long, live free.

August
4, 2007

Jeff
Knaebel [send him
mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995.
He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having
been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

DIGG THIS

Speech
at the Friends of Gandhi Museum
Plenary Session I
International Conference on Global Conflicts and Terrorism
World Foundation on Reverence for All Life
22 January 2007, Pune, India

Sometimes I
think that I will step into the day and see that it was all a bad
dream, a horror movie, not the real human life. I refuse to finance
massive killing from the sky. I refuse to finance the murder of
women and children. It feels better to live and let live. I am not
the property of the State, to be stamped, branded and tracked like
a sheep.

My purpose
in these few minutes is not to advance theories, but to share some
perceptions that I hope will raise questions in our minds about
what we are doing to each other, and to ourselves.

In Vietnam
and Cambodia the US Government murdered around three million human
beings. Women and children living peacefully in huts of bamboo and
straw were incinerated by napalm bombs rained down upon them from
the sky.

And I'll tell
you this: in those days I was an accomplice to that murder because
I was financing it with my income tax. I was part of the system,
catering to the Powers That Be.

The path now
beckons toward the courage of active non-violence. I have yet miles
to go and promises to keep. Promises to life itself and to my own
integrity.

My primary
exemplars have been Indian: Tagore, Aurobindo, Buddha, Gandhi, Khan
Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Vinoba Bhave, J.P. Narayan.

As I speak,
the US Government is preparing to launch a nuclear attack on Iran.
Two aircraft carrier strike groups and nuclear missile submarines
are in position already.

Credible reports
indicate an attack planned as early as April.

This will ignite
an unimaginable conflagration that will not be contained. Lights
will go off all around the world. Oppenheimer's statement at the
Trinity Test Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945 — "I am become
death" — will have been fulfilled for the third time.

If you doubt
this cold-blooded political calculation, look to history. Hiroshima
and Nagasaki were bombed after Japan had delivered a petition
for surrender.

To me, the
events unfolding before our eyes indicate a kind of mass insanity.
How, otherwise, would six billion human beings choose to organize
themselves such that a handful of madmen — infected with insatiable
lust for power and war profiteering — could start a chain reaction
that reduces humanity to a heap of radioactive ash?

We stand at
a profound junction in our journey as a biological species. We have
not much time to change our course away from fear and murder and
toward love and life.

We must evolve
to a higher consciousness or become extinct through mass suicide.

The fundamental
questions of who we are and what are we doing have moved from the
realm of philosophy to the urgent issue of survival.

Today, the
US has 460,000 military stationed in 144 foreign countries.

The US has
been waging aggressive overt and covert war on foreign lands almost
continuously since the Spanish American War of 1848. It has systematically
employed bestiality and torture.

Its current
Iraq aggression — with goal of oil and war profits for the business-military-political
complex — has resulted in death of an estimated 690,000 people.
Millions have been displaced.

The economic
sanctions imposed for 12 years prior to this war resulted in death
of 500,000 Iraqi children. The Clinton administration stated on
the public record that it was "worth the price."

I think
you would have to look pretty hard to find a bigger terrorist than
the US Government.

In the past
100 years, Nation States have murdered around 230 million people
— many their own citizens within their own borders.

I suggest that
this mass murder — planned and executed by our best and brightest
— should raise in our minds some question about the intelligence
of the design of our human political institutions.

It seems obvious
that the Corporate State is killing us and destroying planetary
ecology in the process. It is owned by the big banks and corporations.
It is operated through revolving door personal power relations within
the military-industrial-banking-political complex. It functions
as a contract hit man on a mass scale for its corporate clients.

The State is
capable of this destructive behavior only with our cooperation.
It subsists only by our permission through public opinion. The money
powers have made an arranged marriage between politics and religion
to advance their agenda. For those of organized religion who doubt
this — or wish the truth — I suggest go check the investment portfolios
of your main parent organization.

We must grow
up and become full human beings. We must give up our childish ideas
of being Indian, Chinese, Russian, American, Hindu, Muslim, Christian,
Buddhist and all the other labels and isms which we are taught and
which are not real.

We must get
on with the hard work of learning to live together on a planet that
has become too small to afford the easy path of violence. If war
is not made obsolete, we will be made obsolete.

The very idea
of a Nation State — in addition to its stupidity — must be abhorrent
to anyone who loves peace.

Draw a line
on a map of India. Then start killing anyone who crosses. This is
crazy.

Who lies and
who dies? The politicians lie and the poor people die.

Who has murdered
more — a few hundred terrorists, or the Corporate Warfare State?
Nineteen men who commandeered aircraft provided the excuse to start
an endless world war that had been planned by the money power long
before. What could have been handled as a civil police function
was rotated to a premeditated "clash of civilizations"
that threatens total annihilation.

Root Cause
of Terrorism is the fear, greed and ignorance within our own mass
mind which allows the money power to manipulate us. People don't
rush off to war. Governments must go to great lengths to incite
their citizens to war. It is made easier to incite violence when
for a long time the people have watched helplessly their lives and
cultures destroyed, the very earth denied to them and burned before
their eyes.

We are passing
to our children a degraded planet and a culture of obscenity, violence,
deceit and corruption.

How did this
come to be?

• Could it
  be the institution of Sovereign Immunity pursuant to which agents
  of State can commit any crime against humanity without fear of
  retribution?
• Could it
  be the illusion that the State — which Gandhi described as a soulless
  machine founded upon organized and concentrated violence — can
  provide security and peace?
• Could it
  be the self-deception that Power will attract good men who are
  morally incorruptible?
• Could it
  be the cunningly manufactured deception that our security and
  peace are best guaranteed by a gang of criminals calling themselves
  a government and taking our earnings by forcible taxation?
• Could it
  be the creation of the legal construct of the corporation which
  shields owners and directors from personal liability for their
  destructive actions against the human commons? Personal accountability
  tends to limit irresponsible behavior.
• Could it
  be the illusion that we can shirk our personal responsibilities
  and pass them off to institutions funded by other people's money
  which was taken from them by force?
• Could it
  be that The Lie — endemic to politics — has everywhere permeated
  society?

What is the
State if not a monopoly on violence?

Can violence
create peace? Have we forgotten that means creates end?

Ask yourself
this about your relationship with the State:

• Does it
  murder?
• Does it
  finance this murder with my taxes?
• Am I therefore
  responsible?
• Do I finance
  it voluntarily of my free will?
• If not,
  then does that make me a slave?
• Why do I
  pay a gang of thieves to enslave me, to commit murder in my name,
  to keep secret what it does with its stolen wealth?
• Why do I
  support the State in crimes for which any citizen would be jailed
  or hung?

Intelligent
people are gathered at this seminar. Similar seminars are held around
the world.

Yet, murder
and planetary destruction continue in our name.

What does this
say about us?

Is it about
a system-structure which we have not the imagination or the courage
to change? Have we forgotten that only the individual can be a moral
agent? Can I assign my moral conscience to another? If my moral
conscience is inalienable, how can I assign it to the State? Thus,
if the State acts against my own conscience in its murder or thievery,
is this possible by any means other than force or threat of force?
Is this something else than slavery?

There is no
government that can save us from the self-inflicted disaster bearing
down upon us. Only the freedom to express our love of life in opposition
to the State's reverence for death can save us. We must tap into
a deep, overflowing, unconditional love of life, of this earth,
of each other.

This nature
of love, this inclination to love, is in every one of us.

To express
this love from within, we must get the State out of our way — so
that we can relate person to person without institutional barriers
to our common humanity.

May you live
long, live free.

January
23, 2007

Jeff
Knaebel [send him
mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995.
He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having
been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

DIGG THIS

During October–November
2006, the writer gave presentations at workshops and seminars across
India that had been convened to address the existential crises facing
humanity. Sponsors and venues included Prakrit Bharati Academy and
Kapil Smarak Samiti, Jaipur; Friends of Gandhi Museum, Pune; Gandhi
Peace Foundation, New Delhi; and World Buddhist Cultural Foundation,
Varanasi. The following introduction is the first in a short series
of condensations.

These presentations
across India express three main themes:

1. A call
   to people of the world to generate an evolutionary quantum leap
   into a higher consciousness of nonviolence in order that we may
   survive as a species. This call is for a revolution from fear
   to love, from greed to generosity, from cruelty to compassion,
   from deceit to truth, from dependence to self-reliance, from war
   to peace, from corporate enslavement to individual liberty.
2. An appeal
   to India to help raise humanity to a more sacred destiny — not
   as a nation state, but as a people — to guide mankind to that
   spiritual unity which alone can bring peace on earth.
3. The story
   of one man's quest for individual moral sovereignty in a world
   of institutionalized structural violence imposed by the corporate
   warfare state. This struggle — within himself as well as with
   powers that be — led him to renunciation of and severance from
   his native land. He lives in India in self-imposed exile.

As
a US citizen, he remains subject to the tyrannical power of the
USA Patriot Acts and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Publication
of these seminars places the author at personal risk. He could be
put on some government watch list or no-fly list. He could be jailed
indefinitely, without charges and without right of habeas corpus.
He dares not return to American soil.

I,
Jeff Knaebel, undertake this risk as a duty to humanity and the
ideals of liberty. Guided by my conscience, I openly declare repudiation
of US income tax law. I do not labor for my earnings to be employed
to finance bombs which shred the bodies of women and children. My
purpose on this earth is not to finance destruction and murder,
but to learn the practice of gratitude and reverence for all life.

Deeds
are essential. All morally vigorous people express thought as action.
The inner work is primary and crucial. One gains strength from introspection.

The
background from which these presentations emanate — as well as the
motivation for speaking — is a set of simple yet horrifying observations.
In all but about twelve of my 67 years, USA has been engaged directly
in foreign warfare. Within the past century, nation states have
murdered at least 200 million people in wars and internal conflict.
The modern corporate warfare state has wrought such vast wanton
ecological and cultural destruction as to threaten survival of human
species. We live under threat of an insane political theory of nuclear
deterrence through mutually assured destruction.

At
this moment, an American nuclear armada is standing off the coast
of Iran. A nuclear attack seems easily within the realm of possibility.
It will precipitate an unimaginable conflagration throughout the
Middle East and West Asia, if not the whole world. For six billion
human beings to have organized themselves into a structure, such
that a handful of powerful men can trigger a final holocaust, is
to me insane. Nuclear proliferation is expanding to include new
players. The sheer scale of violence emanating from a hierarchy
of power relations — fuelled by greed and the drive to dominate
— is leading us to destruction.

The
Corporate Warfare State is the most abominable failure of humanity
in all of history.

My
presentation discusses what the State really is and how it actually
operates, stripped of propaganda and delusion. It points out the
fatal ethical design errors of system. It shows how power structures
attract the most corruptible of men: those who will to ruthless
murder in order to accomplish their evil ends. At the peak of its
growth cycle, the State becomes a gang of criminals ruling by a
mix of force, deceit and manufactured consent.

Using
Gandhi's demonstration of means is to end as seed is to tree, it
is shown how an institution based upon the fundamental moral flaw
of a monopoly on violence can never lead to peace. The State is
likened to a machine which has run amok — out of control. The relevant
operational fact is that State-sponsored endless war is no more
than a profiteering racket. War is health of State. War is profit
to the big corporate money interests. Loss of life does not report
to the corporate balance sheet.

The
nature of power relations which create the operating dynamics of
the State is examined. I conclude: For power, there is no tomorrow.
There are no grandchildren. Even of earth, there is none. There
is only power.

The
way has been lost. We stand on the brink of a maniacal holocaust.
How shall we live?

The
relationship of individual to State is examined. How did it come
to be? Is it a valid relationship in terms of reason, law, common
sense, and conscience? I ask basic questions of the State. Does
it murder? Am I financing this murder? Am I therefore responsible?
Do I finance murder voluntarily? Am I therefore a slave?

Conclusion
is that the constitution is of no authority. There can be no valid
binding agreement among men who never met even to discuss a document
which itself was drafted by men long since dead. The dead cannot
bind the living. Whatever agreements they made, whatever constitutions
they made, applied only to them and died with them. Thus the State
which rules my life is invalid at inception.

A
list of 72 violations of my human rights perpetrated by the United
States is presented. It is clear that — measured by the parameters
of clinical psychology — the historical "run of the mill"
heads of State suffer from paranoid delusions, kleptomania, a pathological
tendency to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty,
an obsessive acting out of ruthless domination. Diagnosis: criminally
insane.

The
reader is asked to question for himself, what three behavioral traits
did the following men all exhibit in common: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill,
Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Mao Zedong, George Bush,
Tony Blair? For one clue, is not the lust for power and domination
quite clear? How did it manifest? Absent the institutional architecture
of an all-powerful State, would it have been possible for them to
have wrought so much murder?

The
government has perverted justice and public morality into such grotesque
forms as to be unrecognizable to a rational man with a conscience.
The State is an abomination vile, corrupt, vicious, destructive
and murderous. It has become the single greatest threat to human
survival.

Perceiving
the American state to be a criminal operation of nigh incomprehensible
scale — having perpetrated innumerable heinous crimes against humanity
— and having executed no contract by which it has any jurisdiction
over my life, I declare my right to renounce and depart from it
without obligation.

I
will present for your consideration my personal Declaration of Severance
and Independence from the United States. It says in part: I hold
these to be self-evident truths, that all people are endowed at
birth with equal, inalienable and independent rights, among which
are sole possession of their own life, liberty and the seeking of
happiness in their own way. That men may secure these rights by
forming such associations as they choose, which must operate by
non-coerced full consensus, and from which any member is free to
secede.

We
make a mistake to plead and litigate with our masters using only
the tools they have provided us. We cannot prevail within a frame
of the same rules by which we are enslaved. By this pleading, we
only feed the monster with our energy and money. We must take back
personal responsibility for our independence, and for our survival.
One way is to exercise our natural right to ignore the State, to
renounce it, and to work at building an independent life, accepting
neither the State's "benefits" nor its costs, to the extent
we are able to avoid them.

Gandhi's
example of Satyagraha (strong adherence to truth) with Ahimsa
(non-violence) points the method. We must be the change we wish
to see. I submit that a simple first step is to tell the truth in
every transaction, to every person, at all times, in every situation.
When we begin to call things by their true name — for example, "collateral
damage" is murder pure and simple — we will begin to wake up
to the reality of the human condition created by The Powers That
Be, and to which we have acquiesced for far too long.

I
conclude that there is no political institution/ism, no authoritarian
person/ist, no economic policy, and no government that can save
us from the self-inflicted disaster bearing down upon us. Only the
freedom to be in love with life, and to express that love without
arbitrary institutional barriers that label us as "the other"
— and thus block person-to-person natural expression — can save
us. This is a freedom to live in the original unconditioned character
— found deep within each of us — of total, sweeping, deep, overflowing,
unconditional love of life, of this earth, of its creatures, of
ourselves, of each other. To express this love, we must get the
State out of our way.

May
you live long, live free.

December
21, 2006

Jeff
Knaebel [send him
mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995.
He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having
been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

DIGG THIS

I am sending
a voice
speak truth to power
We shall be free
In a truthful manner I speak
We shall be free
With a good heart I speak
We shall be free

In April of
1999, President Clinton was in the process of delivering American
“Full Spectrum Dominance” to Kosovo. The methodology is to slaughter
civilians. Rain bombs from killing platforms at high altitude, beyond
reach of anti-aircraft defense. This is the modern American style
of spreading democratic values. I wrote these verses during a visit
to my former home.

On a Visit
to America in the Spring of Ninety Nine
My Heart Hurts, And I Grieve

For sacred
trees, gone to money
For the loneliness
of a faceless mankind / isolated /
in cyberspace

For the disconnect

of human heart / .
Mouse-click missions
that kill form a distance

For all creatures
great and small, killed /
For all things bright and beautiful — destroyed
by our mindless greed
for ease, comfort and “power”

I rage at the
ugliness of self-pity
In my seeming impotence
to do anything more useful
than just say “NO,” and leave

I grieve for
my children
whose inheritance is desecrated
The blue-green planet, once
alive, breathing, sustained by respect

No matter the
price
of personal sacrifice,
I must not support
the killing and the lies.

“There are
times when you have to obey a call which is the highest of all —
the voice of conscience — even though such obedience may cost many
a bitter tear, and even more separation from friends, from family,
from the state to which you my belong, from all you have held as
dear as life itself. For this obedience is the Law of our being….To
deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny him the ordinary
amenities of life is worse than starving the body. It is starvation
of the soul, the dweller in the body.” ~ Gandhi

Further along
in this communication to my fellow men, I deliver one small voice
of notice. It speaks to the violations of humanity that have been
perpetrated by the Powers That Be, and that are continuing. I offer
— without suggestion of relevance to any other — my personal response.
The following verses are offered as preface to my declaration. I
hope thereby to indicate the spirit of my intentions. A man needs
a country. He would be better off without a government.

Emigrant's
Road Log

Now the world
gone mad
in the violence of its greed
humanity gone crazy
thread the labyrinth, try to be pure
the labyrinth made of lies
essence-less
meaningless, yet full of fear.

The bus rolls
out
quiet now, springtime nippy-cold
bird song and pussy willows and a south wind
Feel the great vast serenity space of the North
the land so sweet – a moment of reverie ~

~ then suddenly
sky shattered
civilization comes roaring the earth trembles
with sudden deafening roar
F-16's overhead
corporate state war machines rip the sky
Military Operations Area
full spectrum dominance blows away
the tranquility of ages to the edge of time
land so sweet – humanity so bitter.

First border
crossing just ahead
show documents get interrogated searched
stripped of dignity, violated
as if owned like a serf
tracked like a criminal
this is no way to live
not for a man.

From yonder
far shore
must I wage Satyagraha
my nonviolent struggle
for freedom.

THE IMPERIAL
DOCTRINE

See this man
in tribal cloth,
for generations oppressed
under the jack-boot heel of Big Oil
brand USA?
He is in my way,
obstructing corporate access.
And besides, he hates our freedoms.

Therefore,
in the name of religion
and all that is good, proper and democratic,
remembering my father's words at Kyoto
“The American lifestyle is not negotiable”,
and having silenced peace-loving dissenters
by the insidious draconian Patriot Act
(you are either with me or you are in jail, may Fascism prevail)

let me now kill him off.

I will rain
bombs
upon his huts, his weddings and his children
as I click the murder-mouse
from the safety of my air conditioned bunker.
That my God and my country may reign supreme
and this other man's oil
may be mine forever.

That my shares
of Halliburton, Unocal and Carlyle
may keep on rising with news from Afghanistan and Iraq.
That the dust of depleted uranium
may mutate his foreign genes into forever and ever.
Let the Earth burn.

Let Iraqi children
starve and war widows weep -
as Ambassador Mouthpiece said before me,
“five hundred thousand dead Iraqi children is worth the price.”
After all, we need the oil, and the votes,
so that our children may drive their SUV's
and aimlessly wander in mindless malls.

Lest you mistake
my intentions,
I say to you now -
lying with all my charismatic patriotism –
you had better be afraid,
for the voice of God has told me
Iran is an axis of evil.
Let them be warned,
all options are on the table.
Full spectrum dominance is our aim
shock and awe our tactic
Hiroshima our training ground.
Let them be warned,
for they are next.

Stand aside
women and children when I move my mouth
for I am the Decider and I decide
who shall live and who shall die
never having known
that these others
had lives or hopes or sufferings
or love.

* * *

For Power,
there is no tomorrow. There are no grandchildren.
Even of earth there is none.
There is only power.

The Way
has been lost. We stand on the brink of a maniacal holocaust. How
shall we live?

“The path
is made by walking.” — African proverb

A REFUSAL
OF MURDER

I send this
message to Bush
and his minions of death
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and Gonzales
and all the other faceless unelected
machine parts
in air conditioned bunkers anonymous
maintained at specified operating temperature
don't take it personal
torturers
morally lobotomized organs
of State
self selected symbiotic pairs
with bin Laden
mutually co-dependent
for power
to hold us in thralldom
of your lies.

Symbols of
our devolution projected
we all are responsible
for what you have become
To face and not to deny my share of
this tragedy of the human commons
is the call of duty and conscience
answered now in a clear voice speaking truth to power.

I deny you
permission
to murder in my name
not with my income tax will you murder
come and get me if you wish
before you are booked for crimes against humanity.

I never gave
you
or anyone
moral sovereignty over me
my life is not your property.

Let no infant
wail
for his blown to bits mother
from a bomb I paid for
I practice resurrection
I renounce you and all the murder for which you stand
for you my mind is trackless.

*”What kind
of victory is it when someone is left defeated? What difference
does it make to the dead, the orphans, the homeless, whether the
mad destruction is wrought under name of totalitarianism or the
holy name of liberty and democracy? What is a war criminal? Was
not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and therefore,
were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars,
war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute
of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.” ~
Mohandas Gandhi

The Remedy
of Wisconsin Is Also Remedy of Jeff

The Constitution
has no inherent authority unless as a contract between man and man.
It does not purport to be an agreement among persons now living.
Those persons, if any, who gave their consent, are all long since
dead. The Constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with
them. They had no natural right or legal power to make it binding
upon posterity. The instrument does not purport to be an agreement
between anyone except “We the people of the United States” then
existing. It cannot be said that the Constitution formed “the
people of the United States” into a corporation extending to perpetuity.
No assemblage of men – existing at any one time – has the power
to create a legal perpetuity. As a matter of law and reason, this
instrument cannot bind its posterity.

Furthermore,
according to the present writer, “We the people” is a legal non-entity
with respect to making a contract or entering any binding agreement
whatsoever. “We the people” is no more than an abstract term for
a loose conglomeration of independently acting individuals. It has
no intrinsic reality. It is merely a slogan devoid of content. Exactly
who is “we the people?” Who signs for and assumes the responsibility
and liability of “We the people?” Who steps up and bears the burden
of accountability for actions of “We the people?” Where is there
any accountable, responsible, liable individual or group of individuals
who physically signed or co-signed an instrument and took upon themselves
the burdens of its performance?

And still further,
in the particular events under discussion, those men who allegedly
established an agreement binding upon not only several millions
unknown to them (those millions having had no voice or participation
whatsoever), but also upon their unborn posterity for all time to
come — met and negotiated on behalf of their unknowable clients
in secret, and made an oath of secrecy. They left no record of their
proceedings, and they signed no document purporting to be an agreement
even among themselves, let alone millions of unknowable others and
posterity for all time to come.

That “We the
people” have put up with this nonsense for so long is truly an absurdity
that boggles my mind.

Referring now
to The
Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, by Tom
Woods:

A statement
by the Wisconsin legislature in 1859 said, “Resolved, that the government
formed by the Constitution of the United States was not the exclusive
or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself (I
ask, delegated by whom?); but that, as in all other cases of
a compact among parties having no common judge,
each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of
infractions, as of the mode and measure of redress. The individual
states, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable
right to judge of the Constitution's infractions; and that a
positive defiance of those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts
done or attempted to be done under color of that instrument, is
the rightful remedy.”

Thus I conclude
that the maximum possible validity of the Constitution — notwithstanding
my understanding and belief that it has no validity whatsoever —
is that of a compact among parties having no common judge.

Therefore,
just as the state of Wisconsin is an independent sovereignty in
relation to the United States, so also am I as an individual. If
I am not recognized as an individual sovereignty, then I am a nullity,
for all purposes of law and reason a non-living being, an entity
to be dealt with as an object or a piece of inanimate property.

And therefore,
just as the remedy of Wisconsin is “positive defiance,” so also
is positive defiance my remedy as a sovereign individual.

The foregoing
notwithstanding, my understanding and belief is that the Constitution
is of no authority over me, or anyone. The authority of State emanates
from the barrel of a gun.

I maintain
that it is the right of any individual person to reject and renounce
a government which violates his moral conscience. I maintain that
it is my personal right, in this very body, here and now, to ignore
the State, and to refuse participation in its actions which violate
humanity and life itself. I also declare that the same is my intention
insofar as refusal to pay direct tax to any nation-state. There
can be no treason if one's first loyalty is to humanity and to life
itself. Human life is above Nation-State. Personal conscience and
individual moral sovereignty is above State sovereignty. How can
the question of treason arise when one refuses to murder innocent
women and children? He who claims self ownership can never commit
treason because the State cannot own him. He is not the property
of the State.

Believing the
American State to be a criminal operation of nigh incomprehensible
scale, and having executed no contract by which it has any jurisdiction
over my life, I declare it is my right to renounce and depart from
it without obligation. Like the Hopi, I believe the laws of the
Great Spirit (for me, the Law of Truth and Nonviolence) are of a
higher order than any man-made political law. Pursuant to the application
of reason, common sense, mental purification through self-observation
(far to go here), conscience, and the felt presence of Love, my
highest duty is to do no harm. This means I must not support
war in any manner, directly or indirectly through payment of taxes.

“He who
distrusts freedom in others loses his moral right to it.” ~ Rabindranath
Tagore

*STATEMENT
OF ABUSES AND VIOLATIONS OF MY HUMANITY
AND NATURAL RIGHTS
PERPETRATED AGAINST ME BY THE UNITED STATES

“Civil disobedience
becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless and corrupt.”
~ Mohandas Gandhi

- The United
States has forcibly taken from me, under penalty of my liberty,
the product of my labor.

- It has used
this product of my labor, taken from me by force, to execute massive
crimes against humanity in my name usurped from me. These crimes
are too numerous to account. A few of them include deliberate, calculated,
cold-blooded mass murder of innocent, non-combatant civilians including
women and children; massive destruction of the infrastructure of
civilized societies, resulting in untold suffering and death; long
term poisoning of earth's ecosystem and food-water supply with effluence
of war, such as depleted uranium and Agent Orange; massive destruction
of local ecologies upon which civilians depend for life and livelihood;
massive direct destruction of livestock and crops, leading to suffering
and death of human beings; deliberately fomented and supported war,
revolution and genocide in foreign lands for its own purposes of
domination. Other abuses are discussed elsewhere in the text of
the booklet of which this is part.

- It has used
this product of my labor, forcibly removed from me, to undertake
assassinations and murder in the course of overthrowing foreign
governments. It has further employed these funds for the illegal
imprisonment, torture, degradation and murder of innocent civilians,
without charge, and without habeas corpus.

- It has used
my taxes paid under coercion of threat of force to conduct weapons
experiments with poisonous chemical and radioactive substances on
its own unwitting citizens, some of whom died as a result. This
is premeditated murder.

- It has used
my taxes paid under threat to my liberty to experiment with pesticides
on pregnant women, resulting in damage and death to the unborn.

- It has conscripted
me to military service and dispatched me as a participant in an
aggressive war against a foreign country of no palpable threat to
the United States — a war in which millions of people were murdered.
This violates my right not to kill and not to support killing.

- It has used
the product of my labor forcibly taken from me under penalty of
liberty to manufacture, deploy and drop napalm bombs upon innocent
women and children living in grass huts in non-combatant Cambodia,
dispatching hundreds of thousands of souls to an incendiary death.
This is a grotesque crime against humanity.

- It has used
tax payments forcibly extracted from me to build, maintain and operate
a reported seven hundred military bases around the world, doing
thereby immense ecological damage, disturbing the peace, destabilizing
societies and causing the flames of hatred against America to burn
ever hotter in more and more places.

- It has used
the product of my labor taken from me under palpable threat of force
to execute certain specific “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”
as defined by the UN, including but not limited to the following:

Targeting of
foreign leaders in “decapitation” strikes
Targeting civilian populations and civilian infrastructure with
by intentionally directing attacks upon civilians and hospitals,
medical centers, residential neighborhoods, electricity stations,
water purification facilities, and intense indiscriminate military
operations against cities and towns which resulted in many civilian
casualties.
Using disproportionate force and weapons systems with indiscriminate
effects, such as cluster munitions, incendiary bombs, depleted uranium
and chemical weapons.
Using depleted uranium munitions with devastating long term
effects upon human beings and the environment.
Extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified
by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly (Geneva
Convention).
Seizure of, destruction of and willful damage done to religious
institutions, charity and education, the arts and sciences, historic
documents and archeological treasures of humanity.
Attack and bombardment of undefended towns, villages, dwellings
and buildings.
Wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages with devastation
not justified by military necessity, for example the wanton destruction
of ancient Babylon.
Imposition of interim government over a foreign people with
practices of managed elections and violation of right of self-determination.
Unlawful attacks, including assassinations, summary executions,
murders, disappearances, kidnapping and torture, use of deadly violence
against peaceful protestors, imposition of punishment without charge
or trial, including collective punishment.
Unlawful detention and torture, including by US military personnel
and paramilitary forces operating anonymously, including widespread,
repeated and systematic use of torture and degrading treatment of
civilians as well as military personnel detained in prison facilities
or covertly transferred for torture in foreign countries, practices
which are unconditionally prohibited by international law.
Willfully devastating the environment, including through the
use of depleted uranium.
Systematically utilizing, controlling, directing, manipulating,
misinforming and restricting press and media coverage and deliberately
presenting false and misleading reports to obtain support for US
military and political actions; and to deprive the American people
of knowledge essential to develop an informed public opinion essential
to democratic processes and public justice.
Ordering young Americans, soldiers and others, to commit terrible
acts that will aunt them, their families and their communities.
Their acts of torture and the killing of women, children, injured
people, doctors, nurses, and the bombing of places of worship and
hospitals will not only brutalize these soldiers individually, but
will increase te violence and militarization of American culture.
Indefinite detention of persons seized far from any combat zone
while denying protection of the Geneva Conventions and US Constitution.
The use of military force to seize and detain indefinitely without
charges US citizens, denying right of habeas corpus.
Committing murder by authorizing the CIA to kill people designated
by the President anywhere in the world.

- It has not
only taken from me by force the product of my labor and thereafter
employed it in the execution of crimes against humanity, but it
has also violated my human rights and my conscience as being done
in my name and with my money, in ways listed below, among events
too numerous to account. The overwhelming force of government being
beyond my capacity to resist, this is a clear violation of my person,
as well as utter degradation of humanity itself.

Lying to the
people of the US, the UN and people of the world to provide false
and deceptive rationale for war.
Instituting secret and illegal wiretapping and spying operations
against people of the US.
Violation of the rights of US individuals under the First, Fourth,
Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights.
Making, ordering and condoning false statements and propaganda
about the conduct of foreign governments and individuals and acts
by US government personnel; manipulating the media and foreign governments
with false information; concealing information vital to public discussion
and informed judgment concerning acts, intentions and possession
of weapons of mass destruction in order falsely to create a climate
of fear so as to destroy opposition to US wars of aggression and
first strike attacks.
Violations and subversions of the Charter of the UN and international
law, both a part of the “Supreme Law of the Land” under Article
VI of the Constitution, in an attempt to commit with impunity crimes
against humanity and war crimes, and usurping powers of the UN and
the people of its nations by bribery, coercion and other corrupt
acts and by rejecting treaties, committing treaty violations and
frustrating compliance with treaties in order to destroy any means
by which international law and institutions can prevent, affect,
or adjudicate the exercise of US military and economic power against
the international community.
Acting to strip US citizens of their constitutional and human
rights, ordering indefinite detention of citizens without access
to counsel, without charge, and without opportunity to appear before
a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention, based solely
on the discretionary designation of the Executive of a citizen as
a suspected “threat” to the US.
Ordering and authorizing the Attorney General to override judicial
orders of release of detainees, even where the judicial officer
after full hearing determines a detainee is wrongfully held by the
government.
Ordering indefinite detention of non-citizens in the US and
elsewhere, without charge, at discretion of the Attorney General
or Secretary of Defense.
Authorizing secret military tribunals and summary execution
of persons who are not citizens, designated solely at discretion
of the Executive who acts as indicting official, prosecutor and
as the only avenue of appellate relief.
Refusing to provide disclosure of identities and locations of
persons who have been arrested, detained and imprisoned by the US
government in the US.
Use of secret arrests of persons within the US and elsewhere
and denial f right to public trial.
Authorizing the monitoring of confidential attorney-client privileged
communications by the government, even in absence of court order
and even where incarcerated persons have not been charged with a
crime.
Ordering the seizure of assets of persons in the US, prior to
hearing or trial, for having had lawful or innocent association
with any entity that at discretion of the Executive has been deemed
a “terrorist.”
Institutionalizing racial and religious profiling and domestic
spying by federal law enforcement officials on persons based on
their engagement in non-criminal religious and political activity.
Development of diverse nuclear weaponry in direct violation
of the UN Charter even as it decries other nations for attempting
to acquire their own nuclear weaponry in order to defend themselves
from pre-emptive strike by the US.
Issuing Executive Orders that legalize criminal corporate collusion
with the government in war crimes and finance of war crimes and
concealment of the records thereof.
Employing vast sums of money and large numbers of people to
conduct research and development of weapons of mass destruction,
and to create a stockpile thereof sufficient to destroy all of humanity.

By forcibly
taking from me the product of my labor, under penalty of loss of
liberty and confiscation of property, and employing these funds
in execution of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the government
has made it impossible for me to earn my livelihood without thereby
becoming an accomplice to murder. This is an abomination, a violation
of life itself.

*In addition
to these violations of humanity and of conscience the government
has violated my natural and human rights in other ways too numerous
to account. A few incidents are listed below as “tip of the iceberg”
examples.

- Classifying
documents as “secret” to remove them from public view, their contents
and actions described therein having been financed by the public
notwithstanding.

- Manipulation
and falsification of government statistics on employment, commerce,
money supply, public debt.

- Keeping a
double set of accounts for government financial operations, one
being obscured from public view

- Diversion
of the Social Security Trust Fund to general government operating
expenses.

- Creating
and operating sub-rosa “off-budget” government operations.

- Using the
monetary authority of the Federal Reserve to print new money which
depreciates the currency and robs the people of their savings, as
well as permitting war finance without taxes.

- Using banking
regulations to prevent the free movement of capital and to spy on
people.

- Issue Executive
Orders to authorize the President – at his sole recognizance of
“National Emergency” — to seize property, organize and control the
means of production, seize commodities, restrict travel, take control
of the stock market, institute rationing, and more …

- Using the
powers of Eminent Domain to transfer property to the hands of favored
insiders.

- Using the
powers of regulation and monopoly to advance the business interests
of large corporate contributors at the expense of the public welfare.

- Denying by
law and regulation my freedom to contract; defining the terms thereof
as legal only in Federal Reserve Notes, a medium of depreciating
value; and imposing other strictures on the freedom to contract
on mutually agreeable terms in free and voluntary exchange .

- Obstructing
my right to free and peaceful enjoyment of my property by imposing
ubiquitous and onerous regulation of nonsensical building codes,
ridiculous and counter-productive safety regulations, and everywhere
posting regulations and limits of action under the guise of health
and welfare.

- By operation
of the “Plunge Protection Team” and “Economic Stabilization Fund,”
intervene directly in stock and commodity markets to favor the government
agenda and favored clients.

- Using government
(public) funds to finance huge developments that profit a few at
the cost of massive destruction of the ecology of the human commons.

- In an act
of outright theft, confiscating all the privately held gold of US
citizens in 1933, which included the property of my parents' generation,
and maintaining to this day the executive authority to repeat this
grand larceny.

- In an act
of outright chicanery and breach of faith, abrogating the redemption
of dollars into gold by foreign governments, thereby initiating
world wide economic instability and loss of faith in the US since
the order by Nixon in 1971, with effect upon my personal livelihood.

- Forced payroll
deductions for Social Security, a trust now on the road to bankruptcy.

- Obstructing
my right to educate my children as I see fit; instead, subjecting
them to government brainwashing and outright falsification and censorship
of textbooks.

- Made it quite
impossible to lead a decent, quiet, productive life in any ordinary
sense. Any person of integrity must devote most of his energy to
protecting himself from direct predation of the State upon his property
and common facilities of life — and if he be of morally compassionate
character, he must devote whole of life work to resisting the State's
lust for its hideous foreign wars and exploitations of the rest
of humanity.

- Breach and
violation of my substantive rights to control my own life and property,
to wit:

Unimpeded right
to life, liberty and property
Freedom of speech and press
Right of Habeas Corpus
Right to trial by jury
Freedom to travel
Freedom to educate my children as I see fit
Unimpeded right to own and operate my own business
Right to defend myself, including the right to bear arms
Right to security of my home and papers against government intrusion
Right not to be spied upon.

The government
has perverted justice and the public morality into such grotesque
forms as to be unrecognizable by a rational man with a conscience.
The preceding list is by no means exhaustive. I doubt that I would
live long enough to complete a full tabulation.

This government
is an abomination so vile, corrupt, vicious, destructive and murderous
that it is unfit to exist. It has become the single greatest threat
to survival of the human species. As will be set forth, I renounce
it.

“I am sending
a voice, Great Spirit, forgetting nothing you have made
the stars of the universe and the grasses of earth.” ~ Nicholas
Black Elk

MY PERSONAL
DECLARATION OF SEVERANCE AND INDEPENDENCE

For a time
beyond memory of people now living, the government of the United
States has committed a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
the object of reducing to absolute subordination and servitude the
individuals subject to its power. It has methodically undermined
and abrogated its foundation documents, comprising the Declaration
of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It has
systematically violated established and long standing principles
of the international community of nations. It has committed heinous
crimes against humanity and its own citizens as partially listed
in my Statement of Abuses and Violations. It has so perverted the
precepts of justice, liberty, public morality and human rights as
to make them unrecognizable to a rational man with a conscience.

Sincere respect
for my fellow human beings – brothers and sisters during this earthly
sojourn — demands that I declare the causes which impel my severance
of relations with the government of United States, and my assumption
of an equal and independent station free from the domination and
subordination to which I have been subjected. These causes are enumerated
as Statement of Abuses and Violations in that certain booklet authored
by me under the title Experiments in Moral Sovereignty — Notes
of an American Exile, by this reference incorporated herein
and made a part hereof.

I hold these
to be self evident truths: that all people are endowed at birth
with equal, inalienable and independent rights, among which are
sole possession of their own life, liberty and the seeking of happiness
in their own way. That to secure these rights, associations may
be formed among humans, deriving their just delegations of responsibility
from the full consensus of their members; that it is the right of
any member to secede from any such association without reason given,
to cease all relations of any nature whatsoever, and either to abstain
from or to create or join different associations which adopt such
precepts and principles, and organize their responsibilities in
such form, as to their members shall seem most likely to effect
their safety, enterprise and happiness. ~ by Jeff Knaebel

“Conscience
does not exist if not exercised”

We have lost control of our lives to a force we cannot see, cannot
reckon with, and have no influence over. It is far away while simultaneously
all-pervasive. We must take back control of our lives. To do this
we must take back personal responsibility for our human duties to
family and community. We must not abrogate our responsibilities
to faceless unaccountable institutions.

OFFERING

I add my
breath to your breath
that our days may be long on the earth
that the days of our people may be long
that we may be one person
May our Mother bless you with life
May we finish our roads together
~ Zuni

November
3, 2006

Jeff
Knaebel [send him
mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995.
He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having
been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

DIGG THIS

GENERAL
PRECEPTS OF MAN AS SOCIAL BEING

All life is
one. The world is one home. All are members of one family. All creation
is one organic whole. No person is independent of that whole. The
earth is a sacred gift to be cherished, nurtured, and shared by
all.

All human beings
are endowed by the Law of Nature (God if you prefer, hereinafter
“Truth”) with a moral conscience. The highest law of my being is
the Law of Truth. The Law of Truth is of a higher order than man
made law. It can also be said that Truth is Love, in the sense that
God is Love. Every person is ultimately accountable only to this
Higher Law, the working force of which is Ahimsa, nonviolence, love.

Man is a social
being. It is his duty to live in harmony with the entirety of humanity
in accordance with Laws of Truth, without any distinction whatsoever
for race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, creed, caste,
class, or age. All false appearances belie the actual intrinsic
unity of mankind. Our universal language is the language of the
heart.

Conflicts must
be overcome by great loyalty to humanity. This loyalty supersedes
all other subordinate loyalties, racial or national. It is the law
of Love that rules mankind. Had violence and hatred ruled us, we
would long ago have become extinct. Love is what men live by.

The daily prayer
of Mahatma Gandhi — “Lead me from untruth to truth, from darkness
to light, from death to immortality” — declares an evolutionary
journey which is the birthright of every human being. Ultimate Truth
is the goal of life. Its unimpeded and efficient realization is
the natural right of every person. No State possesses moral authority
to impede this basic human right of Self-Realization.

The five basic
minimum moral precepts of my faith and conscience are (1) to abstain
from killing any visible living being, (2) to abstain from lying,
(3) to abstain from stealing, (4) to abstain from sexual misconduct,
and (5) to abstain from intoxicants.

It is my duty
to adhere to these precepts in my personal actions. It is also my
moral duty not to support or approve violation of them by others
or the State. These responsibilities are intrinsic to my duty to
live in harmony with all other human beings.

Freedom of
religion means I cannot be required by coercion, force, or threat
of force to violate any precepts of my faith, or to support violation
of them by the State.

My moral responsibility
comprises a universal responsibility for welfare of all beings.
My every action affects directly or indirectly the welfare of my
fellowmen. The first morality and the first service to others are
the same: do no harm. It is my duty to renounce violence in my heart
and to employ the power of Ahimsa (nonviolence) generated by this
renunciation.

Because nonviolence
is my most fundamental moral responsibility, it is also my most
fundamental human right. This means that I cannot be required to
support or approve of the State in breaching the precept of Ahimsa.

The scope of
nonviolence herein includes abstaining from all activities (to the
extent humanly possible), which take the life of any visible living
being. Economic, ecological and natural resource exploitation of
the weak and poor by the strong and rich is considered herein an
act of violence from which it is my duty to abstain.

It is my duty
to support actions which promote peace, harmony, and real happiness
of human beings everywhere, and to abstain from actions and support
of actions by the State inimical to these ends. Greed, hatred, and
delusion are the three “great poisons” which deprive humanity of
peace, harmony and happiness. Therefore it is my duty to abstain
from support of actions by the State which generate or promote these
great poisons among human beings.

The end of
any action is defined, predicted and included in the means. Means
may be likened to seed, the end to tree. They are inseparably linked.
A good end cannot arise from immoral means. Man can control the
means, but not the ends. Purity of means is based upon recognition
of moral law. The precept of nonviolence states that it is quality
of means — the intention to suffer for good ends while not inflicting
suffering upon others — which provides justification of the ends.
The means is the end.

All people
are endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty and pursuit
of happiness as necessary prerequisites to enable their achievement
of Self-Realization. Other basic human rights are enumerated in
the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, the
Charter of the United Nations, and in UN Resolutions regarding human
rights. The full scope of human rights is not limited by these enumerations.
In order to promote the full scope of human rights, it is my duty
to resist by nonviolent means the forces of coercion and violence.

I cannot deny
the truth of my perceptions, my conscience and my common sense.
To do so would be to deny myself, my capacity to know, my instruments
of knowledge which enable me to learn Truth. I confess that Truth
recedes as I approach it, like all highest values. It is like approaching
infinity. As a human being, it is extremely difficult to be perfect
in truth. Just as the truth of geometry is not denied by inability
to draw a straight line, so my shortfall from Truth does not deny
its actuality. If I understand a fact as it is, and act on that
fact as guided by my conscience, then I have acted according to
truth.

My own conscience
provides the best understanding for me of Truth in any situation.
No other person is endowed by Nature with the capability or right
to interpret the guidance of my personal conscience. Certainly no
State possesses this power.

Ahimsa and
love are one. Ahimsa means the largest love, the greatest charity.
Ahimsa, the active force of love, requires me to dissociate myself
from evil-doers who employ violence. Ahimsa is not merely the absence
of violence. It is an active engagement in compassion.

Nonviolence
is the supreme value, the one cognizable standard by which truth
in action can be determined. Suffering deprivation, loss or even
injury to one’s own person as a substitute for violence to others
is the essence of nonviolence.

Self-Realization
as a goal and as a duty herein means complete salvation, total release
from cyclic existence of birth-death-rebirth. It is achieved from
a foundation of Ahimsa. Since Self-Realization as the ultimate goal
of man can only be accomplished individually, personal autonomy
takes precedence over the State. Self-government is autonomy of
the moral self, the moral rule of each man over himself. Duty to
one’s own conscience and loyalty to Truth are above one’s loyalty
to State. In matters of individual conscience the rule of majority
has no place. Blind submission to social will is not a righteous
act. No act which is not voluntary can be said to be moral.

Orders from
the State notwithstanding, an act performed against the dictates
of one’s conscience is not a moral act. If a person feels those
orders do not conform to reason and moral sensibility, it is his
duty to disobey and take upon himself the consequences. It is right
to support the actions of State only so long as they are nonviolent.
When actions of State harm living beings, it is one’s duty to withdraw
support.

It is blindly
ignorant and unrighteous to believe that an act of a majority binds
a minority. There are many examples of acts of majorities found
to have been wrong and those of minorities to have been right. Many
reforms have been initiated by minorities in opposition to majorities.
While the blind belief exists that men should obey unjust laws,
so long will their slavery persist. Is a pious man to accept an
order to kill his fellowman, tantamount to his own family, on the
basis of majority rule? It is contrary to humanity to obey laws
repugnant to conscience. Such teaching is opposed to religion and
means slavery. Even the government does not expect such a thing
from us. It does not say “you must do such and such.” It says: “If
you do not do it, we will punish you.”

If man will
realize it is unrighteous to obey unjust laws, no tyranny will enslave
him. This is crucial to self-rule. Throughout history, men have
recognized their birthright to disobey and to resist government
when its tyranny or its inefficiency became great and unendurable.

Individual
freedom alone can motivate a person to surrender to the service
of society. If freedom is wrested from him, he becomes automation
and society is ruined. No society can be built on denial of individual
liberty. The moral person is marked by a readiness to suffer and
make sacrifice for the highest good. The sacrifices must be made
and the suffering borne in a spirit of nonviolence with malice towards
none.

The State does
not possess moral sovereignty over the individual and does not inherently
possess rights to be granted to individuals. Individuals are endowed
with inalienable natural rights and the State derives its authority
from consent of the people. The State cannot grant inalienable rights,
it can only impede them up to the limit which people are willing
to tolerate.

A righteous
person is duty bound to disobey laws repugnant to conscience, taking
upon oneself the consequences and penalties of civil disobedience,
provided, however, that he must never take the law into his own
hands. The conscience of the people is the ultimate sanction of
laws aimed at higher levels of justice and public welfare. It is
the righteous person’s duty to work towards elevating the social
conscience. Rights are not ultimately protected by law. Protection
stems from the moral conscience of society.

The individual
is the supreme consideration. The individual must be a social being
who identifies himself with all other living beings. A rational
individual recognizes that it is in his own long term interest not
to exploit others or ecology. The good of all beings is the real
good of each individual. The good of the individual is included
in the good of all. Men, women, and children must be treated as
ends in themselves. They cannot be used as agency for others. To
achieve Self-Realization — which is a natural right equal to the
right to life itself — is something only free agents can accomplish.
It cannot be done by coercion and cannot be derived from power or
wealth. All individuals are moral ends in themselves. As they wish
to be treated as moral agents, so must they treat others as moral
agents.

An act to be
moral must transcend all selfishness and egoism. It must be motivated
by goodwill for all, since good of individual is contained in the
good of the whole. No man can act without affecting welfare of his
fellowmen. The moral test of an action is whether or not it is conducive
to welfare of all. The great truth is unity of all life. It commands
the love and service of all life. Therefore Truth can be realized
only through moral, nonviolent means.

An organized
society presupposes safety, cooperation and mutual help. These are
impossible without nonviolence. The logical consequence of violent
methods or messages is the increasing brutality of man. No success
is worthy of human effort if it does not ennoble man.

Nonviolent
civil disobedience is itself a birthright. There is no volition
to overpower the wrong doer. The aim of the nonviolent resister’s
suffering is to awaken human sympathy in the heart of wrong doers
and convert them from violence to love. Nonviolence invokes forgiveness,
not vengeance. One must altogether reject even indirect support
for a military state. Emigration is an acceptable nonviolent action.
The main cause of war is greed which leads to exploitation of weaker
nations, races, social groups. It is impossible to achieve peace
by means of war.

The right to
initiate civil disobedience requires prior habitual and sincere
obedience to just law. It is a duty to render voluntary obedience
to law except when that law fosters untruth. Then disobedience
becomes duty. Civil disobedience is, in respect of Higher Law, the
natural recourse of people when they have no effective voice in
their own government.

Power is the
central concept of politics. Coercion is embedded in the power of
the State. The State represents violence in concentrated and organized
form. There can be no nonviolent State, because State means force.
The coercive nature of State power goes against the moral value
of individual action. Politics divides and separates, in opposition
to the unity of all life. George Washington said: “Government, like
fire, is a useful servant but a dangerous master. It is not eloquence,
it is not justice, it is pure force.”

The instruments
of State are designed by men to serve their convenience. They have
no intrinsic natural existence. Just as a righteous man dissociates
himself from evil acts of other men and does not support or approve
them, so must he dissociate himself from or resist evil acts of
State. Actions of State are merely the actions of a group of men
proceeding according to their perceived self-interest. These actions
have no intrinsic moral superiority to the actions of an individual.
To the contrary, it is the common human experience that politicians
are far away from being a reliable repository of the highest moral
and human values.

The chance
occurrence of my birth in a certain State does not compel me to
surrender my moral sovereignty to the political morality of that
State. The State holds me in thrall by force alone. It is only raw
power projected by the State that forces people into acts of mass
destruction. No sane individual does these things. My first loyalty
is to humanity as one, to the wholeness of the human species, not
to a particular State. No laws of nature created national boundaries
that divide people from one another. Human divisiveness brings death.
Unity is life.

A civil society
is harmonious. Harmony means brotherhood. Brotherhood must be supported
by just law. Law which places corporate property rights above human
rights and which creates a judicial framework for exploitation of
the poor by the rich is not moral law. A person must disregard it.
A framework of law which encourages and promotes destruction of
our planetary ecosystem — on which all life depends — must be resisted
by people of conscience.

Life, Liberty,
Pursuit of Happiness: Americans declared independence to enjoy these
inalienable rights. Certainly my freedom not to kill, and
my joy in nonviolence, are abrogated by coercive taxation to finance
constant preparation for war, marketing of war and implements of
war, and the research-development-construction of ever more efficient
means to kill more and more people in less and less time. I do not
labor for the purpose of blowing to bits the bodies of women and
children.

Government
behind closed doors and concealed in classified documents: how can
this be said to be with the consent of the governed? Not only war,
but also all forms of secrecy, lies and compulsion inherent in the
powers of State are a violation of humanity.

The highest
law is the Law of God, the Law of Truth. Love is God. Love does
not kill. The high commandment of Christianity is “Thou shall not
kill.” The first morality taught by the Buddha is to abstain from
killing. The first precept of the Hindu and the Jain is Ahimsa,
nonviolence. Nonviolence is the highest morality of man. This morality
is of a higher order than any State's authority. No State has the
right to interfere with a person’s sincere efforts to pursue the
goal of Self-Realization through Ahimsa.

I will not
voluntarily abide by any law of man which violates my understanding
of Law of Truth. Nor will I take the law of man into my own hands.
I will disobey such laws as are repugnant to my conscience, taking
full personal responsibility for acts of civil disobedience. I willingly
suffer the full consequences and penalties thereunto appertaining.
I declare that obedience to any such repugnant law imposed upon
me by force makes of me a slave, and thereby violates my basic human
right to life and liberty. No man, no constituted authority, and
no State have the right to make me a slave.

Ahimsa is not
merely the absence of violence. It is an active engagement in compassion.
Whenever we consume more than we need, we are engaging in violence.
We are taking from others. Using resources beyond one’s actual needs
depletes what is available to meet the needs of others, including
other species upon whose survival our own ultimately depends. Ahimsa
means not to encroach upon the economic and ecological rights of
others. Their right to life is not ours to take.

PERCEIVED
ERRORS OF PREVAILING ASSUMPTIONS OF GOVERNANCE

Actions of
the modern nation state are based upon false or questionable moral
premises, some of which are perceived as follows.

• That man
  lives by greed rather than by love.
• That nature
  can be freely exploited. That we can destroy billions of years
  of biological evolution — along with interdependent human cultures
  — without consequence.
• That State
  institutions can violate higher moral law.
• That peace
  and security can be achieved through war.
• That material
  progress is man’s greatest good, even at the expense of cultural
  morality.
• Denial of
  interdependence and inter-connectedness of all life.
• Denial of
  man’s universal responsibility to the whole of life.
• That future
  material progress can be gained by mortgaging the web of biological
  life itself to present exploitation.
• That human
  welfare can be achieved by promoting artificial needs and consumerism.
• That the
  State possesses moral authority over the individual.
• That politics
  can be divorced from ethics.
• That the
  State can keep the peace and maintain security.
• That the
  State knows better than the people themselves what is in their
  best interest.
• That the
  people are incapable of taking care of themselves without State
  supervision.
• That the
  State can legislate and maintain public morality among individuals.
• That the
  State can provide any economic good that is not better provided
  by voluntary effort and exchange among free people acting in absence
  of coercion.
• That somehow
  those persons in government possess more goodness than ordinary
  persons, that they are capable of rising above self-interest,
  that power does not corrupt, that power is not addictive.
• That exploitation
  of the weak by the strong is sustainable.
• That owners
  of corporations should be absolved of personal responsibility
  for actions of the corporation.
• That corporations
  should be granted the rights of persons, including political rights,
  and that they are bona fide participants in the political process.
• That the
  end justifies the means.
• That the
  moral code necessary for harmony among individuals does not apply
  to the State.
• That the
  lie of the State is morally valid.
• That the
  State has the right to coerce individuals to support its wrong-doings,
  even to a level of violence which may exterminate millions of
  human beings and threaten survival of all life on earth.
• That to
  protect its citizens the State should violate the Laws of Truth.
• That it
  is morally acceptable for one State to exploit the people and
  ecology of another. Thus, that exploitation is an acceptable aim
  of politics.
• That economic
  interests of corporations are senior to welfare of individuals.
• That an
  industrial economy is unequivocally a good thing for all humanity.
• That corporations
  are the best vehicle for human economic action.
• That ever-increasing
  consumption to support an ever-growing economy is a good thing.
• That corporate
  property rights and investor rights are senior to individual human
  rights.
• That the
  individual is an economic entity and not a moral agency.
• That propaganda
  rather than truth is an acceptable means of informing the public.
• That public
  funds should be employed to subsidize corporations.
• That the
  precept of "just war" is valid in human affairs.
• That State
  Terrorism is a justifiable response to criminally violent acts
  of individuals.
• That lies,
  deceit, secrecy and obfuscation are acceptable methods of "Statecraft."
• That the
  State has a valid claim upon the labor product of its citizens,
  a form of slavery.
• That a valid
  contract exists between the State and its citizens.
• That men
  can be bound by a "constitution" of which they had no
  authorship, that was drafted by persons unknown to them, with
  whom they made no contract, and who are now dead.
• That, in
  effect, the State owns its citizens as property.
• That the
  private lives, speech, thoughts and beliefs of citizens should
  be open to State surveillance and control.
• That "society"
  is a concrete entity rather than a churning coalescence of individuals
  acting according to their own self-interest. That "society"
  is more than a mere abstract term, and that it can thus be "managed"
  without respect for individual rights.
• That "Group
  Think" does not ultimately lead to the lowest common moral
  denominator among individuals comprising the group, in that those
  with the most power are likely to be the least moral.
• That those
  attracted to positions of authority within the State are not likely
  to be psychologically imbalanced, motivated by a lust for power
  and domination, prone to psychopathic behavior when given free
  rein.
• That the
  State, although conceived in violence, maintained by violence,
  subsisting on violence, is a morally valid institution among men.
• That the
  State is somehow a beneficent entity, comprised of Nice Government
  Men who always hold the interests of others above their own. That
  politics does not lead to theft. That politics does not nurture
  the growth of power. That politics does not beget competition
  for power. That politics does not foster centralization of power.
  That power does not absolutely corrupt. That power will not express
  as murder.
• That the
  "public debt" of one generation can be passed to the
  next, i.e., that a man is obliged to the debt of a stranger whom
  he never met and who is now dead. That a person is obliged to
  a debt in the creation of which he had neither awareness nor voice.
• That a group
  of criminals acting in a Parliament or Legislature can create
  and bind citizens to laws which are repugnant to conscience. Laws
  which result in destruction and death, and which violate the wisdom
  teachings of all the great spiritual traditions of humanity. Laws
  which reduce the lives of ordinary citizens to serfdom and conscription
  in carrying out the murderous agenda of the Powers That Be.

MORAL HYPOTHESES
AND CONCLUSIONS

A necessary
prerequisite for a nonviolent society is justice in all aspects
of life: food, shelter, clothing work, education, health, opportunity
for self-realization. Justice requires freedom, together with open
access to livelihood and trade without legal barriers operating
through the State's power of monopoly.

Humanity is
One and harmony must be worldwide. A proper rule of law requires
that human rights of all be equally protected. When a body of law
is created which tramples the rights of minorities and the weak,
such as Bretton Woods agreements, IMF, GATT and WTO, such law is
repugnant to the conscience and must be resisted by nonviolent means.
If we do not find nonviolent methods to resist imperialism in all
its different forms, including corporate imperialism, the suppressed
races of the world appear to have little hope.

A prerequisite
for peace is radical limitation of corporate power, a redefining
of the corporation as a legal entity. We must reject lifestyles
based upon creation of artificial needs, the fulfillment of which
harms others. Only that economy is good which conduces to the long
term good of all.

The modern
science of political economy is false science because it promotes
exploitation of man by man. True science is concerned with the welfare
and destiny of all men. This is the science taught by the sages:
Buddha, Christ, Confucius, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Mahavir, Gandhi,
Schweitzer, U Ba Khin, the Dalai Lama. That economics is untrue
which ignores or disregards moral values. An economics which enables
the strong to exploit the weak is dismal as well as fake. This is
the economics of the Corporate Warfare State.

In 1981, fifty-three
Nobel Prize winners warned of an unprecedented holocaust, encompassing
the horrors of mass exterminations and extending the frontiers of
barbarism and death. In 1980, while tens of millions of people were
on the verge of starvation, the global war machine engaging 60 million
people was squandering nearly a million dollars per minute towards
our universal extermination. Today the level of violence is even
higher. It is incomprehensible.

The most fundamental
of human rights is the right to life. It is morally wrong to support
a group of states in their quest for the power to destroy all life.
A righteous person, intent upon spiritual evolution, must resist
this. Immoral means employed by the State or its corporate licensees
result in doing harm and failing to achieve a good end. It is the
inevitable result of the Law of Cause and Effect. Any perceived
success will be only temporary, while the evil will be long lasting.
The lie of the State at war cannot lead to Truth, just as war cannot
lead to peace.

Immoral means
predict and determine the ends. Modern science and technology have
bestowed upon States power beyond limits. This power is being used
in a moral vacuum. Unlimited power of the soulless state machine
and its corporate licensees, fostered by large-scale mechanization,
automation and massive concentration of wealth and power leads to
disintegration of society. This is manifest in the erosion of human
values we see all around. Such a milieu deprives man of his right
to self-actualization. If the price of "progress" is corruption,
how can a person be happy?

State corporate
governance has failed because it lacks a moral code based on true
human values. We live in a disintegrating culture. That which is
best and noblest in humanity is not nourished. The corporate culture
does not cultivate generosity, compassion, charity, morality, cooperation,
tolerance, wisdom, self-sacrifice, service to others. It does not
encourage gentleness and community, mutual support or harmony. “The
capitalist technocratic state system has become a monstrous destroyer
of what is loving and life affirming in the human soul.” (Miller,
1999).

In a traditional
society, the family and community constituted the basis of morality.
Stealing from one’s neighbor would be morally shocking. Now, in
public institutions, all manner of corruption is expected. The consequences
are huge, because the corruption involves doing violence to entire
cultures. Millions of people are made to suffer. This radical separation
of ethics from politics, foreshadowed in the long ago writings of
Machiavelli, appears to be a generic feature of the corporate state
structure.

A corporation
has no heart, no soul, no conscience, no morals. It is not a living
being. It cannot feel pain, sorrow, remorse shame, and compassion
because it is intrinsically unable to do so. It cannot laugh or
cry, enjoy the world, or suffer with it. Most of all, it cannot
love. This is because it is a legal fiction. Its “body” is a judicial
construct. It is a process, a machine designed for one purpose:
to generate maximum revenue at least cost. It is not connected to
earth or its creatures, to pleasures and responsibilities that derive
from being human, made of earth. When it hurts people or destroys
ecology, it feels nothing. It is incapable of feeling. Yet, under
law, it is deemed a “natural person” with all the legal and political
rights of a person except for actual voting. This is why corporations
are so dangerous: they act in human affairs without feeling and
with wholly selfish motives. They have become very powerful, in
some cases more powerful than the host government of which they
are a parasite.

Not only does
the corporation have the rights of a citizen (such as free speech,
right to sue for slander, libel, injury), but it has been granted
special protection over property rights. Rate of return on investment
has been declared a “property” immune to interference by citizens
or their elected representatives. Under U.S. law they are also granted
“eminent domain,” pursuant to which jury trials were eliminated
for determining whether corporate practices cause harm or injury,
and if so, the assessment of damages.

The fatal moral
flaw which makes these corporations so dangerous to the social body
upon which they feed like a cancer is an ethical design error. Their
owners, the shareholders are protected by law from legal and personal
liability for corporate harm to humanity or damage to ecology. This
is an attempt by men to create a shield that protects them from
consequences of their actions. It is an attempt to violate the Law
of Cause and Effect, the law of moral causation. There is no personal
accountability of the owners to society. The corporation has no
social responsibility. Yet it has legal and political rights by
legislative construct. It is a dangerous entity, pursuing only its
“genetic” program to generate profit without concern for long term
consequences to humanity. Can you imagine the outrage that would
land on the heads of individuals had they committed some of the
crimes of corporations which are now so commonplace in the news
as to have become routine?

“The special
status of corporations has placed them in a position to control
vast economic power by which they may dominate not only the economy
but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.
The liberty of democracy is not safe if people tolerate the growth
of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the state
it itself. That, in essence, is fascism: ownership of government
by an individual, a group, or any controlling private power.” (Franklin
D. Roosevelt).

President
Abraham Lincoln opined: “I see a crisis approaching that unnerves
me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result
of the war, corporations have been enthroned. An era of corruption
in high places will follow and the money power of the country will
endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the
people until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic
is destroyed.”

The 500 largest
corporations in the world now (1999) control 25% of the entire world
economic output. The largest 300 corporations own 25% of the world’s
productive assets. The 50 largest commercial banks and diversified
financial companies control nearly 60% of all global capital.

According to
Paul Hellyer, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, “Globalization is
not about trade. It is about power and control. It is reshaping
the world into one without borders ruled by a dictatorship of the
world’s most powerful central banks, commercial banks and multinational
companies."

The prime role
of government has been usurped by corporations in order to provide
a secure legal environment for profitable transnational investment
and competition. This usurpation provides security for capital,
property, and investors but not for ordinary citizens. The erroneous
premise of this role for government is that corporate property rights
are senior to human rights, and that the earth and its biological
life can be owned and exploited by non-human entities, rather than
nurtured and shared among human beings.

The issue of
taxation without representation was at the core of the American
Revolution. Beginning with the Bretton Woods international agreements
in 1944, followed by the Trilateral Commission of David Rockefeller
and other efforts organized by elite power brokers, control of representative
government has been systematically transferred from the people to
corporations. As shown in the preceding paragraphs, it is not possible
for corporations to have an unbiased interest in the public welfare.
Documented instances of corporate abuse of the public and the environment
are too numerous to list. Campaign contributions and the lobbying
arms of huge businesses control elections, legislation and public
policy. Powerful men hold in “revolving door” rotation high public
office and directorships of MNCs which are members of the military-industrial-political
complex. This is an unholy and incestuous relationship of regulator
and regulated. Reality on the ground is that American “democratic
government” and both of its major political parties are controlled
by corporations, not citizens. It is a false moral premise that
in a democracy these entities should have political rights and political
voice. It is not possible for corporations to represent the will
of the people. Thus we the people are de facto taxed without representation.
We have no effective voice in a government controlled by corporations.

Now, through
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, General Agreement
on Trade & Tariffs (GATT), and the World Trade Organization
(WTO) at policy level — coordinated through the unholy marriage
of governments, central banks and multinational corporations at
the operational level — sovereignty of politically constituted governments
has been usurped by MNCs. The WTO has created an “Economic Constitution”
of the world. Economic exchange is at the core of human action and
affects every aspect of life: environment, education, health, labor
and political rights, war and peace. The scale of corporate activity
has become so large that it affects the most fundamental right:
the right to life itself. Millions of the world’s poorest people
are deprived of adequate livelihood and health by corporate actions
which destroy their ecology and local economies. As in constitutions,
trade agreements set forth rights of their constituents. But these
“constitutions” have been negotiated behind closed doors with input
only from corporations. Under WTO, only corporations are the beneficiaries
of the rights it creates. The interests of others in society are
nowhere to be found.

An international
agency of corporate constituents has the power to veto parliamentary
decisions made by sovereign governments wherever these decisions
are ruled “trade restrictive.” At risk are environmental protection,
labor and health law, consumer protection law, control of foreign
exchange and the massive flows of speculative capital which can
completely disrupt local economies. Witness the recent Asian economic
crisis which did untold damage to the lives of millions of poor
people. Proceedings of the WTO are closed: trade unions, consumer,
health and environmental groups are barred. Details of rulings are
not published. Membership of decision-making bodies is not disclosed
to the public. Everything is anonymous and there is no public accountability.

MNCs which
have substantial control over legislation as well as executive branch
policy are subsidized directly and indirectly with public finance.
Consider global transport and communications infrastructure, scientific
research and development, corporate agriculture, all of which are
subsidized by public funds generated through taxation of individuals.
Yet these MNCs operate clandestinely and are not accountable to
the public. This is truly abusive taxation without representation.
Having gained control of political parties and the electoral process,
corporations have usurped the government of the people and have
created a tyranny. We the people have no effective voice, yet we
subsidize these entities with our taxes.

There are other
issues with respect to taxation without representation. In 1776
the American tyrant was the British King. Today it is an institutionalized
structural tyranny of rule by corporations masquerading as democracy.
The people vote each 2 to 4 years for, usually (if you ask them),
the lesser of two evils, both of whom were put in place by corporate
money. It is a sham democracy. Corporations are the real power.
They form a collective dictatorship. The “nominees” that we elect
are not only beholden to the corporations which finance and control
the electoral outcome, but they may also be shareholders of the
same corporations which will come under their regulatory and policy
purview. It is incestuous.

Foreign policy
is made by people who own banks and corporations which profit from
preparing for war, marketing the war machine, and waging war. To
find the roots of war, follow the money. War may be couched in terms
of freedom, democracy, justice, religion, but if you follow the
money, it leads to powerful decision makers whose constituents in
banking and industry profit from war or the exploitation which leads
to war. Wars are fought with money borrowed from the public, the
employment of which enriches bankers and owners of the military
industrial complex. Only a morally flawed structure permits these
owners to influence decisions of war and peace.

The recent
Afghan situation is one example of many. It is widely known that
Big Oil, the US government and Pakistan coordinated early support
of Taliban in order to secure access for Big Oil to the fields of
Central Asia. Subsequently they destroyed their creation. Now they
will rebuild Afghanistan without having lost sight of the original
objective: access to oil of Central Asia. It has been reported in
the press that families of high US officials own shares in, among
others, Halliburton, Unocal and Carlyle (oil and defense). These
companies stand to profit from operations related to the war. A
political structure which permits State decision makers to benefit
financially from activities of the State over which they have influence
is morally wrong. The setup is such that MNCs benefit from war while
it is being marketed and waged and again profit from post-war reconstruction.
It is like a meat grinder with human beings the raw feed.

Killing is
never justified, but certainly its lowest threshold is self-defense.
There can be no justification for killing in the name of some “national
interest,” invariably an economic interest determined by power brokers
and not ordinary citizens. No villager is justified in murdering
members of another village for their grain. How can US government
be justified in murdering for oil?

The sheer size
and worldwide pervasive presence of the U.S. military establishment
— emplaced to protect corporate interests — is attestation to an
incomprehensible level of violence. This worldwide projection of
power is used to facilitate and expedite economic and ecological
exploitation of weaker and poorer people. On the basis of what wisdom
has the US government determined that its wasteful, destructive,
death-dealing culture is superior to others?

True rationality
must involve both freedom and foresight. The rationale of unbridled
corporate economics is unable to foresee and calculate future costs
in terms of human displacement and disenfranchisement. Class hatred
and violence inevitably arise from the agony of lost culture and
livelihood. What gives the US government the moral authority to
impose its way of life upon others? Together with imperial arrogance
to defend it at any cost — including nuclear holocaust — against
the feeble efforts of hapless millions struggling for mere survival?
Through economic power and leverage the US exploits wherever possible.
When economic power is insufficient to the purpose, it uses armed
force.

What was the
moral basis for US government destruction of millions of lives in
Vietnam? Under whose code of ethics did USG rain napalm bombs on
noncombatant Cambodia, incinerating thatched hut villages along
with women and children. This led to the destabilization that subsequently
spawned the “killing fields.” Whose killing fields are they, really?
The list of incomprehensible atrocities could fill a book. It turns
the stomach.

The human mind
has become brutalized by all pervasive violence, often gratuitous
as “entertainment” viewed by small children. We seem to have become
de-sensitized to the point of having lost all sense of moral outrage.
We are morally passive in the face of atrocity. The moral scale
of society has shrunk to the point that destructiveness and wanton
waste of life are “normal.”

Tax dollars
directly finance not only the military machine. Through direct and
indirect subsidy the ecologically destructive operations of MNCs
are financed by taxation of individuals. The huge infrastructures
of transportation, electric power, communications, media, global
trade, research and development for chemicals, pesticides, agriculture
and biotech enjoy massive public finance. Taxes are subsidizing
corporations which stand accused in the judicial system of criminal
activities, child abuse, and crimes against humanity (Tobacco and
Big Oil). Taxes subsidize alliances between Big Oil and brutal military
regimes in Africa and Burma.

In the 1960s,
the USG organized a military overthrow of Brazilian President Jose
Goulart. He had instituted capital and land reforms to take back
control from MNCs of Brazil’s natural resources. He had defied the
IMF. An alliance of the CIA with US investors and Brazil’s landowning
elite organized a coup and installed a military junta which overturned
Goulart’s reforms. This is but one example of a list that could
fill a library.

A military
infrastructure is needed to keep the structure of globalization
in place and to guarantee access to natural resources on which the
model depends. The hidden hand of the market will never work without
a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas
to build the Stealth Bomber. The hidden fist that keeps the world
safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is the US Army, Air Force,
Navy, Marine Corps. Keeping the world “safe” for global corporations
does not come cheap. Just ensuring the steady supply of oil is costing
US taxpayers $57 billion annually (circa 1998). Including the infrastructure
of military power worldwide, the costs of globalization are much
higher.

Taxes subsidize
increasing international trade which means ever-increasing pollution
and destruction. Corporations control the political system which
grants these subsidies: they are the driving force behind both the
nation state and globalization. Tax dollars finance crimes against
humanity. The same entities which commit the crimes have control
of the political system. It is tyranny.

In summary,
our planetary ecosystem is being shredded by the violence of greed
to fulfill artificial needs, its species genetically engineered,
poisoned and displaced, a majority of the world’s peoples (the gentlest
ones) impoverished, disenfranchised, displaced. Society is devolving
into violence and debauchery. Life is being destroyed by corporations
on all fronts: commercial, military, political, and social. Nowhere
is there silence. The air is fouled, the waters poisoned. This vast
interconnected killing machine is being financed with tax dollars
paid by people who have no effective voice. We have become slaves
to an inhuman machine of heartless corporate components. We the
people created this monster. We the people must peacefully, nonviolently
reprogram it.

THE DECISION
TO RESIST

Gathering of
Elders, Pasquah, Canada: Indigenous spiritual leaders had come from
around the world. The Cree Elder had asked my profession. Upon my
response, he said: “You are like a bank robber. First your people
took our animals, then they took our fish, then they took our trees.
Then they began breaking even the rocks of Earth herself and taking
them. You pushed us from our homelands onto the reserves. Now you
are going to flood even the little bit left to us, so that your
hydro power project will keep the houses of your big city people
cool in summer. You people are like termites eating their own house.
What will you do when there is no home left for anyone?”

Chihuahua City,
Mexico, Environmental Conference: The World Bank had proposed to
finance a project of logging the last of old growth forest in Sierra
Occidental, where Tarahumara Indians are struggling to survive.
The timber is feed for a pulp mill. Before an audience of scientists,
bureaucrats, environmentalists and trade officials assembled in
University of Chihuahua auditorium stands a Tarahumara Elder. His
hand holds a cheap pulp magazine, a transmission of rubbish. Gazing
calmly at the industrialists and bankers, the Tarahumara speaks
softly: “You are cutting the last of our trees to turn them into
this. The forest is the life of my people. When you have cut the
trees, we will die, and you will read this.” A few miles from the
auditorium, Tarahumara women and children are living in burrows
dug into mounds of garbage at the city dump. At a small village
in the Sierra, a Tarahumara elder had said: “I tell my young men
not to fight. I tell them we must be patient, we must wait. The
white man will destroy himself.”

I had piloted
my personal aircraft from Alaska to Mexico to provide volunteer
flight service for an environmental organization. The mission was
to fly opinion makers for a direct took at logging devastation.
In a kind of epiphany I realized for sure that my whole lifestyle
made me part of the problem. If I sincerely wished to become part
of the solution, I must change — entirely change — my way of life.

I made the
decision to leave my own, my native land forever. I would become
a man without a country, separated by a vast ocean from friends,
family and my young adult children. No more would I smell the rain
on high desert sagebrush, nor hear the wolves howling across moonlit
tundra, nor watch the Northern Lights dance in Arctic sky.

I would owe
allegiance to all of humanity and to no State. I would be the indentured
servant of no gang of murderers sitting in any legislative body.
By paying tax to no State would I finally make a farewell to arms.
I would seek peace and brotherhood.

Man does not
lose his freedom except through his own ignorance. The primary ignorance
at play in a corporate state society is ignorance of the Law of
Cause and Effect, the Law of Moral Causation, the Truth of Dependent
Origination. Freedom and slavery are mental states. First say to
ourselves we shall no longer accept the role of slave. Then be willing
to act and suffer the consequences. There is no high destiny without
self-denial.

Law of Ahimsa
(non-violence): Love is the law of the human race and is infinitely
greater than and superior to brute force. Ahimsa requires a living
faith and commitment to Truth, which is Love (or God if you prefer).
It is inconsistent with modern imperialism based on force for its
defense. It protects one’s self-respect but not his property. Nonviolence
can be practiced by all who have a living faith in Truth and therefore
equal love for all mankind. Moral activity on behalf of others is
self-realization because humanity is One.

Gandhi speaks:
“In order to see face to face the universal and all penetrating
Truth, we must be able to love even the least of creatures as we
love ourselves. The man who attempts this cannot be indifferent
to anything in life. Ahimsa overrides all other forces. It is the
only true force in life. u2018Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and
all else shall be added unto you.' The Kingdom of Heaven is Ahimsa."
One must renounce violence in the heart, and then consciously exercise
of the power of Ahimsa generated by this renunciation.

The pre-eminence
of these principles is made known to me through my personal moral
conscience, life experience and reason. These Laws have been expounded
by the great sages of humanity. Most notable in my personal studies
are the Buddha, Christ, Lao Tse and Mahavir. In modern times they
have been exemplified by Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin, Albert
Schweitzer and Henry David Thoreau. I have drawn on the inspiration
of these and others to organize my thoughts into a plan of action.

Principal
Axioms of Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Resistance: Evil
is parasitic on good, inhumanity on humanity. No man is entirely
devoid of humanity. Suffering, accepted in the spirit of nonviolent
witness to truth, can restore to a person his lost humanity. All
exploitation is based upon cooperation, willing or forced, of the
exploited. Non-cooperation and fearlessness go together. The nonviolent
resister fights with his power of suffering in order to arouse his
opponent’s power of sympathy. This restores to the oppressor his
humanity, while restoring to the oppressed his justice denied. Non-violent
struggle properly conducted, even if it fails, leaves behind no
trail of bitterness. Passive resistance is a method of securing
rights by personal suffering. It is the reverse of resistance by
arms. It involves sacrifice of the self. Sacrifice of the self is
superior to sacrifice of others. Civil disobedience serves all,
including the tyrant, by teaching him his error. Evil can be sustained
only by violence. Therefore, withdrawal of support for evil requires
complete abstention from violence. Nonviolence requires voluntary
submission to the penalty of non-cooperation with evil. The government
itself does not expect our full cooperation. It does not say: “You
must do this.” It says: “If you do not do this, we will punish you.”
Sincerity of a moral position requires willingness to accept the
costs necessary to see the principles realized. When it violates
his moral conscience, no person will submit to the evil of another
or group of others except under coercion. The means pre-exist in,
predict and determine the end. It is impossible for violent means
to achieve moral ends.

Justification
for Civil Disobedience: When the injustice is great and morally
repugnant. When it is of a nature that can be resolved by non-cooperation.
When the offence is real to the best of one’s knowledge and belief.
When administrative recourse is not reasonably available, or after
thorough examination is deemed to be ineffective. The goal must
accord with natural right. The resister must not hate his opponent.
The goal must conduce to the good of all.

Certain
Gandhian Prerequisites for Civil Disobedience: The following
are required in order to earn the moral authority to make a distinction
between moral and immoral law. One must have obeyed consistently
the law of his country. He must have served society. Must have embarked
upon the work of self-purification and be adhering to the five basic
moral precepts. Must have met his family obligations and made arrangements
for them to be covered in his absence. Must be prepared for self-
sacrifice and significant hardship. One cannot disobey the law while
continuing to live under its protection and with its comforts which
are financed by the other citizens who are obeying it. One must
strive for harmony of thought-word-deed. To think one thing, say
another, and do a third is a lie. One must be prepared to embark
upon a program of constructive service to humanity along with self-sacrifice.
The resister must not hate his opponent. The goal must conduce to
the good of all.

MY PERSONAL
PROGRAM OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

I slowly progressed
in self-purification and spiritual growth through meditation practice
as taught by the Buddha. Unbearable became the inner moral conflict
and despair arising from the knowledge that my labor — through the
income tax — was supporting murder of innocent women and children
at many places around the world. In order to save myself from internal
disintegration, it became imperative to act.

At first I
reacted out of anger and despair at the desecration which was being
financed by my labor. As my meditation practice deepened, it became
clear that anger was only hurting me. Anger was doing nothing to
cure human ignorance, which is the root cause of evil. Gradually
I desisted from putting more fuel on the fire of anger. Anger attenuated
and was replaced with first forgiveness, and then compassion for
those people caught in the great MNC killing machine. The call to
action metamorphosed into anguished love with malice towards none.

Now, my actions
are designed with such mindfulness as I can muster to rotate anger
at a system gone mad with the violence of its greed into compassion
for evil-doers, while dissociating myself from them and from the
system. I am doing my best to walk the path pointed by Buddha and
Gandhi: self-purification through meditation, renunciation of worldly
pleasures and comforts, combined with a constructive program of
humanitarian service.

Guided by Gandhi,
I undertook a moral inventory of my deeds in relation to my government.
I had served my country across a span of thirty years in a range
of voluntary humanitarian and public service. My work had received
awards and recognition from all levels of citizenship, including
local community organizations, a State governor, a Secretary of
the US Cabinet, and the President. As an entrepreneur, I had founded
companies that created hundreds of jobs and financed a lot of kids
through school, paid a lot of taxes. I founded nonprofit charitable
organizations, co-created a new Montessori school, an adult learning
center and indigenous social programs. I did significant work in
the largest Native American land settlement in history. I had obeyed
the laws of my country. To this extent I had earned the moral authority
to make my decision.

I examined
the possibilities of actual, practical, timely administrative recourse
in terms of an individual obtaining permission to cease filing and
paying income taxes on the basis of conscience. It is my natural
right to act as an individual and not be required to be a member
of an “authorized” religious organization. No organization has moral
sovereignty over my conscience.

I have had
long personal experience with government at all levels including
the judiciary. They are not bona fide repositories of high moral
wisdom. The closer the approach to inner circles of power, the more
pervasive are corruption and the lie. I and my companies had been
through tax audits with 100% clean marks. Some of my acquaintances
were not so lucky. I am well informed of the abuse of citizens through
tax audits. The invasive procedures of auditors into personal affairs
of citizens are an unwarranted violation of The Bill of Rights.
The power to tax is the power to destroy. The lives of many citizens
have been destroyed by IRS abuses. These methods keep the public
intimidated. Those who request to keep back the “war tax” portion
of their payment on the basis of religion are flagged for special
treatment and subjected to harassment. It is vicious.

I studied these
matters for long. Based upon my observations and common sense, it
is clear that a citizen acting as an individual has no chance against
the government in matters of conscientious objection to the income
tax. The destructive activities of the military-industrial-political
complexes are so systematically embedded that withholding the “war
portion” of a tax is ineffective. It would be like trying to distinguish
blood corpuscles which serve the liver from those that serve the
lung.

The State has
framed the rules. I cannot prevail in a petition brought within
the bounds of the self same rules which my conscience requires me
to disobey. I can only act as guided by my conscience in response
to my perception of events and my understanding of a civil human
society. My choice as a moral being was to take the path of civil
disobedience.

It is incomprehensible
that any government has a moral right to force a person to kill,
or through taxation to finance murder and even mass extermination
of innocent human beings. How can I support war crimes, human rights
violations, crimes against humanity? During the past fifty years
the US government has built an inhuman machinery of escalating violence
that threatens all life with extinction. The government, having
no moral right to require my participation, must rely on brute force
to coerce my payment of taxes. Certainly this meets the test of
“a great and unendurable tyranny.” If I submit to this, I become
a slave. I cannot obey the law without violating my conscience and
my loyalty to the human race. My choice was to participate as an
automaton in the organized, systematic destruction of life or to
withdraw from participation in the corporate controlled society.
The only safe and honorable course for me to keep my self-respect
was to disobey and willingly face the penalties.

These words
are not by way of defense, but simply a description so that rational
people may have a basis for understanding my actions. I am a simple
human being trying to live my ideals. If I run afoul of the State,
let it do with me as it wishes.

Having tried
hard to understand the Law of Ahimsa, to meet its prerequisites
in my personal life, to prepare myself for self-purification and
a life of sacrifice and to embark upon a program of constructive
humanitarian service, I committed myself to a personal solo program
of civil disobedience.

I hereby declare
that I have deliberately disobeyed the tax regulations of my country
(but not the underlying Constitution). I make distinction between
regulation, law, and Constitution because I believe them to be inconsistent
and because law and regulation are so complex and permeated with
obfuscation as to be incomprehensible to me. The regulations as
promulgated in IRS publications seem clear on one point: if a person
fails to file and pay taxes due, he is subject to civil and criminal
penalties. I hereby serve notice upon authorities of the US government
that I have deliberately failed to file tax returns as an act of
conscious civil disobedience. I also declare that no taxes are due,
as will be set forth in the following.

I admit that
I have often been unable to act according to the highest moral law,
which rules thought as well as word and deed. This does not invalidate
the law. It demonstrates the practical difficulties. Geometry is
not less true because I may not be able to draw a straight line.
I can only take one step at a time. The point of beginning is my
capability for nonviolence now, to be improved one day at a time.
The point of departure for moral practice is prevailing morality,
which must be changed, one action at a time towards the goal.

Upon making
the decision to cease filing and paying income tax, I undertook
a radical reorganization of my life. I would have to emigrate, to
become a “tax exile.” It would not be right to benefit from the
facilities and protection of my country while not paying my share.
Reorganization had to be in gradual steps bemuse of obligations
to children. Only when the youngest reached majority could I make
the final move. Withdrawing from my businesses, I began devoting
myself to a wide range of humanitarian service without pay. I ceased
generating income and lived on savings. Personal property of every
description was sold to the point of a simple lifestyle. Stocks
and securities were sold at substantial losses. Corporate and partnership
businesses were divested at large losses. These losses generated
a large "net operating loss carry forward" for tax purposes.

No income tax
would be due for remainder of my life. As a tax protestor I cannot
in good conscience make a claim for Social Security retirement benefits.
The funds I paid to Social Security over a period of more than forty
years are lost to me. It is part of the price of freedom. The needs
of my simple lifestyle could be met out of savings on which taxes
had already been paid.

Knowing that
deposits at interest are indiscriminately loaned to government and
business engaged in destruction of life, I abstained from interest-bearing
instruments. I had come to see interest "earnings" as
the wages of death.

When my youngest
child reached majority, I moved to India. I ceased filing tax returns.
Demands by mail notwithstanding, I believe that filing is not required
if the taxpayer has no income. In my circumstances, the demands
for information are an unwarranted violence upon my person, my privacy,
my right to personal security and to be left alone to pursue my
peaceful life. I will not respond. I declare myself to be a free
man, no longer a slave to the great corporate government killing
machine.

The path of
civil disobedience marked out by Gandhi requires self-sacrifice,
self-purification, and a constructive humanitarian program to run
alongside the action of non-cooperation with evil. Here in an Indian
village I rent two rooms of stone and mud, take two meals per day
of rice, lentils and chapatti, bathe with a bucket of hand-carried
cold water and use the same open field toilet as my Indian hosts.
My basic cost of living is about 2000 rupees per month (less than
$50). I maintain a practice of Buddhist meditation, practice eight
precepts to the extent capable and fast for one day each week. I
have helped build two meditation retreat centers and am working
towards a third. I tutor English, do voluntary service at meditation
centers, help build village schools, establish libraries, sponsor
education of refugee children and a tuberculosis program, and assist
in agricultural and reforestation work. I work to contribute to
the pool of quietude and peace in human consciousness, to balm the
brutality of Western imperialism, to save our ecosystem from destruction.
I organize my life around the ultimate goal of Self-Realization,
the birthright of every human being.

My decision
to undertake civil disobedience through emigration and self-imposed
exile has entailed some hardship and risk. The life of an aging
foreigner alone and homeless in India is not easy. It is painful
to be separated from family, friends, and homeland. There are problems
with safe water, food, health, sanitation, and personal security.
The cold of snowy winter in unheated rooms is penetrating. Support
arrangements are unstable and keep on dissolving. Obstacles of language
and culture are daunting. It is a two-day journey by jeep, bus,
and train to the nearest bona fide medical doctor. Hospitals of
which I have personal knowledge are filthy and septic. Disease is
prevalent, civil disturbances are rampant, and war is an ever-present
threat. Everywhere I witness poverty, misery, and suffering.

I mention the
above only to serve as verifiable background against future actions
of nonviolent civil disobedience that are beginning to present themselves
to my mind. We do not have a lot of time remaining in which to save
ourselves from self-destruction. The looming crises of water and
failure of agriculture are powerful "weapons of mass destruction,"
leave aside the threat of nuclear holocaust. Simply withdrawing
from participation in the "system" may not be of sufficient
moral vigor.

THE GROUND
OF BEING

High above
a mountain village in the Himalaya, on the way towards a place where
I hope to build a meditation hut, I stop to rest at an alpine meadow.
A breath-taking visa of the Grand Himalaya Range stretches for 200
miles. An eagle soars on afternoon thermals as towering thunderheads
rise into a Cerulean sky.

Against this
awesome grandeur, one witnesses human wretchedness and realizes
the depth of his moral responsibility. A Universal Responsibility
towards all beings. My every action affects directly or indirectly
the welfare of my fellowmen. The first morality and the first service
to others is the same: do no harm.

May I learn
from Indian mountain villagers fewness of wishes and generosity.
May I learn to simplify and to use least possible in order that
others may live. May I learn to nourish the life support system
of our shared earth. Whatever I have accumulated during my earthly
sojourn will remain here upon my demise, so let me learn to share
it. Only qualities of heart and mind will accompany me to the next
world, there to determine my destiny.

Answering to
the war drum becomes unthinkable. The pole star of peace beckons
to quiet walks in the woods, or to comforting a child, or communing
with a cow (so calm, gentle and nourishing, a cow). Communing with
a cow reminds me of my identity with all that lives.

May the generosity,
helpfulness, patience, and forbearance of Indian mountain villagers
inspire all who come here to renew their connection with others
and with Nature. May these villagers and all their visitors be successful.
May they all experience real happiness, real peace and real harmony.

In a world
gone mad with the violence of its greed, a way must be made to the
peace and compassion by which alone humanity may survive. Love alone
transfigures hatred. Ahimsa, nonviolence, is the working force of
love.

Einstein said:
“Humanity’s problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking
that created them.” Tolstoy wrote: “Love is what men live by.”

May remembrance
of untrammeled wilderness and a vibrant web of natural life not
vanish from the mind of man. May beauty and the Mystery unlock the
latent urge to inquire within Who am I? From where have I come?
Where am I going? How may I understand, penetrate the cause of birth,
old age, decay and death? How shall I live?

Gandhi believed:
“In the midst of death, life persists. In midst of untruth, truth
persists. In the midst of darkness, light persists. Hence God is
life, truth, love. There is underlying all change a living power
that is changeless, holds all together, creates, dissolves and re-creates.
This informing power or spirit is God.”

It is to this
Truth that is God, non-violence and morality that man owes his first
allegiance. This loyalty, this devotion, this consecration is higher
than that owed to any institution of man.

October
8, 2006

Jeff
Knaebel [send him
mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995.
He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having
been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

DIGG THIS

May humanity
and all the living creatures of this earth benefit from the memory
of Gandhiji and his works. May our children live long, live free.
May we build a new dawn of peace on earth, goodwill toward all.
May all beings be happy.

Mahatma Gandhi
stood for and died for truth, self-reliance and integrity. He showed
us the efficacy of integrity in human affairs to a depth seldom
displayed among men: a man fully integrated in congruency of thought,
word and deed. To think one thing, say another and do a third is
to lie, to dis-integrate. Gandhi was an integral man: he did not
lie, nor did he engage in secrecy. By contrast, today's world is
a sea of lies in which the biggest decisions which affect the lives
of billions of people, and perhaps even the future of all life on
earth, are made in secrecy behind closed doors and sealed in classified
documents. We live in a disintegrating society, one of escalating
mindless violence.

Even language
itself is being slaughtered, when, as Arundhati Roy notes (The
Algebra of Infinite Justice, 2002), it is being systematically
employed to mask intent and to create a breeding ground for
exploitation in the space between what is said and what is done.
The space of lies. It is in this space that a new kind of imperialistic
war of scorched-earth destruction is being fought. The battleground
is mind-space: the aim of conquest is human consciousness itself.

Without a moral
compass, neither individual nor society can navigate the storms
of life. Unless we can find the Pole Star of Truth, we are in big
trouble, with the very survival of civilization in jeopardy. Even
now, having created a world gone mad with the violence of its greed,
can we say we are civilized? Are we humane?

The Mahatma
is not with us except to the extent we imbibe his example of truth,
self-reliance and integrity into our individual lives. We must build
our own dawn.

At the University
of Chihuahua in northern Mexico, an international conference was
held in 1991 to debate the USA-controlled World Bank's plan to finance
a pulp paper mill project which would destroy the last remaining
old-growth forest of the Sierra Occidental. Facing an audience of
trade officials, bureaucrats, scientists and environmentalists stood
an elder of the Tarahumara tribe, in his hand a cheap pulp magazine.
Gazing calmly at the bankers and industrialists, the Tarahumara
spoke softly: "You are cutting the last of our trees to turn
them into this. The forest is the life of my people. When you have
cut our trees, we will die and you will read this."

A few miles
from the University, Tarahumara women and children live in burrows
dug into mounds of garbage at the city dump. At a remote village
in the Sierra, a Tarahumara elder had told me, "My young men
want to fight. I tell them no. We must be patient."

Politically
correct public statements of "concern" notwithstanding,
the State's actual volition was revealed to me by the request of
a peace activist conference attendee for me to fly her to a remote
village without filing a flight plan. She had just spoken at the
conference to expose the timber mafia — government nexus in which
corrupt bureaucrats seek bribes in exchange for logging permits
in protected areas. Visibly shaken, she said "My life is in
danger, I must get away quickly." I dropped her off at the
edge of a short, nasty little crosswind dirt strip on a ridge crest
near Pino Gordo.

I had come
to Chihuahua as a volunteer pilot for an awareness campaign to fly
opinion leaders for a first-hand look at clear-cut logging devastation,
aimed at generating motivation to stop the World Bank. The Gulf
War was on. The juxtaposition of these two American-financed operations
crystallized in my mind as a kind of epiphany. I determined to leave
my country forever, to remove myself entirely from its economic
activity, to cease paying the taxes that finance its war-mongering
greed.

I could not
then have foreseen how much further we would sink into barbarian
depravity, thrust by lies into the pathological insanity of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld
State Terrorism.

Here in India,
I try to implement the other component of non-violent resistance
discovered by Gandhi to be essential to remaining psychologically
whole: a program of positive constructive action in support of social
and moral uplift. Although I fall far short, Gandhi's example continues
to inspire me.

We are not
ruled by an Emperor these days, nor by a Prime Minister, Parliament
or Legislature, but by an inhuman, dehumanizing System-Structure
which owns, controls, markets and operates all of the above as a
machine. And this machine is out of control, run amok. It is a cancer
of exploitation-greed which is destroying — quite rapidly — the
biological web of life on earth and the living, organic social body
of humanity. Democracy, Self-Rule, is a sham in world ruled within
the institutional framework which has arisen to protect the interests
of criminally corrupt corporations, the real rulers of the world
(although it may be argued that the ultimate rulers are the Central
Bankers who print, own and debase through inflation the money which
fuels the engine of commerce).

This Government
System-Structure is the originator of war and ecological destruction.
It is a death-machine which could well annihilate humanity if not
soon dismantled and sent to the scrap yard to be re-cycled in accord
with the "Fourth Revolution" of TN Khoshoo in Mahatma
Gandhi, An Apostle of Applied Human Ecology (Tata Energy
Research Institute).

"In
all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments,
the government alone, independent of the interests of the people,
to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."
(Leo Tolstoy).

"TO
END TERRORISM, END STATE TERRORISM"

Johan Galtung,
JUST Commentary, Vol. 2, No. 9, 2002

The title above
says it all. Beneath the surface are the many documented case histories
of States creating terrorists (e.g., the Reagan Administration's
creation of Jihadism and the US training of bin Laden) and supporting
their activities. States need opponents and war to justify their
existence as pawns of the military-industrial complex and international
bankers who control the States. These entities need wars in order
to have clients (often on both sides) to whom to loan large sums.
To find the origin of a particular war, follow the money. States
need bogeymen like bin Laden and will either find them or create
them.

Is not desecration
of the planetary ecosystem through Corporate Warfare State economic
weapons of mass destruction in fact tantamount to slow-motion terrorism?
Where else are we going to live? Is not the angst of watching helplessly
one's lands, waters, livelihood, culture be destroyed by stealth
invasion of anonymous corporate financial forces the moral equivalent
of genocide? Witness the current Indian State's exercise of eminent
domain to transfer hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland to
multi-national corporations for industrial parks, displacing very
large numbers of families from their ancestral lands, leaving them
destitute and resulting in many deaths, especially of children.
"Investigations" notwithstanding, huge bribes will never
be disclosed.

Might Gandhi
suggest we now ask ourselves: would I trespass my neighbor's land,
steal his crop, poison his well, cut his trees, rape his daughter?
States and Corporations sponsored by them do it on a daily basis,
financed by taxes on our labor. If I willingly support a political
regime which does these things in order that I might have a higher
standard of living and return them to office, do I not then have
a derivative responsibility for their acts of destruction, terror
and genocide? What is my responsibility if I merely acquiesce without
protest? What is my responsibility to life itself? Is there some
point at which, as a non-protesting tax-payer, I become an accomplice
to murder, with blood on my hands?

The sitting
President of a so-called "Democracy" is the same man who
directs the extra-terrestrial ambitions of US security policy,
pursuant to which laser and "kinetic kill" weapons systems
are deployed in battle stations in space whereby "populations
can be eliminated via remote control" (Admiral Eugene Carroll,
USN, in JUST Commentary, Vol. 2, No. 6). Can there be any doubt
that these deadly capabilities, in these hands, place into jeopardy
our very survival? Did we the people consciously choose this destiny?

One of Gandhi's
clearest teachings is that on Means-As-End. It is the same as Buddha's
teaching on the Law of Cause and Effect. The end of any action is
defined, predicted and included in the means. Means is seed, end
is tree. They are inseparably linked. A good end cannot arise from
immoral means. A neem seed cannot beget a mango tree. It is Law
of Nature. My every action affects directly or indirectly the welfare
of my fellowmen. The first moral law is Do No Harm. Because non-violence
is my most fundamental moral responsibility, it is also my most
fundamental human right. This means that I cannot be required to
support or approve of the State in breaching the precept of Ahimsa
(non-violence).

Gandhi said
that one must be motivated by a great loyalty to humanity — the
whole of it — which supersedes all other loyalties, racial or national.
His concept of equality was based on the interconnection of all
life; his rejection of tyranny and force was based on respect for
divinity of all creation. His rejection of institutions such as
Parliaments, armies and law courts arose out of his conviction that
love is superior to force.

The System-Structure
which holds us in thrall is inhuman and it dehumanizes. Gandhi writes,
"The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless
machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes
its very existence." The State is organized violence, force,
coercion. Power is the central motive of politics. Because of their
financial and commercial power and their control of the media, corporations
are the de-facto constituents of "representative" democracy,
not individual voters. Our world is ruled, therefore, by corporations
which exercise their sovereignty through the "Iron Triangle"
of business-politics-military. The State is soulless and the corporations
which control the State are soulless: nowhere is there personal
accountability. We are controlled by a machine within a machine,
neither of which has a heart. We have abdicated our moral sovereignty
to the State, and thereby lost control of our destiny.

Beginning with
Gandhi's attribute of the State as "soulless machine,"
let us further examine the inhuman character of the System-Structure
which rules our lives, the primary and most powerful constituent
of which is the modern multi-national corporation.

A corporation
begins life as a virtual entity on paper, a concept wrapped in words.
It is a legal abstraction, its "body" is a judicial construct.
It is a designed process, a machine intended for a single purpose:
to generate maximum revenue at least cost. It is not a living being.
It cannot feel pain, sorrow, remorse, shame or compassion. Most
of all, it cannot love. When it hurts people or destroys ecology,
it feels nothing. It is incapable of feeling. Yet, under law, it
is deemed a natural person with all the legal and political rights
of a person except for actual voting. This is why corporations are
so dangerous: they act in human affairs without feeling and with
wholly selfish motives, driven by greed only. And they have become
very powerful, often being more powerful than the host government
of which they are a parasite. And the fact of their immortality
changes everything on the scale of human values.

For corporations,
nature, ecology, animals, people, even their own employees are no
more than ciphers on a balance sheet, mere disposable objects to
be used and discarded. Witness the infamous management dictum, "Change
the numbers or change the faces." They are absolutely ruthless
in their exploitation. Look at Union Carbide's behavior in the Bhopal
disaster; Dow Chemical's CFC's depleting the ozone layer which protects
entire humanity; Halliburton and Blackwater in Iraq.

There are two
fatal design errors of the present institutional system which place
our survival at risk: (a) the basic design parameter is to foster
greed and endlessly increasing unnecessary consumption which gives
rise to predatory competition, envy and delusion. This sets up the
spiral of escalating violence, hatred and ecological destruction.
Since greed is known to be as old as life itself, a more sensible
design would be based upon nurturing and supporting contentment,
compassion and love. (b) The system protects perpetrators of violence
from the consequences of their actions through the legal constructs
of limited liability and sovereign immunity. It establishes as the
major actor in human affairs a soulless corporate entity endowed
with the economic and political rights (except actual voting) of
a person, but without corresponding moral reciprocity, social responsibility
and full liability. These are the entities which control politics
and governments and brainwash the populace and sponsor war. Representative
government is an illusion. Corporations rule the world.

To be ruled
by corporations is to be ruled by inhuman machines in the absence
of love. Pursuant to the Law of Cause and Effect and Gandhi's equation
of Means-End, how can we expect to escape the effects of what we
ourselves have caused? If the goal (end) is satiation of greed and
the means is exploitation facilitated by lies and backed by unlimited
State power, how can we expect a result other than violence and
destruction? The evidence of current experience and history indicates
that the worst among us are attracted to the top echelons of State:
those addicted to power and domination.

The disconnect
between humanity and its institutions is because the institutions
are no longer controlled by human beings subject to their conscience.
These institutions are controlled by corporations which are non-human
entities genetically incapable of acting with conscience. And the
consciences of their mentally conditioned "robot-human"
operators are often subsumed by personal ambition or need to survive.
The employee's success depends upon his contribution to profitability
of an abstract entity, typically described by a balance sheet. He
has become a member of a corporate "tribe," and he draws
his identity, esteem and security from approval of superiors and
peers. To succeed within the tribe, which he must do in order to
preserve his livelihood, he feels compelled to make his "tribe"
successful at any cost. Other people – outsiders – don't matter
except to extent they are his market. It is subtle parasitic predation:
this other person is not my brother, he is my meat for today. We
are cannibalizing each other and destroying the earth in the process.

If the company
man's conscience is at all bothered, he may go into psychological
denial because of his need to succeed within the corporate culture.
This denial and dissociation extends beyond his inner self, to his
relationships with others and the earth. Result is a subtle but
profound alienation which desensitizes the mind to violence. According
to Khoshoo, for an Indian, this dynamic will result in further alienation
from his cultural inheritance: "Gandhi was no doubt a profound
environmentalist, like Mahatma Buddha and Asoka the Great. The false
idea that human beings hold supremacy over Nature is alien to Indian
culture. Indians have been utilizers, not exploiters of natural
resources. Had Indians in the past exploited anything like today,
how could its great civilization have survived these 10,000 years?"

Khoshoo goes
on to point out earlier agriculture-based urban civilizations that
died because of their disregard for Nature: the Mediterranean, Lower
Mesopotamian, Nile, Indus, Huang Ho and Mayan all peaked and crashed
within the past 6,000-8,000 years. "Forests precede civilizations,
deserts follow them." It is pure arrogance to think we are
exempt from this fate, even if we do not first blow ourselves up.
Ecological security is the foundation of economic security — just
as for the individual, "health is wealth." Gandhi's message
is about respect for life.

If
the commons of humanity, our ecosystem of land-water-air-forests-flora
and fauna, were managed by actual flesh and blood human beings who
were personally accountable and would have to look us in the eye
while proclaiming stewardship, our chances would be good, despite
many problems. However, so long as the commons remains under control
of the soulless, heartless, conscienceless State-Corporate combine
whose design code is exploitation for money and power, we are in
jeopardy. The sheer wanton waste of the destruction is daunting.
Nothing is sacred before the death-bound juggernaut that destroys
ecology, poisons air and water, generates mass extinctions, fosters
war and genocide in order to fulfill artificial needs created by
media hype so that a few may entertain themselves with expensive
toys in idle and useless pastimes, while the many are oppressed
and exploited by the corporations and central bankers who own and
control the system and the governments that dance to its tune. It
is a dirge of human devolution, a dancing with death, a trashing
of all that is goodness, beauty and truth.

To
withdraw support from all-pervasive violence requires a certain
love combined with Will. It demands one turn his back on all that
is known and familiar, walk away from the battlefield (perhaps alone),
and try to create a new life grounded in love and compassion. For
the generation whose mind has been brutalized and desensitized by
exposure since earliest childhood to the gratuitous violence of
TV-internet-video games-MTV and cinema, it is difficult to conceive
of withdrawal from a system which provides one's livelihood and
also seems "normal." There is no mental ground on which
can stand moral outrage. The ground has been washed away by mindless
media, TV and deliberate State propaganda delivered through the
public education system. The moral compass needle lies broken and
useless. How can there be reverence for life when all one knows
is an abstraction of it, a video image on a cathode ray tube?

Anyone
who seriously considers Gandhi is eventually forced to confront
himself and ask if he is part of the problem or part of the solution.
Then comes the question, what next? Every person has both direct
and derivative responsibilities for sustaining a peaceful society.
The substantial abdication of these responsibilities is, I believe,
a major contributing factor to our present situation. In the end,
we collectively get the society we have earned: this is the Law
of Cause and Effect.

Mind matters
most. Each of us must begin with the only mind we can change: our
own. It is possible to learn from direct experience that the natural
mind of man in a purified state is one of love and compassion. One
way this experience can be gained is through insight meditation
practices. Mental purification through self-observation leads to
inner peace. A compassionate mind can also be cultivated by intensive
selfless service. A compassionate mind, being fearless, can act
with detachment for the benefit of all. It can work in a peaceful
manner to prevent exploitation, having learned to rotate anger into
love. Only peaceful individuals can create a peaceful world.

Gandhi proved
that all domination-exploitation is based upon some level of cooperation
of the exploited. The power of any tyrant depends entirely on people
willing to obey. Power resides in the obedience, not the imprisonment
or the guns (Shepard, 1990). Gandhi said, "I believe that no
government can exist for a single moment without some level of cooperation
of the people." He successfully employed outright civil disobedience,
non-cooperation and tax refusal. He proved that ultimate responsibility
rests with we the people. By virtue of his example, we have no choice
but to face this reality of human culture. He is echoed by the recent
Prime Minister of India, Mr. Atal Vajpayee, saying in August 2006,
"Politics can influence society, but cannot run it …. Politics
cut off from society cannot hold for long." (Times of India).

I think the
modern System-Structure has evolved to some essential differences
that render some of Gandhi's methods inapplicable. We are controlled
and manipulated by an inhuman machine that in turn dehumanizes us.
It violates, brutalizes and desensitizes the human mind for the
calculated profit of a few who are willing to murder. Those who
hold sway over the mass mind manipulate our own mental defilements
of greed, hatred and delusion for satisfaction of their greed, hatred
and delusion. It is all a game played by manipulating the mass mind.
Violence is everywhere because it is in the mind. The mental energy
field of human consciousness is polluted. It is like the situation
of a cancer that has metastasized throughout the entire social body.

Gandhi's non-violent
resistance was against overt physical occupation and oppression
by foreigners. The struggle of Martin Luther King, Jr. in America
was against oppression from a clearly identifiable source. By contrast,
today we face a hydra-headed monster of pervasive moral oppression
by defilements that have taken up occupation of the mass mind. There
is no singular identifiable oppressor. We have participated in the
creation of a System-Structure for which we support in office those
who manipulate and oppress us. We are captives of our own ignorance,
laziness and apathy. We permit our minds to be manipulated by media
and hype and spin and everywhere lies. We must change our mind by
resisting the urge of our own mental defilements which pull us to
participate in the greed-artificial need-destruction cycle.

Those in power – acting through and behind the shield of sovereign immunity and
corporate limited liability – will never voluntarily relinquish
their dominion. And we cannot employ violence against anybody. The
answer may be to withdraw participation and work to establish a
parallel system based upon the highest human values, leaving the
existing system to decay into irrelevance. If we can find a way
to starve it of finance, it will collapse.

The best living
cultural benchmarks before us are in remnants of agrarian cultures
that have lived in relative isolation from modernization, such as
Ladakh and Bhutan, where people actually know of healthy contentment
and peaceful happiness even though living at material standards
of comfort far below the so-called First World. We can study these
societies for precepts of holistic community morality (although
we must move quickly now, for they are rapidly being extinguished).
See, e.g., Ancient
Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge, as well as all of the works
of the International Society for Ecology and Culture and of the
Other India Press, Goa. We can also study what may be the longest-lived
functioning democratic society, the society of monks in the Buddhist
Sangha. Leaders can also learn much from research into the compassion-based
governance of Emperor Asoka the Great.

We must work
simultaneously at the levels of mind and form. Meditation techniques
which generate individual inner peace are very helpful. There can
be no world peace without peaceful individuals. One example is Inculcation
of Values through Self-Observation courses, taught by Prof.
PL Dhar, a Head of Department at Indian Institute of Technology,
Delhi.

At the level
of System-Structure, the work of Ramaswamy Elango needs to be widely
known. He has pioneered village-centered development on a large
scale in South India. At a time when it is in vogue to belittle
Gandhi, the great man is adored by Elango as the one who truly understood
India. Elango came to understand early in life that there can be
no individual happiness if there is misery all around. Elango is
optimistic about village republics in India. He says "There
is an emerging force not visible to the media and most people. It
is at work changing India from below. This force cannot be stemmed."

JC Kumarappa
strongly influenced Gandhi with his assertion that man is not a
wealth-producing animal, but a social being with spiritual, moral
and political instincts. He theorized that an economy of permanence
could be wrought with mutual cooperation. Elango is successfully
implementing the ideas of Kumarappa through development of village
republics.

Ancient wisdom
of India postulates the Universe as a great mental force-field in
which the most subtle, yet most powerful vibrations cannot be detected
by man. It appears to me that findings of modern physics do not
refute this. Nothing is faster, more subtle, more immeasurable than
thought. Yet, it is of immense potency. The fate of we denizens
of this force-field depends upon the nature, the moral quality of
thought vibrations emitted into the flux of consciousness.

With TV, internet,
video games and cinema as moral preceptor and mind conditioner of
childhood, there is reason for concern that we might be finished
as a species, gone to history only. Our minds are being brutalized,
desensitized, conditioned by violence, debauchery, public and private
lies everywhere, betrayals, adultery glorified, commercial predation
glorified, all manner of egoism glorified. A great cancer is growing
in the body politic and the vector of its malignant cells is the
corporate construct of personal non-accountability for one's decisions.

All beings
love life and fear death. All of us suffer pain, disappointment,
loneliness, fear, hope for dreams unfulfilled. Many suffer from
physical privation, hunger, thirst, misery of grinding poverty in
midst of filth. All of us have a tendency to do the wrong thing
as well as to love. So we must live with compassion, we must love
one another. We are all in the same boat. Again Gandhi: "The
good of the individual is contained in the good of all." Only
through duty and responsibility is there real unity. Absent these,
we are totally alone.

I submit that
much of our alienation stems from abdication to the State of our
personal responsibility and moral sovereignty. In my view, the State
as a system-structure is a vehicle of collective madness. As a species,
we seem to be facing a terminal mental illness, and the State as
vector bears the same relationship to our disease as rats to the
bubonic plague. The mere existence of the State, conceived in and
sustained by violence, is admission of the failure of the human
spirit: that we cannot live in peace and harmony, that greed and
violence dominate our consciousness. How much of what we know of
other cultures is derived from TV reports of the latest State bombing
of their women and children?

If actions
of the State were to be examined by the parameters of clinical psychology
applied to an individual human being, the diagnosis would be chronic
paranoid delusions, a pathological tendency to commit murder and
acts of extreme violence and cruelty, an obsessive acting out of
ruthless domination: criminally insane.

I feel we
are a species that has lost its way. Witness Khalil Gibron in Sand
and Foam:

"Trees
are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.
We
fell them down and turn them into paper
that
we may record our emptiness."

Financing the
drum beat of war by paying taxes levied upon the sweat of my brow
has become intolerable for me. The pole star of peace beckons to
quiet walks in the woods, or to comforting a child, or communing
with a cow (so calm, gentle and nourishing, a cow). Communing with
a cow reminds me of my identity with all that lives.

Unable to oppose
its imperialistic destruction in any meaningful way, I left my country.
It is my way of meeting my derivative responsibility as a member
of the total human community. My choice was to participate as an
automaton in the organized, systematic destruction of life or to
withdraw from direct participation in the corporate-controlled society.
I live on savings accrued through sale of my enterprises. I am a
temporary guest in a foreign land, paying no tax to any jurisdiction,
except whatever portion of the price of daily rations may include
some unknown sales tax.

My human-ness
knows not of national borders or "national interests."
My human-ness loves the life which conceived it. I would rob this
life from no other being. We are interconnected and interdependent,
all of us in the same boat trying to cross the ocean of samsara
(incarnate existence). As Kurt Vonnegut says in A
Man Without A Country, "We are here to help each other
get through this thing, whatever it is."

Freedom and
moral sovereignty are my birthright. No one has the right to deprive
me of them. Just as my birth into a family of slaves would not bind
me forever to slavery, so my birth under a particular State's political
system cannot bind my conscience to its depraved values. I have
entered no contract with a State pursuant to which I waived my rights,
assigned my conscience. No institution created by a preceding generation
has valid authority to control my life, to conscript me to murder.
Nor can the wastrel foolishness of a preceding generation obligate
me to its debt. I have contracted no debt save for that which bears
my signature.

I stand free
and whole now only — how can the dead gone before me claim an enforceable
contract over my life energy, of which they could not imagine or
foresee, let alone bind by contract? I am bound by no constitution,
nor by any tomes of so-called "law" created by forbears
or so-called "representatives" unknown to me and to whom
always I will remain unknown. Except I voluntarily agree or submit
to forceful coercion, someone else's rules cannot bind me. How can
there be a valid contract where one party is anonymous, unsigned,
protected by sovereign immunity, and thus unaccountable, non-responsible,
and non-liable for consequences or specific performance? And yet,
is it not by just such nonsense that the State would bind us to
its rules? There is no accountable individual at risk of personal
liability for actions of the State. Without mutual accountability,
how can there be a valid contract?

I conceive
as a great error of humanity its attempt to institutionalize life.
This urge seems to originate in fear. It is a grasping for security
that robs us of liberty, and finally of authentic living. How can
we grasp life, any more than we can grasp the wind? Better to be
born free, live free, arrayed like lilies in the field, than to
cower behind desks piled high with musty books of the laws of institutionalized
serfdom.

Many are now
enunciating a stark choice for humanity: evolve or die. We must
exorcise our arrogant ideologies, belief systems and mythologies.
We are pressed, hemmed in on all sides by minions of State. The
horizon is darkened with clouds of lust for power, promulgated by
America as "full spectrum dominance" to be established
by tactics of "shock and awe." How to re-orient our minds?
Each must find his own way, yet we must all help one another. This
solitary work cannot be done alone. I offer brief recollections
of experiences that might resonate with some, especially if the
reader may be of the generation that remembers the movie Sound
of Music, with lines of the song "I go to the hills
when my heart is lonely."

The following
diary quotes are words evoked by experiences in the Grand Himalaya
of India. "Against this awesome grandeur, one witnesses human
wretchedness and realizes the depth of his moral responsibility
— a universal responsibility toward all beings. May I learn from
these mountain villagers fewness of wishes, and generosity. May
I learn to simplify and to use least possible in order that others
may live. Only qualities of heart and mind will accompany me to
the next world, there to determine my destiny. May remembrance of
untrammeled wilderness and a vibrant web of natural life not vanish
from the mind of man. May beauty and the Mystery spark the latent
urge to inquire within "Who am I? From whence have I come?
Where am I going? How may I understand, penetrate the cause of birth,
old age, decay and death? How shall I live?"

September
9, 2006

Jeff
Knaebel [send him
mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995.
He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having
been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

We stand on
the shoulders of Gandhi. I submit that he would ask, that by standing
on his shoulders, we reach higher, that we not pause too long in
front of his statues, but that we must work, work, work.

I believe that
Gandhi was totally correct when he said "We must be the change
we wish to see." The point where change must occur is at the
individual, personal level, multiplied by about 6 billion. As the
cartoon character Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and they
is us."

Once when Gandhi's
great friend, the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, was visiting
a Bedouin camp in Iraq, the chief told Tagore, "Our prophet
has said that a true Muslim is he who, by his words and deeds not
the least of his brother-men may ever come to any harm." Tagore
then noted in his diary, "I was startled into recognizing in
his words the voice of essential humanity."

As I speak,
the country of my birth is systematically, in cold-blooded calculation,
destroying the Iraq of which Tagore spoke. When the killing will
stop, no one knows. I stand before you with a deep sense of shame.
My country's actions are a stain upon humanity.

Tagore also
wrote "So long as there is any suffering and insult in humanity,
no individual man can ever win his escape." As one of the invited
speakers has written, in our globalized and inter-connected world,
there can be no peace in India so long as there is war in Iraq.
Because of war inflation of oil prices, basic foods will cost more,
the poor of India will eat less, children will become more malnourished,
and more trees will burn in the cooking fires of villagers who cannot
afford kerosene.

Arundhati Roy,
the Indian winner of the Booker Prize for literature, wrote in The
Algebra of Infinite Justice "… a world laid waste by
America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal,
its vulgar policy of u2018full spectrum dominance', its chilling disregard
for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its
support for despotic dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic
agenda that has munched though poor countries like a cloud of locusts…The
International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the
richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and
sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest
stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction. They have fought the most
wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing,
and human rights violations in modern history. They have worshipped,
almost deified the cult of violence and war…"

I left my country
almost 15 years ago in order to start a new life in Sacred India,
so as to be no longer an accomplice to this systematic murder by
my payment of income taxes into this ruthless war machine. One of
the waypoints that crystallized my decision was a visit to the Museum
at Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb.
The Temple of Death at the Mother Mandir of the Science of Total
Annihilation. How could I ever again be sweat at law in an economy
whose best and brightest produce this abominable machinery of mass
murder, with my tax support? I joined the river of the dispossessed,
the disenfranchised. How can we call this a "civilization"
— this mindless Corporate State War Machine – in the service
of which so many children go to bed hungry, so many shattered lives
are lived in silent, burning fury?

But a man cannot
escape his humanity…. We are all in the same boat together, like
it or not. I hope I can point out some things to you citizens of
India by way of a warning of dangers ahead. I am speaking from my
American experience; yet I ask you to open your minds to the dangers
to India's people that come from adopting the Western profligate
consumerist lifestyle.

India has a
heavy responsibility to the whole of humanity because of her status
as the cradle of human spiritual wisdom. What other land has produced
a Krishna, a Mahavir, a Buddha, and Gandhi? There is even a significant
body of evidence that Jesus studied here during the eighteen-year
gap of His unknown whereabouts. On the destiny of India hangs the
fate of mankind.

Who defines
the soul of India? When future generations contemplate the footprint
of India on the path of Man, what shall they see: a print heavy
with death wrought by a consumerism and arms industry matching the
American Nuclear Bully? Or a gentle sign, like that of a butterfly
on the morning dew, leaving a sweet fragrance of Sanathana Dharma
(Eternal Wisdom)? Shall humanity recollect India's responsibility
as the keeper of the flame of Eternal Wisdom?

WE ARE THROWING
AWAY OUR HUMANITY FOR A PLASTIC TOY

The so-called
leader of the free world is a perpetrator of mass murder who should,
under terms of the Geneva Convention, be booked and brought to trial
for crimes against humanity. He should, under US law, also be tried
for fraud because of the lies he used to get the US Congress to
approve his war for oil and corporate military profiteering. Sensible
and concerned Americans are calling for his impeachment.

Gandhi wrote,
"The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless
machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes
its very existence." There was a recent movie "Maine Gandhi
Ko Nahin Mara," with theme "We have murdered Gandhi"
(by disregarding his message of nonviolence). I left the American
Corporate Warfare State Machine in order not to be among those who
murdered Gandhi.

In the past
100 years, Nation-States have murdered about 200 million people,
many of them their own citizens within their own borders. Ordinary
people, your friends and neighbors, don't spontaneously rush to
make war on others. Governments must make the most strenuous efforts
to mobilize populations for war. Isn't it about time we questioned
this way of living together on this small planet? Why is it that
we submit to this rampant destruction all around, in fact even paying
homage to those who would enslave us and destroy all living beings
for their own wealth and power?

How do we lose
touch with the core of love deep within each of us? Could it be
through conditioning since childhood that the State is God, the
final source of security and survival?

How is it that
we do not call the State by its true name of organized violence
and perpetrator of mass murder? Is it because we live in a sea of
lies, deceit, secrecy and hidden agendas? Such that we are expected
to believe heads of State when they tell us that war is peace and
murder is liberation? Or is it that we have become mentally conditioned
to violence by the TV? Language is employed to keep thought at bay.

On the role
of State-Controlled Education in the maintenance of Empire, I turn
briefly to Dr. Claude Alvares, PhD, President, Organic Farmers Association
of India and educationist in Multiversity: "What kind of u2018education'
would allow the brutalization of innocent people in Iraq? Which
system of learning would justify the open theft of resources from
a nation kept forcibly impoverished for a dozen years? Can one ever
applaud a high-tech war against a nation of undernourished people,
mainly children? The rulers of these highly u2018educated' and so-called
advanced societies of the USA and UK have violated every law known
to civilized society. They lied, and fabricated documents. By their
unilateral use of brute force, the invaders created overnight a
country bereft of civic life and education (and a planet emptied
of international law as well). The violent American conquest of
Iraq symbolizes the failure of education in USA…. These ideals failed
in the US where even school children take up guns in senseless bouts
of violence. So what can be expected of their political leaders?
We may not be able to stop the American war machine in its tracks,
because there is today simply no institution large enough to hold
the clinically insane, thoroughly schooled individuals who control
and direct it. …. We must never surrender our children to a system
that can only benefit and strengthen this manic cabal of anti-civilization,
anti-culture terrorists and thieves …" (Multiversity Newsletter,
2003).

From the Nobel
Lecture of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970) I quote, " Violence
does not live alone and it is not capable of living alone: it is
necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Violence finds its only refuge
in falsehood and falsehood its only support in violence. Any man
who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose
falsehood as his principle. At its birth violence acts openly and
even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established
than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot
continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing
them in sweet talk. It does not always openly throttle the throat;
more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance
to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood."

Written 35
years ago, is this by Solzhenitsyn not a perfect caricature of the
script being followed by the so-called leaders of the free world
today?

The State makes
it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time in
reasonable comfort at even a modest level of civic amenities.

HOW CAN
A HUMAN SOCIETY SURVIVE WHEN THERE IS NO MORAL GROUND?

We have abdicated
our moral sovereignty and outsourced our personal responsibility
to corporations and to the State. These are both non-human entities
without heart, soul or conscience. They are machines, abstract legal
constructs. They cannot feel pain, cannot love, experience empathy,
touch the moist grass of this earth with their bare feet, hear a
birdsong, or scratch a puppy's ear. Yet, by operation of sovereign
immunity and the corporate veil, their anonymous members can make
secret decisions that destroy thousands, millions of lives, and
they remain personally unaccountable.

The State has
no ears for Nature, it hears not the cries of earth and her creatures;
it cannot respond to Nature. It would be wise for us not to forget,
in our pride, that man IS nature. The State responds only to the
self-interest of its power, and to money. We expect individuals
to lead a life of reasonable morality. The State has no morality.

We must remember
that finally this tyranny is grounded on popular acceptance. If
government is "of the people, by the people and for the people,"
when the problems become ugly and dangerous, we had best look to
ourselves.

In Gandhi's
philosophy, the State must itself be morally illegitimate, because
it is based upon a monopoly of force and it operates through coercion
only. There is a word that describes our condition. That word is
Slavery.

Gandhi: "Civil
disobedience becomes a sacred duty when State becomes lawless and
corrupt." As so many writers have emphasized, Gandhi's greatest
teaching vehicle was "My life is my message." His first
loyalty was always to life, to humanity, a loyalty which he said
superseded any other loyalty to nation, race, class, caste. Love
is the highest law of life.

Now I refer
to news reports and photos of joint India-US Army exercises at Ranikhet,
Uttaranchal. I have visited the nearby Anasakti Ashram at Kausani,
Uttaranchal, where Gandhi penned some of his most famous lines,
and thought I was on holy ground. Look now at the foreign army on
your sacred soil, where the waters feed the Holy Ganges. Look now
at a foreign military desecrating your land by teaching your Indian
army in counter-insurgency, which means bluntly, teaching Indians
how to kill each other more efficiently.

More and more
the news is reporting mega weapons deals between India and USA:
big purchases of aircraft and military hardware along with nuclear
weapons cooperation. How many generations must live in the fear
spawned by the insanity of the atom bomb and Hiroshima before we
wake up to what the Corporate Warfare State is doing to us, to all
living beings?

My country
did produce one man who made a contribution to India. His name was
Henry David Thoreau and his writings on Civil Disobedience helped
inspire Gandhi's program to liberate India. Regarding his own imprisonment
in South Africa, Gandhi wrote, "Placed in a similar position
for refusing to pay his tax, the American citizen Thoreau expressed
similar thoughts in 1849." Thoreau was very much anti-war.

Thoreau wrote,
"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree,
resign his conscience to the legislator? Why then has every man
a conscience? I think that we should be men first, and subjects
afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate respect for the law,
so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right
to assume is to do at any time what I think right."

Gandhi wrote,
"What difference does it make to the dead … whether the mad
destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the
holy name of liberty or democracy?"

All of us on
this earth are living under the rule of some Nation State or the
other. I believe the Nation State is a bad plan for humanity, based
upon flawed concepts which will lead to our ultimate destruction.
The most fundamental flaw is moral illegitimacy because of its basis
in force and coercion. The State is incapable of appropriate social
response; in fact, it cannot even know what appropriate response
is. It is a great error to believe that in a world system of all-powerful
technology combined with the stress of over-population, we can safely
allow the monstrous power of the State to be deployed by the egos
of a few men at the center.

I quote a
modern Gandhian activist and writer named T.S. Ananthu, a man educated
in both India and USA (MSc. Stanford): "Here is where Gandhi's
insights are really useful to us. While the American and Soviet
models SEEMED to be at odds with each other, they shared something
very basic in common: a materialistic notion of life. It has been
called, mistakenly, a u2018scientific' view of the world, notwithstanding
the fact that both Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics reach
a much different conclusion. But in the name of science, both capitalism
and communism shared a definition of human progress and success
that is exclusively based on the material: income levels in the
case of individuals and corporations; GNP in the case of societies.
It is this vision that is at the root of all modern development
and progress, and also forms the driving force behind the globalization
phenomena we are currently witnessing.

"Gandhi
had the foresight to predict a century ago that if our worldview
is totally materialistic, we will end up with the same kind of seemingly
democratic but actually totalitarian structures that are crushing
American agriculture, no matter what our dedication to democracy
and free enterprise may be. To Gandhi, a civilization based on materialism
was no civilization at all, for the greed it forces us to cultivate
prevents us from becoming civilized in the deepest sense of the
term.

"The following
five trends are INEVITABLE results of any development effort based
purely on materialistic considerations, whether the political model
is communism or capitalism:

1. Unchecked
urbanization, mushrooming metropolises and a disappearing farming
community.

2. Massive
heavy industrialization, especially of the capital-intensive variety.

3. Total
centralization of power and decision-making, with the ordinary citizen,
whether farmer, worker or voter, a helpless spectator to the
horrors he is witnessing.

4. Complete
monetization, not only of all goods and services, but even of the
earth's ecosystems and basic human values.

5. Rampant
militarization, both at government and non-government levels including
terrorism.

The United
States today represents the above trends in action. Should we really
be emulating them?"

Back to Gandhi:
"Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes
lawless and corrupt."

From the Nobel
Prize Lecture of Harold Pinter, December 2005, I quote: "The
invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant State terrorism,
demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international
law… We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable
acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi
people and we call it u2018bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle
East.' What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have
any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely
employed these days — conscience? A conscience to do not only with
our own acts, but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts
of others. Is all this dead?"

I commend Pinter's
entire lecture to your earnest attention, and Solzhenitsyn as well.

Standing before
you as an American runaway slave, I say watch carefully the path
you tread. Do not march to the American drum, blindly down the trail
of tears into the Valley of Death, surrounded on all sides by agents
and slave masters of the Corporate Warfare State, armed with nuclear
weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready on as little as eight minute's
notice to scorch the earth on the command of one man, and that
too a man who claims that

God spoke
to him personally and told him to invade Iraq. Simply by virtue
of my presence here as a human being, I have a derivative responsibility
for these abominable actions.

That one man,
said by some to be psychotic – holds at his command the power
to unleash the incomprehensibly destructive products of American
nuclear weapons R & D – is to put every child on this earth
under his malevolent influence. As Oppenheimer said at the first
atomic test explosion, "I am become death." Americans
are showing the world, by where they put their money, that they
value the science of death more than the art of living. Hiroshima
changed the very meaning of life itself. What, now, does it mean
to be human?

They
once taxed my bread labor
and used
it to murder children in the womb
yet unborn,
a threat to oil
and bomb
your weddings, and strew the body parts
coolly
they press the button; death rains from the sky
mission
accomplished, without breaking a sweat
American
kids watch cannibals on DVD
and drive
their parent's SUV
your
children harvest death-by-cluster-bomb in broken fields
there
can be no greater act of betrayal than sending young people to death
in war
on the
basis of fraud.

The freest
man I know is an Indian villager who has no ID card, no tax ID number,
no bank account, no birth registration certificate, and no Big Brother
tracking his every move. He earns his bread by labor with mind and
body given by God, and he gives thanks for every day of life. He
speaks kind words to all he meets. He is a man of peace.

Long live the
possibility of this way of life, for it is my belief that the fate
of the Indian villager is the "canary in the coal mine,"
the harbinger of mankind's future. Before the last villager will
have been displaced by some big dam, or an express highway, or an
IT Park, or cutting the last of his forest, or pumping the last
of his water, before his last tree has been cut down, mankind will
have become extinct.

Is there hope
that we may yet create a society of love and reason? I say yes,
and part of the energy behind that u2018yes' comes from messages of
eminent Indians expressing themselves about the coming visit of
the Emperor: a retired Supreme Court Justice says "…stand for
an example to all decent human beings to make visits impossible
by warmongers and imperialists masquerading as champions of democracy."
A retired Indian Civil Service officer, "GW Bush is a war criminal
and I am utterly ashamed that my country has invited him to be a
guest here… the shame of our elected government consorting with
war criminals."

I say yes,
because that hope is in the proof of Gandhi's life, that once before,
humanity rose up in response to a call to nobility of character,
a call to truth. As one of today's speakers has written earlier,
"Gandhi and Tolstoy together created a spiritual crisis for
the British. Gandhi's thought, influenced by Tolstoy's book The
Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You, his public correspondence with
Tolstoy, his personal example, and his call to make manifest in
this world the values of Christ – presented a spiritual challenge
of Christ himself to the British rule."

Again I say
yes, because what we have done once, we can do again. By love alone
can hatred be overcome. Violence originates in the mind. We can
change our mind. May love prevail.

"It
is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but
rather for him who loveth the world. The earth is but one country,
and mankind its citizens."

~
Baha'u'llah

February
2, 2006

Jeff
Knaebel [send him
mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995.
He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having
been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.

I
stand before you as a runaway slave of the American Empire, seeking
freedom in exile from the land of my birth. I stand here wrapped
in a cloak of mortal shame for the murderous acts of the culture
of the gun. Mixed with the shame is a righteous anger at having
once been duped by that government which has created the most destructive
and dangerous weaponry in all of human history, an arsenal of nuclear
bombs, that most cowardly of weapons. My inner work is to rotate
anger into nonviolent compassionate resistance expressed outwardly
as seeking peace by peaceful means.

The
true names of what we face are Slavery, Corporate Warfare State,
Murder, Wanton Waste, Corruption and Destruction. I am calling things
bluntly by their true names in order to help awaken us to the reality
of our collective moral degradation. A problem must be seen and
understood before it can be solved. The human mind has become so
brutalized by the gratuitous violence of TV, video games and cinema,
together with the actual violence of endless war that only blunt
words seem to penetrate the veil of denial. At a mass level we appear
to have lost our capacity for sensitivity and the subtle feelings
of the inner spirit.

Before
you I stand inwardly ashamed of my government, knowing that if you
were Iraqi rather than Indian, and were I still in America, my tax
dollars would be financing the murder of your women and children,
for oil and lucrative contracts for big corporations such as Halliburton,
Bechtel and Carlyle, whose shareholders profit from war and among
whom are the ruling families of America.

I
stand before you, dear citizens of India, with a simple plea: watch
carefully the path you tread. Do not march to the American drum,
blindly down the trail of tears into the Valley of Death, surrounded
on all sides by agents and slave-masters of the Corporate Warfare
State, armed with nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready on
as little as eight minutes notice to scorch the earth on the command
of one man.

If
I had not abandoned everything I had built up, leaving my country
in order to escape slavery, if I were still a hard-working American
taxpayer, I would have on my hands the blood of innocent Iraqi children,
infants murdered in cold calculation as part of the price of oil
and corporate dividends for the likes of Halliburton, Bechtel and
Carlyle. Recall former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, justifying
the economic sanctions imposed prior to the present war by stating
in effect that the lost lives of 500,000 Iraqi children is worth
the price of preserving the American consumer lifestyle.

Sadly,
because of mental conditioning, ignorance and the power of media
deception, I did not wake up in time to avoid the shame of knowing
that some of my earlier tax dollars financed the murder of women
and children in places like Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Vietnam
and Cambodia, among the many others where the American Empire has
laid waste to land and life. Thus, because of my own moral complacency
in the drive to be successful in my former country, I cannot escape
the shame nor the karma of having been a financial accomplice to
murder through my failure to resist taxation.

I
describe myself as a slave of the State, which remains true despite
self-imposed exile.

This
is because, like all Americans everywhere, caught in the Orwellian
web of Big Brother surveillance, I am not a free man. To be labeled,
watched, controlled, tracked by passports, visas, tax identification
numbers, photos, biometrics, and coming soon radio-tracking skin
implants, is to be a slave. Now under the Patriot Act, through which
the great edifice of the American Bill of Rights has been trashed,
they even check a person’s library records. In effect I need permission
from Big Brother in Washington in order to move about, to work,
to live and to express my being.

A
greater atrocity is that this is not merely workman slavery. It
is warmonger slavery because the product of my labor is coercively
removed from me by taxation and placed in the hands of a group of
politicians who have anointed themselves with the power to decide
who shall live and who shall die. No child on this earth is exempt
from nuclear destruction, and where economies are subject to direct
intervention by the State, the decision of whether a hungry child
may receive wheat, or rice, or milk, or nothing at all is in the
hands of a remote bureaucrat or politician who typically acts in
his own self-interest, either as a rent-seeking bribe-taker or in
order to gain an institutional favor.

The
forgoing introduces the first Big Question which I respectfully
place before you: who owns my body? And since it is the condition
of man to have to work for his survival, this question means by
obvious extension, who owns my labor or its product? Am I a free
man or slave of Nation-State? Do I have any say in why or who they
kill with my finance? Am I a slave or even worse, have I simply
appointed them as my hired killers?

Only
an individual can be a moral agent, never an institution or State.
In the exercise of my moral sovereignty, would I personally murder
women and children in a distant land who pose no threat to me? If
I finance this murder by my deliberate cooperation with a system
of taxation, have I or have I not surrendered my moral sovereignty?
Who am I then? Am I still a man?

The
statistics of this abdication, this outsourcing of moral sovereignty
and personal responsibility over the past century are tragically
awesome. Nation-states have murdered about 200 million people in
these hundred years, many of them their own citizens within their
own borders. Two hundred million living, breathing, loving human
beings crushed, snuffed out. The mind shuts down or disassociates:
it cannot grasp the picture.

My
working hypothesis of human nature is that there are few truly evil
"others.” All of us, whether Iraqi, Pakistani, Taliban, Indian,
Chinese, American, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew, are
suffering human beings who wish mostly to be happy. But we are subject
to mental conditioning by local wielders of power and education
so as to believe that the "other" is a threat. This is
done by the State because war is its health.

Thus,
our latent goodness notwithstanding, we are manipulated and controlled
by the Corporate Warfare State. It is an evil system of destruction
which fosters the worst aspects of our apparent duality by promoting
greed rather than subduing desire.

We
in democracies must understand that the enemy is us. We are responsible
for our own fate and that of the Earth. No government, even the
totalitarian dictatorship, can stand without some level of cooperation
from the people. Power is held by only a few. If the mass of people
refuse to cooperate, the system collapses.

The
next Big Question I submit to you is how do we lose our sense of
what is Good, Beautiful and True? How do we lose touch with the
core of love deep within each of us? Could it be through conditioning
since childhood that the State is God, the final source of security
and survival? Can we not see that the State holds us in thrall through
fear only, that fear is the obverse of greed, and that greed arises
because of ignorance: a mistaken metaphysic that we are the body
only?

How
is it that we do not call the State by its true name of organized
violence and perpetrator of mass murder? Is it because we live in
a sea of lies, deceit, manipulation, secrecy and hidden agendas,
such that even language is corrupted so far beyond recognition that
we are expected to believe heads of State who tell us brazenly that
war is peace, that murder is liberation? Or is it that we live in
a mental condition of denial, benumbed by TV and media as by an
injection of moral anesthetic?

People of conscience are called to respond. Great thinkers and spiritual
leaders, the wisest counsel available to us, are saying that this
time the very survival of humanity is in jeopardy.

My
final question today is what is the way forward, the upward path
to harmony with Nature and each other? Each one must answer this
question himself or herself. The answer will be made manifest through
the day-to-day actions of those who are now the youth.

Gandhiji
has provided us with many ideas as well as a personal example. In
terms of our relationship to power and the State, the writings of
Gene Sharp based on Gandhi provide many practical methods of regaining
our sovereignty, particularly his title The
Politics of Nonviolent Action. Also recommended is The
Power
of Nonviolence, an anthology including Howard Zinn
and others (Beacon 2002).

I
suggest re-awakening to the Sanathana Dharma (eternal wisdom) of
ancient India: human beings must gain control of the mind and reduce
their desires to the level of "simple living with high thinking."
The Western cultural value system of creating insatiable desire
in order to fan the flames of endless economic growth and wantonly
wasteful consumerism leads inexorably to destruction, conflict and
violence. This way of living does not seem sustainable for a population
advancing toward the nine billion mark.

The
happiness and welfare of humanity, and perhaps by now even the mere
survival of the human species, requires us to create a community
of love and reason. The American experience, now bordering on martial
law, is showing us that democracy is no proof against despotism
and that democracy is not a sufficient condition for peace. Peace
requires liberty. Liberty demands a self-disciplined people of strong
moral fiber adhering to the highest values of ethics and reverence
for life. The first step is to vow to do no harm.

I
suggest that peace-loving people withdraw as much as possible from
interaction with and dependence upon the State. Begin building an
independent nonviolent culture of self-reliance as taught by Gandhiji.
This is now coming to life here and there among India’s villages.
Let the State die peacefully of its own internal rot and corruption.
Let us build our own wholesome lives. The foundation of morality
is respect for all living beings. Let us free ourselves simply by
refusing to cooperate with what we know is wrong.

We
must build a community of love and reason ourselves, with our own
bare hands, working together in peace and nonviolence. The entrenched
political class will not do it for us because they would lose their
fiefdoms of power. Their self-interest is to keep in place the corrupt
system with all its emoluments and privileges. Politicians are not
known to act against their own self-interest.

Modern terrorism plays directly into the hands of the political
class as an excuse to abrogate civil liberties in order to increase
their power in the name of security. History shows that this robs
the people of both liberty and security. Widely dispersed terrorism
can only be healed by widely dispersed liberty through which local
self-governance gives people a voice in their own destiny. Maximum
decentralization creates maximum self-determination. Maximum liberty
fosters maximum security.

Nobody
likes to be controlled by another, particularly when the controller
is far away, ignorant of local conditions, concerned only with his
own power, and known to be corrupt. A free man is not bound by a
contract at birth which he neither co-authored nor signed. One generation
cannot contract the next to indentured servitude. We are meant to
be born free, our only debt being one of gratitude to our parents,
our benefactors, and Creation itself. We repay that debt by passing
to the next generation a vibrant and healthy planet supporting a
free and ethical human society.

Herewith
submitted is the idea that one potentially powerful way to begin
is to be totally, transparently honest in word and deed with all
others at all times. Shine the light of Truth as exemplified by
Gandhiji’s Satyagraha (strong adherence to truth). Honesty means
in part to call things by their true name directly, straight away.

Through
this honest reporting, we might see what we are really doing, rather
than being helplessly immobilized by the sheer horror of it all,
or simply unable to find the pole star of truth to guide us on the
sea of lies.

As
Gandhiji said, we must be the change we wish to see. In the
autumn of life, one sees clearly how fast the wick burns. We have
so little time together here on this earth. We will not pass this
way again. Let us try to recover a true and natural sweetness of
life. Let us look upon each other with eyes of good will and affection.

I would like to close with brief quotations of three leaders I have
studied. These quotes form a connecting link among fact, faith,
and wisdom as enunciated by a Hindu, a Christian monk, and a Buddhist
monk.

"The
individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine,
it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its
very existence."

~ Mahatma Gandhi

"Someday,
after mastering the wind,
waves,
tides and gravity,
we
shall harness the energies of love,
and
then,
for
the second time in the history of the world,
man
will discover fire."

~
Fr. Teilhard de Chardin

"One
thing cannot be doubted, the possibility of a quality is
within us.

It is called
pragya, wisdom. We can deny everything, except that we have the
possibility of being better. Simply reflect on that."

~ H.H. Dalai Lama

September
7, 2005

Jeff
Knaebel [send him
mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995.
He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having
been trained at Cornell Univ. and the Colorado School of Mines.
This essay is a talk given at the 75th anniversary celebration of
Gandhi’s march to Dandi.

Inspired by
Gandhiji, I left my native country and came to India to learn, and
to try to practice a life of satyagraha (adherence to truth), ahimsa
(compassionate non-violence) and sarvodaya (welfare of all). And
thus led by Gandhiji, I met the woman who was to become my wife
when she invited me to speak at a Gandhi Seminar here in Pune.

It is astounding
to me that I find myself addressing this group of eminent people;
I hope I can do justice to the occasion. Please understand that
I represent no organization and speak only for myself.

In observing
the human condition and history of the last 90 years, I feel moved
to question the future of the human race, and for this I would like
to place some considerations before you. The baseline fact is that
the various Nation-States of this small and lonely planet have murdered
around 200 million people in wars and internal conflicts during
these years. They have indirectly destroyed many millions more lives
through Corporate-State institutionalized economic exploitation
and ecological destruction.

From these
facts arise the questions: Who are we?

What do we
think we are doing?

Being proud
of our bombs, missiles and kill-at-a-distance weapons systems, might
not the death of humanity be our reward?

What, really,
does it mean to be human?

What was Gandhiji
doing at Dandi? Of course we know it was a protest against taxes
imposed by the State, which were used to finance further exploitation
and oppression of the people.

Gandhi taught
Ahimsa, compassionate non-violence. Taxation is the expropriation
of private property under threat of violence. What is this if not
theft? What is theft if not violence? Is this what Gandhi taught?

History tells
us that the American, Henry David Thoreau, had some influence on
Gandhi’s development of civil disobedience as a tactic to fight
oppression. This is what Thoreau said about taxes during the American
imperialist war against Mexico (1846–48): "If a thousand
people would not pay their taxes this year, that would not be so
violent and bloody as it would be to pay the taxes and enable the
State to commit violence and shed innocent blood."

In more modem
times, "civilization" having devolved to a state of totaI
war, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig said (1982) regarding
war protesters: "Let them march all they want, as long as they
continue to pay their taxes."

From whence
comes the finance for Nation-States to murder 200 million people
in the past 90 years? It comes from taxes mostly. Who paid the taxes?
Was it not us as citizens? So, who financed the murder and who is
responsible?

Gandhi said,
"The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless
machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes
its very existence." Who owns the individual? Who owns my body?
Do I own my body and the product of its labor, or does it belong
to the State? Who really owns your property, that is, the product
of your labor?

So long as
there are taxes obtained through threat of violence by a State which
holds monopoly on the use of force, I do not, as a matter of public
law, own my body or the product of my labor.

Is not my moral
sovereignty inalienable? Is not my will inalienable? Can I assign
my will to another person, give it away to him? It is impossible.
Then what right does the State have to the product of my labor,
which is the extension of my personality? Are not taxes then a form
of enslavement?

Nehru said
of Gandhi’s march to Dandi: "There is a fire of great resolve
in him, and love of truth and love of freedom that inspires."
LOVE OF TRUTH. LOVE OF FREEDOM. Does anyone capable of reading a
newspaper believe that any State at any time upholds TRUTH? When
the State can take your property by threat of force, where is FREEDOM?

Gandhi said
means is to end as seed is to tree. A good end is not possible through
evil means. Therefore, how can we expect a good outcome from the
use of force to take property from people? Violence always begets
violence. It is the obvious outcome of Law of Cause and Effect.

Peace is, at
minimum, the absence of violence or threat of violence against persons
and their property. The State uses threats of force against my person
and property if I don’t pay taxes. Then it uses my tax money to
murder innocent women and children in far away lands. This is the
breeding cycle of State-Corporate–sponsored escalating violence,
opposite of Gandhi’s humane non-violence, opposite of the moral
choice promulgated by all great wisdom teachings of humanity.

Power, especially
power in a centralized government, promotes violence. "War
is the health of the State." Only Liberty promotes non-violence.
Gandhi was a revolutionary for Liberty.

Now, we in
democracies are meeting the final enemy and recognizing that it
is us. It is now we who are desecrating all life through consumerism
and militarism. Now we need an Inner Revolution:

From fear to
love, from greed to generosity
From selfishness to compassion, deceit to truth
From dependence to self-reliance, war to peace
From enslavement to Liberty

To think one
thing, say another and do a third is to lie, to disintegrate the
pysche. Gandhi was integrity personified. He did not lie and he
did not engage in secrecy. Contrast that to the world leaders of
today. We live in a sea of lies. How can we navigate? Only by the
compass of Moral Courage.

Gandhi lived
and taught Truth, non-violence, integrity, self-reliance. Is it
not self-evident, based upon our common experience, that these Beatitudes
of life require Liberty?

Historical
Footnote: The Dandi Salt March of 1930 was undertaken by Gandhi
to protest the British tax on salt, which was a great hardship imposed
upon the poor. Gandhi and a hardy band of followers marched 241
miles in the heat of Indian summer to reach the sea coast at Dandi.
Gandhi addressed large crowds along the way, and each day more people
joined him. Upon reaching the sea, prayers were offered and Gandhi
harvested a lump of natural salt, thus breaking the law. Many others
followed suit and soon the jails were full and Gandhi himself was
jailed.

April
14, 2005

Jeff
Knaebel [send him
mail] is an expatriate American domiciled in India since 1995.
He formerly practiced as a registered professional engineer, having
been trained at Cornell Univ and the Colorado School of Mines. This
essay is a talk given at the 75th anniversary celebration of Gandhi’s
march to Dandi.