~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The media kept referring to this war as an effort to "liberate Iraq." And they reported this as a fact! Like, "two divisions moved closer to Baghdad today." Is it a fact that the U. S. is "liberating Iraq" and its residents? If that’s the case, it’s news to me. I live in the U.S. and I am not free. And my country is run by the same army that is now "liberating Iraq." Best wishes, my new fellow citizens of the United State of Greater America.

Freedom is a very simple concept. It means doing what you wish with what is yours. It takes years of post-graduate study under PhD’s to unlearn what freedom means. Freedom means that when you wake up in the morning, your life, liberty and property are yours to do with them what you will. Of course, that means that no one else’s life, liberty, or property is yours. That’s freedom. It’s real simple. It’s also a state of being I have never experienced. And I have no reason to believe that any Iraqi under American rule will ever experience it either.

Let me give the post-graduately brain-washed an example. I recently sent New York State $1,000 to satisfy one of the fifty or so taxes I have to pay every year to avoid being dragged out of my home and thrown into a dungeon. At the same time, I was asked to contribute to a very local charitable cause which I will not identify lest anyone’s privacy be violated. I contributed $50. I wanted to give more, but alas, I had just been the victim of a robbery by the state (technically, an extortion, for you lawyers). Freedom is being able to do what you will with your own. I am not free and none of my fellow-citizens is free either. For one thing, we are compelled to pay for America’s global and growing military empire even though it makes us sick.

That most Americans think they are free is the result of the revolution of 1861–1865, which changed our fundamental law from individual rights to the will of the majority. The vast majority of Americans, utterly ignorant of their founding history, believe that whatever the government does is right because it is the "will of the majority." I pity their unwitting nihilism.

Sorry, Abe, but freedom has nothing to do with elections and voting and majority rule; rather, these charades have become an all-purpose excuse to deprive us of our freedom. Freedom is personal immunity from election results. I exercised more control over my life when I ordered off the menu at the local diner last week than I had with all the votes I ever cast in an election since 1976. If you give an inmate in a maximum security prison the right to vote, have you liberated him?

That the same government that daily deprives me of the freedom I was born with, is going to liberate the Iraqis, is a sickening lie. And, being mindlessly trumpeted by the media, it’s a scary lie as well. Which is why I say, Semper LRC!