Shadows and Foreshadowing at Nagasaki

Atomic shadows at Nagasaki

        

When U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft arrived in Nagasaki Harbor on July 31, 1905, he and the huge imperial retinue about the SS Manchuria were given a rapturous welcome. 

As the ship departed that evening, notes James Bradley in his infuriatingly informative history The Imperial Cruise, Nagasaki's mayor toasted Taft and his party with champagne. The Sumo-sized American functionary then led the throng in a war chant to celebrate Japan's battlefield triumphs over Russian forces in Manchuria:

Japanese emperor -- banzai [may he live ten thousand years]!

Japanese navy -- banzai!

Japanese army -- banzai!

At least some of those who joined in Taft's celebration would be immolated almost exactly 40 years later, some of them memorialized in the "atomic shadows" etched into walls by the nuclear fireball that vaporized them. As they lifted their hands skyward, those Nagasaki residents couldn't have imagined that their government's imperial benefactor would someday annihilate them.

The frenzied reception granted to Taft and his entourage was generated, at least in part, by the celebrity of Alice Roosevelt, Teddy's oldest daughter, a rebellious girl who was something of a pre-electronic media Britney Spears. (One widely circulated photo depicted the First Wild Child wearing a boa constrictor draped around her neck and shoulders.)  But Japan's government, in which Washington had played a key role, was eager to please its imperial patron. 

Teddy Roosevelt, whose geopolitical views were defined by a nearly obsessive preoccupation with what he called "ethnic conquest," had conferred the status of "honorary Aryans" on the Japanese. In diplomatic machinations he kept secret from his cabinet and the Congress, Roosevelt had abetted the rise of Japanese militarism, goading them into their war with Russia over control of Manchuria. 

Harvard-educated Japanese emissary Kentaro Kaneko.

Japan had a role in TR's vision for the Pacific. As long as Japan kept Russia in check, did its part to pry open China to Washington's corporate clients, and didn't make a play for America's overseas colony in the Philippines, it could claim dominion over Korea and Manchuria under the terms of a "Monroe Doctrine for Asia," Roosevelt privately told Baron Kentaro Kaneko, Tokyo's emissary to the United States. 


"Japan is the only nation in Asia that understands the principles and methods of Western civilization," Roosevelt wrote to Kaneko on July 8, 1905. "She has proved that she can assimilate Western civilization, yet not break up her own heritage. All the Asiatic nations are now faced with the urgent necessity of adjusting themselves to the present age. Japan should be their natural leader in that process, and their protector during the transition stage, much as the United States assumed the leadership of the American continent many years ago, and by means of the Monroe Doctrine preserved Latin American nations from European interference, while they were maturing their independence."


Kaneko repeatedly urged Roosevelt to make public his support for a Japan-dominated "Monroe Doctrine for Asia." Teddy unctuously assured the Japanese emissary that while he couldn't do so as president, he would gladly offer public support once he had left office. 

As Bradley points out, if Congress had been aware of Roosevelt's secret dealings, "perhaps a senator would have challenged Roosevelt to think through the consequences of the United States' carving out a chunk of Asia for Japan to nibble on. Perhaps a congressman might have inspired Roosevelt to imagine a Japan that later would chafe at Teddy's leash." 


At the time, however, America's imperial elite was too enthralled by the Japanese victories in Manchuria -- where, as Teddy privately exulted, they were "playing my game" -- to consider what would happen when Japan's imperial ambitions could no longer be restrained by Washington. 


"The victory of the Japanese is a distinct triumph for Christianity," pontificated Reverend Robert MacArthur of New York's Calvary Baptist Church following the Battle of Tsushima. "The new civilization of Japan is largely the result of Christian teaching. A very great proportion of Japan's leading men today, especially those who fight her battles on land and sea, with such skill and valor, profess the Christian faith." 

Japan was emulating "Christian" teaching in the sense that any pious adulterer could claim to be acting on Jimmy Swaggart's example. The Japanese government's duplicitous and aggressive behavior faithfully mimicked that of the ascendant "Christian" power of the age. 

Under McKinley and Roosevelt, the U.S. government offered a detailed tutorial in the ruthless acquisition of territory through aggression, and the pitiless exercise of power to suppress uprisings against imperial rule.  The Philippines provided the classroom, and the Japanese would prove to be eager and observant students. 


After Washington wrested the Philippines from Spain, Admiral George Dewey (whose assault on the decrepit Spanish fleet -- ancient wooden vessels tied up in rows in Manila Bay -- wasn't much different from the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor) sent a pair of emissaries to compile a report on the Filipino civic culture. Under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, hailed as the "George Washington" of the Philippines during the war with Spain, the Filipinos had developed all of the institutions of representative government, and were firmly committed to the rule of law.


The report commissioned by Dewey was quickly buried by the War Department. After all, the prevailing doctrine held that the inhabitants of the Philippines -- like other non-Anglo-Saxon peoples -- weren't fit for self-government, and wouldn't be ready until after at least a few generations of benevolent, paternalistic rule by their racial superiors. 

This meant, Admiral Dewey would later write, that the U.S. Government would have to "establish our authority by force against the very people whom we sought to benefit." After learning of the victory of Teddy Roosevelt -- an apostle of imposing Anglo-Saxon "authority" by force -- in the 1900 presidential election, Private Robert Austill, who was serving in the Philippines, paraphrased Dewey's conclusion in terms that were both earthier and more candid: "The people of the United States want us to kill all the men, f**k all the women, and raise up a new race in these Islands." 


It was the islands Washington coveted as an outpost for the projection of military power into Asia. The Filipinos were an encumbrance.

“We do not want the Filipinos,” declared the San Francisco Argonaut in 1898. “We want the Philippines. The islands are enormously rich, but unfortunately they are infested with Filipinos. There are many millions there and, it is to be feared, their extinction will be slow.”

Fortunately, the Filipinos are not extinct, despite the U.S. Government's devoted efforts. In a 41-month period from 1898 to1902, roughly 20,000 Filipino guerrillas were killed. At least ten times that number of civilians were slaughtered as well. Some chroniclers estimate that more than two million Filipinos were liberated of their mortal cares during America's lethal application of muscular Christianity in the islands.

"The United States later fought World War II over a period of fifty-six months with approximately four hundred thousand American deaths," observes Bradley, who has written two acclaimed books about the Pacific War (Flags of our Fathers and Flyboys).  "So Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, with their mechanized weaponry, killed about the same per month -- seventy-two hundred -- as American civilizers did in the Philippines." 

Call this an "imperial baptism": US "ministering angels" at work.

Among the benefits of Christian culture the American Army shared with the Filipinos was the ancient ritual called the "water cure."




During World War II, American P.O.W.s were subjected to waterboarding by Japanese interrogators who, as convicted war criminals, experienced the long drop to the end of a hangman's rope. 

Decades earlier, American soldiers sent to "pacify" and "civilize" the archipelago -- “We come as ministering angels, not as despots,” warbled Senator Knute Nelson in praise of that noble venture -- would chant a marching cadence called "The Water Cure" in happy anticipation of their ministry:


Hurray, hurrah. We bring the Jubilee.
Hurray, Hurrah. The flag that makes him free.
Shove in the nozzle deep and let him taste of liberty.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!


We've come across the bounding main to kindly spread around
Sweet liberty whenever there are rebels to be found.
So hurry with the syringe boys. We've got him down and bound.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!...


Oh pump it up in him till he swells like a toy balloon.
The fool pretends that liberty is not a precious boon.
But we'll contrive to make him see the beauty of it soon.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!



Grover Flint, a first lieutenant in the 35th Infantry who served in the Philippines for a year and a half, later described how America's Ministering Angels used the "water cure" to fill Filipinos to the brim with liquid liberty:


"He [the victim] is simply held down, and then water is poured into his face, down his throat and nose from a jar, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becoming unconscious, and when he becomes unconscious he is simply rolled aside and he is allowed to come to.... His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but he can not drown." 

"Let him taste of liberty!"

Such treatment was appropriate, insisted Gen. Frederick Funston, whose troops -- with his knowledge and support -- executed helpless POWs, tortured civilians, massacred non-combatants, and raped countless women. 

The Filipinos, explained this exponent of pagan barbarism, are "an illiterate, semi-savage people, who are waging war, not against tyranny, but against Anglo-Saxon order and decency."


The "decency" of which Funston spoke so piously was famously displayed in a village called LaNog, the entire population of which was murdered on the orders of Captain Fred McDonald -- except for a single comely mestizo woman who was gang-raped by McDonald's officers and then turned over to the enlisted men for similar treatment. 


A particularly vigorous display of "Anglo-Saxon decency" took place in March 1906, when the Army mowed down roughly 1,000 Muslim men, women, and children who had taken refuge in the crater of an inert volcano.


"I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag," Roosevelt wrote, without a whisper of irony,  in a congratulatory cable to the commander. 

"A brilliant feat of arms": The Moro Massacre.

Mark Twain, who lent his gifted pen to the service of the anti-imperialist cause, pointed out that penning six hundred "helpless and weaponless" Filipinos "in a hole like rats in a trap" and then gunning them down at leisure  over a 36-hour period "from a safe position on the heights above" could hardly qualify as a brilliant feat of arms. This would have been true "even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets."


On the home front, Roosevelt and his comrades relentlessly de-humanized the Filipinos -- or, as they were commonly called, "Pacific Negroes."  

The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair would be a propaganda triumph for Roosevelt. Hundreds of thousands flocked to exhibits promoting America's imperial thrust into Asia, and depicting Filipinos (as well as Chinese and "uncivilized," non-westernized Japanese) as evolutionary throwbacks in need of Washington's stern but enlightened rule. Millions received this indoctrination second-hand through press coverage.


"As a keepsake souvenir to take home to the kids, fairgoers could purchase an `Album of Philippine Types,'" recalls Bradley. "Each Filipino type was represented by two photographs that looked like mug shots, which they were -- Roosevelt's scientists had searched Bilibid Prison in Manila to find `typical' Pacific Negroes. Fairgoers viewed more than one thousand photographs depicting a Philippines populated by robbers, murderers, and rapists."


Filipinos conscripted into America's imperial military were among the troops who marched past Roosevelt's reviewing stand during his second inaugural in March 1905. TR was heard commenting that these assimilated "Pacific Negroes" were "rejoicing in their shackles."

I wonder if Japan's short-lived conquest of the Philippines produced similar expressions of self-satisfaction from its imperial ruling class. 

I also find myself wondering how many of the Americans who perished in the Bataan Death March had been given a copy of the Roosevelt administration's "Album of Philippine Types" as children in order to advance their education regarding their duty to promote "Anglo-Saxon civilization" at bayonet point. 

And I detect nearly toxic levels of irony in the fact that at least some of the Americans who would later perish in the Pacific War saw the World's Fair exhibit celebrating the achievements of the "Japanese Empire" -- Washington's sub-contractor in "civilizing" Northern Asia.

Monument to 26 Christians martyred in Nagasaki during the 16th Century.

"In 1905, when he green-lit Japanese expansion, Roosevelt was forty-six years old and Baron Kaneko was fifty-two," notes Bradley. "Roosevelt would be dead fifteen years later, while Kaneko would live to hear Franklin Roosevelt condemn Japan for doing what Theodore Roosevelt had recommended." 


Kaneko died on May 16, 1942, just weeks before the Battle of Midway effectively ended Japan's dream of dominating the Pacific. 

To his credit, Kaneko exercised whatever influence he could muster to encourage peaceful relations between Japan and the United States; he opposed war with America as late as 1941. Had he lived three years longer Kaneko may have witnessed the aftermath of the August 9, 1945 atomic assault on Nagasaki, where just a generation earlier the skies were rent by American-led war chants in praise of the Imperial Japanese military. 


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Presidential Dictatorship: Not Thinking Things Through

He sees the flaw in your logic: Lucius Fox

Let me get this straight: You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands -- and your plan is to blackmail this person?... Good luck.

Bruce Wayne's confidante and tech adviser Lucius Fox, confronting accountant Coleman Rose when the number-cruncher tries to expose Batman's secret identity. 

Some of Barack Obama's most impassioned conservative critics see him as an incipient dictator bent on radically transforming the United States into a socialist dystopia through the exercise of unfiltered executive power.

Many of those same critics denounce Obama for being insufficiently ruthless in using arbitrary presidential power to kill and imprison people. Their plan, apparently, is to goad that incipient dictator into becoming a fully realized despot. 

Writing in Investor's Business Daily, attorney Ernest S. Christian and economist Gary A. Robbins -- the former a veteran of the Ford administration, the latter a Reagan administration alumnus -- tidily encapsulate the conservative Republican critique of Obama the embryonic dictator:

"Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion over too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.... [Barack Obama] is undermining our constitutional traditions: The rule of law and our Anglo-Saxon concepts of private property hang in the balance. Obama may be the most 'consequential' president ever."

In fact, Obama is nothing less than "an alien in the White House," they write, borrowing an expression coined by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal. 

"A wounded rampaging president can do much damage -- and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that might be," they continue. There is even the possibility that Obama would remain in office in defiance of law and the will of the electorate, since the "overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured -- Chicago-style."

The authors appear to believe that the formidable powers exercised by Obama somehow originated with him -- or, at very least, that Republican occupancy of the White House immunizes the office against depravity.

While painting Obama as a singular threat to liberty and Bill Clinton as a degenerate who "lowered the culture" of an electorate that twice elected him, they insist that "George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily." 

Translated into Roman terms, the authors would have us believe that Clinton was the corrupt, self-absorbed adolescent Elagabalus, and Obama either the depraved Nero or the despotic Diocletian -- but Bush the Younger, heck, he was Claudius, a relatively well-intentioned, albeit physically maladroit and verbally challenged, legitimate heir.

In fact, Obama is not materially different from his predecessor in any significant way. Mssrs. Christian and Robbins depict Obama as a unique threat to our "Anglo-Saxon" tradition of liberty protected by law. But it was Bush -- acting under the influence of his Sith Master, Dick Cheney -- who disemboweled the habeas corpus guarantee, the foundation of common law protections of individual rights. Granted, Obama has embraced and enlarged on Bush's actions, but the damage was done before the "alien" occupied the Oval Office. 

Brutum hominis cum Imperator

Perhaps Christian and Robbins intend to intimate that the threat Obama poses to the "Anglo-Saxon" tradition is a matter of identity, rather than performance, given that the chief damage was done by Bush the All-American Boy, rather than Obama the "alien."

During the reign of Bush the Lesser, Marc Thiessen -- now enjoying a sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute -- was one of the Imperator's scriptwriters. Since the end of that regime, Thiessen has continue to evangelize on behalf of torture, murder by executive decree, and other key tenets of the Bush-Cheney doctrine of totalitarian presidential power.


Thiessen has done nothing to conceal his disdain for the incumbent president; he is firmly in the camp of those who see Obama as a subversive and aspiring tyrant. Yet in a recent Washington Post column, Thiessen called for that same neo-Leninist to employ extraordinary means to abduct WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.


"Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States," observes Thiessen. "This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice  [sic] and put his criminal syndicate out of business."

This could mean sending a CIA or even a military team to snatch Assange off the streets of Iceland, Belgium, or other friendly countries unwilling to surrender him to Washington, Thiessen insists. It also means using the newly created U.S. CyberCommand to interdict WikiLeaks' access to the Web: "With a stroke of his pen, the president can authorize USCYBERCOM to protect American and allied forces by eliminating WikiLeaks' ability to disseminate classified information that puts their lives at risk," Thiessen insists.
 
In other words, Thiessen is eager to see the dreaded Obama deploy kidnapping teams and throw the internet "kill switch," and will hector him mercilessly until he does -- making sure to season those critiques of presidential weakness with dire regarding what he has described as Obama's despotic designs.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, Thiessen's comrade at National Review, likewise laments the supposed fact that Barack Obama -- whom he has described as a "neo-communist" -- has been diffident and tentative in exercising presidential power.

In an address last March in an event sponsored by Hillsdale College, McCarthy chided Obama for not emulating Andrew Jackson's example as military governor of New Orleans during the War of 1812.

On December 15, 1814 -- shortly before the storied "Battle of New Orleans" -- Jackson issued a decree announcing that it was his "unalterable determination rigidly to execute the martial law in all cases which should come before [my] province." The city would be run as an armed camp. A 9:00 PM curfew was imposed, and anyone found on the streets after that hour would "be apprehended as spies and held for examination."

Following the battle -- regarded as the only significant American victory, although the War of 1812 had already ended -- Jackson refused to restore civilian government. In March, nearly two months after the climactic battle,  a member of the Louisiana senate named Louis Louailler published an anonymous letter in the Louisiana Courier condemning the continued state of martial law as an affront to "our oath of making the Constitution respected."

"It is high time the laws should resume their empire," wrote Senator Louailler, who also demanded that the dozens of civilians held in military custody be brought before civilian courts and either charged or released.

As if anticipating Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction-era dictum -- "Whenever you hear a man prating about the Constitution, spot him as a traitor" -- Jackson treated this invocation of the U.S. Constitution as the act of a British spy.

He first commissioned publication of a propaganda sheet called Friend of the Laws that pointedly warned New Orleans residents that those found guilty of "espionage" within the "armed camp" would be subject to immediate execution. He then dispatched agents to learn the identity of his anonymous critic and arrest him.


Once Louailler was in military custody, he was accused of acting with  "the direct and manifest object [of bringing] the military authority into contempt," as well as fomenting sedition by "stirring up discontent and mutiny in the camp" -- meaning the City of New Orleans.

Jackson's critics had a point.

Some of Louailler's constituents filed an appeal with U.S. District Judge Dominick Augustin Hall, who issued a writ of habeas corpus.

"Instead of responding to the writ as directed," McCarthy admiringly recalls, Jackson "had Judge Hall arrested." Jackson charged the judge of "aiding[,] abetting, and executing mutiny within the camp" and threw him into the same cell holding Louailler. Shortly thereafter, Judge Hall was marched a short distance outside the "camp" and released.

A few weeks later, Louailler -- a civilian legislator -- was subjected to a court martial on numerous charges, including espionage, "illegal and improper conduct," "disobedience to orders," and "writing a willful and corrupt libel."

To his credit, Louallier refused to recognize the jurisdiction of that spurious court, and also rejected an offer of amnesty "by which they had sought to brand me a criminal." He spent years working to restore his reputation.

Alas, sighs McCarthy, "We've come a long way from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama" -- the latter, presumably, a timid milquetoast scandalously unwilling to punish dissent through summary imprisonment, and exile judges who object to such abuses of due process.

My question to McCarthy would be this: Do you really want Obama to exercise those powers? Would we really be better off if Obama -- the incumbent "wartime Commander-in-Chief" -- treated criticism of his actions as sedition, arrested his critics, and imprisoned judges who issued writs demanding that the government justify its actions?

Jackson repays former allies: The Cherokee "Trail of Tears."

As it happens, Obama's behavior in office isn't that far removed from the totalitarian ideal espoused by Thiessen, McCarthy, and their ilk.


The indefatigable -- and entirely irreplaceable -- Glenn Greenwald of Salon points out that the Obama administration, building on the precedents set by Thiessen and McCarthy's former boss, has created a "hit list" of people subject to summary execution on presidential orders. This includes several U.S. citizens, prominent among them the radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

When Awlaki's father -- working with the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights -- filed an emergency appeal for an injunction to prevent the extra-judicial state murder of his son, "a significant and extraordinary problem arose," notes Greenwald: Regulations issued by the Treasury Department under the Bush administration "prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with individuals labeled by the Government as `Specially Designated Global Terrorists,' and those regulations specifically bar lawyers from providing legal services to such individuals without a special `license' from the Treasury Department specifically allowing such representation."

"On July 16, roughly two weeks after Awlaki's father retained the ACLU and CCR to file suit, the Treasury Department slapped that label on Awlaki," Greenwald continues. "That action would have made it a criminal offense for those organizations to file suit on behalf of Awlaki or otherwise provide legal representation to him without express permission from the U.S. Government."


Timothy Geithner, the career criminal in charge of the Treasury Department, has condescended to issue the requested license, thereby permitting Awlaki's father to press his legal challenge. This also preserves the supposed authority of the executive branch to grant or deny -- on any whimsical basis it considers appropriate -- permission to attorneys seeking to defend the legal rights of people on the president's "kill list."

Last January, after Awlaki was accused of inciting the attempted Christmas bombing of Northwest Flight 253, his father was asked why he didn't encourage his son to return to the United States to confront the charges.

"I will do my best to convince my son to do this," Awlaki told CNN, but he understandably doesn't trust a government that claims the right to execute his son without trial -- or even formal criminal charges.

"They want to kill my son," he pointed out. "How can the American government kill one of their own citizens?"

The unsettling answer to that troubling question is one terrifying word: "easily." Obama's conservative critics want to make this task even easier still. They really haven't thought this through, have they?

    Postscript, August 5: On the subject of the "Alien in the White House"....

This is the kind of thing that threatens to eliminate the ever-narrowing gap between life and parody that sustains The Onion's existence: 

The head of an eastern Pennsylvania amusement company has yanked a carnival game in which players shot foam darts at an image resembling President Barack Obama.

Irvin Good Jr. pulled the target-shooting game after receiving a complaint from a Massachusetts woman attending a fair in Roseto, about 65 miles north of Philadelphia. Good said Wednesday his company, Hellertown-based Goodtime Amusements, won't offer the game again.

"It was just a big, big mistake in judgment, and I feel sorry about it," he told The Associated Press. "I can't take it back, but I can try to make it better."

The game, dubbed "Alien Attack," featured a large painted image of a black man wearing a belt buckle with the presidential seal and holding a scroll labeled "Health Bill." Players could win prizes such as stuffed animals by hitting targets on the image's head and heart.

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The Plunderbund's Persecution of Phil Hart (Good News Update, July 30)

See the update below.

The memory of man runs not to a time when an elected representative faced an ethics inquiry over official actions involving the theft and redistribution of the property of other people. 

By way of illustration, consider -- if you can stand to -- the career of the late Robert Byrd. The former Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan "redeemed" himself by spending more than a half-century building monuments to himself out of wealth pillaged from other people. Byrd's memorials include a statue of himself he inflicted on the West Virginia state capitol, in violation of a law forbidding such acts of taxpayer-funded narcissism by living politicians. 

Former Exalted Cyclops, now immortalized in bronze.

During his long reign as West Virginia's pompadoured paladin of pork, Byrd never
faced an ethics inquiry. This is because the erstwhile Klansman was a dutiful servant of the Plunderbund. 

By way of contrast, Idaho state representative Phil Hart finds himself arraigned before the ethics commisariat because he provoked the hostility of the tax-extraction bureaucracy.

His "offense" was to questioning the constitutional and legal premises on which that bureaucracy was built. Quixotic though his campaign might be, Hart has never been guilty of corruption or criminal conduct. Yet his supposed allies in the state Republican Party seem determined to expel him from the legislature.



Rep. Hart, who represents a northern Idaho town called Athol in the state legislature, has been uniformly execrated in the courtier press as a "tax cheat" and "scofflaw" by the media in both Idaho and Washington. 

It is true that Hart -- an engineer by education and professional background, a reluctant politician by conviction -- withheld tax payments while mounting a constitutional challenge to the federal income tax. However, after exhausting his judicial remedies in 2004, Hart filed a tax return and has since then paid more than $120,000 in combined taxes, interest, and penalties. 

This isn't the behavior of a determined "tax cheat" (an expression that connotes a moral delinquency on the part of someone trying to protect his honestly earned wealth from the designs of government-sanctioned robbers). Furthermore, there's nothing criminal or corrupt about mounting a constitutional challenge and losing in the courts.

Rep. Hart's actual offense was not withholding payment of taxes, but rather refusing to surrender to the IRS the names and contact information of the thousands of people who purchased his self-published book Constitutional Income: Do You Have Any?, a detailed, scholarly examination of the history of the federal income tax.  

In writing that book, Hart applied the mental discipline of a trained engineer to the task of examining the convoluted legal and political history of the income tax.  This included a study of every available legislative debate over the 16th Amendment, as well as contemporaneous media accounts and the official transcripts of the relevant Supreme Court decisions. Many of the documents Hart examined were found only through exceptionally devoted research and had never been read by eyes other than his. 

Hart's conclusion was that "there is no evidence upon which the government can rely for their claim that the American People desired to have their wages and salaries taxed.... It was never the intention of the American People for the 16th Amendment to confer the new power upon Congress that the bureaucracy says it has."

"Among the states which purportedly ratified the 16th Amendment, at least four of them have overturned state income taxation on the basis that earning a living is a fundamental right which cannot be taxed," continues Hart. A tax on one's wages is a form of slavery; it is literally a tax on a person's right to exist.


The original intent of the 16th Amendment, as one Congressman pointed out during a 1943 congressional on the House floor (see Congressional Record, March 27,1943, p. 2580), was not to impose a tax "on income as such," but rather to impose an "excise tax with respect to certain activities and privileges which is measured by reference to the income which they produce." In other words, the income tax was applied to income derived from the privilege of acting as a government-created corporation. 

As is the case with much of what happened in annus horribilis 1913 -- the Federal Reserve System being the most notable example -- the income tax was sold to the public as a way of protecting the common people from the predations of the super-wealthy. 

Currently burning in hell: Nelson Aldrich.

At the time, the Republican-created tariff system that amounted to "a tax placed on the American people not by government, but by business," writes Hart. 

The income tax was designed to target those who profited from government-created and tariff-assisted monopolies. This was the "bait." The "switch" came once the 16th Amendment was ratified, when legislators in thrall to what used to be called the Money Power (with the detestable Nelson Aldrich playing a key role, as he did in the creation of the Federal Reserve) retrofitted language into the tax code that defined "wages" as the revenue source targeted by the income tax. 


Hart's analysis is similar to, but more comprehensive than, many other critiques of the income tax system. He is optimistic that the system can be reformed if he and others can cultivate sufficient awareness of the original intent behind the income tax, and the institutionalized fraud committed by the current tax bureaucracy. 

Unfortunately, he seems to have radically overestimated the system's capacity for institutional reform, while radically underestimating its capacity for institutionalized malice toward those who pose a substantial threat.




"I read your book `Constitutional Income: Do You Have Any?'" Hart was notified in a letter from IRS agent Barbara Parks announcing that the state-sponsored terrorist clique employing her was beginning an "investigation" of the book. The purpose of that inquiry, she continued, was "to determine whether or not your statements are commercial speech and whether this activity causes harm to the government." 

With the help of the Center for Individual Rights, Hart successfully sued the IRS to interdict the agency's demand that he turn over the names of everybody who had purchased his book. Four years later, the IRS retaliated against Hart by issuing a final audit report denying all of his business deductions for eight years, hitting him with an additional tax liability of roughly $125,000. When he protested his treatment to the IRS, an official with the agency gloatingly explained: "When you don't give us everything we ask for, you get all of your deductions denied."

"During [my] four year audit, I provided the IRS with all my canceled checks, receipts, invoices and so on -- boxes worth," Hart recounts. "Yet these deductions were denied solely for political reasons." 

Certified Public Accountant Paul J. Desfosses, a retired U.S. Treasury Agent residing in Pocatello, Idaho, sustains and elaborates on Hart's conclusion that he has been targeted for retaliation by the IRS "for failing to `snitch' on and provide the names of those Citizens who might have dared to buy and read [his] book with its critical history and assessment of Federal Income Tax Law."

"I wish I could say that Representative Hart is wrong and that the IRS does not demand the names of Citizens who read disparaging comments about the Federal Income Tax, the IRS, or `big brother government' in general," writes Desfosses. "The truth is, that does happen...."


"While assigned to the Internal Revenue Service Idaho District, I was a National Treasury Employees Union Official and I routinely acted as the Union Steward in situations involving IRS employees who had been ordered to commit reprehensible and often felony criminal actions by their IRS managers or other IRS top officials," Desfosses elaborates. The agency "collected and compiled huge lists of citizens who were then targeted for audit and harassment for having bought and read a book such as Representative Hart's," or because they were perceived to be "a `threat' to the Federal Government's power" by IRS supervisors.


Representative Hart isn't the only recent victim of this treatment, Desfosses continues. "In April I attended a U.S. Tax Court trial involving an Idaho State University Professor who had obviously been targeted by [the] IRS at the request of a Federal District Court Judge whose past criminal actions the professor had exposed in a newsletter," thereby resulting in the denial of an appointment to the Appeals Court. But abuses of this kind -- against both tax victims and IRS employees still burdened with a functioning conscience --are commonplace, Desfosses concludes.


In persecuting the Plunderbund's enemies, the IRS can rely on the support of minor-league predators in state-level positions. So it's not surprising that the Idaho Tax Commission, after learning of the IRS's assault on Hart, gleefully piled on, demanding its cut of the fraudulently inflated "taxable income" and barraging him with tax liens. 

Since abandoning his constitutional challenge, Hart ruefully observes, none of the more than $120,000 he has paid "has been used to offset any of the lien amounts." His ongoing legal struggle with the Tax Commission provided the pretext for the ethics investigation against Hart. 

In Idaho, as in other states, legislators are protected from any "civil process" while the legislature is in session (vide the Idaho State Constitution, Art. III,  Sec. 7: "Senators and representatives in all cases ... shall not be liable to any civil process during the session of the legislature, nor during the ten days next before the commencement thereof....") 

Invoking that long-established principle, Rep. Hart sought to postpone his protracted legal struggle with the Idaho Tax Commission until after the end of the legislative session. This was somehow transmuted by his critics into an attempt "to obtain special treatment from the Idaho Tax Commission." Likewise, Hart's service on the tax policy committee was described as giving the appearance of an attempt "to set aside the tax law and obtain personal financial benefit."

The second charge is facially ludicrous. In describing Rep. Hart's supposed offense, Idaho House Minority Leader John Rusche complained that the committee assignment creates "the perception of a conflict of interest." But neither he nor any of Hart's other critics can specify the "financial benefit" Hart supposedly receives from that post. Indeed, Hart's service has done nothing to stanch his financial hemorrhage, much less provide him with some ill-obtained emolument. 

As Washington state legislator Matthew Shea observes in a tightly-reasoned essay examining the principle of legislative immunity in light of precedent and practices in other states, Rep. Hart's legal position is unassailable. 

"Rep. Hart has relied on the legislative immunity provision of the Idaho Constitution to postpone working on his own tax issues, which have been ongoing for a few years," writes Rep. Shea, who is also a practicing attorney. "There is no question that it is within the sovereign power of the states to afford this protection. Furthermore, the law seems to be clearly on Rep. Hart's side. So why does the witch hunt continue?"

"Not only are Rep. Hart's accusers in error," concludes Rep. Shea, "but the entire situation substantiates the very reason legislative immunity was written into the constitution in the first place -- to prevent political persecution." 


In an interview with Pro Libertate Rep. Hart -- a political ally of several insurgent candidates in the recent Idaho Republican primaries -- expressed the view that the ethics complaint was confected by enemies within the statist elements of the state's Republican establishment. This is an entirely plausible explanation for the otherwise inexplicable decision of the Republican-dominated legislative leadership to stage an ethics inquisition on the basis of terminally flimsy charges. 

Already under siege by the world's most despicable terrorist syndicate (no, not al-Qaeda -- the IRS),  Hart now has to contend with spurious charges of seeking "special treatment" and "financial gain." Yet state Rep. Ken Roberts remains secure within the Idaho Republican Party in spite of the fact, recently disclosed by the Lewiston Tribune, that Roberts has received nearly $370,000 in farm subsidies since 1995. 

Roberts, who ritualistically reviles subsidies directed at others, insists that when he's on the receiving end of plunder he's not redistributing wealth, but rather "recycling wealth." Predictably, nobody in the state Republican leadership has proposed that Roberts be subjected to an ethics inquiry. 


The Idaho Falls Post-Register notes that "three of the four members of the House GOP leadership team have cashed federal farm checks." A total of 36 current members of the state legislature have received federal agriculture payments (including disaster assistance and conservation reserve payments) since 1995. Of that number, 19 received subsidies -- and 18 of the Welfare Queens are Republicans, the people who "led the mostly ceremonial fight against the federal government during the 2010 legislative session," observes the Post-Register.


Phil Hart's fight against federal tyranny was substantive, not ceremonial -- and that's why he's taking fire not only from the agents of the Plunderbund who confront him, but also from the less principled Republicans who are cowering behind him. 

                                     UPDATE, July 30: "I believe it's over." 

After a three-hour inquest in which Rep. Hart's votes, tax controversies, and personal actions were subjected to minute scrutiny, all of the ethics charges dealing with supposed conflicts of interest were dismissed. 

The only remaining charge -- namely, that Hart may have "abused" his office by seeking to postpone tax litigation during the legislative session -- has been postponed and "could result in a legal challenge that would take years if they pursuit it," Hart informed Pro Libertate. 

"Deputy Attorney General Brian Kane said that the complaint was filed and then `we went on a fishing expedition,'" Hart recalls. "They weren't able to catch anything, but they certainly tried."

As for the remaining charge, "I'm in a rock solid position," Hart continues, "the same one that's been followed in 11 other states. I wouldn't have proceeded as I did unless my legal position was as solid as it is." This may result in litigation, and if it does, Hart predicts, "I'll win." In any case, "it looks like it will be a little harder to throw me under the bus." 



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The Regime's War on Food (Updated, July 25)

Enemies of food fascism: Max Kane (left) and Canadian dairy farmer Michael Schmidt

Many thousands of years ago, two men came across a dairy cow, a beast neither had previously beheld. 

One of them, seeking to impress the other, pointed to the creature's udder and declared: "You see those things dangling from the underside of that animal? Well, I'm going to squeeze one of them and drink whatever comes out of it!"

According to the late and much-missed George Carlin, that nameless daredevil was the bravest man who ever lived. He was also exceptionally fortunate, since he was able to consume raw milk, and even extol its nutritional benefits, without running the risk of imprisonment.

"I drink raw milk, sold illegally on the underground black market," admits organic farmer and polymath Joel F. Salatin in the foreword to David Gumpert's book The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle over Food Rights.  "I grew up on raw milk, from our own Guernsey cows that our family hand-milked twice a day. We made yogurt, ice cream, butter and cottage cheese. All through high school in the early 1970s, I sold our homemade yogurt, butter, buttermilk, and cottage cheese at the curb market on Saturday mornings."

Udder nonsense: The FDA considers this a death dispenser.

This was possible only because our rulers -- who plunder our earnings to subsidize production of government-approved toxins such as high fructose corn syrup, and don't hesitate to confer the "safe foods" label on Twinkies and other hydrogenated wads of incremental death  -- hadn't yet decided to protect us from the scourge of unprocessed natural foods, such as raw milk.


That oversight has since been corrected. As a result, explains Salatin, home dairy producers like the family in which he grew up are forbidden to sell their products at a contemporary farmer's market.

It isn't an exaggeration to say that the Regime is conducting a low-grade war against producers and consumers of raw milk -- a campaign that bears an undeniable family resemblance to the murderous, decades-long farce called the War on Drugs. It shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that a government presuming to dictate to us what mood-altering substances we can consume would likewise presume to tell us what foods we can eat and offer to others.

The federal Food and Drug Administration, working through a multi-state network of sycophants, is treating the private distribution of raw milk as a species of criminal conspiracy. Borrowing a tactic employed in the War on Drugs, the Feds are seeking to extort the cooperation of some consumers to work as informants.


Wisconsin resident and raw milk consumer Max Kane was targeted for that treatment, but refused to submit.  As a result, Kane may wind up in prison for the supposed offense of drinking raw milk and sharing it with others.

As a child, Kane was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease, a gastrointestinal disorder that left him chronically weak, malnourished, and -- as he put it -- "wasting away."

At his adult height of 5'11", Kane weighed 110 pounds. After conventional medical treatment availed nothing, Kane sought an answer in nutrition; he found one in a diet of raw foods, including raw, unpasteurized milk.

Kane insists that raw milk and dairy products helped him attain the vibrant health he displayed to good advantage by staging a 40-day bicycle across the continental U.S. During that odyssey, Kane consumed only the dairy products supplied by farmers belonging to a nation-wide network of raw milk producers.

According to raw milk proponents, pasteurization destroys not only harmful pathogens, but also beneficial bacteria needed to maintain a healthy balance of gastrointestinal flora (a subject about which I acquired some hard-won knowledge about a year ago). Homogenization further denatures milk, depriving it of vital alkalizing minerals that can bind with toxins and remove them from the body. 

There are trade-offs involved whether one chooses to consume milk in its raw or pasteurized/homogenized form. Furthermore, there are some accomplished health and fitness experts -- among them the legendary nonagenarian stud Jack LaLane -- who insist that human beings have no business consuming dairy products at all.

Apart from the paternalistic assumptions favored by our self-appointed bureaucratic custodians, there's no reason to believe that individuals are incapable of making healthy decisions for themselves. As Kane points out, his case is a dispute over property rights in the most elemental terms. "My body is my private property," he explains. "Nobody gets to say what I eat except me."

Although the government that afflicts Wisconsin insists it is "illegal" to sell raw milk, the law contains no impediment to direct sale of milk by farmers to consumers. Kane, who founded the Raw Milk Party, lives with his wife and young children in Viroqua, a town of roughly 4400 people that prides itself on its organic farming and farmer's markets. He belongs to a "cow share" co-op, whose members receive raw milk in exchange for paying a portion of the upkeep of the animals.

Like similar private ventures across the country, Kane's co-op is a subscription-based arrangement, which means that it deals with members, not customers. Kane sells his raw milk to another membership-based food club in Chicago called Belle's Lunchbox. In late 2008, Kane's club came under scrutiny by both federal regulators and Wisconsin's Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) following a conveniently anonymous complaint from an Illinois resident supposedly took ill after consuming unpasteurized milk.

Georgia raw milk farmers were forced to destroy their inventory.

The milk was traced to farms in Wisconsin, and the federal anti-raw milk gestapo -- already working with state counterparts in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin to crack down on the distribution of raw milk and other natural foods -- dispatched functionaries to test for brucella and other pathogens.

 Unfortunately for them, the tests proved negative, so they were deprived of a vital propaganda tool.


"I hope I don't come to resent making this statement," wrote Wisconsin veterinary commissar Roger Ehlenfeldt in a December 19, 2008 e-mail to his comrades, "but the Brucellosis issue may have been the simplest part of this problem and could have been a pretty good lever to use to push the raw milk issue." ( Emphasis added.)

Mark this well: The chief concern expressed here was not for the health and well-being of the public, but rather regret over the loss of an opportunity to exploit suffering in order to restrict the freedom of others.

Deprived of that "lever," the federal food fascisti attempted to pressure Kane into informing on others involved in the "criminal" purveyance of pure milk.

Despite the fact that Kane has never been accused of a crime, he confronts the possibility of criminal contempt charges for his refusal to provide names, addresses, and other information about people who belong to his raw milk club.

Last June 18, Kane was summoned by Wisconsin State assistant Attorney General Philip Ferris to offer a deposition. Kane, who has always represented himself in court, wisely refused to answer any questions until and unless his constitutionally protected rights were explicitly recognized by Ferris. For his part, Ferris adamantly refused even to admit on record that he had sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. and state constitutions -- a refusal that is tacit admission that his oath was an act of public perjury.

Ferris, thoroughly out-lawyered by an amateur, got nothing. Kane responded to the subpoena by challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin's anti-raw milk statutes. This prompted the State of Wisconsin to escalate its assault by using the threat of criminal contempt charges in an attempt to extort Kane's cooperation. The term "extortion" is the only suitable one to describe what's happening here, since nobody has ever signed a criminal complaint against Kane or any of his associates.  Despite that fact, the Wisconsin AG's office filed a motion to have Kane designated a "threat to the public" and imprisoned while his appeal proceeded through the courts.

In an April 19 hearing, Vernon County Judge Michael Rosborough denied the state's vindictive motion to imprison the 32-year-old farmer and granted Kane sufficient time to collect transcripts and prepare for his appeal.

The standoff in Wisconsin represents just one front in the Regime's war against people who produce and consume raw milk. David Gumpert (author of The Raw Milk Revolution) offers a rundown of some other recent outrages.

 "[In early June], agents of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, escorted by police and also bearing search warrants, raided and shut down Traditional Foods Warehouse, a popular food club in Minneapolis specializing in locally-produced foods," writes Gumpert. "They also raided two farms suspected of illegally selling raw milk. And in a national first among such raids, agents searched a private home and made off with computers; the family's offense appears to have been that it allowed one of the raw dairy farmers to park in its driveway to distribute raw milk to area residents who had ordered it."

In California, Gumpert relates, a mob of 20 armed tax-feeders -- including personnel from two sheriff's offices, the LA County District Attorney's office, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture -- descended on Sharon Palmer's Ventura County farm. Palmer has endured three assaults of this kind over the past 18 months, apparently as a result of a technical error in the labeling of goat's milk.

Actor George Lopez with raw milk farmer Mark McAfee

 On the same day, government goons laid siege to Rawsome Foods, a Venice, California food club that offers a variety of unprocessed dairy products. The marauders made off with a large haul of raw honey and dairy products before shuttering the private club for failure to obtain a health permit.

To his considerable credit, Rawsome owner Aajonus Vonderplanitz -- who has endured in-person harassment by the FBI and FDA -- re-opened his club just hours after the government-licensed vandals had wrecked it.

These raids -- and scores of others like them -- are part of a coordinated campaign by the Federal Government to arrest "the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years -- food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured [not pasteurized] eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products," observes Gumpert. "Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, these groups generally avoid obtaining retail and public health licensed required of retailers that sell to the general public."

All of this is dictated by the basic totalitarian formula: Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Private food clubs, like every other association, simply have to be brought under state control, or destroyed in a fit of coercive benevolence.

We also shouldn't underestimate the Regime's irrepressible hostility toward any enterprise that promotes self-sufficiency: Witness the premonitory rumblings of a new Federal jihad against the precious metals industry.
 
As the Greater Depression deepens and large-scale retail distribution networks collapse, Americans will increasingly rely on locally produced foods -- an ironically beneficial side effect of the economic meltdown. In the fact that the Regime has chosen, in this economic environment, to mount a persecution campaign against independent local food producers we find eloquent testimony of its incurable malevolence.

Update, July 25: 

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times (by way of The Agitator) comes the video record of the armed raid on Rawsome Foods -- and yes, the wankers in government-issued costumes did enter the establishment with their guns drawn.

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Dum spiro, pugno!