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On Demise of the American Democracy

by Victor Serge

Scientifically speaking, the United States is not a democracy, and it never was. The United States has been a republican empire with some democratic elements, which now decays... transforming the country into a monarchic empire. Nevertheless, I will use the term "American democracy" as it bestowed upon me and you by the upper-class propagandists.

The American Democracy, as we know it, ceased to exist on November 25, 2002, when Mr. Bush signed into a law a legislative project that intended the biggest reorganization of the federal executive bureaucracy in more than 50 years, creating a Department of Homeland Security (DOHS). With a stroke of his pen, Mr. Bush formalized the death of the American Democracy, the final stage of which was conceived in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and was officially transformed when Lindon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Mr. Bush promised that the newly created sub-division of the federal bureaucracy will “focus the full resources of the American government on the safety of the American people”. However, this is hard to believe if you take into consideration the name of the agency (homeland security), which implies not the protection of people but rather the inanimate land; that is, the stiff bureaucracy itself.

The names of the Soviet KGB (Committee of State Security – secret police) and MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs – police) reflected more or less the true destination of those agencies – to protect the entire class of Soviet political and corporate bureaucrats from their external (the political and corporate bureaucrats of other nations) and internal (the Soviet commoners and laborers) foes.

The combination of the American NSA and CIA is already the American version of KGB, but only without the border patrol troops. The latter was organized as a part of the KGB, promising to protect the people from external foes, but soon deteriorating into the means to lock in Soviet commoners or laborers so that not one of them would escape the exploitation of Soviet bureaucracy.

The goal of the NSA and CIA is to secretly protect the entire American upper class from its external foes, particularly from the Islamic establishment. Although neither the FBI nor the CIA will be part of the DOHS, some legislators seek to bestow onto the border patrolling policemen a greater share of the analytical part of information, gathered by their externally oriented colleagues of the NSA, CIA and FBI. Now, by reorganizing 22 federal agencies into a humongous DOHS, the American establishment created the American version of border patrol troops, the goal of which is to openly protect the American political and corporate bureaucrats from their external foes – the establishments of other nations, mainly the Muslim ones. However, when the dust of a scramble with bin Ladens and Husseins settles down, the American commoners and laborers will be the primary target of those border-patrolling troops.

Consequently, Mr. Cheney nominated the former governor of Pennsylvania, Mr. Ridge, to head the DOHS and the Navy Secretary, Mr. England, to be Ridge’s deputy. The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Mr. Hutchinson will be an under-secretary of DOHS’ main sub-division of border and transportation security.

Initially, the Republicans opposed the idea of a new federal department that will swallow 22 existing agencies with combined budgets of about $40 billion and employ 170,000 workers, the most aggrandizing reorganization of the federal executive bureaucracy since the birth of the Department of Defense (DOD) in 1947. However, facing questions on what the White House (WH) bureaucrats knew about the terrorists before the latter struck on Sept. 11, 2001, following the polling trend and using Clinton’s tactic of triangulation, the Republicans turned the tables on the Democrats, though neither one of them believe that those 170,000 federal agents, united under the umbrella of the DOHS, will screen out the would-be attackers of the American establishment better than they do it now. The Dems, at least, hope and pray that the newly minted border policemen wouldn’t slow down considerably (that is, the commoners and laborers wouldn’t notice it before the election of 2004) some yearly incoming 500 million people, 11 million trucks, 2.2 million rail cars and 51,000 foreign ships. The Reps wouldn't give a damn if the commoners and laborers notice the slowing pace of incoming people and goods or not, because the Reps, though creating it, will anyway blame the Dems for wanting the “big government”.

Consequently, the federal legislators approved the creation of DOHS in the House – by 299 against 121, and in the Senate – by 90 against 9.

The bill provides the president (or the vice president) with broad authority to hire, fire and transfer workers at the DOHS in the name of security of the American establishment, permits guns in airline cockpits, extends by one year the deadline for the screening of all airline baggage and exempts the policing bureaucrats from observing many rules of the Freedom of Information Act. The DOHS bill also permits the federal bureaucrats to do business with the American corporate bureaucrats who have moved their headquarters abroad to exempt themselves from the U.S. taxes. The bill also shields the American drug corporate bureaucrats from being sued over such ingredients as mercury-based preservatives that are used in vaccines and are likely cause autism in children.

The Congressional Democrats first refused to grant the president those broad powers over the hiring/firing of federal workers; however, the Republicans accused them of protecting workers’ rights more than the bureaucrats’ own security, by labeling it as the “nation’s security”. The Dems reversed their course after losing some Congressional seats, wrongly attributing the loss to their “homeland” security policy.

Thereafter, Congress has created the DOHS that will have six sub-divisions:
Border and Transportation Security;
Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Countermeasures
Emergency Preparedness and Response
Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection
Secret Service;
Office for coordination with state, local and private sector efforts.

Most American commoners and laborers already understand that the new Soviet-style bureaumon (bureaucratic monster) will eventually skew their rights and tramp their liberties, but very few of them know the difference between these two political concepts and sometimes use them interchangeably. Nevertheless, when the underlying causes of these two concepts are in considerable misbalance, they require tough political decisions that can lead to revolutions or civil wars.

 

POLITICAL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES

The Political Rights concept refers to the ideas of freedom, justice, and political equality that the commoners wish to get from the political bureaucrats when the former elect the latter. The concept implies that the political bureaucrats are the guardians of equal opportunity of commoners and laborers to become the unequal political or corporate bureaucrats, regardless of religion, race, gender, age and other characteristics, irrelevant to freedom and political equality of commoners and laborers. The rights of many individuals are overlapping and interacting; thus, the right of one to free speech or religious ritual may infringe on the rights of others. Therefore, upper-class guardians are necessary to balance those rights of commoners and laborers.

Consequently, the Civil Liberties concept refers to what level of actual freedom and political equality the commoners and laborers can rise to and hold despite the antagonistic tendency of their political and economic bureaucrats.

Historically, the concept that human beings have inalienable rights and liberties that cannot justly be violated by other peers or the political bureaucrats, while a distinct idea, is linked to the history of democratic institutions. The Greek philosophers first expressed the concept. Thus, Socrates chose to die rather than renounce his right to teach the young a new, inner way of searching for wisdom and to speak freely against the political and religious bureaucrats, who were abusing their powers. His sacrifice of own life was not in vain, because it fertilized the political soil of ancient Athens and gave ammunition to the political parties, the leaders of which argued for- and against-democracy. Though there was little democracy, if any, for of the 403 thousand inhabitants of Athens -- 3 thousand were the political and corporate bureaucrats, 150 thousand somewhat free commoners and 250 thousand slave-laborers.

The proponents of democracy argued that nature is good and civilization is bad, that by nature all men are equal, becoming unequal only by class-made institutions, and that law is an invention of the strong to chain and rule the weak.

The best example of this type of argument you may find in the Declaration of Independence of the American colonies – a fine piece of propaganda of the colonial bureaucrats against the corruption of the metropolitan bureaucrats (see Appendix).

The opponents of democracy argued that nature is beyond good and evil, that by nature all men are unequal, that morality is an invention of the weak to limit and deter the strong, that power is the supreme virtue and the supreme desire of men, and that of all forms of government the wisest and most natural is aristocracy.

The best example of this type of argument you may find in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion – a refined piece of contra-propaganda of the Russo-German aristocrats against the rising Russo-Jewish commoners (see Appendix).

Somewhat later, the Stoic philosophers coherently formulated the doctrine of the rights of the man. However, neither the commoners nor the political and corporate bureaucrats of the Roman Empire embraced the ideals of human rights. Consequently, they had come only sporadically to the surface of social life during medieval times. Nevertheless, the ideas of human rights had ripened in the depths of social life and, finally, crystallized into a concept that:

‘Individual freedom of the commoners and laborers can survive only under a system of law by which the rulers can check not only on the ruled but also on each other; moreover, the ruled may also check upon the rulers’.

In 1215, for the first time, the idea of government limited by law was expressed in the Magna Charta, in accord with which the English political and economic bureaucrats might check upon the power of their own leader (king). The provisions of Magna Charta do not draw upon egalitarian beliefs, because the nature of bureaucratic class is the union of the non-equals, who rather know the precise boundaries of their niche of subsistence. That union of the non-equals was organized with a goal to capture, hold and exploit the unorganized equals (commoners and laborers). It was a treaty between a leader and members of his gang of conquistadors that defined their relationship and paved the way for the concept that the supreme ruler was also subject to the law rather than being above it.

However, the ideas of absolutism and divine right of a sovereign leader drew upon the religious beliefs of divine origin of law itself, and thus persisted in European and worldly politics. Consequently, the reigns of sovereign monarchs were the permanent and fierce struggle for survival of the fittest among the bureaucrats themselves and between them and the commoners and laborers.

During the Reformation, the political principles of human rights were rather channeled through the religious outlets, because tolerance was a rare commodity among the political bureaucrats, though it was arguably milder among the religious bureaucrats. In 1612, Unitarians of England were still burned at stake as heretics. Nearly to the end of the 18th century, other Christian sectarians of Europe had been tortured for their ideals and killed by the inquisitors and political bureaucrats.

Fleeing terror of their political and religious bureaucrats, European colonists brought the concept of limited bureaucracy and individual freedom of commoners and laborers to the New World. The early laws of Virginia, Massachusetts, and other colonies reflected interest in the reform of criminal procedure that was emerging in Europe.

The events leading to the English, French, and American revolutions inspired such writers as Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Paine, Jefferson and others who laid the foundations for modern ideals of human rights. Consequently, the English, French, and American revolutions minted the political principles of human rights in the structure of national bureaucracies, which must rule in accord with a written constitution or system of laws. Thus, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in France and the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution formally established the principles of human rights as a foundation of modern system of social control.

Only few commoners and none of laborers took a part in developing the principles of limited government and personal freedom; the vast majority of the thinkers were from the aristocratic bureaucracy, who had the time and practical interest to study the subject. Consequently, many founders of the American Constitution did not favor democracy, and the majority of them were slave-owners. And that is why the original Constitution of the United States treated a black man as three fifth of a white man. Thus, the descendants of those minority dissidents who fled from persecutions of their European bureaucrats, found a new way to persecute the contemporary minority -- for the color of skin of its members. Though political power was formally vested in representative assemblies, the creation of law, more its enforcement, was arbitrary and despotic, because the black minority has had few safeguards against the tyranny of white majority.

Nevertheless, the lame Constitution of the United States was a step forward comparatively with the law and order of despotic European monarchies. The political rights of U.S. citizens (mainly, the white men, who paid taxes) had been embodied in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

The 1st Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religious exercise as well as separation of church and state. To emphasize the separation of the religious from the political bureaucrats was necessary because the prevailing perception was that the despotism and arbitrariness of European bureaucracies drew much of its power from their vague transparency – when the religious inquisitors often used the political bureaucrats to do the killing job, and the latter asked the former to do the snooping job.

Although religious freedom was guaranteed by the original Constitution of the U.S., some denominations and sects such as the Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Scientologists and others have sometimes been persecuted until the 20th century. There were few acts of the political bureaucrats in the 20th century against the members of Islamic denomination and the Christian sect of Unification Church, but on a whole, the religious discriminations have considerably subsided comparatively with the 19th century discriminations.

The 2nd Amendment contains the general guarantee that the citizens can have weapons to protect their life and property, and to be able to organize themselves into the militia bodies to resist effectively to the foreign and domestic tyrants.

The 4th Amendment protects the privacy and security of the home, and prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

The 5th Amendment guarantees that no one shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

The 5th through 8th amendments, in short, protect persons accused of crime (which means the transgression against the interests of the majority of the people). The amendments guarantee the right of commoners and laborers to trial by jury of peers, the right to confront hostile witnesses and to have legal counsel, and the privilege of not testifying against oneself. Originally, these amendments were binding only on the federal bureaucracy; however, in the 20th century decisions of U.S. Supreme Court, the judges held that the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment (ratified after the Civil War, in 1868) extends the Bill of Rights to action by the state and local bureaucracies.

Clarifying the U.S. Constitution, the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as many state and local laws, prohibits religious discrimination. The political bureaucrats of all levels recognize the right of religious pacifists to refuse to bear arms, even in time of war, and the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that conscientious objection need not be based only on religious training or belief in a supreme being. The supreme judicial bureaucrats have also upheld the right of the members of Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse to salute the flag as a symbol of the political bureaucracy.

Applying the principle of separation of church and state, the supreme judicial bureaucrats have prevented attempts to use public funds to finance religious schools; nevertheless, they have sometimes permitted the use of public funds for buildings and other non-sectarian programs of religious bureaucrats.

In the 1960s, the federal judicial bureaucrats ruled that state-composed prayers and Bible reading in public schools violated the Constitution. Efforts to reverse these rulings were unsuccessful, but in recent years, the federal judicial bureaucrats have been less vigilant in scrutinizing their legislative and executive colleagues for aiding to the religious bureaucrats. For instance, the federal judicial bureaucrats have upheld the local political bureaucrats’ duty to place religious displays on public property as the majority of a community demanded.

American civil liberties have been often curtailed during periods of national emergency. Thus, in 1798, hostility toward revolutionary France led the federal congressmen to enact the Alien and Sedition Acts, which stripped aliens of nearly all civil rights and threatened freedom of speech and the press by prohibiting "false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government (Congress or the president). The constitutionality of these acts was never tested, but they were not reenacted; and now, most scholars agree that those acts were unconstitutional.

During the American Civil War, President of the Union, Abraham Lincoln, assumed absolute power, and then, delegated the lion share of it to his principal military bureaucrats to arrest civilians for disloyal speeches or acts. After World War I, fear of the newly established Communist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union prompted the American bureaucracy to harass suspected communist sympathizers.

The combination of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the spread of Soviet communism and the rise of German National Socialism prompted once again the federal bureaucrats to curtail the American liberties by implementing stiff internal security in order to deal with saboteurs. In 1940, the federal congressmen passed the Smith Act, thus proscribing the advocacy of force and violence as a means of bringing about changes in government. In 1950, they again adopted the Internal Security Act, thus establishing a new federal agency for identifying and suppressing so-called subversives and their organizations.

In 1954, in concert with the state congressmen, the federal ones, heading by notorious Mr. McCarthy of Wisconsin and Mr. McCarran of Nevada, virtually outlawed the Communist party, though they did not formally criminalize  the membership in the party. They conducted widely publicized hearings at which they questioned thousands of individuals concerning their political activities and associations, if any, with the Communist party. The federal judicial bureaucrats upheld these statutes, which eventually fell into disuse during the 1960s uprising. And in 1969, the federal judiciaries were necessitated to limit such proceedings and adopt a constitutional standard that protected political speech unless it was "directed to inciting... imminent lawless action" and was likely to produce such action.

New problems emerged. Demonstrations by opponents of racial discrimination and the Vietnam War during the 1960s and '70s, and corresponding bureaucratic attempts to suppress these demonstrations, necessitated the federal judiciaries to specify where, when, and how streets, parks, and other public places could be used for purposes of protest. At the same time, certain symbolic forms of expression were employed by the protesters, prompting the federal judicial bureaucrats to uphold criminal punishment for the burning of draft cards but reversing convictions for the burning of the American flag as a form of expression. In 1990-91, the federal judiciaries affirmed that neither the federal nor the state bureaucracies could single out the burning of the American flag for criminal penalties.

In 1964, the federal judicial bureaucrats were necessitated to admit for the first time that libelous statements about public officials were protected by the 1st Amendment unless uttered with "actual malice"; that is, with knowledge of their falsehood or with reckless disregard of the facts. Later cases refined this decision but left to the discretion of the state bureaucrats whether to allow defamation actions brought by persons who are neither public officials nor public figures.

Elaborating on their 1957 ruling, the federal judiciaries held that obscenity is not constitutionally protected speech. However, because it was difficult to determine the content of obscenity, they defined it in 1973 as speech that, taken as a whole, “appeals to the prurient interest, is patently offensive in depicting sexual conduct, and lacks serious literary, political, or scientific value”. This vague definition has led to numerous lawsuits, because who would define what is ‘prurient’, ‘patently’ or ‘serious’? Conservative religious bureaucrats and some feminists have attempted to restrict the distribution of pornographic material that was not “obscene” or “offensive” to the 49 percent of voters. Consequently, the conservative movement achieved limited success and the civil liberties of the people suffered from this form of censorship.

One of the most controversial 1st amendment cases did not reach the Supreme Court. In the late 1970s when a U.S. Nazi group sought to march in Skokie, Ill., the home of many Jewish survivors of German concentration camps, emotions were aroused, and the city enacted laws designed to prevent the march. Both federal and state courts upheld the right of this Nazi group, which was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, to express its interests peaceably.

A number of Supreme Court rulings have been concerned with the rights of persons accused of crimes. Defendants in state as well as federal criminal cases are assured that they cannot be imprisoned for an offense unless represented by counsel; if a defendant is indigent, such counsel must be supplied by the government. Defendants must be warned that they may not be questioned until counsel is provided, and defendants may not be convicted on the basis of confessions obtained by coercion. However, it is still the theory rather than the American practice.

To demonstrate this point, look at so-called the Central Park jogger’s case. Now, the unbiased majority of us may clearly see that it was not that gang of marauding, black teenagers “wilding” through the “whity” part of Central Park who raped and all but murdered a young woman 12 years ago. At the time, the case gave the establishment of New York such shiver that few of them - openly, but the majority – quietly, damned Mr. Lincoln for not sending the blacks back to Africa. It was one of those moments during which the upper class racial prophets and heroes like Rudy Giuliani rise into the head-lines and power, while trying to preserve legally what was once looted illegally by their fathers.

Now, after the five convicts have done the time, we learn that they weren't there and didn't do it. We are steadily growing our skepticism about “our” system of justice and getting accustomed to this kind of news because of regularity of such bureaucratic snafus since mitochondrial DNA testing has been introduced to establish who really was and who wasn’t a rapist or other kind of criminal in a case where blood or spit or other flesh is an element of the evidence. Thanks to the forensic scientists, we are repeatedly reminded that in the increasing percentage of cases, our executive and judicial bureaucrats aren't getting them right, but we, the taxpayers, must be paying for the sins of the Giuliani & Co., because the city has a huge budgetary deficit.

This case was, as Mr. Giuliani used to say, a slam dunk, because the accused confessed, and there is no evidence that the cops "worked on" them as they worked on Mr. Louima. But then again, guilty confessions by innocent persons are hardly a new phenomenon in our history. Most of the thousands of European and American women in the 16th and 17th centuries, who were hanged or burned at the stake, confessed to being witches though not many of them were physically tortured. And the European and American upper classes of those epochs were gratified with the manipulative skills of their inquisitors, because the latter helped the former immensely in sustaining the political and economic status quo. In the 20th century, the Russian and Chinese Communists perfected the psychological torture. Their bureaucrats managed to acquire confessions that looked like the genuine ones to the foreign eyes and ears though were made by the duped men and women who were in psychological distress and temporal disbelief in own ability to reason while being under influence of skillful interrogators.

In the coming years, when the price-tag for the loss of freedom of those five guys will be high enough to prompt the New York establishment to seek for a scapegoat or two, we will know precisely how the five were induced to make their confessions. Were they framed because the Giuliani & Co. were longing for power or because the majority of New Yorkers felt impatiently that somebody should be punished for that crime? Or both?

So, what is "the American Justice". Whose justice is it and to whom? Isn't "our" justice to the five akin to the justice of Mr. Bush to Saddam Hussein? With all those FBI labs and all those mitochondrial DNA tests, new truths about ancient crimes spring continually out of the "closed" cases, as we learn time and again that our justice depends on the interests of the majority of us.

Getting justly in the criminal courts just slightly more than half the time may be about as good as we can get with our present system of justice, which begets increasingly bulging dockets, incompetent lawyers, fatigue, and general corruption. However, being just in 51 percent of cases is not enough to consider themselves as living in democracy.

Most criminal cases depend on snitches and witnesses. Snitches are notoriously unreliable because they have a direct interest to snitch either not having money or not having personal freedom. As for witnesses, however they honest may be, they are a part of the system; and as such, they are under the indirect influence of the interest of the majority, and therefore, can hardly be unbiased and disregard the compelling interest of their social class. Moreover, physiologically, most of us cannot correctly see and accurately recall an event if it involves speedy movements in three-dimensional space and time, as it usually does.

The Hollywood cops may still impress some of us by solving a crime puzzle by finding a blood trace or a bit of hair. Nevertheless, the reality shows that technology is able to make only modest contributions toward catching and convicting the real perpetrator. Fingerprinting, photography, DNA-testing, the Internet bounty-hunters, and other technological innovations can only modestly help to find a real criminal. Experience shows that in most cases, the ordinary people, when the interest of the community compel them, are the major factor in finding the correct individual for the correct jail cell, as it was in the recent "Washington D.C. sniper" case.

All the paraphernalia of modern technology availed the detectives nothing. The criminals had to phone in tips on themselves to the cops, and do so persistently as to leaving major clues on the answering machine of a Catholic priest, who bound to get the lion share of $2 million bounty award, thus multiplying the problem of trust to the Catholic churchmen. The Maryland's Montgomery County policemen were criticized for letting the killers continue to do their lethal job, but it wasn't the detectives' fault; they hadn't the tools... nobody had. As in the case with the Unabomber, all the federal agents, all the profilers, all the crime labs, all the technology, and all the money rewards were all for naught until the Unabomber's brother recognized the writing style of the Unabomber's Manifesto.

If we elaborate on the cost of "our" bureaucratic apparatus, one of which major functions is to convince us, the taxpayers, of just the opposite -- to make us believe that justice is done in 100 percent of cases, because the "exceptional" cases (like that one of the five who confessed) only confirm the rule that "our" criminal justice-injustice system is the best in the world.  All "our" public defenders of the upper class, who got megaphones and may skillfully appeal to the Bill of Rights, serve to reassure us that only the guilty ones are being punished for the crimes they actually committed. All their service to us consists in creating the myth that their system is alive and kicking when, in fact, the internal "justice" system of our bureaucrats toward us (the people - the commoners and laborers) deteriorated to the comatose-stage and is waiting to be unplugged.

Now, glance at the external "justice" system of our bureaucrats. It has been a year since Mr. Bush pronounced the the birth of an "axis of evil." The White House (WH) speech-writer who actually created this squeaky label for last year's State of the Union address, is currently out of speech-writing business, thus, leaving Bush's aides rather in precarious position how to explain American foreign policy to us (the commoners and laborers) coherently.

Generally, Mr. Bush will have to tell us why he thinks that it would be better for the Americans if Israel will be surrounded with democracies. If he thinks so because the democracies did not wage the aggressive wars, then, America wouldn't be able to claim to be a democracy when it would conquer Iraq.

Specifically, Mr. Bush will have to tell us why his administration is preparing for a short war on Iraqi bureaucrats, who have no nuclear weapons, and preparing for long talks with North Korean bureaucrats, who probably have several and declares their determination to build more.

The "evilness" of Baghdad, Pyongyang and Tehran's bureaucracies may not be in dispute by themselves, but the "axis" notion is arguable more than ever, considering that Iranian and Iraqi bureaucrats had been waging a decade long territorial war only two decades ago. Moreover, North Korean bureaucrats have no significant connections with two above mentioned bureaucracies. And as Seymour Hersh reported recently in The New Yorker - the North Korean nuclear program was rather likely made possible by Pakistani bureaucrats, whom the WH bureaucrats consider as allies in the "war on terrorism".

Bolstering their case for immediate and pre-emptive "regime change" in Baghdad, the WH bureaucrats argue that the former operate as the world's worst violators of domestic human rights and willing to starve their people to death while pursuing nationalist ambitions; and therefore, they are potentially dangerous to their neighbors and to world peace. But the same, and even in greater degree, the observers of Amnesty International are saying about Pyongyang bureaucrats, who are habitual breakers of their words and mockers of international law and treaties.

Moreover, the Iraqi bureaucrats have admitted more than 200 U.N. weapons inspectors, who are moving around Iraq with equipment that can detect minute chemical, biological or radio-active residues. And contrary to the predictions of the WH bureaucrats that the U.N. inspectors would be unable to find anything, the latter incidentally uncovered a dozen empty chemical-warhead missiles, thus prompting the WH bureaucrats to declare this discovery "serious and troubling"; this declaration, in its turn, implies that the U.N. inspectors are capable of accomplishing their task.

Even though the Iraqi bureaucrats habitually object on words to an intrusive methods of the U.N. inspection, they in fact has allowed unannounced visits to their palaces and say they will permit unaccompanied interviews of their military scientists. The Iraqi bureaucrats consistently deny that they possess any weapons of mass destruction or that they intend to construct or use any. Indeed, the Iraqi bureaucrats have not threatened any of their neighbors since their armed forces were expelled from Kuwait by the allied coalition in 1991. Moreover, the Iraqi bureaucrats possess no inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM), never did, and say so. And the U.N. bureaucrats created their team of inspectors to verify the truthfulness of sayings of the Iraqi bureaucrats.

If the WH bureaucrats know a better way of verification, they ought to say so and produce their information with its verifiable sources of information or des-information.

Meanwhile, the North Korean bureaucrats have thrown out the U.N. inspectors who checked on their nuclear facilities and withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Starting from January 1, 2003, the Pyongyang bureaucrats habitually issue "warnings" to the Washington bureaucrats not to threat them as the second-class citizens of the world because... they have built nuclear weapons.

The North Korean bureaucrats possess also an unknown number of inter-continental ballistic missiles. This is a well known fact because the North Korean military bureaucrats tested one by shooting it over northern Japan in August 1998. Apparently they're working on a new version of ICBM, with a longer range that can reach Alaska. Recently, they announced that they plan to resume testing their missiles unless the Washington bureaucrats change their attitude and help them to feed and shelter the North Korean commoners and laborers, as the Washington bureaucrats promised to do but then bug out of that promise excusing themselves with an economic crisis at home.

For a while, the WH bureaucrats were trying to be tough with the Pyongyang bureaucrats, then, after several tantrums and denunciations, the WH bureaucrats reverted to the policy of pacification and the carrot on a stick, expressing their "disappointment" but dispatching emissaries to negotiate written promises and amount of aid.

Toward the Iraqi bureaucrats, who have neither nuclear weapons nor ICBMs, the WH bureaucrats have been responding increasingly saber-rattling. The latter denounced every move of the former as "too little, too late or too uncooperative", while deploying tens of thousands of troops, hundreds of aircraft and thousands of tons of ammunition in the Gulf region.

Displaying their deep disdain for the U.N. bureaucrats and their arms control efforts, the WH hawks are now proving to any tyrant or despot of the world that the American bureaucrats respect only the powerful people, whose bureaucrats have nuclear bombs and the means of delivery of those bombs.

The "might is right" have been a motto of every Stalin-Hitler-Mao for millennia, and so have been their external "justice". According to the international law (that is, theoretically), the Baghdad bureaucrats have the same rights as the Washington bureaucrats; but apparently, the actual liberties of the former depend on the strength of the latter, more correctly, according to the WH bureaucrats, the liberties of the Baghdad bureaucrats depend on their own weaknesses, and that means that the latter are out of luck for not having nuclear technology. Thus, paradoxically, the WH bureaucrats corner the small national bureaucracies into trying to get nuclear technology by any means, thus propelling the world to nuclear disaster.

As you may notice, our (the American commoners and laborers) actual liberties are in considerable disparity with our theoretical rights, because the former were abridged by the Washington bureaucracy. The latter also abridged the liberties of the small national bureaucracies all over the globe, turning out for them as a totalitarian regime. And even though the young American aristocrats, such as John Kerry, are trying to reanimate the myth of the American Democracy, but it is too little and too late, because the old hawks, such as Cheney-Rumsfield-Wolfowitz, are firmly entrenched into the Washington bureaucracy, which no longer requires reanimation but needs a rebirth.

1/20/03


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Victor J. Serge created this page and revised it on 04/13/03