The Once and Future United States

President John F. Kennedy had been murdered only a few months before the Gulf of Tonkin affair.

Kennedy had built his political career on courageous opposition to imperialism, and his insistence that real U.S. national interests should be attended to. He had opposed demands that the U.S. should follow the path of the imperialists and plunge into war in Vietnam. His assassination let the pro-war faction take power in America.

The Fall of the Great Republic

Over the past week I have watched two films about the fall of the United States as a great republic, and the consequences of that fall. Both films were directed by Oliver Stone; they are JFK, about the murder of President Kennedy as a coup d’etat, an overthrow of our elected government; and Snowden, about the regime of surveillance and control imposed on the American people and the world.

Viewing these films has reenforced my own conviction, as an American patriot and a dissident, that

the evil done to the people of other nations by the United States, and the evil done to the people of the United States, is by the same ruling regime of usurpers.

I therefore affirm it as the right and duty of people everywhere to fight that usurpation and to overturn it.

My historical work is meant to provide ammunition and inspiration for that fight. I show that America’s Revolutionary founding and later achievements are humanity’s precious heritage.

Our independence and Constitution established a standard, that a people has the right to self-government, to national sovereignty. They have the right to a government active on behalf of their own interests. They must have freedom of speech and freedom of action if they are to exercise that self-government, if they are to improve their condition, achieve higher living standards and a more dignified status. These objectives were met in our inventive, industrious America, above other countries.

The transatlantic faction of usurpers denies all of the principles that constitute this precious heritage.

They impose instead, censorship, surveillance, assassination of opponents, deindustrialization, runaway shops and cheap labor, degradation of culture, permanent war. They deny the divine essence of human nature. Perhaps for that reason they are blind to the threat of universal nuclear annihilation.

Some would argue that America’s historic crimes against African-Americans, Native Americans and others negate any value in our country’s heritage. They may therefore surrender to the usurpation on the assumption that no change has occurred.

The Usurpers in the Mode of Historic Criminals

I would urge the consideration that our historic crimes have grievously hurt our country, as well as devastating the direct victims of those crimes.

The slaveowners dominated the federal government for several decades, blocking attempts to industrialize and upgrade general conditions, before plunging us into a bloody Civil War. They grabbed Native lands to expand slavery and to increase their negating power over our country.

Native lands were also stolen in the settlement of our West, a betrayal of our promises and our civilization. Yet there was abundant land for all, settlers and Natives. And in the absence of a national program for intensive agro-industrial development of the West, we only thinly settled that vast region. Plutocrats and transnational corporations seized the land, the resources, while the federal government shut immense areas away from use. Like the Native Americans, our country was plundered.

Today’s transnational rulers deny the right of the American people to choose a government that advances their own interests – for example, our right to control the market-place for higher wages and more jobs. These usurpers thus continue the old slaveowners’ insistence on cheap labor as the only legitimate basis for an economy.

With the mass shipment of bombs, they deny the right of the native Mideastern people to live in peace, in self-government. With another mass shipment of bombs, they continue the British empire’s insistence that the old harmony between America and pre-communist Russia must not be restored.

None of the outrages of the present transnational regime have the approval and confidence of the American people. No majority would vote to censor or spy on their own communications; or to carry on foreign wars, directly or through proxies; or to take down American high-wage factories to get cheaper terms from defenseless foreign labor.

To cover their crimes, these usurpers now openly declare that America’s national founding must be reversed.

Transatlantic establishment newspapers are touting a new book entitled, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Law School of the University of California at Berkeley.

The New York Times boosted the book in an August 31 review entitled, “The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous? One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.”

The London Guardian boosted the book in a September 1 review entitled,

“Erwin Chemerinsky on the need for a new US constitution: `Our democracy is at grave risk’ … the eminent law professor points to a source of growing disunion – the constitution itself.”

The Guardian quotes author Chemerinsky attacking any “absolute” right to free speech. The paper notes that he doubts that a new constitution is feasible – but that he sees the breakup of the USA as more likely and more practical.

Our Right to the Future

I recommend the viewing of the two Oliver Stone films cited above, JFK and Snowden, to get a visceral sense of the usurpation and denial of our rightful heritage of freedom and self-government, the robbery of our right to peace and to Constitutional order.

At our best, the United States has believed that these were universal values. At our worst, we have been allied with empires.

I believe it is essential that we cherish the best principles and the best accomplishments in our past. We are then fortified to resist the usurpers, and to have hope and confidence that the future USA will be a blessing to its people and to the world.