HOMELAND SECURITY For What and for Whom?
by Edwin Vieira, Jr., Ph.D.,J.D.
Why do so many Americans think that "homeland security" means what they think it means?Americans have learned the painful lesson that what "is" going on in politics and government these days all too often depends upon the secret, idiosyncratic definitions of "is", and many other words, that politicians and public officials are using. Of course, if a public official says something that he knows people will think means X, when in his own mind he means Y, he is lying. But such verbal legerdemain is difficult to expose, because the deceitful officeholder can always defend his statement as being literally true. Americans must therefore be perpetually on their guard to parse every sentence, phrase, and even noun and verb that politicians and public officials employ, searching for the hidden meanings lurking among the letters.
This problem of differentiating between the sound of what members of the political class intone and the sense of what they really intend is nowhere more critical than in the matter of "homeland security". Too many people, however, naively accept this term at face value, without asking the vital, probing questions: What "security"? and Whose "security"?
If the "homeland" is the United States of America, then obviously her "security" is defined by her Constitution, because there cannot be security without law, and the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Just as obviously, those who are to benefit from that security are the authors of the Constitution and their descendants: We the People.
The essentials of America’s true, historic "homeland security" are to be found in the Preamble to the Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The Preamble is more than an exhortation. It is neither a mere "wish list" nor a set of dispensable options. The Preamble is a statement of political purpose, a legal mandate and requirement, and a strict rule of interpretation. All the powers and disabilities (that is, absences of power) that follow in the body of the Constitution are to be construed in light of, and to be employed so as to advance, all of the goals the Preamble sets forth, not to thwart, subvert, or ignore any of them. That all of the goals are of equal importance and to be achieved simultaneously the Preamble makes clear in its use of the conjunction "and".
Yet all Americans are being told, and large numbers of them apparently have come to believe, that "insur[ing] domestic Tranquility, [and] provid[ing] for the common defence" is actually incompatible with "secur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". They are told that "security" must be preferred to liberty, and can be obtained only at the price of liberty. And they are told that it is necessary to implement this supposed trade-off by setting up a Department of Homeland Security which will provide a largely undefined "security" precisely by limiting Americans' real, historic liberties. As to the last point, surely, public officials are not lying. For no one needs an advanced degree in the structural engineering of criminal politics to identify the Department of Homeland Security, in its purpose, architecture, and operations, as a burgeoning national police-state apparatus all too reminiscent of a Ministry of the Interior in some Stalinist regime in Eastern Europe in the 1950s.
Even more ominously, Americans are being warned (although "conditioned" may be a more accurate term) by people as highly placed as General Tommy Franks that someday soon the Constitution will be set aside entirely in order to enable the General Government to provide adequate "security". Even disregarding the questions of who has lawful authority to overturn the supreme law of the land, and how there could be a legitimate "government" at all in that eventuality, anyone can see that, with the Constitution gone, America will be under the heel of a police state subject to no law at all other than the wills, appetites, and vices of the people who run it.
How is any of this possible? America's civilian and military leaders all take oaths to support the Constitution. For example, pursuant to Article II, Section 1, Clause 7 of the Constitution, the President takes an "Oath or Affirmation" that he "will to the best of [his] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Self-evidently, the Constitution cannot be "preserve[d]" by being set aside, or "protect[ed] and defend[ed]" by being disregarded in any particular. And what is so difficult to understand in the Preamble's explicit conjunction of "domestic Tranquility, * * * the common defence, * * * and * * * the Blessings of Liberty"? Are the public officials who tell Americans that liberty must be surrendered for "security", or that the Constitution as a whole must be discarded, simply incapable of understanding the Constitution (in which case they cannot honestly take an oath to support it), or simply unwilling to tell the truth about how they intend to violate it (in which case taking such an oath is plain perjury)?
To answer the question "Why is this happening?" one must ask the deeper question: Cui bono? Who benefits? Whose "security" is being obtained by the systematic abridgment of common Americans' constitutional liberties? And by the step-by-step creation of a national police state that could (and doubtlessly is designed to) eliminate those liberties altogether? And by what is obviously a plan in the works to cement that police state into place by scrapping the Constitution when a suitable occasion and excuse arises or can be contrived?
Well, what good is the "security" of a thoroughgoing police state to its victims? Obviously, none. A police state provides security only for the elitists who run it and who benefit from the repression it imposes on the mass of citizens. By hypothesis, then, today's push for "homeland security" actually aims, not at the security of the United States or of the American people under the Constitution, but at the Establishment’s security over the Constitution and against the people.
This is as perfectly understandable as it should have been predictable: The "security" at which the Establishment aims is always its own security, not that of common Americans. In the final analysis, to the Establishment common Americans are mere "human resources" to be used by "the government" (that is, the élitists for whom "the government" fronts) for the purpose of maintaining and increasing the Establishment's economic and political power, the general welfare be disregarded, if not damned outright. (That the Establishment does not openly disparage Americans as "cattle" is probably not because it holds them in higher esteem than bovines, but instead because it considers most of them, at least morally and mentally, mere vegetables.) The Establishment does not identify itself with the people. To the contrary: It sees itself as separate from the people, independent of them (except when it misuses their votes in manipulated elections to provide a veneer of "democratic" coloration to the misrule of its political Pinocchios), and always superior to them, in the way that men are superior to cattle, and even cattle are superior to vegetables.
But why, with all its wealth, power, political and social positions, and other advantages, is the Establishment so suddenly and deeply concerned about its security? All the militant Islamic fanatics from Casablanca to the Celebes could never subjugate this country in a hundred years of waging a "war of terror". They could not even inflict much physical damage in comparison to what an old-fashioned conventional shooting war might cause, for which the Department of Defense supposedly already provides this country with adequate protection. And, in any event, the Establishment's big wigs, their families, and their assets are thoroughly guarded against the worst that handfuls of terrorists could accomplish. So, the ostensible threats terrorists pose cannot possibly justify turning this whole country upside down in fits of orchestrated mass hysteria, let alone constructing a Stalinist-strength police state that directly contravenes the Constitution. For this result some reason other than the Establishment’s paranoia must be discovered.
Even paranoiacs can have real and dangerous enemies whom they recognize and rightly fear although others do not. The Establishment is systematically constructing a domestic police- state apparatus, indoctrinated, trained, and ready to impose on the great mass of Americans whatever harsh measures the Establishment decrees, because it expects, in the not-so-distant future, disturbances in America of magnitudes far greater and consequences far more reaching than anything a few Islamic terrorists could possibly cause. These must be disturbances that involve very large numbers of average Americans, not simply a few militant extremists. They must be disturbances that only a police state can quell, which means that in whole or in large part they will be completely justified under the Constitution. And, most importantly, they must be disturbances which, if not quelled at whatever cost, would bring down the Establishment.
What might cause such disturbances? As with most questions in criminal politics, the answer can be found by "following the money". What poses the most dangerous threat to the Establishment's continued rule, and even existence, if not the instability of the Ponzified monetary and banking systems, and superheated financial markets, that provide the foundations for its economic and political power? Any scheme of fractional-reserve banking based on fiat currency the value of which is secured by nothing more than economically unsound debt and the government's power to tax is inherently and inexorably self-destructive. No such scheme can long survive. The Federal Reserve System is just such a scheme. And the Establishment knows it.
If America's hypertrophic markets and gas-bag banks were to burst all at once, as they did in 1929-1932, nationwide chaos would ensue. A catastrophic implosion (depression) or explosion (hyperinflation) is perhaps unlikely, though, because the Establishment can employ myriad economic and political dirty tricks not available in the 1920s and 1930s to retard the destructive forces from aggregating into one big bang. (Or at least the Establishment seems to believe, or hopes, that it can.) The Establishment cannot, however, prevent the rotten monetary and banking regime from gradually crumbling in a series of smaller, yet nonetheless serious crises. And, again, the Establishment knows it.
When a critical mass of Americans finally realizes that these crises will continue to consume more and more of their economic substance, and that the people in charge be can do nothing to abate them (or are in fact their ultimate cause, and probably profiting from them as well), the Latin-Americanization of the financial sector will spill over into a Latin-Americanization of the political sector. Political instability will threaten the Establishment's debt-based currency, the incestuous relationship between the Ponzified banks and the Treasury, and even the Establishment's phony "two-party system" of Mensheviks and Bolsheviks--who, of course, Americans will correctly recognize as equally responsible for the mess, because they are but the two false faces of the same evil political god, Janus Americanus.
Make no mistake about it: To maintain its own economic and political positions, the Establishment will sacrifice the economic welfare and the constitutional rights of everyone else. And to succeed it will be compelled to crack down: first, on people's resistance to its propaganda, agitation, disinformation, and other techniques of psycho-political manipulation; then on refractory dissent; then on rebellion at the polls; then on mass refusals to obey its oppressive "statutes", "regulations", and "judicial decisions"; and, at length, on revolt against every aspect of its misrule. The Establishment is building a domestic police state today for the purpose of deterring, cowing, and if necessary smashing this opposition tomorrow. So, even if the supposed threat from Islamic terrorists were to disappear today, the Department of Homeland Security would continue to grow tomorrow. Also, the breakneck speed at which the Department of Homeland Security is being constructed should warn America how much the Establishment fears that monetary and banking crises of serious proportions cannot be long delayed.
The question is what Americans intend to do about it, before they can no longer do anything about it. Simply opposing the Department of Homeland Security or the Patriot Act (and subsequent legislation of that ilk) will not be enough. For these are only effects, not causes. The danger will continue to exist as long as this country's Ponzified monetary and banking systems remain in place, increasingly shaky and prone to collapse. Americans need to begin working now to replace these systems with sound money and honest banking.
08 March 2005
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