Government’s Evil
March 26, 2011
Washington’s Blog has this post on Standing Up to Evil, in which failure to stand up to evil enables more destructive acts. This includes how people have rationalized their failure to stand up to evil, as well as rationalizing evil acts (especially the evil done by governments) themselves. Washington’s Blog details the acts of going to war against Iraq based on lies, and the extent to which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld went to “pressure” CIA and other agents of the U.S. government to extract false information from Gitmo detainees, via torture, to link Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda.
In fact, it was revealed, as discussed in that post by Washington’s Blog, that the true purpose of the Gitmo torture regime was just that: to extract false confessions from detainees. It was that important to George W. Bush to go to Iraq and invade and initiate a war against another country that had not attacked the U.S. and was of no threat to us. I know I’ve mentioned this several times here, but Bush was quoted to have said that a good war would be good “political capital,” i.e. to help him get reelected the following year. His father, the Elder Bush, had his reelection bid the year after his war against Iraq that hadn’t attacked the U.S. and was no threat to us. And now, Obama’s war against Libya is during the year before Obama’s reelection bid.
It is just very sad when much of a population approves of their government starting wars of violence, murder and destruction against other countries, wars not of defense but of aggression. It isn’t just these acts of direct violence and their rationalizations that are evil, but other ways that governments have violated their people’s lives, liberty and property have also been evil. Such as ObamaCare.
I know that there are a lot of economic ignoramuses out there who approve of government-run, government-controlled, government-mandated medical care, but they are just uninformed as to the harmful results of State intrusions into those private matters, and do not seem to understand all that history has told us of the dangers of letting governments usurp control over private individuals’ medical and other private matters.
Unfortunately, because of the ignorance of the mainstream media, we are constantly told that “free market healthcare doesn’t work,” as though there has ever been a free market in medical care. Republicans want to repeal ObamaCare and “replace” it with RepublicanCare, i.e. continued government intrusions and socialized medicine like we have now, but just a little less to get themselves reelected.
No, what we need is medical freedom, repealing each and every government-imposed restriction, regulation, tax, fee, State licensure, and every government intrusion into the private associations and contracts between and among medical patients, doctors and other providers and insurers. Doing that will bring down the costs and raise the quality of medical care, and allow the greatest number of people, rich and poor alike, access to needed quality medical care. The problem has been the evil intrusions that distort the prices and make medical care unafforable to many people.
Unfortunately, too many people just haven’t learned what the evil Soviet Union medical care should have taught them.
And just recently I had a post on the federal government’s newest Nazi-like proposals to further violate our liberty, privacy, property and our dignity with its spying and searching of private citizens in public areas. It is clearly evil what our government is doing now.
I also think that it’s evil of our “Justice” Department to drop a case against black activists who were charged with voter intimidation against white voters in Philadelphia during the 2008 elections. Attorney General Eric von Holder’s “Justice” Department would prosecute whites for the same kind of intimidation against black voters, no doubt about that, or you would see Congressional hearings as to why they weren’t doing that. But, when it comes to prosecuting black alleged offenders? No way! As von Holder declared, that would be demeaning to “my people.” This means that Eric von Holder does not believe in equal rights under the law, and his view is based on the color of people’s skin, pure and simple. In my opinion, a racist “Justice” Department that engages in cover-ups is evil.
And I also think that John McCain’s cover-up of the truth about remaining Vietnam POWs was evil.
But speaking of wars and how so many people abandon their moral principles and engage in rationalization, I’ll never understand how so many acts of government-perpetrated crimes against humanity have been rationalized for this or that reason. For instance, President Harry Truman’s bombing of civilians in Japan during World War II. You can’t tell me that an innocent Japanese family, men, women and children who did nothing to anyone, who were totally innocent of any wrongdoing, actually deserved to be murdered in cold blood. It is completely immoral to murder innocent human beings. To rationalize the murder of innocent human beings is to defend evil.
And plenty of people over the past 150 years have defended and rationalized President Lincoln’s murders of innocents during the war that he started against people in the peacefully seceding states of the South.
And plenty of people in more recent years have defended the U.S. government’s murders of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries. It is just as evil for agents of our government to murder innocent human beings in foreign lands as it is evil for al Qaeda to murder thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11.
There are some people, some top officials who are evil just by their supporting those evil policies, whether based on good or bad intentions or based on their own ignorance of moral values and human rights. For example, Sen. Joe Lieberman has supported one atrocity after another that the U.S. government has committed abroad, and one civil liberties violation after another, mainly because he lacks understanding of basic values of right and wrong. He also lacks any understanding whatsoever of the concepts of presumption of innocence and Due Process. Hard to believe that Lieberman is an attorney, and was actually the state attorney general in his state of Connecticut.
Glenn Greenwald had this great piece summarizing Lieberman’s career as an ignoramus and a leader in the War on Civil Liberties.