Letters to the Editor
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Remember Guantanamo and secret prisons?
I understand the point that Rorytheta and "New Deal Democrat" make when they advocate civil disobedience and paying the consequences for one's actions. Under other circumstances I'd be right there with them. Just one little problem: the United States's executive branch of its government lies in the hands of people who have established secret prisons, indefinite detention, the demise of habeous corpus and most chilling, two-faced mealy mouthed justifications of toruture (or attempts to define it out of legal consideration).
Rorytheta wrote:
"If you genuinely believe that you are engaging in an act of civil disobedience, then remember that civil disobedience means breaking unjust laws -- and facing punsihment. It means making a statement that you feel strongly enough to break the unjust law, take it on the chin, and use that as a platform for change. Anyone can break a law. Someone who breaks the law, serves the time, and campaigns for the law to change has real moral authority."
Well put, but when "taking it on the chin" could include who knows what will be in store for consciencious objectors under the Bush regime, I'm not so sanguine about the "stand for something and go to prison" option. During WWI conscientious objectors were forced to advance across no-man's land in their underwear (refusal to wear uniforms), prodded by bayonetes. What punishments await the deserter under the present administration?
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Except for the fact that law breaking and law enforcement is a budgetary bright spot
Everywhere in the US law enforcement and the 'justice' system is a gold mine for local and country governments. There is no upside to them if they give up the revenue stream to the Federal government. Whereas they can arrest you, bail you and put you on probation for the most trivial of things, all it represents to you is an inconvenient schedule and perhaps a few hundred bucks a month in fees, fines, probation, assessment, courty mandated intervention programs and whatnot. My own county makes a sizeable part of their budget from low end crimes, traffic tickets and all the bullshit that involves. It's really just another tax and since the level of 'enforcement' is so massive, it touches almost everyone and so is actually a fairly equitable tax. In the US about 10-11% of the total population has first or second hand contact with local law enforcement through arrest, bail and either incarceration or the probation system. In the next decade or so you can expect that number to mushroom as localities have to scramble for money. So while you imagine it's scary to fight The Man, the fact is they'd rather rape your pockets then send you to a some Gulag somewhere. Gulags are cost centers and they don't like that.
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OH, CANADA
the obligation os a soldier to follow his conscience and refuse ilegal and inhumane orders from his superiors was, i thought, established at the war criminal trials after WWI. think what the actions of a country presumably guided by the rule of law say about that country when it conspires with another country's citizen, who is apparently not an official representatine of that country, to snatch a consciencious deserter. seems like desperate lengths to go to round up cannonfodder in order to avoid the draft, which would enlist the scions of lesser american "nobility;" it is obvious that the top tier have access to safety in that case, as GWB showed the world. bush, cheney, rumsfeld, and rove have earned war criminal status at the very least. let them be treated accordingly.