The State of Exception: Tyranny's Theory

 The State of Exception:  Tyranny's Theory
The Regime's Disinformation Governance Board

Politics is that portion of Human Action [1] involved in establishing and maintaining the State. The following from Max Weber: the "state can be defined as a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". [2]

Private Associations, such as patriot groups, interact with politics at large and have their own internal legitimacy issues. However, from Weber's definition, those internal activities are not "politics" but rather the natural give-and-take of a voluntary community. Voluntary association is the hallmark of communities of free people.  Involuntary association is the hallmark of the monopoly State. 

So what do the activities of people in institutions of government have to do with the private expressive association activities of various private associations? Let's approach that issue by looking at a little history.  We could mention the Mannerbund (the Men's Group) of Northern Tradition, or the voluntary communities established by pioneers, such as the Amish. But a more direct example can be found in the American Revolution.

I recently saw part of a documentary on the American Revolution wherein the narrator mentioned "the Sons of Liberty which was recruited from local street gangs...". I see the modern patriot groups, such as the self-proclaimed men's drinking club, the Proud Boys, as not-dissimilar to those Sons of Liberty (it wasn't tea those men were drinking before the Boston Tea Party...).

In contrast to the impending tyranny is the freedom philosophy contained, for example, in the Proud Boys Tenets [3] which include such beliefs as "Minimal Government / Maximum Freedom; Pro Free Speech / Pro Gun Rights; Anti-Racism / Anti Racial Guilt; Glorify the Entrepreneur / Venerate the Housewife...". Equally important is a willingness to fight for the Right. 

These views lead to an adherence to the American Constitution, as originally understood and intended to limit government power, not the rights of individual citizens. Patriots see their role as standing firmly for traditional values.  

Such Americans view the "State of Exception" under which we currently live as unacceptable. 

What is a "State of Exception"?  It is the legal theory justifying tyranny asserted originally by the German Jurist (and Nazi) Carl Schmitt [4] and strongly criticized by libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard. [5]

As originally asserted, prior to the Nazi take-over of Germany, and later developed in his post-war Theory of the Partisan, Schmitt saw the unlimited powers of the totalitarian state as arising from a permanent state of emergency, a "State of Exception" which allowed ruling elites to act arbitrarily, capriciously and without adherence to the rule of law. He asserted such a State justified:

    1. Special executive powers
    2. Suspension of the Rule of Law
    3. Derogation of legal and constitutional rights

American legal theory, based on constitutional limits on government power, does not permit broad emergency exceptions. A good example of this is the constitutional restriction on suspending the writ of habeas corpus (the writ that allows Judges to question arbitrary imprisonment). And even if the writ were to be suspended, the Bill of Rights, which amended the original Constitution including the writ provision, holds that government must respect basic human rights.  No one may be deprived of life, liberty or property without "Due Process of Law", the opposite of a "State of Exception".

It is undeniable that the American Deep State holds to a theory of government more like that of the Nazis than that of the Constitution. We have been ruled under emergency regulations since the declaration of war against Japan.  More so since the PATRIOT Act and other emergency laws arising after the September 11th attacks. The federal authorities currently use whole series of emergency measures to restrict political speech, going so far as to engage in false-flag and entrapment techniques designed to provide the very terrorist threats against which they are supposed to protect us.  

Examples can be offered:  the now-exposed entrapment regarding the supposed plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, or the dozens of federal agents exposed as directing the January 6th "insurrection." 

The Nazi Reichstag Fire was not the only false-flag used to justify a "State of Exception."

There have been increasing attacks against patriots over recent months as the unelected Regime imposed as a result of Congress certifying the 2020 election consolidated power.  Nearly a thousand have been arrested for allegedly participating in the January 6th "insurrection" and dozens remain in jail, under horrific conditions. The mass purge of public employees who might object to tyranny, under the rubric of "vaccine" mandates, resulting in the firing of thousands of soldiers, police, health care workers and first responders, is a troubling development. 

The attacks have just escalated with the increasingly heavily armed Department of Homeland Security establishing a new censorship bureau during April 2022, called the Disinformation Governance Board. [6] The Board was created without Congressional approval.  The head of DGS intoned, "The goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat." [7] What threat? Apparently the "threat" that some people on social media may disagree with Regime policies.  Specifically mentioned were questioning the legitimacy of the stolen 2020 election, the opening of the southern border or the risk of war in East Europe. The real goal is Total Information Control.  It is simply totalitarianism.

This attack on the First Amendment is, of course, justified by the "State of Exception" first created as a response to the 9/11 attacks and continued by the government's excessive response to the declared pandemic.  It was, we are assured, just to "protect the Homeland."

The original American political theory of Inalienable Rights and constitutionally limited government, with the First Amendment explicitly denying government power to restrict speech, petition and association, has been abrogated and the ruling elite now base their power on the same theory of government, the "State of Exception" that was the basis of Hitler's dictatorship.

Just as Germany was devastated by Nazi governance ("Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely")  Americans now face similar threats from a governing elite that has unconsciously adopted as its meme the Capitol surrounded by barbed wire, making clear the "State of Exception" upon which its power is based.

What is to be done?  

Is the creation of a censorship board to oppose the First Amendment the "red line"? Are the increasingly shrill attacks on the Second Amendment?  When will the Sons of Liberty arise again?

The Proud Boys and other patriot groups, especially "crews" offering fellowship in dark times, seek to be ready.  They engage in physical training as well as "hearts and minds" social activities.  They heard President Trump's famous injunction to "Stand Back and Stand By..." [8]  

Many are now convinced this is the time to Stand Up and Stand Forward.

There are no emergency exceptions to inalienable rights.

--------------------

[1] See Mises, Human Action https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html - All Human Action is predicated on dissatisfaction.

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8107736-a-state-is-a-human-community-that-successfully-claims

[3] https://jerseyline.godaddysites.com/proud-boy-tenets

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt

[5] https://mises.org/library/carl-schmitt-and-murray-rothbard

[6] https://youtu.be/e4inJSblCUY

[7] https://adnamerica.com/en/united-states/mayorkas-announces-dhs-disinformation-governance-board-two-days-after-elon-musks

[8] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/did-trump-mean-told-proud-035805906.html

My "Political" Biography

 

Ralph Fucetola JD

Political Biography: 1961 - 2022

I was born into a large Italian construction and business family in, and lived in, northern New Jersey, all my life.  I am an American Citizen, age 76.  Although born in 1945 and technically too old to be a Boomer (and old enough to have avoided the war in VietNam through student deferments) I was part of the Boomer generation. 

I remember being with Ralph Ginsberg and Larry Ferlinghetti at Rutgers in '63; I was part of the post-Beat Generation Rutgers poetry club. I shared a few joints with Prof. Tim Leary and author Robert Anton Wilson.  Profs. Murray Rothbard and Walter Block mentored me as a young man.  Remote Viewer  (Maj. Gen.) Bert Stubblebine was a mentor in later life.

I spent my summers "down the shore" in Ortley Beach where we've had a house for over 7 decades.  My uncles all had places on the same lagoon, so my cousins and I had summers growing up together.

My political activities started in High School (Verona NJ) in the early 1960s when a friend and I were the only conservatives in the News Club, so we gave our views once a week over the school loudspeaker.  Learned about censorship early.

Of course I read Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative and anything I could find by Ayn Rand.

I was the second person in my family (36 cousins in my generation) to go to college and the first to get a graduate degree (JD).  The family had a construction company (yes, I did work on construction jobs a couple of summers) five bowling alleys and, eventually, a strip mall and a hotel, all in north NJ. After I graduated my office was between Arlington Lanes and our construction company.

At Rutgers College (B.A. with Distinction, New Brunswick, class of '67) I was one of the few conservatives on the student newspaper.  They didn't purge the conservatives until a few years later.  I joined College Republicans and was a Youth for Goldwater in '64.  I was among the "Rat Finks" purged from the College (G)OP by the Rockerfellerists after that election.

In 1967 I was in D.C. with some Catholic Peace Protesters, at the Pentagon during the infamous exorcism there. The Right has almost always opposed foreign wars and supported the Founders of the Republic's foreign policy of non-intervention.

I joined Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and became NJ Ex. Director.  During '69 I was one of the YAFers who, under the influence of the great libertarian Prof. Murray Rothbard and Prof. Walter Block (now head of economics department at Loyola) moved to a consistently libertarian position.  In the summer of '69 both Leftist SDS and proto-Neocon YAF purged the libertarians.  I was among those so purged, along with the extraordinary Kate Greene who became my wife (for 48 years, until her passing in 2021). We insisted that conscription was involuntary servitude and thus were booted out...

During that time period the Rutgers Newark YAF group (6 undergrads and one law student, me) decided to take our big Stars and Stripes and oppose a pro-Viet Cong march of thousands in Newark, NJ.  We stood on Broad Street at the south end of Military Park with our flag outspread. The crowd was much larger than we expected.  There was some pushing and shoving by the New Left precursors of Antifa (with some knees and elbows and fists flying) but we stood our ground. The mob was "deflected" by the flag and instead of rallying in the park as they had planned, they fled to Rutgers Campus and occupied the Student Union and surrounding buildings. We must have 'triggered' them... BTW, we were not pro-war and were certainly anti-draft.

The University put some "FreePeople" organizers on trial for the occupation and added me as a defendant for, I guess, carrying a flag.  I could have been (but was not) expelled from law school. The Trial was a farce. Intentionally, with the FreePeople providing popcorn for the audience. The law school professors, being good liberals, did not expel anyone. I did come to respect the libertarian left and joined them at the occupation of Old Queens on the Rutgers College campus a few years later, without supporting any of their inarticulately expressed goals...  

Became a member of the Rothbard-inspired Radical Libertarian Alliance (RLA) and still have one of the old banners carried in anti-war demonstrations in DC and NYC, "Conscription is Slavery, Taxation is Theft, War is Murder." I remember a bunch of us sharing a joint in the back of the hall when Rothbard spoke to the National Taxpayers Union, probably in 1970.

I've been a Libertarian Party supporter since the party's founding and have almost always voted for LP candidates, although there are (G)OPers like Rand Paul I like. While I did not vote for him, I do consider DJ Trump the legitimate President and the 2020 election to have been stolen. Trump was/will be the last Baby Boomer president (current Head of Regime Biden is too old to be a Boomer)

In 1970 I was at a Society for Individual Liberty meeting in Philly where we heard from the great L. von Mises, the 20th Century's leading philosopher of freedom, then in his 90s.  In that speech to a group of long-haired libertarians (some of whom would become Members of Congress, Federal Administrators or best selling authors, lawyers and the like), he wagged his finger at us and said, "You are eating your seed corn."  Of course he was right.  [I have a distinct memory of a very hippie Durk Pearson chatting with Margot Mises about why she should try LSD...] The post-Boomer generation, however, may now be in the biggest seed-eating frenzy of all.

Kate Greene and I hung out with consciousness warriors like Robert Anton Wilson and Tim Leary and adopted neopagan, gnostic beliefs. We delved into "alternative healing" and became certified in Human Bioacoustics, Hololinguistics and very basic Homeopathy, along with Reiki and other modalities.

I've been an ordained minister since 1973 in LifeSpirit Church -- www.lifespirit.org which was founded as the Libertarian Congregational Church. I smoked hemp, tripped on various substances, and survived the 1970s and 80s, while practicing law (1973 - 2006) and officiating at marriages and funerals along the way.

One of the first Internet Chats happened at our Morristown townhome in 1986, when Robert Anton Wilson chatted over my Commodore 64 text interface with people around the globe -- http://www.lifespirit.org/RAW-1986-chat.html -- transcript of vintage RAW. 

I was a leader in the NJ Taxpayers Movement in the '70s into the '80s and spoke to the huge crowd at the Stop the Income Tax Rally in Trenton in 1976 stating that I could "no longer distinguish between taxation and theft."

Kate and I had one child, our magnificent son Drew Adriel, in 1988.

Of course I've supported Ron Paul. In the 1970s I was a member of the National Committee to Relegalize Gold, which supported the then-young congressman's successful effort to relegalize private ownership of bullion Gold -- one of the first great libertarian political victories of the last century.

Similarly, I worked with the TEA Party in more recent years.  I am very active in the Health Freedom Movement, agreeing with my mentor and friend, the late Maj. Gen. Bert Stubblebine that "Informed Consent is the defining issue of the 21st Century."

Just before the start of the "pandemic" of 2020 I delivered a paper at the Libertarian Scholars' Conference (at Kings College, Manhattan, October 2019) wherein I discussed the universal right of Informed Consent -- just as the globalist elite were setting-up the biggest attack on Informed Consent since the end of WWII:  https://inhere.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Informed-Consent.paper_.1a.pdf

I am currently a trustee of National Solutions Foundation and President of the Institute for Health Research -- www.InHeRe.org and I post at www.OpenSourceTruth.com

Unsurprisingly I was purged from Facebook during the Great Purge of 2020/21. My Telegram Chats:  https://t.me/opensourcetruth and https://t.me/redpillcrusaders -- @FreedomAdvocate2°

I became a proud second degree Proud Boy on September 11, 2021.

Boycott Big Tech Media! http://www.opensourcetruth.com/socialmediaboycott/

I do consulting in the natural products industry:  http://www.SystemsProcessingIntegration.com

Kate Greene's Collected Works and my Memoirs and other books are at https://tinyurl.com/FoundersLegacy

You can support our work here:   https://fundly.com/support-lifespirit-church/

The "White Supremacist" Big Lie

 "DON'T LOOK AT WHAT THEY STAND FOR
LOOK INSTEAD AT WHAT
WE SAY THEY REALLY MEAN"

I am neither a racist nor a white supremacist, though I am proud of my Caucasian roots; we are the great civilizers of the Western World. I am however an enthusiastic member of the often misrepresented alliance of independent men's clubs known as the “Proud Boys” (which has a lot in common with traditional American patriot groups from the 1700's, such as the Sons of Liberty, who were similarly both a hard-drinking fraternal organization and a political movement -- they weren't drinking tea before the Boston Tea Party).

I am heartedly tired of the miss-characterization of this and similar groups. Hence, this essay.

The Big Lie propaganda technique was perfected by the Nazis and the Communists, and brought to modern American politics by Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.  

Repeat the lie often enough, said Hitler, and the "masses" will believe it.  

The Soviets were masters of this vile art as well, and we see it in play as the CCP denies genocide against Chinese Muslims while carrying it out, in plain sight.

When the Big Lie is attached to the Alinsky dictum that the strongest propaganda is to personalize the conflict -- not a conflict of competing ideas, but rather, an ad hominin attack of character assassination and disinformation -- you know the fix is in...

These are the techniques being used by such Deep State shills as Antifa and the Democrat Left. American nationalists, conservatives and libertarians are the target.  The Big Lie is that anyone to the right of the extreme left is a "White Supremacist" -- a very convenient label to demonize the opposition to growing Deep State tyranny.

Why the amount of melanin in one's skin should have anything to do with the value of one's ideas is a canard that only a Marxist CRT drone could parse.  In classic Marxism ideas had no validity beyond the "class" holding them  In modern CRT "race" is substituted for "class." Same intellectual dishonesty.

Libertarians point out that collective nouns such as "race" or "class" are not capable of holding ideas.  Only individual humans think, plan and engage in human action, as the 20th Century's greatest philosopher of liberty, L. von Mises, noted. Reasonable humans judge ideas by their content, not by the "race" or other irrelevant, artificial category that may be applicable to the expresser of the ideas.

To elevate "race" or "class" or similar above individual thought is to make the same grave error as the Nazis and the Communists.  Their failure to perceive the reality of human action is why humanity has decisively rejected both forms of socialist ideology.

Let's apply this analysis to the recent attempt by the Deep State Left to label everyone who disagrees with their attempts to consolidate their illegitimate power as a "White Racist" or "White Supremacist."

A good example is the way the corporate mass media continually mislabels groups like the Proud Boys.

Just look at any Google Search.

The same propaganda terms are repeated over and over by various Deep State fronts such as ADL and SPLC.  They "know" the real beliefs of the Proud Boys although the PBs state, in their own foundational documents, clear opposition to racism.  

The "logic" behind this is something like: 'These White Racists are not proud of their beliefs so they express the opposite.  We know they are racists although they seek to recruit members without regard to race, religion, ethnicity and adult sexual preference.'

Only propagandists could come up with the Big Lie that the PBs are racist although they publicly proclaim they are not. While the Left may be that devious and duplicitous, hiding their beliefs to trick people into blindly following them, the PBs are proud to stand for what they believe.

There would be no reason to pretend, no benefit to lie.  The very purpose of the members is to express precisely the beliefs they profess, not hide them.

Of course Truth has nothing to do with the Big Lie. 

In deed the more preposterous the lie, as Hitler noted, the more ready the "masses" are to believe it. He was, of course, wrong about the nature of humanity and the total collapse of both nationalist and internationalist socialist ideology proves that.

Now, though, we face the danger of a resurgent collectivist ideology, championed by a globalist elite, that seeks to categorize and divide humans so as to maintain the system of fake ideas and fiat money that only serves the increasingly perverse desires of that elite.

Although labeled as evil nationalists and supremacists around the world the real humans on this planet, those who are calling themselves the Unvaccinated, the Awake, the Resistance, or the "Pure Bloods" (of every ethnicity, religion and race) have taken to the streets in unprecedented numbers, earlier this year every other month and more recently every Saturday, to resisted Lockdowns, Mandates, Medical Tyranny in all its forms.

The Proud Boys are just one example of the Human Supremacists who are resisting the dehumanization we have all faced over the course of the Declared Pandemic.  

They stand courageously for a program of traditional liberty and are willing to risk their freedom to preserve our liberty. That dozens of Proud Boy leaders are now prisoners of conscience, prisoners of war, since the false flag deep state coup of 6 January 2021 proves that.

Song Review: By God We'll Have Our Home Again

By God We'll Have Our Home Again

A battle march, By God We'll Have Our Home Again, penned in June of 2020, has captured widespread notoriety, becoming a rallying song of the Resistance.

Resistance to what? That varies from person to person.

Some see it as Resistance to tyrannical government, worldwide. Those governments are using public reaction to COVID-19, an overblown novel flu-like outbreak (with 99%+ survivor-ability), to impose unprecedented lockdowns and medical mandates, to the detriment of all but the elites. 

These new Resisters see local economies destroyed by the lockdowns while elites reap every higher incomes and dominance.  

They are beginning to realize that the inoculations and authorized "treatment" are far deadlier than the alleged disease. Some expect a "1346 Event" triggered by the escalating avalanche of adverse reactions being reported to vaccine reporting systems around the world. They are not alone in this; a number of respected holistic physicians are predicting just that.

What is a "1346 Event"?  That's the year the Black Death came to Eurasia.  Within two years between a third and half of the population was dead.  That is a real possibility now as well; perhaps a probability.  Such an event would fracture modern society and crash all trade and transport connections that make that society possible.  We see that starting in the supply chain problems of 2021.  The looming tyranny is the predicate for the collapse of both population and economy.

Others see the central threat as an imminent economic collapse, brought about by the globalist elite's use of "global climate change" or "overpopulation" or similar dystopian possibilities to grab ever more while ignoring the very real harm being done to people around the world -- the destruction of the world market and its potential for greater prosperity, replaced by restrictions and regulations intended to diminish humanity.  The opening images of the Song place it in just such a dystopian, very near, future.  

Patriots in many nations, though, resist, setting aside their fears, planning to be part of the remnant that is willing to expend everything for a chance at a free future.  These good folk, in every land, are the Resistance.

They resist by gathering in cities, towns and villages around the world,originally every other month on Saturday morning and being together without masks, without "social distancing" and in solidarity and comradery. Over the past three months the demonstrations have become weekly.  Resisters are doing this by the dozens, the thousands and now even the millions (see: Melbourne, November 2021). Although ignored by the elite-controlled media, there is ample proof of a growing, world wide Resistance. [1] 

Expressing oneself through voluntary association is an act of resistance. It is acting free in an increasingly unfree society.

The refrain "By God we'll have our home again" reflects the longings of a formerly free folk and their determination to retrieve their losses.

These words "By God we'll have our home again" bracket a series of complaints about the current situation, with declarations of strong intent to resist. "If there’s no fire to guide my way, then I will start my own."

Though it sounds like it could have been written several centuries ago, perhaps in Scotland or the Old South, it was written during the Year of the Declared Pandemic -- in Middle America. 

This version has strong visuals and the website hosting it expresses some opinions with which I disagree (and some with which I agree). I'm sharing this song for itself alone, as a self-contained, heartfelt message, not necessarily for this particular version's surroundings.

The message is clear, "By blood or sweat..." unless we resist, there is no hope.

https://themannerbund.com/2020/11/11/by-god-well-have-our-home-again/

A wise friend once told me "The side with the best songs wins."  One can only hope.

--------------------------------------

Lyrics

When there’s nothing left but the fire in my chest
        and the air that fills my lungs
I’ll hold my tears and trade my years
             for a glimpse at kingdom come.
On the other side of misery there’s a world we long to see.
The strife we share will take us there to relief and sovereignty.

Oh by god we’ll have our home again, by god we’ll have our home
By blood or sweat we’ll get there yet
By god we’ll have a home

In our own towns we’re foreigners now, our names are spat and cursed.
The headlines smack of another attack, not the last and not the worst.
Oh my fathers they look down on me, I wonder what they feel
To see their noble sons driven down beneath a cowards heel.

Oh by god we’ll have our home again, by god we’ll have our home
By blood or sweat we’ll get there yet
By god we’ll have a home 

The way is dark, the road is lost, my eyes they strain to see.
I struggle forth to find a friend to light the way for me.
Oh brothers can you hear my voice or am I all alone?
If there’s no fire to guide my way, then I will start my own.

Oh by god we’ll have our home again, by god we’ll have our home
By blood or sweat we’ll get there yet
By god we’ll have a home

Oh by god we’ll have our home again, by god we’ll have our home
By blood or sweat we’ll get there yet
By god we’ll have a home

[1]Here is a video compilation from two months ago.  Freedom gatherings have continued to expand since then:   http://www.opensourcetruth.com/be-inspired-video-of-world-wide-demonstration-4/

Sometimes Satire is Impossible

 A few weeks ago I posted a short FlipBook of quotations from Chairman Joe.  In recent days Memes have popped up that cause me to question the satirical accuracy of the FlipBook.  

It's not satire if it's real...

Certainly in an era hell-bent on tyranny, both petty and profound, humor is risky.

Herewith therefore FlipBook and Memes.

Read the FlipBook Here:
https://fliphtml5.com/hdrue/owwd

UPDATE -- THE FALL OF KABUL

The US retreat from Afghanistan shows us that the Imposed Head of the Regime was wrong about another entry in Chairman Joe's Little Red Book.  The Taliban did not need jet fighters and nukes to send the foreign troops away.  

Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires.  Defeated the British Empire twice in the 19th Century, the Soviet Union in the 20th and the USA in the 21st.  Perhaps it will be China's turn next.  The only conqueror who sort-of-succeeded was Alexander the Great and he did so by marrying an Afghani princess...

Meme Wars

 THE MEME WARS

With Memes the Medium is the Message
“The Politicos So Misconstrue Reality That
Their Memes are Never Dank Enough to Reach the Soul...” JG

-----------------------

We know from 20th Century media guru Marshall McLuhan that "the medium is the message..." [1] 

The medium that carries the information is its own message. That seems especially true of our 21st Century hyper-connected Internet virtual reality. The sign both contains the meaning and becomes the meaning. [2]

Political discourse is morphing into Meme Wars, and sometimes into street battles. The symbol becomes the meaning.

For example, consider the image of the US Capitol surrounded by barbed wire.

An Unintentional Meme

Even without words, a powerful message is displayed. The contrast between the Dome of the Capitol, an image rich in associate meanings such as the Sovereignty of the People and representative democracy contrasts with the barbed wire which conveys an opposite meaning.  Thus, the image embodies the tension between the image and the significance that defines the concept of the Meme.

I recommend reading Josh Weltman's book Seducing Strangers. [3] In it he makes a fascinating observation, one of many, starting with a term from Aristotle's Rhetoric, "Enthymeme." [4]

He connects the term to Internet "memes" -- a word that was originally a play on the term "gene." [5] A meme is an idea (embodied as a catchphrase, image or the like) which spreads throughout a society in a fashion not unlike the way genes spread through a population. Or like viruses are said to spread.

The point he makes is that there is a certain pattern to the use of Internet Memes that makes them powerful persuasive tools.  "If the first part... confuses, the second part must explain. And if the first part explains, the second part should confuse." [6]

Aristotle's Enthymeme is a logical construct where the "first term" of the syllogism is assumed to be understood by the listener.  The second and third terms of the argument are more persuasive since the first is already in the minds of the listener.

For Internet image memes this can be generalized to: If the image confuses (or shocks, or astounds or amuses = surprises) then the words should explain; if the image explains, the words should surprise.

An Advertising Meme

To a degree the image above is an example of the process. The retro-image is typical '60s California and carries with it the whole meme complex of California Living.  The words pull it into the present, starting with the then current year date and become a warning to those doing business in California that the changing rules will impact them and require attention.

The average attention span of the average Internet user is very short. Just seconds. [7] Notice mainstream TV, for example. The editing cuts (especially for ads) are often the length of a heartbeat, sometimes two or three. Hardly ever more.

Thus the Internet Meme, with its rhetorical tension between image and word, is an ideal tool to get the message through the medium and into the minds of your audience -- in the concise form needed by modern attention spans.

Internet communication is becoming a battleground of memes – a virtual Meme War. This is especially true regarding political opinion communications.  The carefully orchestrated censoring of Internet legacy media (such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook) which (shades of Apartheid) “banned” thousands of users (including your author) due to their political opinions, just prior to the 2020 USA elections, is widely seen as an attempt to control the election results by preventing the exposure of the way the elections were rigged. [8] During the same period that the legacy media were driving hundreds of millions away uncensored platforms such as Telegram.org experienced exponential growth. [9]

A good example of how Memes are used to organize political activism can be seen in the World Wide Demonstrations occurring every other month since March 2021, targeting the COVID Declared Pandemic masking, lockdowns and increasingly mandated Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) inoculations.

With the legacy media banning all mention of the Worldwide Demonstrations the organizers focused on using Telegram.org to coordinate.  The main Worldwide Telegram chat has 58,000 subscribers. [10] Every nation and many provinces, states and local communities have Worldwide chats as well.  This small group of people from across the world have orchestrated increasingly large and coordinated events, involving up to a hundred nations with some cities hosting hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, defying lockdown and masking mandates.

 

Under the powerful memes WWG1WGA (Where We Go One We Go All), “One Day Everyone Together” and #WeWillAllBeThere images are created that convey the world-wide scope of the effort. Note the use of the hashtag (#) which is itself an Internet Meme, originally intended to enable easier Internet searching of social media.  It now conveys the concept that what follows is a label that relates to meme-like communication. It becomes a meme of itself, thus both violating and confirming the semiotic concept of a sign that signifies something other than its self.

What makes a “good” (effective) meme? Why did my young interlocutor assert that the "Politicians" (Presumably in contrast to the Patriots) can’t meme?

He says it is because they have a highly distorted perception of Reality (in the Misean sense). Now I agree that statists of all stripes misperceive Reality, believing that collective nouns (like party, class, nation, corporation) can engage in Human Action.  They cannot, as Mises showed – only individuals think, plan and act. [12]

Misperceiving the basic nature of our social interactions must distort the human action that results from the dissatisfaction triggered by the misperception. Truth is a precondition for effective human action.

So what does Truth have to do with meming? Can a false meme be effective?  Is “propaganda” simply false meming?

Since the Internet meme is usually built on the tension between the image and the word, if either is false to the communication sought to be made, the power of the whole to communicate is diminished. But what if the person offering the communication wants to communicate a lie?  Then the rhetorical structure of the meme can be seen to be a two edged sword.

In ancient Greece rhetoric could be used to defend truth or to deny it.  To utter grand philosophic ideals, or to condemn Socrates to death.

My Millennial Connections tell me they call what is happening The Meme Wars. Some of the most popular online groups are built around what are called "Dank Memes." [11] The more dissonance between the image and the words, the better. And so it goes.

If the image astounds, the words explain. If the image explains, the words astound...

-----------

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message  - "The medium is the message is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in any message it would transmit or convey, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived."

[2] “In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste. .... the sign as a triadic relation as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity"” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_(semiotics)

[3] Workman Publishing, 2015 - ISBN 978-0-7611-8495-9 (Co-producer of the TV series, Mad Men)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthymeme  - "An enthymeme (Greek: ἐνθύμημα, enthumēma) is a rhetorical syllogism ... used in oratorical practice."

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme  - "In 2013 Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as being a meme deliberately altered by human creativity—distinguished from biological genes and Dawkins' pre-Internet concept of a meme which involved mutation by random change and spreading through accurate replication as in Darwinian selection."

[6] Weltman, - see page 25.

[7] http://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/  - You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish

[8] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/reuters-68-percent-of-republicans-say-election-was-e2-80-98rigged-e2-80-99/ar-BB1b8mzp

[9] https://www.theepochtimes.com/telegram-experiences-massive-growth-in-january-90-million-new-users_3668448.html

[10] https://t.me/worldwidedemonstration

[11] https://www.facebook.com/groups/1715753248636816/  [Gary Johnson's 2015 Dank Meme Stash was on Facebook but no longer accessible. A newer example of a libertarian-oriented meme stash is at https://t.me/toalibertarian  -- here is a collection of memes from that site:

               

Subtle is better...

[12] At the very end of Human Action, Mises warned us all - https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/936

 

“Man's freedom to choose and to act is restricted in a threefold way. There are first the physical laws to whose unfeeling absoluteness man must adjust his conduct if he wants to live. There are second the individual's innate constitutional characteristics and dispositions and the operation of environmental factors; we know that they influence both the choice of the ends and that of the means, although our cognizance of the mode of their operation is rather vague. There is finally the regularity of phenomena with regard to the interconnectedness of means and ends, viz., the praxeological law as distinct from the physical and from the physiological law.

 

The elucidation and the categorical and formal examination of this third class of laws of the universe is the subject matter of praxeology and its hitherto best-developed branch, economics. The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral, intellectual, technological, and therapeutical achievements of the last centuries have been built. It rests with men whether they will make the proper use of the rich treasure with which this knowledge provides them or whether they will leave it unused. But if they fail to take the best advantage of it and disregard its teachings and warnings, they will not annul economics; they will stamp out society and the human race.”

Ninth Circuit Ignores Second Amendment

Ninth Circuit Goes Back to English Law in the Middle Ages, Says Pre-U.S. Law in Hawaii Allows State’s Open Carry Restrictions

A federal court denied a challenge to Hawaii’s prohibition on the open carry of firearms in a lengthy and scholarly opinion released Wednesday — finding that Hawaiian law and practice both predate and supersede a broad application of the Second Amendment.

“Hawai‘i law began limiting public carriage of dangerous weapons, including firearms, more than 150 years ago — nearly fifty years before it became a U.S. territory and more than a century before it became a state,” the opinion explains in language foreshadowing the method of inquiry and eventual ruling in favor of anti-gun regulation.

https://lawandcrime.com/second-amendment/ninth-circuit-goes-back-to-english-law-in-the-middle-ages-says-pre-u-s-law-in-hawaii-allows-states-open-carry-restrictions/

So we now make Constitutional decisions that restrict the Second Amendment based ignoring the Bill of Rights!

"The thorough (and admittedly non-exhaustive) historical inquiry, necessarily long and time-consuming, begins by invoking 'a series of orders to local sheriffs that prohibited ‘going armed’ without the king’s permission' which were promulgated by “King Edward I and his successor, King Edward II.” The final laws cited in this section are two explicit prohibitions on the public carrying of firearms which were upheld by the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1876 and 1882."?

That means the very reason for the Second Amendment -- the British King's efforts to deny Americans our right to keep and bear arms (as in Concord and Lexington) becomes precedent to ignore the Amendment! 

This absurdity is followed by a reconstruction era Arkansas court, before the 14th Amendment jurisprudence developed, denying the right. What remains of the Amendment if I cannot go about armed?

The alleged conservative majority on the Supreme Court needs to clearly announce that our individual right to keep and bear arms trumps state restrictions, no matter how old the legal error which allowed them may be. Once we had a Federal Common Law until SCOTUS said it never was... 

Tribunals of Conscience

Private Tribunals of Conscience
Their History and Why They Matter
Ralph Fucetola, JD

Support the Efforts of the Tribunals
www.MarshallsofConscience.com

Tribunals of Conscience and Crimes Against Humanity

Over the past century and more, various private Tribunals of Conscience have focused the moral judgment of humanity in situations where official bodies have either failed to hold violators of human rights to account or have been themselves the perpetrators of horrific acts that shock the conscience.

These nongovernmental, private expressive associations must be distinguished from international legal tribunals, such as the Nuremberg Tribunals and the International Court of Justice, which are examples of multinational courts established by governments under international law to try cases of making war and of war crimes.

International Criminal Tribunals

Discussing the impact of International Criminal Tribunals, a recent paper from the Netherlands noted,

“The idea that a ruler’s power cannot be absolute, that there must be standards beyond the ruler to protect his citizens, has become the foundation stone of international human rights law. But the idea of international criminal law, and international criminal tribunals, goes a step further. In the extreme case where the ruler commits or condones crimes against his people, it takes not only the formulation of norms, but also the administration of punitive justice out of his hands and up to the international level, even to the point where he himself can be tried on criminal charges. . . .

Yet the symbolic power of international criminal tribunals may be far greater than their legal authority and capacity would suggest. In the cases of Georgia and Kenya, the threat of an ICC investigation appears to be spurring national investigations. Above all, in the former Yugoslavia and in the situations the ICC is currently investigating, the existence of the investigations has given local civil society actors room to discuss "difficult subjects" related to the recent past, such as the occurrence of massacres, the use of mass rape as a political instrument, the use of child-soldiers, and the issue of accountability in whatever shape.” [1]

Crimes Against Humanity

International Law is ambiguous with regard to Crimes Against Humanity (CAHs).

“Unlike genocide and war crimes, which have been widely recognized and prohibited in international criminal law since the establishment of the Nuremberg principles, there has never been a comprehensive convention on crimes against humanity, even though such crimes are continuously perpetrated worldwide in numerous conflicts and crises. There are eleven international texts defining crimes against humanity, but they all differ slightly as to their definition of that crime and its legal elements.” [2]

While the phrase “Crimes Against Humanity” (Class C Charges) was used in the post-World War II imposition of “victors justice” against CAH perpetrators on the losing side, “the charge of crimes against peace was a prerequisite to prosecution—only those individuals whose crimes included crimes against peace could be prosecuted by the Tribunal. In the event, no [independent] Class C charges were heard in Tokyo...” [3]

The failure of governments to respond to public concerns regarding CAH necessitates and justifies private persons constituting themselves into private associations for the purpose of condemning violations of basic humane standards.

Before the earliest Tribunals of Conscience there were several important international campaigns which contained elements later developed by the Tribunals.  These include campaigns against slavery which started even before the beginning of the 19^th Century. Often led by concerns of conscience, by religious libertarians such as the Quakers, the anti-slavery movement included a major element of the Tribunals:  the public condemnation of acts seen as immoral. [4]

Similarly, private commissions of investigation were established to oppose the horrific abuses in the Congo during the early 19^th Century when that territory was a personal fiefdom of the King of the Belgians.  Slavery enforced by brutalities, including dismemberment, was widely condemned and various private campaigns, often led by clergy, investigated and condemned the violations of humanitarian standards.  It was one of those campaigns where the phrase “Crimes Against Humanity” was first used. [5] Later the phrase was used in reference to the genocide against Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. [6]

Tribunals of Conscience

Various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have sought to define “Tribunals of Conscience”. 

The National Lawyers Guild, for example, has posited the following:

“A Tribunal of Conscience is a People’s Tribunal. Such tribunals date back more than six decades to the era of the Russell Tribunal on US war crimes in Viet Nam and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of People (Algiers, 1976). They provide an alternative forum for those who find no recourse in the formal institutions of the state or the international community. They are the place where the people judge the crimes of the state, not where the state judges the people.” [7]

Perhaps the earliest self-denoted Tribunal of Conscience was that convoked by B. Russell and J-P. Sartre regarding the War in Vietnam, in 1966.  After two public sessions in Europe the Tribunal published a strong condemnation of United States' actions in Vietnam in 1967.

Russel quoted Robert H. Jackson, the Chief Nuremberg Prosecutor, in justification of the establishment of the Tribunal:

“If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” — Justice Robert H. Jackson [8]

The Russel/Sartre Tribunal encouraged subsequent private efforts:

“Additional tribunals have been conducted in the following decades on the same model, using the denomination Russell Tribunal. E.g., The Russell Tribunal on Latin America focused on human rights violations in the military dictatorships of Argentina and Brazil (Rome, 1973), on Chile's military coup d'état (Rome, 1974–76), on the situation of Human Rights in Germany (1978), on the Threat of Indigenous Peoples of America (1982), on Human Rights in Psychiatry (Berlin, 2001), on Iraq (Brussels, 2004), and on Palestine (Barcelona, 2009–12).” [9]

These efforts have also continued beyond the Russel/Sartre model. The “Permanent Peoples' Tribunal was established at the behest of a member of the Senate of Italy in Bologna in the late 1970s.  It has held 46 sessions regarding separate Crimes Against Humanity over the ensuing decades. [10] These sessions have reviewed situations involving CAHs primarily against peoples who are not recognized as “nations”, such as the population of Western Sahara or the Kurds, who live in several Middle Eastern nations.

Recent Developments

Other Tribunals of Conscience have included the 2009 Agent Orange Tribunal of the International Democratic Lawyers Association [11]; the 2020 Belmarish Tribunal regarding the persecution of Julian Assange [12]; and the 2019 China Tribunal which states:

“The China Tribunal is an independent people’s tribunal established to inquire into forced organ harvesting from, amongst others, prisoners of conscience in China and to investigate what criminal offences, if any, have been committed by state or state-approved bodies, organisations or individuals in China that may have engaged in forced organ harvesting. “ [13]

During the 2020-2021 period of the “Declared Pandemic” the Natural and Common Law Tribunal for Public Health and Justice was established to hold the perpetrators of what the Tribunal found to be the “Genocidal Technologies Pandemic” accountable.  It entered a formal judgment against various state-actors, politicians, businesses and NGOs for their various roles in triggering the false-flag “pandemic” and rushing “unavoidably unsafe” vaccines, including novel class of “gene altering” injections into production and deployment. [14]

Humanity Benefits from Tribunals of Conscience

“What”, the skeptic may ask, “is the value of private Tribunals of Conscience to humanity?”

We live in a world where the promise of global peace and prosperity has become a distortion used to empower globalist elites with their demonstrated eugenocidal agenda (most recently, through the Declared COVID Pandemic), where relations among nation-states resemble the brutal behavior of thugs -- a true Hobbesian international order. The new religion of this world is Statism, the worship of the institutions of the States, including their judicial institutions and administrative indiscretions.

As the lack of intellectual viability of Statism in its various racial, religious, national, international, bureaucratic, imperialist and other forms becomes increasingly exposed and become, perhaps, increasingly irrelevant in an economically globalized, blockchain-enabled, post-singularity world, an alternative to state-sponsored "justice" is needed.

The juridical subjects of International Law, "International Actors," include nation-states (even micro-states like the Vatican), a certain few private associations (like the Red Cross or Sovereign Knights of Malta), and international agencies like the UN along with its associated institutions (such as certain privileged NGOs and "specialized agencies" -- WHO and FAO, for example). Not included in this list are actual private persons, natural or cultural Nations, even juridical persons such as private associations and registered corporations.

The humans and human organizations with which we usually interact are missing from the globalist structure of international relations.

We individuals do not exist in the currently dominant Statist view of international law.

In the eyes of Globalist International Actors, we real people and our private associations are little more than disregarded entities. This state of affairs is entirely unsatisfactory to humane individuals.

Consider the long march of human history and how treating individual humans as objects led us to endless millennia of Statist imperial warfare, culminating the 20th Century's killing fields and nuclear incinerations.

Consider the historic role of Statism in the imposition of what libertarian philosopher and lawyer Lysander Spooner saw as the Great Monopolies: the horror of slavery, vicious state churches, the legal "incapacities of women" and the King's trade monopolies – all Statist institutions which have repeatedly perpetrated Crimes Against Humanity.

How can humanity trust the very Statist institutions which have so violated humane standards, by committing Crimes Against Humanity to exact meaningful justice for their own misdeeds, no matter how egregious?

Even as the vicious old concepts, chattel slavery, religious and racial bigotry, institutionalized inequality of women and various others, have become anathema to civilized people, the very concept a "sovereign" State, not subject to the same rule of law that applies to private persons, must also be rejected. States and their political elites must be subject to true Justice or there is no Justice.

Clearly, that justice will not come from the very source of the criminality.  Private persons of conscience must take the lead to expose and publicly condemn Crimes Against Humanity.  This is the role, which is of inestimable value to humanity, of Private Tribunals of Conscience.

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[1] https://www.academia.edu/4171788/International_Criminal_Tribunals

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Military_Tribunal_for_the_Far_East#Charges

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity#Abolition_of_the_slave_trade

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity#First_use

[6] https://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.160/current_category.7/affirmation_detail.html

[7] www.inquirycommission.org / https://www.nlginternational.org/report/Final_Preliminary_ITC_Verdict.pdf

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal#Subsequent_Tribunals

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Peoples%27_Tribunal#List_of_sessions

[11] https://vn-agentorange.org/edmaterials/paris_2009_tribunal_decision_2.15.10.pdf

[12] https://popularresistance.org/the-belmarsh-tribunal/ 

[13] https://chinatribunal.com/

[14]  http://www.peaceinspace.org

Also to be posted at:
International Journal of Natural Health, Science and Policy
http://www.inhere.org/international-journal-of-nhsp/