Last Updated on October 2, 2021 by Constitutional Militia
PART SIX of this Commentary explained what the Establishment and common Americans might do in the face of adoption by the Islamic world of gold and silver as media of exchange. Completing that analysis..
E. Finally, in all of this, average Americans should not assume self-righteous airs. They deserve to be in danger. And it is their responsibility to take appropriate action. For, according to the theory of “self-government” on which the United States supposedly operates, they have brought all of these perils upon themselves.
1. A people’s accountability for the actions of their government is proportionate to that government’s representative nature. If public officials are chosen through fair elections, and their powers defined and limited by a constitution which the people themselves retain the right and power to interpret, amend, and enforce, then the people are ultimately responsible for every illegal act that those officeholders perpetrate in their name and that the people refuse or fail to punish. The principals must answer for the damages caused by the acts of their agents that the principals empowered and tolerated those agents to commit.
If, knowing or with reckless disregard of the facts, the people actively aid and abet, accede to, applaud, approve, accept, or even acquiesce in the dishonest and criminal acts of public officials and the special interests that suborn them, they are just as responsible as the perpetrators. Perhaps even more so, because it is the people’s legal and moral duty, as well as their own self-interest, to arrest such behavior and arraign the malefactors before the bar of justice, inasmuch as the people put the malefactors into positions of power in the first place.
The Constitution makes pellucid in its Preamble that We the People are the authors of, and thus necessarily both legally and morally accountable for, the laws of the United States and their applications and misapplications by the public officials We the People select to enact and administer them. So, if We the People stand idly by, while malevolent officeholders commit criminal acts in their name and under the color of their laws, their silence betokens consent, their consent imputes guilt, and their guilt renders them fit subjects for retaliation by the victims of the officeholders’ crimes.
A blind, unthinking patriotism cannot excuse inaction. A patriot loves his country and stands behind its legitimate authority. The essence of America is her Declaration of Independence and Constitution. A citizen who does not check every act of every public official against those documents is no patriot, only a chauvinist. No one may hide behind the plea that he has a duty to support the government “right or wrong.” For if public officials are wrong (in the sense of violating the Constitution), then to that extent they do not constitute “the government” at all; their acts are not “governmental” acts but mere private wrongdoing; and every patriot’s constitutional duty is to oppose them and rectify the situation. Indeed, that people demand what is right in the face of official wrong is the essence and the test of true patriotism.
On the other side, neither can it be a valid reason for inaction that the present political system is thoroughly corrupt. If it is, who let it degenerate to that level, if not the American people themselves? Who allows it to remain corrupt, if not they? And who will ever correct the situation, if they do nothing?
That certain individuals in temporary control of the apparatus of the General Government have launched a global attack against the Islamic world (and, truth be told, against Islam itself) is no excuse for common Americans’ complicity or inaction. As the first, most important, and defining principle of constitutionalism teaches, not all acts that persons in public office may perform are legitimate acts of government. No electoral mandate, party platform, political policy, or majority vote in Congress or the Supreme Court can justify a war of imperial aggrandizement. As the Preamble to the Constitution emphasizes, We the People delegated powers to the General Government “to provide for the common defence”, not to attack other nations. Indeed, aggression against other nations violates “the Law of Nations”, “Offenses” against which the Constitution empowers Congress “[t]o define and punish,”[1] not to approve and facilitate. So, their perpetrating a policy of international aggression is a sufficient and compelling reason for removing from office—and, one would hope, prosecuting to the utmost—not only those who actually put such a policy into operation but also those who advise, devise, and promote it, as well as those who have the power and duty to intervene, but stand silently by, watching everything but doing nothing. That, surely, is the fundamental and fully justifiable lesson of the war-crimes trials of Nuremberg and Tokyo, which are now part and parcel of the precedents that make up “the Law of Nations”.
Therefore, if domestic public officials in this country oppress foreigners—and, on the basis of the predictable consequences of that oppression, then attempt to subject Americans to the further oppression of a domestic police state—We the People have a duty (and, indeed, a desperate self-interest), not to obey them, but to change the personnel in, or if necessary even to pull down the structure of, the erstwhile “government”—or be held at least morally accountable before the entire world. As the Declaration of Independence emphasizes, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” “[I]t is their duty”. Yet what course of action are far too many Americans following? Resistance at the polls? Remonstrances to political leaders? Even self-preparedness for an ultimate day of reckoning with the monetary, banking, and other crises the Establishment has made inevitable? Or a self-imposed reluctance to face reality, coupled with retreat into the fantasylands of “sports”, “entertainment”, and general hedonism—while continually re-electing the evildoers or their political clones?
2. A collapse of the Establishment’s Ponzified monetary and banking systems might strip Americans of their black glasses of willful blindness. The key qualification, of course, is “might”. That vanishingly few Americans have awakened to their victimization, and identified the villains responsible for it, suggests that far too many Americans may never arouse themselves from their self-imposed slumber. Admittedly, that the Establishment’s monetary and banking policies rest on lies, larceny, and thoroughgoing lawlessness may not be as obvious as that Pearl Harbor suffered no “sneak attack” or that the cross fire in Dealey Plaza was the work of no “lone gunman”. Nonetheless, the evidence is accessible to and understandable by every American of average intelligence who bothers to search the open literature. Indeed, common sense teaches that the monetary and banking systems cannot be less corrupt than the total political-cum-economic regime of which they constitute important parts—and in the nature of things must be expected to be even more septic, the love of money being the root of all evil.
From even superficial research, every American can discover the absence of any truly patriotic “public interest” in this country’s monetary and banking systems. And, just as easily, Americans can uncover the presence of parasitic special interests, composed of a small number of identifiable individuals self-consciously organized in families, groups, corporations, and so on, who originally put central banking across in 1913, who systematically expanded its powers thereafter, and who now ruthlessly run it for their and their clients’ personal advantages (and, as a necessary consequence, the personal disadvantages of everyone else).[2] Yet, with all this information readily at hand, most Americans have failed to educate themselves. And the few exceptional individuals have proven unable, so far, to translate their knowledge into a movement for monetary and banking reform—proving, once again, that no man is likely to be taken for a prophet in his own country.
In historical context, this is hardly surprising. In the last mammoth crisis of fractional-reserve central banking in the United States—the banking collapse of 1931-1932 and the Great Depression that the Roosevelt regime perpetuated until World War II—Americans by the tens of millions allowed themselves to be deluded, manipulated, and even stampeded by the Establishment into sinking the vampiric fangs of political banking and political currency into America’s throat even more deeply than ever before. Proving not only that Experience keeps a dear school, but also (and more depressingly) that her students rarely learn the lessons she teaches most emphatically.
So, if new monetary and banking crises were to occur in the near future, in the course of Muslims’ adoption of silver and gold as their media of exchange, whom would many Americans be likely to blame? Or, more realistically put, whom would the Establishment deceive many Americans into blaming?
On any moral, political, or economic calculus, no blame should properly attach to Muslims. All peoples, everywhere in the world, have a natural, inalienable right to choose whatever honest media of exchange they desire. And of all contemporary media of exchange, the only ones that can be deemed as honest as human endeavors allow are silver and gold. Moreover, Americans’ own Constitution requires that their governments—National, State, and Local—employ silver and gold as their official media of exchange, to the exclusion of any other. So, Americans cannot possibly fault Muslims (or anyone else) for using the very media of exchange We the People themselves have mandated for the United States.
Rather, Americans should condemn their own erstwhile public officials, and the special interests that pull those Pinocchios’ strings, for leading this country into such a morass by launching a perpetual global assault on Islam while America remains vulnerable to the most effective—indeed, devastating—counterattack Muslims could employ in defense of themselves, their countries, and their religion.
The Constitution provides that “[t]he United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”[3] This presumes that what the Preamble calls the “more perfect Union” of “[t]he United States” will collectively remain “a Republican Form of Government,” too, because the Union consists of individual States that are each “guarantee[d]” to be of such “Form.” No republic, though, can survive if its ultimate guardians, its people, remain mere dumb spectators while their own erstwhile “representatives” engage in coldly calculated, systematic deracination, depravation, depredation, and demolition of their country.[4] In this, too, perhaps Americans can learn a lesson, or heed a warning, from the Islamic world: As the Sunan Al-Nasa’i[5] recites,
A man asked the Messenger of Allah: “What kind of jihad is better?” He replied, “A word of truth in front of an oppressive ruler!”
Footnotes:
1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 10.
2. See M. Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy (1995), at; [Read] J. Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (1986); G. Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (1963); W. Greider, The Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (1987).
3. Article IV, Section 4.
4. Just so that no one intent on misconstruing my words can attribute the promotion of “racism” to me, the reader should understand that I use the word “deracination” to mean a “detachment from the customs and traditions of one’s country”. See Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1971), at 607. This preemptive explanation would not be necessary were the political world not filled with people who are as unscrupulous as they are illiterate.
5. One of six leading collections of hadith, recognized by Sunni Muslims.
©2006 Edwin Vieira, Jr. – All Rights Reserved.
