The Criminality of the State

[P]erhaps, our people might get into their heads some glimmering of the fact that the State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation – that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class – that is, for a criminal purpose.

- Albert Jay Nock

Its Happening Here

"The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."- Frank Zappa

And so it goes. Today's news includes an item about opinion tracking software that will be used to identify anti-American (Bush?) sentiment, ostensibly amongst our foreign freinds and neighbors, but ominously funded by the Department of Homeland Security.

The United States has always been overrated as a democratic system. We are at best an almagation of a 19th century bourgeois republic and an oligarchy of extreme wealth. Democracies that have been established since 1789 have progressively become more, well, Democratic. The United States as a political/economic system capable of empowering its majority consituents, and responding to their needs is woefully deficient as compared to the parlimentary social democracies that flourish in the rest of the first world, (and in most of the second world).

The insults to democracy that have occurred in the past 6 years: stolen elections, suspension of habeus corpus, exaltation of the executive branch, underscore the true nature of our system. It was never intended to be a popular republic. Founded on the Roman model, it seems destined for blatant Caesarism.