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Title: Is the U.S. Government Evil? You Tell Me
Source:
The Rutherford Institute
URL Source: https://www.rutherford.org/publicat ... s._government_evil_you_tell_me
Published: Apr 23, 2018
Author: John Whitehead
Post Date: 2018-04-25 08:08:11 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 2020
Comments: 49
Is the U.S. government evil? You tell me. This is a government that treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, tracked, tortured, and eventually eliminated once they’ve outgrown their usefulness. This is a government that treats human beings like lab rats to be caged, branded, experimented upon, and then discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects. This is a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn. This is a government that wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and then turns a blind eye and a deaf ear while its henchmen rape and kill and pillage. No, this is not a government that can be trusted to do what is right or moral or humane or honorable but instead seems to gravitate towards corruption, malevolence, misconduct, greed, cruelty, brutality and injustice. This is not a government you should trust with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms. This is the face of evil, disguised as a democracy, sold to the people as an institution that has their best interests at heart. Don’t fall for the lie. The government has never had our best interests at heart. Endless wars. The government didn’t have our best interests at heart when it propelled us into endless oil-fueled wars and military occupations in the Middle East that wreaked havoc on our economy, stretched thin our military resources and subjected us to horrific blowback. A police state. There is no way the government had our best interests at heart when it passed laws subjecting us to all manner of invasive searches and surveillance, censoring our speech and stifling our expression, rendering us anti-government extremists for daring to disagree with its dictates, locking us up for criticizing government policies on social media, encouraging Americans to spy and snitch on their fellow citizens, and allowing government agents to grope, strip, search, taser, shoot and kill us. Battlefield America. Certainly the government did not have our best interests at heart when it turned America into a battlefield, transforming law enforcement agencies into extensions of the military, conducting military drills on domestic soil, distributing “free” military equipment and weaponry to local police, and desensitizing Americans to the menace of the police state with active shooter drills, color-coded terror alerts, and randomly conducted security checkpoints at “soft” targets such as shopping malls and sports arenas. School-to-prison pipeline. It would be a reach to suggest that the government had our best interests at heart when it locked down the schools, installing metal detectors and surveillance cameras, adopting zero tolerance policies that punish childish behavior as harshly as criminal actions, and teaching our young people that they have no rights, that being force-fed facts is education rather than indoctrination, that they are not to question governmental authority, that they must meekly accept a life of censorship, round-the-clock surveillance, roadside blood draws, SWAT team raids and other indignities. Secret human experimentation. One would also be hard-pressed to suggest that the American government had our best interests at heart when it conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. The government reasoned that it was legitimate (and cheaper) to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks. As the Associated Press reports, “The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.” In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment so that the government could study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners were implanted with testicles from livestock and executed convicts so the government could test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis so the government could study the disease. In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses so the government could monitor their symptoms. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis so the government could work on a cure. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu so the government could experiment with a flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days, so the government could study the impact. In New York, prisoners at a reformatory prison were split into two groups to determine how a deadly stomach virus was spread: the first group was made to swallow an unfiltered stool suspension, while the second group merely breathed in germs sprayed into the air. In Staten Island, children with mental retardation were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured. Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation. For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men (African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics, etc.). As NPR reports, “All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren't recorded on the subjects' official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn't tell doctors what happened to them.” And then there was the CIA’s Cold War-era program, MKULTRA, in which the government began secretly experimenting on hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel by dosing them with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug secretly slipped into their drinks, so that the government could explore its uses in brainwashing and controlling targets. The CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down. Similarly, the top-secret Montauk Project, the inspiration for the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, allegedly was working to develop mind-control techniques that would then be tested out on locals in a nearby village, triggering crime waves or causing teenagers to congregate. Sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theorists, I know, but the government’s track record of treating Americans like lab rats has been well-documented, including its attempts to expose whole communities to various toxins as part of its efforts to develop lethal biological weapons and study their impact and delivery methods on unsuspecting populations. In 1949, for instance, the government sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents. In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg using generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas. In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning. Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the U.S. government really changed? Ask yourself: Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry? Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights? Or, having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, has the government simply gotten craftier and more conniving, better able to hide its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.” In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” More recently, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study in Uganda even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children died and many others were left disabled. What kind of government perpetrates such horrific acts on human beings, whether or not they are American citizens? Is there any difference between a government mindset that justifies experimenting on prisoners because they’re “cheaper than chimpanzees” and a government that sanctions jailhouse strip searches of individuals charged with minor infractions simply because it’s easier on a jail warden’s workload? John Lennon was right: “We’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.” Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just recently, for example, a Fusion Center in Washington State (a Dept. of Homeland Security-linked data collection clearinghouse that shares information between state, local and federal agencies) inadvertently released records on remote mind control tactics (the use of “psycho-electronic” weapons to control people from a distance or subject them to varying degrees of pain). Mind you, there is no clear evidence to suggest that these particular documents were created by a government agency. Then again, the government—no stranger to diabolical deeds or shady experiments carried out an unsuspecting populace—has done it before. After all, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity. For too long now, the American people have been persuaded to barter their freedoms for phantom promises of security and, in the process, have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils. No matter how you rationalize it, the lesser of two evils is still evil. There’s a scene in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in which a rogue war profiteer (Harry Lime) views human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children. Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?” “Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins. “Victims?” responds Lime, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” Lime’s callous indifference is no different from the U.S. government’s calculating cost-benefit analyses. In the eyes of the government, “we the people” are chump change. So why do Americans keep believing the government has their best interests at heart? Why do Americans keep trusting the government? Why do Americans pretend not to know what is so obvious to anyone with eyes and ears and a conscience? As Carl Sagan recognized, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” We should never have trusted the government in the first place. That’s why the Founders came up with a Bill of Rights. They recognized that without binding legal protections affirming the rights of the people, the newly instituted American government would be no better than the old British despot. It was Thomas Jefferson who warned, “In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Unfortunately, we didn’t heed the warning. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government has ripped the Constitution to shreds and left us powerless in the face of its power grabs, greed and brutality. So how do you fight back? How do you fight injustice? How do you push back against tyranny? How do you vanquish evil? You don’t fight it by hiding your head in the sand. Stop being apathetic. Stop being neutral. Stop being accomplices. Start recognizing evil and injustice and tyranny for what they are. Demand government transparency. Vote with your feet (i.e., engage in activism, not just politics). Refuse to play politics with your principles. Don’t settle for the lesser of two evils. As British statesman Edmund Burke warned, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing.” It’s time for good men and women to do something. And soon. “The greatest evil is not now done … in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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#1. To: Deckard (#0)
While there is a still a chance. I do not go to church every time the doors are opened, but I love Jesus Christ. I am only human and fail Him daily. I believe Jesus is the Son of God, was born of a virgin, was crucified on a cross, died for my sins and rose from the dead and that He loves us dearly, and is faithful to forgive us of our sins. But He says that if you deny me in front of your friends I will deny you in front of my Father. Can I get an Amen!
I do not think any government is evil. It is a structure that is necessary at least since time of agricultural revolution. The question is what type of people are using it, and what influence it is under.
I read that far and stopped. WHY would the US government test mustard gas on minorities or anyone else in WW-2,when they had tons of data on mustard gas from WW-1? Prior to WW-2 there was an international agreement that NO nation would use nerve or poison gas. US Soldiers weren't even issued gas masks,and I doubt the other armies were,either. In FACT,there were still plenty of WW-1 veterans who were mustard gas victims still living in the 1940's that were being treated in VA hospitals,so there was no need to create new patients to learn how to treat it. My mother's first husband as a WW-1 vet that had been gassed,and I remember seeing and visiting with him in the 50's. He died sometime in the 60's. He looked like something from the Walking Dead and was never able to work or hold a job after he was gassed. He lived off of his army retirement pension,which was shamefully small back then,and the kindness of local farmers who gave him free places to live and even paid his electric bill,as well as gave him a little patch of land and seeds so he could do stuff like grow watermelons,cantaloupes,etc,etc,etc so he would have something to do and a way to get a little pocket money. It is amazing the lies people can dream up to promote their agenda,and expect people to believe it. BTW,WHERE the hell would the military even be able to get 60 thousand blacks,Asians,and "Hispanic" (was there even any such critter back then?) soldiers in the 30's and 40's because there weren't that many even in the military. I am just guessing,but I'm betting there were less than 10 thousand minority total in all branches of the US military back then. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
The US government is not the paragon of virtue it would have us believe, however, if criticism is offered it is considered offensive. The soviets used to call americans imperialists and we dismissed this as propaganda perhaps they knew something we didn't. Yes, they were imperialists too. What we have here is a bad case of paranoia and any nation that has been attacked is paranoid. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely so the answer to the question posed by the thread is yes.
Government is a just a human toy. Men who kill other men, for anything other than the fact that the other man has killed a third man, are evil.
That is a rationalisation permitting evil to exist. In fact humans are the toys of government
In fact, government doesn't even exist. Only the human soul really exists - even the body dies and breaks to pieces, but the soul goes on and on. In regret if it killed others before meeting its own end.
Heavy..... What's your take on Goldberg's book?
In fact humans are the toys of government Both is to some extent correct. But the fact is that people can exist without the government while government cannot exist without people. You need people to be in it, and you need the people to be ruled over.
what we don't need is megalomaniacs and paranoid dillusional idiots who seem to be prevalent in government
I've read your review. I haven't had the chance to read an online chapter yet. Because you sincerely asked me to give you my thoughts, I don't want to give a half-assed off-the-cuff response. I'll read the online chapter and, if I can stand his writing style, I will probably actually get the book and read it. I will tell you going into it, just from what I have seen so far, I am prejudiced against any claim that all good things about the modern world came out of England and English thought. I would say that, on balance, most of the modern world and its thought came out of France, not England. The pretension that England is the epicenter of change in the modern world is not borne out by historical fact. There's a reason that Buckingham Palace and the Russian Summer Palace look like copies of Versailles and not the reverse. Americans speak English, but we're not English. The greatest economic and social impact that English economics had on America was the import - and then imposition by law - of slavery throughout the American colonies. To wit: Pennsylvania and Delaware province, in accordance with their religious principles, outlawed slavery in that colony in 1700, but the English Privy Council overrode them and declared that slavery was a fundamental right of Englishmen, which could not be outlawed in the colonies. To the charge "everybody did that", I will reply that no, everybody DIDN'T do that, but that among those who DID do it, the English and the Dutch were far worse, both in terms of sheer numbers and also in terms of brutality. I'm going to have a problem with Goldberg on two levels if he goes where I think he is going to go. The whole "Rah rah England and all good things that came out of her", because it is not historically true, and then the matter of the glorious American past if it does not focus squarely on the matter of slavery, and how slavery was the source of the wealth of the dominant parts of the country until the industrial and banking revolution. A third element I will not ignore is that American success is in very large part due to the fact that Americans colonized an empty, resource-rich continent in the middle of the temperate zone, essentially inheriting a whole new Europe. The natural advantages of that, and not any particular ingenuity of ideas, are the primary source of American size, power and success. So I will be looking to see how Goldberg addresses those factors. And if he writes a conservative feel-good book: America WAS great because it was English, Protestant and free - but now that it's losing those characters everything is shit - I'm going to have a problem with that, because it's a comic book, and it isn't true. I FEAR that is what I am going to read, and I'm almost prejudging it - but I am not going to. I'll give Goldberg a fair read, and I'll give you a fair review. Just a heads up beforehand: if he goes where I expect him to go, I'm going to give the critique I've already given. Any true book on American history has to deal with the fact of slavery and segregation and treat it with the same moral seriousness as any book on the economic system of the Third Reich has to frankly face the slave labor camps that turned into death camps. Certain moral sins are so great they MUST be addressed in any real history. I know that addressing the legacy of slavery, segregation and the business with the Indians is very painful for the conservative American mindset. I also know that if those things are not addressed, that what is produced without acknowledging the sins and shortcuts is useless, because it isn't true. Now I'll read the book, and I'll hope Goldberg surprises me.
People can subsist without government, and die in their thirties. Human beings are not equipped to live alone in the natural world. We are animals that require a society to thrive.
San people (in South Africa) lived in paradise before Zulu and white governments reached them
But they had their own government. Human beings can live just fine without EUROPEAN government, but they do not thrive without ANY government. Government may be low-key, by consensus, and traditionally organized along clan lines, with elders and the like, but it's still government. There are still social rules, with some sort of enforcement mechanism, and a body of deciders above the individual. Individuals living alone in nature rarely fare well, and don't live nearly as long as those who live in society. The existence of society means the existence of government. Government is the mechanism by which societies are societies and not disassociated mobs.
But they had their own government. Not really. They live in small extended hunter-gatherer families. They have shamans who have miracle cures that big pharma is stealing from them. They live long. Oldest human race, 60 thousands years old that lived in the same place, DNA that is root for blacks, whites and yellows.
Go look them up. I did. They do have loose tribal government.
They had it before Zulu and white invasions? With taxes paid in berries?
it is not politically correct to suggest zulu dont belong in South Africa but the white man found a truely vacant land and what happens, the blacks want to take it away
Where we go, when, and what we do about Cazoo, who killed Aba - these decisions were made by the group, collectively. And that is government.
I think it was sparsely populated, not truly empty. But of course the logic followed. The Dutch found it and settled it. The English did not. The English simply showed uo and carried out a campaign of concentration camps and genocide against the Dutch until the Dutch submitted to English rule and paid taxes to the English. The English are the criminals here - THEY didn't find the land empty, and they came and treated white people the way they treated other people elsewhere from India to Arcadia to Ireland, to the South. So, really, the problem is not white people. It's Anglo-Saxon white people. THEY are the most marauding of criminals. Of course, there's this thing called "blowback", and now it is Londonistan that is being colonized, aggressively, and the culture of the English that is snuffing itself out. Karma's a bitch.
That is why they could not have any government. Did Eskimos have any government before outsiders came? Can you imagine - presidential igloo, igloo prisons, banking system on ice with splinters of precious wood as a reserve. Taxes in frozen walrus fat. Police sleds made from the bones.
Yes. Not very deep government, but government nevertheless. When people en masse make decisions that determine the boundaries of what individuals can and cannot do, that is government. It may be very LIGHT government, with very few restrictions and taboos, but it's still government. I think you're using the term "government" to mean highly organized, bureaucratic government, whereas I am using it as a generic term for the assertion of collective human authority to make laws that bind individuals. A comparable thing would be the difference between "religion" and "organized religion". The eskimos didn't have organized government, but they did have a lawmaking body and an enforcement mechanism - the individual did not live solely according to his own whims and beliefs. So they had government. ORGANIZED government? Not much of that, I agree.
They didn't. Government becomes possible when there is a surplus that the ruling can extract from the ruled.
We're lost in semantics. Government: n. the act or process of governing The Bushmen and the Eskimos have that. All tribes and clans and families do. Organized, formal government? No, but government? Yes.
Name one North American Indian tribal government that extracted surplus from its members.
The problem is not that surplus is extracted, it is that those without surplus are forced to contribute
The problem is not that surplus is extracted, it is that those without surplus are forced to contribute Silly comment.. Name one North American Indian tribal government that forcibly extracted (made them contribute) goods or food from its members for its leaders use.
Name ANY North American Indian tribal government.
The Bushmen and the Eskimos have that. All tribes and clans and families do. OK, then all beings including fish, hills and stars have the Government. Like in the Psalms.
Name ANY North American Indian tribal government. When Europeans got here there were thousands, according to historians. NONE that I've ever read about, --- extracted surplus from its members. --- And I've read a lot on the subject of Indian history.. Obviously, you haven't. -- In fact, it's apparent from the way you reply, that you don't read much about anything..
When Europeans got here there were thousands, according to historians. Name one. Aztec Empire? They did have surplus. Name one American Indian government that functioned without surplus.
Obviously, you haven't. -- In fact, it's apparent from the way you reply, that you don't read much about anything.. You see, reading a lot is not enough. Even collecting a lot of facts is not enough. Because there is knowledge and there is understanding. The two are very different. You can know everything and understand nothing.
Name one North American Indian tribal government that extracted surplus from its members... Of course the Aztec empire had surpluses, as most kingdoms do, and that despotic king and his government undoubtedly violently extracted surplus. Name a tribal government that did.
You missed the point of the exchange completely.
The North American tribes were more democratic, more socialist than that which succeeded them, but they had no need of taxation, they knew the meaning of to each his need from those who possessed
More socialist isn't a good thing is it?
Not all "socialism" is bad, it can lead to extremism such in the communist state, but a society that looks after people isn't necessarily bad. There is a lot to be learned from the way some more primitive societies related to each other. Where mistakes are made is in compromise, the right tries to do something and is compromised by the left. The left tries to do something and is compromised by the right. Some lunatic suggested this is democracy
Not correct; it comes from economic theory based on Hegal, Kant and Marx.
Really am I repeating authors I have never read. Democracy is not consensus
What on Earth do you mean? Please explain your position.
Comments (41 - 49) not displayed.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestIt’s time for good men and women to do something. And soon.
#2. To: Deckard, Vicomte13, Tooconservative, sneakypete (#0)
#3. To: Deckard (#0)
(Edited)
For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men (African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics, etc.). As NPR reports, “All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren't recorded on the subjects' official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn't tell doctors what happened to them.”
#4. To: Deckard (#0)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing.”
#5. To: Deckard (#0)
#6. To: Vicomte13 (#5)
Government is a just a human toy
#7. To: paraclete (#6)
n fact humans are the toys of government
#8. To: Vicomte13 (#7)
(Edited)
Only the human soul really exists -
#9. To: paraclete, Vicomte13 (#6)
(Edited)
"Government is a just a human toy"
#10. To: A Pole (#9)
#11. To: tpaine (#8)
What's your take on Goldberg's book?
#12. To: A Pole (#9)
But the fact is that people can exist without the government
#13. To: Vicomte13 (#12)
People can subsist without government, and die in their thirties
#14. To: A Pole (#13)
San people (in South Africa) lived in paradise before Zulu and white governments reached them
#15. To: Vicomte13 (#14)
San people (in South Africa) lived in paradise before Zulu and white governments reached them
#16. To: A Pole (#15)
Not really.
#17. To: Vicomte13 (#16)
They do have loose tribal government.
#18. To: A Pole (#17)
#19. To: A Pole (#17)
hey had it before Zulu and white invasions? With taxes paid in berries?
#20. To: paraclete (#18)
#21. To: Vicomte13 (#20)
I think it was sparsely populated, not truly empty.
#22. To: A Pole (#21)
That is why they could not have any government. Did Eskimos have any government before outsiders came?
#23. To: Vicomte13 (#22)
The eskimos didn't have organized government, but they did have a lawmaking body and an enforcement mechanism - the individual did not live solely according to his own whims and beliefs. So they had government.
#24. To: A Pole (#23)
#25. To: A Pole (#23)
Government becomes possible when there is a surplus that the ruling can extract from the ruled.
#26. To: tpaine (#25)
Name one North American Indian tribal government that extracted surplus from its members
#27. To: paraclete (#26)
Name one North American Indian tribal government that extracted surplus from its members
#28. To: tpaine (#25)
Name one North American Indian tribal government that extracted surplus from its members.
#29. To: Vicomte13 (#24)
Government: n. the act or process of governing
#30. To: A Pole (#28)
Name one North American Indian tribal government that extracted surplus from its members.
#31. To: tpaine (#30)
(Edited)
Name ANY North American Indian tribal government.
#32. To: tpaine (#30)
(Edited)
And I've read a lot on the subject of Indian history..
#33. To: A Pole (#31)
Aztec Empire? They did have surplus.
#34. To: tpaine (#33)
#35. To: tpaine (#27)
#36. To: paraclete (#35)
#37. To: A K A Stone (#36)
More socialist isn't a good thing is it?
#38. To: paraclete (#37)
Where mistakes are made is in compromise, the right tries to do something and is compromised by the left. The left tries to do something and is compromised by the right. Some lunatic suggested this is democracy
#39. To: buckeroo (#38)
#40. To: paraclete (#39)
Democracy is not consensus
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