Freedom or Fear?
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Transcripts by Juan Manosalva, Valparaíso Chile
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This transcript has been corrected by the very same John Buckley
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Hello there folks! It's Wednesday 15th of March 2006 and you're listening to Dissident Vox podcasting for freedom and against tyranny on yet another freezing cold and very wet northern day. I'm here in the snow tipped hills of Yorkshire and hello if you're just tuning in for the first time, welcome to the show hope I can offer you a warm welcome and, I hope you enjoy you stay here and find something valuable. I'd like to say thank you to all my regular listeners, who continue to download the show, say how proud I am of have your support, so thank you.
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But you know I have been just constantly amazed by the reach of the show and by that I mean I've received e-mails and feedback from places that I couldn't even imagine, I mean just this week I was ... e-mails with a guy by the name of Juan Manosalva who's a 24 year old university student in Chile, and it tells me that Juan was kind enough to transcribe some of the previous shows I produced from audio into text and put them up in his blog as a kind of tribute to Dissident Vox which was just amazing and really touching so Juan this is for you "Gracias mi amigo estancia en tacto".
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I'm sorry for that poorly Spanish but that was the best I could do using babelfish and my non existent Spanish accent but it mean "Thanks my friend stay in touch" hopefully you ... for that, but you know thank you to all the folks that continue to send me e-mails and feedback, you're welcome to do so, ah, if you have never done so you can e-mail me at jhwbuckley@gmail.com and you're always welcome to leave comments on my weblog at dissidentvox.com. -
Anyway, after that ...speech of an introduction what I want to do first is just get stuck into a few of the new stories which are floating around in the ether as I'm putting together this show today.
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And first up we start with FBI documents acquired under freedom of information legislation, released to reporters in the States today, or maybe it was yesterday, clearly showing that there's a massive program of unauthorised wire-tapping taking place, activists and the press included. It continues to expand, and AP is reporting that at least a dozen political and religious groups have been targeted in the New York city-state area alone.
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A quote from Allan Bryson who's the director of ACLU, quote: "from the FBI to the Pentagon to the National Security Agency, this administration has embark on an unprecedented campaign to spy on Americans" unquote.
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Also in the news this week former ... operative and failed dictator Slobodan Milosevic ... "bought the farm" under somewhat mysterious circumstances it seems, with poisoning allegations clouding the air, also in the news today there's been a massive increase in execution style shootings in Iraq, with at least 87 people killed in the space of 24 hours, all of this coming as the fallout continues after the black operation that was perpetuated last month when somebody destroyed the sacred Shiite ... and this action has coincidentally pushed Iraq much closer to a very vicious and bloody civil war. Which perhaps the intended consequence.
We now have 2000, ah sorry, 2310 US military casualties, that's dead guys I think, dead soldiers, 2310 US soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq and it continues to rise. God knows how many Iraqis have lost their lives.
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But, what else is happening, oh yes! Goggle now has a date in court with the Department of Justice, and all of this coming after the recent "China fiasco" where goggle was caught basically ... cosying up over censorship and having a nice chat with the freedom-loving Chinese communist party. Now it seems google is keen to do some PR repair work and look a little cleaner in public, but the outcome of this I would speculate, is likely to make a little difference really to what actually happens because the government lawyers and the federal judge appointed to oversee the case we know will likely compel google to do what the government wants so not much would change there, and apart from maybe a little bit of paint work, touching up goggle's public reputation.
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But, what else, oh yes, on the cheery note the Chicago Tribune is reporting that president Bush now has a new approval rating apparently his hit and all-time low of 36% but with Bush acting about, preaching that, quote: " there will be more tough days ahead and more images of chaos and carnage in the days to come" unquote. This is not likely to improve much, is it? But now the American elite is currently polishing up a nice a democrat victory at the next major electoral fraud.
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Anyway, that's done with the news, but what I really want to talk about today, the one thing I really want to talk about is the most misused and malign word in the English language and it's a word that could be said to be one of the most important. It's something that everybody needs and if you are to go on to do any other things that you think are important in your life, and that word folks is "freedom", freedom, it's what this show is about, because this is the place where I exercise my personal freedom, this is my podcast where I express my opinions and my feelings and present my conclusions based upon my own research and reading.
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But I don't think many people would argue with me though if I were to say that the concept, or the belief in, or the struggle to get and maintain freedom has been one of the defying qualities of human existence, at least for as long as we as a human race can remember. I mean there are belief systems, as we all know that claim and teach that there was once a Golden Age, there was once a time when human beings were not in conflict with each other or the world around them.
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Something happened though, to change that state and to bring about the present situation where we found ourselves now often the state of being that we have, is something we would say it's not free.
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But anyway the purpose of this particular show is to dig a little deeper and just uncover a little bit more about that state, that ideal, that word, that concept, that feeling, that concerns us so greatly today and for which so many people throughout history have been willing to sacrifice so much.
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Freedom, freedom was once called the oxygen of the soul, by president Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, the Rosicrucian Abraham Lincoln who said, quote: " Freedom is the last best hope on earth" unquote. And he also said, quote: "Those who deny freedom to others do not deserve it themselves". But, as I said is the quest to obtain freedom that has inspired men and women of every political, religious and ideological persuasion, and they've all pursued it, their conviction of it, their version of it, and that's what's driven them.
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But as we've seen, no group, no state or nation has been successful in establishing, a nation that could maintain freedom. Never mind the fact that they were founded on the principal of "freedom", nobody seems to have been successful at maintaining a society where freedom reins.
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And this is despite the dreams and the combined efforts of generations of thinkers, social planner, intellectuals, utopians, politicians, policy makers, generals, all these people. And of course the influence of the secret societies, but we'll leave that for today.
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But anyway, the fact is, a great majority of the people of the planet today do not enjoy freedom and they continue to die without it, in their millions in fact.
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But, let's take a quick look at a dictionary definition of the term, particularly the Oxford English Dictionary which defines freedom as, the power or right to act, speak or think freely, and it also defines it as a state of being free, it's an unrestricted use of something and it implies an exemption from ... abuse by authority.
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Some more dictionary definitions here, the Cambridge Dictionary describes it as an absence of coercion and states that it implies the power to speak, the power to act, and the power to think in a free manner. So, yet again it's a condition of being able to act in a free manner, and a lack of compulsion in that action.
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Now broadly defined it seems more people would accept four freedoms as the primary and most important, and this would be freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear of aggression.
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So if we accept that, our next question becomes as well, Where do all these freedoms arrive from?, What is it that gives birth to these freedoms? All the rights and privileges attributable to the state of freedom and this concept of freedom, where do we get them from? Where did they come from? I mean, are they innate? I mean, that's what was taught, for example by the signers of the founding documents of the United States, the declaration of independence, which was signed in July 4th 1776.
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I mean, they stated, quote: "We hold this truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted amongst men deriving theirs just power from the consent of the government. That's whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to abolish it and to institute new government laying its foundations on such principles, and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall see most likely to affect their safety and happiness" unquote.
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Now, it's interesting because in the declaration of independence there are at least four references to "A Creator", I mean it's clear that that's what' the founding fathers believed, that the rights and freedoms that they were codifying in a constitution, the bill of rights, the founding documents of America, of the United States were creator endowed.
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I mean, there are really two ways of looking it this, aren't they? You can either accept that humans… obviously you have to accept first that humans have rights; there are some people throughout history who seem not to have accepted that. But having done so, there are only two sources of those rights, either man himself confers those rights upon himself or something external to man does, a creator.
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Of course, in the first viewpoint it's men that create governments and it's men that give man his rights because man is a creature solely derived and evolved from nature and therefore has no inalienable rights given to him by a creator, and only governments of men are the source of those rights, and indeed, the source of those laws and values. It is government which determines by law what can be limited or not, government passes those laws, those laws are instituted by men, amongst men, and by men and men are the source of them, that's the other belief system.
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The problem with that I would say is that laws can be passed by men which directly reverse the decisions of previous men, because there's no concept of those rights being inviolable, I mean the constitution argues that in order to protect people's right, a strictly limited form of government should exist, and it's power to affect inalienable rights should be strictly limited, with carefully thought and restrictions on that government's activities.
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I mean for example containing in the first ten amendments of the constitution, are statements like, quote: "Congress shall pass no law", or quote: "The right of the people shall not be infringed", or quote: "No person shall be deprived", all of these are basically restrictions on the right of the government to act, protections of the freedoms, the inalienable inviolate freedoms of the people.
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I mean, the constitution was concerned to make the maximum protections of those rights available to the people, these were not privileges, they weren't granted or bequeathed to the people by authority, in this case the king, they were the lawful property of the people and they resided within each person.
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There's an interesting definition of right and privileges by the writer Ralph Epperson in his book "The Unseeing hand", and he states, quote "A right is the freedom to act morally without asking permission" unquote. And he also goes on to say, quote: "A privilege is a freedom to act morally but only after permission has been granted by some governmental entity" unquote.
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So, we can see how this two positions can in themselves create conflict and division, because for example, if the right to life is not considered by some people as an innate residual right. You can see how becomes possible for a dictator to basically decide that some people do not have the right to live, they don't have the right to life, and then if he orders to exterminate them. I mean in this situation the right to life has become a privilege, within the power of men... according to the laws, which they make up at that time and the governments that they create to enforce them.
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Anyway, I think this is a, this is a good point to take a little break, I have a piece of music floating around, that was kindly chosen by Mrs. Vox, this a tune which I found at the podsafe network by an artist who's getting a lot of airplay in the podosphere at the moment, you can call it that, "The Podosphere", but anyway, she goes by the name of Adrina Thorpe, which is kind of an unusual name, and this track is called "round the bend", so check it out and I'll see you on the other side.
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Beginning of the tune...
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Ending of the tune...
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There you go folks, that was Adrina Thorpe with the track Round the Bend and I linked to that from the blog, I linked to her blog, to the track.
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I hope you've enjoyed that, my wife certainly did, and I think it's a lovely song, she's got a great voice little voice, remains me a bit of Sarah Mclachlan which is attached already, I had attached to her but I hope she continues to grow as an artist and develop her music and it's great to see the staff that's going out under the label of podsafe these days, just the quality is amazing and the artists themselves just fantastic.
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So, on this side of the show I want to talk a little bit about the UK, and in particular I want to get into how this whole notion of freedom is currently being used very effectively to justify the removal of the very freedoms the government is supposed to be protecting.
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Now here in the United Kingdom we have no written constitution ... although we do have documents like the Magna Carta, the Great Charta, which was signed by King John in 1215, and although was very much a document of its time, and reflected the power of the English barons, and in particular, it might be added, the crown Knights Templar over the king, it did grant certain rights of due process to us.
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For example, it stated that, quote: "No official shall place a man on trial on his own unsupported statement without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it".
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However, in Tony Blair's New Britain that statement is apparently not worth the paper it was written on. For here the Home Secretary can jail a man on his own unsupported statement, never has to produce a single credible witness to substantiate it.
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Fantastic hey!? In fact the way we're going now, a man can be held indefinitely in such circumstances, because the burden of proof has been removed, and the grounds are now merely reasonable suspicion. It's just incredible but, there you go, this is the new reality that we are in now, this is what perhaps president George Walker Bush was talking about when he said right after 9/11 that, whoever destroyed the World Trade Centre towers had declared war on freedom, and that certainly seems to be the case, doesn't it? Because ever since, we had our government in concert and coalition with others declaring an open-ended war against a nebulous enemy who turns out now to be 'amongst us' and this necessitates the removal, and restriction, and suspension of the very freedoms and laws that our societies were set up to protect.
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I mean, is incredible, in the last five years alone we've seen wholesale sweeping rafts of legislation, security legislation designed to expand government, centralise control, remove restrictions on ministers to take away our rights, and revoke guaranteed freedoms, and all of this done in the name of protecting us from danger.
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I mean the Home Secretary has powers to ban specified articles or substances, prohibit individuals or groups from the use of certain services such as Internet phone mail, etc. He can restrict their association and communication with their friends, their family, their associates or anybody else for that matter. He can also require people to be at specified places or particular areas, each day, at certain times, He can restrict their travel movements, and can specify who has access to their home and a t what time. Articles can be removed from that home at will, they can be searched at will, they can be electronically tagged or other means, and they can even apparently be required to provide information, I don't know what that means folks, but it sounds like a torture clause to me. You are required to provide information? Remember 'The Prisoner' that 1960 show? "What do you want?" "We want information", Well, "you won't get it".
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I was just watching that show recently, I watched all of it and really enjoyed it, it's ah, some fabulous symbolism, if ah, deeply Masonic, and based in the mystery religions, but nonetheless, some interesting television.
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But, back to the facts or, back to the realities, I mean we already know that this government has no regard for the liberties and freedoms and rights of its citizens, right? They push through all this repressive legislation at every opportunity from Controls Bills to the, new anti-terror bill, the Civil Contingencies Bill, the Crime Bill, the, ah, Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill which is currently going through parliament, the Identity Card Bill, I mean, and on and on and on, and they do it in spite of frequent rulings from the House of Lords, and many prominent Judges stating that this is in flagrant violation of human rights laws.
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I mean, think about this, I mean if you don't defend those rights you're going to lose them, and parliament is not going to defend you, at least not on this current form folks I mean, Do you know what nasty little beast is currently sliding its way through parliament in your name? That's the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill and as innocuous as that sounds, it grants any government ... minister the right to amend, replace or repeal existing legislation, and they are able to do all this without going to the trouble of having that nasty and unnecessary public and parliamentary scrutiny, they can just wholesale amend the law, wholesale repeal the law, as it presently stands, this is the kind of stuff they are sliding under the door, another wonderful, authoritarian innovation from the Blair government.
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Hey guys, now, they can even create new criminal offences with prison terms of up to two years, which, I guess is something that might come in useful, to pacify all those illegal demonstrators who decide to congregate and protest outside the Houses of Parliament at some point in the future, which incidentally, folks, is something you can now only do with the permission of "Sir Ian I've record other people's phone calls and potentially covered up evidence Blair".
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I mean, it's just incredible, do you realise how seriously out of control this is getting? Do you know that The Times news paper had an article, ah, I believe it was, where six Cambridge Lord professors went over this bill, and they concluded that as it currently stands a minister could abolish trial by jury, they could suspend habeas corpus or change anything else they damn well please.
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And what's the justification for this bill, do you know? The justification is, right, they say they need to cut down on red tape. And how do they plan to do that? By cutting straight through your rights and your freedoms.
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Wake up folks, because we are back to the same old questions here, and these people clearly don't believe that any of our civil liberties or our rights are inalienable or creator endowed or anything else for that matter, rather they see themselves as the arbiters and judges, and they see our rights as thoroughly removable and malleable.
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I mean, what an arrogant and thoroughly autocratic bunch of authoritarian imbeciles they are, I mean we've constantly being told now, the rules have changed, we live in a post-9/11 world, and apparently we all have to make sacrifices now for our security, I mean isn't that the mantra, isn't that the justification for everything that's changing about the way we view our freedom in this new millennium, this is the new world we are living, you know, and is a world of identity bases, electronic tagging, DNA profiling, iris scanning, phone tapping, constant surveillance, big brother, all powerful overseeing, overlord state.
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You know where our police are dressing up like Judge Dredd now, in black Darth Vader suits, armed with guns and ... and cameras and sound cannons following us, I mean, think about it folks, every sacrifice of liberty you've been asked to make here, and I'm not just referring to the U.K., this is happening everywhere, this whole thesis, the whole premise the reason we've been asked to sacrifice, is "the war on terror", that's it, the so called "war on terror". But undoubtedly a war, which exists, it's a war, which has cost tens of thousands of lives, and it's been the source of massive social and political change ...
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But I mean, whatever the complexities that are being engendered by this, by what is a masterful manipulation of problem, reaction and solution, a masterful elite manipulation of the mass mind.
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Please! Let's not forget the facts here, ok? I mean it's easy to get confused in the fog of war you know, and right now, whether you know it or not you're on the battlefield and you're in a war and the smoke of the propaganda is all around you and it's coming at you.
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Well, in at least three different colours that I can think of, I mean, you've got the standard military issue black, which consists of the illegal and the totally fraudulent, the destructive and deliberate disinformation, directed to anyone who's fool enough to swallow it.
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Then I suppose you've got the armoured truck grey smoke, where you mix the truth with lies, so that anybody actually is searching for the truth because they are not really sure what they are looking for, inhales a good unhealthy dose of misinformation and desensitisation along the way there.
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And finally, you've got the pure candy white staff, in a way it disguises it self as the real deal and it's designed to basically infiltrate and corrupt the source, so that those who do know what they are looking for can be deceived by a good fake.
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I mean, if you don't believe this kind of propaganda exists, take a look at the link on the blog to, ah, strategic communications laboratories, which advertises itself to international governments as being able to manage and execute military and humanitarian strategic communications campaigns, and they do this for international governments, police forces, the military and worldwide.
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They utilise what they call, "behavioural dynamics", and they are apparently the world's leading authority on persuasion, communication, psychology and public diplomacy, privately founded of course.
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Interesting just taking a brief look at some of the biographies of the Board of Directors and the associates of this company, it's ah, primarily a British based company, and it's all men who've served with the military or being former previous counsellor.. Lords of the realm, Vice Chairman of the Conservative party, all experienced men, some them experienced running elections campaigns for international governments, amongst those, choice, once in there that I found were Indonesia and the Philippines, and of course these are the people that advice at the highest levels and influence and persuade the powerful.
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All hand puppets of the powerful, all done in a subtle way of course, so not to arouse too much in the wave of public scrutiny.
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But, this is a war zone, this is a propaganda war zone, and freedom is stake here. It's important that we look at the facts, even though there is obviously an attempt on the way to conceal them from public scrutiny.Ok, let's go back to Iraq for a moment or the war on terror, ok? The basic idea behind this is that ... the terrorists and insurgents are carrying out a global war jihad against the west...
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Ok, but, we also know from the public record that the top agent, the big cheese, the head banana, the big enchilada of this spectre-like underground dwelling jihadist movement, Mister Emanuel Goldstein, Osama Bin Laden, was once an employee of the very same Intelligence and military interests, who are now so passionately interested in his whereabouts, although they disavow any knowledge of where that might be, and in fact, recently, they claimed not to be that interested in capturing him.
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Despite accusing him of mass murder, and organising the most devilish band of killers ever known to man, and despite, Osama Bin Laden's irregularly schedule news conferences, whereby he appears and disappears and sometimes mysteriously only appears on tape, radio, you know, just to pronounce doom and destruction upon the infidel.
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And listen, it wasn't just Osama Bin Laden who was funded and trained by intelligence interests in Pakistan, global intelligence interests, secret intelligence and military personnel, the organisation that all of this grew out of, the Mujahadin, were created to fight the Soviet Union, to produce in the words of one of the elite strategists quote, "the Soviet Union's very own Vietnam in Afghanistan in the 1980.
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"And this was an Islamic army created and funded and programmed and equipped by the west. To a large extent it's still being done in Pakistan today. This was the movement that created the Mujahadin, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban.
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Now, Osama Bin Laden was a prominent Mujahadin, organiser and financier, operating it must be said internationally with the assistance of the America's ally Saudi Arabia.
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I mean, you all know about the Bushes and the Bin Ladens, now, yes, how they finally were secretly flown out at the US in the hours after 9/11 under special presidential orders, not to be questioned, beyond reproach, no useful intelligence on Osama, apparently, also they said.
So how do you figure this out, what's going on here? Is, is, Osama, a classic case of what the intelligence agencies call "blowback", whereby a former agentl or operative turns on his creators, "or", is it possible that at some strategic or secret level he remains an agent of that power that recruited him to further its interests in decades past? It's possible, and the connections are to say, the least, a little bit more than tenuous.
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I mean, ask yourself, is the terror agenda giving power to those who seek authoritarian solutions to human, social and developmental problems. I mean, come on! Is it? I mean, how much money do you think this war is worth? We are talking "billions" invested in death, "tens of billions", and to what purpose but building torture camps, and a global police state of surveillance and censorship.
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You think all this legislation is for nothing, I mean seriously; you think you're safe? That your rights are protected? Are we really fighting a war to preserve freedom here, and if we are, why are we daily being asked to surrender more and more of ourselves to the scrutiny of the state?
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I mean, just recently in the UK we had identity cards, which is basically the foundation stone for the...
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The rest of the transript will be ready soon.
