you must hate america if you don't read this

I was browsing my old mail bag on jitraguy@yahoo.co.uk and found this..
SO I just thought I'd share it with my visitors.. Thank You

The US Government vs. America
by Anthony Gregory

As far as the nationalists are concerned, to oppose the U.S. warfare
state is to despise America, to condemn the atrocities committed by
the Bush administration is the hate America, to reveal skepticism of
foreign intervention is to reveal disloyalty to America, whereas to be
a shill for all the slaughter done by the U.S. government is to be a
good American.

The Pentagon is America. The Homeland Security Department is America.
The Iraq War is America. George W. Bush is America. The imperial
capital – complete with snipers on the rooftops, armed battalions
keeping the city in siege, and a power elite bent on running the world
– is America, and if you don't like it, you must hate America.

Oddly enough, this principle, usually coming from conservatives or
"libertarian" nationalist internationalists, does not seem to apply to
other things the government does. If you don't like welfare, do you
hate America? If you distrust Social Security, does it mean you hope
for America's downfall? If you are less than enthusiastic about gun
control, public education, or the war on drugs, are you rooting for
the failure of America itself? No.

How about in other countries, at other times? Did the Russians who
spoke out against Stalin hate Russia? Did the Germans who reviled
Hitler hate Germany? Did the Chinese who despised Mao hate China?

These analogies might seem over the top. Even today, America is
certainly among the best places to live inside, despite its many
troubles. For one thing, we still have many freedoms, at least
tacitly, that most other countries do not. For another, living in
America, we have much less a chance of being bombed by the U.S.
government than do foreigners.

This does not mean that Americans are free from the U.S. state.
Americans must still pay rent to the government for the privilege of
earning a living. Americans must still use the inflated, counterfeited
currency controlled by the Federal Reserve monopoly. Americans must
still accept the terms of the "social contract" that dictates where
they send their children to school, what they may put into their own
bodies, which weapons they are free to own, what business arrangements
they may enter, and which government programs, including wars, they
must fund through taxation, upon penalty of imprisonment.

Occasionally, the government here kills the wrong Americans for the
wrong reasons. Police sometimes shoot the wrong person. Sometimes,
there are military-style assaults, conducted by the U.S. government,
against American citizens. If you lived in a certain neighborhood in
Philadelphia in 1985, a certain shack in Idaho in 1992, or a certain
commune in Texas in 1993, you might have found yourself firebombed by
the police department, shot and killed by an FBI sniper, or gassed,
machine-gunned, burned, and crushed to death by the feds.

More often than its military sieges on "its" own citizens, the U.S.
government locks up innocent people who never broke the law for which
they were charged. Even more frequently, the government imprisons
harmless people who broke laws that should not be laws, often ones
that contradict the ostensible Supreme Law that is the Constitution.

For the average American, these nightmares are fortunately not a
reality. But for years nevertheless they have been oppressed by a
ridiculous tax system and regulatory regime, and constantly in danger
of having their property seized, their liberty confined to a jail
cell, or their lives snuffed out, due to the error, incompetence, or
malice of some high-paid bureaucrat in an office building somewhere
they never met.

It has only gotten worse under Bush. Americans can now be spied on by
the federal thought police who are supposedly working to stop
terrorism, detained indefinitely without trial or benefit of habeas
corpus, and, perhaps quite soon, forced to surrender their children to
a national universal mandatory mental-health screening apparatus right
out of Brave New World.

Do you love this? If to oppose the warfare state is to oppose America,
must those who love America also love the state's destruction of the
Bill of Rights, its occasional murders of innocent Americans, its
burgeoning prison-industrial complex filled with peaceful innocents,
its crippling taxation, repressive regulation, medieval property
seizures, and attempts to nationalize the very minds of America's
children?

Do you love seeing America being preyed on by the overblown parasitic
state in Washington, DC? If you truly love America, you should oppose
the government that has always been its greatest enemy – especially as
it concerns the power of that government to kill, not accidentally or
anomalously, as it sometimes does at home, but as a matter of outright
policy, as it does abroad. Or, at a minimum, if you love America, you
should stop cheering on this killing and refuse to participate in the
glorification of the security state that robs Americans blind and uses
the loot to wreck our privacy and liberty and to bomb, crush and
murder foreign innocents.

The U.S. government is now posturing itself to invade the world,
country by country, beginning, it seems, with Iran and Syria. If the
project commences, it will kill thousands on top of the thousands it
has killed in the last three years and the millions it has killed
since it embarked on empire in 1898. I oppose this strongly, not
because I hate America, but because I love America, I love my fellow
Americans, and I do not trust the U.S. state to bring liberty to the
world any more than I trust it to refrain from destroying liberty, as
it has done continually and for the most part increasingly, ever since
the founding of this beautiful country in which I was born and which I
will always love.

February 8, 2005

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is a writer and musician who lives in
Berkeley, California. He is a research assistant at the Independent
Institute. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com