r meaning and the courts are now protecting the government against the rights of the people.
The legal system, like our legislative system has collapsed. It has made every freedom unlawful, and every constitutional violation of our rights to now be “the new rule of law.” Everything from indefinite detention, to torture, to wholesale surveillance, to killing Americans without a trial and due process is all at the whim of our government.
Ask yourself, what can possibly be used to stop this runaway government? Be fully convinced that you cannot trust the system to reform itself. No upcoming election will make a difference or turn the tide. Snowden’s revelations made SOME of us conscious, but as George Orwell wrote in 1984, “Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.”
Societies such as ours are often the most easily seduced into totalitarianism because those who apply their totalitarian structure continue to pay lip service to the ideal practices and forms of our system even while they are fully engaged in the process of destroying it.
Thomas Paine described despotic governments as a fungus growing out of a corrupt civil society. And this is what has happened to us.
No one is free who lives under constant surveillance, who is subject to detention anywhere and at any time, whose conversations, messages, meetings, proclivities and habits are recorded, stored and analyzed.
Yet the state assures us that our rights are sacred, that it abides by the will of the people, and that the fourth amendment remains intact. They claim that our system is still ruled with the consent of the governed.
The defense of liberty which Snowden exhibited when he cast his fortune, safety and his life aside to inform the public of the forces arrayed against our constitutional rights entails grave risks. It demands personal sacrifice.
Snowden has called us to this sacrifice. He has allowed us to see who we are and what we have become. He has given us a chance. He has also shown us the heavy cost of defiance. It is up to us to seize this chance and dismantle the corporate state.
This means removing from power those who have stolen our liberty and lied to us. It means in naively trust in their cosmetic reforms.
Reforms will never come from those who are complicit in these crimes. Reform will only come, through the building of mass movements and alternative centers of power that can overthrow this corporate state.
The world’s only hope comes through rebellion, by building mass movements that threaten the totalitarian centers of power. Any rebellion will require not just physical courage, but ultimately moral courage. Physical courage is not the same as moral courage. Very few of even the bravest warriors have moral courage.
Because moral courage means to defy the crowd. To stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating embrace of comradeship and to be disobedient to authority even to the risk of your life, all for a higher principle.
With moral courage comes persecution. The American army pilot Hugh Thompson had moral courage. He landed his helicopter between a platoon of US soldiers and ten terrified Vietnamese civilians during the Mai Li massacre. He ordered his gunner to fire on the advancing US soldiers if they began to shoot the villagers.
For this act of moral courage, Thompson, like Edward Snowden, was hounded and reviled. Moral courage always looks like this. It is always defined by the State as treason. The army attempted to cover up the massacre and court martial Thompson.
Moral courage is the courage to act and speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsberg had it. Malcolm X had it; Martin Luther King had it. Snowden has it. If we fail to sever these chains now, we will become like so many in past civilizations who failed to rise up in time to save their civil societies from becoming human chattel.
This means we to must defy this new excuse for the law—which is in direct contradiction to our US Constitution—and engage in civil obedience to those laws which attempt to eliminate the power which our Constitution specificall