On Government Violence and the Citizen’s Refusal to Acknowledge It
[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Cody Fox]
-Thoreau
At a young age, 10-12 I believe, I was put on the path to liberty by George Carlin and his can’t trust the government attitude. George was not perfect by any means but his influence led me to other free thinkers like Thoreau and Emmerson in high school and later Rand, Rothbard and other freedom oriented authors. The more I read and studied history, the more I began to see a common thread among all governments of the world, since forever. No matter when or where, that commonality is state sponsored violence. This alone is cause to reexamine and deeply analyze the way government operates in the modern age. If we look at the 20 and 21 century alone we can find countless examples of state sponsored violence, murder and genocide. According to ushmm.org, in 1915 the Ottoman Empire enacted a plan to expel and massacre Armenians living within their borders.
By 1916 at least 664,00 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were dead at the hands of the Ottomans. When the dust cleared from the state sponsored violence of World War 1 the death toll was estimated at nearly 40 million military personnel and civilians killed. The National Socialist Workers Party, the Nazis, wiped out a high estimate of nearly 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and World War 2 was responsible for 60-80 million deaths in total. When the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in 1965 between 1.7 and 2 million Cambodians died in the “Killing Fields”. In 1994 in Rwanda the majority Hutu government massacred an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. Communist regimes are estimated to have killed up to 100 million people in the 19 century alone. And to top it all off, the beacon of freedom, Team America itself, the U.S. Government, has been responsible for the deaths of countless civilians including the near extermination of the American Indian, countless declared wars, black ops and numerous C.I.A. sponsored proxy wars that have destabilized various regions leading to further bloodshed.
State sponsored violence is not to war crimes. In the U.S. police can detain, assault and even murder you at the slightest resistance to their demands and chances are they will get off with no real consequence. Police violence in the U.S. is an everyday thing. According to the Washington Post, there have been 867 people killed by police in the U.S. in 2017. Regardless of who these people were or why they were killed, the fact that a militarized police force is allowed to murder citizens with nearly no repercussions is absolutely detestable and should not be allowed to continue in a modern nation.
There are also U.S. troops and other military personnel deployed in countless areas all over the world including active combat zones and peaceful areas. These countries include but are not limited to Peru, Brazil, Djibouti, Greece, Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, Greenland, Spain, Bahrain, Qatar and Germany. Regardless of what label you put on this it is still foreign soldiers occupying another people’s land.
There are also numerous countries under Sharia Law, the set of laws that Muhammad, the most violent messiah in the history of modern religion, dictated for Islam. Under Sharia Law punishments are extreme, easily falling under western laws against cruel and unusual punishment.
Here are a few examples:
-Theft is punishable by amputation of the hands. Quran 5:38
-Any female alleging rape without producing 4 male witnesses is guilty of adultery. Quran 24:13
-A man can beat his wife for insubordination. Quran 4:34
-Muslims are to subjugate the world under Islam. Quran 9:29
-Apostasy is punishable by death.
This is by no means a comprehensive list. The atrocious punishments are far more numerous. In the modern age a case against state sponsored violence is not hard to make. Technology has made it easy for people to access information yet so many still put their faith in government. People can watch videos of state sponsored executions from all over the world. There are even entire countries that still follow systems of laws created by early medieval religions that have not reformed to modern sensibilities. Intelligent, morally upright people should not be able to stomach being a part of any system that participates in any such practices, military, policing or religious. I’m not saying everyone needs to become an anarchist right now, but I am saying everyone needs to more closely evaluate the entities and systems they support.
[Cody Fox is from parts unknown in Wyoming. He is a social media guru, crack shot with a long gun, gym rat, prepper and voluntaryist. You can bother him any time on Twitter: @cody4140]