America Has Already Collapsed
Brandon Smith,
ContributorActivist PostMany of us in the liberty movement find ourselves searching for a
distinct root cause of the trials and tribulations of American culture —
the Holy Grail catalyst that, if unraveled, would save this country and
heal the septic wounds covering the landscape of our hobbled society.
The obvious answer would be to remove the global elites who are
poisoning the well from the picture entirely. Yes, this has to be done
eventually. However, we must also identify how those elites have been
able to so thoroughly con the masses of this nation for so long.
What inherent weakness has made us susceptible to manipulation? For this
question, there are NO easy answers. But, if I had to choose a single
frailty of our collective psyche as paramount to our downfall, I would
say that Americans most of all are confounded by their own patriotism.
We often embrace the ideal without knowing what it really means.
There are in fact two kinds of patriotism: the
concrete, and the imagined. Many Americans fall haphazardly into the
fantasy of being patriotic. They define patriotism upon the exploits of
the mainstream and of the government in control at the time. They become
cheerleaders for the establishment instead of stalwart champions of
their country’s founding principles. In fact, true patriotism is NOT
about blindly defending one’s nation or leadership regardless of its
trespasses; true patriotism is about defending the philosophy that made
one’s nation possible and prosperous in the first place — even if that
means standing against the power structure in place today.
I often hear the uneducated and unaware claim that America and its
principles have been a bane to the rest of the world. They say America
is at the center of the vampire squid, flailing its vicious tentacles
against innocent foreign civilizations. This is an oversimplification at
best. The crimes that these well-meaning but naïve activists scorn
cannot be attributed to “America” because the American ideal has been
completely abandoned by those in the seat of power in our modern era. We
do not live in “America” — at least, not the America that the Founding
Fathers and authors of the Constitution created. Therefore, the
original philosophy that gave birth to America is not the issue, the
abuse and neglect of that philosophy is.
America has been ransacked and deformed into a hideous lampoon of its
former self. This has been done for the most part through the
destruction of the guiding principles we pretend we still hold onto as a
culture, but in reality have cast aside. If we are ever to undo the
damage that has already been done, we have to rediscover what the
original design of America was. Wailing and growling about the
inadequacies of the present does nothing unless we also establish where
it is that we have fallen from grace. What is America supposed to be?
What did the Founders truly intend?
America Is Supposed To Be Controlled By The PeopleThe concept of a Republic revolves around a reversal of the traditional
narrative of power. Throughout most of history, government stood at the
top of the pyramid, where the hands of a few dominated the destinies of
the citizenry. The future was a matter for the elites, not the peasants,
to be concerned with. The American Republic, as designed by the
revolutionary colonists who defeated the old oligarchy (at least for a
time), flipped the role of government to servant rather than master. The
goal was to make government tangible and accountable rather than
abstract and untouchable. The America of today has no such
accountability anymore.
We have a two-party system that pursues the mechanizations of globalism
in tandem, not in contest. When both parties have the same desires and
goals, when both parties collude to remove civil liberties rather than
protect them, and when both parties are funded by the same corporate
backers, there is no such thing as change through the process of
elections. Anyone who claims that government corruption can be punished
through the ballot box hasn’t the slightest clue how our system really
functions. They think we are still living in the original “America,” one
that values the voice of the people.
When the government decides to push through banker bailouts, the Patriot
Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, etc., all while ignoring
opposition by a vast majority of citizens, it is clear that the paradigm
has shifted and the American value of representation by and for the
people is lost.
America Is Supposed To Prosper Through Free MarketsOne of the first acts of the American Revolution in the fight against
British tyranny was to decouple from British economic dominance. They
stopped relying on goods produced in England and peddled by the European
merchant class and began making their own. From homespun clothing to
homemade rifles, Americans created a legitimate free-market environment.
Free markets are systems controlled by the people, thriving on the
natural functions of supply and demand. They are not administered by
bureaucracies or corporate hierarchies that manipulate the economy to
fit preconceived political and social ends.
Free markets are decentralized markets. Corporations, which obstruct
decentralization, were never meant to exist according to Adam Smith, the
architect of traditional free markets. Today’s framework operates on
centralization and the removal of options and choices, which is
facilitated by the imbalance and lack of accountability in the corporate
legal structure.
I have to laugh every time I hear someone attack “capitalism” and free
markets as the source of all our ills. America has not had the pleasure
of free markets for at least 100 years (since the construction of the
private Federal Reserve, a collusion between banking and government
interests). No one alive today has ever seen an actual American “free
market” beyond community barter, so to blame free markets for our modern
failings is rather thoughtless. To summarize, the U.S. economy is
nothing like what the founders envisioned and fought for.
America Is Supposed To Have A Reserved Foreign PolicyThe Founding Fathers specifically sought to keep America out of foreign
entanglements and haphazard alliances. They knew from experience that
the elites and monarchies of Europe often used wars as a means of
consolidating power and keeping populations in relative fear. They were
well aware of the methodologies of Niccolo Machiavelli and knew that
forced alliances were a trap used to ensnare nations into unnecessary
conflict and financial dependency while keeping the masses subservient
through false patriotism.
Today, our government has utterly violated the original principles of
reserved foreign policy, especially in the past century. The excuse
always used is that “we are under attack,” yet we usually discover later
that these “attacks” were actually fabricated by our own leaders. From
the sinking of the USS Maine, to the sinking of the Lusitania, to the
Gulf of Tonkin and beyond, for the past 100 years, Americans have been
presented with false flag threats used as leverage to convince us to
become entangled in foreign engagements. This strategy has become so
common that elitists now openly admit their intentions to commit future
false flags in order to draw us into yet another war,
this time with Iran.
The current policy of “exporting democracy” has not only been a complete
failure (just look at Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.), it
is also a total affront to the foundation of the American dynamic.
Patriotism in the name of interventionism is foolhardy and decidedly
un-American.
America Is Supposed To Respect Individual RightsThe
Founders witnessed the extreme abuses of government firsthand: invasion
of privacy, invasion of property, wrongful arrest and imprisonment,
loss of representation, overt and malicious taxation, thuggish law
enforcement, and the targeting of those who dared to dissent in their
speech. The excuse used by the British for their tyrannical behavior
was, essentially, national security. In the end, though, the elites’
actions had nothing to do with security for the populous and everything
to do with what they saw as opposition to their hegemony. Our government
has become a mirror image of the elitist power-mongers of Britain in
the days of the revolution. Absolutely everything the colonists fought
against has been re-established by the globalists in our political
structure today, once again, all in the name of national security.
We have seen the enslavement of our money supply and general economy by
the Federal Reserve; invasive and violent taxation through the Internal
Revenue Service; loss of privacy through the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance and the Patriot acts; loss of property rights through
multiple agencies including the Bureau of Land Management, the
Environmental Protection Agency, the IRS, the Food and Drug
Administration, etc. (who claim their tightening fist is for our own
safety, yet they constantly overlook corporate misdeeds that put the
public in true danger while pummeling average citizens for minor or
non-existent offenses); the militarization of law enforcement through
the Department of Homeland Security and Federally dominated fusion
centers; potential loss of Habeas Corpus through the NDAA; and even
wrongful arrest against those who merely speak openly of their
discontent (look into the case of Marine veteran Brandon Raub for a
taste of what lay ahead).
What Have We Become?Those who rally behind the modern concept of America rally behind a
façade — an empty shell devoid of the heart and soul that gave life to
this once great experiment. I do not support what America is. I support
what America was and what it could be again if the truth is adequately
smashed into the faces of the currently oblivious public. If this
country is content to suckle from the putrid teat of globalism and
forsake the moral force of conscience that gave it life, then it has
become another place — an alien land.
I have heard the argument that America is meant to be a kind of
chameleon built to change its stripes and adapt to the demands of the
era. I have heard it argued that the Constitution and the principles of
the Founding Fathers are outdated and inadequate for our new age of
technological wizardry and terrorist ideologies. This is pure
intellectual idiocy. The principles of freedom never expire. Individual
liberty is inherent and eternal. It is the driving force of every great
accomplishment in the history of mankind. The Constitution and the Bill
of Rights embody the spirit of that eternal battle of individual
liberty. There is no adaptation. There is only freedom or tyranny.
It is time for us to decide what kind of Americans we wish to be: the
deluded rah-rah puppets of a desiccated totalitarian society, or the
watchmen on the wall. Will we be the keepers and protectors of the vital
core of the American identity, or will we be fly-by-night consumers of
the flavor-of-the-day political carnival, eating every tainted sample
from the elitist platter in an insane attempt to replace our free
heritage with a sleek, sexy, rehashed form of top-down feudalism?
Source:-
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/10/america-has-already-collapsed.html