Is this the beginning of the end?

In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1). It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331-335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.

Public Law 109-364, or the “John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007″ (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a “public emergency” and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.”

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Unfortunately, this past week, the president dealt posse comitatus, along with American democracy, a near fatal blow. Consequently, it will take an aroused citizenry to undo the damage wrought by this horrendous act, part and parcel, as we have seen, of a long train of abuses and outrages perpetrated by this authoritarian administration.

Despite the unprecedented and shocking nature of this act, there has been no outcry in the American media, and little reaction from our elected officials in Congress. On September 19th, a lone Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) noted that 2007’s Defense Authorization Act contained a “widely opposed provision to allow the President more control over the National Guard [adopting] changes to the Insurrection Act, which will make it easier for this or any future President to use the military to restore domestic order WITHOUT the consent of the nation’s governors.”

Wake up America, or else there will be no America left to wake up to.

Read The Full Report

San Francisco’s Indymedia Center has this report posted as well.

Garrison Keillor hits the money shot with this virulent screed against the un-American cowards and hacks that populate the halls of power in today’s Amerika.

He hits it hard, here. Succinctly and powerfully.

It’s good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed him. Go back to the Senate of 1964 — Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright — and you won’t find more than 10 votes for it.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the Court will dispose of this piece of garbage.

If, however, the Court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Read The Complete Essay

The Rubber Stamp Congress has gone and done it.

Read More Details On This Legislation Here.

USTV viewer CM weighs in on this…

Andy, I’m afraid you’ve put it together. The way I see it, as of November 1, 2006, the Administration will declare a National War Emergency and martial law, suspending the elections until the “crisis” is over.

We already know that an extra carrier group is on its way to the Persian Gulf and most other units are in place or expect to be there and ready to wage war on Iran as of October 21, 2006. Special Forces are already in-country selecting targets. Mine-sweeper units are being readied to deal with expected Iranian mining of the Straits of Hormuz.

Given the timing, this allows for 10 days of “wiggle-room” such as any good commander would want for unforeseen problems and tidying up the details prior to the commencement of hostilities. It seems to me that on or about Halloween, we can expect some “Dastardly Attack” from the Iranians on our forces conveniently positioned on and inside of their borders (how dare they attack the military of a country that is invading them!) which will “force” GWBUSH to go to Congress demanding blood and revenge. It will probably be very photogenic and horrific-looking, and there will be lots of heart-wrenching video footage to be replayed on all the networks. And of course, in such a state of “crisis”, we just won’t have time for elections; it will be far too necessary to turn all that excess energy into the War Effort. Besides, all those people coming into unsecured schools and retirement homes to vote make such a good target for Evil Terrorists; we surely don’t want to risk such danger to our vulnerable children and elderly.

I suggest you pass this on to every network you can access. Just because we’re paranoid does NOT mean they aren’t out to “get” us. Tyrants like these don’t just give up power based on a free and honest election; those elections will only be held if they can be sure they can control them.

I did fly this by Ed (Lacy) and am open to a slight refinement of the hypothesis, however. Ed believes that in order to provide sufficient excuse for war, such an attack would need to occur within the U.S. Political considerations suggest two prime targets: the Golden Gate Bridge or the Port of Los Angeles; both located in Republican-unfriendly California where war fever and paranoia are notably lacking and could use some reinforcement. Such an attack by “Hezbollah”, immediately traceable to Iran, would justify both war in the Middle East and unprecedented security measures at home.

I hope they are wrong about this, but I don’t know if I would bet against it.

Yep. It looks like it may finally be here. Full-blown, metastasized dictatorship. Oh, but we don’t have a dictator, we have ‘The Decider’.

Molly Ivins elaborates…

Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary - these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law. I’d like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

This sounds like hyperbole, but she is right. The rubber stamp Reichstag of a Congress has just passed it’s own Enabling Act to give our Dear Leader full range of powers to dictate who is an ‘enemy of the state.’

Read The Full Article from Molly Ivins

This is all starting to sound rather eerily familiar to some past turbulence we had in our history, which stemmed from some whiney complaints from the locals.

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

These people didn’t stay in their designated ‘free speech zone.’ It got kinda dicey from what I understand. The local insurgents and terrorists started to endanger public safety and security, too! They wouldn’t even fight by the normal ‘civilized’ rules of warfare, and thus had to be subjected to the utmost of harshest penalties. Wonder whatever became of them anyway?

New Democracy Statement of Principles
newdemocracyworld.org

We live under a dictatorship of the wealthy. Most people want a better world. We can only achieve a new world by openly declaring our goals:

1. We are for revolution to create a real democracy. We call on people everywhere to end elite rule and to create real democracy based on principles of solidarity and equality. Democracy means ordinary people shaping all of society with their shared values. It means people together freely deciding their goals and how they will cooperate to achieve them. This includes transforming the goals, organization, and control of work to create an economy where the productive wealth of society is used to meet the human needs of all.

2. Revolution to achieve real democracy is necessary and possible. Revolution is necessary because the problems we face are rooted in a system of elite rule that controls people by attacking relations of solidarity and equality. These problems cannot be solved without creating a new society. Revolution is possible because the struggle of ordinary people to humanize the world is the force that drives history, and because most people want the new world that only revolution can bring.

3. Our confidence in the possibility of revolution comes from our confidence in ordinary people. Capitalism, communism, and socialism have all led to societies in which an elite holds the power. None of these systems is democratic. Communism and socialism failed as alternatives to capitalism because they accepted capitalism’s view that economic development is the basis of human development, that self-interest is the primary human motivation, and that ordinary people are a passive mass or a dangerous problem. The basis of a new society is a new, positive view of people.

4. The everyday struggle of ordinary people to humanize the world creates the wealth of society and whatever positive human relationships exist within it. Most people in their everyday lives struggle against a culture based on competition and exploitation. They strive in their families and workplaces to create relationships based on equality and commitment to each other. People’s everyday lives have revolutionary meaning.

5. Class struggle is a struggle over what values should shape society, what goals it should pursue, and who should control it. It is a struggle over what it means to be a human being. The values of the capitalist class are inequality, competition, and control from above. The values of the working class are equality, solidarity, and democracy. The goal of working class struggle is to transform the whole world with its values. The most personal acts of kindness and the most public acts of class war are part of the same struggle to humanize the world.

6. The revolutionary movement must not be based on politicians or union officials or business structures or the courts but on ordinary people themselves as the driving force and leaders of change.

7. Revolutions are built on hope. The revolutionary movement will unite ordinary men and women of every race and nationality in a movement in which our confidence in our ability to change the world comes from our confidence in each other.

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New Democracy works for democratic revolution
Write us at P.O. Box 427, Boston, MA 02130
Or call: Boston: John Spritzler, 617-566-9637; Decatur: Larry Solomon, 217-763-4451
E-mail: Newdem@aol.com Webpage: http://www.newdemocracyworld.org

Thom Hartmann delivers this expose’ on the canard about “Islamo-Fascism” and the Bush regime’s disingenuous use of the term.

In the years since George W. Bush first used 9/11 as his own “Reichstag fire” to gut the Constitution and enhance the power and wealth of his corporate cronies, many across the political spectrum have accused him and his Republican support group of being fascists.

On the right, The John Birch Society’s website editor recently opined of the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretap program: “This is to say that from the administration’s perspective, the president is, in effect, our living constitution. This is, in a specific and unmistakable sense, fascist.”

On the left, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. specifically indicts the Bush administration for fascistic behavior in his book “Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.”

Genuine American fascists are on the run, and part of their survival strategy is to redefine the term “fascism” so it can’t be applied to them any more. Most recently, George W. Bush said: “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”

In fact, the Islamic fundamentalists who apparently perpetrated 9/11 and other crimes in Spain and the United Kingdom are advocating a fundamentalist theocracy, not fascism.

But theocracy - the merging of religion and government - is also on the plate for the new American fascists (just as it was for Hitler, who based the Nazi death cult on a “new Christianity” that would bring “a thousand years of peace”), so they don’t want to use that term, either.

Read Hartmann’s Complete Article on the history of fascism, what it is and how it is being brazenly manipulated by the Bush regime for political purposes.

Mark Ash weighs in with this essay on “Fascists of All Varieties”

“Since, Mr. Bush, you have chosen to put the issue of fascism before the public, it begs a broader dialog on fascism’s role in our lives today. I accept the challenge to enter that dialog. Frankly Mr. Bush, many Americans refer to you as a fascist.”

And while we are on the topic of fascism, here is a follow up from Arthur Versluis in CounterPunch on “How Carl Schmitt Spawned Fascist America” 

According to Schmitt, the ultimate power of government is not to be found in legislation, but in the executive power to abrogate or suspend legislation. What matters is not the rule, but the exception, and “sovereign is he who decides the exception.”  Schmitt’s aphorism describes how Hitler in fact took power, with the unilateral abrogation of civil liberties in Germany. Hitler imposed a “state of exception” on those whom he deemed alien to or a danger to the regime, and those in such a state of exception no longer have the rights of citizens. This state of exception, willed by the German unitary executive power, was the juridical basis for the Nazi death camps. The assertion of notional “unitary executive power” in part results from officials’ prior disgust at the inherent weakness of a parliamentary system to forcefully address long-term problems facing society, like a weak fiat currency, economic crisis, or terrorism.  A “unitary executive power” appeals to the “Right,” to which Schmitt and purportedly the Bush Jr. administration belong, but, one has to note, it also could have appeal for the “Left.”  Such executive powers no doubt appeal to all who are certain of their own rectitude, certain that they are guided by destiny or by God to act, to be decisive.  Thus one characteristic of fascism is said to be “decisionism.”  “At least we’re doing something,” a decisionist says - even if what “we’re” doing is in fact despotic and destructive.  George W. Bush is, he tells us, “the decider.”

Read The Complete Article

Another excellent interview with one of America’s preeminent writers and historians Gore Vidal, by David Barsamian of The Progressive. Here are excerpts….

The management, then and now, truly believes the United States is the master of the Earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown,” he says. “We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense.

Economic collapse. We are too deeply in debt. We can’t service the debt, or so my financial friends tell me, that’s paying the interest on the Treasury bonds, particularly to the foreign countries that have been financing us. I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That’s the end of our wars.

We’ve never had a government like this. The United States has done wicked things in the past to other countries but never on such a scale and never in such an existentialist way. It’s as though we are evil. We strike first. We’ll destroy you. This is an eternal war against terrorism. It’s like a war against dandruff. There’s no such thing as a war against terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

Our media has collapsed. They’ve questioned no one. One of the reasons Bush and Cheney are so daring is that they know there’s nobody to stop them. Nobody is going to write a story that says this is not a war, only Congress can declare war. And you can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids. Nothing makes any sense, and the people are getting very confused. The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

[The Democratic Party] isn’t an opposition party. I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party-the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

What can people do to energize democracy? The tactic would be to go after smaller offices, state by state, school board, sheriff, state legislatures. You can turn them around and that doesn’t take much of anything. Take back everything at the grassroots, starting with state legislatures. That’s what Madison always said. I’d like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.

Newton’s Third Law. I hope that law is still working. American laws don’t work, but at least the laws of physics might work. And the Third Law is: There is no action without reaction. There should be a great deal of reaction to the total incompetence of this Administration. It’s going to take two or three generations to recover what we had as of twenty years ago.

Read The Complete Interview

A provocative question, and a pretty good answer from this brave editorial from the LA Times.

WWFFD? WHO CARES?
By Mark Kurlansky
Los Angeles Times
July 4, 2006

Someone has to say it or we are never going to get out of this rut: I am sick and tired of the founding fathers and all their intents.

The real American question of our times is how our country in a little over 200 years sank from the great hope to the most backward democracy in the West. The U.S. offers the worst healthcare program, one of the worst public school systems and the worst benefits for workers.

The margin between rich and poor has been growing precipitously while it has been decreasing in Europe. Among the great democracies, we use military might less cautiously, show less respect for international law and are the stumbling block in international environmental cooperation. Few informed people look to the United States anymore for progressive ideas.

We ought to do something. Instead, we keep worrying about the vision of a bunch of sexist, slave-owning 18th century white men in wigs and breeches. Even in the 18th century, the founding fathers were not the most enlightened thinkers available. They were the ones whose ideas prevailed. Those who favored independence but were not in favor of war are not called founding fathers.

John Dickinson of Pennsylvania — with whom John Adams bitterly fought in the Constitutional Congress of 1776 because Dickinson did not believe it was necessary to engage in bloody warfare in order to achieve independence — is not a founding father. You could speak out against slavery and still be a founding father, as long as you did not insist on its abolition, as many did who aren’t in the pantheon.

The Constitution produced by the founding fathers lacked the enlightenment of some of the colonial charters of several generations earlier, most notably the laws of Pennsylvania that barred slavery, refused to raise militias and insisted on fair-minded treaties with Indians. Benjamin Franklin despised these “Quaker laws” of his colony and even published a pamphlet denouncing the Pennsylvania Assembly for not sending young men to fight the French and Indians.

To be honest, the U.S. was never as good as it was supposed to be. Perhaps no nation is. Henry David Thoreau wrote of nations, “The historian strives in vain to make them memorable.” Even in the first few decades, most Europeans who came to see the great new experiment were disappointed.

Writer after writer, from British novelist Charles Dickens to the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, arrived to discover less than they imagined. Tocqueville observed of American character: “They unceasingly harass you to extort praise and if you resist their entreaties, they fall to praising themselves.”

Fanny Trollope, the English writer, made a similar observation in 1832: “A slight word indicative of doubt, that any thing, or every thing, in that country is not the very best in the world, produces an effect which must be seen and felt to be understood.” I have no doubt the response to this article will show an America still unwilling to be criticized. But it is difficult for a society that accepts no criticism to progress.

Slavery was the most celebrated flaw of the founding fathers, but they also set the stage for the genocide of about 10 million American Indians and did not even entirely reject colonialism. They believed that it was wrong to tax colonists who did not have representation in the legislature, but the tax, not the lack of representation, was the grievance. They were affluent men of property, and they hated paying taxes. Ironically, they repeatedly used words like “enslavement” and “slavery” to criticize taxes while at the same time accepting real slavery.

The founding fathers were all men of the establishment who wanted what Robespierre sneeringly called, when his own French Revolution was accused of excess, “a revolution without a revolution.” John Steinbeck noted that the American Revolution was different from that of France’s or Russia’s because the so-called revolutionaries “did not want a new form of government; they wanted the same kind, only run by themselves.”

Yet it is only with anti-establishment thinkers that a society progresses. The reason that there is always more disillusionment with Democrats than Republicans is that Democrats raise the expectation of being anti-establishment when, in reality, both parties are committed to maintaining the status quo and the “intent of the founding fathers.”

But the founding fathers, unlike the Americans of today, understood their own shortcomings. Thomas Jefferson warned against a slavish worship of their work, which he referred to as “sanctimonious reverence” for the Constitution. Jefferson believed in the ability of humans to grow wiser, of humankind to make progress, and he believed that the Constitution should be rewritten in every generation.

“Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind,” Jefferson wrote in 1816. “As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstance, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

It is surprising that these words are not more often quoted in Washington because they are literally carved in stone — on a wall of the Jefferson Memorial to be exact.

So let us stop worshiping the founding fathers and allow our minds to progress and try to build a nation of great new ideas. That is, after all, the intent of the founding fathers.

Mark Kurlansky is the author of many books, including, most recently, “The Big Oyster: History On a Half Shell.”

As much as we at USTV like to quote and reference the first Americans (in a political nation-state sense, of course), we also find the deification of those who proved dominant in the history books, and especially the overly-glorified impression of the Constitution to be a bit much, and distracting from the work at hand.

The final lines of this editorial hit the nail on the head, and directly confront the nonsense of so-called self-proclaimed “originalists” of the likes of Antonin Scalia and his ilk, as well our fellow Americans who are terrified of confronting the need for changing the Constitution itself. One point of contention with this piece, is that I’m not sure how far I’d go with finding Robespierre as a historical character witness for making my point, though. LOL

America has always (as do almost all modern industrial societies) had its share of fascist strains infecting its politics and society throughout its history. I wonder how much the confrontation with it during the era of the Depression and the liberalism of the New Deal in the global struggle against it, inoculated Americans to its real ever-present threat. Its like we were lulled into complacency thinking we beat the extremist forces of the right, and the real struggle, as defined by the Cold War, was with extremist forces of the left.

So we grew complacent and blind to the cancer to the body politic easing its way back onto the scene stage right. So many people warned us of the dangers of Communism, where business is controlled by the state, whereas the potentially fatal danger to America is fascism, where the state is controlled by business.

Here, Alan Bisbort lays out an insightful and worthy expose on how powerful Americans have long had a fascination with power-mad rulers, and the threat that poses to us all.

Benito Mussolini was a darling of the American business community. Captains of industry courted his favor, drank his wine and laughed at his jokes, envious as they were of Italy´s perfect waves of union-free capitalism, state-run media dispensing right-wing propaganda as news, its religious fervor and preemptive military actions in Africa and the Middle East.

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As Mussolini and Hitler showed, fascism — for all its gut-level, simplistic appeal to the basest human instincts — can never last. This may be because the fertilizer that´s needed to maintain it eventually sickens even the most ignorant and unquestioning. That is, fascism is brought to power by illegal, often violent means. In the Black Shirt Putsch and Reichstag Fire, echoes of our own purged votes, calls for the ¨murder¨ of war hero Rep. John Murtha (as the best-selling Coulter made this week) and the daily nonsense that spews from the mouths of Malkin, O´Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, et al., can be found.

All of this, to succeed, must be driven by a never-ending ¨crisis¨ against an easily maligned ¨them¨ (Bolsheviks, Jews, terrorists) as well as a constant reinforcement — by public rhetoric and military parades and secret police and a controlled media — of what Mussolini called ¨righteous force.¨ This ugly paradigm cannot be described any more clearly than this, from Il Duce: ¨In certain contingencies violence has a deep moral significance … It was necessary to give timely, genial recognition to chivalrous violence.¨

The good news: once Mussolini was driven from power and hung by a meat hook from a Milan lamppost, proper Italians, his erstwhile backers, jeered, perhaps with no small measure of guilt or at least a hangover from years of brainwashing.

Read The Full Article Here

A New Declaration of Independence
By Emma Goldman
Published in Mother Earth, Vol. IV, no. 5, July 1909

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

The mere fact that these forces–inimical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–are legalized by statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power, in no way justifies their continued existence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life; that to secure this right, there must be established among men economic, social, and political freedom; we hold further that government exists but to maintain special privilege and property rights; that it coerces man into submission and therefore robs him of dignity, self-respect, and life.

The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people. A vast country, rich enough to supply all her children with all possible comforts, and insure well-being to all, is in the hands of a few, while the nameless millions are at the mercy of ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, and corrupt politicians. Sturdy sons of America are forced to tramp the country in a fruitless search for bread, and many of her daughters are driven into the street, while thousands of tender children are daily sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. The reign of these kings is holding mankind in slavery, perpetuating poverty and disease, maintaining crime and corruption; it is fettering the spirit of liberty, throttling the voice of justice, and degrading and oppressing humanity. It is engaged in continual war and slaughter, devastating the country and destroying the best and finest qualities of man; it nurtures superstition and ignorance, sows prejudice and strife, and turns the human family into a camp of Ishmaelites.

We, therefore, the liberty-loving men and women, realizing the great injustice and brutality of this state of affairs, earnestly and boldly do hereby declare, That each and every individual is and ought to be free to own himself and to enjoy the full fruit of his labor; that man is absolved from all allegiance to the kings of authority and capital; that he has, by the very fact of his being, free access to the land and all means of production, and entire liberty of disposing of the fruits of his efforts; that each and every individual has the unquestionable and unabridgeable right of free and voluntary association with other equally sovereign individuals for economic, political, social, and all other purposes, and that to achieve this end man must emancipate himself from the sacredness of property, the respect for man-made law, the fear of the Church, the cowardice of public opinion, the stupid arrogance of national, racial, religious, and sex superiority, and from the narrow puritanical conception of human life. And for the support of this Declaration, and with a firm reliance on the harmonious blending of man’s social and individual tendencies, the lovers of liberty joyfully consecrate their uncompromising devotion, their energy and intelligence, their solidarity and their lives.

This ‘Declaration’ was written at the request of a certain newspaper, which subsequently refused to publish it, though the article was already in composition.