The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The United States vs Treason

The United States vs Treason

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Tuesday, March 17 2009, 18:31:44 (CET)
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The United States vs Treason

The following is taken from Robert Meeropol’s “An Execution in the Family”. Meeropol is the adoptive name of Robert Rosenberg, younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenburg executed by the United States on trumped up charges of conspiring to commit espionage in 1953.

In his book he states that the Founding Fathers, having known all too well the oppressive conditions under dictatorships determined to define treason in concrete and specific terms so that a Bush or Ashcroft couldn’t one day apply the term to anyone whose ideas they didn’t like...anyone who fought for the rights of the poor or dark people and against corporations..

In the United States Constitution, at least as of last week, treason is defined....

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. (Article III, section 3.)”

That’s pretty damn good...concise and thorough. Of course “aid” and “comfort” must needs remain vague....but other than that it’s as specific and exact as can be.

In fact it pretty well sums up the actions of Assyrian-Americans who dare make noise about their "indigenous rights" in an Iraq they have betrayed to the United States.

Meeropol, in the epilogue to his book is covering that time after 9/11 when Bush was taking advantage of that incident to cram the conservative agenda down the nation’s throat. He is worried that all sorts of charges of treason will be leveled against people who simply disagree with the government’s position...which is, after all, the whole point to democracy.

In talks he gave across the country he asked the audience to name the one and only true case of treason against the United States, according to our own Constitution. Hear him tell it...

“...I’ve told this story and posed this question to a number of audiences since November 2001, and with just one exception my question has been met with silence. I’ve prodded people by saying that the answer seemed slam-dunk obvious to me, but the silence lengthened. Ultimately I have given the answer away with a question. When in our history did a group seek to destroy our nation by conducting a war within its borders that led to the deaths of more than a million American soldiers? Finally someone would say, often with a bit of wonder in his or her voice: ‘The Civil War’.” (I didn’t get it either)

“Despite its ultimate defeat, the Confederacy was by far the most massive and successful traitorous conspiracy in our history. And to this day the Stars and Bars flag, the symbol of that great treason, is displayed, in some cases with official sanction not only in the South but nationwide....We’ve buried the Confederacy’s treason so deep that the vast majority of us are shocked to hear the Confederacy described in this way.”

Which helps explain the fact that the most damaging presidents we’ve had, not to mention federal politicians, have come increasingly from the South. I don’t think they ever got over the Civil War....and what was that war really but the federal government telling the southern states what they could not do? This is the reason conservatives are determined to wreck the federal government by deliberately staffing it with nincompoops and those dedicated to making it ineffective...as a way of proving its limitations and the benefits that would come from State’s Rights. Because if each state, especially in the South, was master of its own laws, there never would have been an end to slavery and Jim Crow....lynching would never have been punished...schools never desegregated...or laws allowing intermarriage between the races...or rights for Gay people...or rights for women.

Washington D.C. for all its limitations is the seat of the national government....officials from all over the world come there and mingle...ideas are exchanged, the atmosphere is far more cosmopolitan than in Richmond or Raleigh. In the backwoods capitols of southern states narrow provincialism can triumph and the prejudice of bygone days be maintained. That’s why Bush and Ashcroft and so many others went into federal politics...not to make good government but to dismantle the federal government...make it inefficient and helpless...so we would all agree that it’s best to let individual states go their own ways....thereby turning the South’s defeat in 1864 to victory in 2001.

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