Israel is no empire; it is a tiny but evil apartheid state built on stolen land. This is a fact, and that’s how it will go down in history. But this is not my topic in this essay. What I want to address is the evil nature of Israel’s enabler, the US, and why it is so uniquely evil.
The Evil That They Do
The US is an evil empire. The amount of evil it has done to the world is well documented and, sad to say, is something each one of us witness on daily basis, but exactly because it is something we witness on daily basis we have become blind to it, taking evil’s banality for its nonexistence. The crimes are so numerous you’ll need books to list many of them. For illustrative purposes, I’ll mention a few here. In Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War, the author Lindsey A. O’Rourke, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College, examines U.S. covert interventions during the Cold War, analyzing 64 covert attempts at regime change between 1947 and 1989. Another book, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, written by Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, provides a fast-paced narrative history of the coups, revolutions, and invasions by which the United States has toppled fourteen foreign governments over more than a hundred years. Books maybe informative, but what they may not be able to convey is that evil has a face. If you wish to see the evil face of some of the people that represent this nation, go check out 60 Minutes’ interview of Clinton’s former Secretary of State – a Jew – who declares with unblinking eyes that “for us, the death of half a million Iraqi children is worth it.” (watch the video below).
See also the most recent UN resolution for cease-fire in Gaza (see the UN resolution vote record below), and the name of the lone nation backing Israel.
There had been empires throughout history before the rise of this one, and you know that some of these empires must be evil in some ways. But none comes close to the US empire in its evil nature. Why is this one so evil?
Many past empires were violent and destructive, both in the scale and its impact, but few if any were evil. Take the Mongol empire built by Genghis Khan. It was a world scale destructive force, but it’s not something you would use ‘evil’ to describe. Genghis Khan’s army destroyed and plundered, erased anything and everything in their paths. But they did not carry out their destruction by a premeditated plan; it’s not like the Mongol empire had a principle to which all Genghis Khan’s men had to swear allegiance. Hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes are better analogies for describing what the Mongols did than the term ‘evil.’
The British Empire was also one that caused immense suffering and destruction, but many of its destructions took the form of the legacy it left behind, which the Palestinian issue is one of the most egregious. I’m not saying that the 200 year’s rule of India by the British was not brutal. But there is a difference between brutality and being evil, for all the evil the British Empire committed, it is not like there was one principle, on which the Empire was founded, and to which it’s citizens swore alliance and put in action. The evil nature of the US empire is in an entirely different category – a type the world has never before seen. Let me explain.
Two Kinds of Evil
Evil comes in two types: inherent evil, and derivative evil. The genocide Israel has been committing against the Palestinian people in the past 70 years and on-going is an example of derivative evil – it is an evil enabled by another evil. Without US bombs, missiles, tanks, jets, and intelligence, Israel could not have done what it did, and is still doing. Without the US naval fleets and its many military bases in and around eastern Mediterranean Sea to deter the rest of the world from taking action to protect the Palestinian from slaughter, and to ensure that Israel can carry out its killing and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian land, Israel could not have done what it did and is still doing.
In contrast, the evil nature of the US empire is intrinsic, and not merely derivative. Intrinsic evil has three faces: 1) it is a form of deliberate intention; 2) the destruction that issues from it does so exactly because of the intentional adoption of the deliberate intention; and 3) the brutal and cruel ways harm and destruction are delivered. Let us see how the US as a nation fits this definition of being an intrinsic evil.
Warner Bros. made a movie back in 1956, called Bad Seed. The movie tells the story of a female child (the Bad Seed) who has all the cunning and charm of a true psycho or conman. After killing another child, she is able to wiggle out of trouble by lying and sweet talking to everyone – the suspecting parents and neighbors, the school teachers, and the police. An evil that grows out of an evil seed is what I call “intrinsic evil.”
The bad seed the evil empire grows out of is the body of its nation-founding principles, a legal document known as “the US Constitution,” often shortened to “the Constitution.” The evil this empire has unleashed upon the world since its founding days can all be traced to this evil seed. In what sense is the Constitution the source of all evil the US has carried out? To answer this question, we look at two particular principles that lay at the very foundation of this body of legal documents. I call these “two evil seeds,” and they are the cornerstones of US as a nation.
Bad Seed No. 1 The Lockean Theory of Property
“The founding fathers”, when drafting the nation-founding principles, made a version of John Locke’s theory of property a pillar of the Constitution (and its amendment, the initial Bill of Rights). To those who are unfamiliar with the theory, here is the gist of it. First, it declares that if a man can be said to have any property right to anything at all, he has a property right to his own body. (Sounds reasonable, you nod). Next, it declares that because a person owns his body, he owns his own labor. (Again, you say to yourself, sounds reasonable). Furthermore, and for ease of understanding (since I’m not writing for college egg-heads but for you, people who care about the Palestinian people, and many other more who have suffered at the hands of the empire), it declares that your body is like a bottle, and your labor is like the bodily fluids in your body. According to one version of John Locke’s view, championed by the former Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, when you mix your labor, which you rightfully own, with something previously unowned by anyone, then right there, you have acquired a property right to that previously unowned thing. To continue with the bottle and juice analogy: if you come across something previously unowned, say a pond in the woods, and you squeeze yourself, and jerk out some of your (milky) ketchup, and then you pick up a stick and stir the water a bit. What have you just done? “Congratulations!” exclaim Locke and Nozick. “You have just become a property owner! By mixing your bodily fluid with the water in the pond, you have become the rightful owner of the pond!”
“Phew! That was easy!” you could hardly bring yourself to belief it, but who wants to turn down mana when it drops in your lap so easily.
Of course, things are not always so simple and straightforward. For example, the pond might be something the red-skinned native Americans had been making regular use of up until you showed up but who had never thought of declaring it their property. Maybe the natives believed that “He who is thirsty may take water from this pond.” So, does that mean when an early European settler squirts into the pond, and stirs the water a bit, he now owns the pond? That doesn’t sound convincing, right? Locke and Nozick were aware of this difficulty. What’s their answer to this? Here is what they tell us: “Well, if the white man sets up a Reservation and puts the red people on it, and also gives them some liquor and lets them run a casino, then the white man has more than corrected whatever wrong he has done to the natives by declaring the pond his property.”
John Locke and Robert Nozick tell us many more fun stories about their so-called “labor-mixing” theory of how private property is acquired, and why squirting into a pond lets you keep the pond. But I’ll leave that part of their story for those who are curious about it to explore. I’ll move on and talk about the profound implications of adopting this theory of private property as a cornerstone of the Constitution, and its deadliness when it joins force with a second founding principle.
For the sake of argument, let me begin by making a huge concession to people like Locke and Nozick – and all their followers, including the “founding fathers” of the US as a nation. Let us say that at the exact moment when they drafted the Constitution (and its supplementary documents the initial Bill of Rights), North America had no native people; it was just a vast, previously unowned no man’s land. What happens next? Use your imagination! But here is how I envision it:
Remember the key claim: “If a person owns anything, he owns his body.” I once held a job in China. For meals I would go to the canteens, which offered a whole variety of dishes, even for lunch. It’s hard sometimes to make up your mind what you wanted to order, since there were so many to choose from. This one is priced at 25 cents, that one is 35 cents, and that one 30, another one is 45, a scoop of rice is 15, and a soup 5. I get charged accordingly. Now that I have my food, I carry my tray to a table and sit down to eat. As I start to dig in, I see two cleaning ladies – one is mopping the floor, the other is cleaning the tables. I thought: “Gee, that’s interesting! How come these two work the floors and the dirty tables while that one over there sits comfortably behind the counter and scoops out dishes?” Then it occurred to me: “Of course! What else! To be the one serving dishes, you got to be good with numbers! Whereas mopping floors and washing dishes require no brains!” But division of labor is only one aspect of it. There must also be pay differences. I’ll bet the lady scooping dishes gets paid more than the women doing the cleaning. In other words, one person is better off thanks to her own brain, which she cannot claim credit for other than being lucky, and another is doing just so-so, thanks to the cursed brain.
No doubt, if Locke or Nozick heard my story, they would offer to sum up its lesson by this slogan:
From each as their speed, to each according to the size of their bladder.
This, folks, is the first of the two bad seeds at the core of this nation. But why is this a bad seed? You ask. What’s wrong with it? My story about the canteen workers is to emphasize a fact we all know already: Humans are not born equal. Some humans are born smart, can do math, can code, and some are born slow, low IQs, with mental retardation, and physical disabilities, and most of humans are just average folks when it comes to possession of attributions needed to be super successful or luck to go far in life. How a person fares in life has a lot to do with their mental, physical abilities as well as personality, all of which are in some sense pre-determined and beyond their control. The result is inequalities – inequalities in income and wealth, in opportunities, and in respect.
Now I want you to keep firmly in mind the following distinction: Inequalities in natural endowment, and legally and institutionally enforced inequalities. Inequalities of the former are a fundamental condition of human existence; as long as there are humans, there are going to be individual differences in mental and physical powers. There is really not much that can be done about it. In contrast, inequalities of the latter are a creation of men, not of nature. Laws are made by humans, and laws are made to maintain a desired and often idealized order. To continue our example of the canteen: the cashier is better at math than the cleaning lady, and that’s why she sits comfortably behind the window and makes more money than the one mopping floors, whose only fault is that she is less endowed and perhaps inferior in other ways.
Over time, and on average, the legally protected inequalities can only get greater in a society where the long-term impact of this “lottery by mother nature” is legally enforced. Mr. Rockefeller had quicker legs than others, so was able to squirt his juice into more ponds than others, and bigger ones as well, whereas every pond the cripple came upon had already had Mr. Rockefeller’s bodily fluid mixed in it. As time goes on, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Let’s Switch to the sequel. Having no luck finding a pond of his own, Mr. Cripple found employment at one of Mr. Rockefeller’s ponds, shrimping being his job. That was back when Forest Gump was just released, and everyone was talking about going down to Alabama to buy a boat and becoming one’s own Shrimp Boat Captain. But now the shrimp boat fever has cooled, and companies are laying off their shrimp men. Mr. Cripple is fired from his job. This leads us to a legal doctrine in the US known as “Employment at will.” This is an employment law that’s invoked whenever there are layoffs in the private sector in the US. This is what this doctrine says: “An employer can fire an employee for good reason, or no reason, or even bad reason. Likewise, an employee can quick their job for cause, no cause, or a bad cause.” This legal doctrine is a strict logical consequence of the US Constitution and is therefore completely constitutional. The business, or company, belongs to its owner, and it’s up to the owner to decide what they want to do with their own business. If the company decides to eliminate a job, they have a constitutionally guaranteed right to do so. Likewise, the body of an employee like Mr. Cripple is his or her own, so anytime they want to remove their body from the company, they have a right to do so.
Side note: It’s worth pointing out that although all states in the US are at-will employment states, over the years this legal doctrine has been watered down so much and is now subject to a wide range of restrictions, these later developments being all based on distortions or convoluted readings of the Constitution. Strictly speaking, they’re diagonal to the Bad Seed No. 1, and are thereby unconstitutional. By the way, most of these later modifications were ushered in with an abusive and misguided use of another US legal doctrine known as “the Inter-State Commerce Clause,” which has been invoked to justify the many regulations of the Federal government without a constitutional basis.
If one must point out one most consequential result of Bad Seed No. 1, it must be the fact that the US is currently a society where there is the greatest inequality in wealth in human history. With the top 1% holding 50% of the nation’s wealth. See the table below.
Bad Seed No. 2: Representative Democracy in an Unstrained Lockean Society
Democracy is a type of government. The term “democracy” comes from Greek, a combination of “demos” (meaning “people”) and “kratos” (meaning “rule” or “governance”). There are basically just two types of rule-by-the-people: direct, or participatory democracy, and representative democracy (constitutional monarchies, plus some other forms where voting is a thing but being representative is the key ). The difference between the two is in the meaning of “demos”: who count as the “people” in the “demos” in demo-cracy? In the participatory democracy, as first practiced by the people of the Athenian state in ancient Greece, the “people” that ran the government were not people who “represent” others (e.g., the voters), they are citizens representing themselves. The type of government exemplified by the US system is a type of representative democracy, where the people that run the government and the people that put them in the government are two different categories – elected officials, vs. voters, with the former’s job supposedly being “representing” the latter – their interests, their concerns, and how they want their society to be run.
In the “representative” democracy that the US is, people become lawmakers by deciding to run for a seat in one of the two lawmaking houses. Who get to run for offices, you ask? The American people, duh! Who are the “people?” You mean both Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Cripple get to run for government offices? Don’t be stupid! But of course, calling someone a “Rockefeller” is just another way of saying that the man is a Billionaire. Who else can afford to run for a Congressional seat – not to mention the presidency – if he does not have millions under his name?
Now you see the deadly combination of the Lokean theory of property and representative democracy: a Lokean society leads to legally justified and enforced inequality, a representative form of government that is made possible by that very inequality, and then makes laws to ensure its perpetuation.
And there you have it: the two bad seeds, the root of the evil.
“The US Congress is Israeli Occupied Territory“
This is the late Pat Buchanan’s famous condemnation of the US government. But if you want to understand why a foreign power can occupy the US government, runs its entire foreign policy, makes it wage endless wars in the Mideast, has the entire US senate kneel and grovel at a criminal with an arrest warrant on his head by the International Criminal Court, you have to go back to those two bad seeds that are the founding principles of this nation. A society that bases all its laws on the idea, that whatever a man makes, he gets to keep it, and that whatever wealth a man has, he gets to use it to run for government office and make laws, is a society that has only one guiding principle – Money. Money reigns supreme in the US, and it does not matter where the money is from, does not matter whose money it is. If it’s money, it’s God. When the money men are the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, and the Carnegies, the US government grovels and snivels at their feet, takes its orders; when the money man is Israel and the AIPAC, the US government grovels and snivels at its feet, takes orders from it and does its bidding. You can bet that if the Devil shows up, with more money than a Jew can dream of, the US government will switch allegiance from Israel to the Devil.
So much for your “city upon a hill” and your “bacon 🥓of democracy” (as that brainless German woman, former trampoliner Angelina Baerbock calls it).
P. S.
I saw this today on X/Twitter: a link on @zerohedge to an article by senator Ron Paul. Though I respect senator Paul, I can’t help it: “Tell me senator, which article of the US Constitution says money and state must be separate ?” You can’t! because to keep money and state inseparable is the very foundation of the US Constitution.
Yego’s Chronicles 