Is it possible to commit treason against Liberty — by lying all the time?

© 2017 Peter Free

 

10 February 2017

 

 

Theme — Government deception defeats Liberty

 

I will use a Russian example of State-concocted deception to make a point about the importance of Truth to the maintenance of American liberty.

 

 

The mainstream United States has been self-righteously chattering about . . .

 

. . . that allegedly supreme bad buy, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.

 

So, let me ask a question — (this will make sense in just a bit):

 

 

Question — Who is Alexei Navalny and why should we care?

 

Answer — He's a Russian Putin-opposition leader. What probably happened to him is instructive about truth's relationship to freedom.

 

 

President Putin appears to have conveniently defanged Navalny by lying or deceptively changing applicable contexts. Al Jazeera English reported that:

 

 

A court in a provincial Russian city has found opposition leader Alexei Navalny guilty in a retrial of a 2013 fraud case, which means that he cannot run for president next year.

 

In a webcast hearing on Wednesday, Judge Alexei Vtyurin handed down a five-year suspended prison sentence  and a fine of about $8,500 to Navalny for embezzling timber worth about $500,000.

 

Navalny, 40, vowed to appeal the "politically motivated" ruling issued in Kirov - a city nearly 800 km east of Moscow - and continue with his plans of challenging President Vladimir Putin in the upcoming presidential elections even though the Russian law bars anyone convicted of a crime from running for a public office for 10 years.

 

© 2017 Al Jazeera and news agencies, Russian opposition leader Navalny found guilty of fraud, Al Jazeera English (08 February 2017) (excerpts)

 

 

A thought experiment — 2 questions

 

How many of you think that Alexei Navalny was really guilty of fraud? Or if he was, whether he was any more criminal than the other gangsters, including Putin, in Russian government.

 

And how many of you think that lots of what American Government tells us (about important things) is true?

 

 

Asked and answered

 

Merely having to pose these questions under today's circumstances, implicitly answers them.

 

 

For example

 

Setting aside Presidents Bush II, Obama and Trump's tireless infatuation with lying and deception regarding critically important issues — consider the following serendipitously representative report — that the United States conducted thousands of deadly air strikes without telling anyone:

 

 

The American military has failed to publicly disclose potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes conducted over several years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, a Military Times investigation has revealed.

 

The enormous data gap raises serious doubts about transparency in reported progress against the Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Taliban, and calls into question the accuracy of other Defense Department disclosures documenting everything from costs to casualty counts.

 

In 2016 alone, U.S. combat aircraft conducted at least 456 airstrikes in Afghanistan that were not recorded as part of an open-source database maintained by the U.S. Air Force, information relied on by Congress, American allies, military analysts, academic researchers, the media and independent watchdog groups to assess each war's expense, manpower requirements and human toll.

 

Those airstrikes were carried out by attack helicopters and armed drones operated by the U.S. Army, metrics quietly excluded from otherwise comprehensive monthly summaries, published online for years, detailing American military activity in all three theaters.

 

Most alarming is the prospect this data has been incomplete since the war on terrorism began in October 2001.

 

[The article continues by providing the reasoning upon which its assertions are based.]

 

© 2017 Andrew deGrandpre and Shawn Snow, The U.S. military's stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported, Military Times (05 February 2017)

 

 

We might reasonably infer from this that . . .

 

American government has decided that covering up collateral damage civilian casualties is a troublesome endeavor.

 

It is arguably easier on everyone (except the dead, maimed and familially affected) to conceal everything that US leadership does.

 

That way there's no push back from the public. No one gets excited. And we in Government get to do whatever we want, whenever we want.

 

How is that different than totalitarianism?

 

 

The pot and kettle dance

 

Before we go calling the Vladimir Putin kettle "blackest of black" — perhaps we should evaluate our own American pot of death-inducing deception.

 

We might even ask ourselves whether American Government's practice of serial lying diminishes the scope and quality of American liberty.

 

 

The key point — Truth is the bedrock of freedom

 

In an alleged democracy, if We the People don't know the facts, it is impossible to go anywhere reliably or accurately.

 

And if we cannot follow Reason's or Whim's paths through Reality, how can we call ourselves free?

 

 

The moral? — When Government leaders start engaging in wall-to-wall untruths . . .

 

. . . we are best off treating them like traitors to Liberty's ingredients.

 

In a purportedly constitutionally free nation like the United States, impenetrably presented Government deception very arguably constitutes Liberty-crushing treason.

 

There are exceptions to this, of course.

 

But these days, the scope of pretended exceptions devour what they pretend to protect.

 

I would hazard that the top folks doing most of the lying know this perfectly well.

 

They lie because it is a profitable way of staying in power. Which, of course, is why President Putin and Islamic terrorists do the same thing.

 

Hmmm.