Does writing something on a piece of paper make it a "law"?

"Whew! You sure gotta climb a lot of steps to get to the Capitol Building here in Washington. 

Well I wonder who that sad little scrap of paper is?"

And with those words began one of my childhood favorite Schoolhouse Rock videos, which used to be on television back in the early 1970s when I wasn't really old enough to have any idea what exactly they were all about, or why they would sometimes show up in between episodes of Superfriends, Speed Racer, or Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.

In  I'm just a bill," we witness the progress by which "that sad little scrap of paper" receives a fancy seal and a president's signature and becomes a law ("He signed ya, Bill: Now you're a Law!").

Although the video does an admirable job depicting some of the checks and balances contained in the US Constitution, through which the members of both houses of the legislature must agree to send the bill forward to the executive branch for final approval before any proposed bill is signed into law, it does tend to convey the impression that any "good idea" can be transformed into "a Law" through the magical process of being debated by important-looking men in impressive-looking buildings with lots of steps and Greek columns, on top of high hills (and filled with long rows of impassive US Marines in dress blue uniforms, and statues of distinguished statesmen from previous generations), signed by the president using a fountain pen, and affixed with a shiny-looking seal with a ribbon.

Nineteenth-century abolitionist, legal scholar and philosopher Lysander Spooner (1808 - 1887) would vehemently disagree that something becomes "a law" just because it goes through the above process and receives a president's signature and a fancy stamp. In fact, he published a treatise in 1850 entitled A Defence for Fugitive Slaves against the Acts of Congress of February 12, 1793 and September 18, 1850, in which he argued that an illegal law is no law at all, and confers no obligation on anyone to obey it, nor any authority to anyone desiring to enforce it.

He begins his treatise with the complete copy of each of the two acts in question, both of which were considered "law" in 1850, compelling men or women who knew of a "fugitive slave" to help catch that "fugitive slave" or face penalties including fines and imprisonment (the term "slave" is put in quotation marks here because Spooner argues that no person can ever own another person, and that there actually is no such thing as a legal slave or the legal condition of slavery, all so-called "laws" which make one person the property of another being illegal and criminal).

Those two so-called laws (the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850) were both signed by the presidents of their day, George Washington in the first instance and Millard Fillmore in the second (they also bear the signatures of the respective Speakers of the House and Presidents of the Senate). But these signatures do not make them true laws, according to Spooner's arguments. Spooner demonstrates that holding anyone else as property is a crime, and that putting something on paper, stamping it with fancy seals, embellishing it with fancy legal language, and endorsing it with the signatures of people bearing impressive titles does not make it into law: it's still just a "sad little scrap of paper" in his eyes.

He even goes so far as to say that men and women have the right to resist illegal laws, in what is undoubtedly among the most important sections of his argument, found on pages 27 and 28. There, he powerfully dismantles the counter-arguments that he anticipates from those who would argue that once something is "a law," it must be obeyed until it is repealed.

If it were really true that an illegal or unconstitutional law must be obeyed until repealed, he reasons, then "there would therefore be no difference at all between a constitutional and an unconstitutional law, in respect to their binding force; and that would be equivalent to abolishing the constitution, and giving to the government unlimited power" (28).

Those who would disagree with Lysander Spooner on this point are invited to participate in a mental experiment, in which they imagine that the president has signed a law saying that if you in any way hinder the search for an escaped slave, or in any way assist a person who has been designated a "slave" and who has run away and is hiding from the authorities, then you yourself are a criminal and can be subject to enormous fines and imprisonment. Note that this is not just a hypothetical scenario: the first and the thirteenth presidents of the United States each signed such a proposition into "law."

Today, nobody reading this blog would likely argue that they would feel a moral duty to obey such a "law," or that they would have to actually support it until such time as they could eventually get it repealed through the same arduous process depicted in the Schoolhouse Rock video shown above.

Nearly every man or woman would agree with Spooner that the institution of slavery and "laws" enforcing one person's ability to "own" another are not laws but rather outrageous crimes, and would reject the notion that writing such a "law" down on a piece of paper, stamping it with a pretty seal and adding some flowery signatures suddenly turns it into something that must be willingly and voluntarily obeyed until it can be debated and eventually repealed.

Writing something on a piece of paper does not make it a law.

But, if this is true, then what does make something a law? Lysander Spooner argued that the actions of men and women cannot actually make anything a law, but that there is already an immutable or unchangeable universal law which he called "Natural Law" or the "Science of Justice." He believed that human society should only enforce natural law, and not dream up additional or "artificial" laws, and that trying to add to or subtract from the natural law is as foolish as trying to add to or subtract from other natural laws, such as the law of gravity.

He argued that men and women could voluntarily band together to help ensure compliance with this natural law among their group, but that they could not compel others to join that voluntary association. Even within such a voluntary association, he believed that people or groups could only rightly compel compliance with the natural law, which was generally extremely simple and basically entailed the command to "live honestly, hurt no one, and give everyone his or her due."

In an 1882 publication entitled Natural Law; or The Science of Justice, Spooner set out to explain the concept of natural law. In it, he made a distinction between those things that everyone has a legal duty to either do or to refrain from doing, and which others can and must compel in others, and those things which everyone has a moral duty to do but which must be left up to each person's own judgment and which no one has the right or duty to compel.

Below is a table based upon Spooner's 1882 text, generally following the order and wording of his argument:

The left column (labeled "Legal Duty" and highlighted in yellow), in Spooner's view, constitutes those things which are part of the natural law, and can actually be the only things which anyone can rightfully use force to uphold. He says that everyone has a duty to refrain from injuring others, and that force may and must be used when someone sees someone else in the act of injuring someone else. Spooner further argues in that 1882 text that nearly everyone understands these natural law prohibitions and duties before they are even old enough to know that "three and three are six, or five and five ten" (9).

The right column (labeled "Moral Duty" and highlighted in green), in Spooner's view, constitutes those things which we do have a moral duty to perform, but which no one else can compel us to do: we must judge the extent to which we are able to do those things, and how we wish to best accomplish them when we do decide to do them.

Thus, in Spooner's view, any so-called law that goes beyond the legal duties in the left column (or, worse yet, directly contradicts and violates those legal duties, as did the Fugitive Slave Acts) is actually no law at all and it can and must be disobeyed as illegal and criminal, regardless of whether it was written down on paper using legal-sounding language and passed by men and women in fancy buildings and stamped with fancy stamps and inscribed with fancy signatures.

At this point, the reader may be thinking that all of this is very nice, but what on earth does it have to do with the general subject matter covered in this blog?

The answer is: everything. 

Because, as insightful thinkers such as Mark Passio have articulated, violations of natural law are so contrary to our innate understanding of right and wrong (remember that Spooner says we know it before we even know that 3 + 3 = 6) that artificial laws which violate natural law must always be dressed up with various symbols and word-formulas designed to convey legitimacy, and reinforced by systems of mind control by which men and women who should know that those violations are immoral can somehow be made to believe that those violations of natural law are instead right and good and deserving of support.  

Institutionalized violations of natural law are nearly always accompanied by powerful forms of illusion, or the creation of "false realities" that enable those violations to appear legitimate, and to get people to go along with them. 

Therefore, seeing through these false realities is of absolutely primary importance. This blog primarily examines false realities which can be seen operating all around us, including in the realm of conventional history as taught in all the institutions of academia and reinforced by the organs of the conventional media (see for example "Piercing the fog of deception that hides the contours of history" and also the two short videos entitled "The importance of challenging false narratives").

These false realities or false narratives which cause people to accept gross violations of natural law are operating today with just as much force as they were operating in Spooner's day -- perhaps even more so.

False narratives assist in getting people to accept the premise that so-called "laws" permitting government surveillance of individual men and women at virtually any time and place are legitimate (see here and here). This is a violation of natural law in that it enables hidden enforcers and observers to treat individuals as criminals on the suspicion that they might do something to harm others, elevating some to the status of "prison guards" and demoting everyone else to the status of prisoners under constant suspicion and surveillance.

False narratives convince people to accept the idea that men and women can and should be locked up and denied their freedom for possessing certain plants or mushrooms known to induce a state of ecstasy. This is a violation of natural law in that it uses force to prohibit behavior that in no way harms the person or property of another or infringes on another's rights.

False narratives convince people to accept the idea that men and women representing the government and wearing military gear and driving military vehicles can point military weapons at people assembling in the streets to express themselves, or at people in their homes in a neighborhood where fugitives are supposedly hiding. These are clear violations of natural law in that such actions basically declare that force can be used against citizens whenever it is convenient for the government to say there is a need to do so, an idea which Spooner eloquently demolishes in pages 27 and 28 of his text against the Fugitive Slave Acts. In a passage labeled "Section IV" of his 1882 treatise on Natural Law, Spooner declares that the rights belonging to every human being by the unchangeable principle of justice "necessarily remain with him [or her] during life," and although these rights are "capable of being trampled upon" they are nevertheless "incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated from" each and every human being, and that there is no authority high enough to simply declare them null or void.

False narratives have even apparently convinced some people that it is somehow excusable to cover up evidence of the potentially harmful effects of vaccines on certain children in order to support "herd immunity."

All of the above examples, along with the many other violations of natural law currently taking place, are enabled and excused by a variety of false realities or false narratives, created and maintained in order to lend an air of legitimacy to these violations. So were many other horrendous violations of natural law which were enabled by false narratives and illusions throughout history, including the enslavement of Africans which Spooner argued against in the 1850s, to the destruction of Native American tribes in the western US after the end of the US Civil War and the seizure of their lands and their confinement to reservations or "agencies," to the seizure of the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines in the years after that, and on and on right up to the present.

All of the above examples were enabled by lies, illusions, and false narratives or false realities.  For more on breaking through illusions and false realities, and creating new realities, see for example this previous post entitled "Jon Rappoport's talk on the trickster-god and creating reality."

It is one of Lysander Spooner's singular contributions that he perceived and forcefully argued that a criminal "law" is no law at all, and that men and women have the right and the duty to treat it as such, and to inform others of their right to do the same.

Putting something on paper doesn't make it a "law" -- even if it has been adorned with all the necessary stamps and signatures. As Spooner alludes in the writings linked above, the US Constitution as originally designed, and especially the Bill of Rights as originally conceived, were designed to safeguard natural-law rights in many ways, and to the extent that Schoolhouse Rock taught those principles to a new generation in the 1970s, it can be commended. Perhaps Spooner's arguments about an illegal law being no law at all could not really be expected to be squeezed into the "I'm Just a Bill" song.

But Lysander Spooner's arguments deserve to be brought into the modern era, in much the same way that the creators of Schoolhouse Rock tried to speak to the younger generation of the 1970s using the language and imagery of the 1970s. Spooner's arguments on behalf of the individual's rights under natural law -- rights which could never be abridged by any authority -- and his arguments against the creation of arbitrary "laws" which everyone has to obey just because a legislature or a president gave them the title of a "law" deserve examination, consideration, and thoughtful debate today more than ever.

And the false narratives supporting so-called laws which supposedly authorize some people to use violence against others, or to threaten violence against others, or to take away the freedom of others when those others have not done anything to harm anyone else's persons or property, must be shown to be the form of mind control that they are. No individuals or groups can give themselves the right to violate natural law and in doing so to infringe on anyone else's rights, simply by writing something down on a "sad little scrap of paper."

"Just following orders"

Spoiler alert: do not watch the above clip if you have not seen the film Breaker Morant yet. Instead, go watch it as soon as you can possibly find a way to do so.

Foreword note: Let me state at the outset that, while the essay below primarily deals with the responsibilities of the individual, on the larger scale I believe that war in itself is a criminal act under the concept of natural universal law except in the very limited cases in which it is undertaken in self-defense to stop an ongoing act of invasion or killing, just as individually using force against someone else is only justified to when one's own person or home is actually attacked, and only until the aggressor stops (you cannot keep going after that, or you become the aggressor). Further, it is not self-defense if you are actually invading or taking the land of another people and they offer resistance: it is proper to use force against someone who breaks into your home at night, and the person breaking in cannot claim to be acting in accordance with natural law if that person points to your legitimate use of force and calls it aggression and calls their subsequent actions "self-defense." The idea that individuals can violate natural law when acting in groups or on behalf of a "country" or other entity is a form of mind control.

When I was a young cadet at West Point, we received countless classes in a variety of subjects related to the standards of morality and honor expected of an officer, including numerous classes devoted to one particular subject: the absolute duty of an officer to refuse to carry out an unlawful order.

Ask any of my classmates and they will attest to the fact that this particular subject was stressed over and over, and to the fact that the film which we would watch almost every time this subject was going to be discussed was Breaker Morant (released in March of 1980). I believe I can safely say without exaggeration that my classmates and I were shown Breaker Morant at least five times in its entirety in conjunction with classes on and discussions about the topic of unlawful orders, and probably closer to ten or even twelve times during our four years at the Academy.

Fortunately, Breaker Morant is an outstanding film, and anyone who has not seen it should do himself or herself a favor and go watch it immediately. I think the first time I saw it I did not understand a word that anyone said in the movie (Australian being a very difficult language when first encountered by non-native speakers) but after seeing it so many times I can probably recite the entire movie from memory.

The point of showing Breaker Morant to young future officers was that in the film (which is based on true events which took place during the horrendous Boer War, 1899 - 1902) young lieutenants and captains are given orders that Boer prisoners caught wearing British uniforms are to be shot, an order which Lieutenant Morant carries out. Although one of the most powerful issues explored in the film is the fact that the junior officers who carried out the orders were court martialled while the high-ranking British officers who actually issued those orders are never tried and were not even made available to provide testimony despite the requests of the defense lawyer, the consuming focus of all our "honor classes" on this subject was

the clear and unequivocal teaching that an officer must never obey an unlawful order, and that if an officer commits an unlawful act, saying "I was just following orders" is no excuse.

In one sense, it might be said that Breaker Morant was not the best choice of films to use to try to hammer this point home: after all, Lieutenant Morant (played brilliantly by the inimitable Edward Woodward, leading an outstanding cast), Lieutenant Handcock, and Lieutenant Witton are extremely sympathetic characters who are clearly being railroaded in a gross miscarriage of justice, and as noted above the film is really about the treachery of the British high command in leaving young officers to swing in the wind for political reasons. While the shooting of prisoners who are no longer enemy combatants is clearly a crime, deliberately withholding material evidence from the defense in a capital murder trial is of course also a crime which could also have been profitably discussed in those classes (it never was), and in fact the entire Boer War can be argued to have been a criminal undertaking by the British Empire, in which a populace which wanted to remain independent and had every right to remain independent was forcibly brought to its knees in order to annex their country (using brutal tactics including concentration camps). 

On the other hand, the use of that particular film can be seen to have been an outstanding choice, in that it explores the subject of "unlawful orders" in great depth and with considerable dexterity, and powerfully dramatizes the tremendous pressures which threaten to sweep the individual off of his or her moral foundations, especially when he or she is caught up in a society which is actually being run by leaders who themselves are in gross violation of natural universal law. The irony of the events dramatized in the movie, and an irony of which the participants themselves are fully aware, is that they are being tried for murder by a system which continually demonstrates that it does not uphold the very laws that it is trying them for breaking.

While it may seem that the subject of Breaker Morant is rather far removed from the "ordinary experience" of those of us who are not exposed to the rather extreme situations Lieutenants Morant, Handcock, and Witton had to face, the subject of unlawful orders is actually incredibly relevant to all of our daily lives, and to the subjects discussed in this blog.

First, the subject has direct application to the discussion in the previous post regarding the use of the atom bomb to kill noncombatants at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, exactly sixty-nine years ago. As that post revealed, the majority of high-ranking officers in the armed forces of the United States, all of whom had endured years of bitter fighting, believed that the use of those weapons was wrong, including the seniormost officer on active duty during the war, Admiral William D. Leahy, the Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief, who stated unequivocally that dropping the bomb was barbaric and unethical.

Many of them expressed the belief that the use of the atom bombs was not necessary to convince Japan to surrender, and several of them stated that even if it was determined that their use was necessary, they could have been dropped on an uninhabited area as a demonstration of their power, with one stating that if they were to be dropped on a built-up area, civilians could have been warned some weeks in advance in order to allow them to leave before the bombs were dropped.

However, the question remains: if so many of these high-ranking officers opposed the use of the atomic bomb, and if the seniormost officer in the armed forces felt that it was actually ethically wrong and barbaric to use it, then how is it that they allowed it to be dropped? The answer is that there is a very strong tradition of civilian control of the military, and that these high-ranking officers were obeying the orders of the civilian commander-in-chief. They caused these orders to be carried out not just once, on August the sixth against Hiroshima, but again a second time on August the ninth, against Nagasaki.

That these officers believed it was their duty to carry out orders with which they strongly disagreed is quite clear from several of the quotations cited in the previous post.

General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold (West Point Class of 1907), the commander of the US Army Air Corps, stated publicly within days of the bombing that he felt the use of the atom bomb had been unnecessary. His deputy, General Ira C. Eaker, stated that:

Arnold's view was that it was unnecessary. He said that he knew the Japanese wanted peace. There were political implications in the decision and Arnold did not feel it was the military's job to question it.

There are several important points in that quotation: Arnold knew that Japan was already looking to surrender. He therefore concluded that militarily, further attacks were no longer necessary. He realized that there were apparently political reasons, but believed that there were no longer military reasons to do so. If one knows that one's opponent wants to stop the fighting, then continuing to attack (for instance, in order to push for "unconditional surrender") is no longer self-defense, but actual aggression (this situation can be argued to be directly analogous to the shooting of prisoners after they have surrendered). Further, the quotation, from someone who knew General Arnold well, indicates that Arnold believed it was not his place to question orders from the civilian politicians, although he clearly had strong misgivings about this fact.

Another indication of the same sentiment is the account in the previously-linked series of quotations from high-ranking military leaders who opposed the bombing of General Carl "Tooey" Spaatz (West Point Class of 1914), the commander of US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific at the time of Hiroshima. He suggested dropping the bomb over the water to demonstrate its power without dropping it on civilians, and was so upset when he was told he was (in his words) "supposed to go out there and blow off the whole south end of the Japanese Islands" that he insisted on having the order in writing, saying: "I would not drop an atomic bomb on verbal orders -- they had to be written."

He later wrote: "The dropping of the atomic bomb was done by a military man under military orders. We're supposed to carry out orders and not question them." Obviously, General Spaatz was still very upset about this decision, and was explaining his reasoning for carrying out an order with which he deeply disagreed.

By the time my class went through West Point, new classes had been implemented (at some point in time) which emphasized the exact opposite: that an officer is never supposed to carry out unlawful orders and in fact has a duty to refuse to do so.

This subject relates directly to the arguments put forward by nineteenth century abolitionist, lawyer, and philosopher Lysander Spooner (1808 - 1887). He argued that an artificial law (that is to say, a "man-made law") which violates natural law is in fact an illegal law and hence no law at all, and that all men and women have a duty to refuse to honor an illegal law. He made this argument quite forcibly prior to the American Civil War (so-called, although it was not actually a "civil war" in that one side was not trying to take over the government of the nation, but rather to leave the nation), in which he argued that the Fugitive Slave Act was an illegal law in that it demanded upon penalty of imprisonment that people turn in runaway slaves, and Spooner argued that the holding of men and women as property (as slaves) was a gross violation of natural law.

Notice that he did not argue that men and women had to obey the Fugitive Slave Act, since it had been signed into law, until they were able to overturn the law through the due process of legislative action: he argued that the so-called "law" was illegal and hence no law at all. He further argued that those who argue that people are required to uphold an illegal law until it was overturned through legislative action are actually arguing for tyranny, because under that view a law is binding just because someone says it is, even if that law is illegal (such as laws enforcing slavery). In A Defence for Fugitive Slaves against the Acts of Congress of February 12, 1793, and September 18, 1850, Spooner argues that the Fugitive Slave Acts are unconstitutional (it can be demonstrated that Spooner sees the boundaries of the constitutional protections of individual liberty as co-located with the boundaries of natural law 'sprotections of individual liberty), and then goes on to say:

An unconstitutional statute is no law, in the view of the constitution. It is void [. . .]. If this doctrine were not true, [. . .] congress may authorize whomsoever they please, to ravish women, and butcher children, at pleasure, and the people have no right to resist them. 27.

By the word "ravish," it should be obvious, Spooner is describing what we would today term "rape." By offering such extreme examples as laws which would permit the raping of women and the butchering of children, Spooner was demonstrating the untenability of the position of those who argue that men and women must obey "laws" the moment they are placed on the books by a legislative body, regardless of whether or not those so-called laws violate natural universal law.

Clearly, in Spooner's eyes, even a military officer would not be required to obey the orders of the president, if that president ordered something that was clearly a violation of natural universal law (such as the employment of atomic weapons against noncombatant women and children). We could rephrase this argument as follows: "An order from a president which violates natural law carries no force of law -- it is void. If this doctrine were not true, the president could order whatever arbitrary injustice he wanted, and military officers would have no right to oppose him."

While the discussion above clearly applies to the duty of those in militaries to refuse to obey unlawful orders, Spooner argued with great moral clarity that this duty applies equally to citizens during peacetime, and particularly with regard to participation on juries. Spooner advocated a position known as "jury nullification," in which he argued that a member of a jury has an obligation to oppose a law which violates natural law or which is unconstitutional (in his eyes, they were very nearly the same thing, since he saw the US Constitution as being largely premised upon natural law, and rejected its authority in any places where it was used to support violations of natural law, such as in its toleration of the institution of slavery).

In a sense, one could argue that Spooner's position on jury nullification is very analogous to the teaching of the Breaker Morant classes I received at West Point, in that Spooner argues that a jury member had a right and even a duty to refuse to obey the instructions of a judge regarding the enforcement of an unlawful statute.

In a trial by jury, after all the arguments have been presented, the judge typically issues instructions to the jury which state that the jury has an obligation to determine whether or not the defendant has violated the law as it is written and as it has been explained by the presiding judge: they must not try to rule on whether or not the law itself is right or wrong. See for example the discussion of "instructions to the jury" on this web page of the American Bar Association, which declares that:

The judge will point out that his or her instructions contain the interpretation of the relevant laws that govern the case, and that jurors are required to adhere to these laws in making their decision, regardless of what the jurors believe the law is or ought to be. In short, the jurors determine the facts and reach a verdict, within the guidelines of the law as determined by the judge.

In other words, it is up to the judge to tell them the law, and for them to accept it and not question it, but only to determine whether or not the law was broken. But Spooner strenuously objects to this interpretation of the role of the juror: he argues that the juror is the last and most important obstacle to the imposition of arbitrary and tyrannical law. By the exact same arguments cited above, the position articulated by the American Bar Association, that the juror has no right to decide if a law is valid, could and would be interpreted to mean that a juror must vote to lock a defendant away if the law said that walking about in one's house without a shirt on was punishable by imprisonment, if the evidence presented proved that the defendant did so, regardless of the fact that such a law would be quite against natural universal law, not to mention the Fourth Amendment and various other parts of the Bill of Rights.

The arguments of the American Bar Association and the instructions they outline for the judge to give to the jury are equivalent to telling officers in the military that they must not judge whether or not an order is illegal: their duty is simply to carry it out.

In An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852), Spooner says that such a teaching would be tantamount to tyranny, in that it would obligate men and women to uphold criminal laws. He writes of juries:

It is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.

Unless such be the right and duty of jurors, it is plain that, instead of juries being a "palladium of liberty" -- a barrier against the tyranny and oppression of the government -- they are really mere tools in its hands, for carrying into execution any injustice and oppression it may desire to have executed. [page 1, italics in the original].

Under the doctrine of jury nullification, juries could decide not to send someone to prison for life under the "three strikes" law for the crime of stealing a piece of pizza, or they could decide not to take away someone's liberty for possessing a plant which is "legal" to possess in one state and "illegal" in another. This position does not mean that Spooner is arguing that juries can simply decide what laws they "like" or don't like: note carefully that he argues that jurors have a duty to hold invalid those laws which are unjust or oppressive, which is to say those which violate natural universal law. The doctrine of jury nullification no more means that jurors don't have to uphold valid laws than the classes we received at West Point taught us that we didn't have to obey lawful orders (they absolutely taught that we did have to obey lawful orders). The classes taught us that we had a duty to resist unlawful orders, and Spooner is arguing that jurors have a duty to nullify unjust laws (those which can be demonstrated to violate the higher law of natural universal law).

We now see that we do not need to find ourselves in the rather extreme circumstances of risking arrest for refusing to tell the whereabouts of a fugitive slave, or fighting a guerrilla war on the high veldt at the turn of the century (the last century), or facing orders to drop an atomic bomb, in order to think about the importance of refusing to enforce an unlawful order, and to apply the teaching that we each have a duty to refuse to carry out illegal orders.

We should hope that, had we faced those extreme situations, we would not have turned in a runaway slave (even though the law said we could go to jail if we did not), and we would not have shot prisoners after they surrendered (even though our superior officers had told us that this was now the official policy), and we would not have acquiesced to the decision to use the atom bomb (even though we received unequivocal orders to do so). But, even if we never are put to such a drastic test, there will be times in each of our lives (perhaps on jury duty, perhaps in some other capacity) when, in Spooner's words, we must be "a barrier against the tyranny and oppression of the government" rather than "a mere tool in its hands for carrying into execution any injustice and oppression it may desire to have executed."

Afterword:  If you read the evidence in my latest book, The Undying Stars, regarding aspects of world history which are not well known (and which in fact have been carefully covered up) and the mechanisms of mind control (including literalist religious dogmas but also political structures and hierarchies) which have been used by a relatively small number of people in positions of power to influence the majority of people (who generally know natural law more or less innately) to permit atrocious violations of natural law, you will understand that the above discussion is not a departure from the normal subject matter discussed on this blog, but is instead actually quite central to it. Some discussion of the connections can also be found in this interview.

August 06, 2014

August 06, 2014 marks the 69th year since the bombing of Hiroshima.

It may not be widely known that many high-ranking military officers serving in the US armed forces at the time were opposed to the bombings, and went on record to say that they believed the use of two atomic bombs against Japan (the first against the city of Hiroshima on August 06, 1945 and the second against the city of Nagasaki on August 09, 1945) was unnecessary and morally wrong.

This site published by a professor at the University of Colorado gives a partial list of high-ranking US officers who opposed the bombing, along with quotations in which they stated their reasons.

One of the first quotations given is from the Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief during the war, Admiral William D. Leahy (1875 - 1959), who declared that in using the atomic bomb against cities full of noncombatants, the United States

adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. 

General Douglas MacArthur's pilot, Weldon E. Rhoades, wrote an entry in his diary the day after the Hiroshima bombing, in which he stated:

General MacArthur is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster. I had a long talk with him today, necessitated by the impending trip to Okinawa.

A common theme among the quotations cited is the opinion, given by high-ranking military officers who had been commanding at various levels throughout the war and whose professional judgment on the subject should be respected, that the bombings were not necessary in order to end the war and that they were employed for political reasons rather than military reasons. This opinion, which is repeated several times among those officers quoted, is in direct opposition to what children in the United States are taught in school about the necessity of using the atomic bombs against Japan.

Also present in many of the quotations are opinions that it was wrong to target noncombatants and that if a demonstration of the atomic bombs was considered necessary it could have been done over an uninhabited area in order to show their destructive power. 

Nevertheless, questioning the decision to use the atomic bombs in the way that they were used often elicits powerful emotional responses, including at times hostility, name-calling (such as "revisionist history" or "revisionism," as well as "anti-American" and "unpatriotic," and even "disrespectful to those who served in World War II"), and the general opinion that questioning the decision is off-limits.

This fact in and of itself should set off an alarm, in that the declaration that some subjects cannot be discussed or that only one conclusion is allowed to be considered is often a sign that natural universal law is being violated and the violation is being covered over with arguments to try to excuse it and to deflect the natural human reaction to such violation, which is revulsion. Note that the military officers cited above almost universally rejected the arguments and excuses offered in support of the use of the atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Because most people recognize violations of natural law, and reject it, it generally takes a concerted and coordinated effort to convince large numbers of people that a violation of natural law is actually something to applaud rather than something to reject. Two previous posts in particular have discussed this subject: "Lysander Spooner, natural law, and human consciousness," and "A Memorial Day meditation on natural universal law." 

In those two previous essays, quotations from nineteenth-century natural law advocate, anti-slavery abolitionist, and philosopher Lysander Spooner are cited in which Spooner declares: 

• that acting as an officer of government in any capacity does not give anyone the right to violate natural universal law, 
• that artificially-enacted laws which violate natural universal law may and must be resisted at all times (and must not be "obeyed until they are overturned," as some incorrectly argue), 
• that officers of government who violate natural universal law may and must also be declared to be criminals and treated as such, 
• and that those who try to argue that artificial law can ever trump natural law will always resort to "pretences and disguises" to try to overcome the innate human revulsion towards violations of natural universal law.

The twin facts of the high numbers of American military officers who were appalled and revolted by the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, and the situation in which questioning this decision has been declared to be "unpatriotic," "anti-American," and "off limits" in the decades since, indicate that the use of the two atomic bombs was in fact completely in violation of natural law, and that "pretences and disguises" have been heavily employed in the decades since in order to try to cover-over this violation. 

Another name for these "pretences and disguises" is mind control.

The horrific destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the hideous incineration of the citizens of those cities -- including huge numbers of noncombatant men, women and children -- was quite simply an illegal and immoral violation of natural law.

The fact that this destruction was inflicted using atomic weapons had the additional effect of exposing thousands of those who survived the initial day of the bombing to lingering death from radiation and the diseases such as leukemia which that radiation caused in their human bodies.

Emblematic of the horrible effects of the bombing, its illegality under natural law and its lack of justification was the death of Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who was two years old when the bomb was dropped near her home next to the Misasa Bridge in Hiroshima. Nine years later, at the age of eleven, she began to develop swelling and purple spots in the tissues of her body. She died of leukemia less than a year later, at the age of twelve. In addition to symbolizing the wider tragedy, her death at such a young age was of course also a personal tragedy for Sadako herself and for her family.

There is simply no way to argue that the deliberate targeting of women and children, the rubbling of their homes, and the inflicting of such diseases upon noncombatants, is in accordance with natural law.

Although next year will mark seventy years since this tragic event and the tragic bombing three days later of Nagasaki, these issues remain absolutely relevant today -- perhaps more relevant than ever.

image: Origami crane (orizuru), Wikimedia commons (link).

Know the stars: change the world

image: Wikimedia commons (link).

How can knowing the stars change your life? And even . . . change the world?

The endless, silent motion of the circling stars (along with the planets, and the motions of the sun and the moon) form the foundation of all the world's ancient sacred traditions -- from ancient Egypt, to ancient Greece, to the land of the Norsemen, to North America, and Central America, and Japan, and China -- even the islands of the broad Pacific (and in many other cultures and places not named here but which can also be demonstrated to have myths and sacred stories based upon the heavenly motions).

These heavenly cycles even form the basis for the stories found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (see for example here, here, and here).

If virtually every ancient sacred tradition and set of ancient scriptures is based upon the motion of the stars and other heavenly bodies, the formulators of those priceless vessels of ancient wisdom must have felt that this subject was vitally important.

What were they trying to tell us?

Plato, using the character of Socrates, seems to hint that the message of these celestial myths is the message of the temple at Delphi: Know thyself.

Part of that knowing involves who we are as human beings, and (according to Socrates) the knowledge that we consist of a soul which "is not born and does not die," a soul which descends into and "besouls" a body during multiple successive incarnations, in order to learn certain lessons -- all of which are related (according to Plato and Socrates) to love. This motion of incarnation and reincarnation is demonstrated to us in the motions of the stars and the heavenly spheres. See for example the discussion here.

But there is more. Because knowing that we are actually denizens of a spiritual realm and that our immaterial souls transcend the material realm (and are not dependent for their ultimate survival upon the material body), in the eyes of the ancients, implies something else. It implies that just as we are not bound by the material realm, and will one day transcend its bounds, we are also capable of transcending the material realm even during this life. It can be demonstrated that all of the ancient sacred traditions taught a vision that can be described as shamanic -- a vision that taught that we can transcend the artificial boundaries and limits that others try to impose upon us, or that we impose upon ourselves.

This is the vision that I describe as shamanic-holographic: the perception that what we take for "realities" are often simply illusions, created by our mind -- that we can actually replace these realities with new ones. Writer, investigative reporter and philosopher Jon Rappoport is one of the most eloquent champions of the individual's ability to transcend the realities that others try to force upon us (or that we force upon ourselves), and to create new realities. His concept of art and the artist is very much in harmony with the teaching that I believe is found in all the world's sacred mythologies, and which I have described in my book as "shamanic." He clearly perceives this purpose in the ancient stories of the gods and goddesses -- and in particular the presence of a "trickster" in every myth system, something he spoke of in his performance this past weekend at the Secret Space Program conference (I hope to explore in future posts some of the profound concepts he raised this past Sunday).

Take a look, for example, at this recent essay from Jon Rappoport's website, paying particular attention towards the end to his examination of the message of the god Hermes.

As he demonstrates in that essay, it is possible to transcend boundaries and to change the world for the better through art. The ancient scriptures (including those found in the Old and New Testaments) also teach that it is possible to actually tune our consciousness to the hidden world, the immaterial world -- the world to which shamans travel, and through which people may be moving when they have out-of-body experiences. This hidden realm may also be the world which we encounter when we dream, and which people tap into when they experience a "placebo effect" (essentially healing themselves in some way, based on a belief that they gave themselves by taking a placebo or "sugar pill").

This ability to transcend artificial boundaries -- an ability that the star-myths all urge us to grasp and to wield -- has very real potential to change our world for the better even beyond the individually life-changing possibilities hinted at above. Because most if not all of the world's injustices and violations of human rights are based upon the ability of perpetrators to impose "artificial laws" upon other men and women, and to get men and women to accept these artificial laws.

The great nineteenth-century philosopher and abolitionist Lysander Spooner contrasted artificial laws with what he called natural law. Examples he offered of artificial laws: laws passed in the United States which allowed men and women to be treated as property -- that is, as slaves -- which he argued loudly and powerfully to abolish, as well as laws which said that if citizens living in free states did not turn in fugitive slaves, they could be held to be in violation of the law and subject to both fines and imprisonment themselves. Spooner argued that men and women have the ability -- and even the right and the duty -- to ignore such artificial (and actually criminal) so-called laws. In other words, he argued that we must transcend the phony boundaries and statutes that others try to impose upon us, and that so-called "laws" which violate natural law (what I prefer to call "natural universal law") are no laws at all.

When we know the stars -- and the timeless message which the ancient scriptures of humanity meant to convey using the majestic motions of those stars -- then we can know ourselves, and know that we each individually contain and reflect the infinite cosmos. This endows each of us with infinite worth, and it also endows everyone we meet with the same. It teaches that we cannot violate the rights of our neighbor, and also that no one has the right to violate ours -- no matter what artificial systems others try to erect in order to attempt to excuse such violations or to hypnotize the people into permitting and even enabling such violations. It teaches that we can and must ignore and transcend so-called laws which are actually no laws at all (even as we obey the natural universal law which forbids doing violence to another person, who is equally an immortal soul and who individually also contains and reflects the entire cosmos).

And, on a personal level, it teaches that we can explode and scatter the artificial boundaries and limits that we or others try to impose upon ourselves and our potential, and boxes that we put ourselves into.

These are all potentially world-changing truths.

Know the stars: change the world (for the better).

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25 - 26, 1876

image: Sioux Sun Dance, 1874. Wikimedia commons (link).

June 25 is the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which took place from June 25-26 in 1876.

The causes leading up to the battle were complex, but can be boiled down to the fact that the US Army was seeking to attack the Sioux and other Native Americans who refused to be confined to the reservations, and the larger issue that the US Government wanted to purchase the Black Hills (Paha Sapa) from the Sioux due to the discovery of gold there, and that the Sioux did not want to sell them.

In Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (1975), historian Stephen E. Ambrose writes:

The United States Government was embarrassed, not at the way its citizens were violating the treaty but by its failure to obtain some legal excuse to take the Hills. It seemed to have little sense of the nation's honor and little morality of its own. On November 3, 1875, President Grant held a high-level Cabinet meeting, with General Sheridan in attendance. It was decided that the hostiles were the ones standing in the way of a Black Hills take-over, so the solution was to drive the hostiles out of the unceded Indian territory in Wyoming and Montana and force them onto the reservations. On December 6 Grant ordered all Indians in the unceded country to move onto the agencies by January 31, 1876. Otherwise, they would be certified as hostile and the Army would come after them. The unceded country would become a free-fire zone. It was a declaration of war, although it should be added that neither Grant nor his advisors thought that the hostiles would put up a fight; in their view, the Army would have an easy time of bullying Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the others onto a reservation. 396.

Sitting Bull was one of the leaders of the Hunkpapa Lakota warriors who refused to come in to the reservations and and who wanted to preserve their way of life; Crazy Horse was a leader of the Oglala Sioux who likewise disdained the idea of coming in. While the number of Indians who remained with Sitting Bull and the other leaders who wanted to live free had been dwindling, during the summer of 1876 their numbers began to swell dramatically, in large part because of the terrible conditions including food shortages found on the reservations, where corruption among the government agents commissioned to provide food to the reservation Indians was rampant.

Regarding the abominable conditions in the Indian agency camps, Ambrose writes:

The truth was that the agents were corrupt. They accepted diseased cattle, rotten flour, wormy corn, and so on from the white contractors, then took kickbacks when the United States Government paid the bill. There was nothing for the Indians to do at the agencies; the people were undernourished at best, starving at worst. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail argued incessantly with their agents, demanding more and better food, to no avail. 389.

According to Ambrose, an opinion he backs up with evidence from newspaper accounts and the actions Custer took, Custer himself was disgusted at the corruption in the setup, which he suspected (and went on public saying) could be traced all the way up to the brother of US president Ulysses S. Grant (399). There is also some evidence that Custer thought he could become the Democrat candidate for the presidency and win an election against Grant (a Republican), particularly if he gained a big victory in time for the news to make it back east before the Democrat National Convention, scheduled to open on June 27(407).

In an interview in 1881 in which he spoke of the battle for the first time since it took place, Sitting Bull said to a reporter:

During the Summer previous to the one in which Custer attacked us, he sent a letter to me telling me that if I did not go to an agency he would fight me, and I sent word back to him by his messenger that I did not want to fight, but only to be left alone. I told him at the same time that if he wanted to fight that he should go and fight those Indians who wanted to fight him. Custer then sent me word again, (this was in the Winter.) * * * 'You would not take my former offer, now I am going to fight you this Winter.' I sent word back and said just what I had said before, that I did not want to fight, and only wanted to be left alone, and that my camp was the only one that had not fought against him. Custer again sent a message: 'I am fitting up my wagons and soldiers, and am determined to fight against you in the Spring.' I thought that I would try him again, and sent him a message saying I did not want to fight; that I wanted, first of all, to go to British Territory, and after I had been there and came back, if he still wanted to fight me, that I would fight then. Custer sent back word and said: 'I will fight you in eight days.' I then saw that it was no use, that I would have to fight, so I sent him word back, 'All right; get all your men mounted and I will get all my men mounted: we will have a fight; the Great Spirit will look on, and the side that is in the wrong will be defeated.'

Ambrose confirms the general outline of the above account, with the US Government making a deadline (as noted in the earlier block quotation) for all Sioux to be in to the agencies by January 31. They sent out runners to inform all the "wild Sioux" of the impending deadline. Ambrose writes: "The runners found Sitting Bull camped at the mouth of the Powder River. He sent back a friendly message -- he couldn't come in just now, but he would consider the order and might come in later on, perhaps next summer, maybe later" (396). Ambrose says that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse both regarded the order as "a good joke" (396-397).

The Secretary of the Interior wrote to the Secretary of War: "Said Indians are hereby turned over to the War Department for such action on the part of the Army as you may deem proper under the circumstances" (397). In between the end of the deadline and the actual departure of the 7th Cavalry into Sioux territory in May, Custer was involved in political bickering with President Grant, and was almost relieved of command of the expedition.

As word of the impending army campaign spread amongst the Sioux in the Indian agencies, more and more began to join Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Hunkpapas, Oglalas, Brulés, and Blackfeet Sioux, Cheyennes, Sans Arcs, Assiniboines and Arapahoes. Some estimates put the number of lodges that had gathered around the great camp in the Powder River country at over a thousand -- in some estimates two thousand. Ambrose estimates that the number of warriors was probably between two thousand and four thousand. The camp had to move frequently because the enormous numbers of ponies would exhaust the grass for forage, and new grazing areas would need to be found. The mighty camp moved into the Rosebud Valley in early June of 1876, and prepared for a Sun Dance.

Ambrose explains:

All the people, Sioux and Cheyenne, went into one enormous circle. Everything was done in the old way, according to strict and elaborate ritual. Virgins cut the sacred tree; chiefs carried it into the camp circle; braves counted coup upon it. The buffalo skulls were set up, along with the sacred pipes and other paraphernalia. Many men pierced at that dance, undergoing the self-torture so that Wakan Tanka, the All, would smile upon his people. Sitting Bull, his breast already covered with scars from previous Sun Dances, was the sponsor and leader. He sat on the ground with his back to the sacred Sun Dance pole while his adopted brother, Jumping Bull, lifted a small piece of his, Sitting Bull's, skin with an awl and cut it with a sharp knife. Jumping Bull cut fifty pieces of flesh from Sitting Bull's right arm, then fifty more from the left arm.

With blood streaming down both his arms, Sitting Bull then danced around and around the pole, staring constantly at the sun. He danced after the sun had set, through the night and into the next day; for eighteen hours he danced. Then he fainted. When Black Moon revived him by throwing cold water on his face, Sitting Bull's eyes cleared and he spoke to Black Moon in a low voice. His offering had been accepted, his prayers had been heard. He had had a vision.

Black Moon walked into the middle of the circle and called out, "Sitting Bull wishes to announce that he just heard a voice from above saying, 'I give you these because they have no ears.' He looked up and saw soldiers and some Indians on horseback coming down like grasshoppers, with their heads down and their hats falling off. They were falling right into our camp." 417.

This vision, which has become famous, had an effect on the gathered warriors that was electric. Later, during their reconnaissance on the two days prior to the battle itself, some of Custer's many Native American scouts (probably the "Indians on horseback" seen in the vision with the white soldiers) came across drawings in the sand along the Rosebud of Sitting Bull's vision and told the officers about it, warning them to turn back, but Custer only shrugged (428).

Crazy Horse was also known to possess very strong medicine through which it was believed that he could never be killed in battle by a bullet or by an enemy, something he had been told in his vision as a young adolescent boy of twelve or thirteen, 22 years before the Battle of the Little Bighorn (described by Ambrose on pages 68-69). After the Little Bighorn, an Arapaho who had ridden with Crazy Horse reported that, "Crazy Horse, the Sioux Chief, was the bravest man I ever saw. He rode closest to the soldiers, yelling to his warriors. All the soldiers were shooting at him, but he was never hit" (442).

Ambrose describes the decision undertaken by Crazy Horse during the actual attack, when Custer had split his twelve troops of cavalry into three maneuver elements, with three troops going with Captain Benteen, three troops with Major Reno, and five with Custer himself (one troop was left back to safeguard the supporting troops with the supplies and ammunition in the rear). It was a breathtaking maneuver on the part of Crazy Horse. Custer himself apparently planned to ride around in a large flanking maneuver to attack the rear of the Indian village (the north end as it was arrayed along the generally north-south direction of the Little Bighorn), planning to have Reno and Benteen coming up from the south. But, as Ambrose explains, Crazy Horse had ridden through the village, gathering a stream of warriors behind him, and set off to outflank Custer's maneuver:

Crazy Horse called to his men, "Ho-ka hey! It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die! Strong hearts, brave hearts, to the front! Weak hearts and cowards to the rear!" He then led them, at a gallop, through the camp, planning to get beyond Custer, ford the Little Bighorn, and hit the 7th Cavalry in the right flank and rear. The Indian force picked up reinforcements as it tore through the camp, until there were as many as one thousand men following Crazy Horse, mainly Oglalas and Cheyennes. 440.

Meanwhile, the Hunkpapa war chief Gall had engaged Custer with as many as a thousand warriors of his own, crucially tying up Custer's maneuver force and setting them up for the flanking movement being led by Crazy Horse. Gall's two wives and children had been killed when Major Reno's troopers had launched the attack on the southern end of the village that morning. Ambrose speculates that when Gall's force lit into Custer's troops, Custer must have realized that he himself "was no longer on the offensive. Suddenly he was in a fight for survival" (440).

Custer may have tried to make his way towards the hilltop which is famous today for being the site of his "last stand." But at that moment, Ambrose believes, Crazy Horse with his thousand or so mounted warriors crested the intervisibility line created by the top of the hill Custer and his men were making for:

What a sight it must have been, especially for George Armstrong Custer, who was -- probably -- at that instant leading his men toward the spot on which Crazy Horse stood. Behind Crazy Horse, Custer would have seen the thousand warriors, all painted, many with war bonnets, some holding spears high in the air, their glistening points aimed right at Custer. Many braves, as many as one out of five, were brandishing Winchesters or other rifles. Half or more of the Indians held bows and fistfuls of arrows, often with shields in the other hand -- they guided their ponies with their knees. The ponies were painted too, with streaks and zigzags and other designs, and with their new coats, sleek sides, and plenty of fat from the spring grass, the animals looked magnificent. [. . .]

Crazy Horse would have been in front, alone, standing out in that kaleidoscope of shifting color by his apparent plainness. He would have worn only his breechcloth and a single hawk's feather in his hair. Almost surely he had his pebble behind his ear, another under his arm, and had thrown some dust over himself and his pony after painting zigzag marks on his body and some lightning streaks on his pony. He carried his Winchester lightly. His eyes must have sparkled; certainly he must have been proud -- of himself, of his warriors, of all the Oglalas, all the Sioux and Cheyennes. Together they had achieved something never before accomplished -- an armed mass of Indians, a thousand or more strong, was about to descend from an unexpected direction upon less than 225 regular Army troopers. 441.

There are many deep lessons here to reflect upon, a hundred and thirty-eight years after that fateful day. First, in spite of the massive victory by the Native American tribes acting in concert against the invaders, a victory that sent shock waves throughout the world, the aftermath was ultimately not favorable for the Sioux and the Cheyenne and their allies. Their way of life would soon be destroyed, their people forced onto the reservations, the Black Hills appropriated by the US Government that same year -- and the faces of four US presidents carved into them during the 1920s and 1930s.

Sitting Bull would try to continue to live the old life with a band of followers, moving up into Canada, but the cold winters eventually caused his followers to abandon the dream, and eventually he turned himself in, as Crazy Horse did years earlier, his own followers facing starvation from lack of buffalo and several children having frozen to death from the cold. Both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were killed by being stabbed in the back (Crazy Horse) and shot (Sitting Bull) under suspicious circumstances while in police custody in the agencies.

Clearly, the events described above show that the actions taken by the US Government were in egregious violation of natural universal law. To declare that men and women must place themselves on a reservation or be "certified as hostile" and subject to attack at any time by the army violates natural law. On the other hand, Sitting Bull not once but several times stated that he and his people did not want to fight, but would fight back if attacked. His testimony is that he and his people wanted to be left alone to live as they chose to live.

But, although they were perfectly within their rights to fight back when confronted with deadly force from the invading armies, their victory did not cause the people who were supporting the murderous policies in the first place -- that is to say, the people who elected and supported the US Government and gave their approval to the policies being enacted ostensibly in their name -- to change their minds and reconsider the fact that they were in the wrong and were guilty of violating natural universal law against their fellow human beings. In fact, the stunning defeat of Custer and the 7th Cavalry only hardened their resolve to continue their illegal seizure of the homelands of the Native Americans and to insist on the destruction of their way of life.

It is a certainty that, had enough people become outraged at the illegal and murderous actions that were taking place, those actions could have been ended. But in order to make that happen, the ideologies and mind control that enabled all those people to excuse and overlook the illegal policies had to be overcome. The use of force -- even when rightly employed to try to stop violence -- is rarely enough to overcome the ideologies and mind control that are blinding those who are excusing and enabling murder. However, as discussed in this previous post on Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolent demonstrations which cause the perpetrators of these crimes to reveal the true nature of their heinous beliefs and activities can sometimes do so, by appealing to and awakening that innate knowledge of natural law which nearly all men and women possess, and which the enablers of violence and violation must "hypnotize" and "put to sleep" using ideology and mind control.

Had the Native Americans employed techniques designed to appeal to this aspect of the populace back east that was enabling the murderous policies in the west, and had they combined that with continued brilliant military actions such as that which delivered the crushing defeat to the 7th Cavalry in 1876, the results might well have been different. Military victories alone could not accomplish this.

Another important lesson from the events just described is the way they fit into a much larger pattern, a pattern that has been absolutely dominant throughout the history of the past seventeen centuries, but which has been camouflaged so well that most of us do not even realize it is going on. That pattern consists of the tactics of the enemies of what we might call "the shamanic." The goal of the US Government, stated in black and white ink in their treaties with the Sioux (treaties the US Government later shamelessly broke), was not simply control of the Black Hills and their gold, but also the requirement that the Native Americans turn over their children to be educated by the agents of the government from the ages of six through sixteen. These stipulations can be seen in the Treaty of 1868 in Article VII in this transcript, or in the images of the original handwritten treaty documents here.

The overt goal of the US Government was the eradication of the old ways. We can see from the historical events cited at the beginning of this post that the pattern included the registration of the formerly free Indians in an "agency," where they would be dependent upon government agents for their food. This situation naturally invited corruption, in which certain people who had "connections" (including, in this case, possibly the brother of the president of the US himself, along with others administrating the system) could make money for themselves through those connections.

In this particular example, the corruption involved the purchase of rotten or substandard food from suppliers, probably at a discount (the suppliers being happy to get any money for goods which would otherwise have to be thrown away) and then overstating the prices paid in order to skim the difference for themselves. But this is just one form such corruption can take. Note that the entire Middle Ages basically followed a similar pattern -- the Middle Ages that were set up in Europe, according to the theory I explore in The Undying Stars, by the experts in mind control who took over the Roman Empire using the twin mechanisms of Mithraism and literalist Christianity, and who then established for themselves fiefdoms across Europe.

During the Middle Ages, in other words, the bulk of the populace was reduced to a status similar to that of the Native Americans who were forced into the agencies: their freedoms were curtailed, they were dependent upon those who had declared themselves to be the owners of the lands, and they were reduced to conditions at or near poverty, while those well connected to the governing bodies could create lucrative schemes to enrich themselves in much the same way as did the corrupt agents who were procuring rotten food for the Indian agencies described above.

Put another way, we can see the pattern that was imposed on Europe during the time of feudalism being imposed upon the Native Americans during the nineteenth century.

Additionally and related to the foregoing, the incidents just described indicate the fact that the Native American cultures were clearly shamanic, and had access to knowledge and powers which cannot be explained within the general paradigm favored by those in charge of the conventional historical narrative today. Both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse genuinely appear to have been able to cross over the boundaries between this world and the "other realm," with positive impact on their own lives and on the lives of those they led. Crazy Horse had at least one such boundary-crossing vision, at the age of twelve or thirteen, which guided him for the rest of his life. He may have had others, but we can be sure he had one. Sitting Bull by all accounts had many others, and appears to have had a very clear vision prior to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, during which he was able to access information from another aspect of reality or another realm of experience.

I have suggested in The Undying Stars that part of the pattern of those people who created the conditions of the Middle Ages included the deliberate destruction of such shamanic knowledge, wherever it might be (beginning first within the Roman Empire itself, then expanding to other parts of Europe and Africa, and then across the oceans).

Finally, and this may be most crucial of all, we might want to ask ourselves to what degree we today are enabling and supporting the placing of other human beings "onto the reservation" -- to what degree we "look the other way" to violations of natural universal law, or by our ideologies excuse those violations and try to convince ourselves that they are not really violations at all. And, related to that question, we might also ask in what ways we ourselves are being told that we must give up on the idea of freedom and submit to life "on the agencies" (by accepting universal, ubiquitous surveillance, for example).

Custer himself, who was a very complex character, certainly with many flaws but in many ways not entirely unsympathetic, went on record as saying: "If I were an Indian, I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people who adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation" (cited in Ambrose, 387).

We may tell ourselves, in the comfort of our living room, reading about the events of 1876, that if given the choice, we too would have followed the path of Crazy Horse, or of Sitting Bull, and opted for freedom, politely declining the invitation to come in to the agencies, not seeking the way of war but unafraid of it if it came. But, given the fact that we may well be staring at impending changes which will be every bit as radical as those faced by the Sioux, we must ask ourselves whether we are casting our lot with those who "adhered to the free open plains" or those who have decided to "submit to the confined limits of a reservation," in Custer's words. It is very interesting that the US company Google chose to host their annual I/O conference on the anniversary of this particular battle, with demonstrations related to new ways to add "input-output" devices and software to your television, your automobile, and just about everywhere else you go during the day, including devices to monitor you while you sleep, although of course it is probably only coincidence.

These issues show us that the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the examples set by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, and the others are not merely the "stuff of history," but that they continue to have tremendous relevance to the lives of every man and woman alive today.

"Thou journeyest on the road whereon the gods journeyed"

image: Wikimedia commons (link).

The earth has now passed the point of the June solstice, and the sun is now beginning its long decline towards the bottom of the year (for those in the northern hemisphere: for the southern hemisphere, the sun's path will now be climbing in the sky).

This long descent of the sun each year furnishes the ancient mythology of the world with a powerful metaphor for the descent of the god out of the fiery realm of the heavens and into the miry realm of earth and water: the incarnation.

In Lost Light, Alvin Boyd Kuhn argues that all the ancient myths of the god or goddess descending to earth -- there to be cut up and scattered abroad, or to search for the cut up body of the god, or to dwell among mankind, or to be hidden in a secret place -- were intended to teach that individual men and women (and babies and children too) each contain a divine and immortal spark, temporarily buried inside material flesh.  

In other words, the gods and goddesses of the myths are in humanity.

Examples cited by Kuhn in chapter VII of Lost Light include the tearing to pieces of Dionysus or Bacchus, the cutting in pieces of Osiris, the descent to earth to search for the pieces of Osiris by Isis, the descent of Persephone into the underworld for six months of each year, the bringing of fire to mankind by Prometheus (here Kuhn quotes Thomas Taylor who says that Prometheus concealing the fire in the Thyrsus reed was representative of "leading the soul into the body"), the descent of Eros the god to wed the human bride Psyche, the descent of Orpheus into the underworld to pursue Eurydice, the descent of Hercules into Hades to bring up the three-headed dog Cerberus, and many more. 

In support of his argument, Kuhn cites a remarkable passage from the Pyramid Texts of the Egyptian king Pepi I (reigned circa 2289 BC to 2255 BC). On page 121 of Lost Light, Kuhn writes:

In Egyptian scriptures we encounter the promise that "if Pepi falleth on to the earth, Keb [Seb] will lift him up." Pepi here stands for the divinity in man, the god come to earth. To him in another place it is said: "Thou plowest the earth . . . Thou journeyest on the road whereon the gods journeyed." Here is identification of the earth as the place to which the gods were sent to travel the road of evolution.

Note what Kuhn is asserting in the above lines: that the scriptures in the Pyramid Texts are identifying the "road whereon the gods journeyed" as this human world of the incarnation. 

In other words, the gods and goddesses of the myths are in humanity.

Here is a more modern translation of the same passage from the Pyramid Texts of Pepi I, this time from the 2005 publication Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, translated by James P. Allen and edited by Peter der Manuelian, available to read in its entirety online here (but worth owning in hard copy as well, of course). On page 107, we find the passage that Kuhn quotes in his argument: it is from Recitation 37, Address to the Spirit as Osiris in the Duat:

The earth has been hacked for you and a presented offering laid down for you before you, and you will go on yonder path on which the gods go.

The implications of this passage are profound. The ancient text is here confirming the interpretation presented by Kuhn, and elaborated in The Undying Stars, that the celestial motions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets which are allegorized in all the ancient myth-systems of the world (including those in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible) were intended to convey an esoteric teaching: that the gods descend and walk the path of the underworld, and that this path is the path we ourselves are walking ("thou journeyest on the road whereon the gods journeyed").

The gods, of course, are the sun, moon, planets, and stars -- after all, are the planets not named Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn? And yet, as they journey along their "road" through the heavens, each of these eventually plunges down into the western horizon, there to toil through the underworld until they rise again on the eastern horizon. This allegorizes the human condition in incarnation, divine sparks plunged into bodies made of clay (water and earth).

And the assertion that the gods and goddesses of the myths are to be found inside each one of us is reinforced in this passage by the text's calling attention to the "road" or "path" on which the gods go. The sun, moon, and visible planets travel through the sky along the ecliptic band: this is the road whereon they journey, and they cannot deviate from it. That ecliptic band contains the stars which make up the zodiac constellations -- and we have already seen that the ancients taught that there is a direct zodiac correspondence in the human body ("as above, so below"). In other words, the zodiac not only stretches across the infinite heavens in the macrocosm, but is also contained in the microcosm of the individual body of each man or woman -- from head to toe (Santos Bonacci has many outstanding videos in which he expounds upon this concept).

So, if the planets (that is to say, "the gods") travel along the zodiac path through the heavens, but that zodiac path is also reflected within the human body, we can see once again the clear teaching that . . . the gods and goddesses of the myths are in humanity. And, as discussed in this previous post, there are ancient wisdom traditions which teach a direct connection between each major organ in our bodies and a specific planet in the heavens.

While literalist theology as it has been taught for the past seventeen centuries would generally tend to reject the assertion that "the incarnation" refers to the spark of divinity coming down and incarnating in every single human being, there is some clear support in the scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments for the position that this is exactly what they always intended to convey.  In the Old Testament, for example, Kuhn argues in that same chapter VII of Lost Light that myths such as Abram being sent out of Ur of the Chaldees into a land to the west is yet another clear celestial allegory of the descending heavenly spark, representative of incarnation (he argues on page 113 that the word Ur itself means "fire," as in the realm of the fiery stars, and notes that the Duat of the Egyptians was located in the west, where the stars set due to the turning of our planet on its axis).  He also points to the "descent" of Abram into Egypt (allegorical for the lower half of the zodiac wheel, the underworld) for a time as telling the same incarnational story, and again that the descent of the twelve sons of Jacob later in Genesis tells the same (113).

Another well-known Old Testament verse which Kuhn does not directly point to in Lost Light, but which seems to have a clear parallel to the metaphor of Prometheus bringing down divine fire concealed in a smoking reed or handful of reeds is found in Isaiah 42 (quoted again in the New Testament book of Matthew): "A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgement unto truth" (Isaiah 42:3; Matthew 12:20 modifies the last part somewhat by saying "till he send forth judgment unto victory," which could be esoterically understood as saying that our incarnations here will continue until the cycle ends in judgement unto victory).

In the New Testament, Paul teaches in many places "the mystery of Christ in you," for example in 2 Corinthians 13:5, as well as in his own description of his first receiving the revelation of this mystery, in Galatians 1:16. 

And, Kuhn argues that this understanding of the New Testament metaphors (that they teach the exact same esoteric truth as that which was conveyed by the descent of the gods to earth in the myths of Dionysus or Osiris) helps shed light on the otherwise difficult-to-explain passage in Luke 14:26, in which Jesus orders his followers to hate their father, mother, brother, sister. In Kuhn's interpretation, this discussion of "leaving one's family" is metaphorically describing the leaving of the heavenly realms to plunge into exile in matter (the incarnation). Seen in this light, Kuhn argues, it is not talking about our human parents and siblings at all, and it certainly is not teaching "hatred" of those human relations (Lost Light, 126). 

On the contrary, all these ancient teachings should impart to us a new appreciation of everyone we meet, as well as ourselves. In this view, each person contains an infinite universe, because each is a "microcosm" of the infinite cosmos. Each, too, embodies within himself or herself "the gods." That includes the baby screaming in the seat behind us on an airplane (or the 4-year old kicking the back of our seat)! This should engender in us a profound sense of wonder for everyone we meet, and a new appreciation of who we are as well. It should also point us towards the natural-law principles of nonviolence and respect for the lives and bodily safety of those with whom we come in contact (and our own as well).

The importance of challenging false narratives

In the above video, I discuss the importance of challenging false narratives. 

The presentation is actually in two parts: 

• challenging false narratives, part 1
• challenging false narratives, part 2