Tag Archives: Law

The Obvious Futility of the Drug War

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

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Milton Friedman 2

“More police, more jails, more stringent penalties. Increased efforts at interception, increased publicity about the evils of drugs — all this has been accompanied by more, not fewer, drug addicts; more, not fewer, crimes and murders; more, not less, corruption; more, not fewer, innocent victims…

Legalizing drugs is not equivalent to surrender in the fight against drug addiction. On the contrary, I believe that legalizing drugs is a precondition for an effective fight. We might then have a real chance to prevent sales to minors; get drugs out of the schools and playgrounds; save crack babies and reduce their number; launch an effective educational campaign on the personal costs of drug use — not necessarily conducted, I might add, by government; punish drug users guilty of harming others while ‘under the influence’; and encourage large numbers of addicts to volunteer for treatment and rehabilitation when they could do so without confessing to criminal actions…

I do not believe, and neither did [the American founders], that it is the responsibility of government to tell free citizens what is right and wrong. That is something for them to decide for themselves. Government is a means to enable each of us to pursue our own vision in our own way so long as we do not interfere with the right of others to do the same. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, ‘all Men are… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Governed.’ In my view, Justice Louis Brandeis was a ‘true friend of freedom’ when he wrote, ‘Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasions of their liberty- by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning. but without understanding.’”

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Pulled from Milton Friedman’s 1989 WSJ article “Bennett Fears ‘Public Policy Disaster’ — It’s Already Here!”. You can find it in his seminal collection of writings on public policy Why Government Is the Problem.

I am certainly in Friedman’s liberty-centric camp. Nonetheless I think arguments against the drug war can rest securely on several other foundations, including the fact that this generations-long “war” has been a fundamentally disruptive, rather than pacifying, force for our society. Johann Hari, whose new book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the Drug War is next on my reading list, shared the following insight about one of the most orderly people on the planet, the Swiss:

Switzerland, a very conservative country, legalized heroin for addicts, meaning you go to the doctor, the doctor assigns you to a clinic, you go to that clinic every day, and you inject your heroin. You can’t take it out with you. I went to that clinic — it looks like a fancy Manhattan hairdresser’s, and the addicts go out after injecting their heroin to their jobs and their lives.

I stress again — Switzerland is a very right-wing country, and after its citizens had seen this in practice, they voted by 70% in two referenda to keep heroin legal for addicts, because they could see that it works. They saw that crime massively fell, property crime massively fell, muggings and street prostitution declined enormously…

The arguments that work well in persuading the people we still want to reach are order-based arguments. I think the Swiss heroin referenda are good models for that. Basically, what they said was drug war means chaos. It means unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark, in our public places, filled with disease and chaos. Legalization is a way of imposing regulation and order on this anarchy. It’s about taking it away from criminal gangs and giving it to doctors and pharmacists, and making sure it happens in nice clean clinics, and we get our nice parks back, and we reduce crime. That’s the argument that will win. And it’s not like it’s a rhetorical trick — it’s true. That is what happens.

Hari continues, reflecting on the even more dramatic example presented by the Portuguese experiment:

In 2000 Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of extraordinary. Every year they tried the American way more and more: They arrested and imprisoned more people, and every year the problem got worse…

They convened a panel of scientists and doctors and said to them (again I’m paraphrasing), “Go away and figure out what would solve this problem, and we will agree in advance to do whatever you recommend.” They just took it out of politics. It was very smart…

The panel went away for a year and a half and came back and said: “Decriminalize everything from cannabis to crack. But” — and this is the crucial next stage — “take all the money we used to spend on arresting and harassing and imprisoning drug users, and spend it on reconnecting them with society and turning their lives around.”

Some of it was what we think of as treatment in America and Britain — they do do residential rehab, and they do therapy — but actually most of it wasn’t that. Most of it, the most successful part, was really very simple. It was making sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. It consisted of subsidized jobs and microloans to set up small businesses.

Say you used to be a mechanic. When you’re ready, they’ll go to a garage and they’ll say, “If you employ Sam for a year, we’ll pay half his wages.” The microloans had extremely low interest rates, and many businesses were set up by addicts.

It’s been nearly 15 years since this experiment began, and the results are in. Drug use by injection is down by 50%, broader addiction is down, overdose is massively down, and HIV transmission among addicts is massively down.

Compare that with the results in the United States over the past few years.

Like I said, I’m on the same page as Friedman. These guys are too:

America’s Threat from Within

26 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by in Freedom, Politics

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Joseph Story

“Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence.

The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid; its compartments are beautiful as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order; and its defences are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE.

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.”

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From the 2nd edition of Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1851).

More on the threat from without:

Joseph Story

Why Liberty?

17 Friday Oct 2014

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H. L. Mencken“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value.

I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave…

In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen… I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.”

__________

From H.L. Mencken, writing in his article “Why Liberty?”, published in the Chicago Tribune on January 30th, 1927.

I had to reread this essential essay after scanning the sixth chapter of Mencken’s Prejudices a few nights ago and running across his consummately cool statement that, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” Of course the thought is only metaphorical — and its overt violence only meant to instill verve, not aggression, in the reader — but under the shadow of the monsters now slitting throats under black flags across Iraq and Syria, the paragraph didn’t sit well. But that’s not Mencken’s fault, and there could be no more durable, stalwart rebuke of Takfirism, Salafism, and all other totalitarianisms than his article “Why Liberty,” published only a decade after the October Revolution and a decade before the Spanish Civil War.

Read on:

William F. Buckley on Legalizing Drugs

29 Thursday May 2014

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William F. Buckley

“First of all, please don’t confuse my position with that of people who are indifferent to drugs. I’m not indifferent to drugs. I think I’ve been quoted as saying if I could turn a single latch which would make all the drugs disappear from the face of the earth, with the exception of here and there, a vineyard in Bordeaux, I would turn that latch.

Now, you say is it inconsistent for a conservative to take my position. I don’t think it is, because a conservative seeks to be grounded in reality. That which works is quantifiable; that which simply does not work, isn’t. If you were to pass a law requiring people to go to church on Sunday, it wouldn’t work. Under the circumstances, you would eventually simply withdraw such a law. My position on drugs is that our drug laws aren’t working, and that more net damage is being done by their continuation than would be done by withdrawing them from the books. This, as I say, should not be confused as a sanction for drugs. Drugs are a form of escapism, and the damage in taking them is not by any means self-limited. It damages other people also. For that reason, the question is: How do you diminish the net harm done by drugs?[…]

Anybody who becomes an alcoholic, which is probably the primary curse of this country, in my judgment, is morally stigmatized by permitting himself to get into that condition. That is not an argument for prohibition. Adultery is widely practiced. So is fornication. You can simultaneously say it’s morally wrong, but we’re not going to tell the police to open the doors of every motel to find out whether the people inside have marriage licenses.”

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William F. Buckley, speaking in an interview on Richard Heffner’s The Open Mind on August 6th, 1996.

More on various vices:

  • Richard Burton discusses how alcohol pushed him to the brink of death
  • Noam Chomsky explains what the lottery can teach us about the drug war
  • Former addict Will Self reflects on the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman

William F Buckley

Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

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Gore Vidal Portrait Session

“We would together constitute a new nation, founded upon ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The first two foundation stones were familiar, if vague… ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is the real Joker in the deck. To this day, no one is sure just what Jefferson meant. But I suppose what he had in mind was that government will leave each citizen alone, to develop as best he can in a tranquil climate, to achieve whatever it is that his heart desires, with a minimum of distress to the other pursuers of happiness. This was a revolutionary concept in 1776, and it still is…

Although the Founding Fathers were, to a man, natural conservatives, there were enough Jeffersonian-minded pursuers of happiness among them to realize that so lawyerly a Republic would probably act as a straight jacket to those of an energetic nature. So to ensure the rights of each to pursue happiness, the Bill of Rights was attached to the Constitution. In theory, henceforward, no one need fear the tyranny of either the state or of the majority. Certain of our rights, like the freedom of speech, were said to be inalienable.

But some like to remind us that the right to privacy cannot be found anywhere in the pages of the Constitution, or even in the Federalist Papers… We are told that since the Constitution nowhere says that a citizen has the right to have sex with another citizen, or to take drugs, or to OD on cigarettes — or, as the nation is now doing, on sugar — that the Founders therefore did not license them to do any of these things that may be proscribed by the prejudices of a local majority. But this is an invitation to tyranny…

Was the United States meant to be a patriarchal society? I think the answer is no. Was the United States meant to be a monotheistic society, Christian or otherwise? The answer is no. Religion may be freely practiced here, but religion was deliberately excluded from the political arrangements of our republic…

Each year it is discovered with some alarm that American high school students, when confronted anonymously by the Bill of Rights, neither like it nor approve of it. Our society has made them into true patriots — but not of the idea of a free society, but of a stern patriarchy, where the police have every right to arrest you for just about anything that the state disapproves of. To me the tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crack up of an empire we never knew what to do with in the first place; but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous, whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

__________

From Gore Vidal’s speech at The Nation’s 125th Anniversary in 1990.

As typically is the case with Vidal, the combination of his intelligence and charm — conveyed as they are in his patrician, cisatlantic tones — masks a scattering of sins of hyperbole and historical judgement. I nevertheless recommend the speech below, and have listened to it twice now — not because of it’s heavy scholarship, but because it’s as heady and sardonic a piece of political theater as you’ll find.

Read on:

  • Vidal’s hilarious, prophetic rebuttal to Bush’s second inaugural
  • Reader of this site Dr. Robert P. George debates Krauthammer on the founders’ views of human nature
  • The greatest debate of all time: Hitchens grapples with Galloway on Iraq

Gore Vidal

Andrew Jackson on the Rule of Law

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

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Andrew Jackson

“But in order to maintain the Union unimpaired, it is absolutely necessary that the laws passed by the constituted authorities should be faithfully executed in every part of the country, and that every good citizen should at all times stand ready to put down, with the combined force of the nation, every attempt at unlawful resistance, under whatever pretext it may be made or whatever shape it may assume…

You have no longer any cause to fear danger from abroad; your strength and power are well known throughout the civilized world, as well as the high and gallant bearing of your sons. It is from within, among yourselves, from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition, and inordinate thirst for power, that factions will be formed and liberty endangered… You have the highest of human trusts committed to your care. Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number, and has chosen you, as the guardians of freedom, to preserve it for the benefit of the human race. May He who holds in his hands the destinies of nations make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed, and enable you, with pure hearts, and pure hands, and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time the great charge He has committed to your keeping.

My own race is nearly run; advanced age and failing health warn me that before long I must pass beyond the reach of human events and cease to feel the vicissitudes of human affairs. I thank God that my life has been spent in a land of liberty, and that he has given me a heart to love my country with the affection of a son. And filled with gratitude for your constant and unwavering kindness, I bid you a last and affectionate farewell.”

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Excerpted from Andrew Jackson’s 1837 Farewell Address.  This speech was given to mark Jackson’s retirement from both the presidency and public life. He would spend the remainder of his life at his home in Nashville, where he died in 1845.

The first section of these elevated words came bounding into my mind this morning as I watched coverage of Cliven Bundy’s Nevada saga debated by a panel of experts on CNN. That this stand-off is happening is strange enough; that it’s being discussed in earnest by talking heads on major networks is positively surreal. If there is anything worth saying about this self-parodying story it’s this: arming a militia is not a substitute for settling your grievances with fellow citizens, government, or law through established legal channels. For twenty years, Bundy grazed 900 cattle on 600,000 acres of public land, and he’s racked up a million-dollar tab. Obviously he doesn’t want to pay, but that money is owed — owed to the American taxpayer. If Bundy, his friends, or anyone else in Nevada had an issue with the Bureau of Land Management or the proportion of land aggregated to the Federal Government in their state, then they could have made their beef known on the streets and eventually on ballots and/or bills. Instead, as numerous sources have described, they only now decided to grab their rifles, form a barricade… and “put all the women up at the front.” Real honorable, guys.

While being interviewed by Sean Hannity last week, Bundy compared himself and his gang to the Minutemen of the American Revolution. Hannity apparently didn’t see anything objectionable in this claim, nodding in agreement as if it’s inherently legitimate to challenge taxation and the powers that be, so long as you do it with a cowboy hat, gun, and accent. But it’s not. The rule of law is not a slogan, nor is threatening federal agents with violence a game. John Adams wasn’t prattling like a pundit when he observed we are a nation of laws not a nation of men. Folks like Bundy are fond of railing against the takers in our society who depend on forms of government assistance like food stamps. But Bundy has literally and knowingly been mooching off of the federal government for two decades, only to now be feigning confusion and outrage when the bill, visible from miles away, comes due.

Read on:

  • Martin Luther King describes when and how you should break the law
  • Robert P. George and Charles Krauthammer discuss: What was the American founders’ view of human nature?
  • Thomas Paine delineates society from government

Cliven Bundy

“It Is Not the Function of Our Government to Keep the Citizen from Falling into Error”

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Political Philosophy

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Robert Jackson

“Progress generally begins in skepticism about accepted truths. Intellectual freedom means the right to reexamine much that has been long taken for granted. A free man must be a reasoning man, and he must dare to doubt what a legislative or electoral majority may most passionately assert. The danger that citizens will think wrongly is serious, but less dangerous than atrophy from not thinking at all… The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored. […]

I think that, under our system, it is time enough for the law to lay hold of the citizen when he acts illegally, or in some rare circumstances when his thoughts are given illegal utterance. I think we must let his mind alone.”

__________

A section from Justice Robert Jackson’s decision in American Communications Association v. Douds (1950).

Robert Jackson, who in addition to serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court also oversaw the Nuremberg Tribunal, never earned his Juris Doctor. Incredibly, he dropped out of Albany law school after only two semesters.

More from the Court:

  • Robert Jackson’s solemn, powerful opening to the Nuremberg tribunals
  • Justice Louis Brandeis explains why a government’s contempt for law is contagious
  • Brandeis describes the resilience of the American founders

Robert Jackson at Nuremberg

Above: Jackson opens Nuremberg, November, 1945.

A Government’s Contempt for Law Is Contagious

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Political Philosophy

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Justice Louis Brandeis

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding…

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.”

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Justice Louis Brandeis, dissenting in his opinion for Olmstead v. United States in 1928.

For this case, which was decided over 85-years-ago, the Supreme Court deliberated whether the wiretapping of private telephone conversations — which was initiated by federal agents — could produce evidence that was legally admissible. The Supreme Court eventually ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that such wiretapping was not a violation of either the Fourth or Fifth Amendment, and thereby was not an encroachment on the defendant’s rights.

I agree with Justice Brandeis’s dissent here. And, happily, so did the Supreme Court — albeit not until four decades later, when they overturned Olmstead with their decision in Katz v. United States in 1967.

In thinking about this underlying but essential truth — that the government, like citizens, is not be allowed to break the law — I’m drawn to a juxtaposition that’s latent in the now popular story of Marcus Luttrell. When their lives were put on the line, when they were at their most vulnerable and had an easy but morally dubious way out, they refused to commit a war crime. Instead they abided by the rules of combat, knowing that such a choice would very likely lead to their demise.

Contrast this with the tough-talkers who were in Washington at that time. Bush, Cheney, and co., themselves so allergic to combat when their names were called, shredded not only domestic law (including habeas corpus, arguably the most important legal instrument we’ve got), but also international rules and norms, including the Geneva Conventions and the precedents set at the Nuremberg Tribunal.

 

More Brandeis:

Louis Brandeis

Those Who Won Our Independence

More Security State:

Surveillance Cameras

Bridling the Surveillance State

More International Law:

Der Hauptanklagevertreter

Robert Jackson Opens the Nuremberg Tribunal

Dissent, Not Disloyalty: MLK’s Immortal Words on Vietnam

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Politics, Speeches, War

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

“He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. ‘Ye shall know the truth,’ says Jesus, ‘and the truth shall set you free.’ Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal…

Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition…

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…

MLK and Lyndon Johnson

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love…

America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State — they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America’s strayed away…

And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.'”

MLK and Lyndon Johnson

__________

Some favorite sections from Martin Luther King’s sermon “Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”, spoken at Riverside Church in New York, on April 30th, 1967. Find it in his collected speeches.

As a small note: King was channeling John F. Kennedy when he cited Dante above. In 1963, when he was signing the charter that established the German Peace Corps in Bonn, West Germany, Kennedy remarked, “Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” This comment is probably based on a simplistic reading of the third canto of The Inferno.

But since I’ve just slogged through the relevant part of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Dante, I feel I can be petty enough to say that both King and Kennedy seem to have never picked up The Divine Comedy. In Dante’s vision of the underworld, it is traitors — not cowards or equivocators — who get it the worst. In Kokytos, the ninth and final circle of the underworld, there are four concentric rings, starting with Caina, for traitors to blood relatives (hence, “Cain”), and ending with Judecca, for those who are traitorous to their masters. I’ll let you infer the namesake of that circle. And one more thing, the punishment isn’t fire; it’s ice.

…Well, that got morbid. Back to King. His opposition to Vietnam was so unwavering and so cogent. Dissent is not disloyalty; but, then as now, people don’t seem to get that. They assume that supporting government policy, even in its most baseless and ruinous permutations, is equatable to supporting the people whom government is tasked with representing. And as one of the vast majority of Americans who explicitly oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can’t help but overlay his comments atop the decade-high pile of imperial waste we have just burned through.

Watch a short clip of King discussing Muhammad Ali in the context of the Vietnam War:

Listen to the entire opposition speech:

More from Dr. King:

Martin Luther King, Jr. and His Wife and Daughter

The Mountaintop: Martin Luther King’s Last Speech

Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested.

How You Should Break the Law

Martin Luther King Jr. Preaching

Loving Your Enemies

Robert Jackson Opens the Nuremberg Trials

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in History, Politics, War

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Der Hauptanklagevertreter

Robert H. Jackson
Chief of Counsel for the United States
Nuremberg, Germany
November 21, 1945

“May it please Your Honors:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason…

In the prisoners’ dock sit twenty-odd broken men. Reproached by the humiliation of those they have led almost as bitterly as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever past. It is hard now to perceive in these men as captives the power by which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of the world and terrified most of it. Merely as individuals their fate is of little consequence to the world.

What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.”

__________

An excerpt from Robert H. Jackson, the chief United States prosecutor as he opened the Nuremberg trials on November 21, 1945. This first and particularly visible trial was decribed by British barrister Norman Birkett as, “the greatest trial in history.” Read more about Jackson in Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis.

Jackson was also United States Attorney General and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1941-1954, despite never having graduated from law school (he attended Albany Law School for one year before dropping out).

In a recent interview, Justice Antonin Scalia was asked which modern member of the Supreme Court he admired most. His immediate answer was Jackson, whom he said he admired for his ideological originalism (the Constitution is not a “living” document), his staunch defense of due process protections, and his literary technique — his ability to powerfully communicate as a master stylist. And you can see that unyielding force and consummate style above.

“We [the Supreme Court] are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”

– Robert Jackson, writing in Brown v. Allen, February 9th, 1953

Robert Jackson

When and How You Should Break the Law

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by in Freedom, History, Interview, Political Philosophy, Politics

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Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested.

Mr. Wicker: How are we to enforce law when a doctrine is preached that one man’s conscience may tell him that the law is unjust, when other men’s consciences don’t tell them that?

Dr. King: I think you enforce it, and I think you deal with it by not allowing anarchy to develop. I do not believe in defying the law, as many of the segregationists do, I do not believe in evading the law as many of the segregationists do. The fact is that most of the segregationists and racists that I see are not willing to suffer enough for their beliefs in segregation, and they are not willing to go to jail. I think the chief norm for guiding the situation is the willingness to accept the penalty, and I don’t think any society can call an individual irresponsible who breaks a law and willingly accepts the penalty if conscience tells him that that law is unjust.

I think that this is a long tradition in our society, it is a long tradition in Biblical history; Meshach and Abednego broke an unjust law and they did it because they had to be true to a higher moral law. The early Christians practiced civil disobedience in a superb manner. Academic freedom would not be a reality today if it had not been for Socrates and if it had not been for Socrates’ willingness to practice civil disobedience. And I would say that in our own history there is nothing that expresses massive civil disobedience any more than the Boston Tea Party, and yet we give this to our young people and our students as a part of the great tradition of our nation. So I think we are in good company when we break unjust laws, and I think those who are willing to do it and accept the penalty are those who are part of the saving of the nation.

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From Martin Luther King, Jr. on NBC’s Meet the Press. The interview took place on March 28th, 1965, a week after King led the five-day March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. You’ll find extended reflections on this in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr..

It’s astounding how patronizing the questioners are to King throughout this half hour segment. The entire interview is worth watching, but the quoted portion is copied below.

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We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’ (people always forget the ‘Jobs’ part), so expect to find King’s name coming up not only on this site but throughout the media.

Below: Dr. King and Karl Barth outside the Princeton University chapel. On Sunday, April 29th, 1962, King preached the morning service and Barth taught the evening theology class. Not a bad day’s line-up.Karl Barth and Martin Luther King Jr.