{"id":701,"date":"2010-12-30T20:14:43","date_gmt":"2010-12-31T00:14:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=701"},"modified":"2011-11-14T00:29:43","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T04:29:43","slug":"indeed-style-republication-of-kevin-carsons-tribute-to-bradley-manning-at-the-c4ss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=701","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Carson at the C4SS: “Bradley Manning: One Soldier Who Really Did ‘Defend Our Freedom'”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a confession to make. One of my early posts<\/a> on this blog was ripped off in its entirety from an article by Thomas Knapp<\/a> at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS). In my defense, his article was titled “Steal This Column.” Also in my defense, the C4SS encourages such wanton theft:<\/p>\n

Take our content, please!<\/strong><\/p>\n

All content on this site is available for republishing under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We want<\/strong> you to copy and distribute this stuff as widely as possible. That’s what we’re here for!<\/p>\n

You don’t have to ask our permission. That’s what the Creative Commons licensing is for. Everybody has permission already. Just do it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you want to be nice, you can include a link back to us, but the only requirement is to provide attribution to the author and C4SS.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because the authors at the C4SS so often say things I wish I’d said, I plan to take them up on their offer and steal their content more often. And I couldn’t begin my thievery with a better article than the one posted today by Kevin Carson and copied and pasted in its entirety below by me:<\/p>\n

Bradley Manning: One Soldier Who Really Did “Defend Our Freedom”<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I hear someone say that soldiers \u201cdefend our freedom,\u201d my immediate response is to gag.\u00a0 I think the last time American soldiers actually fought for the freedom of Americans was probably the Revolutionary War \u2014 or maybe the War of 1812, if you want to be generous.\u00a0 Every war since then has been for nothing but to uphold a system of power, and to make the rich folks even richer.<\/p>\n

But I can think of one exception.\u00a0 If there\u2019s a soldier anywhere in the world who\u2019s fought and suffered for my freedom, it\u2019s Pfc. Bradley Manning.<\/p>\n

Manning is frequently portrayed, among the knuckle-draggers on right-wing message boards, as some sort of spoiled brat or ingrate, acting on an adolescent whim.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not quite what happened, according to Johann Hari (\u201cThe under-appreciated heroes of 2010<\/a>,\u201d The Independent, Dec. 24).<\/p>\n

Manning, like many young soldiers, joined up in the naive belief that he was defending the freedom of his fellow Americans.\u00a0 When he got to Iraq, he found himself working under orders \u201cto round up and hand over Iraqi civilians to America\u2019s new Iraqi allies, who he could see were then torturing them with electrical drills and other implements.\u201d\u00a0 The people he arrested, and handed over for torture, were guilty of such \u201ccrimes\u201d as writing \u201cscholarly critiques\u201d of the U.S. occupation forces and its puppet government.\u00a0 When he expressed his moral reservations to his supervisor, Manning \u201cwas told to shut up and get back to herding up Iraqis.\u201d<\/p>\n

The people Manning saw tortured, by the way, were frequently the very same people who had been tortured by Saddam:\u00a0 trade unionists, members of the Iraqi Freedom Congress, and other freedom-loving people who had no more use for Halliburton and Blackwater than they had for the Baath Party.<\/p>\n

For exposing his government\u2019s crimes against humanity, Manning has spent seven months in solitary confinement \u2013\u00a0 a torture deliberately calculated to break the human mind.<\/p>\n

We see a lot of \u201cserious thinkers\u201d on the op-ed pages and talking head shows, people like David Gergen, Chris Matthews and Michael Kinsley, going on about all the stuff that Manning\u2019s leaks have impaired the ability of \u201cour government\u201d to do.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s impaired the ability of the U.S. government to conduct diplomacy in pursuit of some fabled \u201cnational interest\u201d that I supposedly have in common with Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Disney.\u00a0 He\u2019s risked untold numbers of innocent lives, according to the very same people who have ordered the deaths of untold thousands of innocent people.\u00a0 According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Manning\u2019s exposure of secret U.S. collusion with authoritarian governments in the Middle East, to promote policies that their peoples would find abhorrent, undermines America\u2019s ability to promote \u201cdemocracy, open government, and free and open societies.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll tell you what Manning\u2019s really impaired government\u2019s ability to do.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s impaired the U.S. government\u2019s ability to lie us into wars where thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of foreigners are murdered.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s impaired its ability to use such wars \u2014 under the guise of promoting \u201cdemocracy\u201d \u2014 to install puppet governments like the Coalition Provisional Authority, that will rubber stamp neoliberal \u201cfree trade\u201d agreements (including harsh \u201cintellectual property\u201d provisions written by the proprietary content industries) and cut special deals with American crony capitalists.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s impaired its ability to seize good, decent people who \u2014 unlike most soldiers \u2014 really are fighting for freedom, and hand them over to thuggish governments for torture with power tools.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get something straight.\u00a0 Bradley Manning may be a criminal by the standards of the American state.\u00a0 But by all human standards of morality, the government and its functionaries that Manning exposed to the light of day are criminals.\u00a0 And Manning is a hero of freedom for doing it.<\/p>\n

So if you\u2019re one of the authoritarian state-worshippers, one of the grovelling sycophants of power, who are cheering on Manning\u2019s punishment and calling for even harsher treatment, all I can say is that you\u2019d probably have been there at the crucifixion urging Pontius Pilate to lay the lashes on a little harder.\u00a0 You\u2019d have told the Nazis where Anne Frank was hiding.\u00a0 You\u2019re unworthy of the freedoms which so many heroes and martyrs\u00a0 throughout history \u2014 heroes like Bradley Manning \u2014 have fought to give you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a confession to make. One of my early posts on this blog was ripped off in its entirety from an article by Thomas Knapp at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS). In my defense, his article was titled “Steal This Column.” Also in my defense, the C4SS encourages such wanton theft: Take […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,156],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bradley-manning","category-kevin-carson"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":710,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions\/710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}