"If injustice is of such a nature that it causes you to become the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine." Henry David Thoreau: On Civil Disobedience
eing an independent spirit, and ever loyal in his commitment to America's highest stated ideals, not to mention that he lived a mere two houses down the street from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the other Transcendentalists, Thoreau found the United States invasion of Mexico and ensuing war with Mexico, so profoundly disgraceful a policy that he could see no option but to protest.Loudly.
He was imprisoned for his views; the federal authorities did not care to have some loudmouth misfit, as they saw him, criticizing their policies. They were business men after all, and brooked not the least word against their economic machinations. This was before it was socially and morally acceptable to go to jail for expressing dissent. But what most Americans have long ago forgotten and historians have consistently glossed over, is that the war was fought over slavery. Slaves were worth money. Slaves were wealth itself. Black slaves actually built this country and established with their lives and labor, what we now enjoy as an economy.
Mexico forbade slavery.
And the gawd-almighty Texan invaders wanted to bring their slaves into Mexico.
Hence, the solution was war. And the war was the first real expression of Manifest Destiny. It was a scarcely a glorious victory. Many American historians tend to want to celebrate the war. One of the few good things to come out of the war was that slavery had become an issue. In the same way that many far right wingers agree with the neo-con view as stated in the mission of the PNAC, Policy for the New American Century.
As we all know Manifest Destiny, so similar in its view that the United States corporate interests saw it as their God given right to expand not only across the continent but across the world as well.
The mission statement of Project for the New American Century or PNAC, so like Manifest Destiny, is an expression of the desire, nay, design, for the god-given right to establish Empire throughout the world. And along with that --- and as a guiding spirit --- to despoil and exploit all of the natural resources of the smaller nations.
Now, like then, America is the villain. Then it was expansion and slavery; now it is expansion and serfdom. And Congress merely lines up with their hands out to big oil, the Koch brothers, and other corporate sponsors.
As we have seen with the Occupy Movement, any protest whatsoever, will bring down the entire military force, since the Federal government has begun training and arming local police forces as if they were the military. This is to be expected. Small protests will do nothing, ignored or swatted away like flies. Organized dissent, however peaceful, will be silenced with maximum brutality, since the National Corporate State will not be interfered with, nor even exposed. Most Americans are still hypnotized by the corporate state; and the corporate state does not wish their placid and submissive minds to even suspect that they are being manipulated. Brutal response of the newly militarized local police will be all the more swift and nasty in direct proportion to the rightness and accuracy of the protest.
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