Overcoming Three Hundred Years of Reaction

Almost three centuries ago ideas were born in the minds of philosophers that personal liberties, economic free-choice, legal equality, and human fellowship are natural rights derived from an authority higher than humankind–from Providence, or a Creator or God himself.
No matter what the source is called, liberty is given by powers which no human reason or power can contradict or take away. Liberty is the personal action stemming from a free-minded belief. As a natural by-product of liberty, a market-place of free-choice can best bring prosperity and, ultimately, peace on earth, through unrestrained enterprise and commerce by common people making economic choices based in their family’s interests.
For almost three centuries, Old and New World aristocrats reacted against common people attaining equality and empowerment under the idea of free-minds and free-markets. The philosophy upon which America was founded in 1776 was slow to grow world-wide, held back by imperialist greed and militarists solutions, as well as America’s isolated development into a world power. Even in America, however, our own aristocrats eventually emerged. Few independent and sovereign countries existed outside of a few dozen in Europe, the Americas, and Japan by the beginning of the 20th Century. Then, the royal and the industrial aristocracies of imperialism and militarism began a “war to end all wars” in 1914–so-called the Great War.
That war, known now as World War I, unleashed dynamic forces of radical change and global struggle all under the threat of genocide (such as the Holocaust) or suicide (like that posed by nuclear weapons and Mutual Assured Destruction). This global-scale conflict did not end with the World War I-empowered Soviet regime in Russia in 1991. Until that time, the fight between liberal democracies of the North Atlantic region and the totalitarian ideologies of Bolshevism-Nazism were led on both sides by political-economic elites who assumed and maintained power by their control of wealth and the mass manipulation of their public’s perception (through propaganda or public relations?).
Both sides of the Ideology War, for the “American way of life,” “to make the world safe for democracy,” or for the “dictatorship of the working class,” used economic imperialism to expand their sphere of influence. And they both used militarism disguised as “living space,” “wars of national liberation,” or “for national security” in many wars of choice; for example, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Vietnam, Iraq; or proxy wars in Africa and Asia. To greater effect, the balance sheet of financial power and the perception of justice accrued to the Western liberal democracies, but they were no less controlled by the wealthy using violence against their “enemies” when necessary to secure the interest of the ruling class.
To mark a distinct difference in the Ideology War, the liberal democracies provided more benefits to and less overt pressure for conformity over their publics. In sum, the West created a more capable, better educated middle management class, with less wealth to be sure than the ruling class, but with greater illusions of their own power–the wages of arrogant pride, as Nixon found out. Yet, the most unlimited economic choices and the most immunity from danger remained with the political-economic leaders, as indeed it always has (better opportunities, service deferments, bomb-shelters like Mount Weather, etc.).
For 300 years now, a bitter struggle has raged in sub-reality between the movement for the liberty and freedom of common people every where against the leaders with imperial-scale wealth ruling with legal-militarized police powers. Absent a conspiracy of any kind, natural aristocracies emerge in the normal flow of history. Elites all over the world have more in common with each other than with their own populations. The French Revolution devolved to the control of dictators and to violence despite the initial explosion for the liberty, equality, and fraternity of all its citizens.
America’s own revolution for liberty in a republic form of government has literally settled since the advent of the Industrial Revolution into a quiet form of corporatist-government privilege, and since Vietnam into a tyranny ruled by security policy. The idea of liberty and freedom–free-minds and free-markets–is now firmly under the hand of a small class with enough people willing to support it in a second tier Opinion Complex that justifies, disguises it, with power politics and policy. We falsely call it special interests but it is really legal and social exemption, tax-payer paid welfare for the rich, and political control of foreign akin to an American-style Soviet-era Nomenklatura.
This growth of rule by an oligarchy is a natural course of history–from ancient Greece and Rome on through the 21st Century. Another natural development in history has always accompanied it: The stripping and overthrow of this power by an oppressed majority in the name of liberty, freedom, justice and truth, hence the American Revolution. When enough people, financially insecure as at present, realize the nature of this political-economic aristocracy (who made the “good money” in events like the sub-prime credit process), then asserting and enforcing the natural rights given by God hold the key to liberation.
Those rights, found in the US Declaration and the Constitution, present the moral and legal means by which the people of America can steal back their government, their country and their future from a great catastrophe brewing in the world. The end of freedom of conscience and freedom of choice threaten. Unless the common people unite–peacefully, determined, strong and focused–humanity will suffer the 21st Century economic struggles and wars of survival for the sole benefit and protection of the aristocratic class.
It is up to us. Take back the power, together–for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–before there is nothing left for which to fight.