Treason comes to us mainly from the movies and TV … “You speak Treason … off with your head!!” And so on.
Webster’s dictionary says that the word comes from the Latin meaning … to “hand over.” It is 1: a betrayal of trust: Treachery. 2: the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or his family.
The Constitution of the United States of America is very specific about treason to our Federal government. “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”
When we Americans think of treason or traitors we generally first think of Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary War General, who defected to the British. Or maybe if we muse upon it, we think of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who gave the Soviet Union, our then mortal enemy, the secrets to the atomic bomb. Or maybe Alger Hiss, the Communist fellow traveler Soviet spy and aid to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gave the Soviets secrets straight out of the White House. Of course, in modern times, we have the spies that have given military secrets to foreign governments generally for a big pay off which, depending on who they gave the secrets to, friend or foe, would determine their crime under the Constitution.
Were the draft card burning draft dodgers and flag burners, the people that spit on our returning war veterans committing treason? Probably a pretty close call … many of us thought so.
Are the governmental employees or officials who, in consideration of their jobs, swear to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States and then go about doing everything they can think of to subvert the Constitution and laws for a “new idea” or “new order,” traitors? Does the finding of “new, hidden intent” in our in our sacred writings constitute treason? … some of us think so.
Of course, maybe accusations of treason are too harsh, maybe it is just sedition. Sedition is probably most accurately defined as agitating or advocating for the overthrow of the government, whereas treason is the knowing overt act to that end. Treason comes to us in many kinds of clothes and because of this diversity, is often not only hard, but sometimes nearly impossible to discern who is in the costume.
What inspired this blog was my reading of the definition of treason given by a man from long ago who was trying to save his Republic from a tyrant … read what Marcus Tillius Cicero, a contemporary of Julius Caesar thought about it:
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
This begs the question, “Do we have these kinds of traitors in our midst?”
What did President Obama mean by “hope and change?” What is there to change in a government that for the first time in history venerates the individual and was instituted safeguard that individual’s unalienable Rights. Well, the Constitution is not perfect you might say nor is the American system and you would be right. The men that wrote the Constitution were perfectly aware that they didn’t have all the answers. What they did understand was that the people in the various States in the Union, when presented with prickly dilemmas would work it out to their local satisfaction. Conditions in New Hampshire would dictate a different solution for a problem there than would the same problem in South Carolina … viva la difference. If the solution in New Hampshire was untenable to an individual, under the new Union, that person could move to South Carolina or Tennessee if he wanted. What the Constitution was about was protecting the States from foreigners, insuring tranquility amongst the States and maximizing the ability of the individual to move and do freely what he wanted. When he was growing up, the only system that President Obama was attuned to was collectivism; the socialistic teachings of his father, step father, mother, grandfather, his grandfatherly friend, Frank Marshall Davis, his communist indoctrinated political mentors like David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett and revolutionary friends like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn were his education. For Obama, because of his upbringing and associations, political change could only mean socialism … some kind of command statism directed by an individual or by a committee. The irony is that under statism, the freedom so cherished by he and his acolytes, that were hoping for hope and change, who voted for him and so ardently supported him, would, of necessity, see it disappear.
For the entire 20th Century, the USA fought collectivism and statism. The Kaiser, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Che Min, among others. As these totalitarian socialistic beasts murdered millions, hundreds of thousands of Americans died to stop them. They stopped those implacable foes of individual and human freedom from gaining the ascendant power that they so desired. Now we have a Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, who unabashedly wants to turn America into a socialistic state. Hillary Clinton panders to him. Barack Obama supports Hillary. These people are internationalists, they are kindred souls with the above named beasts in that they seek world domination … one world government … so that they can dictate their view of Utopia to us, the ignorant masses. They all claim to be “Progressives,” wanting us to “progress into socialism.” Progress is a good word meaning to go forward into something better. There can be no progress in going backward into failed ideology or polity. Ironic isn’t it when one recognizes that every socialistic experiment from the mid 19th Century through the 20th Century right up to today has failed. But, as we have formerly pointed out in previous blogs, these people have one of the most successful secret political weapons ever devised … Fabianism, the incremental, step by step, “death by a thousand cuts” destruction, in this case, of individual freedom.
Socialism became ascendant in the mid nineteenth century when people who were inspired by the writings of Marx attempted the revolutions of 1848 … which all failed. In the US, of course, there was the early test of socialism in the Plymouth colony, which you can read about. In Plymouth, during this communist tryout, all things produced belonged to the community. It was the first American test of “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” After a year of experimentation it was found that everyone had great needs, but that ability degenerated to the lowest common denominator. In other words, “why should I bust my backside when the guy who does nothing dips into the pot as deeply as I do?” There was a town meeting and it was decided that each person would be responsible for himself and could keep or sell whatever he produced at his own discretion. The system worked and the rest is history. After the American and especially the French revolutions, numerous thinkers like St. Simon, Fourier and Owen began to theorize about socialism, this long before Marx and Engels. Robert Owen tried a commune in New Harmony, Indiana in the 1820’s which failed in 3 years. I could go into many case histories, but they all failed and the same was the fate of the socialistic political movement in 19th Century America. By the end of the century, socialism was so discredited that its disenchanted followers began to call themselves “Progressives” in order to avoid the stigma. Make no mistake, a modern Progressive is an ardent socialist. If you are following someone who brags about being a Progressive, and you are not one now, you are being co-opted into being a socialist.
So how does this affect treason? The Progressive (the word Progressive sounds good, doesn’t it?) movement seeing that they couldn’t overthrow the US by force majeure began to use Fabianism to achieve their goals. After Theodore Roosevelt with his “Progressive” party elected Woodrow Wilson, the nails began to be quickly driven into America’s coffin. The adoption of the 16th, 17th and 18th Amendments all were stakes driven into the heart of the Constitution. The Founders were terrified by the thought of giving the Federal government the ability to tax the populous. They were adamantly opposed to a distant and powerful entity taxing the individual, and rightly so; we were in an European war within 4 years. The 17th Amendment took away the right of the States to be represented in the Senate to by the State’s exemplars and gave that privilege to the carpetbaggers with the biggest sack of money. The 18th Amendment was the first Constitutional power given the Federal government to suppress States Rights. And worst of all, they gave us the criminal, money counterfeiting Federal Reserve System. Then came FDR. His administration debunked the money to the point that he made it a crime to own gold. He tried a myriad of socialistic schemes to bring the people out of the depression, all of which failed, until at last he finally put the American people to work fighting WWII. But his real success in promoting socialism came in the incremental changes in the Supreme Court. At first he was defeated in his aims when he impatiently tryed to “pack” the Court. But as he demagogued the electorate into four presidential terms, he outlived his nemeses and was able to put his men on the court. He did his best to overthrow the Constitution that he had sworn to “preserve, protect and defend.”
So what did the Court do? The best example of the Court’s perversion of the Constitution is the Wickard vs. Filburn case where wheat that a farmer grew on his farm and fed to his pigs, which he then butchered and ate was found to be in interstate commerce. The implication being that everything is in interstate commerce, so the Federal government can regulate everything. A blatant perversion of the intent of the Constitution. Was it treason? The Justices who had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution had knowingly broken their oath. Since that 1941 decision, subsequent Courts have heaped mountains of similar decisions upon the citizenry.
Every attorney in law school is taught, on pain of scholastic failure, that when the Supreme Court rules, there is no appeal. Patrick Henry perceived this problem when he first inspected the Constitution that James Madison brought him from Philadelphia. Henry insisted that there be a bill of rights added to the Constitution to protect the people from those who would run the Federal government. His answer to the above dilemma was the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights. The law schools denigrate the 10th Amendment. Is this treason?
In the Federal government, the bureaucracy is controlled by the executive … the President. The Congress makes the laws and the President upholds and administrates, according to the Constitution. But there is a fly in the ointment. The Congress makes a broad law and inserts a clause stating, “and the ‘insert name of bureau’ shall make the rules and regulations necessary to implement this law.” Of course this means that the President has control of the “rules and regulations” which now amount to well over 80,000 pages … all of which carry the full force of law, which can be tried in the Federal courts. Is this treason?
And of course, we have the “executive order” (now about 14,000 of them) power that the Congress has given the President, which also carry the full force of law. In order for an “executive order” to be overridden a law must go through both the House and Senate and be presented to the President, which he will undoubtedly veto. This then requires that in order for the law to be effective it must now be resubmitted to the Congress for a 2/3 override vote. Was this the intention of the Founders or is it treason?
Then we have the President’s military and treaty making powers and his control of foreign policy. President Obama and his minions, basically Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have basically given away America’s reputation in foreign policy by their actions in supporting jihadist regimes in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Their unratified treaty with Iran guarantees that that country will soon have atomic bombs. Is that treason? Many of us think so and Israel certainly does.
I could go on and on by elaborating on the gutting of the military command structure, his Supreme Court appointments, the profligate spending spree, the crimes against citizens fomented by the EPA, the IRS, the Border Patrol, the Justice Department, the Energy Department, the Forest Service and BLM. What about transgender bathrooms, anti-police rhetoric and as I said, on and on. Are these actions treason or just “hope and change?”
Is it possible that what President Obama meant by “hope and change” was the destruction of our democratic Republic and “changing” it into a socialist utopia. If you read the tenants of communist revolution or Saul Alinski’s “Rules for Radicals” you will see that they are the template for the actions of the Obama administration. This is the kind of treason that that brilliant, lonely republican Roman, Marcus Tillius Cicero was talking about. Worse and more dangerous than barbarians at the gate. Are the President and his “Progressive” sycophants committing treason? Many of us think so.
But if you ask your state Legislators or US Senators or Congressmen, as I stated in a previous blog you will find,
NONE DARE CALL IT TREASON!!!