No one knows better than children of the Holocaust how the lessons of history must never be forgotten. Yet Americans, whose battle cry was once, Give me liberty or give me death, have sat placidly by as a new king was crowned. In America a new king was crowned by the shrug of our shoulders when our neighbors were wrongfully seized. A new king was crowned when we capitulated to a regime that is no longer sensitive to people, but to non-people--to corporations, to money and to power. The new king was crowned when we turned our heads as the poor and the forgotten and damned were rendered mute and defenseless, not because they were evil but because, in the scheme of our lives, they seemed unimportant, not because they were essentially dangerous but because they were essentially powerless. The new king was crowned when we cheered the government on as it prosecuted the progeny of our ghettos and filled our prisons with black men whose first crime was that they were born in the ghettos. We cheered the new king on as it diluted our right to be secure in our homes against unlawful searches and to be secure in the courts against unlawful evidence. We cheered the new king on because we were told that our sacred rights were but loopholes but which our enemies: the murderers and rapists and thieves and drug dealers, escaped. We were told that those who fought for our rights, the lawyers, were worse than the thieves who stole from us in the night, that our juries were irresponsible and ignorant and ought not to be trusted. We watched with barely more than a mumble as the legal system that once protected us became populated with judges who were appointed by the new king. At last the new king was crowned when we forgot the lessons of history, that when the rights of our enemies have been wrested from them, we have lost our own rights as well, for the same rights serve both citizen and criminal. When Randy Weaver failed to appear in court because he had lost his trust in the government we witnessed the fruit of our crime. The government indeed had no intent to protect his rights. The government had but one purpose, as it remains today, the disengagement of this citizen from society. Those who suffered and died in the Holocaust must have exquisitely understood such illicit motivations of power. ~Gerry Spence on defending Randy Weaver
Posted on: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 18:00:03 +0000
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