Yes, We Must Burn Sade And Snuff Porn And, Especially, Lies - Hate Mail

And you can throw the ACLU on to that pyre, too.

THERE IS SOMETHING OBVIOUSLY wrong with a conception of "freedom" which can contain the concept that some should be free to keep others in slavery and to commit genocide.  Yet that conception of freedom is exactly what the fabled founders of the United States Constitution not only held with but rigidly fixed into the Constitution which we still live under.  The slavery part of that is indisputable, nor is the genocide part of it, both which were not only the actual history but the official as well as somewhat unofficial policy of the United States.  Overt chattel slavery was still a part of it until just after the Civil War and genocide even after that is charcteristic of America under the Bill of Rights.  The Supreme Court, repeatedly, over that period, not only retained the slavery embedded into the Constitution, it intensified and, in the Dred Scott decision (which the Court has never overturned) it made it the supreme law of the land, making every state a de facto slave state.   That wasn't entirely or even effectively expunged from the foundational law of the United States.  The Courts and many states continued de facto slavery in the Jim Crow period until the 1960s.  What wasn't done by law and court ruling was done through white supremacist terrorism and violence enforced discrimination.  As I mentioned yesterday there were many slavery promoting and protecting features of the Constitution which were not, in fact, abolished in the vitally important amendments drafted in the wake of the Civil War.  Such things as mentioned yesterday.  And those Civil War Amendments have been twisted and distorted by the corrupt Supreme Court through thier usurped, extra-Constitutional powers to, by a simple majority of fewer than ten "justices" nullify laws duly adopted by the representatives of The People and the president  and to lie about the obvious meaning of the Constitution when it suits them.  The Supreme Court, not voted into office by the voters, the most remote part of the government from The People, stupidly given tenure for life by laws that should have been changed centuries ago, is, in fact, the most corrupt part of the government.  Until the Congress and President nullify the extra-Constitutional powers that the "justices" have granted themselves and placed the "justices" under an effective code of ethical conduct - for the first time in that Court's existence - it will be the dead hand of the slave power, white supremacy and oligarchy exerting itself as it did in the post Civil War period and, in the Rehnquist and courts, now, in their nullification of just the latest attempts to shake off the power of white supremacy, copying the late 19th century, Jim Crow Courts.  We are at high risk from our indigenous form of fascism, under which Black People and other People of Color and, yes, WOMEN have lived for most of the period in which the slave owners and financiers have had their Constitution in effect.  Not to mention workers in general.

But the misconception of "freedom" that I'm talking about above is older and more fundamentally depraved than the U.S. Constitution.   

To put it plainly, there is something obviously wrong with a conception of freedom that permits People to do what's wrong.*  I mentioned the Supreme Court ruling that said that the suppression of the trade in snuff porn was a terrible violation of that most idolized section of the Constitution, the idolized First Amendment.   That was a ruling joined in by every member on the court at that time except, oddly enough, one of the worst and most corrupt members of the court, Alito.  It was supported by the idolized Ruth Bader Ginsburg and all but one of the "original intent" "textualist" liars.   I'm always suspicious when they agree on something.   Now, I would bet you my last dollar that if we could revive the First Congress which drafted the First Amendment and every last member of every legislature that adopted the thing and asked them if contemporary snuff porn in which small animals are tortured and killed for the sexual pleasure of sadists and other degenerates was what they intended to protect, they would think you were insane to ask the question.  I think the American right went from their opposition to pornography to understanding the profit they got from allowing it in that the "freedom of speech" that line of civil libertarianism adopted by the Court was an opening for all kinds of peddling of lies profitable for the oligarchs and their fellow fascists.   On the other hand, I don't know if the legendary RGB had read the stupid and famous essay by Simone de Beauvoir, Must We Burn Sade, and if that figured into her vote on that issue of inverse morality, to allow snuff porn, to allow American sadists to have pay-per-view access to monkeys and other small animals being tortured to death for profit, but I wonder if it or its equivalent in literary essays did.  

I've written extensively about Sade and the assertion that his immoral and evil literature and the assertion that it comprises an act of libertarian virtue.  Of
Freedom, if you will.  A "freedom" which infamously includes the enslavement of Women and Children and men of the underclass so that libertines can practice their "liberties" upon them, their torture and rape and destruction, acts which the "enlightenment" conception of libertarian "freedom" valued so much that he was sprung from incarceration and put into the governing assembly during that other iconographic height of "enlightenment" "freedom," the reign of terror.  That the aristocratic de Sade  survived it while so many other aristocrats of his class - and myriads of common people - were tortured and viciously murdered in the name of "liberty, equality and fraternity" is certainly a sign of what such an "enlightened" conception of "freedom" leads to.   And if one thing's clear, it isn't equality that it leads to.  It's frequently not anything good.  As can be seen in the United States Supreme Court rulings which have made sadism into a "right" and the degenerate legal culture which has made that permission into some inverted conception of a virtue, Sade isn't in any danger of being burned today.  I mentioned the freedoms of presses and speech which gave rise to the commercial printing of and dissemination of penny postcard snuff porn of pictures of Black People lynched, of notices being posted that a lynching was going to happen at a specified time and date - something which no Supreme Court to my knowledge ever suppressed.  Not to mention the literature of white supremacy, the even more effective and corrupting cinematic promotion of white supremacy in its most violent manifestations at least since the time of Birth of a Nation which I've written about here before.  All of that was a promotion of violence and oppression of Black People, none of it was ever legally suppressed under the First Amendment or other laws upheld by the Supreme Court which I've been able to find.  It is what is allowed in under the gaping hole that that most lauded of all parts of the Constitution, that and the actual violence and oppression which inevitably comes with it.   To assert that we must allow that promotion is to assert that the next time those who want that have a right to do it under the First Amendment.   Forgive me if I suspect the "civil libertarians" of the legal profession and, um, "journalism" will be too busy worrying about some liberal, somewhere being mean to a Nazi to bother in fighting against it.  They are deadly parasites on the real left of equality and democracy.  

I can hear the scrupulous adherents to that libertarian conception of "liberty" now,  "But if we suppress lies, why, why,  we may be suppressed from telling the truth,"   or some such line as if the two things had to be considered as equivalent under the law.  That judges pretend that while they selectively make judgements on lies and truth (especially when the wealth of the wealthy needs to be protected) is one of the most amoral games of our legal system.

There is something not only wrong but brain-dead stupid with a conception of freedom that asserts to treat others as equals and well and to tell the truth and to live a normal, decent, not depraved life, "we must" permit others to treat others worse than shit.  Not only that but to allow them to to lie, to harm, to steal, to destroy.  Yet that is the very conception of freedom as is elevated by our depraved current Constitutional, legal, political and cultural presentations of it.  Not only is there no reason to conceive of the freedom to do what is good and right that way, it's clear, now, after that libertarian conception of freedom for some at the expense of others has been given a long test of time and political supremacy, it destroys the right to live decently.  Hearing a long time civil-rights lawyer I respect, a Woman of Color repeat the mantra of mendacity "there is a right to lie" made that reality click for me.  So deeply is that depraved conception of "freedom" embedded into all of those where it really does endanger us all.

I wonder if that Christianity was unfashionable among the 18th century "enlightened" founders of the United States that they clearly rejected the idea contained in Scripture that it's the truth that will set you free, otherwise they'd have written the First Amendment to distinguish between the truth and the lies that will enslave.   Perhaps they realized the truth that slavery was wrong would diminish their personal fortunes unacceptably.  

Again, there is something deeply wrong with the conception of freedom when it is divorced from the moral absolutes of equality and truth and the moral commandments to treat others as you would want to be treated.  To not harm or exploit or use or enslave other People and to treat other living beings with as much kindness as possible.  Such a misconception of freedom was certainly not what any of those who made the several attempts at a revolution in the late 18th century intended.  Certainly not the revolutionaries in France who immediately fell into murdering each other, as they were murdering so many others in their attempt to gain and consolidate their own power.  The modern secular-lefty adoration of the French Revolution and the similar and worse Russian and Chinese Revolutions leading to some of the most brutal dictatorships in human history are a continuation of the most extreme insanity in that regard.  It is part of the "Must We Must Not Burn Sade" pseudo-left.   

Monarchy, what the "enlightenment" revolutions were supposedly against, was an expression of freedom in a hierarchy of ever decreasing freedom from the monarch and the thugs who kept one in power, down to those who were enslaved ending in the destitute who weren't even kept as slaves who might, at least, be valued as property.  Modern dictatorship as Trump wants to install here is merely a less decorous form of that gangster governance.  And the "enlightenment" for all its claims, never delivered on that.  In part getting caught up in a conception of freedom divorced from egalitarian morality has played a big part in that.  I might agree that the American Revolution may be considered to be the best they did.

But the American Revolution, the elite part of it, the part which didn't do much fighting (largely done by the underclass, recently enslaved, indentured, propertyless) but which controlled politics and the judiciary and wrote the Constitution, clearly weren't far different in kind.  The embedding of slavery, of genocide and imperialism, into the Constitution,  the subjugation of Women, etc. in the Constitution and law, by them, proves that.  It's no great wonder that the January 6th insurrectionists used the flags and symbols of the American Revolution AS WELL AS THE SLAVE POWER CONFEDERACY in their attack on a Democratic Presidents election and installation.  Those symbols and that lore - the Black Revolutionary common soldiers being bleached out of the "history" they learned from TV and movies and novels and perhaps even "history books" - are useful to modern American fascism, the continuation of our long lasting and greatly empowered indigenous form of it, white supremacy because of the real nature of America's history.  

The real and only worthwhile story of American history is the long and continually thwarted struggle against the slave-power features of the American Constitution and the dead hand of inequality.  The latest lesson in that history is the actual nature of the supposed freedoms and liberties contained in the Bill of Rights as those really are in real life.  Rights for mass murderers and the criminally insane to obtain automatic military rifles with which they mow down young children and anyone else, rights for the promotion of that in the mass media and others in the pay of the corporations that make those military rifles and sell them to the mass murderers.  Rights for those who promote sadism and torture and murder to encourage those in the population who want to do that for profit.  Rights for those who want to violently attack and kill People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc.   Our history is the struggle against the Constitution and that libertarian distortion of freedom in all its form.   In the 21st century it is the struggle against the depraved conception of "freedom of the press" which permits lies to triumph over the truth, racism and sexism over equality, the "freedom" which created and installed Donald Trump in the presidency, the American judicial and legal and Constitutional system stupidly and impotently leaving it as an open question whether or not he can, not only do the damage he did before, but assume the insanely structured and empowered American presidency to destroy even the self-doomed liberal democracy that was wrested out of the original Constitution.  That something like that very likely would have quickly happened if Madison had not been forced to promise a Bill of Rights in the First Congress and if the improvised and dangerous one that was adopted was in place, far earlier is no excuse to ignore that Trumpism is a product of that very Bill of Rights as interpreted by 20th century courts in the age of mass media.  Hamilton certainly wanted that and he was far from the only one of the "founders" who wanted to thwart anything like egalitarian democracy.  

The "free speech" rulings of the Court, with the support of the ACLU and other "civil liberties" frauds are certainly a part of that, in that they have protected the big money corruption of our politics and the lies in the media on which the big money depends.   I think we must scrap the ACLU and its conception of "civil liberties" if we're going to have any chance of getting and keeping egalitarian democracy.  

We need to take a hard, critical look at all of this and much more if we're going to survive, not only as any kind of democracy but as a species.**  I think anything like egalitarian democracy requires that.   In thinking about this I thought of the often made atheist critique of Jesus that he didn't condemn slavery, which I would hold is not true.  You can't keep someone in slavery if you do to others what you would have done to you.  Jesus often spoke in parables, some of which are more confusing than others.  I think he told his listeners rather explicitly what he was doing in those which he compared the Kingdom of Heaven to the sewing of seeds and putting yeast in bread dough.  He was planting seeds and leavening dough with his elevation of the commandments of equality, the Golden Rule, his commands to love.  Those have certainly not yet taken though, perhaps, they are still embedded in the culture that was forming.  They had, in fact, been part of the Law of Moses, already.  They are certainly negated and destroyed by a conception of morality and rights divorced from equality and the practice of love, concepts that slave holders and genocidalists and sharp businessmen have no use for, especially on an equal basis.  

I don't remember, perhaps it was the moral brute Churchill,  who noted that Americans will always do the right thing but only when they have no other choice.  I think the conditions we live under right now leave us with no other choice, though getting past the mythical status of the Constitution and our legal and political traditions will have to be overcome just as the slave provisions in those had to be overcome to come to even the point of progress we are at now.  Slavery and lynch law endured with the insouciant acceptance of and tacit understanding of the majority of those with power for a long, long time.  The same powers which profited from those are trying to bring them back, the Republican-fascist party, the party of Trump and the backlash against the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the other laws which were adopted in the 1960s and 70s and a few after, are still powerful and using the Constitution and the mythical conception of our history and traditions to reimpose them.  The Roberts Court, the Republican-fascists in Congress, the American mass media are all part of that.  I don't think the American left really needs to help them by holding that it would be a terrible affront to "ethics" to suppress snuff porn and S&M, B&D promotion and the promotion of racism and fascism.   That anyone could hold that Nazism or Stalinism should have another chance at power, that our indigenous form of that as embodied in the KKK should have a chance to redo it here AS A VALUE OF THE AMERICAN LEFT HAS NO CREDIBILITY, AT ALL..  

We certainly have to get past the ACLU conception of freedom, they're some of the worst enablers of America's indigenous form of fascism which has taken hold of the country, a large number of states, as the slave states were always under their control from the start.   We need to scrap them for a real civil liberties entity, not like that thing.  I don't trust them at all.  One which does not hold that the KKK and Nazis are to always have a chance to do it again as they preen in their First Amendmenty purity.   I've long thought of Alan Dershowitz as an advocate of torture who plays a civil libertarian on TV since about the turn of the century.  I wasn't at all surprised when he turned out as he has.  Now I understand that even better than I did twenty years ago.  Such a conception of freedom will always trend that way.

* Since I'm sure some will take advantage of the difficulty of scientifically or mathematically determining what is wrong, I'd base a political and legal definition of that on the basis of every person's right to bodily autonomy, the right to live in a viable environment and the moral obligation to treat others as they would want to be treated.  Taking into account that mental illness can twist those desires in a small number of People BUT that such Peoples' desires are not useful for making a rule of general governance instead of turning that insanity into a rule under which all are supposed to live, as the stupid "enlightenment" comes down to when that question is pressed.  That's why an educated idiot like de Beauvior could ask if we must burn de Sade instead of living under a regime of "freedom" in which his psychotic fantasies re held up as a beacon of liberty.  I will point out that she and her boy friend Sartre, were supporters of Maoism as Mao and his inner circle was competing with Hitler and Stalin for whose mountain of corpses would be highest.  Such was her erudition on the topic of "liberty" and "equality."   Don't get me started on Pollitt's nostaliga for the Maoist "Progressive Labor Party."  They are in every way the exact moral equivalent of the German American Bund and the French collaboration.  

** The "liberty" of the oil, coal and other extraction industries to peddle lies through American TV and radio about global warming should stand as the absolute proof that such a conception of "civil liberties" is prepared to get us all killed in the name of "liberty."   That is a more subtle lesson of experience than them turning America into a shooting gallery through the same promotion of lies in the mass media but it's more deadly in the end.  Civil libertarianism and Constitutionalism is a demand that we don't even learn from even the hardest lessons of experience.