by Prof. John Kozy
September 3, 2010
from
GlobalResearch Website
|
John Kozy is a retired professor
of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic
issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20
years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer.
He has published a textbook in formal
logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial
magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers.
His on-line pieces can be found on
http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's
homepage. |
Modern societies have justified
their adoption of criminal activities by claiming that such
techniques are necessary to combat evil. But the war against
evil by the good cannot be won using evil tactics.
Evil never
yields goodness, and by using these evil practices, the amount
of evil in the world increases both in amount and extent.
Attempting to save the nation by becoming what you are trying to
save the nation from is suicidal. Unless benign techniques such
as those developed by primitive societies are put to use, evil
will prevail.
Then, paraphrasing J. Robert Oppenheimer's comment
after the first atomic bomb was successfully tested, We will
have become evil, the destroyer of goodness.
Some decades ago, while having dinner with a newly elected Attorney General
of the State of North Carolina and the Chief Justice of that state's Supreme
Court, the jurist told me that everyone involved in the legal system and
enforcement had to think like criminals to catch them.
He believed the statement to be straight forward
and evident until I pointed out that the line between thinking like a
criminal and acting like one is very fine and is easily and frequently
crossed, which results in increasing the amount of evil in society rather
than reducing it.
Few apparently notice this consequence and the
criminal-like behavior of those charged with enforcing and adjudicating the
law has increased so substantially that it has become common practice.
YouTube is replete with videos of police brutality.
Police have been
videoed beating subdued prisoners, tasering people (even little old ladies)
indiscriminately, shooting mentally challenged people they have been called
upon to help, and killing people caught committing non-capital crimes who
try to escape (sometimes by shooting them in the back). Investigations to
determine whether those officers should be held accountable rarely result in
any punishment.
People providing forensic information in trials have been shown to have
falsified evidence in ways that facilitate convictions.
A
recent report claims that,
"agents of the
[N.C.] State Bureau of Investigation repeatedly aided prosecutors in
obtaining convictions over a 16-year period, mostly by misrepresenting blood
evidence and keeping critical notes from defense attorneys... calling
into question convictions in 230 criminal cases."
Similar problems have been
found with other forensic labs.
In Dallas, TX, a former prosecutor,
Henry Wade, now deceased, has become
infamous for having convicted a large number of innocent defendants. Dallas
has had more exonerations than any other county in America; yet most
requests for the retesting of DNA have been denied by trial court judges on
the recommendation of former District Attorney
Bill Hill, a protégé of
Wade's.
Mr. Hill's prosecutors routinely opposed
testing.
In addition to almost complete reliance on eyewitness testimony, a
review of the Dallas County DNA cases shows that,
-
13 of the 19 wrongly convicted men were
black
-
eight were misidentified by victims of
another race
-
investigators, prosecutors, and many of
the juries in the cases were all white
-
police used suggestive lineup procedures
and sometimes pressured victims to pick their suspect and then
cleared the case once an identification was made
-
prosecutors frequently went to trial
with single-witness identifications and flimsy corroboration and
tried to preserve shaky identifications by withholding evidence that
pointed to other potential suspects
-
judges routinely approved even tainted
pretrial identifications
When Bill Hill, who said he was confident his
assistants verified the accuracy of all eyewitness identifications was told
his office prosecuted one those exonerated, Mr. Hill said the two
prosecutors on the case were incompetent holdovers from the previous
administration.
Terri Moore, the current DA's top assistant and
a former federal prosecutor, said,
"It's almost like it's the whole system.
Everybody drops the ball somewhere, starting with the police
investigation. And we just take the case and adopt what the police say."
Then there are those prosecutions that rely on
the testimony of criminals who have been bribed to act as informants.
Bribery is a criminal activity, and if a defense attorney were shown to have
bribed a witness, disbarment would be the likely result; yet prosecutors
commonly do it.
The preceding paragraphs limn an ugly picture, ugly indeed!
But the evil is not limited to local law enforcement. When officials
realized that they can act with impunity without fear of suffering any
personal consequences, the maxim, one must think like criminals to catch
them, underwent subtle alterations. Now one must think like bankers to be
able to regulate them. The same thing is said of stock brokers, oil men, and
every other interest group. Everyone wants to be self-regulated.
But
self-regulation is nothing but a license to engage in criminal behavior. The
whole system of governing becomes an oligarchy of old boys scratching each
other's backs. Everyone knows just how well that works out.
Federal agencies, including the Supreme Court, are complicit, too. The Court
violates the Constitution routinely. Remember the decision validating the
incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII?
Other decisions, perhaps not quite so obvious,
can easily be cited.
The FBI and Homeland Security routinely violate the
privacy provisions of both the Constitution and the law, and the courts have
failed to intervene. The CIA has become an official version of Murder, Inc.,
now even advocating the assassination of Americans living abroad who have
been labeled "terrorists."
The agency has become the dispenser of vigilante
justice, while Americans are told to never take the law into their own
hands.
No one seems to realize that the war against evil by the good cannot be won
using evil tactics. Evil never yields goodness, and by using these evil
practices on the pretext of fighting evil, the amount of evil in the world
increases both in amount and extent.
Attempting to save a nation by becoming what you
are trying to save the nation from is an act of national self-destruction;
it is suicidal.
So how can the good be
expected to fight evil?
Edmund Burke's claim,
"All that is necessary for the triumph of
evil is that good men do nothing," is often cited.
Sounds good, doesn't it?
But the claim falls into the category of notions
that Michael Faraday labeled "favorite ideas," and he warned us to be leery
of them. Think about it for just a minute.
Are people who do nothing really good?
Anyone who has watched network television over the past decade has seen
stories about people who have seen crimes taking place without ever
intervening and people collapsing in the street without ever stopping to
render aid. ABC News currently has a series, titled What Would You Do?, that
stages illegal acts in public places to see how unaware bystanders respond.
Many do nothing.
The implication of these stories is that there's something
wrong with such people.
In fact, no one knows what the ratio of good to bad people in society is.
Perhaps there simply are not enough good people to make a difference no
matter what they do. But even supposing, as most people do, that the good
outnumber the bad, few realize how hard it is for the good to fight evil.
Good people are repelled by it; they can never employ it even with the best
of intentions; they know multiple wrongs never make right.
So what are they to do? They can, of course,
rail against the evil.
Some like the ACLU, the Innocence Project, and
others file lawsuits, others expose evil by requesting documents through the
Freedom of Information act and by becoming whistleblowers. Although all of
these actions are worthwhile and often result in combating specific wrongful
acts, they have little effect on the systemic evil that has been
incorporated into institutional behavior. Good people seem to be limited by
their very goodness.
Is there then no hope? Can nothing be done to
prevent the triumph of evil?
Some societies have developed benign and civil ways of dealing with it.
Gandhi was able to use passive resistance to expel the evil British RAJ from
India, but, unfortunately, the Indians were unable to use it to keep an evil
local RAJ from acquiring control. Nevertheless, Gandhi demonstrated that
passive resistance can work.
The Norwegians during WWII redefined the surname Quisling to mean traitor
and thereby vilified Vidkun Quisling who assisted Nazi Germany after it
conquered Norway so that he himself could rule.
The term was later used to
vilify fascist political parties, military and paramilitary forces and other
collaborators in occupied Allied countries.
If, as some claim, America is becoming a fascist
state, "Quisling" can still be used today. Recently, Stephanie Madoff,
daughter-in-law of Bernard Madoff, filed court papers asking to
change her and her children's last name to Morgan to avoid additional
humiliation and harassment.
Vilification by associating a person's name with
his acts and applying it to others who act likewise is an effective, benign
way of attacking evil. In an earlier piece, I suggested that those who
advocate war but deliberately avoid serving themselves be called Cheyneys.
The French Resistance, during and after WWII, shaved the heads of women
caught consorting with German occupiers. These "shaved-heads" exposed their
shame until their hair re-grew, and even later, others rarely forgot who
they were. (Some would consider forcefully shaving a person's head a battery
which is illegal, but even so, it is a rather harmless battery.)
Primitive societies developed a whole range of benign ways of confronting
evil, some of which are still in use today in isolated places. Ostracism,
shunning, anathema, and social rejection have been used successfully. Then
there are the more modern practices of boycotting and picketing.
But modern technological advances have made even other practices available.
Imaginative uses of these tried and proven methods can be very effective.
For instance, most computer literate people are familiar with
denial of
service attacks used by hackers. A denial of service attack is an attempt to
make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. These attacks
are a great nuisance, but often cause no real damage. No good person would
recommend using such attacks, but consider the following situation:
People are routinely asked to write their congressmen to influence their
voting on specific issues. These letters are usually delivered to Capitol
Hill, perhaps causing congressmen some annoyance, but rarely enough to
induce much real change.
But,
-
What if the letters, written in civil
language without threats, were sent to the residences of a congressman's
parents, siblings, spouse, and children?
-
What if the letters merely asked
the recipient's to urge their relatives to consider changing his/her mind?
-
What if thousands of letters were sent to these people?
The annoyance would be enormous. If this were
done to enough congressmen often enough, perhaps they would consider acting
in more responsible ways or perhaps leaving office altogether.
Denying miscreants of the convenient use of the
proceeds of their actions could be a powerful tool.
This technique can be used against,
-
corporate officers and their governing
boards
-
judges who routinely reduce the amounts jurors award plaintiffs
-
the
police who are shown to have acted brutally
-
Justices of the Supreme Court
who issue rulings that cannot be justified by normal readings of the
Constitution,
...in short, anyone acting in an official capacity
who has done a
great wrong.
Furthermore, the U.S. Postal Service needs the
money. The establishment does not expect people to act in such ways; it
expects them to use the normal established channels to express their
disapproval. But those established channels have long ago been shown to be
ineffective.
All that is required to win the battle against evil is to find ways to make
the lives of the miscreants miserable.
No laws, not violence, not even punishment is
needed:
Even if the good in society
constitute only a minority, if the minority is large enough, it can succeed
using such benign but annoying techniques.
The situation described above is only one of many possibilities. Imaginative
people can conceive of others which can be equally effective. Think of ways
of using the telephone, twitter, posters, and anything else in similar ways.
The governing maxim needed is just make the miscreant's life miserable.
Unless such techniques are put to use, evil will prevail.
Then, paraphrasing J. Robert Oppenheimer's
comment after the first atomic bomb was successfully tested,
We will have become evil, the destroyer of
goodness.