When I was about 15 or 16, I read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. The book is a history of the Soviet concentration camp system between 1918 and 1956, based on the testimony of actual prison inmates, of which Solzhenitsyn was one—and it had a profound effect on me, both politically and as a future writer.
But most of all, it taught me something crucial: What is legal is not necessarily the same as what is just.
Because you see, the Gulag system of forced-labor and concentration camps was completely legal: Proper laws had been properly passed, which allowed innocent people to be shipped off to their doom in a properly legal process. Even before the Nazis came up with the Wannsee Protocol, Lenin and his Soviets had perfected the idea of using the law to rape justice and the rights of human beings.
We today look at such abuses of the law as perversions typical of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes—
—but what about in a democracy? What about in our democracy? What about in America?
Recently, the United States’ Congress duly and democratically passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which President Obama duly and democratically signed into law.
The NDAA makes it legal for the executive branch to unilaterally declare anyone, including an American citizen, a terrorist suspect. And on merely the strength of this suspicion—not an act, not even a plan, but merely on a suspicion—an accused person can be “detained” indefinitely.
read the rest here
Passive resistance should be a part of Resistance (with no other options off the table--HM).
AP--Thought of you when I saw Lira's reference to Solzhenitsyn
...passive or active...resist
Thoughtful blog thanks for posting
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