I have been a fairly run-of-the-mill critic of the Bush administration and bad U.S. policy in general for much of my time as a Kossack. I think the hiring of former FEMA Director Michael Brown was idiotic, and I think Paul Wolfowitz's Medal of Freedom cheapens the honor associated with other winners, who manage to gain their respectability in this country by means other than planning the invasions of other countries.
I would love very dearly to see jailed those who signed off on torture. I would love to see abstinence-only education dropped and banned like the idiocy it is and the school of "thought" behind it exposed for the theosophy, not science, it stems from.
I hate where this country has been going, but I am even less fond of where it will yet go before the American people are allowed to take the wheel back from a reckless teenager who just wanted to know how many fire hydrants and schoolchildren he could run over before someone stopped him.
And it's a good thing the Sedition Act of 1918, passed on this date by Congress, was repealed in 1921, or my ass would in the slammer faster than you could say "Me too!"
[W]hoever when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause, or incite or attempt to incite, insubordination, disloyalty[;] willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States [...] shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or the imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both[.]
Also, you stopped getting your mail:
When the United States is at war, the Postmaster General may, upon evidence satisfactory to him that any person or concern is using the mails in violation of any of the provisions of this Act, instruct the postmaster at any post office at which mail is received addressed to such person or concern to return to the postmaster at the office at which they were originally mailed all letters or other matter so addressed, with the words "Mail to this address undeliverable under Espionage Act" plainly written or stamped upon the outside thereof, and all such letters or other matter so returned to such postmasters shall be by them returned to the senders thereof under such regulations as the Postmaster General may prescribe.
No word on if they ever bothered to tell you you weren't getting letters from your mother because you hated America. But with a real Frank Burns type leading the charge, nothing would surprise me:
Within a month [of the passage of the Espionage Act, the precursor to the Sedition Act], 15 publications had been excluded from the mail, including The Masses and The Milwaukee Leader.
(Kenesaw Mountain Landis pops up again under an accusation of prejudice. Color me shocked.)
Any WHY did Congress see fit to criminalize speech it didn't like? This one will sure seem foreign:
In the midst of an unpopular war, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918. This law, aimed at silencing criticism of the United States during World War I, restricted freedom of speech in the interest of national security.
Remember being accused of hating America because you opposed some part of the Bush administration's grand plan to get back at al-Qaeda by ... attacking someone unrelated? al-Qaeda has more of a presence in Iraq than it did before we turned it into civil war soup, and Ambassador Crocker himself says the real fight is not where we have 150,000 soldiers engaged tonight.
And remember any other president being so secretive in the interest of "national security"? (Though, in all unfairness, this president's actions indicate pretty clearly to me that he'd cite executive privilege if you asked him what he ate for breakfast and he wasn't feeling cheery.)
I don't mind not knowing exactly when and where troops are going. I don't mind not knowing when during the day troops are going to get back from wherever they've been fighting. Discussing specifics like deployments and such should be only by those involved specifically in those discussions.
But don't tell me that criticizing my government makes me a traitor, makes me anti-America (when I am just anti-Bush), makes me supportive of the terrorists, any of that. Don't tell me that the same things that make Washington, Jefferson, everyone down to John bloody Rutledge heroes, make me a traitor. (When I declare my independence from this country, brand me a traitor.)
Oh, and it gets better. Remember the times Bush, Vice President Cheney and so many other Republican officials accused anyone who countered the administration of wanting the terrorists to win? Be glad they couldn't do more:
[Whoever, when the United States is at war,] shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any language intended to incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of its enemies, or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy [... and] whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein [... gets to do the same time as those other traitors.]
We antiwar protesters, Iraqi-Americans and Democratic elected officials should be pretty glad we can no longer be put in jail for resisting the war, having the audacity to fly our national flag or say that the president's war on terror is as effective as mowing the lawn by looking at the grass menacingly from time to time.
Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.
But, of course, Rumsfeld only laid out that haphazard timeline after initially saying nobody could foresee what would happen, so nobody could say how long it would (will) take.
However, Rumsfeld said the post-war troop commitment would be less than the number of troops required to win the war.
(Can't analyze that one, as the administration isn't saying if we've won the war. John McCain says we're winning, "my friends," but winning ain't won. And, of course, the Mission Accomplished banner referred to the ship flying it, not the war as a whole, which any old fool can see.)
Yeah ... how quickly did the president and his men retreat from that "gonna be a while" one? "Nobody could have known how long this would take," we hear from exasperated current and former administration officials. Um, folks, your head dunce said "gonna be a while 'fore we lick this thing" not 12 hours after the towers were hit. General Shinseki said several hundred thousand troops would be the minimum to secure Iraq.
But anyway. Speech suppression — this is nothing new. Opposing the war and being compared negatively to the enemy is by far not limited to this president or this conflict. One of the more recent examples (at least in comparison to 1798) is also arguably America's favorite president to hate — and to bash in songs — preserved in Simon & Garfunkel's deceptively sweet 7 O'Clock News/Silent Night, the end of which contains this line, spoken as if in a news broadcast: "[Former Vice President Nixon] also said opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single weapon working against the U.S." And that was in 1966 (turn your sound up):
So we have two threads at play here. We have the habitual demonization of antiwar protesters — at one point including the fining and jailing of guilty parties. (How ever did the government assure itself the traitors would get the summonses, since their mail wasn't being delivered?) These days we settle for saying such people hate America, are in league with the terrorists, that Hamas or Hezbollah or al-Qaeda wants them to win, etc.
And we have the liberty to speak out, to call out administration officials on their lies (and maybe some day the press corps will wake up and make Dana Perino work for her money), to make them accountable to the people who vote for them and their bosses.
It would just be nice if speaking out against the ruling party hadn't so quickly become such a bad thing after the first time.
But there is something else here, something that doesn't get a lot of play and really should. That's the Sedition Act's public health effect.
See, lots was happening in 1918, including a lot of not talking about the deadly flu strain going around and killing millions of people over two years.
How bad was the Spanish flu? It killed 20 to 100 million people. IN TWO YEARS. Even lowballing it, that flu strain killed twice as many people in two years as the Nazis killed in concentration camps in six. This guy say's it's more like 50 million.
But no, the pandemic, "which swept over nearly every continent and island of the whole globe," was no cause for worry:
On September 28, 200,000 gather for a 4th Liberty Loan Drive in Philadelphia. Days after the parade, 635 new cases of influenza were reported. Within days, the city will be forced to admit that epidemic conditions exist. Churches, schools, and theaters are ordered closed, along with all other places of "public amusement."
Royal Copeland, the Health Commissioner of New York City, announces, "The city is in no danger of an epidemic. No need for our people to worry."
[...]
October 1918 turns out to be the deadliest month in the nation's history as 195,000 Americans fall victim to influenza.
(I suppose people wear masks in New York every Oct. 16. It's part of half-Halloween. On Oct. 16, you wear your mask, and on Oct. 17, you wear the rest of your costume. Gauge reaction, that sort of thing. Nine days later, some stuff happens. Probably fictional, like this.)
Incidentally, the name for this flu comes from the only country that said anything about it (bolding mine):
The Allies of World War I frequently called it the "Spanish Flu." This was mainly because the pandemic received greater press attention in Spain than in the rest of the world, because Spain was not involved in the war and there was no wartime censorship. Spain did have one of the worst early outbreaks of the disease, with some 8 million people infected in May 1918. It was also known as "only the flu" or "the grippe" by public health officials seeking to prevent panic.
It could be that the Spanish flu was the reason or one of the reasons to the end of World War I. More soldiers of the United States died from the Spanish flu during World War I than from the war itself.
