This diary was prompted by a couple of different things I've seen online in the past couple of days. The first is the really very poor and amateurish forgery of Barack Obama's alleged Kenyan birth certificate. The second is the reaction I've seen from a few Kossacks: they have labeled the actions of the Birthers as treason or treasonous.
The actions of the Birther movement present us with important questions. I'm afraid I don't have any easy or pat answers for this community.
Many of us saw the post yesterday with a link to a Birther "news" site. I'm not going to further empower them by linking to it. Suffice it to say that the Birthers predicted that the [forged] birth certificate would be rejected, that this would lead to an uprising against President Obama, and Obama would respond by declaring martial law.
Make no mistake about it: this rather obvious forgery is meant to encourage the Birther wackos to begin a campaign of violence against Barack Obama and anyone seen to support him.
This pathetic forgery will of course be rejected by the judiciary, and that will lead in turn to accusations by Birthers of "martial law." This forgery is clearly part of a strategy to encourage a wave of domestic terror to be carried out by nutjobs like the one recently arrested in front of the Air National Guard base in New York.
The Birther strategy seems obvious to me, but it presents a pressing question that does not seem to have an easy answer. It seems to me that the key question is: can you commit treason by proxy?
At least one purpose of the individuals behind the Birther movement seems to be to propagandize the less intelligent and more violent members of the movement and nudge them towards violence without ever overtly calling for violence.
We've seen it before: the propagandist always stops short of overtly calling for violence, yet they deliberately create the conditions under which an act of terrorism is all but certain. Is that treason? Is creating the conditions under which a terrorist act is all but certain the levying of war? And how can you prove it if there is no overt act to be witnessed?
It's hard to deal with this threat because it shields itself behind our Freedom of Speech, and that freedom is too precious to risk. The Birthers have positioned themselves in such a way that to go after them is to attack our own Freedom of Speech. Perhaps that's the deeper truth: the Birthers hate the very Freedom of Speech they abuse.
As I've said before, I don't have any easy answers or prescriptions. We may just have to ride out the coming wave of Right Wing terror. It may be that we will have to accept a certain amount of "terrorism by proxy" as the price of our Freedom of Speech.