Muhammad: The "Banned" Images Blog Free Speech at Risk

America Is Rwanda

Not in the severity or brutality of violence, but certainly in its use of arbitrary and capricious "law" to control and punish innocent citizens.

The Rwandan government has jailed a lawyer for the "crime" of "promoting genocidal ideology," i.e., for publishing opinions that "threaten the country's security." (The American law professor is in Rwanda to support an opposition candidate. And this is an obvious ploy by the government to terrorize such opposition and to metastasize its rule.) In this case, a government is using non-objective law to create and punish "political" criminals.

In the U.S., we have cases such as the one noted below: "The Government Against Doctors (and Patients)." In that case, America's statists use the undefinable and whim-driven antitrust laws to turn innocent and productive doctors into "economic" criminals.

In both cases, innocent individuals are stuck in a perpetual state of uncertainty -- with the only absolute being a chronic fear of bureaucratic revenge. The goal in both cases is identical: the preemptive use of the government's police power to silence and punish those who oppose the government's arbitrary decrees.

"[O]nly a non-objective law can give a statist the chance he seeks: a chance to impose his arbitrary will—his policies, his decisions, his interpretations, his enforcement, his punishment or favor—on disarmed, defenseless victims." (Ayn Rand, "Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason")

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/world/africa/06rwanda.html?scp=1&sq=rwanda%20charges&st=cse