George,

Peculiarly, a lot of what American patriot Tom Paine condemned about the conduct of the British Crown appears to have resurfaced in America today.

For example, Paine believed, “any excuse can be made to serve the purpose of malignity when it is in power.” And when ever was there a better illustration of this than President Bush's deceitful WMD excuse to invade Iraq? Is the WMD lie not, in fact, an example of when "malignity is in power?"

As historian John Keane wrote in his “Tom Paine: A Political Life” (Little, Brown and Co.), despots—as Paine saw them—plunder “the pockets and lives of their subjects, since that is the most effective way of raising and feeding armies and making their subjects afraid, obedient, and willing to pay taxes. Wars between despotic states thereby tend to increase rulers’ lust for power over their own populations. War, wrote Paine, is ‘the art of conquering at home.’” (Original italics.)

How prescient! Get a war going and as comedian Goodman Ace once said, it's an excuse to stuff a lot of legislation down the drain when the public isn't looking. And so we are, indeed, conquered at home. We live under a regime that can arrest and imprison any of us for as long as it likes, without a warrant or providing us with an attorney or knowledge of the charges.

The public having been given no honest reason for launching the war on Iraq, perhaps the real reason is oil, just as Paine wrote the reason King George III made war on America was because “her crime is property.” After all, the Bush family seems to specialize in invading oil-rich kingdoms.

As President Bush harvests our taxes for Iraq, and claims the lives of our troops, let’s recall Paine’s words about the crimes of the Crown: “Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor?”

These words ring true in thousands of American homes tonight, where loved ones have been killed in Iraq; they ring true as well for tens of thousands of Iraq families who have lost everything—breadwinners, wives, children, homes, jobs, and every semblance of civilized life.

And what would Tom Paine have made of the wanton cruelty that was never a policy of George Washington’s soldiers but can now be described as “routine” under Commander-in-Chief Bush’s military? Paine was compassionate toward American royalists.

“It is time to have done with tarring, feathering, carting and taking securities for their future good behaviour,” Paine wrote charitably of British sympathizers. “Every sensible man must feel conscious shame at seeing a poor fellow hawked for a show about the streets.” What Paine might have said of men stacked in human pyramids or hung from chains until dead!

Paine inveighed loudly against the death penalty. Condemning the excesses of the French Revolution, he said, “as France has been the first of European nations to abolish royalty, let her also be the first to abolish the punishment of death, and to find out a milder and more effective substitute.” With every passing day, the killing of more and more U.S. detainees is coming to light.

As for all citizens bearing government’s burden equally, Paine took a stand opposite President Bush’s call for ditching the inheritance tax. According to author Keane: Believing as Paine did the earth is “the common property of the human race,” it followed “the propertied have an obligation to help the poor, not by charity alone, but by accepting a government-administered inheritance tax system designed to redistribute and equalize income.”

Bush boasts about freedom. Paine had a pretty good retort for such people: “When it shall be said in any country in the world, ‘My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive’—when these things can be said then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.”

Sherwood Ross (electronic mail, September 27, 2005)