Nicole Morgan is a PhD Philosophie politique, anthropologue, thèse (publiée) sur les origines de l’état moderne suivie de nombreuses publications sur son effritement et les idéologies contemporaines qui tentent de légiférer un bien commun global en l’absence d’un gouvernement global. [1]
This article has been published originally on Cosmopolis cosmopolis-rev.org (Revue semestrielle créée en 2007, Cosmopolis s’appuie sur un Conseil éditorial international de spécialistes de divers domaines, dont l’objectif est d’aborder sous un jour neuf le projet cosmopolitique.)
The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereinafter referred to as CRC or the Convention) is an international treaty that aims to protect the rights of children worldwide. It defines a child as any human being under the age of 18, and calls on States Parties to take all appropriate measures to ensure that children’s rights are protected—including the right to a name and nationality; freedom of speech and thought; access to healthcare and education; and freedom from exploitation, torture, and abuse. CRC entered into force in September 1990, and has been ratified by 195 countries, making it the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world.
The United States signed the UNCRC in February 1995, five years after the first 60 signatory states, but it is the only country in the world, who have not ratified it. Therefore, the provisions of the CRC are not legally binding in the United States.
If some of the rights of the child it guarantees are flouted in the United States, citizens cannot protect themselves in court. Article 37 does not have the force of law. It stipulates that “No child shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without the possibility of release should be imposed for offenses committed by persons under the age of eighteen years. "[2]
First degree of abandonment
You should know that each state is free to organize its justice, as long as it does not break the constitutional rules. This is why some states apply the death penalty while others have abolished it. It is also for this that the age thresholds for capital punishment vary between states and can vary, in the same state, according to the times and the laws passed on this subject in the state.
But the judicial majority is a federal domain. It is currently sixteen, for the entire United States. It used to be lower…
On June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinnez [3] was executed in South Carolina at the age of fourteen. He is the youngest person to have been executed in the United States in this century. More than fifty years later, there are American politicians and prosecutors asking for the death penalty to be reapplied to 14-year-old and even younger offenders. In 1996, more than a hundred years after the last execution of a juvenile offender in New Mexico, the governor of that state declared himself in favor of the death penalty for minors from the age of thirteen. The last execution of a delinquent minor in California dates back to 1923. In mid-98, a member of the Texas House of Representatives announced his intention to introduce a law fixing the age at eleven years of age. a child could be sentenced to death. The examination of his proposal was subsequently postponed. It seems unlikely that a state or federal court would allow an offender under the age of sixteen at the time of the offense to remain under sentence of death or to be executed, suggesting that it is rather the demagoguery that drives senior officials. According to jurists, this mention of the death penalty and life imprisonment is undoubtedly at the root of this exceptionalism.[4]
Which settles above all, the arms lobby which dictates more than ever its policies to the American president, a slogan which it repeats ad nauseam: Guns do not kill people, people kill people. (It’s not guns that kill people, it’s people who kill people). In other words, the state has no responsibility for the killings and no regulations will impede the market and the right to bear arms, which is also the second amendment to the American Constitution (based on the totally misunderstood philosophy of Thomas Hobbes). A mentally ill adolescent kills a child. He is responsible. He is liable to the death penalty.
The circle is becoming more and more vicious because children are less and less protected by the State which increasingly refuses them access to free care, psychiatric care in mind. Initiated in the 1960s, the movement to close psychiatric hospitals continued. In 1955, the United States had one psychiatric bed per 300 people. In 2010, the ratio was 1 in 7,100 Americans, and 4,000 beds were again deleted between 2010 and 2012.[5]
Originally, the idea was to treat patients closer to home, in an open environment. In practice, this often means giving them drugs or leaving them to fend for themselves. Sheriffs complain about losing whole days recovering the sick and not knowing what to do with them, other than putting them in jail. This partly explains why the rate of incarceration in the United States is 5 to 10 times higher than in other democracies, which prisons under the pretext of economy are now privatized at an accelerated rate.
Donald Trump made the promise: "I think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons. It seems to work much better.” The day after his election, the two main companies in the sector, Corecivic (ex-Corrections Corporations of America) and GEO Group, saw their shares soar by 43% and 21% respectively. after being moribund for long months.
Since Reagan, adolescents and children have become prey to racketeering: schizophrenic adolescents wandering aimlessly in the streets with staring eyes, like lost dogs, young delinquents thrown out by their parents, unemployed, living on petty theft, and of course the newcomers: immigrant children of all ages. The detention centers for migrants are overwhelmingly managed by these same private companies, in particular Corecivic and GEO Group, under the supervision of the Federal Agency for Immigration and Customs (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE).
It was a cash flow, and the scandals were not long in coming. The aptly named Kids for Cash scandal involves a private Pennsylvania juvenile prison from the Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corporation. The company was found guilty, in 2009, of having given $ 2.8 million in bribes to two judges, so that they condemned, over a period of almost ten years, 2000 children to prison terms for trivial offenses, some of which are not even criminal.
The imprisonment of immigrant children at the border has become a gold mine for shareholders. In the United States, the overwhelming majority of migrant detention centers are managed by these same private companies, notably Corecivic and GEO Group, under the supervision of the Federal Immigration and Customs Agency Enforcement, ICE). Currently, some 400,000 migrants are detained in the United States each year, according to various estimates, with a cost to the taxpayer and sources of income for businesses.
According to the research firm IBISWorld, this industry of detention of people awaiting deportation represents today 21% of a global market of private incarceration estimated at 5.3 billion dollars in the United States.
According to a UN study, more than 100,000 children are currently detained in connection with immigration to the United States, a total including children detained with their parents and minors detained separately, the UN said on Monday. "The total number of (children) detained is 103,000," Manfred Nowak, lead author of the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, told AFP. He called this estimate "cautious", based on official figures as well as on "very reliable" additional sources.
None of these children, whether immigrant or American, can think of receiving an education that would allow them to rehabilitate themselves (for a crime that they did not commit in most cases). Under the leadership of Donald Trump, schools are increasingly privatized. This is a whole chapter to write.
What is left but suicide direct or through drugs. The children are abandoned. They know it. They take their own lives.
An article published by the Washington State university documents the somber statistics with this comment.[6]
We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.
Second degree of abandonment
There is even more serious. Donald Trump and his support team have a gospel diva: the very powerful Ayn Rand whose books have been and are best sellers which, advertising says, are rivaled only by the Bible.
Armed with a massive, intelligent ego and a simple and hard-hitting doctrine, "Long live selfishness", Ayn Rand has always fought the slightest intrusion of the government in market forces. Hence the title of a very detailed biography devoted to her (Jennifer Burns Goddess of the market). Hosted by Donald Trump and his troops, adored by both libertarians and shocking conservatives, her books are selling more than ever.
Whether in her never-ending novels or in her philosophy textbooks, she violently attacks parasites. It was she who openly divided the world into two categories: that of entrepreneurial heroes whose moral vector is money and who are only disciplined by the market and the parasites created and maintained by none other than Satan (the One of the Armageddon) protector of the state, its laws and its institutions. The enemy was designated by Donald Trump as the Democrats and all the whiners in the world begging for power and money, taking down with the then courageous entrepreneur who live for himself and in himself. In Ayn Rand's novels, the sufferings of ordinary Americans - these "parasites", as she calls them serve as a counterpoint to the extraordinary pleasures (which she describes in bizarre sexual terms) of heroic captains of industry.
She showered the parasites with insults. This philosopher, who claims to be the epitomy of objectivity, has tirelessly pilloried the enemies of entrepreneurs and growth inhibitors. She repeated endlessly the words "parasites", "looters", "beggars at the small week", "lice", "imitation of humans", "lie", or "zombies" to describe all those who do not create the wealth, but live (state officials, including teachers, firefighter or others) the sick, the retired, the list is long.
Let there be no mistake. These words are not a resurgence of her Russian culture whose colorful vocabulary we have appreciated in the books of the Comtesse de Ségur. Rand goes far beyond insult by suggesting that these worms deserve more than the knout: they deserves death. Few readers have been able to detect from its beginnings, the implacable hatred implicit in her writings. Whittaker Chambers tried it in an article which made a lot of noise in 1957, not only by its content but because. Chambers was a respected conservative Republican "In almost every page of Atlas's Revolt," he wrote, "you hear that voice crying," In the gas chamber - Go! ". [7]
And it is true, recognizes this journalist-writer, that Ayn Rand, in the scene where passengers are trapped in a train immobilized in a tunnel, seems to take pleasure in describing their asphyxiation as if, not sharing her ideas, they deserved their fate. She whispers: "It is said that disasters are due to pure chance and some will say that Comet passengers are neither guilty nor responsible for what happens to them. Then she coldly reads the count which condemns the inexcusable intellectual errors of the sixteen men and women prisoners of the train. “The man in seat 5 of car number 7 was a worker who believed he had a“ right ”to a job, whether his employer wanted to employ him or not. The woman in cabin 6 of car number 8 was a speaker who believed, as a customer, that she had "a right" to transportation whether rail staff wanted it or not. "
Whiteker Chambers was accused by the well-meaning press, which claims to be open to all ideas, of exaggeration if not of itself being prey to hatred. He received a beating from the sect that surrounded Ayn Rand, which poured insults on anyone who dared to express the slightest reservation about her. But he worried enough Allan Greenspan, the ex-president of the American Federal Reserve, a great disciple of the Goddess of the market. He wrote the same year a letter to the New York Times to clear up what he thought was a misunderstanding. . There is no hatred, he says, but destiny. “The Atlas Revolt is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is relentless. Creators and the blunt end goal of reason lead to joy and self-realization. Parasites that persistently avoid this goal or reason will perish as it should. "
The sentence should have frozen the blood of analysts but we still believed too much in the ideology of progressive democracy to accept to take the words seriously. Ideologies are made for that: not having to think, questioning and especially not seeing dysfunctions. "It's very convenient," says Isaiah Berlin, "and not tiring. Ideology generally exempts individuals from all responsibility: it is enough for them to surrender to the forces of history, to the laws of progress, to be right. ”. [8]
Back to the long list of Any Rand parasites. Where is the child ? The child is not a producer and depends entirely on the care and protection of the State referred to in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It goes back to the Aristotle definition of human beings being the political animal, meaning becoming human through a culture which is not genetically inherited. It takes a village to raise a child
In the psychotic world of Ayn Rand and Donald Trump, it's very simple: the child does not exist. He is not there. The child is obliterated.
Ayn Rand, in the thousands of pages novels devoted to her heroes, obliterates the child "In this regard", as François Flahaut pointed out very judiciously, "it is symptomatic that in the two great bestsellers of Ayn Rand, however so large, there is no room for a child character. It is that the mere existence of children, and therefore of the relationship between generations, would have been enough to ruin the model of individual that it exalts. "[9]
But it goes much more and here I am advancing on a path where little dares to venture: that of psychotics: the child exists, as tortured and source of enjoyment.
Let’s bring back the younger years of Ayn Rand already in search of her heroes She found one Ayn Rand William Hickman . Who was he ? A mobster, a thief, a serial killer who raped, tortured and dismembered a twelve-year-old girl. The autopsy report is not publishable.
She saw in his trial the indictment of the lonely man by a servile society, of a lone hero. Inspired by the news, she began to write a novel in which the hero is inspired by Hickman. She did not publish it, but her notes have just been published: "Her trial," she writes, "is the extraordinary image of a man, alone with his conscience, who respects nothing of what society holds sacred. . A man who is alone in front of his actions ... A strong man who holds society under his feet. He was not strong enough. But is it a crime? He was not able to serve because he could dominate ... He was superior and wanted to prove it ... and that is what society did not allow him to do. "
Let's go on. Hickman, she muses, "has a wonderful free, light conscience - not cluttered with a social instinct, a horde instinct. He does not understand the necessity, that is to say the importance of the other. The others do not exist for him and he does not understand that he should exist ”[10] She is full of praise and wallows at his feet like a silly teen ager. In her novels these superiorly selfish men are handsome, they have gray eyes and matching hair.
When we analyze the speeches of Donald Trump we will understand that he who reads so little, if not at all has on his bedside table a novel by Ayn Rand [17]. He finds himself magnificent and identifies with Howard Roark hero of The Living Source (original title: The Fountainhead). Which speaks to itself, ignites, punctuating its declarations with the leitmotif “I want to declare”. He proclaims his independence and repeats that he is not a man who exists in function of others in a society of slaves; which allows him to add that he recognizes no obligation towards men other than that of respecting their independence, as he requires them to respect his own. “I don't need justification or sanction to be what I am,” he says. I am my own justification and my own sanction. "[11] [12]
TOTAL ABANDONMENT
In the long history of humanity, the perverse couple formed by Donald Trump and Ayn Rand are certainly not the first. If interested in this pathology of power one can do research on the couple Nicolae Elena Ceaușescu.
But let’s stop here on what has become a voyeurism of the perversions of power. If it is true that the evil virtual couple formed by Donald Trump and Ayn Rand are not the first, they may well be the last, not because humanity will gradually come out of its follies but because humanity risks disappearing at least a good part of humanity, children first.
For entrepreneurs who want their hands free to sack the planet, any law protecting the environment, and therefore guaranteeing the survival of future generations, is a hindrance to growth: They see in ecologists, experts and other scientists, parasites who propagate false information for their own benefit. In a 60-minute interview, Donald Trump loudly proclaims, "Look, these scientists have a political agenda. There is no environmental crisis, he says, offering as the only proof his brilliant sixth sense which makes him smell all these crooks-beggars, scientists in mind. But here is the reason which guarantees him many votes. He says it frankly: I don't want to lose millions and millions of votes I don't want to be put in a bad position (not to be re-elected)
Ayn Rand appears more rational, but on the surface of the arguments. Before dying, she had the time to take on the defenders of ecology and the environment who asked the State to assume ownership of the exploitation of its resources. She sees it as a manipulation of governments, intended to reduce freedoms and to pour into emotion at the expense of reason. In Against Environmentalism, she considers that ecology is a return of the religious and the irrational, while only technical progress can improve the human condition. "Urban smog and polluted rivers," she writes, "are not good for men (although they are not as dangerous as fearmongers. It is a scientific and technological problem - not a political problem - and it will only be solved using technology. And even if smog were a risk to human life, it must always be remembered that life in its natural state, without technology, is a death sentence. ”1
But the conclusion is the same. Donald Trump was a president who has taken all the powers. He has systematically abolished the laws and regulations already in place to protect the planet. He has shut down all research on the greenhouse effect. When Donald Trump was asked when he got out of if he was not thinking about the children who will pay the price for his policies, he shrugged and said: this is their problem, I do not care. In twenty years I will be dead.
We will never repeat enough : money always takes precedence over the child. We use money and not the term capitalism, overused and politicized to the point of no longer meaning much. This international monetary exchange holds mafia exchanges, a theme to be developed if one wishes to analyze the international situation.
Laissez faire is laissez mourir : children first
But there is even more serious. In the background of Trump's speech, which resonates in other speeches in other countries that one should listen carefully, there is no much any longer denial of the environmental crisis to be replaced by an idea which smacks social Darwinism. The acceleration of global warming is on the verge of an unconscious desire for laissez-mourir. It can only help the rich countries to get rid of the teeming populations of parasitic children who cannot and will not care for.
Denial is not climate denial. It is the denial that the elite of humanity is in danger like the masses. The wealthiest, those in Silicon Valley especially, think they will be able to immigrate to regions, distant countries on pure islands or on Mars. It was the same madness that, when atomic fear was in full swing, had underground shelters built for those who only believed in individual rescue.
The United States of America is abandoning the future. Only instant reward count
Notes
[1] https://agora.qc.ca/nicole-morgan
[2] Policy advocacy for children about the convention on the rights of the child
[3] The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv19cw9f8
[5] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/30/567477160/how-the-loss-of-u-s-psychiatric-hospitals-led-to-a-mental-health-crisis
[6] Who killed the knapp family
[7] Ayn Rand la passionaria du capitalisme in Haine rouge et peur blanche
[8] Cited in Guy Sorman, The True Thinkers of Our Time, Paris, Fayard, 1989;
[9] François Flahault, "Neither god, nor master, nor taxes", Le Monde diplomatique, August 2008; FLAHAUT / 16182.
[10] Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis
[11] Nicole Morgan, Haine Froide Paris, Le Seuil 2012, p47