THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1996
February
- February: Saddam Hussein pardons General Hussein Kamel and his brother, along with their families, and says they may return to Iraq. They are shot days after their return by their wives, according to the government-owned media. The wives are also reported to have died. In reality, Hussein had both executed. (Out There News/Electric Venom)
- February 8: John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the cyberspace liberties the Electronic Frontier Foundation, pens the groundbreaking missive, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." In it Barlow declares the Internet, and cyberspace in general, is "naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.... Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, and there is no matter here."
- Barlow writes, "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. ...We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. ...We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. ...You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. ...We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before." (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
