By James Corbett, May 22nd, 2013.

 “Tyranny” in the popular imagination is something that exists safely in the past. It's the stuff of museums and oil paintings of long dead emperors and grainy black-and-white footage of goosestepping Europeans. “Surely there are no tyrants these days,” say the masses. “Not in our modern western democracies.”

This is a perception that is based purely on optics. Tyrants carry scepters and wear crowns. Or they wear military uniforms and scream like madmen. They aren't the shirt-and-tie wearing, smiling, baby-kissing political candidates in Washington or London or Berlin or Tokyo.

But in the real world tyrants are not identified by sight, they are identified by actions. So are our modern day governments tyrannical?

One of the surest signs that you are living in a tyranny is that there is a two-tier system of justice: one for the tyrants and their friends, another for everyone else. Is this so in America? Of course it is. One need only look at the recent jailing of Lauryn Hill for one somewhat trivial example of this phenomenon. Like Wesley Snipes before her, she was dragged to court and eventually jailed for money allegedly owing to the IRS. The same IRS that recently attempted to cover up its politically motivated targeting of peaceful Americans by a pre-scripted lame duck apology. The hypocrisy is overwhelming: former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was himself a tax evader, having failed to pay over $40,0...
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