Open Letter to President of USA and Prime Minister of India
From: Jeff Knaebel, Moral Sovereign - January 2011
[Editor’s Note: Jeff Knaebel destroyed
himself by self-immolation on January 25, 2011 near the ancient Buddhist
site of Bairat, near Rajasthan, India. The following letter was found
near his incinerated body. “Knowing that under certain conditions
it is not worthwhile to live” (Aristotle, ETHICS, IV, 3) he deemed
it “unconscionable and morally repugnant to live as a slave.” He
maintained that taxation, government enforced citizenship, and travel
and domicile restrictions, were all badges of enslavement.
Jeff's posthumous manuscript titled Message From a Moral Sovereign: The Life and Death Story of an American's Journey
from Warpath to Gandhi Path was published in India in Fall 2011. A 320 page paperback, it is now available from The
Voluntaryist for $ 20 postage paid, sent to
The Voluntaryist
P.O. Box 275-D
Gramling, South Carolina 29348
You can also send bitcoin to
, which you can click to email us your address.]
Subject: My Final Satyagraha for Nonviolence
and Freedom
For a long time the Government of the
USA (“USG”) has been the world’s leading merchant of death and
destruction. Throughout my entire lifetime of 72 years the USG
has been committing horrible crimes against humanity and all life. The
sustained systematic psychopathic practices of the USG have launched
humanity on a path to extinction. Mahatma Gandhi said upon the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima that unless we adopted a nonviolent way
of life, it spelled the suicide of the human species. Daily he
is being proven correct.
As a citizen-slave of the USG I have
been coerced to pay taxes which are then employed in bloody wars of
aggression and coercive international economic practices which exploit
weaker peoples whose lives, cultures, and ecologies are destroyed in
the process. While dwelling in the land of my birth I was not
permitted to withdraw from citizenship and the concomitant complicity
in mass murder which USG citizenship entailed. Therefore I chose
to come to India, and eventually decided to renounce my USG citizenship,
and to destroy my United States passport and other government identity
documents at the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat, New Delhi on 19 June 2009.
I acted in protest of government denial
of my right to exist as a natural human living with respect for all
life and answering to my own conscience. By requirement of identification
and travel documents and permits both the USG and the Government of
India (“GOI”) mark me as a piece of property to be regulated and
controlled as the human equivalent of a dog on a leash. By my
self-directed death I demonstrate my refusal to be the slave of either
government.
To the Prime Minister of India (GOI),
I refer the attached letter of 20 October 2010 from the General Counsel
of The World Service Authority, which cites the violations by GOI of
my human rights under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
and International Law.
The GOI, acting through its police
and the orders of its Supreme Court, has prohibited my freedom of movement
and has denied me access to shelter pursuant to threat of FIR against
any person who would host me. In thus pronouncing me to be an
illegal human being, the GOI has denied my right to exist. A person
cannot survive without freedom of movement and shelter.
My petition for Statelessness, denied
by your Supreme Court, was based upon the clear fact that to change
citizenship would only be to change the name of my slave master, for
the GOI engages in many life-destroying and murderous actions against
its own citizens, and also seeks "Strategic Partnership" with
the war criminal USG.
By my death I send my answer to the
rulers of the Corporate State who value property and profit more than
human life and the life of Earth herself. In refusing to live
as a slave I also extend to both of you my metta-karuna (compassion
and loving-kindness), for if one examines deeply he will find that the
corporate master is more tightly bound than the slave, for the slaves
are powerless to come out of it, while the Powers That Be have free
will that they fail to exercise because of addictive enslavement to
power. For the corporate rulers, the power to manipulate and control
other people has become an end in itself. They will no longer
control me.
My wish for you is that you come to
see the intrinsic evil of the governments which you head, and resign
from your official positions, understanding that the people need no
institutionally imposed ‘leaders.’
My campaign of Satyagraha has made
it clear for all to see that under law and practice of both USG and
GOI, a person striving for nonviolence at even the most rudimentary
levels of non-support of killing is denied by law the right to exist.
It is not by the laws of the Corporate State that humanity will find
peace and justice, for such law is conceived in the womb of greed and
implemented through the violence of power.
I give my life to the cause of nonviolence.
I wish not to live under coercion to support the cruel inhumanity of
either of your governments. I wish not to live under control of
governments who possess neither the wisdom, nor the virtue, nor the
right to exercise power over human life.
Only through fellow-feeling and loving-kindness
can mankind survive on our small and crowded planet. We must share this
Earth equally and with respect among all. I have acted out of
love to try to send a warning to my fellowmen, and I send to each of
you my sincere feelings of kindness and my prayers for your peace, happiness
and harmony.
May peace and goodwill prevail among
all men. May you both abide in well-being,
Signed - Jeff Knaebel
