Usurpation Day 2017: Arendt Footnotes #8 Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, on 9 April 1792, Congress initiated the representation usurpation we still live under, the one against We the People and our birthright, constitutional representation according to numbers.
Usurpation of representation is illegal, immoderate and unconstitutional.
Usurpation of representation is a stolen American birthright.
Usurpation of representation is an act of war against We the People.
Speak your birthright America: for those who believe in the US Constitution, let 2020 begin today.
Hannah Arendt
The Human Condition
Section 24: The Disclosure Of The Agent In Speech And Action
(177, bold added)
To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, “to begin,” “to lead,” and eventually “to rule,” indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere). Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. [Initium] ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit (“that there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody”), said Augustine in his political philosophy. (footnote 2) This beginning is not the same as the beginning of the world; (footnote 3) it is not the beginning of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself. With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only another way of saying the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before.
2. De civitate Dei xii. 20.
3. According to Augustine, the two were so different that he used a different word to indicate the beginning which is man (initium), designating the beginning of the world by principium, which is the standard translation for the first Bible verse. As can be seen from De civitate Dei xi. 32, the word principium carried for Augustine a much less radical meaning; the beginning of the world “does not mean that nothing was made before (for the angels were),” whereas he adds explicitly in the phrase quoted above with reference to man that nobody was before him.
Next Up: Saturday April 15th and a 2020: Tax Day Disses Our Revolution and Abraham Lincoln.
Posted by Bryan W. Brickner
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