Glenn Beck needs to pull his head out

Or I will beat him with a bar of soap stuffed in a sock until he stops saying he’s a libertarian. In this segment (thanks LRC), interviewing Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy project, he displays his massive ignorance about drugs and the drug war. Kampia speaks nothing but sense, while Beck puffs and guffaws and waxes incomprehensible about legalizing even the most harmless of drugs available, whose use is pervasive yet social impact negligible.

Discussions about drugs tends to produce the same kind of irrational blather from conservatives that discussion about guns produces from liberals. But aside from debates over public health and safety (vastly delusional when it comes to pot anyway), everyone, especially everyone self-applying the “libertarian” handle, needs to know that the War on Drugs is the biggest shuck since Keynesian economics. It is not a war on drugs at all, since the American populace is awash in legal mind and mood-altering substances, from anti-depressants to painkillers to gallon-cans of the latest sugar/caffeine cocktail, and let’s not forget the ubiquitous booze. What it is a war against are property rights, personal liberty, and the growing underclass, waged at the behest of the legal drug lobby, Washington bureaucracy, and a new and fearsome private prison system.

Let’s see if we can’t get Walter Block on this show to school young Glenn on what real Libertarianism is about, huh?

The case against Lincoln

Okay, the Lincoln thing is getting re-god-damn-diculous. First, Obama can’t make a speech without invoking Lord Lincoln. Second, you can’t watch a news network (or even the “fake news” on Comedy Central). Third, take a trip down to your local Barnes and noble and count all the Lincoln books. Seriously, you can’t get away from this guy! In 1920, H.L. Mencken wrote, “there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States- first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism, and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.” Apparently nothing has changed in the 89 years since. And then there’s this poll, ranking Lincoln as our greatest president.

When one historical figure is so ubiquitous and so revered, something must be amiss. So, in honor of President’s Day: the case against Lincoln, briefly stated.

Here is Mencken again on the Lincoln Myth:

Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality. . . . there is an obvious effort to pump all his human weakness out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost. What could be more absurd? Lincoln, in point of fact, was a practical politician of long experience and high talents, and by no means cursed with idealistic superstitions. . . . Even his handling of the slavery question was that of a politician, and not that of a messiah.

Without a doubt, it is the “slavery question” that provides the foundation for the Lincoln myth. The prevailing wisdom is that if you criticize Lincoln or the Civil War, you are an apologist for slavery. But a closer look at the facts behind the rhetoric reveals him to be far less than a messiah indeed. He said many times throughout his career that he considered white men to be superior to black, and supported enshrining southern slavery permanently in the constitution. He was furthermore obsessed with the idea of sending all the slaves back to the African colony of Liberia. Never an abolitionist, he decided to sign the emancipation proclamation as a strategy for winning the civil war. There are so many statements on record of Lincoln’s support of slavery and white supremacy, that a whole cottage industry of court historians is dedicated to the hermeneutics of “what Lincoln really meant.” The more honest apologists will simply say that he was lying in order to be elected.

It was for not slavery, but the crime of secession that Lincoln decided to wage the first modern total war against the south. The proof of this is not only in Lincoln’s own statements, but the fact that the war was against not the small minority of slaveholders, but against every man, woman, and child in the confederacy. You can compare this tactic with the libertarian strategy espoused by Lysander Spooner of forming volunteer armies of abolitionists (and there were many) to free the slaves and arm them for insurrection and expropriation of the lands, which properly belonged to the slaves. And of course, once the North won the war, the slaves were not given their full compensation due for their forced labor. The just, and libertarian, solution would be to throw the slaveholders out on their collective ears, and all their property turned over to the slaves. But it was the slaves who were displaced, while the rest of the non-slaveholding South had to submit to government by the North. Clearly we can see what the priorities were.

In the course of fighting the war, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed his political opponents and other dissidents, and generally pissed all over the constitution.

In economic policy, Lincoln was essentially a whore for big business, particularly for the railroads, whom he had a relationship with dating back to his days as a private practice lawyer.

"You have swollen the earth with the blood of my children."

In short, the verdict on Lincoln, Greatest American President, ought to be: liar, mass murderer, tyrant, racist.

But why the pervasive mythology? I think there are two main reasons. The lesser one is that he was assassinated, and America, true to form as a fiercely Christian nation, loves a martyr. The greater one is has to do with the very descrepancy between his record and reputation. Lincoln did many things that were flagrantly unconstitutional and in contempt of American political traditions. If Lincoln enjoys such popularity, later Presidents who want to get away with such things can use the excuse that, “Lincoln did it, and hey, wasn’t he America’s Greatest President?” I remember vividly an NPR editorial in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that invoked Lincoln’s wartime crackdown on civil liberties (the commentator was British). Consider how Lincoln is admired by both the Right and Left, Democrat and Republican. The same cannot be said about other Presidents who frequently rank high on those lists, like Reagan and FDR.

For more information, please peruse Lew Rockwell.com’s King Lincoln Archive, especially America’s greatest anti-Lincoln scholar, Thomas DiLorenzo. And to see how the slaves could have been freed without destroying the people’s right of secession, (along with most of the South) see Lysander Spooner’s Plan for the Abolition of Slavery. For a less bilious assessment of Lincoln that still confirms him as a destroyer of civil liberties and architect of the modern Leviathan, see Jeffrey Rodgers Hummel’s article in the Chicago Tribune; and for one which similarly throws cold water on the “Great Emancipator” myth, though still clinging to the “Great Union-Preserver Myth”, (what, is a man who holds his wife captive against her will a great preserver of marriage?), see this Baltimore Sun article by Leonard Pitts.

The Coldest of All Cold Monsters

A cartoon courtesy of my brother Joe:

“State is the name for the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’ . . . But the state lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it has, it has stolen. Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, and it snarls. Even its very entrails are false. . . State I call it where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the base: state, where the slow suicide of all- is called ‘life’. . . . There where the state ceases, only there does the human being who is not superfluous: there the song of the one who is necessary begins, the unique and irreplaceable melody.”

-Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

The Evil and Stuipid Party vs. the Party That isn’t Quite as Stupid and Evil

I’d hate for anybody to think from my last post that I was either conservative or a Republican partisan, so let me go on record by saying that I have some hope for things to get better with Obama, however much that hope is attenuated by skepticism, and that I regard the Democrats as the lesser evil (though not lesser enough to make me join their cheer section). For example, the recent bill supporting Israel’s bombing of Gaza was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Only four Democrats in the House voted against (including Dennis Kucinich) but that’s better than the mere one Republican rejected the proposal. Can you guess who? That’s right, our man Ron Paul.

And if I end up bashing the liberals a lot more on this blog, it’s only because I don’t like easy game. Take this asshole, for instance, who wants fresh young conscripts to send to Pakistan, of all places. As you watch the video of this fat, pasty bag of crap pimp his new book, which bears the John Wayne-esque title American Grit, you have to wonder what kind of childhood playground demons he is exorcising by playing the tough-guy pundit. I’m sick to death of these “clash of civilizations” fantasists, who really ought to do what every other unathletic adolescent nerd does to feel powerful and play Tom Clancy videogames. “What happens if Pakistan goes Jihad-y?” he asks. I don’t know, maybe you could pick up your gun and leap into the fray like the Duke would, you useless bastard. As for me, I’m hoping America goes Jihad-y against its corpulent gasbag ruling class. That would be a clash of civilizations I’d sign up for. (By the way, do you notice how revolutionary and resistence movements never need to conscript anybody? You think that says anything about the justice of their cause?)

Clintonia Revisited

"O what fine thought we had because we thought/That the worst rogues and rascals had died out." -Yeats

Inspired in part by the return of much of Team Clinton to the Obama White House (nominations which prove Obama not to be the bomb-throwing radical McCain partisans wished to paint him as*, but rather the not-so-left-wing representative of the War Party), and in part by my post on the liberal police state, named “Clintonia” after its Master Builder, I have been revisiting the nineties through several books. I have just finished Christopher Hitchens‘* No One Left to Lie To, a brief but delicious piece of muckraking that not only confirms my suspicions about the fascist contours of Clintonia, but many other libertarian insights on the nature of the State as well.

The best part of Hitchens’ book is that he mounts a righteous smackdown of the Clintons (yes, both of them) from a left-liberal rather than right-wing perspective. His book reminds us that before the Lewinski affair and impeachment, Clinton and his whole neo-liberal approach was actually despised by much of the Left, and still would be if the Republicans hadn’t bungled their attempts to depose him. They raised the (mostly imagined) specter of a “sexual McCarthyism” and puritan hysteria, causing liberals everywhere to circle the wagons and stick their fingers in their ears to shut out the white noise of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy if they were to ever catch so much as a hint of the incredible corruption and criminality emanating from the White House in the age of Clinton. (Reminding me that another virtue of Hitchens’ book is that he is a well-known name who writes for mainstream publications like Vanity Fair, which insulates him somewhat from the inevitable “conspiracy theorist” accusation, and allows him to get away with more severe allegations- the worst I am not even discussing here- than more proletarian writers could, even though, as he says, “no Clinton apologist can dare, after the victim cult sponsored by both the president and the First Lady, to ridicule the idea of ‘conspiracy’, vast or otherwise.”) Never mind that the Clintons were horrible even when you evaluate them based on their own professed values! Without Monica-gate, only the most fawning and epicene of Clintonistas and most shameless Democratic party hacks (and of course, the ever-present neocons) would now be apologizing for Clinton. Thanks, Republicans!

About the prurience and puritanism of the Starr inquisition, I think Hitchens dispatches this liberal bugaboo pretty handily:

Those who claim to detect, in the widespread loathing of Clinton, an aggressive “culture war” against the freedom-loving sixties should be forced to ask themselves if Clinton, with his almost sexless conquests and his eerie affectless claim that the female felt no pleasure, represents the erotic freedom they have in mind.

Indeed, and apart from the enormous hypocrisies of claims by the architects of the most petulant and overbearing nanny-state that the government should “stay out of their bedroom”- which was owned by the American taxpayer anyway- as well as self-identified “feminists” defending the honor of a man who never went anywhere without leaving a trail of quite credible allegations of sexual harassment and rape by women who he then defamed as nuts and sluts in his wake (behavior which would cause those with a much-publicized bout of sexual hysteria and puritanism themselves to burn him in effigy, if only he had been a Republican), it’s clear that the real sexual inquisition was coming from the White House. Hitchens describes callous interrogations of military personnel about potential adultery and homosexuality, stating that “Such persecutions increased during the Clinton era, with discharges for sexual incorrectness reaching an all-time high in 1998.”

Hitchens doesn’t even have to get into Waco and Janet Reno or Kosovo and Madeline Albright to see in Clinton’s foreign and domestic policies as just to the right of Mussolini. (Remember that this book came out before 9/11.)

Mr. Clinton can also claim credit for warrantless searches of public housing and the innovation of the “roving wiretap”. If any successor to Arthur Miller [Hitchens had just quoted, and eviscerated, a ludicrous Miller op-ed painting poor Bill as the victim of- what else- a witch hunt] wanted depict a modern Salem , he would do better to investigate the hysteria of the war on drugs, where to be suspected is to be guilty [and to have your property confiscated, and quite possibly be murdered with no recompense to your family]. In 1995, arrests for drug offenses that involved no violence were numbered 1.5 million per annum, having climbed 31 percent in Mr. Clinton’s first three years of tenure. The crime and terrorism statutes enacted in the same period caused even his most dogmatic apologists- Anthony Lewis, most notably- to wince.

And on the foreign front:

. . . the Clinton White House took no step of any kind to acknowledge, much less take take advantage of this new reality [of the end of the Cold War] and always acted as if the most paranoid predictions of John Foster Dulles were about to be fulfilled.

The budget of the Central Intelligence Agency was increased, while democratic “oversight” of its activity was held to a myopic level . . .

No matter how fanciful or budget-busting the concept, from the B-1 bomber upwards, Clinton always relaxed his commitment to government spending, and invariably advocated not only a welfare “safety net” for the likes of General Dynamics and Boeing, but a handout free and clear.

Bill Clinton sometimes did find the strength and the nerve to disagree with his military chiefs. He overruled them when they expressed doubts on the rocketing of Khartoum [the supposed “chemical weapons plant” that turned out to be a pharmaceutical plant making medicine for the abysmally poor Sudan- oops, guess we got some bad intelligence!] and Afghanistan in August 1998. [I should note that Noam Chomsky has also written about and condemned these attacks.]

Now, note that I have said Clinton was bad even from the liberals’ own standards, and I am fully aware how low a concern the war on drugs and the military-industrial complex are for the average liberal (those are more New Left type worries), so how about the Clinton record on health care and welfare? Didn’t Hillary at least try? It wasn’t that the Republicans thwarted her plan, or even that her plan was too complicated even if well-intentioned. Hitchens’ reveals it to be a ruse pure and simple. Attacking an ad that criticized her scheme, Hillary said in a speech, “What you don’t get told in the ad is that it is paid for by the insurance companies. It is time for every American to stand up and say to the insurance industry: ‘Enough is enough, we want our health-care system back!'”

Hillary standing up for the poor un- and-under-insured against the Capitalist fat-cats? Not so fast.

Had the masses risen up against the insurance companies, they would have discovered that the four largest of them- Aetna, Prudential, Met Life, and Cigna- had helped finance and design the “managed competition” scheme which the Clintons and their Jackson Hole Group had put forward in the first place.

But wait, it gets better. The aforementioned advertisement was indeed paid for by insurance companies- the many small ones trying to compete with the Big Four, who were spending even more trying to get Clinton’s plan passed, a plan which would insure (no pun intended) that they would be running the show. “The Clintons demagogically campaigned against the ‘insurance industry’ while backing- and with the backing of- those large fish those large fish that were preparing to swallow the minnows.”

And here is where we approach the weakest part of Hitchens’ analysis. He views the Clinton health plan, along with his welfare “reform”, as a betrayal of the New Deal and Roosevelt’s legacy. Actually, this was Rooseveltian fake-populism and patrician liberalism all over again. Clinton just didn’t have the Great Depression to blind everybody to the mere voodoo of his system; he had no crisis to put everybody into a state of mind readily susceptible to hero-worship that demagogues always rise up amidst- until Ms. Lewinski, that is. (Oh yeah, and the Oklahoma City bombing, but I don’t even want to get into a cui bono analysis of that one, except to note that Clinton’s approval rating soared immediately after, just as Bush II’s did after 9/11, and that, more anecdotally, journalist and Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey noted of Bill’s post-bombing speech, “His righteous anger reflects Mussolini-like vitality rather than his usual wan, comforting equivocations.” Mussolini? Well, that’s a bit high a balcony to place Slick Willie on perhaps, but the event did apparently help him tap into his inner Merle Haggard, as he told and audience at Michigan University, “You have the right to say what you please in this country, but that doesn’t give people the right to tear down this country.” That would be even a bit too rednecky for my grandpa! This guy is supposed to be a liberal?)

If Hitchens were aware of the libertarian analysis of the New Deal (or the New Left revisionists like Gabriel Kolko, for that matter), he would know that it, too, was partially written by corporations to cartelize the economy and drive their small-fish competitors out. A good deal of it was simply cribbed from a plan drawn up by one Gerard Swope, president of GE, and the scheme was much admired from abroad by Hitler and Mussolini. All with anti-plutocrat and pro-working man rhetoric, of course (and as always, the conservatives were dumb enough to believe it). The New Deal was against the free market, no doubt, but it was also for the corporations (This is the real meaning of the well-trod truism that FDR “saved Capitalism”- sure, for Capitalists). The Clinton plan “embodied the worst of bureaucracy  and the worst of ‘free enterprise'”: that’s the New Deal to a T, right down to the free enterprise in quotation marks. Hitchens describes the “Clintonian style of populism for the poor and reassurance for the rich or, if you prefer, big pieces of the pie for the fat cats and ‘good government’ for the rest.” Who does this sound like more than ol’ magnanimous papa himself, FDR? Oh, and you might want to check out who funded Obama’s campaign too, just so you know who’ll be left out when Obama rolls out his “anti-big business” legislation. (Not that Republican’s are the slightest bit better. They just tend to be less hypocritical about their coziness with robber barons, if only because nobody would believe it if they claimed otherwise.)

You can usually find that big business heartily endorses certain types of “socialist” legislation. The irony is that this is when they are acting most fully as predatory capitalists, and yet it is also precisely when they are praised by intellectuals as setting their own greedy self-interest aside and acting for the public good. It’s a shell game. And if you don’t know who the mark is. . .

So also with the Clinton welfare reform, the prime beneficiaries of which Hitchens sees as being government-favored businesses such as Tyson Foods, which “uses the Direct Job Placement scheme as its taxpayer-funded recruiting sergreant.” The analysis is perfectly in accord with that of left-libertarians like Kevin Carson, who sees in the expansion of so-called “services” such as the public school system an enormous boon for big business since it helps to manufacture and manage obedient worker-bees (or cannon fodder in the case of those restless souls who aren’t fit to wear a blue collar and need to learn how to “respect authority” more) for the corporate-therapeutic state, all while externalizing their operating costs onto the hapless and eternally bamboozled taxpayer. And then what little security net there is left is ruthlessly pulled away by a man who “feels your pain”.  Hitchens sums up the Clinton plan to move people from “welfare to work”: the state bureaucracy mutates itself into a hiring wall for cheap labor in junk-nutrition conglomerates such as Tyson Foods. Welfare recipients are told to sign on and gut fifty chickens a minute, or be wiped from the rolls of the new Poor Law.  (I don’t support the welfare state per se, but I do recognize that it is perverse to create the conditions which make it necessary, and then take it way- such is the philosophy of neoliberalism – and then go on to preach about the insufficient morals of the exploited class- such is neoconservativism. Cut welfare for the rich first! Welfare for the poor is only an evil insofar as it is used as an ideological tool to justify the existence of an ever-expanding state apparatus. It doesn’t help the poor, it helps keep them under control. )

Can you see now why the Left hated the pre-Monica Clinton? And let’s not forget Hillary, since she’s back with a vengeance. She, too, fails to live up to the image portrayed by either liberal hagiographers or conservative demonologists.

She is a dogged attender at church and a frequent waffler at prayer breakfasts and similar spectacles. She is for sexual abstinence, law and order, and the war on drugs [boy is she ever!] She stands by her man. She is for a woman’s right to “choose”, but so are most Republican ladies these days. She used to be a Goldwater girl and a preachy miss, and it shows. She once assured Larry King that “there is no Left in the Clinton White House.”

And there is none now. I just hope Obama knows what he is getting into by bringing a Clinton back to the throne. Or maybe I don’t. I still have some respect for the guy.

* Although, in a way most of our presidents have been bomb-throwing radicals. Harry Truman, for instance, was a greater terrorist by several orders of magnitude then anybody who was in the Weather Underground.

* Obviously, I don’t agree with everything, or even most things, that Hitchens has written. He is way wrong on the Iraq war, and seems to have become a bit of a neocon like so many ex-Trotskyites, after a brief, superficial flirtation with libertarianism. During this latter period, he wrote the introduction to the Reason Magazine anthology, Choice, which was particularly galling since this book also contained an interview with Hitchens that revealed how little he knew about libertarianism. Look, you can not get the whole of libertarian philosophy just by reading Reason. At any rate, he remains a witty, literate contrarian and intellectual pugilist and there simply aren’t enough journalists like that out there. You read good writers for the good writing, not to swallow all of their opinions whole. (Although, I should point out that Hitchens admires all the right people- Paine, Jefferson, Orwell- and hates all the right people- Kissinger, the Clintons, Mother Theresa, God.) George Bernard Shaw was an excellent writer, and he was wrong about almost everything.

Building a Death Star would bring full employment, say Lord Vader’s Keynesian advisors

In a previous post, I described how nonplussed I was with the economic defense of Keynesian policy by its marquee mouthpiece. But there is a more pressing reason to oppose giving control of spending over to the State, and it is spelled W-A-R. Keynesian policy, which states that it really doesn’t matter what the government spends money on, as long as it provides unemployment and kicks off the magical multiplier effect, provides an intellectual defense of what the government likes to spend it on the most, which is war and the preparation for war. It’s clear that the anti-capitalist and anti-state Left (I know you’re out there) should oppose this particular branch of capitalist economics most of all. Yes, I know you don’t care for Mises and other reactionary booze-wah pigs, but at least Mises and Rothbard stood against war and empire, the former writing:

"In the long run, we are all dead."

Whereas Keynes’ boy Krugman has even found some economic good in the 9/11 attacks.  And now, right on cue we have a Keynesian in the Wall Street Journal pimping for the DOD, (a glib photo caption reads: “we could use some more F-22’s”- yeah, like a freakin’ hole in the head!) prompting Mises and Rothbard’s heir Robert Higgs to write:

Feldstein’s article reminds us that the elites who rule this country have a high threshold for embarrassment. They will shamelessly trot out any sorry intellectual apparatus to justify snatching the taxpayers’ money and funneling it to privileged corporate contractors and to the horde of drones on the government’s payroll. However intellectually contemptible military Keynesianism may be, though, it has a proven record of getting the Establishment where it wants to go.

Now you can see why Rothbard called it the “Welfare/Warfare” State. Liberals are attracted to the former, conservatives the latter, each side thinking they can have one without the other, but as long as we let the State control our economic life they will be eternally wedded.

On the other hand, there is a small but vocal anti-war conservative contingent. John Zmirak says “Cut the Pentagon ‘Till its a Triangle”, writing:

Perhaps the only positive outcome our country could squeeze from this year’s grapes of wrath is this: We are too poor to pay for our empire. Faced with years of a shrinking economy, debts we can’t even imagine paying down, demands that the government cannot meet, and a populace incapable of self-sacrifice or even postponing gratification, there is only one place where the government can look to impose the kind of painless budget cuts that Americans will endure: Our massive, metastasized military. Of all the things on which the government wastes our money, this one is the most obvious.

But the choice between being rich warmongers and a poor nation that turns the other cheek is a false one.

Folks, if your common sense tells you that war, plagues, and earthquakes are bad for human prosperity, trust that sense and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, even if they have a Nobel prize and assure you they have the “conscience of a liberal”.

And oh yeah, not to get all ad hominem or anything, but personally John Maynard Keynes was a fascist sympathizer and anti-Semite.

Conservatives against the Cops/Police State Liberals

“. . . they’re not warring on drugs. . . . They’re warring on neighborhoods. They’re warring on people who can’t stand up to them.” –Ed Burns, co-creator of The Wire

Conservatives like to see themselves as upholders of law and order, morality and decency. But they tend to focus obsessively on marginal phenomena- Hollywood or illegitimacy among the underclass. Paul Craig Roberts is a notable exception, who denounces not only our foreign empire, but the domestic one as well (otherwise known as the “criminal justice system”), as thoroughly immoral:

In the United States, the country with the largest prison population in the world, the number of wrongly convicted is very large. Hardly any felony charges are resolved with trials. The vast majority of defendants, both innocent and guilty, are coerced into plea bargains. Not only are the innocent framed, but the guilty as well. It is quicker and less expensive to frame the guilty than to convict them on the evidence.

Many Americans are wrongfully convicted, because they trust the justice system. They naively believe that police and prosecutors are moved by evidence and have a sense of justice. The trust they have in authorities makes them easy victims of a system that has no moral conscience and is untroubled by the injustice it perpetrates.

He says that “law and order conservatives” are largely to blame, for becoming so hysterical about crime and terrorism that they give the State the kind of license which generates brutality and abuse. But the sad thing is that you rarely hear about prisons or the war on drugs from the left anymore, who have abandoned themselves to narrow identity politics and postmodern nihilism, neither of which does a thing to help the underclass that makes up nearly 100 percent of the prison population.

I often watch shows like “Cops” and “Lock-Up” with my girlfriend, and we laugh at the ridiculous behavior of the hapless, intoxicated bumblers and quail at the unreformable psychopaths who end up going through the system. But something in me consistently screams that this is an insidious way to deal with crime, that nobody should ever have to live in the dark satanic mill that is the American prison.

The conservative writer Sam Francis, with whom I would have to say I disagree with about most things, came up with the concept (in a different context) of “Anarcho-Tyranny”: you get all of the tyranny associated with government and all of the chaos associated with anarchy. Perhaps we should no longer speak of “law and order” conservatives, but “anarcho-tyranny” conservatives.

Who supports which part of the national security/police state often depends on whether or not one sympathizes with the victims, which in turn depends on one’s political disposition. The war on drugs has mostly affected inner-city minorities (masterfully dramatized in the HBO series The Wire, focusing on the city of Baltimore), inducing sympathy with liberals but not conservatives. But when the victims are rural white religious nuts*, well . . .

"The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold."

Anthony Gregory has a couple of interesting articles at Lew Rockwell.com on the incidents in Waco and Oklahoma City, and how the events and public response mirror that of 9/11. In the former, many conservatives saw the Oklahoma City bombing as a “blowback” from the criminal government attacks at Waco and Ruby Ridge, while liberals supported the government and Clinton, accusing anyone who dared bring up government atrocities as justifying terrorism. In the latter, as we all know, the situation reversed.  Gregory writes:

Waco should remind us that Democrats are no more restrained than the Republicans when it comes to being “tough on crime,” if all that entails is using the bludgeon of state power against all social elements the ruling class has deemed less than human. It should also remind us that that bludgeon is no more surgically precise or benevolent no matter who wields it, and how corrupting it is for those who do. This should really be obvious by now, as the Bush government has turned Iraq into one big Branch Davidian compound and now appears poised to give the Waco treatment to Tehran.

Any reasonable person knows that the longer a right-wing government is in power, the closer we get to fascism. But apparently many democrats wouldn’t mind living in a police state- so long as it’s a liberal police state (call it “Clintonia”).

But am I not out of order in placing blame for Ruby Ridge and Waco at the feet of the feds? I recommend skeptics check out a brilliant documentary called Waco: the Rules of Engagement, which inspired as staunch a liberal as critic Roger Ebert to write: I am more inclined to use the words “religion” than “cult,” and “church center” than “compound.” Yes, the Branch Davidians had some strange beliefs, but no weirder than those held by many other religions. And it is pretty clear, on the basis of this film, that the original raid was staged as a publicity stunt, and the final raid was a government riot–a tragedy caused by uniformed boys with toys.

First they came for the religious weirdos, but I said nothing, for I was not a religious weirdo. . .

But of course a government investigation found- surprise surprise- the government was not at fault. Scenes featuring New York senator Chuck Schumer badgering the victims of this tragedy are particularly revolting- from the evidence of this film, that man is a moral cretin. Hans Hoppe has critiqued this aspect of the State. It claims justification on the fact that there must be a final judge in disputes between any two parties, or else we have a war of all against all- but who is to be final arbiter in disputes concerning the state itself? Well, we see the results.

Mutualist Kevin Carson has an interesting post as well on an oft-ignored constituency for the liberal police state: soccer moms.

It is not my intent in this article to blast conservatives or liberals per se, only to show how commonly accepted attitudes on both the left and right contribute to the decline of liberty and allow the State to torture and murder with impunity. Of course there are good people on both sides as well.

Apparently Edmund Burke did not say “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” But it is no less true for that.

* Actually, a significant number of the Branch Davidians were black, a fact I did not know until watching the documentary. Did you? The government loves to play the race card at times like these, but it simply won’t wash in Waco. At one point during the siege, there was a banner put up by the Davidians on the side of the house (notice how different it seems when you don’t say “compound”) that read, “RODNEY KING WE UNDERSTAND”. The question is, did those outraged over the King beating understand what was happening in Waco? Similarly, while nobody would deny a presence of anti-semitism among militia types, particularly those subscribing to Christian Identity beliefs, Adam Parfrey wrote in his article “Finding Our Way Out of Oklahoma” that, “the presumption of anti-semitism in the militia movement is overstated, especially when a number of Jewish libertarians, including Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership, are movers and shakers within the militia movement.” The militias would have done well to adopt the slogan, “BLACK PANTHERS WE UNDERSTAND”.

P.S.- If you’ve never heard it, check out Bill Hicks’ great bit about Waco and Koresh.

The Bourne Prophecy

"Ancestral voices prophecying war!"

Does this scenario sound familiar to anyone?

The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

That’s American writer Randolph Bourne, writing in 1918 about World War One. His analysis of how the ideal of the State caused supposedly freedom-loving America to be plunged into Europe’s senseless bloodbath, and how it destroyed any vestige of civil liberty at home, is uncannily resonant with George the Second’s crusade in the Middle East and the parallel “War on Terror” which is largely being conducted within our own borders and upon our own citizens. Read the classic essay, War is the Health of the State.

And if you dig that, check out Murray Rothbard on who got us into World War I, how and why they did it.