Forgetting History's Lesson

Famous singer/actor Will Smith got himself into hot water recently by noting that the world's greatest purveyors of harm, notably Adolf Hitler, often seek to do good rather than evil. The grievance industry mobilized with lightning speed and hounded Smith into a pusillanimous retraction, proving in one fell swoop that the most important lesson of the twentieth century has fallen on deaf ears. What Mr. Smith said was not only tragically true, but also applicable to America's own fall from grace.

A man filled with the burning desire to "make the world a better place" poses a far greater menace than the common criminal: while the latter is easily recognizable as a transgressor and can perpetrate only limited harm, the former has the potential to dupe hundreds, thousands, or even millions of men into transgressing on his behalf for decades. And transgress these followers will, exercising whatever horrific means they feel necessary to implement their hallucinatory noble ends. The Soviets murdered more people in their idealistic quest than the Nazis did; the Chinese murdered more people in their idealistic quest than the Soviets did. And consider for a moment why we hear precious little about those latter two historic episodes: socialism and communism appear far more "idealistic" than racist Nazism does, so much so that many European politicians to this day proudly wear the badge of history's most vile murderers on their chests. (Back in the 1930s and 1950s, many useful-idiot Americans such as Paul Robeson idolized the Soviet Union because its constitution forbade racial discrimination, even by private persons). I invite anyone harboring delusions about the desirability of socialism or communism to read this book.

While America has not seen atrocities to that awful degree, it has borne witness to the same type of idealistic rationalizations that have effectively destroyed the rule of law and robbed us of a great deal of life, liberty, and property in the process. Whether it's to "make the world safe for democracy," the "New Deal," the "Great Society," the "War on Terror," or to "save the planet," America has yoked the language of idealism to gut the Constitution's crystal-clear restraints on federal power and subject us all to centralized political whimsy, all in the pursuit of reproducing heaven on Earth. We may not inhabit Nazi Germany, but we surely do not inhabit the land of the free either.

By refusing to consider the significance of the Holocaust beyond hanging the label of "evil" around it, we have forgotten that evil resides in all of us and can be countered first and foremost by looking into a mirror. Hitler and the Nazis are not just "them"; they are "us" as well, willfully doing wrong in the name of promoting right. To borrow from the Bible, the kingdom of God is within you, and you can achieve paradise only through self-denial, self-improvement, and redemption -- good is not "out there" to be won with the crude implements of politics and force. Under the Constitution the Founders gave us, the government respected its limited purview and protected our ability to tackle our personal challenges as a free people. Under the Tumor of today, however, self-improvement has yielded to the forceful improvement of others, which is precisely what the twentieth century should have taught us to avoid.

Illegal-Immigration Frustration

I just posted the following message on the forum for our local paper, The Sun-Sentinel, in response to a gentleman who crowed that nobody could oust him or the hordes of illegals from this land because the President and the feds are on their side. Even though I was writing off the cuff, I felt pleased with the result:

Yes, the President and the rest of the corrupt federal government indeed want you here as a reliable source of cheap labor and welfare-statism.

And since the federal government is not doing the job that it's supposed to do under the Constitution -- enforcing the law and preserving the borders -- Americans are starting to take matters back into our own hands, as is our right. All power comes from the people, and if the federal government refuses to do the people's will, then cities and towns across this country will set their own policies and see to it that their communities are not disrupted by the likes of you anymore.

Surely you and your enablers will file lawsuit after lawsuit to block Americans' wishes, but those tactics cannot stop the brushfire of anger that is spreading, and those tactics also will do nothing to make you a true American citizen (which requires far more than a piece of paper). The more you bully us, the less welcome you will be, and the less welcome you will be made to feel. No matter how hard the feds try to foist you onto us, you cannot scale the wall into our hearts.

Ron Paulites Still Don't Get It

The otherwise refreshing website Lewrockwell.com has lately degenerated into campaign headquarters for Ron Paul, with article after article every day exhorting the libertarian-minded to vote for a man who supposedly will turn the Tumor around on a dime and bring it into compliance with the Constitution. No such thing is possible, of course, because the vested interests of thousands of barnacled bureaucrats and millions of welfare-state dependent citizens would sooner revolt than accept full constitutional compliance (no Social Security, no Medicare, no unemployment support, no FDA, no funding for the arts or for vaccines, etc.). What a sad commentary on our times: Americans are far more likely to incite revolution to subvert the Constitution than to uphold it.

Today, things took an even more disturbing turn on Lewrockwell.com with this plea by David Gordon, which begs the principled among us to drop our objections to voting in federal elections so that Ron Paul can assume office and proceed to a stalemate against everyone else in the Tumor. Right off the bat, the article misportrays the primary principled objection to voting as follows:

The libertarian arguments against Ron Paul fall into two main classes. First, supporting anyone for President involves accepting the political system of the United States.

Wrong. Supporting anyone for President involves accepting the federal government as legitimate. There is a much broader "political system" stretching across the United States composed of States, counties, and municipalities that we can support separately without making the awful concession that the Tumor has any right to govern us collectively. David Gordon would have us swallow the false dichotomy of federal government versus no government at all, which faintly resembles Abraham Lincoln's flawed syllogism that secession from the federal system constitutes utter anarchy. Sorry, but we do not have to be wild-eyed anarchists to oppose participating in federal elections; there is a healthy middle ground, and it involves government minus the federal variant thereof.

Gordon goes on to argue that Ron Paul will reverse all those terrible things that the Bush administration has unleashed, such as the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. While that's very reassuring, these are mere symptoms of a deeper syndrome of rampant federal illegality, and sweeping those symptoms under the rug will get us no closer to curing the disease. A Ron Paul presidency would be worthwhile only if he could erase the roughly 80% of modern federal activity that is unconstitutional, and as I've stated many times before, there is no way on God's green Earth that anything of the sort will happen by virtue of one President over a maximum of eight years. Stopping Bush's reign of error -- without reversing the entire trajectory of the ship of state -- will guarantee that all of the worst abuses of power will re-appear once again (not to mention the ordinary abuses of life, liberty, and property that are constant and unrelenting under the modern regime).

The only explanation for such breathtaking cognitive dissonance in favor of Ron Paul is intellectual surrender, with a dash of sentimentalism. Despite their avowed idealism, these people have intellectually surrendered to the sentimental notion that the federal government is "ours" and counts as our only one, blinding them to the fact that civil disobedience of federal authority is the only moral and practical solution. Defiance must begin at the individual and local level, and it already has in several areas (notably with regard to immigration and the Patriot Act).

Perhaps the best thing that can happen is for Ron Paul to lose spectacularly, thereby illustrating the absolute disconnect between principle and power today, and eventually causing things to become so intolerable that even the thickest skulls out there can no longer pretend that salvation through federation is possible. Maybe the problem really is the solution, and people will finally come to their senses when there are no more nice places to flee to; when their standard of living slides into penury; when all their towns become Towers of Babel; or when the next terrorist attack hurls us into a national lockdown.

By the same token, perhaps the worst thing that might happen is if Ron Paul somehow won, since this would delude many of the brightest people into prolonging a corrupt and failed institution.