TWA 800 and the Police State of Georgia
By L. Neil Smith
[email protected]
Special to The Libertarian Enterprise
I've been sitting around all week, watching the Olympics whether I
like it or not, because my wife and daughter want to watch them, and I
can deny them nothing.
In between undeniably dramatic moments -- astonishingly courageous
little girls "playing hurt", as if they were major-league football
players -- I've been treated to story after story of how, due to the
efforts of thousands of uniformed professional paranoids, Georgia, USA
is coming to resemble Soviet Georgia. The sight of hundreds of
trailers moved in to house these security "troops" is demoralizing in
and of itself to anyone with a regard for a free society.
At the same time, I've been a TV witness to the tragedy of TWA
Flight 800 and an ignoble struggle by network fear-vampires to wring
the story of its last delectable drop -- "It was a bomb!" "It was a
missile!" "It was a bomb!" "It was a missile!" -- the whole thing
beginning to sound like a macabre Certs commercial.
Over it all hung the spectre of international terrorism, and the
swollen, corrupt, bulbous-nosed, droopy-jowled visage of a politician
(no "New Democrat" as it turns out, but just another damned fascist)
grimly determined -- exactly like Richard Milhous "Guns are an
Abomination" Nixon before him -- to be the last democratically elected
President of the United States: William Jefferson Blythe Clinton.
Clinton -- aided by his vile minions, the national "news" media --
went into raptures of ecstasy, listing all the ways that the freedom
of Americans would have to be curtailed (Clinton has spoken of this
before; it's a favorite theme of his) due to the heinous act he
transparently hoped had been committed against TWA 800.
Afterward, the round-heeled sprayheads obligingly searched out the
usual street-cretins to rubberstamp Our Glorious Leader's latest Five
Minute Plan, and add that they wouldn't mind at all paying extra for
the "service" of having their inalienable rights violated even worse
-- within the increasingly Bulgarian-style compounds American airports
have become -- than they're being violated now.
But there's a simpler, more effective way to prevent the criminal
acts generally labelled "terrorism" that Clinton and his idiot-box
doxies don't want anyone to know about. Behind virtually every
terrorist attack we've ever seen or suffered, it's relatively easy to
discover vicious and repeated acts of aggression against innocent
individuals by the state.
Preceeding the highly-publicized excesses of the Irish Republican
Army, for example, we find 850 years of violent occupation by an
exceptionally brutal foreign power that's managed to con the world
into believing that it's civilized.
Half a hundred years of Middle Eastern terror arise directly from
the fact that, instead of coming to America -- the appropriate refuge
for "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" -- either before or
after World War II, European Jews decided to take somebody else's land
away, and treat their victims the same way they themselves were
treated by the Nazis. (In fairness, at least before the war, would-be
refugees from Hitler's terroristic state weren't given much choice, at
least not by the American Medical Association, the American Bar
Association, and the Roosevelt Administration, all of whom worked
overtime, keeping out imported professional competition.)
Similarly, there would never have been an Oklahoma City had there
never been a Ruby Ridge or Waco. If Clinton had any real interest in
reducing the threat of "domestic terrorism" (he most assuredly does
not: terrorism, like war before it, has become "the health of the
state") instead of ratcheting government controls tighter around the
necks of 250 million Americans who've done nothing wrong, he'd
immediately arrest, try, convict, and punish all of those responsible
for Ruby Ridge and Waco, abolish the outlaw agencies in whose names
they were perpetrated, and repeal or nullify the unconstitutional laws
which provided them their justification.
The trouble is, he'd have to arrest, try, convict, and punish
himself.
Oh, yeah, the plan: the best-kept "secret" of our overly-
governmentalized age is that terrorism almost invariably
reactionary; simply stop doing things -- things you shouldn't be
doing anyway -- that cause terrorists to attack you and the attacks
will stop.
Terrorism is the price that governments -- and their hostage
subjects -- pay for exercising illegitimate power. Despite pundits
whose ignorance is exceeded only by their presumption (Wall Street
Journal's Paul Gigot leaps immediately to mind) 20th century history
demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that no further expansion of
that power will do anything but make make the problem worse.
Benjamin Franklin warned us, more or less, that anyone who trades
liberty for safety is a fool, in part, because there ain't no such
thing as safety.
We're reminded by Amnesty International that more individuals have
been murdered by governments in this century -- well over 100 million -- than
have died in its wars (war itself being a government
enterprise, as well), proving that government is a worse threat than
anything it claims to protect us from. Tragedies like TWA 800 is
presumed to be, represent a failure of the state -- of the very
idea of the state -- and it is the state, not individuals, that must
be penalized, by reducing its income, and especially the power it
wields over individual lives.
Americans are famous the world over for doing what was never done
before. It's time we did something historically unprecedented again.
We flew the first airplane; we sent the first men to the Moon. Both of
those were possible only because we were the first people ever to
tell a King to go to hell.
Now it's time to tell a President to go to hell. It's time to be
the first people ever to refuse to be steam-rollered out of our
liberties by jackbooted thugs claiming to protect us from people and
events that don't threaten any of us nearly as much as the thugs
themselves.
L. Neil Smith's award-winning first novel, The Probability Broach,
which has long been out of print, will be republished by TOR Books
this October. Permission to redistribute this article is herewith
granted by the author, provided that it is reproduced unedited, in its
entirety, and appropriate credit given.
