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Only Nixon
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
—The Thirteenth Amendment

Over the past several days, since the recent general election, I have received countless despairing e-messages from individuals who are certain that the ascendency of Barack H. Obama to the Presidency of the United States represents the end of America, the end of democracy, the end of history, the end of the world, or some combination of the above.

You may feel that way, yourself. I certainly have, from moment to moment, but despair is not my chosen mode of existence, and I have spent those moments trying to figure out how to get my family and myself through the bad times that are about to result from electing this Marxoid thug, with a minimum of injury and some hope for the future.

Upon due consideration, there are enough bright spots on the horizon to keep our world warm and bright while we all work through and repair the damage that this "historical event" has done—and will continue trying to do—to the advance of individual human liberty.

To begin with, try not to be too angry or disappointed with your fellow Americans. Most of them don't care about politics as much as the majority of my readers, and the education they have received about it from the government's public school system is nothing more than a septic tank full of warmed-over self-serving statist lies and leftist propaganda.

Even so, they clearly understand that George W. Bush is the worst President this country has ever had—so far—and that plugging John McCain in to replace him would have been no improvement. What they didn't understand is that Obama isn't a real alternative, either. Even if they had understood, what could they have done about it that libertarians haven't been trying to do, without success, for over 40 years?

So here we all are, stuck with a Glorious Leader whose sainthood, conferred by masses of worshippers and by mass media sinking fast and clutching at any straw, threatens to make Jack Kennedy's beatification—or even that of Father Abraham Lincoln—look like a poor, pale thing.

It is up to libertarians to keep our heads up, our vision clear, and to speak the truth at every turn. Barack Obama is the pampered pet of Chicago gangsters. He is good buddies with a murderous African dictator. And his wacko leftist academic background evokes memories of the style of sideways thinking that inspired the death marches in Cambodia.

The man burns to have a private army all his own. During the election campaign, he threatened to create a "domestic security force" as large and well-funded as the entire U.S. military, just the thing to send door-to-door (as the police attempted in the Chicago projects) searching for privately-owned weapons. Sure enough, the very first item to appear on his website www.change.org following the election was a proposal to require "mandatory community service"—50 hours a year from junior high school and high school students, 100 hours from those in college—or the individuals in question needn't expect to graduate.

Rather than receiving all this as bad news, however, libertarians should celebrate it as a gift. Think of it as an error of arrogance, the hubris that inevitably undoes the bumbling heroes of classical Greek tragedy. It would appear that, just as "only Nixon could go to China," only the first black president, Barack Obama, would attempt to reimpose slavery on a nation that once tore itself into bloody shreds—or so establishment historians assure us—to put an end to slavery.

The fact is—given his institution of a personal income tax and military conscription on a once-free citizenry—Abraham Lincoln, yet another corrupt politician inappropriately elevated to godhood by his drooling sycophants, didn't abolish slavery, he merely nationalized it.

But I digress.

Where both houses of Congress and the presidency are controlled by the Democrats, this evil cannot be dealt with at the national level. The way to handle it—I believe it calls for collaboration between the Libertarian Party and the American Civil Liberties Union—is with thousands of lawsuits and injunctions at the local level, rooted in the Thirteenth Amendment, preventing public schools and colleges from enslaving children and young adults. Such an effort must be nationwide. Those who operate these institutions must be made to understand clearly that cooperation with the Obama regime means the inevitable destruction of all public schools and publicly-funded colleges.

Over the years, I've made a lot of predictions that have come true. Remember this one: two years from now, even those who supported Barack Obama most enthusiastically will be feeling a certain nostalgia about George W. Bush and secretly wishing they'd voted for John McCain.

Yeah, I know, disgusting. But that's the way the world works. Nobody alive today would willingly admit to voting for Adolf Hitler, although the third or fourth worst mass-murderer in history (behind Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, and, on a per capita basis, Pol Pot) won by a landslide. Once the outrages to come have ended and there are thousands—perhaps even millions—of Obama's crimes to account for, would you want to admit to having voted to make those crimes possible?

For libertarians, the possibilities are endless. When socialism fails—again—to bring about paradise on Earth and leaves the usual trail of utter wreckage behind it, we will be there to say "I told you so", exactly as we have been saying it for the past 40-odd years, exactly as we must continue saying it through the next horrible years.

Maybe this time somebody will listen.

The first step libertarians must take is to reshape our own party, to reinstall the Zero Aggression Principle, and to reboot the proudly principled platforms of the late 1970s, so that it can serve us, thus scrubbed of cowardice and compromise, as a tool to resist Obama's fascism and replace it with policies guided—and limited—by the Bill of Rights.

Maybe "fumigated" would be a better word.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.com has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, or at www.Amazon.com.

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