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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 581, August 1, 2010 "The definitive Nero Wolfe"
Tyranny's Collapse
Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise Perez: It may seem that I am beating a dead horse when I continue to go on about the totally insane murder rate in Juarez. However, the fate of that city on the border is a foreshadowing of where I fear corruption and disregard for personal liberty is taking America's cities, and eventually the whole United States. There have been at least two ambushes of Mexican federal police by La Linea, the enforcement arm of the Juarez Cartel, "justified" by claims that the federales were working for the Sinaloa Cartel (one of the bases for this claim is that the President of Mexico is kin by marriage to the head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Hmmm.). In one, some seventeen officers were gunned down. The more recent of the two was a car bombing that killed "only" three people (apparently Mexico's sicarios are better shots than bombers. Guess this reflects a taste for more honorable methods of fighting.). Disturbingly, they threatened another bombing if the American DEA and FBI did not investigate claims that the Mexican government is helping the Sinalao Cartel. In the spring an American Consular employee and her husband were murdered on their way back to El Paso from a birthday party in Juarez. The husband was a corrections officer at the El Paso County jail. The hit appears to have been carried out by the Barrio Azteca, an El Paso gang that whose members work as mercenaries for La Linea. According to a story going the rounds, the intended target was the husband because he had mistreated one of the Azteca leaders when he was in jail in El Paso. I have no reason to comment one way or another on the truthfulness of this claim. However, there is a very important point here. The leader of the Azteca believed that as long as the corrections officer was in the US both men were bound to play the game by American rules. However, in Juarez La Linea and its mercenaries make the rules, and once the correction officer entered Juarez he was open season. The Juarez Cartel sees itself as sovereign. It believes it can not only break the law in Mexico, but that it can in fact make its own laws. It can set its own rules of justice. It can make requests of foreign governments as an equal. Years of corruption, rigged elections, and socialism substituted for fundamental freedom have led to this point. The Mexican government is fighting to retain sovereignty, not merely enforce the law. Tyranny in Mexico has led to the point where criminals feel they can seize sovereignty of whole cities without debasing themselves by becoming politicians. Do we want freedom? Or do we want to let corruption and special privilege build up until people have no choice but to turn to criminal gangs to survive? Does it have to get so bad that the local Mafia boss walks in to city hall and takes over claiming to straighten out the mess, and he's really an improvement? Folks, that's the next step in Juarez, either that or the US seizes the northern tier of Mexican states as unclaimed territory. Will Canada have to seize American cities to restore order? Look at Juarez. Look at Mexico. Look at where socialism substituted for liberty ultimately takes you. Then choose what you want for America. Since, you're reading TLE I can assume you've chosen a free country. The question is, what praxis will you follow to achieve that goal and spare us what happens when tyranny falls. Bartucci: The concept of civil government as a form of organized crime is as old as the foundation of Babylon. A great deal of thought was devoted to this subject by the political philosophers of the Enlightenment, notably Dr. John Locke—a physician who make his living largely in the "turn-your-head-and-cough" trade and took something of a diagnosis-oriented approach to the maladies he perceived—and in the second of his Two Treatises (see [here] for a good brief article on his life and career published in The Freeman in 1996) he wrote:
Thereby we get what is in essence the fundamentally American discernment of what is and is not tyranny—meaning what reaches the threshold at which armed rebellion becomes, by right, a proper and lawful recourse on the part of the people. America is a concept borne of the Enlightenment, and Dr. Locke had a prominent role as the fertility specialist who saw to its conception. It is not merely socialism in Mexico but violation of individual rights in Mexico under the color of "socialism," socialism employed by the governing class as a handwave to cloak their tyrannies under the guise of the pursuit of "social justice." Now, Mexico is not culturally or philosophically the beneficiary of Dr. Locke's efforts. The poor bastards down there have tried to assume the seeming of popular democracy and civil government under the rule of law, but they lack the heritage and the knowledge base that came to America with John Locke's contemporaries and successors. In these United States, in spite of the best efforts of our educationalists and the malignant socialists who dominate the colleges and the universities, even the victims of the government school systems still retain at least a holographic fragment of a proper understanding of what is today being called "American exceptionalism," the fruit of that literally blood-spattered philosophical struggle conducted in the 17th and 18th Centuries to set the intellectual and therefore moral and economic foundations upon which the Founders erected the structure of civil government presently being dominated and perverted by both factions of our big, permanently and institutionally incumbent Boot-On-Your-Neck Party. The reason we're exceptional and pitiful wrecks like Mexico are so fucked up is because we look back, consciously and directly or subliminally and indirectly, upon the work of men like William Penn, Algernon Sydney, Richard Rumbold, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Trenchard and Gordon, and John Locke. The Mexicans—the Hispanic world as a whole—had NOBODY of such stature and purpose, nobody to help them find and integrate a definition of the individual human being as morally, economically, and politically valuable in the face of government power. There's the real difference you're seeing between Juarez and El Paso today. On one side of the border, the remnant of Locke's ideal, civil government constrained by a rule of law enforced by the right of the people to rise in violent revolution and replace it, a right so credible that we have seldom needed to exercise it. On the other side, in Juarez, a civil government so lawless that flagrant, self-admitted narcotrafficantes condemn it as illegitimate, denying that the rule of law even exists in their polity. Even flagrant criminals understand that the rule of law is absolutely vital to the survival of civil society. They see it functioning just across the border in El Norte, and they want the armed "War on (Some) Drugs" goons of the United States—the DEA and the FBI—to come down into their country and impose law and order upon their own government. How the hell much greater can the desperation of Mexico get? What is presently being seen in Mexico isn't socialism per se but rather the absence of the Enlightenment heritage which we in America—whether we trace our roots back to the settlers at Jamestown or to parents who sang foreign-language lullabies to us in our cradles—absorbed in the cultural milieu that makes this nation "exceptional." That heritage is death to socialism just as it is death to every form of tyranny over the mind of man, as the clueless Barry Soetoro and his coterie of ACORN elves have been learning since Crash Test Johnnie took that spectacular dive in November 2008 and let the rapists rampage into the orphanage. Aaron Zelman and Mr. Smith promulgated a entirely acceptable solution to the problem posed by Mexico in their novel Hope (2001). A Bill of Rights plebiscite. Translate the first ten articles of the Amendments into Spanish, [Done http://www.jpfo.org/your10rights/pdf-doc/bor-spanish.pdf—Editor] and publish them in Mexico. Engage a popular vote to determine if the people of a given Mexican state want to join the federal union, based upon their acceptance of the Bill of Rights as valid and supreme law. Hell, even the drug traffickers would go for that, wouldn't they? Perez: Please remember that Latin American Revolutionary thought was influenced by French Revolutionary thought, which includes the idea that it was the invention of the concept of property that ended the state of nature, which French social contract thinkers view as the equivalent of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden. Meanwhile conservative Latin Americans view themselves as the successors of the old Spanish Aristocracy, entitled to take from the "lower classes." An allergy to flying lead caused my family to leave Mexico, now you know part of the reason I'm glad we never went back.
TLE AFFILIATE
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