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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 592, October 17, 2010 "Taxation is theft. Taxation is slavery. And taxation is the fuel of war."
Special to The Libertarian Enterprise Several years ago, I agreed to provide some writing for an outfit called "Strike the Root" which was pretending to be against government oppression, tyranny, and the violence of the state. The name of the site comes from a quote from Henry David Thoreau about how for all the thousands hacking at the branches of evil there is only one striking at the root. It has one of those Biblical sounds, reminiscent of Jesus talking about taking out the corrupt tree both root and branch. You could probably look it up. Thus I wrote a few brief essays. Then the topic of the Waco massacre came up. Seven dozen Texans butchered by their government in their church. The two dozen women and children obliterated by a detonation charge placed on the church vault. A toxic gas, a war gas, banned by international treaty, used to subdue the people in the church. Pyrotechnic rounds deliberately fired into the flammable gas. The building deliberately ventilated to maximise the speed of the fire spreading. The windiest day in weeks picked for the attack. Fire trucks prevented from closing with the fire. Snipers from Delta Force operations set up to gun down anyone coming out of the church. Rob of Strike the Root says they deserved what happened to them, that they set the fires, and the government must not be questioned about the Waco massacre. It was the right thing to do. So, I stopped writing for that guy. Occasionally I stop by to say a few things on their forum. But, what can I say, really? How do you respond to something like that? Something uniquely American. Liberty is important, as long as you don't have weird religious beliefs. The government is bad unless it is slaughtering people you don't like. Saturday evening I saw a comment on Anok Black's profile about how it really was a good thing. Anok had posted a link to the video of a documentary detailing how the government under Bill Clinton and Janet Reno had deliberately lied about the events of 28 February 1993, how they had no warrant, how the BATF opened fire without presenting a warrant, how they had a national guard helicopter armed and firing into the church from above during the first raid, and how they then slaughtered those people and buried the evidence. One of Anok's very good, dear friends, I think named Alec Weinstein, wrote that it was a great thing that these horrid conservatives got what was coming to them. He then objected when I wrote that his view was monstrous, equivalent to the Nazis slaughtering Jews for being Jewish. He wrote that he had reconsidered his view, but that it was really okay as long as it had only been ten armed militants and maybe two children. I explained how his position was monstrous. Then someone named Stephanie McGarrah chimed in that I must calm down. Her words were "Jim calm down." Of course, I don't take well to being ordered around. Another one of Anok's bosom buddies Bobby Anarquía Whittenberg-James chimed in to insist that the government's version of events about the children had to be believed, although it was not, of course, the federal government's job to consider charges of child molestation (they aren't federal charges) and the state of Texas having investigated several times found the charges to be baseless. Bobby says "Fuck all right wingers and religious wack jobs" and later quoted Trotsky justifying the slaughter of people defying party authority. So, I removed my comments. Apparently my views that Alec Weinstein was wrong and the Branch Davidians should have been left alone were unwelcome. I did find Norman Singleton, the legislative aide for Ron Paul, hitting the "like" button for my comments. Which is sort of nice, until you think about him un-friending me for daring to object to Ron Paul endorsing the Nazi war monger Lamar Smith in January 2010, effectively throwing pro-liberty candidate Stephen Schoppe under the bus. Then I shut down the computer and went to sleep. What a miserable bunch of bastards, Americans. Americans loved it when the Branch Davidians were slaughtered in their church. Americans loved it when Vicky Weaver's wife was killed for holding a baby. Americans love it when the government tortures people to death. Americans love it when people are detained without charges, strip searched, raped in prison, tortured, and murdered. Americans are enthusiastic about foreign wars and the slaughter of civilians. American soldiers go around Afghanistan torturing and slaughtering, taking trophies of their victims. When an American soldier reports these facts, he is beaten in his bunk for ratting out his comrades in arms, and the military treats him as reprehensible. Americans are evil. And this is very difficult to put up with. It was difficult to go to school every day and have fire crackers thrown at me by the bully on the corner. It was difficult to go to school every day and be expected to put up with teasing and bullying from fuckwits. I ran away from school during recess in the third grade, and nobody noticed. I got beaten up more than once. Because Americans love to bully and tease and belittle other people, and are arrogant, ugly, and mean. So I went to sleep thinking bad thoughts. And I woke up thinking more bad thoughts. I'm tired of trying to make a difference. I'm tired of shouting and no one seems to care. I have been writing persistently about these issues since 1996. I've gone to Somalia looking for solutions. I've gone to Wyoming looking for Americans who care, and found none. I've been to New Hampshire many times, and found nothing. Americans like the military. Americans demand that you support the troops slaughtering foreigners. My buddy had to replace all four tires in New Hampshire because having Texas plates was reason enough for them to be slashed near Winchester, NH. One of my friends likes Albert Jay Nock's essay about the remnant. Isaiah's job. Nice essay, you should probably look it up and read it. I'm not going to link to it, because, frankly, if you are too fucking lazy to spend fifteen seconds on search, you don't deserve my help. Anyway, apparently there are a few people "worth saving." Maybe so. And I thought about something that I'd written recently, trying to help a friend who was having difficulty. It seemed interesting enough that I made it my status update. "The state actually isn't real. The state is a fiction. It is a sort of consensual hallucination. The state is just men and women who are in uniforms and wear fancy hats who do things that we would never accept from people in daily life—they steal, and call it taxes, they lie and call it national security, they kill and call it justice. "When you think about the state being the problem, and I think it is a problem, you have to think about changing the story. Using opiates is a way of shutting out the story, and going to sleep. And that's very tempting. I do not say that I am not tempted by drugs, alcohol, and sleep. Escape is a vital part of literature. "But the reality of the state is that there is no state. It is a fiction, and though it is clearly of the horror genre, it only has as much reality as you grant it. When you dissect the state, all you find is people. When you take every individual out of the state, there isn't anything left." So, again, this morning, I'm here, writing about what happened, what was said, and how it makes me feel. I'm thinking about changing the story. I don't really have any answers at this point. I've thought about what Samuel Edward Konkin III wrote about libertarian zionism. And I've had more than enough of Americans in New Hampshire and Americans in Wyoming to be sure that the people congregating in those places aren't decent, don't tolerate dissent, have no willingness to accept different points of view, and enjoy, especially Ian Freeman of Keene, NH, bullying anyone who says anything he doesn't like. All I have are questions. Why? How can you? What do you think all this brutality and stupidity is accomplishing? Why are Americans enthusiastic about professional sports? Why do they memorise sports statistics, but have no idea what the Bill of Rights says? Why are Americans bullies? Why do they beat up their children? Why do they encourage their children to beat up the other kids at school? Why are Americans authoritarians? When did that start getting fun? Why don't Americans drag the bankers, the bureau-rats, the politicians, the scum who ruin their lives out of their homes and burn those houses to the ground? Why am I expected to calm down? What has all this calm gotten you? Why do you think that meek, obedient, deferential people are "professional"? How does that kind of idiocy help you get your job done? Where are all these people who are supposedly interested in freedom, in self-sovereignty, in justice? Where do you go to find people like that? Who are you, and what do you have to say about this mess? How do you expect to see individuals realise their potential if all you can think to do is put them in cages for possession of a plant or some contraband chemical? Why are you making the prison industrial complex rich? You outnumber the police by 310 million to 860,000. Americans could, if they wanted to, obliterate the police stations in this country with their rifles, go in, get the home addresses of these brutal thugs, and take them out of their homes to be eviscerated and draped over highway overpasses, to strangle in their own intestines. Why not? What is stopping you? Not the mercy you got at the hands of the last pig you had to deal with. Not a sense of justice in a system that has been totally putrescent for decades. "Everywhere you prod it, even with the shortest stick, the established system isn't simply corrupt, it's unequivocally putrescent. The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable criminals, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course I'm above the law. And so are you."—L. Neil Smith, Pallas (1993) You outnumber the government by 300 million to roughly 10 million. Why do you put up with these clowns? Is it the workmanship? The pride in their control over the economy? The careful way they strive for full employment? The integrity they show in putting $800 billion in the hands of bankrupt bankers and insurance companies, so some of the largest executive pay can be handed out a few months later? Or is it the way they continue to send your sons and daughters off to war to bleed and kill and die? Is that what you are getting out of this deal? Is it that you think you are on the side that's winning? Ten years in Afghanistan, 15 years in Vietnam, and you think you're winning? What, you didn't know that there were USA troops in Vietnam in 1959? There were American soldiers killed in Vietnam that year, and all the way up through 1974. What is it with you people? Why so evil?
TLE AFFILIATE
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