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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 689, September 23, 2012 "Almost everybody believes that other people's lives, and the products of those lives, are theirs to take away and use in any manner that strikes them as desirable."
Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise During an involuntary moment of leisure, with nothing else to do, I recently found myself watching a program on the Public Broadcasting System. I'd seen—and even written about—other episodes of Rick Steves' European travels before, notably his special on Iran, which ought to be shown to every war-mongering chickenhawk in America, if for no other reason than to see if it really is possible to die of shame. This time, the subject was the ancient Polish city of Krakow, which has many attractions for tourists, especially those interested in history. Unfortunately, a significant part of that history is represented by the nearby sites of Auschwitz and Birkenau, where murder became an industrial process under socialist utopianism, and millions of Jews, Gypsies, gays, Russians, Poles, and others died as a result. It is absolutely essential, in this connection, never to forget that Adolf Hitler, exactly like all his mindless, souless idolators, was a creature of the Left. "Nazi" is an abbreviation—a pet name, if you will—of the German words for "National Socialist German Workers' Party". I've seen many other programs about the Nazi Holocaust—or Shoah (the "Catastrophe") as it's also been called—and so have you. Along with the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, the Chinese "Massacre of the Landlords", Stalin's deadly crimes, (I would also include what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and the insanity of the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Nazi Holocaust, the principal horror of the 20th century, was the crowning achievement of untrammeled statism in an age which, not by any means coincidentally, saw the rise of the gigantic super-government. The 20th century was a century of mass-murder and war. The 20th century was a century of unprecedentedly powerful government. Plenty of "deep thinkers" have tried to account for the nightmare of the 20th century without taking the rise of the super-state into account. Philosopher and author Jacob Bronowski, sifting the muddy ashes of the martyred dead at Auschwitz through his fingers, declared that it was the "moral certainty" of the Nazis that killed their victims, and that humanity must cease striving for certainty of that kind. But it was not moral certainty that allowed the Nazis to liquidate six million Jews and seven or eight million other individual human beings whose existence they disapproved of—not to mention tens of millions more who died in the general fighting of the Second World War. On the contrary, it was a lack of a moral certainty that other people's lives do not belong to you, and that you have no right, for any reason, to interfere with those lives by initiating force against them. Either that, or it was timidity—convicted mass-murderer Adolf Eichmann observed that his fellow Germans lacked "social courage" -- fear of asserting what anybody with a speck of sanity or decency knows is right and what anybody knows is wrong (among other things, that you don't round people up, herd them into concentratioin camps, and murder them). In either case, this is also the principal element in what many thinkers are already lamenting as the death (or suicide) of Western Civilization. The Nazis were far from alone in their deficiencies of character. Indeed, it was and remains the predominant mode of thought to this day. Almost everybody believes—and are more than happy to use their super-governments to enforce it—that other people's lives, and the products of those lives, are theirs to take away and use in any manner that strikes them as desirable. That is the psychological and ethical origin of intrusive economic and behavioral regulation. It's why I cannot support any candidate who advocates any form of taxation at all: taxation is theft; taxation is slavery; taxation is the fuel of war. Some of us have learned better, and we're having greater and greater success at teaching others. I believe that's what the Ron Paul campaign was really about. This could be a century of peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity. It could be the century of the Bill of Rights. But we have big problems to solve. Aside from casualties in a conflict that he started, Adolf Hitler murdered about thirteen million individuals. Josef Stalin murdered about the same number trying to collectivize Soviet agriculture and vainly attemptiung to appease his own crawling paranoia. Mao Zedong slaughtered 50 million human beings. Overall, in the battered, bloody 20th century alone, states killed one hundred million of their own people—a crime called "demicide"—in acts entirely separate from war, But here's the news, and it is not good. All of this bloodshed (over 2 million 55-gallon barrels of the stuff from 1900 to 1999; double it to include "legitimate" fatalities of war) pales pathetically beside the unspeakably evil scheming of the usual parties who have deluded themselves into a belief that they have a right to tell other individuals what to do, indeed, that in some way they own those others and can do whatever they like with them, In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, crusty old Walter Huston famously declared that the world was "being shaved by an insane barber". The mysterious B. Traven's anarchist novel was written in 1927. The classic John Huston/Humphrey Bogart movie was produced in 1948. Today's world is being led by maniacs not one bit less demented and malevolent than Jim Jones of the People's Temple and Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate. In the name of saving lovely Mother Gaia (an idea fully as nutty as joining the Mother Ship behind the comet Hale-Bopp), the "dominant culture" of so-called progressives and liberals is nothing more than a giant, wealthy, and powerful suicide cult. The degree they have revealed of their deadly ambitions would put Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the entire Ottoman Empire to shame. All of this would seem as perversely laughable (the Jim Jones poisonings probably raised the aggregate intelligencde of the San Francisco Bay area by a measurable percentage) and dismissable as any other death cult, except that it consists of most of the leaders of the United Nations and key members of the current Obama presidential administration. The cult's supporting policies are embodied in a U.N. declaration entitled "Agenda 21". They're quite open about it—look it up on their website—although everything is couched in environmentalist terms. Every time they employ the word "sustainable", be sure to check your chamber and your magazine. Basically, "sustainable" refers to any activity or undertaking that will make your life shorter and more miserable. Anything that makes life longer or more enjoyable is not sustainable. Somehow, they have divined that the Earth's "carrying capacity" has already been exceeded by a thousand percent. Their goal is to reverse ther achievements of Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Thomas Edison, Charles Steinmetz, Henry Ford, and all of humanity's other great benefactors, and reduce the population of the planet by nine tenths, over which they mean to rule with politically correct benevolence. They intend to dispose of about five billion people. That's almost certainly why, for starters, we appear to be headed for a nuclear war in the Middle East, and it thoroughly (and obscenely) explains most of the last half-century's western foreign and domestic policy decisions. Not irrational, after all, they were just aimed at achieving different results than we'd ever have guessed had they not chosen to brag about them. Obama's job (he has masters to obey) was to smash the economic engine of America and crush the philosophy of individual liberty on which it operates. His job is only halfway finished; he needs another term. The job of Hillary Clinton (and others, like Charles Schumer, Carolyn McCarthy, Henry Waxman, and Diana DeGett) is to strip Americans of the personal weapons that will otherwise make reducing them under absolute despotism so difficult and messy. She is doomed to fail. Americans have obeyed their last gun law. The future is plastic. The badguys have their plans. We must make ours. Free people will all make different plans. That is our great strength. Don't work with anyone who says it is a weakness.
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