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Enemies and Friends
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Long ago, before I had a computer, or there was even an Internet, I realized a simple but important truth about the victim disarmament industry.

I know that you know exactly who I mean: those sick, twisted dregs of sub-humanity who, owing to some horrendously traumatic event while they were being toilet-trained, or a hideously personality-scarring miscalculation during their first date with a real, live member of the sex they feel opposite to, would rather see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own pantyhose, than see her with a gun in her hand.

They are scavengers.

The image that still rises in my mind is of a flock of vultures, sitting on the arms of a saguaro cactus, waiting for something to die. Except that these vultures wear the faces of Michael Bloomberg, Diane Feinstein, Charles Schumer, Diana DeGette, and all their necrophagic friends.

Another image that rises unbidden in my mind is of a t-shirt logo popular when I was in college: on the saguaro cactus, one emaciated vulture says to another, "Patience my ass! I'm gonna kill something!" My regular readers know that I have long suspected that many if not all of the spectacular and telegenic mass shootings over the past five decades were coldly contrived to manipulate public opinions about gun ownership.

I got a message recently from a FaceBook friend (I'll withhold his name unless he tells me otherwise) referring me to a website. What he said about the entry was, "This just reinforces what I've always believed that the gun control lobby is not really interested in public safety but the accomplishment of a Democrat Party agenda item, which is no different than if it were an agenda item of the Communist Party USA."

The site belongs to an outfit called GunsSaveLives.net and the article, dated August 8, is called "Leaked Democrat Document Instructs Anti-gunners to Use National Tragedies As Opportunities to Pass Gun Control". This embarrassing memo confirms what I've always known about our enemies, that they are a conspiracy of heartless, soulless, gutless bastards who don't give a damn about the victims of "gun violence". If they did, the city of Chicago would be in the hands of the Illinois National Guard right now, the new authorities would be urging the population to acquire guns, and the Mayor and his staff would be in prison.

[see article at gunssavelives.net]

What they really care about, of course, is a totalitarian plan, in essence, the same plan that was pursued in their time by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and the Ortega brothers, among others. Only their plan is much "greener" and vastly more ambitious, ultimately calling for the roundup and elimination of the "surplus" nine tenths of the human race: 6.3 billion innocent individuals.

It's a little item the United Nations hatched, called "Agenda 21".

Look it up.

The only reason they want your guns is so they can do things to you—to all of us—that you wouldn't let them do if you had your guns.

I replied to my friend that the important thing to understand is that ultimately, strategically, the final war between individualism and collectivism has begun. I no longer believe that any other political spectrum—right-left, or even the Nolan-Fritz diamond— counts. The choice is freedom or non-freedom, and since you can't be only partially free (because there's really only one freedom, the freedom not to be molested by anyone for any reason), that means we have a terrible, possibly fatal, problem: many of those we consider to be our allies are fully as collectivistic as those we identify as our enemies.

Let me make those two points again, so there can be no mistake:

You are either free or you are not, there's no middle ground;

Many of the people and groups most of us consider allies—or at least fellow-travelers—are every bit as collectivistic as our enemies.

Never forget that it was Milton Friedman who invented the hated graduated income tax, Richard Nixon who gave us wage-price controls and the War on Drugs as we know it and love it today, and George W. Bush who saddled all of us with the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security.

The great libertarian thinker and teacher Robert LeFevre called the Republicans "Socialist Party B", because the only difference between them and the Democrats is that they promise to enslave you more cheaply and efficiently. At the end of the day there isn't a single collectivist concept—historical tradition, the family, national security, the Church in all of its various guises—to which they won't gleefully sacrifice us if it proves expedient. Any claim that they may make to the contrary is instantly discredited by their adoration of war, taxation, and the peculiar form of slavery called conscription.

The way that the GOP means it, the motto "duty, honor, country" is a threat. It's pure cannibalism. The fact is, I have only those duties I have voluntarily and explicitly accepted. Only individuals can have honor. And a country is only as good as the guarantees it can offer— and fulfill—to protect the rights of the individuals living within it.

One of the main reasons we find ourselves in this mess today is because—from the CIA's own William F. Buckley to Harry Reid's own John Boehner, and especially that unspeakable pile of crap and blubber Chris Christie—those who call themselves "conservatives" don't have a clue what they really are, sovereign individuals, or ants in a giant ant-hill.

In 2008, despite all that was clearly phony and creepy, crooked and crazy, about Barack Obana, people voted him in because every time they vote for the GOP, it finds excuses to send young people all over the world to kill and die for corporations run by its buddies, while at home, it tries to nationalize women's uteruses, and cockroaches like Pat Robertson squeeze out of the baseboards to threaten anyone questioning their interpretation of a 3000-year-old manual written by sheepherders who didn't even understand why the sun comes up in the morning.

Republicans twist, distort, and lie about the First Amendment "It doesn't really call for separation of church and state, that was just a phrase Jefferson thought up after it was ratified.") in exactly the same way Democrats twist, distort, and lie about the Second ("There's no individual right to own and carry weapons, that's only for the militia.")

Over the next several years, the most important issue in American history will be decided. Freedom or non-freedom. We, libertarians and the people of the general freedom movement, have no choice but to ally ourselves with conservatives and Republicans. We need the Tea Parties (which I find infinitely more palatable than the others) and they need us.

They may have the man-power; we have the idea-power.

But until they figure out who and what they really are—and that "It's about freedom, stupid"—we will never have a genuinely free country.

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