Special/Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

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The practice of what I call “remote psychologizing” is very popular among those who consider themselves intellectuals. What was George Washington thinking, for example, when he decided to stop being British and start being American? What was Abraham Lincoln thinking when he decided that preserving a mere political structure was worth seeing three quarters of a million people killed?

Remote psychologizing works—or it doesn’t—on contemporary subjects, as well. What are Democrats thinking (assuming that they’re actually capable of it), trying to rule against the expressed will of eighty million individuals? Has their party been taken over by Harvey Weinstein and the malign spirit (if you believe he’s really dead) of Jeffrey Epstein? It looks like we’re all members of the “me, too” movement now, baby.

I’m not pushing any thesis here. I’m merely giving my readers something interesting (I hope) to bounce around in their skulls like a handful of jacks and Sigmund Freud’s little red rubber ball. Consider it an if-then exercise, or a thought-experiment, if you will.

Okay, first premise (you only have to accept it for the sake of the thought-experiment): the Earth has been visited by aliens, intelligent creatures who evolved on some other world. One way or another, I make no argument for the proposition (which millions of Unidentified Flying Object believers are eager to do), I merely present it.

Established UFO lore has it that these alien visitors tried to give a leg up to the Nazis of all people, during World War II, handing them flying saucer technology and even establishing a hidden base for them deep under the Antarctic ice sheet. It’s a damn good thing for us that it failed to take, somehow, or this essay would be written in German and we’d all be goose-stepping around. But what are we to think of “superior” intellects or “advanced” beings who buddy up to the likes of Adolf Hitler?

But wait—as Ron Popeil used to say, there’s more! Just a few years later, humanity’s would-be alien benefactors apparently attempted to switch to the winning side. President Dwight David Eisenhower (call him “Ike”, everybody else did), the former multi-starred American general who directed what the aliens must have regarded as a humiliating defeat for their swastical clients, was persuaded somehow to parley with them on at least three occasions at an Air Force base out west. There’s a handful of pretty reliable witnesses and even Eisenhower’s granddaughter Laura who says it’s true.

Reportedly, the aliens promised our culture all kinds of goodies—a faster-than-light stardrive, perhaps, or a cure for the common cold—but there was a condition. America, President Ike was informed, would have to give up its budding nuclear arsenal, which somehow constituted a threat to the entire frigging galaxy. Yeah, right.

Keep in mind that this was during an era when the old Soviet Union was ironhandedly ruled by a vicious, ruthless, paranoid dictator, Josef Stalin, in the process of slaughtering about twenty million innocent people because they refused to give their farms to the state and trust the failed collective to feed them and their families. Stalin, too, had nukes; his agents had stolen the secret from us. He wouldn’t treat with the “benevolent” aliens. If we disarmed we’d be at the mercy of his murderous regime.

Wisely, Ike told the aliens (if you’re still following the story), “Thanks, but no thanks”. The aliens grumbled a little and fribbled off. Later on, some of them apparently bribed the government not to publicly expose their existence, The corrupt government treacherously agreed, utterly destroying a one hundred seventy-five year experiment in self-governance. Consult the Constitution: they did not have that right then and they do not have that right now. The Men in Black must become the Men in Orange.

That’s more or less the end of the story as you see it on TV, but consider: these supposedly benign entities were on the side of what is generally agreed to be the most evil regime in human history. Then they wanted the kindliest, most generous realm in human history to render itself harmless against Adolf Hitler’s bloody-handed understudy, Josef Stalin. Believe me, there’s no moral equivalent here, none at all. America may not be perfect, but it is unquestionably good. Nazism and communism are pure evil.

Perhaps, as some say, there are different factions of aliens, maybe even different species, working to cross-purposes, some of them good, some of them bad. Call it exopolitics, if you will. They may even be human, time-travelers trying to establish a future in which the badguys won. Of course they may not exist at all.

But it’s past time that We the People started asking questions and demanding answers, or firing wholesale those who falsely claim to represent us in this democratically-operated republic of ours. I will not ever give up, how about you? Where we Go 1, We Go All.