This past Sunday, David Stockman’s Contra Corner
ran an article entitled Lyndon
Baines Kerry telling the sad tale of how the idealist young anti-war
crusader grew up to become his arch nemesis. Like the President who sent him
into combat a half century ago, Secretary of State, John Kerry has morphed in
into a spewer of lies, distortions and half truths, all the while pushing
America to the brink of war. It happened
with Syria. It’s now happening with the
Ukraine.
But this is not about Kerry.
It’s about the delusion that the American Left is the bulwark of
non-aggression and pacifism. Nothing can
be further from the truth.
It is true that in Sixties, the Left led the way in
protesting the Viet Nam war. However
their objection was not based in principle.
It was based on sympathy with the Viet Cong cause which they viewed as a
war of liberation. Far from being peaceniks
as the purported to be, American Leftists cheered on murderous regimes in
Russia, China and Latin America. They
deified cold blooded killers Lenin to Mao, from Stalin to Castro. From Pol Pot to Che Guevara.
Their cold blooded attitude towards human life was summed up
perfectly by Stalin’s quip to Truman, "The death of one man is a tragedy,
the death of millions is a statistic."
A century and a half earlier, the collectivist French revolutionary justified
the Reign of Terror with another off hand quip, "One can't expect to make
an omelet without breaking eggs."
The vanguard of America’s left wing stood in firm support
Soviet communism until it became too embarrassing to endorse the 100+ million
people Stalin killed once his successor revealed it to the world.
America’s collectivists have not yet given us gulags and
reeducation camps, though it not necessarily a mark of their virtue. Violence is part and parcel of the
ideological DNA. Progressives from
Wilson onward have not shrunk from forcibly trying to export democracy, our own
brand collectivism, via the force of arms.
This is Lyndon Baines Kerry’s agenda here in the 21st
century.
In his treatise, Power
and Market, Murray Rothbard is bemused to find that “people tend to regard government as a
quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed
neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built
for the use of force”.
Rothbard
correctly points out that, “There are two and only two ways that an economy can
be organized. One is by freedom and voluntary choice—the way of the market. The
other is by force and dictation—the way of the State.”
In his
words, collectivism “is the violent abolition of the market.”
Thus when a
government imposes its will upon its constituents via coercive force, it is at
war with them. John Locke explains:
“….that he who attempts to get
another man into his absolute power, does thereby put, himself into a slate of
war with him: it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his
life : for I have reason to conclude, that he who would get me into his power
without my consent, would use me as he pleased when he had got me there, and
destroy me too when he had a fancy to it; for nobody can desire to have me in
his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against
the right of my freedom , i. e. make me a slave.”
“A slave”, he
says? Yes, that is why Hayek entitled
his monumental best seller, The Road to Serfdom. He dedicated the book to "The
socialists of all parties" be they communists, social democrats, fascists,
American style left-liberals or today’s elite corporatist--globalists. In the end, their programs cannot tolerate
dissent and must, by necessity, devolve into force and coercion – to the point
of death if need be.
Thus the
left cannot be anti-war as they are, by nature and definition, in a state of
continual war with the individuals that they govern, who they strive to bend to
their will. In America their favored
tools are fines, confiscations, garnishment and imprisonment. Through political correctness, they curtail debate
and honest critical thinking. Occasionally
they like to make a bold faced show of force as they did at the Bundy ranch.
Fortunately
Americans are still a well armed people so the Feds were force to back down for
a moment. Thus it is that all
collectivists disarm their citizens. A
well armed citizenry is the last best defense against tyranny. It is the only language that the warrior-collectivists
truly understand and respect.
Subscribe to the 2 Percenter blog by going to http://feedage.com and entering 2percentpov into the Search box on top -choose your favorite reader.
Connect through:
OnFire Radio Show
"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
No comments:
Post a Comment