L. Neil Smith L.Neil Smith is the libertarian movement's most prolific author, with more than twenty books to his credit. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. CLICK HERE FOR RATIONAL REVIEW NEWS DIGEST SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS WHY AREN'T YOU A SPONSOR?
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We were almost free Remember 1989, when the Wall fell? Well, it didn't fall, exactly, it was pushed. It was smashed down, bit by bit with sledgehammers, and torn apart by the bleeding fingers of individuals who burned to destroy the symbol -- and at the same time, the concrete representation -- of government gone mad, and of one nation in particular, that had deliberately turned itself into a vast prison in which simple residence was transformed into a life sentence. I remember, too, shortly afterward, how eastern Europe shook off its subservience to the Communist Empire and began, very haltingly, very tentatively, to breathe free -- until the talk of freedom mutated into talk of democracy, and a Mordorian darkness fell across the land again. My own sad, stupid country began violently interfering, as it always has, in the affairs of others, and what might eventually have been an amiable Balkan divorce, like the Czechs and Slovaks enjoyed, was turned into a murderous religious war, instead. It is a murderous religious war that is still going on, and if you want to know what the real intentions of the United States government are, simply look at the way it now approves of the brutal Russian effort to keep Chechnya enslaved. Following the incident with the wooden horse, people used to say, "Beware Greeks bearing gifts". Today we're better advised to beware politicians -- and mass media hacks -- bearing the dubious gift of democracy. Inevitably they offer it as a substitute more acceptable (to them) than the despised and unthinkable phenomenon of individual liberty. Early in my life -- I couldn't have been more than five or six, but I was a weird kid -- I saw a Hollywood movie about postwar Berlin, in which the G.I. hero, asked by his German girlfriend to explain the difference between freedom and democracy, could only produce Ralph Kramdenlike gabblings. I guess it was supposed to be funny -- although it accurately reflected an important and lamentable truth about us -- but it piqued my curiosity and explains a lot about the way I turned out. What I discovered -- in hardly any time and without any effort at all, despite the way most Americans are deliberately miseducated about freedom and democracy -- was that they aren't even closely related political entities. Freedom is the absence of coercion. Period. The end. Democracy, as the saying goes, is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Hitler claimed to be a democrat, and so did Stalin. Democracy is also a state of perpetual warfare between voracious special interest groups -- all competing for a cut of trillions stolen for them from the Productive Class by government thugs -- and between the individual politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers who champion and cater to them. Best of all (from their viewpoint), it means perpetual employment for all three, because it never, ever ends. Last year's "final" vote is always subject to revision or reversal by next year's session of the legislature, if not by "the people" at this year's election. What keeps it going is this simple fact: the lust for power over other people's lives is a sickness, an incurable, insatiable pathology that leads, when it can, to the accumulation of more and more power. There never lived a city councilman (or woman) or county commissioner, in a brand new cheap blue suit from Sears, who didn't gaze at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of his closet door and imagine himself being called "Mr. President." The ultimate, collectivized expression of that individual lust for power is the 20th century Superstate. Sociologists will tell you that, in order to build and maintain a Superstate, there always has to be an outside (or an inside) threat to justify binding the lambs and bleeding them dry. Hitler played it both ways, of course, with tremendous success, what with Jews on the inside and Allies on the outside. But what I referred to as "the War Century" in my novel Pallas actually began in the 1860s, with an endless stream of Lincolnian excuses for murdering more than 620,00 men, women, and children. Some of Lincoln's generals took a special delight in executing helpless southern women who were carrying unborn "rebel" babies. The War century continued escalating with the Spanish American War, which tranformed Lincoln's continental empire into a worldwide concern, stretching from Cuba to the Philippine Islands. Then came World War I -- the only justifications for American participation in that, the infamous Zimmerman telegram and the sinking of the "civilian passenger liner" Lusitania, have since been proven fraudulent -- World War II, the "Cold War", the Korean War, and finally the War in Vietnam. It must have been a shock to maintainers of the Superstate when the Vietnam war was ended, for all practical purposes, by millions of everyday Americans disgusted by it and by the lies that had supported it. When the latterday Lincolnians were sure that sort of thing would no longer work, the War on Drugs was engineered. And when that finally began to grow tiresome, the War on Terrorism -- beginning with the Persian Gulf War -- was brought in like a wrestler at a tag-team match, thanks to an incredibly convenient attack on the World Trade Center. When the Wall fell in 1989, for a brief shining moment it looked like we might be free, free from oppressive taxation (people were talking about a "Peace Dividend"), free from being spied on and controlled by an unconstitutional government using unconstitutional laws. But it was not to be. Far too many jobs depended on keeping the Superstate in place. Too many political careers. Too many diseased minds and hearts would no longer be able to act out their unspeakable contempt for themselves by mutilating the lives and fortunes of others. Now they have their USA Patriot Act and their Department of Homeland Security to guarantee that their insanity is never threatened again. Or else. Once upon a time, first in 1776, and again in 1989, we were almost free. |
