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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If you want peace,
free the slaves
I watched a movie yesterday, in which a Jewish boy is being herded by Nazi soldiers, along with other recently rounded-up Jews, including his mother and father, toward barbed wire pens from which the audience knows they will probably be taken away to concentration camps. As they are shoved along, the boy sees other Jews, in striped concentration camp uniforms, laboring to repair the street, and he recognizes that he and his family, if they're allowed to live, are about to become slaves. Just like in the Old South.
It's important to note that Lincoln didn't free a single slave. They didn't tell you this in grade school, but the Emancipation Proclamation didn't apply to the northern states, where there were plenty of slaves. (Slaves were kept busy rebuilding the Capitol dome all throughout the war.) Nor did it apply to the border states; Lincoln exempted them because they might have been offended by it and joined the Rebellion. It only "applied" to those states Lincoln didn't control. What's more, although slavery would probably have not survived another decade in an independent South (whose principal intellectual, political, and military leaders tended to favor abolition), thanks to the crushing northern victory and to Reconstruction, a system of black peonage was substituted for it that lasted another century. I saw it myself, when I was young, in the turpentine woods of the Gulf Coast, and it was as ugly in its own way as anything out of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lincoln, in fact, managed to enslave all Americans, black and white, condemning them to a lifetime of involuntary servitude that begins with using their young bodies to conquer and occupy other nations, and afterwards seizes half of everything they produce -- five times what was taken from a medieval serf by his feudal master. Before the war, the South had been paying eighty percent of all the taxes in the country. So insistent was the North on not losing the fruits of their labors, that it was willing to sacrifice thousands of them -- consuming its own flesh and blood to do it -- to maintain its own "peculiar institution". It was the Federal North, then, not the Confederate South, that fought to maintain slavery -- and is about to go on another looting expedition, this time in the oil-rich Middle East. All governments are kleptocracies; this one has just decided not to try hiding it any longer. But I digress. Slavery is such an insidious evil that it's sometimes difficult to detect, even when it's going on all around you. People were finally persuaded to see it for what it was in the nineteenth century, when it was occurring in the South, and later on, in Europe, under the Nazis. To a much lesser extent -- no thanks to the Marxoid mass media -- some of them could see its vile flower blooming in Communist regimes. It's too bad so many of them can't see it happening today, by order of the IRS, the Selective Service System, and the Department of Homeland Security. But the important thing to see -- and to act on -- is the fact that the entire purpose of twenty-first century slavery is to feed the machinery of war. By the standards of any other century in mankind's 6000-year history, wars were fought on an unprecedented scale in the twentieth, only because governments operated on an unprecedented scale. The two things that made those phenomena -- cancerous war and metastatic government -- possible were taxation on an unprecedented scale ... And the conscription of hundreds of millions. The present regime is reluctant today to reinitiate the draft, which would probably cause rioting in the streets. It would rather finance its petropiracy through deficit spending and monetization of the resulting debt, than by direct taxation, which would cause similar problems. The day will come, however, when maintaining a worldwide empire will force this or successor regimes to begin conscription again. This time, they will draft our daughters, as well. Likewise, circumstances will compel them to raise taxes massively, if not simply to finance the military occupation of the whole Moslem world, then in a Keynesian attempt to absorb the runaway inflation brought about by their idiot policies. It will take a lot more than Vietnam-style street demonstrations to prevent this (although they are a good beginning). Americans at every level of the culture and in every walk of life must come to understand that taxation is the fuel of war, and that conscription is slavery. That is the first step in achieving lasting peace. |
