Comments (0) Will Grigg: The Old ‘False-Flag Trick’
…Government is the only human enterprise that profits from failure. Once that principle is understood, many otherwise inexplicable choices made by ruling elites and their servants can be made intelligible…
Justin Raimondo: Next Stop: Yemen
Cleveland Plain Dealer: TSA Agents Subpoena Bloggers to Find Out Who Leaked New Security Document
Murray Rothbard: War, Peace and the State
WASHINGTON (Roto-Reuters)–With the full body scanning the TSA plans to implement at the nation’s busy airports, the Obama Administration also wants to have airline passengers drink barium before walking through the screening area to give them a full GI Series, as well as colonoscopy, and suggesting the inclusion of mammograms and prostrate cancer screening, the Administration claims will save billions from the proposed federal health plan currently considered by Congress.
I wanted to clarify some things: my reference to Harry Elmer Barnes in the previous post, and my views on US troops abroad.
Since I wasn’t familiar with Harry Barnes, I looked in Wikipedia, which noted that he was a “Holocaust denier.” I then did some Google searching and found that a lot of sources label Barnes as such. Then, I see that some of Barnes’s writings and statements were taken out of context, and some expressed the frustrations of someone who tried feverishly to expose the war-promoting propaganda of his time, the propaganda of the government and the propaganda of the media. However, he may well have been a “Holocaust denier.” I found this particular page of comments by some familiar names (although we can never be sure if those are really the people in question, because on web comments, sometimes people use other people’s names) that referred to a post on a different subject. With that information combined with other info seen on Google, I have concluded that the situation with Barnes is extremely complex, especially given that the article that my post linked (that David Kramer at LRC linked), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, was on the website of such a respectable organization as the Mises Institute. Even Murray Rothbard’s obituary for Barnes is quite informative, but doesn’t mention any alleged “Holocaust denying,” although Rothbard does state that, regarding Barnes who remained anti-interventionist and pro-peace in his opposition to the US entry into WWII despite the “flip-flop” of the liberal news media, Barnes was “denounced as a ‘Nazi’.” I trust the judgment of the Mises Institute and Murray Rothbard far more than Wikipedia’s information or various other websites.
Now, on my views of US troops abroad, I opposed the first President Bush’s Iraq war in 1990-91, and all the other foreign fiascos since then. After 9/11, and when US forces were sent to Afghanistan, I didn’t really have an opinion one way or another, because I really didn’t know what to believe. When George W. Bush wanted to go into Iraq in 2002-03, I was extremely against that. I couldn’t believe the number of people who were supportive of that, and who couldn’t see that Bush just wanted to go to Iraq to finish the job that his Dad started.
However, my thinking was influenced by events in ‘06-’07. I felt that, if US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan are being attacked by “insurgents,” the US troops had a right to shoot back, or bomb back, and defend themselves. I believe in the right of self-defense. And I held that view regarding Iraq until a few months ago. However, I thought more about that, and now I have a much clearer view of that. If you are being shot at, of course you have a right to shoot back. But not if you are trespassing on someone else’s property. The property owner or resident has a right to defend one’s home, one’s property, one’s “turf.” US soldiers who are on other territories are trespassing. You can say what you want about being “at war” etc, but they really have no right and no justification for their presence on those foreign lands. And you can say what you want about terrorists, jihadists, etc. It doesn’t matter. Whether the pro-war supporters want to admit it or not, or understand this, the terrorism from the Middle-east has been a reaction to the US government’s presence in the territories of the people who live there, and it’s not the other way around. And, by the way, I must say that, regardless of this old “the government is the people,” etc., the US government is NOT the people of the United States! The US government is a group of politicians, bureaucrats, hacks, dirtbags, and gangsters. Throughout world history, the worst atrocities that have been committed, and the lies that have been told to justify them, have been committed by governments.
Happy New Year.
In these 11 months since the inauguration, since Gilligan (Obama) has overthrown the Skipper (Dick Cheney), it appears that Gilligan has contracted War-Monger Disease from Bush. We’ll get Puckistan, Afghanistan, and now Yemen, as suggested by the junior senator from Connecticut. Actually, Janet Napolitano would make a better Skipper than Alan Hale, Jr. Why doesn’t the US government just take over all the oil producing Middle-eastern countries and declare the entire territories new States of the United States of America. And if the people there don’t like it, kill them. That’s the Bush-Obama way. At least that would be more honest and above board than what they’ve been doing so far.
I’m glad that David Kramer in this post at LRC included a link to this great article, Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace, excerpted from Harry Elmer Barnes’s collection of essays regarding war propagandists, mostly dealing with World War II, published in 1953.
… It has been well established that Roosevelt lied this country into the Second World War against the wishes of at least 80 percent of the American people. This war cost the United States about a million casualties — 227,131 were killed in action, 26,705 died of wounds, 38,891 died of other causes, 12,780 were missing, and 672,483 were wounded. Its direct monetary cost to the United States was about $350,000,000,000 — the ultimate cost will be at least one and a half trillion dollars, not counting military costs after 1945 which resulted directly from President Roosevelt’s war and which are increasing fantastically today. There were other great cultural and moral costs…
That sure sounds so…recent. Doesn’t it?
Barnes compares the lies, distortions, hysteria and propaganda to that of George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Also discussed is the relationship between the US and Japan in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor Attack.
Another example of propaganda includes the myths of the American Civil War, which was not to end slavery (which was diminishing anyway), but was a war initiated by President Lincoln who refused to let people of certain territories exercise their God-given right of self-determination and independence and their right to sever ties from the centralized federal US government.
Mark Steyn doing the Rush show referred to Janet Napolitano as “Janet Incompetano.” It’s appropriate. Perhaps Janet can shorten that to Janet Inc.
And make a business out of it.
And go bankrupt.
And get bailed out.
Make Gilligan Vice President.
(That’s Barnes’s book ripping apart the myths surrounding WWI.)
Here is Will Grigg on the police brotherhood mourning the deaths of police officers. Unfortunately, we have an authoritarian society that mourns the deaths of police officers killed while on duty, but that does not mourn the deaths of innocent, unarmed citizens killed by over-zealous cops, by tasers as well as bullets.
Some people support the death penalty or other more severe punishments for murderers of police but not necessarily non-police (based on the belief that police officers have greater value than other non-police human beings). Given what they went through in their Revolution against the British ruling state, George Washington and his fellow Founding Fathers would probably toss their cookies at the thought of that.
Those who support greater protections for police officers than for civilians will rethink their position when the Obommunists begin to use the police (and military) to carry out their tyrannical agenda. And likewise when the Obommunists use the Patriot Act (which violates out Fourth and Fifth Amendment Rights, among other unenumerated Rights) to spy on citizens, political opponents and otherwise dissenters, the Act’s supporters will rethink their support of that, too.
I’m probably not way off in asserting that George Washington et al. would favor a well armed citizenry and a totally unarmed state. The situation we have now is a well armed state (and well armed criminals protected by gun control laws and counter-productive drug laws, and leniency of violent criminals) and a defenseless, disarmed citizenry. Such are the moral consequences of democracy.
Randy Barnett agrees with me, regarding the recent attempted plane terrorism and the right to bear arms.
The Conservative Nut That’s Hard To Crack, by Scott Lazarowitz
Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com
During this holiday season and with all the performances of The Nutcracker now, I must express my frustration with hard nuts to crack: influential conservatives who simultaneously criticize domestic Big Government yet support Big Government foreign policies.
Since President Obama’s election, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have been consistently lecturing from the rooftops in favor of free market capitalism and getting the government out of our lives. These conservatives advocate the Founders’ views of “limited government” and private property rights when it comes to government’s invasions of our personal and economic lives. Then, they contradict themselves by enthusiastically supporting the US government’s expansion and invasions into the lives and property of people on foreign lands.
As Lew Rockwell noted, “conservatives have two brains. One sees the government as a menace, something stupid, inefficient, brutal, isolated from real life, and the enemy of liberty. The other sees government as smart, wise, and all-knowing, a friend to all, in touch with life around the planet, and the friend to liberty everywhere.”
In his article, The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism, economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe analyzes post-World War II anti-communism, particularly of National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. Hoppe notes Buckley’s “new conservative credo,” and Buckley having written that “we have to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged…except through the instrument of totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.”
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the US Military Industrial Complex had become a firmly accepted fact of life, along with its funding through taxes and debts, and had conservatives supporting it. In 1990, the elder President Bush decided that Saddam Hussein was the new enemy, and took the US military into Iraq. That was followed by more Islamic-based terrorism in the 1990s and the September 11th, 2001 attacks. The Islamic terrorists had replaced the communists as the bad guys.
Ten years after the elder President Bush invaded Iraq, the younger President Bush’s Doctrine of “end justifies the means” moral relativism was in place. Because the terrorists use unconventional means of attack and are not of any organized nation or state, say the conservatives, therefore it is necessary to compromise our principle of non-aggression by initiating foreign invasions to prevent future attacks.
Those kinds of destructive expansionist policies, from the anti-communist Big Government military socialism to the US government’s last 20 years of invasions and occupations in the Middle-East, could not have been possible without Americans’ dependence on the US government’s compulsory national defense monopoly. Prof. Hoppe has discussed how such a state-run defense monopoly, naively approved by the Founders in their Constitution, is inherently invasive of the very people the state is in charge of protecting, because it compels citizens to participate in such a contract, and it is funded through coerced taxation. As Hoppe notes,
…no one in his right mind would agree to a contract that allowed one’s alleged protector to determine unilaterally, without one’s consent, and irrevocably, without the possibility of exit, how much to charge for protection; and no one in his right mind would agree to an irrevocable contract which granted one’s alleged protector the right to ultimate decision making regarding one’s own person and property…
Hoppe contends that, when the state has a compulsory monopoly in protection, “…instead of preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage.” Is it too cynical to suggest that the elder President Bush’s Iraq War of 1990-91 coinciding with the Soviets’ end was more than just coincidental?
The conservative Bush War supporters’ being manipulated by emotional fear mongering can compare to the left’s being manipulated by the current “global warming” panic. As Prof. Hoppe has observed, it is democracy itself that makes way for deceitful politicians to rise to the top and manipulate external events to achieve the goal of expanding government’s territorial power even further.
While citizens have an inalienable right of presumption of innocence, it would be self-protective of society to presume politicians liars, especially when such politicians are placed at the helm of a compulsory territorial monopoly. If we did that in 1990, for example, we would probably have rejected the elder President Bush’s appeals to invade Iraq. (Of course we can take the word of a former CIA man!)
Reflecting on these last 20 years, one might realize that the terrorism during the 1990s and the September 11th attacks may have resulted from a people of a region reacting to invasions of their territories. People inherently react against aggression into their territories, as demonstrated by the unborn infant’s attempts to ward off an abortionist’s invasive medical instruments.
Some may ask, “Well, if it really is the case that Middle-Eastern, Islamic-based terrorism has been a reaction to the US government’s last 20 years of invasions and occupations of the Middle-east, then how can we protect our country from terrorism?” Here are just a few suggestions:
As Prof. Hoppe has stated,
In order to combat terrorism it is necessary to engage in a non-interventionist foreign policy, to have a heavily armed civilian population – more guns, less crime – and to treat terrorism for what it is: not as a conventional attack by the armed forces of another state but as essentially private conspiracies and crimes which must be combated accordingly by police action, hired mercenaries, privateers, assassination commandoes, and headhunters.
A few months ago, National Review‘s Andy McCarthy questioned the US’s presence in Afghanistan, and NR’s Mark Levin responded with Not So Fast. Perhaps that should be “Nutso Fast,” because clinging to Big Government whether it’s in the name of preventing the spread of Islamism or the spread of communism, or for “spreading democracy” through military force, is irrational and counter-productive. For many years, such debt-increasing policies of military socialism have required huge sacrifices, and, while the costs of “protection services” have risen, the quality has declined to such a degree that such policies are making us more vulnerable.
Do conservatives have some extra genetic component that makes them naively trustful of manipulative Republican politicians but not manipulative Democrat politicians?
Do conservatives really want 300 million Americans to be dependent on a centralized, bureaucratized, politicized national defense monopoly? Wouldn’t a decentralized defense be more efficient? Common sense says, “Yes.”
Most conservatives agree that, domestically, the biggest enemy of freedom and prosperity is government. If only they could see that government is also the enemy of our security and safety, and that our government is destroying our country more than terrorism ever could.
The Volokh Conspiracy’s David Kopel on the Constitutionality of the “Nebraska Compromise” (or the “Cornhusker Kickback”)
…the Constitution is more than merely what the Courts say it is. Even when Courts act as if a constitutional provision had never been written, the People can still act to protect constitutional provisions, through the political process, and through public debate. If the people do so in regards to the “Cornhusker kickback,” they will be acting faithfully to the original meaning of the Constitution…
It appears that Harry Reek and Nancy Smelgrosi have achieved another gain in the war against our liberty with the Senate’s 60-40 initial vote for “health care reform,” or more accurately, “Medical Fascism.” The Republijerks may have all voted against it, but they’re doing a lousy job communicating why this “reform” will make an awful situation even worse.
Republijerks didn’t point out the actual causes of the high cost of health care, those being the intrusive and expensive bureaucratic mandates and regulations already in place, and expensive malpractice insurance. Republijerks need to have the stones to submit legislation to repeal each and every one of those fascist and socialist mandates and regulations and bureaucracy already in place, and make tort reform a mandatory part of any “health care reform.”
Also, the Republijerks neglected to point out that people actually have a right to their medical privacy, and that government officials should not be allowed access into our private health matters, and that we have a right to be free from government officials ordering us to buy insurance or they will jail us, and a right to patient-doctor confidentiality. Had they asserted these basic human rights, Republijerks might have persuaded one or two Demojerks to vote the other way.
Hear is a question: Why can’t the Senate Majority Leader understand that government intrusions into everyday life are the real causes of everything?
Answer: Because “Harry Can’t Reid.” (And Nancy Smelgrosi.)
The problem with these idiots in Congress is that the Republijerks and the Demojerks are all in cahoots with one another and with the AMA and Big Pharma. Their answer to everything is drugging everyone up, rather than addressing the causes of their medical issues. I’m afraid that not only will the drug companies be getting a huge “windfall” in all this, but the government will actually ban over-the-counter remedies that are safer and more effective, just for the greedy Big Pharma’s profits (that will be at even MORE taxpayers’ expense now!). The government will have a monopoly on medical care and we’re all going to suffer because of it.
The Demojerks know that, while they will lose seats in 2010 (but not many, thanks to an ill-informed electorate and the Dems’ media vulture propagandists), eventually this scheme will guarantee votes for Demojerks for a long, long time—and that’s the real point of it.
Last week, I wrote this post on Ron Paul’s bill to “repeal the legal tender laws, prohibit taxation on certain coins and bullion, and repeal superfluous sections related to coinage,” and regarding his bill to audit the Federal Reserve.
Economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe has addressed the issue of monetary policy in his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, comparing monarchical government’s versus democratic government’s control of money, and how, in democracies the rulers can create money out of thin air and can make new laws and be above the law (pp. 56-62):
…The monarchical world was generally characterized by the existence of a commodity money–typically silver of gold–and at long last, after the establishment of a single integrated world market in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by an international gold standard. A commodity money standard makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a government to inflate the money supply. In monopolizing the mint and engaging in “gold-clipping,” kings did their best to enrich themselves at the expense of the public. There also had been attempts to introduce an irredeemable fiat currency…But these fiat money experiments…ended quickly in financial disasters…Monarchical rulers did not succeed in establishing monopolies of pure fiat currencies, i.e., of irredeemable government paper monies, which can be created out of thin air, at practically no cost…
It was only under conditions of democratic republicanism–of anonymous and impersonal rule–that this feat was accomplished. During World War I…the belligerent governments had gone off the gold standard…Unlike earlier wars, however, World War I did not conclude with a return to the gold standard…Consequently, and as a reflection of the international power hierarchy which had come into existence by the end of World War I, the US Government now inflated paper dollars on top of gold…Since then, and for the first time in history, the entire world has adopted a pure fiat money system of freely fluctuating government paper currencies.
As a result, from the beginning of the democratic-republican age–initially under a pseudo gold standard and at an accelerated pace since 1971 under a government paper money standard–a seemingly permanent secular tendency toward inflation and currency depreciation has existed…
…Monarchs…showed considerably more moderation and farsightedness than democratic-republican caretakers…
Throughout the monarchical age, government debts were essentially war debts….In striking contrast, since the onset of the democratic-republican age…US government debt has increased through war and peace…the same tendency toward increased exploitation and present-orientation emerges upon examination of government legislation and regulation. During the monarchical age, with a clear-cut distinction between the ruler and the ruled, the king and his parliament were held to be under the law. They applied preexisting law as judge or jury. They did not make law…
In striking contrast, under democracy, with the exercise of power shrouded in anonymity, presidents and parliaments quickly came to rise above the law. They became not only judge but legislator, the creator of “new” law.
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