Americans’ Mysticism of the State

(This is from my January 13, 2011 Blog post)

In my post a few days ago, I noted the purely emotional reactions to the Arizona shootings, that include ludicrous proposals from the right and the left to limit speech and limit arms possession, and all to do with our government officials’ ego-centric self-deification obsessiveness. Paranoid Congressman Peter King (R-Nutso) thinks that criminalizing arms possession will in some way protect him from harm, and others want to censor speech and talk radio, that they feel is a “threat” to someone’s safety. And, while I noted that the Arizona gunman is solely responsible for the consequences of his choosing to act violently by his own free will, I made it clear that the real threats to us are the actions of government officials who threaten our lives and Liberty on a daily basis.

Despite the history of the U.S. under Lincoln and Roosevelt especially, and the more recent history of the Soviet Union, and the events of current times such as in Venezuela, China and other authoritarian dictatorships, it is sad that so many people really can’t see how the Bush-Obama policies associated with the “War on Terror,” based on violating every individual’s right to presumption of innocence and Due Process, will be used by the government against those who dissent politically. Some commentators, particularly on the left, are actually claiming that the Tea Party movement and anti-ObamaCare protesters, with their “angry, vitriolic rhetoric,” are somehow a “threat” to others. But it is that very ObamaCare, and all other policies like it, in their intrusiveness into our private lives, contracts, associations, property and freedom, that are the real threat.

But first I must comment on some of those on the left, and their hypocrisy. One of them is MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who spends a lot of time criticizing the “anger and vitriol” and venom of the conservatives and Tea Party movement directed at Obama and the left, and directed at “government” in general. Of course, he neglects to mention the “anger and vitriol” and venom of the left and “progressives” and aimed (deservedly) at George W. Bush and his unnecessary, counter-productive wars. That anger and vitriol ceased when Obama became president and became “Obomber,” extending and increasing the wars, and expanding them, destroying more areas in the Middle-East and Asia, and murdering more innocent human beings than Al-Qaeda could ever dream of murdering. But if it’s Obomber doing it, that’s okay, and the left gives us the crickets sounds. (And, by the way, the left were gung-ho in the ’90s with Bill Clinton’s murderous rampages and ethnic cleansing against the people of Kosovo — the Republicans had a problem with it, though.)

Michelle Malkin has this extensive primer on the past ten years of the left’s hate, anger, venom, vitriol, and violent rhetoric and graphic images expressed against Sarah Palin and George W. Bush especially, and against conservatives in general.

I think that the ObamaCare debates and Town Hall meetings were constructive, but the very real threats to our Liberty, property, privacy and our health that the Obama Administration were throwing at us, and the way that the Democrat-led Congress rammed and crammed the Obama Medical Fascism bill through despite the fact that a huge percentage of Americans opposed it, exposed the real issue: the conflict between government and freedom. As Thomas Sowell pointed out,

The corrupt manner in which this massive legislation was rammed through Congress, without any of the committee hearings or extended debates that most landmark legislation has had, has provided a roadmap for pushing through more such sweeping legislation in utter defiance of what the public wants.

The real violence comes from the left, in their envy toward those who achieve success and are rewarded voluntarily for their productive and creative labor by their employers, customers and clients. The real violence comes from the left’s craving for ever-more confiscatory State powers, the armed power of the State to forcibly take the fruits of others’ labor at gunpoint. That’s the bottom line. The left’s ObamaCare is the culmination of their violent resentment toward others, and their hunger for armed State power and control over the masses, by fining and jailing doctors and patients and insurers who do not follow the State bureaucrat’s dictatorial orders. ObamaCare is the ultimate State usurpation.

After we have seen already what government murder medicine does to people, particularly in the U.K. and similar totalitarian societies, and especially what the people of the old Soviet Union escaped from, it is no wonder that so many Americans were terrified and reacted to Obama-Pelosi-Reid’s threats to install a reincarnation of that dangerous Soviet medicine, with protests and “vitriol and anger.” ObamaCare’s Soviet-style health plan is fascist to its very core, it contains one intrusion after another into our private lives and our doctor-patient relationships which are none of the government’s damn business, but most of all ObamaCare is one of the most severe aggressions against our freedom. Not only is ObamaCare a major intrusion into our lives and our freedom, it is also a boondoggle for the hard-left’s criminal gangs unions.

ObamaCare, private wealth expropriation, private property intrusions and aggressions, perpetual wars for military contractor wealth-redistribution welfare, remote-controlled U.S. drones murdering innocent human beings in foreign territories — and some people don’t understand why our society is so violent and disrespectful of the rights of others. They’re worried about “angry rhetoric” and don’t like it when someone expresses “anti-government” rhetoric. As William Grigg noted,

What this means, of course, is that “killing and robbery and coercion” by duly authorized agents of the State isn’t terrorism, it’s policy.

You see, bombs and drones may demolish homes, but only “anti-government” words can harm us. This is why one of the political elite’s most urgent priorities is the control and criminalization of anti-government speech.

This deification of the State and its agents is truly pathological now, when public officials want to make it a crime to criticize the government, which seems to be coming from both the left and the right, and when they want to legislate their self-appointed holiness by giving themselves greater value by law than the average citizen, such as administering stricter punishments for shooting a Congresswoman or a judge than shooting “just another citizen.” That kind of view goes against the philosophy of the Founding Fathers. They believed we are all equal under the law. The same exact punishment should be given to someone who shoots a government official, including a president, congresswoman, or police officer as should be given to someone who shoots a non-government official. Otherwise, you are saying that one individual has greater value than another. But we are all equal under God — at least, that’s what the Declaration of Independence suggests, and I agree with it.

(Jacob Hornberger has this great piece on how the statists tend to devalue the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and rationalize their being murdered as acceptable.)

But this pathological “immaculation of the State,” this making the State, particularly the centralized federal government, a God figure (despite all the corruption, the lying, the stealing, the covetousness, the greed, i.e. every violation of the Ten Commandments, plus a few more they didn’t think of back then) is extremely disturbing. And worse is the sentiment of merging one’s identity and loyalty not with one’s country, but with one’s government. One part of Sarah Palin’s recent statement on the Arizona shootings was very telling as far as how so many Americans seem to find difficulty in distinguishing between the country and the government, between America and the U.S. government:

Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state.

She is not referring to the country, or citizens of America, but the “state,” as in Wikipedia’s definition, “a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.”

Palin is referring to citizens of America’s government. I hope that, eventually, Palin and others whose sentiments of loyalty really are to the State — the federal government — can be convinced that, in all these 200+ years of the United States of America, that the federal government is not something to worship, not something to revere, but is in and of itself, the one institution that has done the most damage to the country, economically as well as most damaging to America’s security.

When the country collapses, it will be because of what all the career bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, lawyers and other imbeciles and gangsters in that centralized, monstrous place called DC have done to America.

Yes, the Anti-Federalists were right.