October 2, 2003

Reading Ronald Reagan’s newly published letters reminds me how much I’ve always liked him, even after I stopped admiring him as a president. He was always a modest, decent, good-humored man, with more common sense and a keener sense of proportion than most politicians. And he loved a good laugh.

But the very qualities that made him charming and convivial underscored the absurdity of entrusting him, or any man, with the awful power of the American presidency. The superlatives his adulators heap on him seem as wide of the mark as the exaggerations of his detractors: he was really quite an ordinary man, and he never pretended to be anything else. He should never have had all that power, but who should? At least it should be in the hands of a man who didn’t take himself too seriously and wouldn’t abuse it as grossly as most.

He only shocked me once. That was in 1983, shortly after the grisly bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, when he ordered the retaliatory shelling of a village that was said to be a terrorist stronghold. Such an act was bound to kill indiscriminately. It was murder! And the Ronald Reagan I knew wasn’t a murderer! This couldn’t be happening!

But it did happen, and everyone seemed to take it for granted that a president had to “strike back” at terrorism, however wildly, in order to display American “resolve.” It wasn’t murder; it was part of the job description.

I’d first paid attention to Reagan when I was in high school and I heard a recorded speech he’d given, as a spokesman for General Electric, contrasting American free enterprise with Communism. I thought he was terrific. I was delighted a few years later when he went into politics and got elected governor of California.

By the time he ran for president in 1980 I had high hopes for him. I thought he would lead a repeal of all of liberalism’s gains since the New Deal. I didn’t stop to reflect that I was thinking like a liberal myself – hoping for a president who would be a messianic leader, a charismatic one-man show.

Well, there have been worse political messiahs. Whatever else he did, Reagan never lost his modest charm. I heard him speak at a few conservative gatherings, and he never failed to bring down the house with a great joke. As a British writer recently observed, Bob Hope couldn’t hold a candle to Reagan as a raconteur. He really brought fun to the White House. I was never prouder than when I heard he’d roared at some of my own jokes.

I was one of his true believers – one of those who cried, “Let Reagan be Reagan!” in the conviction that those weaselly moderate Republican advisors, those disdained “men around the president,” were holding him back from acting like the true conservative he was at heart.

I was bound to be disappointed by his compromises. In time I was so disillusioned with him that I actually made a joke at his expense: “Let someone else be Reagan.” But that wasn’t until his second term.

Many principled conservatives saw through Reagan long before I did – if I ever did. He had a way of convincing sentimentalists like me that he shared our passions, despite any appearances to the contrary. I was a sucker for him, and maybe I still am. I think I know better now, but I’m not entirely sure.

Strange, the way some men can make you want to believe in them. Whatever that quality is, Reagan had it. At one time, about half my friends were Reagan speechwriters, and every one of them worshipped him. They’re still writing loving books about him.

That was my generation. We’ll never feel that way about another politician. Maybe you can be pardoned for getting carried away like that once in your life, but in any case it can’t happen twice.

If you’re really wise, it won’t even happen to you once. The U.S. Constitution defines the president’s duties very narrowly, and they don’t include running the economy, bombing villages, or even telling great jokes.

Reagan wasn’t a great president. “Great” presidents, as usually conceived, are unconstitutional. I like to think Reagan understood this. At least I’m pretty sure he was the last president who even glanced at the Constitution once in a while.

Because I write about politics, people are forever asking me the best way to teach children how our system of government works. I tell them that they can give their own children a basic civics course right in their own homes.

In my own experience as a father, I have discovered several simple devices that can illustrate to a child’s mind the principles on which the modern state deals with its citizens. You may find them helpful, too.

For example, I used to play the simple card game WAR with my son. After a while, when he thoroughly understood that the higher ranking cards beat the lower ranking ones, I created a new game I called GOVERNMENT. In this game, I was Government, and I won every trick, regardless of who had the better card. My boy soon lost interest in my new game, but I like to think it taught him a valuable lesson for later in life.

When your child is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is “fair.” Also, explain that you need the other $4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being “selfish” and “greedy.” Later in life he will thank you.

Make as many rules as possible. Leave the reasons for them obscure. Enforce them arbitrarily. Accuse your child of breaking rules you have never told him about. Keep him anxious that he may be violating commands you haven’t yet issued. Instill in him the feeling that rules are utterly irrational. This will prepare him for living under democratic government.

When your child has matured sufficiently to understand how the judicial system works, set a bedtime for him and then send him to bed an hour early. When he tearfully accuses you of breaking the rules, explain that you made the rules and you can interpret them in any way that seems appropriate to you, according to changing conditions. This will prepare him for the Supreme Court’s concept of the U.S. Constitution as a “living document.”

Promise often to take him to the movies or the zoo, and then, at the appointed hour, recline in an easy chair with a newspaper and tell him you have changed your plans. When he screams, “But you promised!,” explain to him that it was a campaign promise.

Every now and then, without warning, slap your child. Then explain that this is defense. Tell him that you must be vigilant at all times to stop any potential enemy before he gets big enough to hurt you. This, too, your child will appreciate, not right at that moment, maybe, but later in life.

At times your child will naturally express discontent with your methods. He may even give voice to a petulant wish that he lived with another family. To forestall and minimize this reaction, tell him how lucky he is to be with you the most loving and indulgent parent in the world, and recount lurid stories of the cruelties of other parents. This will make him loyal to you and, later, receptive to schoolroom claims that the America of the postmodern welfare state is still the best and freest country on Earth.

This brings me to the most important child-rearing technique of all: lying. Lie to your child constantly. Teach him that words mean nothing – or rather that the meanings of words are continually “evolving,” and may be tomorrow the opposite of what they are today.

Some readers may object that this is a poor way to raise a child. A few may even call it child abuse. But that’s the whole point: Child abuse is the best preparation for adult life under our form of GOVERNMENT.

June 12, 2007

I guess I’ve known Ron Paul for a quarter of a century now, and I don’t remember how we met. My first memory of him is a quiet dinner on Capitol Hill, during the Reagan years. He told me with dry humor of being the only member of Congress to vote against some bill Reagan wanted passed. For Ron it was a matter of principle, and he was under heavy pressure to change his vote.

What amused him was that the Democrats didn’t mind his voting against it; all the pressure came from his fellow Republicans, professed conservatives, who were embarrassed that anyone should actually stand up for their avowed principles when it was unpopular to do so.

That was Ron Paul for you. Still is. The whole country is getting to know him now, and the Republicans still want to get rid of him. The party’s hacks, led by Newt Gingrich, have even tried in vain to destroy him in his own Texas district.

They’re right, in a way. He doesn’t belong in a party that has made conservative a synonym for destructive. George Will calls him a “useful anachronism” because he actually believes, as literally as circumstances permit, in the U.S. Constitution. In his unassuming way, without priggery or histrionics, he stands alone.

He may have become at last what he has always deserved to be: the most respected member of the U.S. Congress. He is also the only Republican candidate for president who is truly what all the others pretend to be, namely, a conservative. His career shows that a patriotic, pacific conservatism isn’t a paradox.

If they can’t expel Ron Paul from the party, they can at least deny him the nomination. The GOP front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, who says he hates abortion more than any other constitutional right (or words to that effect), went into raptures of phony indignation during the first “debate” when Paul said simply that the 9/11 attacks were a natural result of U.S. foreign policy. The pundits applauded the demagogue, but millions of viewers were thrilled to find one honest man on that crowded stage. (By the way, Paul is a doctor who has delivered thousands of babies and never killed one.)

Ron – I’m very proud to call him my friend – fares well not only in comparison with the party’s sorry current candidates, but also with its legendary conservative giants, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. He lacks their charisma and of course Reagan’s matchless charm, but he excels them both in consistency, depth, historical awareness, courage, and honor. Heaven grant him some of Reagan’s luck!

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October 6, 2005

William Bennett has caused another uproar, far from his first, by noting that the crime rate might be reduced by aborting all black babies. He has defended this comment by reminding us that he called this reprehensible idea “reprehensible.”

Which should hardly have been necessary, since it would only have been put in the words he used by someone who considered it reprehensible. Most people who want to promote black abortion call it something vague, like “giving choice to poor women,” and nobody accuses them of saying what they actually mean.

Still, though Bennett had a point, it was a point about certain kinds of crimes – street crimes. But there are other kinds of crimes, crimes we tend to forget are criminal, because the government sanctions them.

Just after Bennett made his comments, I watched the absorbing film Fat Man and Little Boy, a dramatization of how a group of brilliant men, during World War II, created a weapon that would murder thousands of people in a couple of seconds. This, of course, was the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Government’s crash program to make the atomic bomb. The scientists succeeded all too well, but some of them later had qualms about what they had done.

I couldn’t help noticing that all the characters, in the movie as in real life, were white. I suppose you could say – and here I want to stress that the idea is reprehensible – that if all white babies had been aborted, far fewer nonwhites, from Japan to Iraq, would have been killed by American bombs.

When you look at it that way, you begin to see what the late Susan Sontag meant when she wrote, in her precocious days, that the white race is “the cancer of history.” She later apologized for this observation, but it was still quoted in her obituaries. It had all the brutal logic of youth.

Highly civilized white men have produced the world’s most terrible weapons of mass murder, but they prefer to call these “weapons of mass destruction,” a phrase that slightly disguises their nature. It would sound absurd to say that “we mustn’t allow weapons of mass murder to fall into the wrong hands,” since there can be no “right” hands; but if you substitute destruction for murder it sounds almost reasonable to people who don’t stop to think what you are saying.

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As a child I acquired a deep respect for authority and a horror of chaos. In my case the two things were blended by the uncertainty of my existence after my parents divorced and I bounced from one home to another for several years, often living with strangers. A stable authority was something I yearned for.

Meanwhile, my public-school education imbued me with the sort of patriotism encouraged in all children in those days. I grew up feeling that if there was one thing I could trust and rely on, it was my government. I knew it was strong and benign, even if I didn’t know much else about it. The idea that some people — Communists, for example — might want to overthrow the government filled me with horror.

G.K. Chesterton, with his usual gentle audacity, once criticized Rudyard Kipling for his “lack of patriotism.” Since Kipling was renowned for glorifying the British Empire, this might have seemed one of Chesterton’s “paradoxes”; but it was no such thing, except in the sense that it denied what most readers thought was obvious and incontrovertible.

Chesterton, himself a “Little Englander” and opponent of empire, explained what was wrong with Kipling’s view: “He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reason. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.” Which implies there would be nothing to love her for if she were weak.

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Joe Sobran [send him mail] is a nationally syndicated columnist. See complete bio and latest writings. Watch Sobran on YouTube.

Joseph Sobran Archives

You would think that Abe Lincoln had ended slavery with a mere stroke of the pen, and that any other American president might have done so earlier, if only the whim had seized him.

Now I have little use for Barack Obama, the most leftist president this country has had for quite a spell. But at least he has enough sense to realize, as his inaugural address and other early speeches have shown, that he faces many serious obstacles to getting his way. His chief fear seems to be that he will be a scapegoat when he fails to perform the economic miracles and marvels the rabble are clamoring for. To his credit, he doesn’t advertise himself as The Decider. Most of his important decisions have already been made for him.

Long before we knew who would win the crown in 2008, it was obvious to me that our next emperor would have his work cut out for him: cleaning up the Augean horror of the last few years. And this was before the dimensions of that mess were as clear as they are now.

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Joe Sobran [send him mail] is a nationally syndicated columnist. See complete bio and latest writings. Watch Sobran on YouTube.

Joseph Sobran Archives

To begin with simple words. Most people don’t seem to appreciate the difference between “may” and “might,” a distinction that used to be taught in the seventh grade, along with that between “lay” and “lie.” If you don’t see the differences among these words, observe how Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson use them.

How many times have you heard someone say “prior to” instead of “before”? “Prior to” has its proper place, as when we say that something is logically prior to something else, but as a rule “before” is better to indicate temporal order. “It happened a week prior to my birthday” is sluggish and pretentious.

I’m far from the first to complain that hordes of people now use “transpire” to mean “happen” or “occur” instead of “come to light,” “turn out,” or “be revealed.” This has become so common that the traditional usage is apt to cause confusion. An important shade of meaning has been lost to our language.

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Joe Sobran [send him mail] is a nationally syndicated columnist. See complete bio and latest writings. Watch Sobran on YouTube.

Joseph Sobran Archives

This new president of ours is a virtual dark continent of a man. We really know little about him, but the vacuum in our awareness is being filled by empty superlatives and impossibly high hopes.

Mythologists are straining to draw portentous analogies between Obama, on the one hand, and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King on the other. Obama himself encourages this by borrowing bits of these demigods’ famous phrases.

His worshippers are already eager to chisel his features into Mount Rushmore. Why wait? Americans believe profoundly in Great Presidents, who need not have accomplished anything beyond starting wars and getting shot. The media have already dragged out poor old Doris Kearns Goodwin to provide Historical Perspective. Obama’s birthday is not yet, at this writing, a federal holiday, or even a Unitarian high holy day, but it’s getting a trifle fulsome. Talk about high expectations! “Hail to the Chief” may have to yield to a new presidential theme, such as “Magic Man.”

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Joe Sobran [send him mail] is a nationally syndicated columnist. See complete bio and latest writings. Watch Sobran on YouTube.

Joseph Sobran Archives

[A
few of my peeves]

When the devil
wants to enrage old English teachers – an irascible lot, to
be sure – he has people abuse and overuse certain words, among
them the following examples.

To begin with
simple words. Most people don’t seem to appreciate the difference
between “may” and “might,” a distinction that
used to be taught in the seventh grade, along with that between
“lay” and “lie.” If you don’t see the differences
among these words, observe how Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson use
them.

How many times
have you heard someone say “prior to” instead of “before”?
“Prior to” has its proper place, as when we say that something
is logically prior to something else, but as a rule “before”
is better to indicate temporal order. “It happened a week prior
to my birthday” is sluggish and pretentious.

I’m far
from the first to complain that hordes of people now use “transpire”
to mean “happen” or “occur” instead of “come
to light,” “turn out,” or “be revealed.”
This has become so common that the traditional usage is apt to cause
confusion. An important shade of meaning has been lost to our language.

Among the great
political abuses now current in English is the use of “defense”
for “military.” Expenditure for the manufacture of countless
terrible and costly weapons of mass murder is now called “defense
spending.” The phrase “national security” is similarly
abused.

Nowadays, “democracy”
is what Richard Weaver called a god-term. To be democratic is to
be good, and whatever is good must be democratic. Why? Nobody explains.
In fact, it’s rare to find a useful definition of democracy.

“Medieval,”
by contrast, is a devil-word, the opposite of “modern.”
Why is everything medieval assumed to be bad? Again, nobody explains.
But St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Dante Alighieri, to name
but three, were medieval men. To hear some people, you’d think
all men ever did in the Middle Ages was pray and torture each other
by turns. In the enlightened twentieth century, on the other hand,
there was much less prayer and much more torture as man learned
to fly, drop bombs on cities, and congratulate himself on his humanitarian
achievements (such as making abortion easily available). Homicide
is certainly more efficient now than in the Dark Ages. We can be
proud.

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the rest of the article

September
4, 2008

I
found myself still reading it in the wee hours. It was one of the
most emotionally grueling stories I’d ever read. But as soon as
I woke up in the morning I had to finish it. The author asked for
my endorsement; after reading it, I wanted to give copies to all
my friends. It was that powerful.

The
book, Blind
Baseball: A Father’s War, has now been published by AuthorHouse
in Bloomington, Indiana. It’s not about baseball; it’s about a divorce,
and much more. The title is an odd but apt metaphor explained late
in the book. The author, Allen Green, writes with such passion it’s
tempting to believe the tale is autobiographical, but it isn’t.

The
story’s hero, Barry Ballinger, has, to say the least, a troubled
marriage. His wife, Sal, serves him with divorce papers, empties
their bank account, and spitefully runs up huge debts in his name.
She also means to take custody of their six children. And that’s
just the beginning of her campaign to ruin, humiliate, and utterly
destroy him.

Barry
goes to a lawyer, who tells him that under Michigan’s no-fault divorce
law his chances of getting custody of the children are almost nil.
Originally intended to level the playing field and make the dissolution
of marriage as painless as possible, the law actually has the opposite
effect: It gives women like Sal, who know how to play the angles,
huge legal advantages. It also serves the interests of predatory
men, like the sponging lovers Sal brings into the home once Barry
has been expelled. The horror is that Barry is punished for trying
to be a responsible father.

Sal
is none too bright, but she has a shrewd instinct for power. With
the aid of her lawyer – a "barracuda at law," in
Barry’s phrase – she turns all the resources of the state against
Barry. Through her machinations and false accusations, he loses
his children, his property, his livelihood, his reputation, and
very nearly his sanity. At one point he actually finds himself committed
to a mental institution. He seems to be baffled at every turn. For
a while his situation seems hopeless.

Blind
Baseball is to domestic law what Nineteen
Eighty-Four is to politics. It vividly shows how bureaucratic
"social services" can be perverted into tools of raw power
over the unsuspecting individual. At first Barry navely assumes
the basic fairness of the system; he is quickly disabused by the
successive hammer-blows of Sal’s cunning malice.

What
makes this more than a mere divorce novel is Green’s grasp of the
systematic nature of the forces Barry faces. Slowly he comes to
realize that he’s up against something more than a flaw in the system:
This is just how the system is designed to work.

But
unlike Orwell’s hapless hero, Winston Smith, Barry is no passive
victim. As he comprehends that the real enemy is much bigger than
Sal, and as Sal herself overplays her hand, he manages to achieve
a limited victory – though only after the turmoil has caused him
and his kids enormous stress and pain.

Many
fathers can attest that Barry’s plight is neither unique nor exaggerated.
The laws, institutions, and state agents that nearly crush him are
real, and this is how they operate in countless cases every day.
Some fathers, despairing of justice under the law, kidnap their
own children and disappear.

The
book isn’t entirely bleak. Barry receives encouragement and wisdom
from his old mentor, Art Smith, who explains that the state is dedicated
to destroying families. The root of Barry’s crisis is the materialist
philosophy that shapes the laws, creating an unnatural balance of
power. Once he understands this, Barry is able to pull himself together
and salvage his and his children’s lives. And Sal’s malignity finally
carries its own punishment.

Blind
Baseball is in the end a comment not only on marriage and divorce,
but on the irrationality of modern law itself. Barry’s bitter wit
adds both wry amusement and sharp insight to a wrenching drama of
the soul against the state.

April
21, 2005

Joseph Sobran is an
author, syndicated columnist, and editor of a monthly newsletter,
Sobran’s.

Meanwhile, controversy rages over whether President Bush was sufficiently warned of terrorist hijackings last year but failed to take action.

Maybe it wasn’t a failure to act, but a failure to imagine. Before last September, the traditional understanding (so to speak) of hijacking was the forcible diversion of a passenger plane, usually ending with the safe return of plane and passengers; hijackers might or might not escape, but it was taken for granted that, either way, they would leave the plane alive.

Nobody imagined a suicide hijacking. That was the novelty that defeated all security measures. It was to terrorism what the atomic bomb was to conventional warfare: something horribly new under the sun.

Since then, of course, countless new security measures have been installed to prevent the exact repetition of a unique event. We are now well protected against stupid terrorists. Anyone dumb enough to try to smuggle a pistol aboard a passenger plane is apt to get caught. The U.S. Government can foresee the past.

But not the future. Our rulers are still haunted by the possibility that some terrorists may be too clever for them. They realize how vulnerable we are on many fronts, right here at home. A single nuclear incident in Manhattan — even without Hiroshima-scale fatalities — could cripple the U.S. economy.

The worst of it is that the U.S. Government has indeed ignored many warnings and is still doing so. The most basic has nothing to do with the specific practical schemes of enemies; wise people have been warning for years against the interventionist policies that have made the United States, as Buffett observes, the most hated country on earth. If so, the people who are supposed to be protecting us are guilty of criminal responsibility in continuing policies that put our lives in danger.

Our government has succeeded in bringing the wars of the Middle East to our own shores. Symptomatic — and highly symbolic — are the fights between Jewish and Arab students on American college campuses. It’s also symptomatic, and symbolic, that these fights are not about the interests of ordinary Americans, who don’t participate in them. There is no patriotic student group telling these people to take their quarrels elsewhere and leave us out.

In fact we’re now told that it’s unpatriotic to want our country to mind its own business. The average American has been taught, and devoutly believes, that it’s natural for his country to “run the planet,” in the words of one hawkish neoconservative magazine. Fighting terrorism is just one aspect of running a planet.

But how can the same government that provokes terrorism — a protean thing that takes many forms — also hope to defeat it? How can a problem be solved by the same institution that creates it? Americans no longer have a rational philosophy of government; they merely assume that government is a general pragmatic problem-solver. Yet most of the problems it’s supposed to “solve” — the national debt, the annual Federal deficit, the Social Security mess, economic turbulence, high taxes, failing schools, international crises — are of its own making. In a similar way, Americans were told that World War I was “the war to end all wars.” Its chief result was World War II, whose chief result was the Cold War.

Some enormous mental block prevents people from seeing the simple truth that a problem can’t be its own solution. Don’t tell the proud parents, but a child born today is born $100,000 in debt — his tax share of the debt his rulers have accumulated. Of course he may not live to pay it off, since those rulers have also made foreigners want to kill him.

In the meantime, he will attend public schools where he will learn that the government is his friend, protector, and benefactor. If he somehow manages to figure out that this is baneful nonsense, he will be told that he is unpatriotic.

Joe Sobran [send him mail] is a nationally syndicated columnist. He also edits SOBRAN’S, a monthly newsletter of his essays and columns.

He invites you to try his new collection of aphorisms, “Anything Called a ‘Program’ Is Unconstitutional: Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian.” You can get a free copy by subscribing or renewing your subscription to Sobran’s. Just call 800-513-5053, or see his website, www.sobran.com. (He’s still available for speaking engagements too.)

Joseph Sobran Archives

If I were a pagan, I might fancy I heard the Olympian laughter of the gods when modern men think of their rulers as their friends. Common sense would suggest that those who have power over you, and can use it to kill or enslave you, are, more properly speaking, your masters and enemies. We’re supposed to think that the system that can extort half our earnings from us is benevolent?

I don’t think it’s funny, but I can see how Zeus and Neptune and Mercury, with their larger perspective, might get a kick out of it. As described by Homer and Ovid, they didn’t have to pay taxes. They could afford to laugh. “What fools these mortals be!”

The state is a parasite on its subjects, but in America its subjects have acquired the habit of speaking of the state as “we.” As in: “We are fighting a war on terrorism.” There can be no greater triumph for the parasite than for the host to think of it and itself as a single unit. It’s as if a man were to refer to himself and a blood-bloated leech under his skin as “we.”

How does the state pull this off? One tested and well-nigh infallible method is to convince its subjects that it’s protecting them from an even worse enemy than itself. This seldom fails. The majority nearly always fall for the idea that if the state is hurting someone else even worse than it’s hurting them, it’s on their side, and is therefore their friend, protector, and benefactor.

The Soviet Union crushed every freedom worth having, but it assured the “proletariat” that it was only exterminating their “class enemies.” Hitler imposed tyranny on ordinary Germans, but he was even crueler to Jews, so Germans figured he was on their side. The socialist state of Israel robs Jews blind, but since it treats Arabs even worse, Jews think of the state as “us.” And the U.S. Government is stripping away traditional American freedoms; but as long as it is prepared to bomb foreigners to death, Americans imagine that their proximate enemy is defending them. No, it’s even worse than that: they think their enemy is “us.” The enemy becomes the self.

What a blessing “terrorism” is for the state! It’s the ideal distraction from the day-to-day reality of the state’s chief activity: wringing from its subjects the wealth they produce. Last September a handful of fanatics, armed only with box-cutters, provided a new rationale for the trillion-dollar swindle. A bonanza!

I don’t know what these “terrorists” thought they were achieving: Making the infidel respect Allah? If so, they were wrong. You might as well try to make the U.S. Government respect the U.S. Constitution. Ain’t gonna happen. They only made the average American cling all the more tightly to his state.

Orwell, with his Olympian humor, summed up this eerie state of affairs in two words: Big Brother. The all-powerful master feigning blood kinship with his feckless subjects. “We.”

Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, arrives at an illusory happy ending: “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” And no doubt he pasted a decal of Big Brother’s flag — “our” flag — onto his windshield.

When I was ten, I learned how to get a leech out of my leg in a hurry: a lighted match would do the trick. I never supposed that that creepy thing and I were “we.”

But try getting a parasite out of your mind! As soon as you think you’re rid of it, it has a way of coming back. You’ve been trained from childhood to think of your rulers as “we,” just as sports fans speak of the home team as “we,” as if they too had been down on the field earning the victory. Such mental habits are hard to shake.

Even the most wary of us have to keep reminding ourselves that the state is our enemy. Always. Not just when the Republicans — or the Democrats — are in power. Always. Tyranny and freedom are equally nonpartisan.

Joe Sobran [send him mail] is a nationally syndicated columnist. He also edits SOBRAN’S, a monthly newsletter of his essays and columns.

He invites you to try his new collection of aphorisms, “Anything Called a ‘Program’ Is Unconstitutional: Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian.” You can get a free copy by subscribing or renewing your subscription to Sobran’s. Just call 800-513-5053, or see his website, www.sobran.com. (He’s still available for speaking engagements too.)

Joseph Sobran Archives

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January
11, 1999

I
quit following football long ago, so I didn’t care one way
or the other when the Redskins finally made the playoffs. But it
was an occasion for downright gloom for a Muskogee Indian woman,
who the Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy says has
“sensitized” him.

Guess how?
She takes strong exception to the team nickname Redskins.
It’s “so racist” and reminds her of “genocide.”
She takes umbrage at seeing a team mascot, a black man, dressed
in what Milloy describes as “a white man’s version of
an Indian outfit,” implying, I suppose, that real Indians never
wore feathered headdresses and war paint.

What then does
the Indian woman think the team should be called? “Wild Hogs,
because they suggest the real sport in Washington, which is pork
barreling.” This cynical joke inadvertently touches the real
point: that team nicknames are supposed to suggest admirable qualities.
It would be hard to root for the New York Swindlers, the Chicago
Butchers, or the San Francisco Misfits.

Our local team
used to be the Boston Braves, till the owner changed the nickname
to the Boston Redskins to distinguish it from the baseball
Braves, then also in Boston. When he moved the team to Washington
in the 1930s, he kept the new nickname, which has persisted through
several changes of ownership.

Redskins is
a colloquialism that wouldn’t be picked today. But for that
matter, no ethnic organization founded today would say it was fighting
for “colored people.” Yet nobody seems to object that
NAACP still stands for National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People.

Once upon a
time, colored people seemed preferable to the usual slang
term, which, as Mark Twain attests, caused little offense. But in
time politesse came to prefer Negro. Then, in the late 1960s,
we were told that Negro had somehow become “offensive,”
so everyone adopted black (which had formerly been considered rude).
In the 1990s (remember them?) black was widely replaced by
the clumsy African-American, in keeping with the vogue for
pride in African “roots.”

Why Africa
should be sentimentalized by the same people who damn the Confederacy
remains a mystery, since Southern slavery was imported from Africa,
where slavery still persists. But of course we are supposed to believe
that Africa was the Garden of Eden – the land of the Afro hairdo,
the dashiki, and Kwanzaa – while the white man invented slavery
and genocide and stuff.

We are dealing
not with genuine refinements but merely with revolving stereotypes.
For all we know, the phrase African-American, may, in its turn,
join the long roster of “offensive” epithets, when the
descendants of American slaves realize that their ancestors were
originally enslaved by their African brethren, who realized they
could be swapped for the finest fruits of European civilization,
such as whiskey.

But far from
being univocally racist, the white man has romanticized the American
Indian since the days of Fenimore Cooper, naming baseball and football
teams – Indians, Braves, Redskins, Seminoles, Cherokees, Hurons,
et cetera – in honor of the Indian’s prowess as a warrior.
The notion that such names are ethnic slurs is one of the many absurdities
of this era of victim politics. Who’d have guessed that the
descendants of those stoical braves Sitting Bull and Pontiac would
become such whiners?

It does honor
to both races that even during the era of violent hostilities between
them, the white man could see heroism in the red man. The noble
profile of an Indian used to grace the nickel. Even little English
boys used to love pretending to be Indians; they seldom pretended
to be African warriors.

As we all know,
the American Indian has no roots in India, so “Indians”
have lately become “Native Americans.” But American is
a word of Italian derivation, so there may be more trouble ahead
when it sinks in with “Native Americans” that they have
been renamed – irony of ironies! – after a European paleface.

At this point
let us pause to thank our Scandinavian-American friends for not
allowing their little feelings to be hurt by the fact that a certain
Midwestern football team is named after the Vikings. The sons of
the Norsemen never caught onto the silly fads of the twentieth century,
and they are the better for it.

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The
Best of Joseph Sobran

December
30, 1999

Bernard
Shaw’s play The
Devil’s Disciple ends with an ironic exchange between
two British officers who have just realized that Britain is about
to lose her American colonies because of a flukish oversight by
the British cabinet.

Flabbergasted,
the obtuse Major Swindon asks: “But what will history say?”
General Burgoyne replies suavely: “History, sir, will tell
lies, as usual.”

Americans,
ever earnest about what “history” says, can’t bear
to believe that some of their “great” presidents have
been evil men. So it was probably inevitable that the aging historian-courtier
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. should observe the end of the twentieth century
by naming Franklin D. Roosevelt “Person of the Century.”

Like all those
whose lips are still attached to FDR’s backside, Professor
Schlesinger neglects to mention that FDR’s own lips were attached
to Joe Stalin’s backside. In a near-miracle of distortion,
he even manages to give the totally false impression that Roosevelt
had something against Stalin.

Demurring from
Time magazine’s choice of Albert Einstein as P of the
C, Schlesinger asks: “But would science conceivably have flourished
had Roosevelt not secured free society against … external enemies?
Where would Einstein be if Hitler and Stalin had triumphed?”
(In Moscow, no doubt – but that’s another story.)

Sixty years
ago, Schlesinger goes on, democracy was “besieged by Nazism,
Communism, and Japanese militarism.” In that dark hour, “no
person was more vital to the survival and success of the free state
than FDR…. He strengthened democracy from without by leading the
grand coalition that defeated the grim forces of atrocity and horror….
He labored to awaken the nation from its isolationist slumber and
led us to understand the mortal threat posed by foreign dictators.”
Schlesinger even gives FDR indirect credit for the eventual fall
of Communism.

At this point,
a familiar eight-letter synonym for bovine ordure irresistibly suggests
itself. Roosevelt did denounce “dictators,” but not necessarily
all of them. He made one important exception.

Franklin Roosevelt
loved “Uncle Joe” Stalin, as he affectionately nicknamed
him, as ardently as he hated Hitler. In his first year in office,
just after Stalin had deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians,
FDR gave the Soviet Union the diplomatic recognition it craved.
He fatuously praised Stalin’s constitution for guaranteeing
religious freedom. He ignored Stalin’s purges, excused his
show trials, and forgave his aggression against five countries adjacent
to Russia. He extended Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets before the
United States actually went to war. Toward the end of the war, he
was willing to give Stalin a free hand in Poland, where the war
had begun with a joint German-Soviet invasion. Almost incredibly,
he called the Communist butcher “a Christian gentleman.”

Stalin never
had a better friend than FDR. And bear in mind that Roosevelt befriended
him when he had already slaughtered far more people – and in
peacetime! – than Hitler ever would in wartime. FDR’s
jaunty callousness was a perfect match for Stalin’s jovial
cruelty.

Contrary to
liberal mythology, Roosevelt’s friendship with Stalin wasn’t
just a necessity forced on him by war. It was something he freely
chose when he had a choice, and it went far beyond any strategic
need, beyond mere “appeasement.” He chose to help Stalin
from a position of superior strength – long before his indulgence
could be ascribed to age and illness. At least Neville Chamberlain
never idealized Hitler as “Uncle Adolf.” Next to Roosevelt,
Vidkun Quisling was a paragon of honor.

Joe McCarthy’s
famous postwar rampage against Communists in government missed the
point. Soviet agents like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were
only doing on a smaller scale what FDR was doing on a gigantic one.
No wonder commies thrived in the Roosevelt administration and the
Manhattan Project. Can anyone really believe that Roosevelt would
have begrudged a few secrets to Uncle Joe?

Roosevelt trusted
Stalin, a fact of which Stalin took full advantage – rather
like a spoiled child who steals from a doting grandparent. Never
one to accept as a gift what he could steal with his own hands,
Stalin’s shameless exploitation of his benefactor marks him
as, among other things, Ingrate of the Century.

Yes, “history”
– or at least one historian – is telling lies, as usual.
But do they have to be such whoppers?

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The
Best of Joseph Sobran

I was so overwhelmed that when I blew out the candles I couldn’t think of anything to wish for. I had it all. Thank you, Fran! And the food! Thank you, Sue Neff!

Among the gifts I received was a medallion of St. Thomas More, made just for me by the man I regard as the greatest sculptor of our time, Reed Armstrong, whom I hadn’t seen for years.

Seeing dear old friends again was only one of the surprises; so was meeting a dear new relative, my six-month-old great-granddaughter, Christina. Needless to say, she was beautiful, and we seemed to hit it off very well.

Two of my children and five of my seven grandchildren came too.

Among the latter I must mention Elizabeth, now pushing ten. She is a mysterious dark little beauty, whom I feel I must already talk to like a grown woman. The quiet maturity of her speech makes me feel I should be listening instead of speaking. In her tender patience, she is like a second mother to her six brothers.

These were just the high points. By the time I got the last stunning gift, the complete works of Mozart on 172 compact discs, it was just the cherry on the whipped cream on the banana split, as I told some of our newsletter subscribers.

As far as I’m concerned, old age is off to a flying start. Bring it on, I say!

The Real Enemies

Naturally, since the party I’ve reflected on aging and the approaching end of my career, at least in its present form. At this point I expected to be fairly settled, but things are still up in the air. This is also my 20th year writing for The Wanderer, another source of much joy, but, as I am reliably informed, nothing lasts forever. I only hope to continue for a while, as I try to peddle my new novel and stay afloat. At my age you have to think about little things like health insurance, which I always had when I hardly needed it.

In these 20 years American conservatism has changed remarkably. In 1986 I had no inkling of what lay ahead. The Cold War was winding up peacefully and happily, thanks to Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, and I assumed we could turn to the long-deferred business of restoring limited, constitutional government.

At long last, political life could get back to normal.

It seemed a modest enough hope, but yearning for “normality” soon came to seem as utopian as “building socialism.” When Reagan retired, the elder Bush found reasons for war on Panama and Iraq — with the full support of conservatives who should have known better. Then came the Clinton years, then another Bush, who made his father seem like Millard Fillmore.

(And of course I mean that as a compliment to the old man. Don’t make Millard Fillmore jokes around me unless you’re prepared for a heated argument.)

One of the baneful side effects of the Cold War was to make “peace” sound like a left-wing cause and to identify conservatism with war. But warlike habits proved hard to break, and with the Soviet enemy gone, conservatives found new enemies who didn’t threaten the United States at all.

Read the rest of the article

Joseph Sobran (1946—2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one of the most significant American writers. See his website and his intellectual journey.

The Best of Joseph Sobran

To my shock, dismay, and grief, a leading Shakespeare
scholar recently referred to “neo-Marxists” in the English
departments of our universities. He wasn’t criticizing such
scholars; on the contrary, he called them “men and women of
the greatest independence of mind.”

Funny how you can exempt yourself from the crimes of Marxism by
adding the prefix neo. A neo-Nazi isn’t usually regarded as
a higher life form than a regular old Nazi, but a neo-Marxist is
supposed to be unrelated to the folks who gave the world the gulag,
the reeducation camp, and the vast boneyards of Siberia, China,
and Cambodia.

What’s more, the original Marx is being honored with a fancy
new edition of The Communist Manifesto, which is now 150
years old.

So Marx is good, and neo-Marxists are good. It was just the people
who ruled countries in the name of Marx who were bad, you see. They
“betrayed” Marx – Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol
Pot, and the rest of those brutes.

Was there anything about Marx’s ideas that made them especially
susceptible to “betrayal”? This is the question you’re
not supposed to ask, because the answer is so obvious. When an idea
is “betrayed” every single time it’s put into practice,
the fault doesn’t lie with the practitioners alone.

There has never been a humane communist regime. Marxism is inherently
totalitarian. It recognizes no moral limits on the state. It’s
the most convenient ideology for aspiring tyrants; it also retains
its appeal for intellectuals, who have proved equally skillful at
rationalizing abuses of power and at exculpating themselves.

If the tyrants had really “betrayed” Marx, you’d
expect the true-blue Marxists to be nervously vigilant against pseudo-Marxist
despots. But they never are. They are always willing to trust every
new ruler who acts in the holy name of Marxism.

The most successful ideology of the 20th century denied any divine
element in man or the universe warranting modesty in the state.
That meant the end of privacy. People were punished for their thoughts
– even thoughts they hadn’t had yet, but which the Marxist
rulers could predict they would have because of their class membership.
(“Scientific” socialism didn’t have to wait until
they had really committed crimes, not even thought-crimes.)

Read
the rest of the article

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers of his time. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

March
9, 2000

Though
many papers are not carrying my column – for the duration of
my campaign for vice president on the Constitution Party ticket
– and most subscribers receive it by e-mail, a few newspapers
still run it. And one well-disposed editor has raised a point that
has probably occurred to other readers.

The question
is whether I should use this column to plug my own candidacy or
that of my estimable running mate, Howard Phillips. As a rule I’d
agree that I shouldn’t, and I usually avoid doing so. But on
a few recent occasions I’ve mentioned it in passing, and I
should explain why.

Why I should
be king

First, let
me acknowledge the obvious: Howard and I have about as much chance
of winning as I have of pitching in this year’s World Series.
The party has almost no money, name recognition, or television access.
It’s all we can do to get on the ballot: the two major parties
maintain tight control over the rules, which they use to prevent
competing parties from threatening their duopoly. Antitrust legislation
doesn’t apply to politics, where it is most needed. This is
an area where politicians forget to demand “campaign reform.”

Occasionally
I feel duty-bound to remind the world that we exist. In a better
world – a Frank Capra world – my little peeps might lead
to a word-of-mouth brushfire that would sweep the nation, as ordinary
Americans realized that they’re living under a lawless government
in the most literal sense: a government that disregards the fundamental
law of the Constitution. And they would rise up, in a fine populist
fury, and cast it off.

Alas, the world
we live in doesn’t work that way. Political “folk heroes”
like John McCain always turn out to have a lot of powerful connections
– and money.

I didn’t
enter this campaign with the expectation of winning – chilling
thought! Becoming vice president would be an intolerably tedious
interruption of my writing career. It’s the other way around:
I regard the campaign as an extension of my mission as a writer
– to evangelize for the forgotten principles of the Constitution.
If we win, wonderful! If not, we’ve at least offered our country
a chance to return to its roots.

So I have no
wish to bore my readers with campaign propaganda. I don’t want
my columns to sound like stump speeches; in fact, I’m afraid
my stump speech sounds a little too much like my columns, more analytical
than inspirational. The Tenth Amendment, my favorite topic, doesn’t
seem to fire anyone’s blood but my own. So far I’ve been
unable to start a riot by quoting it verbatim. As a demagogue I’m
an utter failure.

Whatever it
takes to make a successful politician, I just don’t seem to
have it. I can’t pretend I feel everyone’s pain. I don’t
have solutions for all their problems. I don’t feel generous
pledging to spend other people’s money on them. I hate to insult
their intelligence with extravagant promises. I don’t even
feel that their lives are necessarily empty without me.

At the risk
of sounding immodest, I believe I’d actually make a rather
good king. After all, the best kings were a lot like me. They knew
they hadn’t done anything to deserve their power, so they used
it sparingly. They didn’t have big dreams, didn’t try
to remake their societies from top to bottom, didn’t promise
their subjects the moon. Even their wars were mostly skirmishes,
by modern standards.

Unlike Woodrow
Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and others I could name, kings didn’t
talk a lot of utopian rot; in a democracy, you hear nothing else.
And compared with modern governments, most kings kept taxes low.
Americans paid far less under George III than under today’s
government. Blasphemous as it may seem to say so, they were freer
than we are. King George didn’t care a hoot whether you smoked
or how much water your toilet tank held. That’s how I would
try to be.

All this may
seem irrelevant, since I’m seeking the vice presidency, not
(at this point, anyway) the monarchy. But I want to assure my readers
and editors that if a crown were ever offered to me, they’d
have no cause for alarm.

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The
Best of Joseph Sobran

July
27, 1999

For
my money, the greatest movie ever made is The
Third Man, first released 50 years ago and now re-released
with restored footage (11 minutes had been cut from the U.S. version).
Usually praised as a "classic thriller," it’s much more
than that: it’s a study of evil that bears repeated viewings.

Rarely has
a film been blessed by such a perfect combination of direction (Carol
Reed), script (Graham Greene), cinematography (Robert Krasker),
music (Anton Karas), and excellent casting, right down to the creepy
minor characters.

An American
pulp-fiction writer named Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) comes to
occupied Vienna just after World War II to take a job writing for
an old pal’s "medical charity." But upon arrival, he learns
that his pal, Harry Lime, has just been run over by his own chauffeur.
Holly attends Harry’s funeral and talks to witnesses, whose conflicting
accounts of a "third man" at the death scene lead him
to believe that Harry was murdered. When a cynical British military
policeman, a Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), tells him that Harry
was "about the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living
in this city," Holly angrily resolves to find "the third
man," solve the murder, and shame Calloway by clearing Harry’s
name.

It turns out
that "the third man" was Harry himself – still alive
and in hiding after faking his own death. Moreover, Calloway was
right: Harry is getting rich in the black-market penicillin trade,
watering the stuff down and causing death and suffering to the innocent.
After falling in love with Harry’s lover, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli),
Holly finds Harry, confronts him, and eventually agrees to help
Calloway capture him.

Harry Lime
is one of the great villains of film. He’s played by Orson Welles
in a brief but unforgettable performance, which is well served by
Welles’s hammy style: Harry is a charming rascal who, as Anna says,
never grew up. Holly’s old schoolmate, who could fake illnesses
and report cards, has developed naturally into a ruthless criminal
who will sacrifice anyone, including Anna, to his own profit.
In his confrontation with Holly in a ferris wheel, Harry jauntily
explains his philosophy. Looking down at the tiny people milling
about below, he asks Holly what he’d say if Harry offered him $20,000
– tax-free – "for every one of those dots that stopped
moving." "Would you really, old man, tell me to keep my
money? Or would you calculate how many of those dots you could afford
to spare?"

In a telling
analogy, Harry likens himself to governments. "They talk about
‘the people’ and ‘the proletariat.’ I talk about the suckers and
the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans,
and I have mine." All this is said with a conspiratorial smile;
Harry knows how seductive he is, even when proposing murder.

Holly won’t
bite. He accuses Harry of throwing Anna to the wolves by allowing
the Russians to repatriate her to Czechoslovakia. Harry deflects
the charge: "What can I do, old man? I’m dead, aren’t I?"

Anna learns
that Harry is alive and that he has betrayed her to the Russians.
But she loves him anyway and won’t forgive Holly for helping Calloway
trap him. The film ends with a stunning snub: Anna walks coldly
past the waiting Holly without even giving him a glance. Even when
destroyed, Harry Lime still exerts a sinister power over the living.

There really
are people like Harry in this world. He may remind you of a certain
politician of similar personality: charming, cunning, ruthless,
knowing all the angles, profoundly self-centered and treacherous,
yet somehow able to retain the loyalty even of people he has deceived
and betrayed.

Evil doesn’t
usually appear with horns and cleft hooves. Often it comes with
a winning smile, an exaggerated warmth, an offhand joke, and an
offer that’s hard to refuse. It may flatter the suckers and the
mugs as "the American people," but it regards them as
so many dots, to be measured by opinion polls and focus groups,
with calculation where its conscience should be. And it gets a lot
of help from people who ought to know better.

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The
Best of Joseph Sobran

This
is a season of patriotism, but also of something that is easily
mistaken for patriotism; namely, nationalism. The difference is
vital.

G.K. Chesterton
once observed that Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of British imperialism,
suffered from a "lack of patriotism." He explained: "He
admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things
with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England
because she is strong, not because she is English."

In the same
way, many Americans admire America for being strong, not for being
American. For them America has to be "the greatest country
on earth" in order to be worthy of their devotion. If it were
only the 2nd-greatest, or the 19th-greatest, or, heaven forbid,
"a 3rd-rate power," it would be virtually worthless.

This is nationalism,
not patriotism. Patriotism is like family love. You love your family
just for being your family, not for being "the greatest family
on earth" (whatever that might mean) or for being "better"
than other families. You don’t feel threatened when other people
love their families the same way. On the contrary, you respect their
love, and you take comfort in knowing they respect yours. You don’t
feel your family is enhanced by feuding with other families.

While patriotism
is a form of affection, nationalism, it has often been said, is
grounded in resentment and rivalry; it’s often defined by its enemies
and traitors, real or supposed. It is militant by nature, and its
typical style is belligerent. Patriotism, by contrast, is peaceful
until forced to fight.

The patriot
differs from the nationalist in this respect too: he can laugh at
his country, the way members of a family can laugh at each other’s
foibles. Affection takes for granted the imperfection of those it
loves; the patriotic Irishman thinks Ireland is hilarious, whereas
the Irish nationalist sees nothing to laugh about.

The nationalist
has to prove his country is always right. He reduces his country
to an idea, a perfect abstraction, rather than a mere home. He may
even find the patriot’s irreverent humor annoying.

Read
the rest of the article

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers of his time. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

Because
I write about politics, people are forever asking me the best way
to teach children how our system of government works. I tell them
that they can give their own children a basic civics course right
in their own homes.

In my own experience
as a father, I have discovered several simple devices that can illustrate
to a child’s mind the principles on which the modern state deals
with its citizens. You may find them helpful, too.

For example,
I used to play the simple card game WAR with my son. After a while,
when he thoroughly understood that the higher ranking cards beat
the lower ranking ones, I created a new game I called GOVERNMENT.
In this game, I was Government, and I won every trick, regardless
of who had the better card. My boy soon lost interest in my new
game, but I like to think it taught him a valuable lesson for later
in life.

When your child
is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way
that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When
he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that
this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him
that this is "fair." Also, explain that you need the other
$4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money.
When he cries, tell him he is being "selfish" and "greedy."
Later in life he will thank you.

Make as many
rules as possible. Leave the reasons for them obscure. Enforce them
arbitrarily. Accuse your child of breaking rules you have never
told him about. Keep him anxious that he may be violating commands
you haven’t yet issued. Instill in him the feeling that rules are
utterly irrational. This will prepare him for living under democratic
government.

When your child
has matured sufficiently to understand how the judicial system works,
set a bedtime for him and then send him to bed an hour early. When
he tearfully accuses you of breaking the rules, explain that you
made the rules and you can interpret them in any way that seems
appropriate to you, according to changing conditions. This will
prepare him for the Supreme Court’s concept of the U.S. Constitution
as a "living document."

Promise often
to take him to the movies or the zoo, and then, at the appointed
hour, recline in an easy chair with a newspaper and tell him you
have changed your plans. When he screams, "But you promised!,"
explain to him that it was a campaign promise.

Every now and
then, without warning, slap your child. Then explain that this is
defense. Tell him that you must be vigilant at all times to stop
any potential enemy before he gets big enough to hurt you. This,
too, your child will appreciate, not right at that moment, maybe,
but later in life.

At times your
child will naturally express discontent with your methods. He may
even give voice to a petulant wish that he lived with another family.
To forestall and minimize this reaction, tell him how lucky he is
to be with you the most loving and indulgent parent in the world,
and recount lurid stories of the cruelties of other parents. This
will make him loyal to you and, later, receptive to schoolroom claims
that the America of the postmodern welfare state is still the best
and freest country on Earth.

This brings
me to the most important child-rearing technique of all: lying.
Lie to your child constantly. Teach him that words mean nothing – or
rather that the meanings of words are continually "evolving,"
and may be tomorrow the opposite of what they are today.

Some readers
may object that this is a poor way to raise a child. A few may even
call it child abuse. But that’s the whole point: Child abuse is
the best preparation for adult life under our form of GOVERNMENT.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers of his time. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

January
8, 2002

I’ve
had a lot of response to my column on Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s
new book Democracy
– The God That Failed, most of it enthusiastic. A surprising
number of citizens of this democracy have lost faith in the state,
democratic or otherwise.

It’s amazing
how seldom we ask the most basic questions. What is a state, anyway?
Where does it get its authority? Might we be better off without
it?

These are serious
questions. One scholar estimates that during the twentieth century,
states murdered about 177 million of their own subjects. And that
doesn’t count foreigners killed in wars. In order to justify
their own existence, states had better be doing someone a lot of
good, or be able to show that in the absence of states, even more
people would have been slaughtered. Neither proposition is credible.

“Wait
a minute,” someone will say. “You’re mixing apples
and oranges. Sure, there are bad states, like the Soviet Union,
which murder millions. But there are also good states, which don’t
murder people and which protect their people from bad states.”

Well, it’s
possible that a mildly rapacious state may afford us some protection
against a much worse one, just as one neighborhood gang may offer
safety against another. But all states are rapacious, almost by
definition.

What is a state?
It is the ruling body in a territory, which claims a monopoly of
the legal right to command obedience. It may demand anything –
our earnings, our services, our lives. Once the right to command
is conceded, there are no limits on its power.

Many people
think a state is a natural necessity of social life. They can hardly
conceive of society without the state.

This would
be plausible if the state confined itself to enforcing natural moral
obligations – that is, if it protected us from robbery, murder,
and the like, otherwise leaving us alone. But what if the state
itself robs and murders, claiming the authority to do so?

Any two men
will usually agree that neither may justly take the other’s
property or life. Nor does either owe the other obedience; that
would be slavery. But somehow the state claims what no individual
may claim – a right to the lives, property, and obedience of
all within its power. The state asserts its “right” to
do things that would be wrongs and crimes between private men. And
most people accept this claim! They think they have a moral duty
to obey power!

So why do people
think they have this duty? Of course, as the philosopher Thomas
Hobbes argued, the state ultimately rests on its power to kill (or
otherwise harm) those who disobey it. But this is a threat, not
a duty. If I demand your money at gunpoint, you will obey, but the
gun doesn’t create an obligation, merely a menace.

But the state
pretends that all its demands, however arbitrary, are moral obligations,
even though those demands rest on force. If it were confined to
demanding only what decent people do anyway – refraining from
murder, robbery, et cetera – it might be bearable. But it never
stops with reasonable moral demands; at a minimum, even the most
“humane” and “democratic” states use the taxing
power to extort staggering amounts of money from their subjects.
The predatory tendency of the state is inherent and expansive, and
nobody has found a way to control it. No control can long withstand
the monopolistic “right” to demand obedience in every
area of human activity the state may choose to invade. Systematized
force – which is all the state really is – follows its
own logic.

Legal forms,
moral rhetoric, and propaganda may disguise force as something it
is not. The idea of “democracy” has persuaded countless
gullible people that they are somehow “consenting” when
they are being coerced. The real triumph of the state occurs when
its subjects refer to it as “we,” like football fans talking
about the home team. That is the delusion of “self-government.”
One might as well speak of “self-coercion” or “self-slavery.”

No, the state,
now grown to a monstrous magnitude, remains what Albert Jay Nock
called it: “our enemy, the State.” Maybe Professor Hoppe
is dreaming. Maybe anarchism couldn’t be sustained. Maybe the
evil of systematized force can never be eliminated in this fallen
world. But why pretend such an evil is a positive good?

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The
Best of Joseph Sobran

February
3, 2000

“How
can you defend an oaf like John Rocker?” a friend asked me
recently. “I don’t disagree with you, but when you take
up his cause you’re just begging to be called a racist yourself.”

Well, being
smeared as a “racist” is just part of the game these days.
Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s evisceration of libel law
in the name of the First Amendment, you can’t do much about
it. But the worst thing you can do is to accept the role of defendant
and let yourself be intimidated by the ethos of laissez-faire libel.

Rocker, the
Atlanta Braves’ star relief pitcher, has now been fined and
suspended for the early part of the coming season by Major League
Baseball’s commissioner, Bud Selig. The sentence also includes
“sensitivity training,” on top of the psychological examination
Rocker has already submitted to. Selig said that Rocker’s unflattering
remarks about New York “offended practically every element
of society and brought dishonor to himself, the Atlanta Braves,
and Major League Baseball.”

Personally,
I disliked Rocker from the first time I saw him pitch. He’s
an abrasive man, like a lot of athletes nowadays. But that doesn’t
justify New York’s fans in spitting on him, pouring beer on
him, and throwing batteries at him. Neither do his opinions about
New York justify Selig in punishing him and, particularly, humiliating
him as a thought-criminal in need of a Soviet-style “cure.”

If Rocker had
broken some well-defined rule, it would be one thing. But Major
League Baseball, as far as I know, has no speech code. Selig himself
has brought dishonor on the sport by trying, in a totally arbitrary
manner, to impose taboos on the expression of opinion – taboos
that didn’t apply to Ted Turner’s crude jokes about Catholics,
the Pope, and Poles. (Turner, the Braves’ owner, has apologized;
but so has Rocker, unavailingly.)

Rocker has
been roundly condemned as a “racist” even though he never
mentioned race. But liberal invective is routinely accepted as free
speech.

The episode
throws a lot of light on the prevailing thought-crime code. Thought-crimes
differ from ordinary crimes in several respects.

First, they
aren’t defined. Nobody knows exactly what “racism”
is; it can mean anything the accuser wants it to mean. And it rarely
refers to overt acts; usually it refers to the alleged thoughts
or attitudes of the accused.

Second, nothing
has to be proved – and since the word has no clear definition,
nothing can be proved. So the accuser bears no burden of proof,
as he would in cases of ordinary crimes. The accused is presumed
guilty as long as the accusation is sufficiently strident. And,
given the vagueness of the charge, he can’t prove he isn’t
racist.

Third, and
most important, nobody ever has to pay a price for making a false
or reckless accusation. Nobody is ruined or disgraced for making
loose charges of “racism.” Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton
continue to thrive after making far more wild charges than Joe McCarthy.

You don’t
have to worry about being falsely accused of murder, because everyone
knows what murder is, there are clear procedures for testing the
charge, and anyone who makes a false accusation against you can
be sued or even jailed. But everyone has to worry about being accused
of “racism,” because these safeguards don’t exist
when that poisonous charge is leveled.

If you really
think racism is a serious matter, you want the word to mean something
definite and you want to make sure that innocent people are safe
from false charges of it. Otherwise, the word merely becomes a weapon
that can be picked up and wielded by opportunists and tyrants to
create a climate of intimidation.

Which course
describes the methods of those who profess to oppose racism in America
today? The answer is obvious. Charges of racism are made so promiscuously
that everyone has to walk on eggs to avoid incurring them. And no
accuser has to worry about any penalty for damaging an innocent
man’s good name.

Such a situation
can only breed such thought-police as Jackson and Sharpton, paving
the way for tyranny. It may not frighten the Ku Klux Klan, but other
people will learn to speak guardedly in multicultural America.

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The
Best of Joseph Sobran

Most observers are predicting a rout of the Republicans in this fall’s elections. Some think the Democrats can even recapture both houses of Congress.

I hope so. Oh, how I hope so. May the Republicans perish forever. May vultures gobble their entrails. May their name be blotted out. In short, may they lose their shirts in November.

Yes, I’m disillusioned with the GOP. It was bad enough when I thought they were unprincipled. Now, however, it’s worse, because they do have a principle after all: war.

Two Bush administrations have proved that. War on Panama, war on Iraq, war on “terror,” war on Afghanistan, war on Iraq again, and war on Iran, comin’ up. And of course the recent Israeli war on Lebanon was waged with George W. Bush’s complicity. Am I leaving anything out? Oh yes, his father’s war on “drugs”; but let’s not even count that one.

Next to the violence of war, I hate the philosophical fallout. This Bush administration has managed to pervert the meaning of conservatism: in most Americans’ minds, for the next generation, the word will mean, above all, militarism.

Not that this is wholly new. Goldwater conservatives supported the Vietnam war, originally a liberal project, even complaining that it wasn’t being waged with enough force. They began sneering at “peaceniks,” then equating peace with liberalism (and war with patriotism) and automatically favoring huge military budgets. Lyndon Johnson’s war soon became “Nixon’s war,” and the anti-war George McGovern redefined the Democratic Party.

By the Reagan years the old lines were redrawn. Quite a change from the days when Democrats wanted war on fascism and Republicans were accused of “isolationism” for preferring peace. Does anyone remember Robert Taft?

By identifying the conservative cause with war, the Republicans have given liberalism the finest gift they could possibly have bestowed on it. The popularity of war is intense but brief. Americans will support quick and victorious wars, but after a few months the thrill tends to wear off.

As late as 1976 grouchy Bob Dole, a bitter World War II vet, could still take a swat at “Democrat wars,” but the phrase sounded quaint. The amnesiac American public thought it was a contradiction in terms. When had the Democrats ever wanted war?

Read the rest of the article

Joseph Sobran (1946—2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one of the most significant American writers. See his website and his intellectual journey.

The Best of Joseph Sobran

My
arrival (very recently) at philosophical anarchism has disturbed
some of my conservative and Christian friends. In fact, it surprises
me, going as it does against my own inclinations.

As a child I acquired a deep respect for authority and a horror
of chaos. In my case the two things were blended by the uncertainty
of my existence after my parents divorced and I bounced from one
home to another for several years, often living with strangers.
A stable authority was something I yearned for.

Meanwhile, my public-school education imbued me with the sort of
patriotism encouraged in all children in those days. I grew up feeling
that if there was one thing I could trust and rely on, it was my
government. I knew it was strong and benign, even if I didn’t know
much else about it. The idea that some people — Communists, for
example — might want to overthrow the government filled me with
horror.

G.K. Chesterton, with his usual gentle audacity, once criticized
Rudyard Kipling for his “lack of patriotism.” Since Kipling was
renowned for glorifying the British Empire, this might have seemed
one of Chesterton’s “paradoxes”; but it was no such thing, except
in the sense that it denied what most readers thought was obvious
and incontrovertible.

Chesterton, himself a “Little Englander” and opponent of empire,
explained what was wrong with Kipling’s view: “He admires England,
but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but
love them without reason. He admires England because she is strong,
not because she is English.” Which implies there would be nothing
to love her for if she were weak.

Of course Chesterton was right. You love your country as you love
your mother — simply because it is yours, not because of
its superiority to others, particularly superiority of power.

This seems axiomatic to me now, but it startled me when I first
read it. After all, I was an American, and American patriotism typically
expresses itself in superlatives. America is the freest, the mightiest,
the richest, in short the greatest country in the world,
with the greatest form of government — the most democratic. Maybe
the poor Finns or Peruvians love their countries too, but heaven
knows why — they have so little to be proud of, so few “reasons.”
America is also the most envied country in the world. Don’t
all people secretly wish they were Americans?

That
was the kind of patriotism instilled in me as a boy, and I was quite
typical in this respect. It was the patriotism of supremacy. For
one thing, America had never lost a war — I was even proud that
America had created the atomic bomb (providentially, it seemed,
just in time to crush the Japs) — and this is why the Vietnam war
was so bitterly frustrating. Not the dead, but the defeat! The end
of history’s great winning streak!

As I grew up, my patriotism began to take another form, which it
took me a long time to realize was in tension with the patriotism
of power. I became a philosophical conservative, with a strong libertarian
streak. I believed in government, but it had to be “limited” government
— confined to a few legitimate purposes, such as defense abroad
and policing at home. These functions, and hardly any others, I
accepted, under the influence of writers like Ayn Rand and Henry
Hazlitt, whose books I read in my college years.

Though I disliked Rand’s atheism (at the time, I was irreligious,
but not anti-religious), she had an odd appeal to my residual Catholicism.
I had read enough Aquinas to respond to her Aristotelian mantras.
Everything had to have its own nature and limitations, including
the state; the idea of a state continually growing, knowing no boundaries,
forever increasing its claims on the citizen, offended and frightened
me. It could only end in tyranny.

I
was also powerfully drawn to Bill Buckley, an explicit Catholic,
who struck the same Aristotelian note. During his 1965 race for
mayor of New York, he made a sublime promise to the voter: he offered
“the internal composure that comes of knowing there are rational
limits to politics.” This may have been the most futile campaign
promise of all time, but it would have won my vote!

It was really this Aristotelian sense of “rational limits,” rather
than any particular doctrine, that made me a conservative. I rejoiced
to find it in certain English writers who were remote from American
conservatism — Chesterton, of course, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke,
George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, Michael Oakeshott.

In
fact I much preferred a literary, contemplative conservatism to
the activist sort that was preoccupied with immediate political
issues. During the Reagan years, which I expected to find exciting,
I found myself bored to death by supply-side economics, enterprise
zones, “privatizing” welfare programs, and similar principle-dodging
gimmickry. I failed to see that “movement” conservatives were less
interested in principles than in Republican victories. To the extent
that I did see it, I failed to grasp what it meant.

Still,
the last thing I expected to become was an anarchist. For many years
I didn’t even know that serious philosophical anarchists existed.
I’d never heard of Lysander Spooner or Murray Rothbard. How could
society survive at all without a state?

Now
I began to be critical of the US Government, though not very. I
saw that the welfare state, chiefly the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s
New Deal, violated the principles of limited government and would
eventually have to go. But I agreed with other conservatives that
in the meantime the urgent global threat of Communism had to be
stopped. Since I viewed “defense” as one of the proper tasks of
government, I thought of the Cold War as a necessity, the overhead,
so to speak, of freedom. If the Soviet threat ever ceased (the prospect
seemed remote), we could afford to slash the military budget and
get back to the job of dismantling the welfare state.

Somewhere, at the rainbow’s end, America would return to her founding
principles. The Federal Government would be shrunk, laws would be
few, taxes minimal. That was what I thought. Hoped, anyway.

I avidly read conservative and free-market literature during those
years with the sense that I was, as a sort of late convert, catching
up with the conservative movement. I took it for granted that other
conservatives had already read the same books and had taken them
to heart. Surely we all wanted the same things! At bottom, the knowledge
that there were rational limits to politics. Good old Aristotle.
At the time, it seemed a short hop from Aristotle to Barry Goldwater.

As is fairly well known by now, I went to work as a young man for
Buckley at National Review and later became a syndicated
columnist. I found my niche in conservative journalism as a critic
of liberal distortions of the US Constitution, particularly in the
Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion, pornography, and “freedom of
expression.”

Gradually I came to see that the conservative challenge to liberalism’s
jurisprudence of “loose construction” was far too narrow. Nearly
everything liberals wanted the Federal Government to do was unconstitutional.
The key to it all, I thought, was the Tenth Amendment, which forbids
the Federal Government to exercise any powers not specifically assigned
to it in the Constitution. But the Tenth Amendment had been comatose
since the New Deal, when Roosevelt’s Court virtually excised it.

This
meant that nearly all Federal legislation from the New Deal to the
Great Society and beyond had been unconstitutional. Instead of fighting
liberal programs piecemeal, conservatives could undermine the whole
lot of them by reviving the true (and, really, obvious) meaning
of the Constitution. Liberalism depended on a long series of usurpations
of power.

Around the time of Judge Robert Bork’s bitterly contested (and defeated)
nomination to the US Supreme Court, conservatives spent a lot of
energy arguing that the “original intent” of the Constitution must
be conclusive. But they applied this principle only to a few ambiguous
phrases and passages that bore on specific hot issues of the day
— the death penalty, for instance. About the general meaning
of the Constitution there could, I thought, be no doubt at all.
The ruling principle is that whatever the Federal Government isn’t
authorized to do, it’s forbidden to do.

Read
the rest of the article

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers of his time. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

January
1, 2004

Once
upon a time, my father bought Time magazine every week, as I do
now. He paid 20 cents per issue; I’m paying $3.95. In my teens
I bought paperback editions of Shakespeare’s plays for 35 cents
each; now they cost about five bucks.

I’m no
economist; these are just some of my rough indices of how prices
have risen in my memory. Things in general now cost ten to twenty
times as much as they used to. Don’t even ask about groceries
or cars. If prices increased 1000 per cent overnight, we’d
notice. Spread over decades, it seems natural. We hardly notice,
let alone suspect mischief.

What’s
going on? Is America under the sway of an enormous counterfeiting
ring? That’s one way to put it. The funny money operation is
formally known as the U.S. Government.

The money supply
is now managed by the Federal Reserve System, which was created
in 1913 and was supposed to protect the dollar from inflation. It
obviously hasn’t quite worked out as planned. Or maybe it has,
but the public wasn’t let in on the real plan. Somebody must
benefit from the constant sapping of the dollar, but don’t
look at me.

Originally
the “dollar” was more than a piece of paper with some
president’s face on it. It was a fixed amount of precious metal.
When paper money came in, you could demand, and get, solid gold
or silver for it.

Over time,
the government took the dollar off the gold standard, meaning that
it was now just a piece of paper. Most people were a bit foggy about
that anyway, since they were used to paper money and supposed it
had some intrinsic value. In fact, its only value now lay in its
relative scarcity; it was no longer a promise to pay in precious
metals.

All this would
have shocked the Framers of the U.S. Constitution, who authorized
Congress to “coin” money, not private bankers to “print”
the stuff. The eventual decline of the dollar is just what they
would have expected when the Constitution’s prescription was
abandoned, which amounts to counterfeiting dollars with the permission
and encouragement of the government itself.

Our forebears
would have seen this as a moral issue – a government conniving
in the defrauding of its own citizens. But we accept it, take it
for granted, don’t get riled up, any more than sheep get indignant
about being sheared.

The chief business
of the U.S. Government today is fleecing us – through taxes,
spending, creating debt, and ensuring that we’re paid in shrinking
dollars. It may look like a conspiracy, but I’m inclined to
think it’s just the aggregate result of the doings of men who
are at once powerful and weak, venal and short-sighted, taking the
path of least resistance for men in their position.

And if the
public puts up with it, why not? Are your grandchildren going to
be furious at having to pay off huge debts bequeathed to them? Probably
no more furious than you are about the national debt you’ve
been paying off all your adult life.

I can’t
really get angry about it myself, even though I sense what’s
happening to us every time I notice another price increase. I almost
admire the people who do make a fuss about it, but there are so
few of them that they sound crazy, like Ezra Pound ranting about
“international financiers.”

No, it’s
hard to make a melodrama out of a slow process. The government is
less like a bank robber who storms in with ski mask and pistol than
like a timid little bank clerk who quietly, over the years, embezzles
a large fortune without setting off alarms or getting caught.

That timid
clerk may look like nobody’s idea of a criminal, but he may
be an all-the-more-effective enemy to trusting people just because
they’d never suspect him of breaking the law. Why, they assume
he shares their concern about the general moral deterioration of
society! Crime has no better mask than outward respectability. And
a man who sticks up a bank for $50 is more noticeable than a man
who embezzles a million bucks over many years, while carefully fixing
the books.

So when the
government tells us it’s protecting us from the world’s
most ruthless criminals, we ought to wonder if perhaps we need to
be protected from criminals a little closer to home. The chances
of your being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The
chance of your being robbed by your own government? That’s
easy: 100 per cent.

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The
Best of Joseph Sobran

May
18, 2000

Unlike
most spiritual leaders and moral teachers, Jesus of Nazareth offered
no formula for worldly happiness and social order. Just the opposite:
he told his disciples to take up their crosses (an image he used
well before the Crucifixion) and to expect suffering. He warned
them that the world would hate them as it hated him: it was their
destiny as Christians.

After the conversion
of the Roman world under the Emperor Constantine, a Christian civilization
arose and the age of martyrdom seemed to be over. Most Western Christians
still think of that period as a thing of the past, a venerable but
remote phase of their history.

But the most
intense persecution of Christianity occurred not in the Roman Empire,
but in the twentieth century, especially in the Communist world.
A large part of this story, hidden and ignored, is told in a new
book by Robert Royal, The
Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century (Crossroad Publishing).

It is hard
to tabulate or even estimate the number of Catholics and other Christians
murdered by modern tyrannies. The figure certainly runs into the
tens of millions, though it isn’t always easy to distinguish
between those killed specifically for their religion and those killed
for other reasons, ethnic and social. But contrary to recent slanders,
the Nazis as well as the Communists regarded the Catholic Church
as their mortal enemy.

After World
War II, Communism’s triumph in Catholic Central Europe –
the bitter fruit of the Anglo-American alliance with the Soviet
Union – brought ferocious assaults on Catholics. Yet, as Royal
observes, surprisingly few renounced their faith even in the face
of torture and death.

The measure
of these Catholics’ courage is suggested by part of one Jesuit’s
summary of the tortures they suffered in Albanian prison camps:

Most of them
were beaten on their bare feet with wooden clubs; the fleshy part
of the legs and buttocks were cut open, rock salt inserted beneath
the skin, and then sewn up again; their feet, placed in boiling
water until the flesh fell off, were then rubbed with salt; their
Achilles’ tendons were pierced with hot wires. Some were hung
by their arms for three days without food; put in ice and icy water
until nearly frozen; had electrical wires placed in their ears,
nose, mouth, genitals, and anus; burning pine needles placed under
fingernails; forced to eat a kilo of salt and having water withheld
for 24 hours; boiled eggs put in their armpits; teeth pulled without
anaesthetic; tied behind vans and dragged; left in solitary confinement
without food or water until almost dead; forced to drink their own
urine and eat their own excrement; put in pits of excrement up to
their necks; put on a bed of nails and covered with heavy material;
put in nail-studded cages which were then rotated rapidly….

As Royal, a
Dante scholar, remarks: “The sorrowful litany shows an inventiveness
in torture surpassing the punishments that Dante, one of the great
human imaginations of all time, displayed in writing his Inferno.”
No less horrible than the sheer conception of these torments is
the fact that men were found who could be paid to inflict them without
fainting.

Yet the martyrs
not only died willingly, but often died forgiving and blessing their
killers, in the very spirit of Christ. Royal recounts similar stories
– amazing, sickening, inspiring – from Russia, Ukraine,
Mexico, Spain, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Latin America,
China, Korea, Vietnam, Africa, and elsewhere. Christ’s warnings
are still being borne out.

Why hasn’t
all this been told before? It’s not surprising that the liberal
Western media should ignore it; what is very surprising is that
American Catholics have ignored the plight of their brethren. But
prosperous American Catholics are a self-absorbed lot, too obsessed
with contraception and women priests to spare much thought for those
who are far worse off.

As the brave
Romanian Bishop Iuliu Hirtea put it before his death in the 1970s:
“It is not we who keep silence here. It is not we who are the
Church of Silence, but the members of the Church in the free world
who are the real Church of Silence, for they do not speak on our
behalf.”

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The
Best of Joseph Sobran

William Bennett has caused another uproar, far from
his first, by noting that the crime rate might be reduced by aborting
all black babies. He has defended this comment by reminding us
that he called this reprehensible idea “reprehensible.”

Which should hardly have been necessary, since it would only have been put in the words he used by someone who considered it reprehensible. Most people who want to promote black abortion call it something vague, like “giving choice to poor women,” and nobody accuses them of saying what they actually mean.

Still, though Bennett had a point, it was a point about certain kinds of crimes – street crimes. But there are other kinds of crimes, crimes we tend to forget are criminal, because the government sanctions them.

Just after Bennett made his comments, I watched the absorbing film Fat Man and Little Boy, a dramatization of how a group of brilliant men, during World War II, created a weapon that would murder thousands of people in a couple of seconds. This, of course, was the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Government’s crash program to make the atomic bomb. The scientists succeeded all too well, but some of them later had qualms about what they had done.

I couldn’t help noticing that all the characters, in the movie as in real life, were white. I suppose you could say – and here I want to stress that the idea is reprehensible – that if all white babies had been aborted, far fewer nonwhites, from Japan to Iraq, would have been killed by American bombs.

When you look at it that way, you begin to see what the late Susan Sontag meant when she wrote, in her precocious days, that the white race is “the cancer of history.” She later apologized for this observation, but it was still quoted in her obituaries. It had all the brutal logic of youth.

Highly civilized white men have produced the world’s most terrible weapons of mass murder, but they prefer to call these “weapons of mass destruction,” a phrase that slightly disguises their nature. It would sound absurd to say that “we mustn’t allow weapons of mass murder to fall into the wrong hands,” since there can be no “right” hands; but if you substitute destruction for murder it sounds almost reasonable to people who don’t stop to think what you are saying.

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Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was
one of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The Best of Joseph Sobran

January 11, 1999

I miss Hemingway.

This may seem an odd time for literary lamentations, but it’s not just my nostalgia speaking. The fog of war is aggravated by the fog of official language, and our rulers seem unable to open their mouths without emitting cant, cliché, dead metaphors, and useless abstractions – about “democracy,” “freedom,” “terrorism,” “Islamofascism,” “diplomatic solutions,” et cetera – which, far from defining the problems we face, only compound the confusion.

At times like this, we need clear, spare, specific language that acknowledges what we are really talking about, the kind of prose that made writers like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, both unsentimental war correspondents as well as novelists, so useful, invigorating, and even in a way consoling to read. Even today, when you read them, you know you aren’t reading dated propaganda. Good reporters still, as ever, avoid the false, loaded language of politicians. This always irritates partisans, who suspect objectivity of being disloyal and treasonous. The more we kill, the more we seem to demand euphemism.

You don’t have to be neutral in order to be honest. You merely have to describe what you see and stick to what you really know. You must ruthlessly suppress anything that smacks of wishful thinking, letting the details do the talking even when they hurt your own side. Good writing should be calm, even cold, something the reader can trust amid all the shooting and shouting.

This is a hard discipline, because impassioned people always want to justify their own side, no matter how urgent the need for the simple perspective of fact. It’s no use denouncing “cowardly terrorists,” for example, when terrorists are often fanatically, terrifyingly courageous and nothing is gained by pretending otherwise.

Likewise it’s no use complaining about “extremism” in an extreme situation, which is what war is. War by its nature inverts ordinary morality. The combatants do and approve things that would horrify them in peacetime. Devout Christians become murderers. Soldiers are honored for killing and dishonored, or worse, for refusing to fight. Atrocities are excused, except when the enemy commits them. Any scruples about killing are said to “handcuff” our own troops.

At such times unflinching honesty becomes a rare virtue. Few can look at their own side with cold eyes, or admit that the enemy is essentially no different from a moral point of view, even if his cause is bad.

In war we naturally adopt a double standard, with one vocabulary for our side and another for the enemy. Americans still cherish the memory of Axis atrocities in World War II and justify their own, particularly the intensive bombing of German and Japanese cities – things nobody would have predicted, much less advocated, before the war broke out. Even today, we commonly justify the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for “shortening the war” and even saving Japanese lives.

But which side’s rulers were tried and put to death for “war crimes” after the war? Which side is even now expected to do eternal penance for what it did during that war? America brought the world into the nuclear age, a permanent and irreversible horror. Was that a war crime?

No, we fret that these weapons of mass murder and mass terror may fall into “the wrong hands.” Ours, of course, are the “right” hands, in which they may be safely trusted. And we marvel that much of the world hates and fears us.

This is why we need that rare minority who can, even in wartime, look at ourselves dispassionately and speak in the disillusioned language, without rhetorical embellishment, of men like Hemingway and Orwell. Such writers do still exist, plentifully enough to help keep us sane, and they are much more likely to be found, I regret to say, in the liberal than in the conservative press. I suppose this is because, since World War II, conservatives have abandoned their old skepticism of war. This is both an explanation and a fact that needs explaining itself.

We live in terrible, confusing times, the worst I can remember. Events are so far beyond our control that about all we can hope to achieve is to keep our own minds clear. It’s not just that our rulers lie to us; it’s that they wouldn’t know how to tell the truth if they wanted to. Honest language is among our few remaining hopes.

Sobran’s Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance on YouTube. Learn how to get a tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one of the most significant American writers. See his website and his intellectual journey.

The Best of Joseph Sobran

January
25, 2007

Dozens
of people have announced their candidacies for the White House in
2008, and if I had to bet at this point, I would put my money on
the old woman. Hillary may be awful, but at least she is predictable.
I suppose I can learn to resign myself to her.

What difference
does it really make? Our next president will have his or her hands
full cleaning up after George W. Bush. In a negative sense, he has
already set the agenda for his unfortunate successor. Just getting
this country back to normal would be a labor of Hercules. And Hercules
isn’t in the race.

Politics doesn’t
often produce good news, but I am slightly heartened to learn that
Congressman Ron Paul is contemplating a run for the presidency.
The Texas Republican has now taken the standard preliminary step
of forming an exploratory committee.

Paul, a pro-life
medical doctor, is a genuine political maverick. When the House
votes for something 434 to 1, you can safely bet that Paul is the
1. He really fights for the principles other Republicans only pretend
to stand for, and does so with carefully reasoned explanations of
his positions.

In essence,
Paul appeals to that subversive document, the U.S. Constitution,
long since abandoned by both major parties, not to mention the U.S.
Supreme Court. He tests every proposed law by asking whether it
exercises a power authorized by the Constitution. The answer is
seldom yes.

Many years
ago Paul told me, with his affably ironic smile, that he felt more
pressure from his fellow Republicans than from Democrats, because
the Democrats weren’t embarrassed when a Republican voted like
a real conservative, but the Republicans were. Showing up his own
party has been the story of Ron Paul’s career. No other Republican
has voted against President Bush as consistently as he has.

Paul isn’t
flamboyant or defiant about it; his style is quiet and reasonable,
not combative. Being a maverick isn’t a pose for him. It’s
a matter of conscience and logic.

As a result,
the GOP doesn’t care much for him and, if he runs, will try
to stifle him. The allegedly right-wing Newt Gingrich, when he was
riding high, once supported Paul’s opponent in the primary
race; Gingrich knew what he was doing. A genuine conservative’s
worst enemy is a fake one. And vice versa.

Paul ran for
president once before, in 1988, when he bolted the GOP to run on
the Libertarian Party ticket. Much as I admired him, I voted for
George H.W. Bush, afraid of ”wasting” my vote on Paul,
who had no real chance of winning. Silly me. I soon realized I had
really wasted my vote on Bush. It made no difference to Bush, after
all, since he was going to win no matter what I did; but it made
a difference to me. I still regret it. (And to this day, Bush has
never thanked me.)

Paul has no
chance of winning this time either, but he may make a real difference
just by being himself. He is what liberals used to call a conscience-raiser.
He makes people reflect. After six years of supporting George W.
Bush, conservatives should be in a reflective mood. American democracy
has come down to an unappetizing choice between the War Party and
the Abortion Party. Paul could offer an alternative to this bitter
dilemma.

The Constitution
must never be mistaken for Holy Writ, but at least it is based on
the idea that there should be what William F. Buckley has called
”rational limits to government.” At this point, even that
may well be a utopian hope.

But we have
subscribed to the principle that the Federal Government must confine
itself to powers actually enumerated therein. And after all, our
rulers are still sworn to uphold it, just as Bill Clinton is still
legally bound by his wedding vows.

Taken literally,
this would reduce the government to about 5 percent of its current
size. That would be a huge improvement. If nothing else, the Constitution
stands as a reminder of what normality used to be.

Well, I can
dream, can’t I? And today I’m dreaming of President Ron
Paul, with a Congress he deserves.

Sobran’s
Reactionary Utopian archives. Watch Sobran’s last TV appearance
on YouTube.
Learn how to get a
tape of his last speech during the FGF Tribute to Joe Sobran
in December 2009. To subscribe to or renew the FGF E-Package, or
support the writings of Joe Sobran, please send a tax-deductible
donation to the: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna,
VA 22183 or subscribe online.

Joseph
Sobran (1946–2010), conservative turned libertarian, was one
of the most significant American writers. See his
website and his
intellectual journey.

The
Best of Joseph Sobran