Eric Margolis’ latest LRC article, Trump of Arabia, particularly hit home with me.
For an old history teacher who has studied, taught about, and witnessed how the US and the West after 1917 built the Soviet military industrial complex, rebuilt the post-WWI German economic infrastructure that facilitated the military build-up of the National Socialist regime under Hitler, enhanced and fostered radical Islamic terrorism (Arc of Islam) as a Cold War strategy against the Soviets and their allied Arab socialist and nationalist regimes gone insanely bad, and many other criminally duplicitous endeavors, I should not be once again outraged and nauseated.
But I am.
In the name of amoral Realpolitik and geostrategy, these necrophiliacs have once again perpetuated their ongoing malignant mission of murder and mayhem.
As you know, I’ve been a libertarian over 45 years, a radical Rothbardian. I often think that for these four plus decades I have been just going through the motions based on over-intellectualizing arguments built upon hollow cliches.
Years ago an emotional cathartic experience upon awaking in the morning finally made me “see” what has been before me all this time: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Corrupts specifically what? One’s soul, the very essence of being a human being created in the image of God.
Suddenly a lifetime of reading, thoughts, reflections came to mind. Pertinent quotes from authors came pouring into my consciousness. Political ideology is often meaningless; it only serves to put blinders on us and mask this basic truth.
It is the very essence of what the fallen and sinful nature of man is all about — what Saint Augustine in The City of God described as Libido Dominandi or the lust for power or domination.
The soul-corrupting, corrosive essence of power, expressed in its ultimate expression as violence, is what it is all about. That is what its prophets and practitioners have been saying all along and acting upon for centuries: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, Sorel, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. The trans-valuation of values, the liberating effect of terror and violence, all contained in the very concept of the State.
This satanic attempt to create a new man-god beyond good and evil is as old as the serpent’s temptation of Adam and Eve. We have been warned about this for centuries, from St. Augustine to James Madison, from Dostoevsky (“if God is dead, everything is permitted”) to Hannah Arendt (“the banality of evil”).
The final pages of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where O’Brien lectures Winston Smith that power is not a means but the end especially came into mind. And here was the break though moment — this dark corrupting impulse, this thirst for power and domination was not something abstract, confined to words of print or distant dictators of past or present. But something we see all about us, today, here in the good ol’ USA (as the late Will Grigg courageously reminded us almost daily at LRC). And it is something that has always been here, embedded in the nature of power and its practitioners, in their lies, deceits, evasions, bullying, thuggery, torture and other expressions of base criminality.
This is the essence of history of the State — the rationalization of violence. Consciously, intellectually, I have known all this for over 40 plus years, but until that morning’s gestalt experience it’s as if I had been an empty vessel.
And as a result of all this, I have gained a new deeper appreciation of the heroic “speaking truth to power” that Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul, Justin Raimondo, Jacob Hornberger, Alex Jones, Tom Woods, and Judge Napolitano do on a daily basis.
Each of them, in their own way, tries to do what Carl Oglesby said decades ago must be done about the system that created and sustained the Vietnam War: “name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and strive to change it.”
That is what Murray Rothbard spent his whole life doing, and each of them have taken up his torch. I hope, in my own way, I will continue to do so also.
Perhaps after serious reflection, you too will come to this powerful realization.
I am confident that many of you have in fact already experienced this deep interior self-examination and have made the appropriate life-shaping decisions for yourself, your family, and others close to you regarding the future of our vanishing Republic.
For this you are to be commended and honored as compatriots in our common struggle.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
12:42 pm on May 26, 2017
