Faith, Force and Freedom

Looking back over 2012, it's been one of my leaner blogging years. Not because nothing was happening worth mentioning - quite the contrary - but because I saw little point in addressing people who just didn't care to listen.

When ideology or prejudice trump reality in the minds of men, discussing reality with them becomes an exercise in pointless frustration. Thinking stops, and everything becomes a conditioned response. The campaign for Emperor demonstrated this on a daily basis. So did the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook elementary. Before the victims were even buried, the usual suspects began with the usual arguments: ban guns, register the mentally ill, whatever. Control, control, control, it's always about control.

Part of that is the corruption of reasoning I did write about. Another part of it is solipsism. In America especially, countless people live their lives entirely obsessed with themselves, to the point where other people simply aren't real to them. They are like NPCs in a video game. And since one doesn't empathize with NPCs, having zero empathy for other people has become the norm. When these NPCs are seen as obstacles to one's happiness - the paramount purpose of life robbed of all other meaning - the next step is actively hating those other people, and finding ways of hurting them. The pathology has a scale, of course: from forum trolling, via committing suicide by jumping in front of a train at rush hour, to picking up a rifle and shooting up a mall, school or movie theater.

That is not to say that video games are to blame. Quite the opposite. Games offer an escape from a reality that has long since become virtual. Remember the Bushians' disdain for the "reality-based community"? The notion that they were creating reality by the sheer force of their willpower, while the pesky realists were merely observing and analyzing it? Well, they aren't the only ones to believe it, just arrogant enough to admit it openly.

Modern omnipotent government has made treating people as things into an art form. Look at the militarized police, or the callous disregard for the lives of people in invaded - oops, liberated - countries. Look at the drones and their pilots. Being a sociopath is almost a recommendation for the job.

If we're looking at a "culture of" anything to blame for the rotten mess we're living in, it's got to be this culture of narcissism, as Brendan O'Neill describes it. Guns? Serbia has the second-highest concentration of guns per capita, after the U.S., but there are no rampage murders there. The Orthodox Church, which is most definitely not concerned with an individual's feelings, might have something to do with it as well.

Of course, the Serbs have gone to the other extreme, refusing to use their weapons even for legitimate self-defense. 

Yet I've been unable to put into words the conclusion that simply leaps out from all this, for several days now. Until I saw this article. So I'll borrow Daniel Greenfield's turn of phrase, and say that what both the Serbs and the Americans need to learn is that "when you give up faith to force, then you also abandon any further reason to resist that force. Without faith, it is easier to let force win."

Caged

Next week it will be two months since the Serbs in northern Kosovo erected roadblocks to oppose the Albanian government's attempted takeover of road crossings into the rest of Serbia. NATO's "peacekeeping" force and EU's "law and order mission" have both backed the Albanian takeover, and continue attempting to coerce the Serbs to submit to the self-proclaimed independent state.

On the rare occasion when Western mainstream media reports on the standoff, it uses terms such as "ethnic clashes". This not only suggests that the Serbs are being motivated by bigotry (following two decades of propaganda claiming that everything the Serbs did was based on bigotry), but also that the two communities are on some kind of equal footing. In actuality, the unarmed Serb civilians are squaring off against the well-armed Albanians, EULEX and KFOR, who in addition to teargas and pepper spray have  even used live ammunition. It is very telling that "ethnic clashes" was the official euphemism for the March 2004 pogrom some 40,000 or more ethnic Albanians perpetrated against the remaining Serbs in the occupied province.

I say "remaining," because hundreds of thousands of Serbs (and others, such as Roma, Turks, etc.) were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo since it was occupied by NATO and handed over to the Albanian separatist KLA in 1999. Over 1000 Serbs have been murdered, countless homes burned, churches destroyed and desecrated, and cemeteries bulldozed. All in the presence of NATO "peacekeepers," all with absolute impunity. Under NATO's "peace," two new Albanian insurrections broke out, in Macedonia and in southern Serbia.

Several pockets of Serbs survive in the south of the province, in ghettos surrounded by barbed wire and "protected" by NATO troops. The great irony is that without those troops, the Albanians would have murdered them by now; yet it was those NATO troops that made the Albanian takeover possible.

In the north of the province, the local Serbs succeeded in halting the KLA takeover in 1999, and have kept a watch on the roads ever since. The writ of the KLA regime does not run there, much to the frustration of the self-proclaimed state. Yet though the areas ruled by the Albanians are almost entirely devoid of non-Albanian inhabitants, while other communities live in peace on Serb-controlled territory, the Western press continues to refer to "Serb-dominated" areas. How about the entire "Albanian-dominated" province? Ah, but they also avoid "Albanian," preferring to use the politically correct euphemism "Kosovar," designed to promote the lie that they are the original inhabitants and rightful owners of the territory.

Recently the Albanian "government" in Pristina and the Albanian government in Tirana signed a deal to share consulates around the world, bringing them a step closer to "Natural Albania" - a state encompassing all territories claimed by ethnic Albanians. Dismissed as "Serb propaganda" in the 1990s, the idea is now publicly promoted by a political party in "Kosovo," and even has the endorsement of a prominent Imperial figure.Yet Imperial propaganda still seeks to dismiss concerns over this as unduly paranoid.

What's disappointing, though, is hearing media that aren't part of the Imperial propaganda mill, such as RT, using the Empire's propaganda phrases. By way of example, in this clip today the presenter used "Serb-dominated" to refer to the north of Kosovo, and reporter Aleksey Yaroshevsky claimed that the Serbs were growing "accustomed to living in the cage they have built for themselves."

Kosovo itself is a cage, not just for Serbs but for everyone else. Even the Albanians who live there are captives of a criminal regime and a bigoted ideology. The Serbs set up the barricades not to seal themselves in, but to keep NATO, EULEX and the KLA "officials" out. Which is precisely what they've done so far, despite all efforts to coerce them into submission. It was a desperate act of a people resisting repression and plans for extinction. They deserve better than to be maligned for it, least of all by people trying to hack the Empire's propaganda matrix.

I guess some people still need to realize there is no spoon.

Good for the Windsors

The extent to which the British royal wedding has provoked both gushing and loathing from the media and the public bears witness to the enduring power of royalty in human minds. These days, "democracy" is on everyone's lips as the universal shibboleth (though few could actually define it, if asked), but for the better part of history human societies have been governed by monarchs of some sort. Even Americans, who in the 1780s resuscitated Roman republicanism and later spread it throughout the world, tend to fawn over their leaders in a decidedly un-republican fashion. Remember the Obama inauguration?

Some of the hate for William and Kate is just humorous. I like Charles Stross as a writer, but his rabid anti-royalism is just outlandish. Yes, monarchies are "hereditary dictatorships", but that actually tends to make them less evil than the non-hereditary ones, and certainly more preferable to the revolving-door oligarchies that pass for republics these days.

I'm not so much a monarchist as someone who vastly prefers honest, organic statism to the totalitarian nanny-state democracies inevitably tend to produce. If you don't believe me, read Hoppe.

The philistines who complain about the cost of the royal wedding never seem to kvetch about the cost of killing people - be it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or elsewhere. I'm sure that, if they'd had a choice, the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would have preferred a small, private ceremony instead of a public performance. That's part of what most people don't bother thinking about: the life of a royal is circumscribed by duty and obligation.

In this particular case, a public ceremony may have been organized with more than just the newlyweds in mind. With Queen Elizabeth II close to matching Queen Victoria's record for the longest reign, and her son Charles so unpopular that crowning him might spell the end of British monarchy, odds are the Brits will be hailing King William V soon.

And who knows, maybe the Windsors' Serbian cousins might learn a lesson or three from the entire affair.

Down to One Question

One can write a dozen essays and argue oneself hoarse over the merits of market economy and still get the ignorant response typical of most people, that governments need to "regulate" the market else it "fails."

I can't count the number of such situations I've found myself in over the past decade or so, and I wish I had this pearl from William Norman Grigg (Pro Libertate), published today on LRC:

Obama is a reasonably bright fellow. Somebody he respects – assuming there is any great enough to command his attention and rebuke his errors – needs to ask him this question, and compel him to answer:

"If the key to prosperity is a centrally planned economy fueled by fiat currency, why isn’t Zimbabwe the wealthiest nation in history?"

Yes, indeed, why not?

Constitution vs. Freedom

By way of a friend in faraway New Zealand, I received this afternoon an opinion piece from the New Zealand Herald, in which the author argues for a Constitution. Apparently, the only three democracies in the world without one are the UK, New Zealand and Israel, and now Gordon Brown (Blair's heir-designate as PM) is talking about changing that in Britain.

If you read the original piece, it's clear that the author sees the Constitution as a bulwark for government programs (education, healthcare, politics of race, etc.) rather than against government abuses. I'm suspecting the same "logic" is at work in Britain; a decade of Blairism has led to many changes in British state and society, and it's only natural for Blair's heir to wish to cement these impositions, rather than risk them undone by someone else down the line.

Here's a passage from the NZ Herald op-ed that seeks to camouflage this sentiment and present a constitution as a protection of rights:

The Institute for Public Policy in Britain has warned that its Parliament can deprive citizens of centuries-old rights "by the same means as an alteration of the speed limit" - that is, a 51 per cent vote.

Welcome to democracy! That's precisely what it's about, when one gets rid of the legalistic frills. Of course the thought is terrifying. But it is precisely because the Parliament has such power that it has been exercised with restraint. That is, until Oliver Cromwell Blair chose to remake Britain in his own vision...

The American constitution, which established the federal government of the U.S.A., was a compromise between statist, empire-building ambitions and a conservative distrust of government. Fast-forward 200+ years since its passage, and one can easily see all the provisions limiting federal government power either circumvented or ignored completely, while a multi-trillion-dollar bureaucracy employing millions has arisen out of deliberate misinterpretation of a couple of words (i.e. commerce clause). But Americans today insist they are free, because the Constitution protects them. Right. And the Moon is made of cheese.

States love constitutions. Rather than being the chain that binds their power, constitutions are a disguise that protects their tyranny. When the behavior of the state is governed by tradition, history and precedents, society has control over the state. Once a paper replaces tradition, that control moves into the hands of the state itself. A court reviews it, a parliament of some kind amends it. The state becomes its own arbiter. How likely is it to judge itself harshly? If you answer "very," I've some beachfront real-estate in Nevada for you. Call now, operators are standing by.

If Britain gets a constitution - and with Labour controlling all the levers of government, the question is not "if " but rather "when" - it will become even less free than it is today (which, admittedly, isn't much). I don't know how highly the Kiwis value their liberty, but they are guaranteed to lose it if they follow Britain's example; leaving Israel as the only democratic state that answers to an authority higher than itself.

Aptly ironic, if you ask me.

Hegemonic Maniacs

Sometimes the sheer absurdity of the world we live in, the wrongness of it, tends to overload my synapses and I just stop paying attention for a while. If I ever allow that condition to become permanent, I would of course become one of the docile drones the Empire counts on to support its continued existence.

Paul Craig Roberts keeps paying attention, though. Just the other day, he listened to two Imperial officials prattle about the need for hegemony on NPR (where else?). In discussing North Korea, Roberts says,

"Both Hill and Carter agreed that no country, with the exception of Israel, has a right to any interests of its own unless it is an interest that coincides with U.S. interests. No other interest is legitimate."

Roberts continues:

"Listening to the pair of hegemonic maniacs, I realized that the United States is the new Rome—there is no legitimate power but us. Any other power is a potential threat to our interests and must be eliminated before it gets any independent ideas."

Yet for all the Neocon prattle about the US being the sole superpower with the world at its mercy, there are billions of people who disagree - and many of them belligerently so. If the USA is the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, this must be what the Empire looked like in its waning days, its power still considered supreme even as it was in practice nothing more than a cruel joke.

Left, Right and Liberty

From an essay by Anthony Gregory, today at LRC:

To love liberty is to oppose the state’s timeless assault on it, whether wearing the cloak of tradition and cheered on by bloodthirsty generals, corporate suits and social conservatives, or donning the mask of humanitarianism and equality and trailed by a parade of social workers, bureaucrats, unionists, humanities professors and multilateral warmongers. [...] But the ugly thing about politics is, no matter how unsavory one side gets as it is exercising and vying for power, the power itself can always corrupt the other side. Left and right can turn on a dime, but the potential of the state itself to grow and worsen is ultimately constrained only by the laws of economics, by human nature, and by a public opinion inclined to resist the state’s advances, regardless of the garb it wears.

Cartoon Controversy

So, a Danish newspaper prints cartoons of Islam's prophet Muhammad several months ago, and the issue flares up two weeks ago into mass protests, flag-burnings, death threats, boycotts, attacks on embassies and missions...

One of the common misconceptions in mainstream reports about the "cartoon row" is that Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere did not riot because some of the cartoons depicted Muhammad in an unflattering manner, but because they depicted Muhammad at all. Visual depiction of Muhammad is strictly forbidden under Islamic law.

Fair enough - but Denmark, Europe, and the US for that matter, don't live under Islamic law, do they? In fact, they follow a set of laws protecting the freedom of expression (at least on paper). So in these countries, depiction of Muhammad - while some may consider it sinful - is not illegal.

This is where ignorance comes in. See, the cartoons were commissioned as commentary on self-censorship by illustrators who balked at drawing Muhammad for a children's book, fearful of provoking just this sort of reaction. Ironically, the book was supposed to teach Danish children tolerance towards Islam. But whoever was behind it obviously had no clue whatsoever that Muslims consider visual representations of their prophet a sin. Nor were they aware that in Islam, sin and crime and pretty much one and the same, because it is not just a faith, it is a social order. And not just that - it is a universal faith and social order, considered by its followers to be the ultimate divine revelation. Islam respects Judaism and Christianity's right to exist insofar as they are considered previous, "flawed" revelations of the divine message. As such, they get special, second-class status in Islamic societies, while all other faiths are deemed idolatrous and condemned to extermination. But they are not, under any circumstances, ever considered equal to Islam.

And because Islam considers itself universal and ultimate, it does not allow for coexistence with other social, religious or political systems: the dar-al-Islam is in constant conflict with dar-al-harb, the dark world of infidels who dare not accept the final revelation of god. To tell a Muslim that he should tolerate the freedom of a Dane to draw a picture of Muhammad is absurd; the injunction against it is at the heart of Islam, and thus applies everywhere, to everyone, especially the infidels. To deny the universal and ultimate character of Islam is to become apostate - and Islamic law says apostasy is punishable by death.

That is not to say that burning Danish embassies is the only response available to Muslims. Though violence in the name of the faith is considered a sacred charge, Muslims had many choices in how to react to the publication. Someone might have written to the editor and said, "Look, you are infidels and you do not understand. Any depiction of the Prophet is sacrilege to us, and we ask you to respect that." In today's West, obsessed with political correctness and "human rights," do you think anyone would deny this request?

But those who chose to make the cartoons into a focal point of mob violence did so on purpose. They wanted the riots, craved the outrage, desired violence, as it promoted their position within Islam as advocates of jihad against the West. The violence also played up old racist animosities; it should not surprise that Iranian papers thought a fitting response would be a cartoon depicting Anne Frank in bed with Hitler.

In a battle between free speech and "multi-culturalism," in today's Europe, free speech is bound to lose. The post-modern, post-Christian West simply cannot comprehend a religion like Islam, whose followers resort to aggression and murder at the smallest slight. Christians don't burn embassies when someone exhibits a crucifix soaked in urine, do they? Which goes to explain why Christianity is under constant attack by the secular state, and Islam is appeased at every step.

Again, the post-modern, post-Christian society running the West has only one religion - power - and only one saint, violence. Force is the only thing they worship, and the only thing they respect. When Christians are offended by something, they protest with words, and are answered with mockery. When Muslims are offended, people die - and Muslims are answered with apologies and claptrap about sensitivity, respect and tolerance: words they see in a completely different context, one the post-religious West doesn't understand.

A Glaring Omission

There is an excellent piece by H. Arthur Scott Trask on LRC today, dealing with the state of perpetual war so beloved of the Imperial government these days. It makes a lot of good points about the Cold War, the imperial mentality and the current "war" on terrorism or whatnot. But it makes one glaring omission: the Balkans.

In Trask's piece, 9-11 follows the 1991 Gulf War, drawing on the continuity between the Bushes. I beg to differ. It was Clinton who ran on an interventionist platform in 1992, and presided over the transformation of NATO into an aggressive alliance, first in Bosnia (1995) then Serbia (1999). It was Clinton who sent troops into Somalia and Haiti, and waged a lengthy air war on Iraq from 1998-99 (stopping only to switch to Serbia). British historian Kate Hudson saw this in 2003, when she called attention to a "pattern of aggression" characterizing the US foreign policy.

Another important aspect of Balkans interventions is that they were gradual. Involvement in Bosnia began as one demilitarized zone for humanitarian aid delivery (Sarajevo airport), then expanded to the no-fly zone, "safe havens," punitive air strikes, and finally a joint military operation with local proxy forces on the ground. Then that precedent was used in 1998 to threaten Serbia over Kosovo, and ratcheted up to full conventional war in March 1999, without even a fig leaf of UN authorization. "Desert Storm" was grounded in international law and authorized by the UN; "Allied Force" was emphatically neither. Can anyone seriously argue that without all those precedents, it would have been possible for Bush II to invade Iraq in the manner he did?

It isn't just the "neocons" that are the problem. Clinton's wars were engineered by "neoliberals," while the neocons cheered on. Both are united in the cause of American Empire, which is the problem. Much as I agree with Trask's article, and the points it's making, I don't see how anyone can fully understand how the Empire came about after the end of the Cold War if the ground-work done in the 1990s isn't at least mentioned. That, rather than personal attachments to the region, is the primary reason I still write about the Balkans.

Freedom, Real and Imagined

From an article by Joseph Sobran, titled National Socialism Comes to America:

"Americans are still permitted to do a great many things, though not as many things as their ancestors could take for granted. Fine. But permission isn’t freedom. The privilege of a subject isn’t the right of a free man. If you can own only what the government permits you to own, then in essence the government owns you. We no longer tell the state what our rights are; it tells us.

Such is the servitude Americans are now accustomed to under an increasingly bureaucratic state. Permission, often in the form of legal licensing, is the residue of the old freedom; but we’re supposed to think that this is still “the land of the free,” and that we owe our freedom to the state, its laws, and especially its wars. The more the state grows — that is, the more it fulfills the character of national socialism — the freer we’re told we are."

These past several weeks, while I wasn't posting on the blog, I've been thinking about the American bureaucratic state and comparing it to the Socialist Yugoslavia of my youth. Back then, people had a distrust of government born out of many failed promises, and decades of experience with "gaming" the bureaucratic system to provide themselves and their relatives the services (monopolized by the state, and therefore both unreliable and shabby) they needed. We understood we were better of than Soviet client-states and even the USSR itself, but few fully realized the reason for that was a higher degree of economic liberty. To further complicate things, much of our "prosperity" was a result of easy credit, fueled by IMF and World Bank loans.

Now I look at the country where I've lived for almost 10 years, and I see the same state-supremacist thinking I grew up with in Socialism, the same credit boondoggles that preceded my country's downfall, the same bureaucratic incompetence that we used to joke about, then circumvent (something not easily achieved here). Add to that the gargantuan military, the National Security state, and a dictatorial Emperor - um, President, yes - and a population 10 times that of Yugoslavia in 1991, and the problems that killed my country are that much more amplified in this one.

But hey, people believe they are free - even though that word has lost all its meaning for them long ago. If you're completely oblivious to something, you can't really miss it when it disappears, right?

The Heart of the Matter

Today on LRC, Anthony Gregory admonishes those who avoid seeing the forest from the trees:

The state is not about laws on pieces of paper. It is about looting and violence. Its principal methods of funding are theft and counterfeiting, its regular modus operandi is extortion and its most conspicuous projects are assault and murder.

[...]

The state is an organization of coercion, a monopoly on aggression, falsely legitimized by its own fiat and sanctified in idolatrous mythology and through lying propaganda. There is no technicality that can curb its inherent conflict with the natural law and individual liberty. It draws actual blood, bankrupts actual companies, bombs actual cities and taxes actual wealth. Its soldiers shoot to kill, its taxmen are equally ruthless. In principle, it is no more bound by a subsection of its tax code than a mobster is bound by his vague promise to protect you. It is for all these reasons that the state must be understood and eventually dismantled wherever and whenever possible. Don’t get too distracted by the fine print and neglect the big picture.

Gregory doesn't deal here with the Empire (the state writ global), but his argument applies to it as well. Those people who still believe international law serves to restrain the Empire from visiting its whims upon whomever it chooses, or that the Empire has any intention of respecting the treaties it signed, are just as deluded as those who seek loopholes in the US tax code.

I want to retch every time I hear some two-bit wannabe diplomat from Belgrade "defend" Serbia's territorial integrity by invoking Resolution 1244, for example. Quibbling about details in Empire's arbitrary proclamations is futile - after all, it can simply make another, and move along on its merry pillaging way.

Finding Serenity

"Once you've been to Serenity, you never leave."

Television is often seen as mind-numbing poison - and in most cases, that's precisely what it is. But every once in a while, something truly brilliant appears on the telescreens: something different, unique, unusual. Such was Firefly, in the fall of 2002. And because it was so different, it was smothered quickly by the suits at the network that has made lowering the lowest common denominator a profitable mission.

Something happened then the suits did not expect. When it came out on DVD, Firefly became a runaway hit. We wanted to know what happened to Captain Mal and his raggedy bunch of misfits in their struggle to "find a job, any job," and "keep flying," always a step ahead of the tyrannical Alliance. And tomorrow we will.

"Serenity," the long-anticipated feature film sequel to the 13 episodes of "Firefly," opens Friday across the US. If you value liberty, despise tyranny and hanker for an old-fashioned adventure, see this movie. You won't regret it.

This is why...

Since the news, rumors and images started coming in from the lost city of New Orleans, I've seen many interesting opinions about the man-made disaster that followed the natural one. I have yet to see a better take than this piece by Butler Shaffer, on LewRockwell.com today:

"Once again, the Events in New Orleans have brought into focus the long-standing question that we have heretofore preferred not to face: is society to be organized by and for the benefit of individuals or of institutions? Does life belong to the living, or to the organizational machinery that the living so unwisely created? We are confronted – as was Dr. Frankenstein – by a monster of our own creation, which must control and dominate us if it is to survive. We continue to feed this destructive creature, not simply with our material wealth, but with our very souls and the lives of our children. [...]

In the outpouring of individual compassion and cooperation following the disaster in New Orleans, the state discovered a threat to its existence. Political systems thrive only through division and conflict; by getting people to organize themselves into mutually-exclusive groups which then fight with one another. This is why “war is the health of the state.” But if people can discover a sense of love and mutuality amongst them, how is the state to maintain the sense of continuing conflict upon which it depends?

This is why the state must prevent the private shipment of truckload after truckload of private aid to victims; this is why flood victims – including those who want nothing more than to remain in their homes – must be turned into a criminal class, against whom state functionaries will “lock and load” their weapons and “shoot and kill... if necessary.” The state is fighting for its life, and must exaggerate its inhumane, life-destroying capacities in order to terrify the rest of us into structured obedience.

Forcibly tossing people out of their homes, seizing their weapons and depriving them of their property is obviously not about "helping" them - it's about helping the state. It's not about compassion, but control. This is the true face of government - not just this government, here and now, but government in general! - and it sure is ugly.

Empire vs. America

My criticism of the Empire has frequently been mistaken as criticism of America, as if they are somehow one and the same. In the eyes of the imperialists, certainly - but anyone else should be able to easily see that not only are they two different things, but also mutually exclusive.

Libertarian columnist Vox Day offers an explanation that might help:

The "freedom" espoused by the utopians should never be confused with the unalienable freedoms that are the American birthright, however. It is no accident that despite the fact that they speak of an American empire, the quasi-democratic systems that result from American military invasions and occupations are inevitably free of the not only the checks and balances of the American Constitution, but also a good part of the American Bill of Rights. [...]

The reason that advocates of utopian empire are inherent traitors to the United States and enemies of its Constitution is because without respect for national sovereignty and self-determination, the United States itself has no raison d'etre. The protections of its constitution are nil and its unalienable rights are void if they are in conflict with the wishes of the utopians. In the same way that neither the Serbs nor the Kurds are permitted the right of self-determination under this utopian scheme, Americans are denied the very rights that they are supposed to be guaranteed. [...]

And because it offers the promise of freedom while delivering its opposite, the neocon's utopian concept of empire is doomed to failure by its inherent inconsistencies. The World Democratic Revolution is no more tenable than the World Communist Revolution, and like its intellectual parent, will eventually collapse into totalitarian tyranny. The particular danger for the United States is that following the tradition of imperial overstretch, its abuse as the utopians' primary weapon will cause the remnants of its constitutional system to break down as well.

Quoted from "On global empire" at Vox Popoli.

Antiwar Verse

Rudyard Kipling's poetry, though good, was in the service of promoting the Empire of the day - in his case, the British. Richard Cummings of LewRockwell.com writes Kiplingesque verse against the empire of the day - in this case, American.

Here is just a sample, to whet your appetite:

The bombs that you dropped
Left Fallujah in rubble,
For the stench there can't be any words.
But no one could tell
In this bloody hell,
Were they Sunnis, or Shi'ites or Kurds?

Read the whole thing here.

If I had any poetic talent whatsoever, I would try to try to adapt this to the Balkans; but beyond "Were they Muslims, or Croats, or Serbs?" nothing comes to mind.

Decline and Fall of Conservatism

Apologies for the lack of posts. Between certain personal obligations and the blistering heatwave rolling across the United States, it's been very hard to think, let alone make coherent comments about anything.

Butler Shaffer of LewRockwell.com doesn't have that problem . Indeed, he continues to write amazing philosophical essays. His latest, "The Decline and Fall of Conservatism," explains how a once-great philosophy of individual liberty, property rights and society-over-state degenerated into a totalitarian institution that tramples liberty, destroys property and elevates state above all.

I really shouldn't quote from the article, as taking anything out of context would be doing it injury; but there is a metaphor I cannot resist mentioning:

"...when the Soviet Union collapsed, conservatives were left without a raison d’être. Their very existence, as a political movement, ceased to be. They had accumulated weapons and powers – along with an army of defense contractors eager to keep the game going – but no "enemy." Conservatives – and, I should add, so-called "liberals" – were like a man with a leash, desperately in search of a dog."

Simply brilliant.

Conscience and freedom

I'm backdating this post to July 13, when it should have appeared. That I forgot to post it does not mean its message is any less important; only that I can be incredibly absent-minded at times.

This is a quote from a 1987 book, specifically from a lecture given by one Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI. The full text is on LewRockwell.com.

"Where conscience prevails there is a barrier against the domination of human orders and human whim, something sacred that must remain inviolable and that in an ultimate sovereignty evades control not only by oneself but by every external agency. Only the absoluteness of conscience is the complete antithesis to tyranny; only the recognition of its inviolability protects human beings from each other and from themselves; only its rule guarantees freedom."

These are certainly words to live by. One does not have to be Catholic to agree.

Useless Power

Charles Featherstone of LRC had another fantastic commentary yesterday, which I somehow missed. For all its belligerence and bluster, he says, the Empire is already crumbling:

America's Army, Navy and Air Force have become useless instruments. Our soldiers can occupy, our planes can bomb relentlessly and with precision, our ships can patrol the seas, but who fears us now? Five years ago, when the glow of the War to Liberate Kuwait and air offensive against Yugoslavia still made American arms appear invincible, perhaps the governments and peoples of the world trembled at the thought of the United States military. But today, when a few thousand insurgents can tie down, tire and incapacitate that Army, what is there to left to fear?

Some governments may still quake at the thought of air strikes and the destruction of government "capital" and "investments" they would bring. But a people determined to resist us can look at Iraq and take heart – yes, we can be beaten. It's not all that hard.

[Paul] Harvey is right to fear defeat. In many ways, we have already lost.

When our whole approach to fighting "terror" is to inflict pain on people until they behave they way we want, what do we do when they can take all the pain we have to give? How much more pain are we willing – or able – to inflict until we realize the pointlessness of it all? Or until conscience confronts us?

And how many hydrogen bombs are we willing to use? One? Two? A dozen? A hundred? And if people still resist, or are driven to resist, what then? Shall we destroy the entire world?

We have unleashed our power upon the world only to discover that it is terribly finite, a great deal more limited than we hoped and imagined. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on bombs, tanks, planes, soldiers, and every passing day we are less and less able to bend the world to our will.

A whole arsenal of useless power.

Those who engineered the rise of the American Empire in the mid-1990s wanted it to be both feared and loved. Bush II decided to dispense with love; "Oderint dum metuant" really did become the Imperial motto. But now the fear is almost gone, and hate is all that remains. Now what?

Liberty, Congress and Old Glory

Musing on the flag-burning amendment recently passed in the House, Anthony Gregory of LRC offers this for thought:

"...ever since the Washington administration, federal politicians have attempted to circumvent, and all too often have succeeded in circumventing, the Bill of Rights’ limits on government power. From the first National Bank to the Federal Reserve, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to Japanese Internment, from the first U.S. invasion of Canada to the second war on Iraq, the busybodies in Washington have frequently carried out colossal projects for which one searches in vain for Constitutional authority."

And also:

"Almost everyone in Congress actively and consistently votes against American liberty. Those who desecrate the Bill of Rights and yet feign a tear at the trumped-up intellection of Old Glory being burned in protest by dangerous anti-American radicals have little understanding of freedom – or America, in the best sense of the word."

How Liberty Dies

Inspired by a truly great line from "Revenge of the Sith," Steven LaTulippe at LRC writes "So This Is How Liberty Dies." The ending is so beautifully written, it simply begs to be quoted at length:

Truly, we are seeing the visions of Yeats [see here] come to life before our very eyes.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

A glance at the structure of our government in this late era of republican governance demonstrates a variety of oddities and ironies. The most interesting is the observation that each branch of our government is now ignoring those areas where its actual responsibilities lie while simultaneously intruding into areas where it was once explicitly forbidden. [...]

Thus, we have a judiciary that wants to be a legislature, a legislature that wants to be a sugar daddy, and a president who wants to be an emperor.

It is a sorry sight to behold, and one that will probably make for a great tragic adventure series someday.

Unfortunately, we are all cast in the role of the "innocent bystanders."

And everyone knows what usually happens to them.