“It is the greatest truth of our age: information is not knowledge.”
– Caleb Carr
Barack Obama is a facile and Machiavellian intriguer of the highest order. I will leave to others in the commentariat to discuss his bona fides for President, his abhorrent collectivist notions of governing and all the other platitudes that point to a creature that has provided the planetary if not historical model for the dangers of the Peter Principle. He is a man out of his depth, which may be anything beyond a minor city council position, and even that would be a stretch.
His keen narcissism keeps him wandering through ironic swamps without realizing he is soaked through. Recently, his teleprompters gave yet another interminable and meandering speech on “violent extremism,” rich in historical ignorance and laced with rhetorical nonsense befitting a man who can speak for hours and not say a word of any consequence. The National Socialist and Communist bloviators of old don’t hold a candle to the verbal hypocrisy and magniloquence this man spews without communicating anything but the status quo.
I have insisted this is Bush’s fourth term and this latest milquetoast broadside does nothing more than confirm that. I suffer through these speeches and, thanks the Gods, I never had such a feckless and talent-less professor chain me to a classroom to listen to such drivel for a semester much less four years.
If Obama does anything morally right, it will usually be by mistake and not design.
In his usual doublespeak, he continuously weaves over the line but never reaches the target.
“By “violent extremism,” we don’t just mean the terrorists who are killing innocent people. We also mean the ideologies, the infrastructure of extremists –the propagandists, the recruiters, the funders who radicalize and recruit or incite people to violence. We all know there is no one profile of a violent extremist or terrorist, so there’s no way to predict who will become radicalized. Around the world, and here in the United States, inexcusable acts of violence have been committed against people of different faiths, by people of different faiths — which is, of course, a betrayal of all our faiths. It’s not unique to one group, or to one geography, or one period of time.”
His protestations ring hollow; fine words and empty promises. The faiths are irrelevant and the modes of operation are the key. Ask any aboriginal American.
This is much like Hitler criticizing the brutality of the communist regime in the USSR or vice versa. This is the same administration that complains about the incineration of a Jordanian pilot and then glibly justifies the drone attacks and indiscriminate bombings that have characterized aspects of the robot war in the conflicts in the Middle East. Apparently, the drones are equipped with water balloons and party hats that they drop as a deadly payload instead of incendiary devices.
The international community and the West has wrestled with the definition of terrorism for decades because it just tread a very delicate path. Simply, terrorism is politically motivated violence against innocents and combatants. The US Department of Defense (an ironic sobriquet in itself) defines it as “the unlawful use of violence or threat of violence to instill fear and coerce governments or societies. Terrorism is often motivated by religious, political, or other ideological beliefs and committed in the pursuit of goals that are usually political.” You’ll note the graybeards in the DoD are very specific in the use of the term lawful because government is the self-satisfied arbiter of lawful terrorism. Absent the terrorist methodology, no government on earth or in history would last a day. Governments and the state invest themselves with right to initiate, threaten and commit violence against the entire populace in their respective tax jurisdictions.
Let’s conduct a thought experiment: if IS (or ISIS or whatever today’s new version is) wore US police uniforms and conducted their daily savagery in that mufti, would they be the subject of the White House broadsides and misdirection? If the IS wore Western style military uniforms and gave lip service to the laws of land warfare and international codes of conduct yet proceeded apace with this barbarism, would the Offal Office be up in arms, as it were?
Publisher’s Note: Max V over at his site published this broadside this morning against his tactical competitors in the training industry. He kindly asked that I make mention of his post over there. Along the way he assumes I write to him in this post. He is mistaken. My site has the curious sobriquet of ZeroGov for a reason. I take no sides in the competency debate and hear nothing but great things about his training. He and I have a gentleman’s disagreement on what should transpire after the SLAVFOR are defeated.
What’s curious is that no matter what minimalist or nil approach one takes to the state in mindset, it will have little bearing on the coalitions formed to dispose of the Main Enemy which is central government. Neither Constitutionalists nor abolitionists make better guerrillas. If abolitionists are wrong and all the ideas are rubbish, one shouldn’t concern oneself with their notions. A close reading of the Anti-Federalists will show the growing alarms and skepticism at the embryonic forms of the Constitutional national government even before it flowered into the totalitarian orchid it grew into after the Second American Revolution in 1861.
Brutus: “History furnishes no example of a free republic, anything like the extent of the United States. The Grecian republics were of small extent; so also was that of the Romans. Both of these, it is true, in process of time, extended their conquests over large territories of country; and the consequence was, that their governments were changed from that of free governments to those of the most tyrannical that ever existed in the world.”
I am simply hoping this is not a redux of the Irish Rebellion in 1922 where socialist fought socialist to defeat the other side and install socialism. In the end, quite literally, I simply want no part of anyone’s government. I wish Max nothing but peace and prosperity. -BB
“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”
-H.L. Mencken
Why am I in the Brotherhood Without Banners? Why does this site exist, and what will you get out of it? Every blog is something of a vanity project and a catharsis for thinking out loud, and this satisfies both for me. Aside from writing a book, a blog is a legacy that may last far longer than the author. Nothing really disappears from the Internet and I am certain there are folks in the government who are always interested in maintaining a watchful eye on blogs such as mine, because they represent the most direct philosophical threat to their very existence.
In an earlier phase of my intellectual development, I had been seduced by the heady siren song of limited government, which sounds like the most viable solution, but on closer examination is the most silly of chimeras. There is no historical precedent in the Western world, throughout its entire history, of a government calving off another or rising out of the ashes of extinction of the previous regime, containing themselves within the confines of power originally set forth at their germination. None. There are plenty of empty promises and proclamations of purity, but the usual suspects will be self-selected, seeking to rule others; most of whom are socio- or psycho-pathic. Politics is nothing more than the nationalization of human transactions, where the converse is the complete privatization of the planet. The latter is the charter of this blog. Nationalization is the government seizure (there is no polite term) of a product, service or behavior. This can happen with something as mundane as the circumference of grapefruit, to something as epic in scope as the forfeiture of health care or the use of the innumerable malum prohibitum laws on the books.
For those who take a longer view of history, it becomes abundantly clear that governments in their life stages, until their eventual and inevitable deaths, rarely seem to calculate second- and third-order effects of their meta-behaviors. I always presume that, while good intentions may be the standard apologia for the lion’s share of government, action and behavior, this is simply an intellectual smokescreen with the same vapidity of hate crimes; hiding the nature of government which is the threat or use of violence against anyone or anything which either refuses to comply or pay the assessed tribute. One should never measure a government’s behavior by its intent, but the fruits of its actions. And that is bitter fruit indeed for the totality of human history. It is almost as if we have been in a fever-dream, surrounded by inmates in a vast prison state which has effectively indoctrinated people to consciously think that harming others through fining, jailing, maiming and killing is the only possible blueprint for society. Somewhat like the bird who has lived in a cage all its life and still hasn’t figured out what wings are used for. Think of that, a near consensus among thinking human beings that the only way to organize a just society is through terror.
Terrorism is the use of politically motivated violence against non-combatants or innocents. Absent the very existence of terrorism, bullying and a daily violation of the Ten Commandments, no government can exist. One might say that the Global War on Terror, or whatever words the Western military-industrial complex has used to re-flag it, has exponentially increased the size of government and has been pointed in the wrong direction.
We have friends and relations who enjoy boasting of law and order. The tough guys who pronounce that the latest police beating was warranted, and the prison rape the men will endure while caged for their sentence is perfectly justified for their crimes, even if the offense were as banal as a paperwork violation, avoidance of taxes or an infraction against the tens of thousands of laws of which no normal human could know or comprehend. Remember that it is all about the law and not the human context, because context is totally absent from government calculus. It is part of its power.
I have mentioned before that every American is subject to indefinite detention in the alleged justice system the Federal government and its subsidiary political elements, known as states, have erected. It is another tool in the arsenal of democracy that is the fancy name for mob rule, subject to the kakocrats at the top of the system. The government has been successful beyond their wildest expectations in creating a captive and occupied population from which they derive both their material succor and the sophisticated means to bully and control tens of millions of humans. The government must erect these officious and brutal means of suppression, otherwise the small percentage of liberty minded folks who chafe at living on a feedlot, and having their lives micromanaged, would set a very bad example for the rest who would take notice of the people who elected not to abide by the system. As with the likelihood of secession looming ever brighter, once the first person is allowed to opt out of the government confines, a stampede will commence that will be unstoppable. This is why the IRS is invested with such formidable power to fine and cage recalcitrant taxpayers.
America has conducted a brilliant government campaign to put the state at the top tier of idolatry, with family and individual volition at the bottom. This has been a two-tiered assault. The government makes it very inconvenient for individuals to fight its depredations and ensures that the education system is kept in a tight orbit around government supremacy. Most of my readers have attended some college and have seen first-hand the absolute monopoly of the government supremacist mindset among faculty, administration and students alike.
When one suggests that non-violence may be a preferable foundation for a peaceful society, instead of the enslavement of government, one is almost universally scorned. Is it not interesting that all the fevered anti-war rhetoric from the “left” has disappeared since the election of the latest scoundrel to the Presidency? Collectivism permeates the American academy with very little exception, and this from doyens in the humanities and social “sciences” whose jobs may belabor 8-12 hours per week, unless they have paid teaching assistants available. The rest of the time is certainly not used to practice critical thinking, but to sharpen the same weak-minded rationalizations of the academy to justify the ultimate goal of extinguishing every private aspect of human life. They prettily dress the rhetoric in high-minded humanitarian goals, but in the end they are the intellectual equivalents of prison guards in their moral imaginations.
“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
Mahatma Gandhi
I have spent many years writing and railing against the police state with far more competent observers like William Grigg providing a veritable cornucopia of evidence showing why police and American policing is an existential threat to any individual liberty it gets near.
Here and now, the police authorities in the US pose a similar threat to individual liberty that the British military regulars did in North America before 1775. The “redcoats” are now bluecoats.They mean to force all societal change at the point of a gun, no less than the Marxist thuggery that authored planet-wide hell-holes in the 20th century.
These are the Jacobin vanguard and the Communard revolutionaries in new garb. When some of the National Socialists held their heads in shame at the conclusion of the War to Save Josef Stalin to proclaim that “orders were orders” did not necessarily absolve the dishonor of what they had visited on their countrymen; this same notion is the instant response by any serving cop in America. We don’t make the law we enforce it. These are the same men that would have gone after runaway slaves, maimed and killed illegal alcohol distillers and simply done what they are told. That they are held as heroes by the government-media complex tells you exactly the moral compass of the news parrots and the state they fellate on a daily basis.
Cops will do what they are told and they will kidnap, cage, maim and kill you depending on the level of resistance of the Helot assaulted. Police in America are the revolutionary vanguard of a violent state power emanating from DC that will stop at nothing to rob, regulate and, if necessary, murder anyone who defies the law. Anyone. They murder men, women, children and animals with alarming frequency and get away with it. Few face the music as a mundane would if charged with a similar crime.
In essence, it is a Federalized police force to the lowest level granted special immunities and protections for doing the state’s dirty work. While there is a secret police functionality in America with the intelligence community providing data it instructs to be laundered for pursuing arrests and convictions, the not-so-secret police continues to behave as a paramilitary occupation force across the fetid plain.
The trifecta of officer safety, qualified immunity and police unions have combined to create the toxic environment every American suffers in now. The Nuremberg Defense has become the primary reason for all American policing; while Germans hung by the neck until dead for this absurd moral agnosticism, the police are lauded as heroes and sage protectors by the American media that fellates them on a daily basis and provides excuses for the barbaric behavior that they practice daily.
The American concept of policing has become perhaps the purest representation of Marxism in the West with the attendant virulent Leninist attitudes that adorn the armed government employees’ sense of self. The Russian and Chinese concepts of Marxism created some of the largest corpse-piles in recent history. These government supremacist bastions relied on might is right and the “rule of law” in a fashion that brought both to their logical conclusion.
I have always been amused by the likes of the diminishing but overfed hordes of autoworkers and teachers and other union employees who did everything in their power to prevent capital from doing its best and always running to the government’s skirts for protection. These unions have done enough harm by contributing to the decades long mediocrity of automotive manufacturing in the US and the enstupidation of entire generations of young minds respectively. What would happen if they had been armed and given a hunting license by the government to quite literally get away with mayhem?
Enter the police union. Cops are state thuggery in the flesh and the pointy messy end of all government regulations and programs.
Immoral means can never yield moral ends yet this is the daily modus operandi of the government. This is the precise calculus that informs one of the most inflated and over-rated notions in western history, the rule of law. The rule of law within government confines only applies to non-government employees since the praetorians and imperial bureaucrats are immune to this rule.
If you doubt that, take a look at the emerging surveillance and national security state. But one does not have to look that far. Look at your local “law enforcement’ entities preening and waddling around your local burg. These normally obese uniformed thugs literally have a license to maim and kill. They are always held to a different standard in case after case and even in the prison system if they find themselves on the other side of the cage bars are usually granted separate privileges. They investigate themselves.
“Under a Communist Party Government, South Africa will become a land of milk and honey.”
-Nelson Mandela
What is a private business? It is a method of trading products and services for wealth to generate profits to enrich the owners and workers in the enterprise and additionally seed the investment, growth and expansion of the business.
What is the business of government and politicians? To earn wealth and establish punitive control over individual transactions with no merit whatsoever; in other words, to employ the monopoly powers of violence to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Bastiat said it more eloquently but there it is. Politicians love to project an image of stately dignity and honorifics for the terrific and self-sacrificing service they do. The deception is blatant and they are no more than thieves wrapped in expensive state regalia with armed guards to protect them from their victims. Those victims they have not mentally turned to eunuchs already through the insidious ministrations of television, government education and the soothing bastardization of the language to manipulate the sheeple, are waking up to the sheer audacity of the heist that has been called the state. Turning the Bolshevik idyll on its head, it speaks to the true nature of government and governance.
Hence some examples of the government “business model”:
What is American-Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) return on its investment of approximately 15 million per annum in memberships and grants? About 2.77 billion taxpayer dollars plus the special dispensation granted by the DoD and other government agencies for grants and giveaways (30% of the acknowledged US foreign aid budget). Of course, we all know that per Federal Election Commission (FEC) v. Akins, et al., AIPAC is not a political organization so it is not required to file the onerous minutiae required for political lobbying even though they have five or six registered lobbyists and a host of espionage allegations.
What is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU)? Both of these fetid organizations would have no reason to exist if the Federal Government weren’t there to provide the backdoor trough from which they rob the taxpayer. Unsurprisingly, a tremendous amount of socialist and communist influence permeates both ACORN and SEIU. Along with the radical Apollo Alliance and the Tides Foundation, they helped craft the monstrous stimulus bill which further bankrupted what is increasingly a zombie economy in these united States.
What do the aforementioned organizations have in common? As with countless other entities in America and around the world, they would not be here except for the existence of the state. The government is the parasite and these are the looters and tax-eaters that live upon other’s production and sweat equity. These are the government analogs of organized crime, muggers and other miscreants whose sole purpose is to thrive off of other members of the community at the point of a gun. Politicians are very well-heeled and equipped highwaymen who are a menace to peace and prosperity throughout the world as history has ably demonstrated. These are simply the latest group of sociopaths and their enablers who maintain that man should not be free but under harness and micromanaged for their own good.
They have even developed a sophisticated academic rationale and industry to provide the apparent intellectual rigor to justify the rapine and murderous behavior that government creates and endorses as it merrily destroys all that is good in the world and replaces it with the hordes of shambling and compliant shells of humanity that shuffle off to work every day to pay their taxes so they feed the Machine. When you consider the tax burden just in America, it almost rivals Denmark and France. I think the graphs and charts once finds on the internet are deceptive because they don’t address the aggregate tax burden (federal, state, local, excise, corporate, etc). As I have pointed out before, when all is said and done, Americans pay nearly 60% of their income in taxes once all Federal, state and lower echelonment taxes are accounted for not to mention the impossible task of putting a dollar figure on the mountains of regulation that impede and strangle business every day. Far greater than the estimated 10% of labor the medieval serfs were yoked with. The universities and major news organs are choked with vine-ripened apologists for statist excess and murder. Whether it is the “right-wing” talk radio celebrities popping the bubbly for more strangers killed overseas or the massive “left-wing” herd of apparatchiks on the news media mewling benignly about the efficacy of more laws and restrictions on human behavior, the message is the same: more government power moves us ever closer to perfection of humanity in this mortal coil. They seek the same enigmatic creature: Homo Sovieticus.
You have to hand it to the self-described socialists and communists like Bernie Sanders, at least he is honest (even though I think all collectivist thought is a form of intellectual drunkenness) in who he is instead of mouthing platitudes about safety, the children and national security to disguise their unbridled lust for power and control over others. At least he has the fortitude to precisely describe his albeit child-like reverence for the state without resorting to the intellectual gymnastics of the usual suspects in the media.
“Life is slavery if the courage to die is absent.”
– Seneca
Fear is the mind killer.
I just finished a multi-part series on Stoicism with Brett Veinotte at the School Sucks Project. We covered plenty of ground but I wanted to tease out what I think is something rarely if ever discussed. The Stoic values inform a mindset that is distinctly libertarian. One might even say the state of mind shares a deep kinship with abolitionism. In fact, some of the Stoic philosophers were slaves themselves. The Stoics paint a broad and useful road-map to live a good life and joyous existence on their own terms.
Stoicism is not as popular today as then because it takes work to be a virtuous Stoic and the foregoing of present consumption for future return is not exactly a hipster vision of living in society today. These hard decisions tend to militate against affluence and find happiness and tranquility in less material well-being than more.
The exploration of Stoicism takes a lifetime to contemplate and master. I‘d like to visit a narrow aspect of it and the concomitant relationship to ultimate freedom. This is the Stoic view of death and the advancing of individual refusal and the withdrawal of consent. If fear is the mortar of all statist government then compliance and obedience is the brick. These two components strip the statist conceit to its essence: the employment of immoral means to achieve moral ends, an impossible calculus but the simple equation that all government lives and dies by. The state threatens and employs violence to build society; absent these means it would be out of business in an hour. At its core, the state must practice slavery to get the tax cattle to do as they are told. It is the antithesis of civilization and the highest form of mob rule. It is, in the end, a death cult.
So if that were the case, how would the government handle tens of thousands of subjects who simply refused? I am not referring to homicide or suicide bombers. They willingly employ violence to bring yet another murderous framework into being. How would they respond to a 21st century satyagraha campaign that did not seek to replace the government but dispose of it and stay rid of it? How would they cajole the unwilling to participate in any of their murderous schemes?
The government would kill them, of course. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn tells us that “[a]ny man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle. These are the twin pillars of the state to guarantee its existence.
And what of it, what would happen then? The state would expect the smoking corpses left behind would serve as object lessons to the rest of the tax cattle and instill a level of fear that would force compliance. This is the single historical knot that binds all collectivist governments from communism to socialism to the sclerotic soft fascist entities throughout the West. Every statist conceit is based on the simple notion that you force humans through ultimate threat of death to comply with the legion of schemes that give government power.
How do you cut the knot? The Stoics have some answers whether the abolition of slavery was their object or not.
One of the greatest strategic minds to grace the geo-strategic stage after the War to Save Josef Stalin concluded was USAF Col. John Boyd. He had many interesting things to say and discovered the OODA loop among other things. He distilled strategy to an elegant yin-yang that simplifies library shelves of overwrought and wrong-headed strategic thinking: strategy is all about alliance and isolation to be effective. The Stoics riff off this elegant construction very simply. Epictetus tells us: “All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.”
You either submit or defy. The middle course will always benefit the former and the acceptance of death as a certitude will inform the latter.
John penned this a couple years ago and the spirit of Popcorn deserves a mention today in these tumultuous times.He represented a more authentic America where he feared for nothing and made his own way without harming another human being.
Neal Hutcheson at Sucker Punch Pictures released his splendid documentary on Sutton. I urge all of you to watch this movie if you get a chance. This is a new age of documentary film-making that is taking it to the next level. This documentary is a sample of this golden age. You can see the trailer here. -BB
“Jesus turned water into wine, I turned it into damn likker”
– Popcorn Sutton
Appalachia’s history is largely comprised of tales of resistance of one form or another. The poster child of Appalachia’s rebellion against unjust authority has always been the Moonshiner, the maker of non-government approved distilled spirits. These spirits were commonly referred to in the southern lexicon as moonshine, mountain dew, white lightning, “painter piss,” or perhaps more simply “likker.” There is no moonshiner more infamous than the Smoky Mountain’s own, Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton. He was not only one of the most famous makers of illicit liquor, but he also led his entire life in defiance of government authority and was quite a character to boot.
Sutton was born in Haywood County, North Carolina, a rural mountainous county on the Tennessee border. At an early age he learned whiskey making from his family and local whiskey makers a like in Haywood and neighboring Cocke County, Tennessee. In due time, he became a well-known whiskey maker in the region. Taking full advantage of the legal jurisdictional confusion between the two states, he plied his trade to the fullest. This was a very common practice employed by bootleggers and moonshiners in years past, when one sheriff would get on your trail you hopped across the state or county line and continued your business.
The tradition of whiskey making as employed by mountain folk originates further back than many people realize. It comes from the Poitín tradition popular in the peat bogs and mountain regions of Scotland and Ireland where most of the ancestors of the southern mountain people originated. While the mountain region of the Southern states lacked wheat, rye or barley for malt historically, residents of the region adapted using Indian corn and malted corn for the fermenting agent. Whiskey making is considered as sacred a right as bearing military style and cosmetically offensive “assault weapons” or keeping livestock. Moonshining in the southern mountains is not only justified on the grounds of natural rights, but also on even simpler grounds. Many makers of illicit whiskey, when asked why they do it have the simple answer of “… my daddy made whiskey, and his daddy made whiskey, and his daddy before him made whiskey, so I’m just gonna keep makin’ it to.”
Popcorn was a dyed in the wool capitalist and largely libertarian in his dealings and belief system. What set him apart from the rest was his unique marketing strategy. He boasts in his book “Me and My Likker,” that him and his father were not political beings, but instead sold moonshine to folks at the polling place on Election Day. This is a much more effective use of time than trying to vote yourself free. He was fiercely independent even to the extent of purchasing his own casket, flowers and the shovels needed to bury him before he died. He is on record of stating that even though he was extremely sick late in life and had amassed a pile of medical bills, “the government nor the county doesn’t pay my bills, I do.”
Popcorn’s first run in with the law was in 1974. He was arrested and later convicted on illegal production of untaxed whiskey, among other charges. In typical mountain fashion, the day after he was released on bond after his arrest, he went right back to the same spot where he was arrested and set his still back up. He figured that was the safest place to be back in business. When speaking of his arrests he was fond of saying “I didn’t steal anything here… I paid for the copper, the sugar, the corn…so I don’t see where I broke the law anywhere.”
Over the years he built up quite a reputation. From selling jars of likker directly out of his junk shop in Maggie Valley, NC to even being close friends with a Federal Judge. He had a unique marketing strategy of writing books about himself and even appearing in documentary films. Many stores in Maggie Valley, North Carolina carried his books and movies and for 50$ each they could be yours. Many still do to this day, years after his death. When confronted about why it might be a bad idea to appear in a movie that depicts him breaking the law, his response was, “You cant sell it if nobody knows you got it.” He would charge $3 to have your picture made “with a real mountain moonshiner” at his store.
Publisher’s Note: My wife home-educated all of our children and the last remaining child we have at home. We have two graduated from college now. As part of her networking, she has hosted a six part practicum for fellow home-educators on Manners and Etiquette in the past. I remembered that George Washington had devised a rather comprehensive list and tried to find it. Well, I found it and I rather liked the list even though some are rather dated.
Manners are the lubricant of civilization and as the always handsomely turned out Fred Astaire said: “The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.” For the men in the readership, please get a copy of Brad Miner’s book, “The Compleat Gentleman“, for a wonderful treatment on why being kind and mannerly is not emasculating. -BB
I hold George Washington in rather low esteem for being one of the most over-rated “Great Captains of History” and a revered father of the maximum state with his championing of the poisonous Constitution. He was a military amateur at best and a horrific despot who held the first political office under the aegis of that fetid documents and proudly led an army against tax evaders a mere three years after being in office. So I offer these in no way as an endorsement of Washington whom I consider an extraordinarily destructive force in American freedom and liberty. Manners are indeed critical to an armed and polite society.
This may be the sole contribution that GW ever made toward liberty and freedom. By age sixteen, Washington had copied out by hand, 110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. They are based on a set of rules composed by French Jesuits in 1595. Presumably they were copied out as part of an exercise in penmanship assigned by young Washington’s schoolmaster. The first English translation of the French rules appeared in 1640, and is ascribed to Francis Hawkins the twelve-year-old son of a doctor.
Today many, if not all of these rules, sound a little fussy if not downright silly. It would be easy to dismiss them as outdated and appropriate to a time of powdered wigs and quills, but they reflect a sentiment that is increasingly difficult to find. They all have in common a focus on other people rather than the narrow concentration of our own self-interests that we find so prevalent today. Fussy or not, they represent more than just manners. They are the small sacrifices that we should all be willing to make for the good of all and the sake of living together.
I suppose it may be the sole contribution to civilization I am proud of George Washington for apart from his vast laundry list of crimes against liberty and freedom. Even for this, he was a mere scribe.
These rules proclaim our respect for others and in turn give us the gift of self-respect and heightened self-esteem. They can all be summed up in the Golden Rule.
For me, it is summed up in one of the most elegant words in the Italian tongue – sprezzatura.
“[A]ll modern manners in the western world were originally aristocratic. Courtesy meant behavior appropriate to a court; chivalry comes from chevalier – a knight. Yet Washington was to dedicate himself to freeing America from a court’s control. Could manners survive the operation? Without realizing it, the Jesuits who wrote them, and the young man who copied them, were outlining and absorbing a system of courtesy appropriate to equals and near-equals. When the company for whom the decent behavior was to be performed expanded to the nation, Washington was ready. Parson Weems got this right, when he wrote that it was ‘no wonder every body honoured him who honoured every body.”
The Rules:
1st Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.
2nd When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usually Discovered.
3rd Show Nothing to your Friend that may affright him.
4th In the Presence of Others Sing not to yourself with a humming Noise, nor Drum with your Fingers or Feet.
5th If You Cough, Sneeze, Sigh, or Yawn, do it not Loud but Privately; and Speak not in your Yawning, but put Your handkerchief or Hand before your face and turn aside.
6th Sleep not when others Speak, Sit not when others stand, Speak not when you Should hold your Peace, walk not on when others Stop.
7th Put not off your Cloths in the presence of Others, nor go out your Chamber half Dressed.
8th At Play and at Fire its Good manners to Give Place to the last Commer, and affect not to Speak Louder than Ordinary.
9th Spit not in the Fire, nor Stoop low before it neither Put your Hands into the Flames to warm them, nor Set your Feet upon the Fire especially if there be meat before it.
10th When you Sit down, Keep your Feet firm and Even, without putting one on the other or Crossing them.
11th Shift not yourself in the Sight of others nor Gnaw your nails.
12th Shake not the head, Feet, or Legs roll not the Eyes lift not one eyebrow higher than the other wry not the mouth, and bedew no mans face with your Spittle, by approaching too near him when you Speak.
13th Kill no Vermin as Fleas, lice ticks &c in the Sight of Others, if you See any filth or thick Spittle put your foot Dexterously upon it if it be upon the Cloths of your Companions, Put it off privately, and if it be upon your own Cloths return Thanks to him who puts it off.
14th Turn not your Back to others especially in Speaking, Jog not the Table or Desk on which Another reads or writes, lean not upon any one.
15th Keep your Nails clean and Short, also your Hands and Teeth Clean yet without Showing any great Concern for them.
16th Do not Puff up the Cheeks, Loll not out the tongue rub the Hands, or beard, thrust out the lips, or bite them or keep the Lips too open or too Close.
17th Be no Flatterer, neither Play with any that delights not to be Play’d Withal.
18th Read no Letters, Books, or Papers in Company but when there is a Necessity for the doing of it you must ask leave: come not near the Books or Writings of Another so as to read them unless desired or give your opinion of them unasked also look not nigh when another is writing a Letter.
19th Let your Countenance be pleasant but in Serious Matters Somewhat grave.
20th The Gestures of the Body must be Suited to the discourse you are upon.
“War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them.”
-Randolph Bourne
War is the health of the state. Randolph Bourne arrived at this conclusion near the beginning of the 20th century. Smedley Butler later wrote in War is a Racket about the baleful special interest vectors that drive us to war. We hear again and again that we owe our freedoms to the conduct of overseas adventures in other countries whether the wresting of Spanish colonies into our possession or the invasion of Europe during the War to Save Joseph Stalin (1939-45) to the modern era of American armed dominion over the planet. I would suggest these are poor assumptions. The next time someone makes one of these specious claims, simply ask them how the defeat of one totalitarian regime while aiding and abetting another noxious regime made America free? Is the Cold War representative of the halcyon days of American individualism?
Most libertarians agree that the American government is colossal, oppressive and a slayer of freedom and liberty. There are certainly domestic influences and causes for the enormous growth in the statist tilt of American governance and concentration of power. The metamorphosis of an agrarian republic birthed in the violent dismissal of British rule to the Sovietized monstrosity we labor under today is the result of both domestic dynamics and the creation of the national security/garrison state to project power and influence overseas. I would submit that war is the unacknowledged silent partner of the leviathan state.
How does a militarized foreign policy create a less free nation at home? Let’s begin with a conflict most Americans can name but few can even place a date to: World War One. I would recommend Niall Ferguson’s book Pity of War as a signal starting point to rip asunder the veil of historical illiteracy and propaganda that has surrounded that sordid conflict. Woodrow Wilson, one of the worst and most evil Presidents to grace that august den of thieves in the White House, promised in 1916 to never enter the European conflict and promptly started the machinations to steer us into the conflagration and militarize American society. The more you learn about Wilson, the more you see he is the point of origin for so much of our national grief. I have previously mentioned the American Protective League and its un-American activities in stifling, fining and jailing dissidents against Wilson’s war. Wilson also inaugurated the Committee on Public Information, which even gave instructions for cartoonists and signed into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts. In France by 1918, half of all men between 20-32 were dead. Serbia suffered a death toll that closed on one in four of the entire population in corpse piles.
Among the many notorious achievements Wilson managed was the Americanization of a fairly decentralized and devolved society. This was the perennial missing link in formalizing the ultimate project of the Hamiltonian ambition: the establishment of a permanent central government for whom the individual states were mere agents and bureaucratic subsidiaries.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters continue to cling to life despite the occupant of the Offal Office doing everything in its power to see their twisted Soviet vision of humanity wrested from imagination into life. The OWS economic illiterates and Marxoid drones are products of the statist school system who can’t get enough big government. Their pet 1% is simply slightly off-target. There is no doubt that the richest in America have the path to wealth wired for sound and these top earners exist in every country and region. Even the beloved Soviet nomenklatura of the OWS intelligentsia found a way to make money off the backs of workers but they used a political spoils system instead of the active provisioning of goods and services.
The total Federal “workforce” (I use the term charitably since they produce nothing and command everything) has hovered around 4.3-5.3 million drones since 1962 including the military.
State and local government numbers are approximately 15 million so the total DIRECT employment by government for SLAVFOR is approximately 20 million. This does not include the contractor population retained and employed by various government entities. One could then posit that about 10 percent works directly for the government and that the remainder are indirect employees. If you don’t believe you are a Federal employee, stop paying your income tax, your “real” employers will make your life miserable if not worse.
Add another million and a half for the 19,000 LEO departments polluting the fetid plain (I did not make up the last word in the link, how appropriate). These are the actual badged thuggery and not the hundreds of thousands of support ancillaries employed by every village, county and state to support the contagion that is American policing. I have spoken at length on the existential threat cops pose to humanity and will not belabor the point here.
Nor can we get a good number on how many contractors the US intelligence community employs much less the rest of the government:
Out of hundreds of agency records, for example, GAO found that almost a fifth lacked enough paperwork to prove how much a contractor was paid. Another fifth of the records were found to have either over-reported or under-reported the actual cost of the contract work.
Good luck on getting an accurate figure on the number of contractors but if one were conservative one could guess that another five million of the American working population is acting as contractors provisioning government services. This brings our grand total to nearly twenty five million adults and their families drawing from the government teat. This of course does not include the tens of millions on EBT, Socialist Security and the entire web of redistribution schemes to rich and poor alike.
Add to all of this the 2.5 trillion dollars in redistribution to pensions, national socialist healthcare, education and welfare in the coming FY in 2015. These forced redistributions go to rich and poor alike and doesn’t even account for the offense spending at the Pentagram.
I think OWS conflates private wealth with government control which is a marriage; but the real power is who sock-puppets the regulatory agencies and their police drones? The debate isn’t about wealth but government, once the latter is erased, the former is problematic. Government weaponizes the misdirection and misallocation of wealth for a living. The entire infrastructure is based on the theft of one person’s income and assets to repatriate to politically connected recipients. That is it in a nutshell. No more complicated than that.
Another sub-strata of the progressive unintelligentsia, the enviruses pride themselves on their altruistic notions of saving the planet from humans but in the end it is all about the money. Failed alternative energy programs bleeding billions, the climate circus and the Endarkenment of millions of minds shuttered from logic and common sense. Look at the gross distortion of pure science after being tainted with government funding. The freed* market could deliver far better than any government funding program without the enormous overhead and bureaucracy. The enviruses like so many other progressive and conservative supplicants to the state would much rather sacrifice economic prudence for the present rapacious rewards of the trifecta of taxes, government funded debt and imposing debt without consent on the unborn.
Historically, the US is trending toward the same collapse and sclerotic paroxysms of self-destructive growth at the expense of the private sector that all fascist economies emulate in history and time. Japan is simply a bellwether of the far more catastrophic collapse the US will suffer once the can will no longer be kicked down the road.
The notion of fascism is not merely hyperbole; fascism is the vertical and horizontal control of private firms and wealth through taxation, regulation and whatever transparent or not so transparent regimes of power employed by the national government and its vassals in the provinces.
The American economy is impossible to sustain, long live the illusion of the American Dream.
The impossible dream.
* I despise the term “free market” because like concealed carry it has the baggage of permissions by a political entity built into the assumptions. Therefore, I employ the terms freed markets and discreet carry.
Publisher’s Note: I love a good turn of phrase and the proper elocution of the English language. I find Winston Churchill to be one of the most eloquent and well-versed humans in rhetoric and literature. I found myself in thrall of his ideas for a while enchanted by his articulation and my then-perceived notion that a well-spoken man was logical and possibly virtuous. Speeches that rivaled the eloquence and power of the ancients in Greece and Rome (yes, I am an avid admirer of Cicero, et al).
Then I discover his blood-lust for war and sheer statist proclivities through the good offices of Professor Raico. As an avid consumer of military history, I had always been tangentially interested in Churchill in the war years and discovered over time he was a menace to humanity from his enthusiastic military disasters in WWI (Wilson’s War) to his shameful advocacy of mass murder from the air in strategic bombing to his group hugs with Stalin at Yalta and the final disgraces of madness like Operation Keelhaul to appease his fellow-travelers in the USSR. A record of active complicity in evil that was only rivaled by our execrable and vicious FDR (RedDR in more accurate parlance).
Churchill is a statist monster.
I stumbled on Raico’s analysis in the audio collection of the book mentioned below and my opinion changed forever. Take the time to read the entire essay and the footnotes. What you discover is that the tissue of lies and power aggrandizement that has been celebrated by the court historians has created this Sovietized West we live in today.
I pursued other lines of inquiry concerning the frenzied and plentiful deception and propaganda operations performed by the British prior to the War to Save Joseph Stalin (others call it WWII):
The massive fabrications and exaggerations in Churchill’s six-volume treatment of the aforementioned conflict. He is a splendid writer and orator and his finest hour was the Amritsar speech in 1920 condemning the UK massacre of hundreds in India. The rest is history and he condemned most of Western humanity to the surveillance state and totalitarian miasma the West is drowning in today.
This may have been the embryonic moment when I started to question every notion I had of American and European history. I have always been something of a skeptic but the essays of James J. Martin and Harry Elmer Barnes started to remove the scales from my eyes. I started devouring more of the “other” historians whom the court historians sniff at in disdain. The libertarian view of history makes the lens and filter even more clear. We tend not to get caught up in party affiliations or preemptive judgments because we know the history of the growth of the state is all about power and control and the wrestling of one faction or another through force of arms or chicanery to get the farmed animals (the people) to yield to the farmers (the state).
The history of the US as of the rest of the world is basically one long sordid story of statist farmers and ranchers purchasing or bickering over the cattle or chattel rights, to use a more quaint but appropriate term. Whether the economically illiterate Marxoid variants of yokes or the more sophisticated farming operations of so-called “free market” states, the modus operandi is to either force or convince the producers to subsidize the looters and parasites (taxing authorities and their clients) through taxation and incessant regulation. It is so simple it almost seems elegant.
Once again, you will discover whatever education you received in government schools was a mass deception operation to make you a more obedient and docile tax cow calmly grazing on the government plantation.
This is merely the last section of the excerpt and I urge all the readers to peruse all the footnotes. -BB
Rethinking Churchill: The Triumph of the Welfare State
In 1945, general elections were held in Britain, and the Labour Party won a landslide victory. Clement Attlee, and his colleagues took power and created the socialist welfare state. But the socializing of Britain was probably inevitable, given the war. It was a natural outgrowth of the wartime sense of solidarity and collectivist emotion, of the feeling that the experience of war had somehow rendered class structure and hierarchy — normal features of any advanced society — obsolete and indecent. And there was a second factor — British society had already been to a large extent socialized in the war years, under Churchill himself. As Ludwig von Mises wrote:
Marching ever further on the way of interventionism, first Germany, then Great Britain and many other European countries have adopted central planning, the Hindenburg pattern of socialism. It is noteworthy that in Germany the deciding measures were not resorted to by the Nazis, but some time before Hitler seized power by Bruning … and in Great Britain not by the Labour Party but by the Tory Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill.[160]
While Churchill waged war, he allowed Attlee to head various Cabinet committees on domestic policy and devise proposals on health, unemployment, education, etc.[161] Churchill himself had already accepted the master-blueprint for the welfare state, the Beveridge Report. As he put it in a radio speech:
You must rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.[162]
That Mises was correct in his judgment on Churchill’s role is indicated by the conclusion of W. H. Greenleaf, in his monumental study of individualism and collectivism in modern Britain. Greenleaf states that it was Churchill who during the war years, instructed R. A. Butler to improve the education of the people and who accepted and sponsored the idea of a four-year plan for national development and the commitment to sustain full employment in the post-war period. As well he approved proposals to establish a national insurance scheme, services for housing and health, and was prepared to accept a broadening field of state enterprises. It was because of this coalition policy that Enoch Powell referred to the veritable social revolution which occurred in the years 1942–44. Aims of this kind were embodied in the Conservative declaration of policy issued by the Premier before the 1945 election.[163]
When the Tories returned to power in 1951, “Churchill chose a Government which was the least recognizably Conservative in history.”[164] There was no attempt to roll back the welfare state, and the only industry that was really reprivatized was road haulage.[165] Churchill “left the core of its [the Labour government’s] work inviolate.”[166] The “Conservative” victory functioned like Republican victories in the United States, from Eisenhower on — to consolidate socialism. Churchill even undertook to make up for “deficiencies” in the welfare programs of the previous Labour government, in housing and public works.[167] Most insidiously of all, he directed his leftist Labour Minister, Walter Monckton, to appease the unions at all costs. Churchill’s surrender to the unions, “dictated by sheer political expediency,” set the stage for the quagmire in labor relations that prevailed in Britain for the next two decades.[168]
What Churchill loved was power, and the opportunities power provided to live a life of drama and struggle and endless war.
Yet, in truth, Churchill never cared a great deal about domestic affairs, even welfarism, except as a means of attaining and keeping office. What he loved was power, and the opportunities power provided to live a life of drama and struggle and endless war.
There is a way of looking at Winston Churchill that is very tempting: that he was a deeply flawed creature, who was summoned at a critical moment to do battle with a uniquely appalling evil, and whose very flaws contributed to a glorious victory — in a way, like Merlin, in C.S. Lewis’s great Christian novel, That Hideous Strength.[169] Such a judgment would, I believe, be superficial. A candid examination of his career, I suggest, yields a different conclusion: that, when all is said and done, Winston Churchill was a Man of Blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.
This essay, which originally appears in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Henry Regnery, who was, of course, not responsible for its content.
Ralph Raico is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He is professor of European history at Buffalo State College and a specialist on the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and the rise of the state.
