Is it Too Late for America?
By L. Neil Smith
© Copyright JPFO. Inc
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Okay, here's the picture: America is fighting a pair of undeclared wars that have have accomplished nothing except the utter and abysmal destruction of one of the most ancient civilizationsin the world, and stretched this nation's ability to defend itself against any actual threat practically to the breaking point.
These wars, which history will likely remember as "Vietnam II and III" (with Iran a possible "IV"), were once advertised as guaranteeing for America a cheap source of fuel. Yet they are draining the economic lifeblood of this country to a point it will probably never recover from. MSNBC estimates that the cost could go as high as two trillion dollars. That's a numeral 2, followed by twelve zeroes, two thousand billion dollars, or about $27,000 from each American household of four.
Go to: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11880954/
Trillions now. How soon before we have to start counting in quadrillions?
Meanwhile, a not-so-secret mercantilist cabal is plotting to fuse this country with Canada and Mexico, absolutely without the consent of the governed, with a hungry eye toward creating a continental empire entirely outside the limitations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Say a fond farewell to your individual right to own and carry weapons. An 18-lane superhighway will be built to tie it all together, and at some point we will be compelled to exchange our dollars for "Ameros".
At the same time, against the clear mandate of that Constitution and the Bill of rights, the government is kidnapping individuals it doesn't care for, hiding them indefinitely and without due process, in secret prisons where it is torturing them -- exactly as the Lincoln Administration did back in the 1860s. It is also applying pressure wherever it can on universities and various media to muzzle or fire its critics and, if at all possible, destroy their careers. It's already built "detention camps" all around the country -- go to: http://tinyurl.com/34r6hc -- for dissidents it can't shut up by other means.
Not surprisingly, the news online (the only real news that this country has ever had) is filled with prophecies of doom from every quarter.
Which actually may turn out to be a good thing.
That perennial right-wing curmudgeon Patrick J. Buchanan has a new book out that's being widely advertised as heralding "the end of America". As is usual with Buchanan, part of what he has to say about current events is absolutely on-target, while other things he wrings his hands over are rather easily solvable problems, or trivial and silly.
Any of the several ugly messes Americans find themselves in at the present moment in history -- those that aren't a result of government bungling of an economy it should have been forbidden even to touch, or of the imperialistic ambitions of at least the last three presidential administrations -- Buchanan shortsightedly blames on immigration, illegal and otherwise. He proposes forcibly ejecting every single last illegal resident, and declaring a moratorium on all legal immigration, too.
Now let me get this straight: Buchanan's willing to build a new Berlin Wall 1200 miles long, from southern California to Texas, force each and every individual this side of it to carry government-issued identification, and erect his new American police state, based on preventing illegal immigration (rather than on drug laws or phony terrorism as past administrations have done), but he's not willing to do things like phase out the welfare state which he and those like him usually identify as the main temptation that brings immigrants to America?
Or, as I have suggested, offer American statehood to any Mexican state that endorses the Bill of Rights with a two-thirds vote of its people? (Go to: http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/bor.htm for a handy translation of the Bill of Rights into Spanish -- and fourteen other languages -- and be sure to celebrate Bill of Rights day with us, December 15!)
It is perhaps important in this context to recall that the word "neoconservative" was first applied to those -- Buchanan and Ronald Reagan were among them -- who accepted the welfare state as something that nobody could do anything about, and generated their policies accordingly.
Over the last three decades or so, Not-so-great Britain has more or less ruined itself by blaming everything on recent immigrants, and ignoring or evading the real causes of cradle-to-grave runaway nanny state problems such as intolerably high taxes, a flat economy, zero tolerance gun control and the deadly crime epidemic it has spawned, Marxoid labor unions, and "me-too" international adventurism. So let's stop, set everything else aside for just a moment, and think about immigration.
Three questions come immediately to mind that I believe Buchanan ought to be required to answer fully before we start taking the man seriously.
First, is this merely the reaction of a xenophobe and racist -- somebody who doesn't want Little Brown Brother hanging around his sister or his daughter -- looking for somebody lower on the social ladder than he is to use as a scapegoat? Or would Buchanan feel the same way toward newcomers to America if they were committed, as we all are, to the values expressed by the highest law of the land, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights?
Second, assuming Buchanan is not a xenophobe or racist, would he be prepared to underwrite -- or to help to underwrite -- a foundation dedicated to conveying those values to newcomers in every possible way? I have issued this challenge to anti-immigrationistas many times in many ways, but all I've ever heard in response was crickets chirping.
Third, if you're not a xenophobe or racist -- I freely admit that this is a very big "if" -- then why are you still standing there, Buchanan?
Get busy!
At the opposite, liberal or "progressive", end of the conventional two-dimensional political spectrum (ask me what an accurate map of the political world looks like some time -- or better yet, buy my novel The American Zone at http://www.lneilsmith.org/lnsbooks.html which describes it in considerable detail), we find Naomi Wolf. An extreme far left feminist, formerly a political campaign consultant to Bill Clinton and Albert Gore, Wolf has recently become gravely worried about the police state she sees being erected around us. (One can't help wondering if this former accomplice to Waco Willy and Hot Airgore realizes that her former clients took huge strides themselves, in its initiation.)
Be that as it may, Wolf has begun waking up, has written a book about her concerns, and produced a list of ten steps that the evil, stupid, or insane leaders of a democracy (which America was never intended to be) must take first in order to transmogrify a once-free country into a fascist police state. She's even gone so far as to endorse reform legislation written and introduced into Congress by Ron Paul.
Go to: http://tinyurl.com/yqhznn
And to: http://tinyurl.com/2g26rs
I'd often wondered whether the Lefties bellyaching now about what the Righties are inflicting on the country would complain -- or even feel particularly threatened -- if their fellow liberal Democrats were the ones doing the inflicting. Like very few other writers I've read so far, right, left, or center, Wolf seems to understand that, given the grossly unconstitutional and atrocious practices that have been forced upon America by the Bush Administration, President Rudy or President Hillary would be equally inclined to rule as a dictator because it would be easier, especially in some handily manufactured crisis. Both know how inconvenient it would be if Congress were to find its BACKBONE once again and start talking back to an Imperial Presidency.
And always there is the not-so-subtle threat, not so very far in the background, that, if whatever war the government has involved us in lately doesn't go well, those being forced to pay for it now in the form of taxation and inflation will be forced to pay for it all over again by seeing their sons and daughters enslaved by the military -- despite a prohibition against "involuntary servitude of any kind", clearly including the draft (go to: http://tinyurl.com/3bsr7p ), in the Thirteenth Amendment -- and poured straight down into the dark, bottomless warfare state rathole like so many worthless grains of sand.
Reading Naomi Wolf's writing gives me hope. If an individual like her can rise above the level of the counterfeit struggle between the two heads of the Boot-On-Your-Neck Party, and see -- and write about -- what's actually at stake today, then maybe America still has a chance.
On the other hand, Buchanan still has a considerable way to go. If, like him, we allow ourselves to be distracted by the trivial (and immigration is trivial, compared with what government plans for our future: detention camps, DNA libraries, ID implants, politically convenient disappearances, 24/7 surveillance by cameras and other technology, the hijacking of our children by the public school system and social "services", brainwashing and physical torture) then we are doomed.
Even leaving out xenophobia or racism as possible motivations for this distraction, is it better to be fighting over a few jobs (with people who, the antis claim out of the other side of their mouths, are not here to work but to scrounge), or building a free economy in a free society that creates more new jobs every day than can possibly be filled?
Which brings us back to Naomi Wolf. As much as I like hearing what she has to say, I notice that not one of the ten points she makes has anything to do with the physical, mechanical means of preserving liberty that Buchanan, despite his many and grievous faults probably understands.
Of course I'm referring here to the unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right of every man, woman, and responsible child to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission. Like it or not, it is the free exercise of this right, and no other, that keeps Americans from becoming mud hut peasants like we see on TV, being robbed, raped, and murdered by their outlaw governments and roving bands of killers and thieves.
The left wing media mistakenly believe that the right wing regime is generally friendly toward the private ownership of weapons, but nothing could be further from the truth. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft's first utterance on the Second Amendment should have sent chills up the spine of every individual in America who wishes to stay free. What he said was that, sure 'nuff, the Second Amendment protects an individual right -- one that government has the power to regulate or even suspend -- just like habeas corpus -- whenever it feels like it.
In the years since George W. Bush chose to barricade himself in the White House, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives -- "on his watch", as the saying goes -- has grown more brutal, more given to totalitarian strategy and tactics, more inclined to violate the law themselves, than ever before, even under the Clinton Administration. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/22nzz6 . This could be stopped with an Executive Order of the kind this administration is so fond of issuing. If they're friendly to gun owners, where's that Order?
So add Step Number 11 to Wolf's list and note that it's on the horizon. The Second Amendment is about to be ruled on by the same gang of old fogies in black dresses -- their predecessors once decided that slavery was just dandy -- who grandly declared that your property can be stolen by any sufficiently corrupt city council that decides that the crooks they give it to will end up paying them more by way of taxes.
Both Buchanan and Wolf, although their awareness of the dangers America faces -- and their willingness and ability to communicate it -- are heartening, desperately need to see a slightly broader picture than they're apparently seeing now. They could make a good beginning by screening Innocents Betrayed a documentary DVD produced by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, that demonstrates beyond question the direct and inavoidable connection between "gun control" (more correctly described as victim disarmament) -- especially mass prohibitions and confiscations -- and the genocidal mass killings that almost all governments seem to feel an urge to indulge in from time to time.
Go to http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm#chart and read the rest of this afterward.
No amount of "reform" will ever change this. By its very nature, government perceives individuals as interchangeable and expendable components -- a natural outgrowth of seeing them as masses of voters. You and I -- we parents, brothers, sisters, FRIENDS, wives, husbands, and children -- do not. Only by cutting government back -- like the dangerous, unruly, and thorn-covered shrub it is -- to virtually nothing in the way of money and power, can any of us ever hope to regain the individual freedom that made us a beacon to the rest of the world.
At no time was it ever necessary to send soldiers overseas and shove that idea down folk's throats at bayonet point. They always got it.
And they always will.
The America we all once loved has exactly the chance for survival left that you -- that we -- and that folks like Buchanan and Wolf give it.
What are you prepared to do? --
A fifty-year veteran of the libertarian movement, L. Neil Smith is the Author of 33 books including The Probability Broach, Ceres, Sweeter Than Wine, And Down With Power: libertarian Policy In A Time Of Crisis. He is also the Publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise, now in its 17th year online.
Visit the Neil Smith archive on JPFO.
© Copyright Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership 2012.
