Posted on 06/11/2002 5:10:40 PM PDT by Noumenon
Killers Without Conscience
Ward Dorrity - 2002
It's difficult to imagine how anyone could remain unmoved by an unflinching look at the history of the previous century. Small-minded, bitter people are easily seduced by the offer of a little money and unlimited power. The power to harm - without consequences - is irresistible to many.
There are those in government - in your government who want you dead. They would kill you if they could get away with it. They would take everything you have if they felt that they could do so without being held accountable. They would use the apparatus of the state to censor your speech, punish you for politically incorrect thoughts, strip you of the fruits of your labor, confiscate your property, render you helpless and defenseless and dictate the very terms of your existence if they could do so with impunity. They are killers without conscience. They have a pedigree and they have a history.
If we have learned anything at all from the sad and sorry history of the previous century, it is this: whenever and wherever a government assumes the power to violate your fundamental rights to life and liberty, those who wish to strip you of your rights will sooner or later gain control of state power, and they will use that power. Regardless of the scope of that authority, they will exercise it to its fullest extent. If that authority encompasses the power to kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people, sooner or later, the killers without conscience will make the fullest and most horrible use of it. The history of the 20th century bears stark and irrefutable witness to this fact. The record is crystal clear in this regard: 'state actors' will use and abuse whatever power and authority they have, to whatever extent they can, and they will actively seek the means and the opportunity to do so.
To the extent that we endow the state with power, we invariably create the opportunity for those who wish to acquire and abuse power to do evil. Those who wish to do evil typically disguise their intentions under the guise of 'achieving the greatest good for the greatest number'. They may claim that they are 'doing the business of the people' or that they are acting according to 'the will of the people'. 'It's for the children,' you see. When it has come to creating the 'New Socialist Man,' those who advance such arguments remain untroubled by the oceans of blood they would have to navigate and the mountains of corpses they would have to traverse in order to realize their dreams.
You may recall that a politician once said that, "... a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have." Everything you have, including your life. The greatest tragedies in recent history have come about in this manner. In the last century alone, more than 170 million people - say it again: more than 170 million people - unarmed, non-combatant civilians - were murdered by those exercising the power of the state. They were starved, gassed, tortured, shot, impaled, burned alive, frozen to death, hacked apart with hoes, axes and machetes - a litany of brutality and atrocity beyond human imagination. Hundreds of millions more survived to suffer from lesser abuses. Many of them may have come to envy the dead.
Virtually without exception, these cruel and murderous states have been - and continue to be - collectivist totalitarian dictatorships of one sort or another. The crimes and the horrors of collectivism in all its forms - socialism, communism, national socialism, fascism - have been demonstrated beyond dispute by their murderous trajectory through history and the ruin, slaughter, and untold human misery strewn in their wake. This is the undeniable and irrefutable truth of our times.
Try to comprehend just how monstrous this is, and you'll soon discover that concepts like genocide and mass murder pale before the reality of historical fact. Professor R. J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii coined the term democide in order to give us the means to frame the nature and the scope of the worst slaughters of the 20th century. Rummel offers these definitions:
Genocide: among other things, the killing of people by a government because of their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language). Politicide: the murder of any person or people by a government because of their politics or for political purposes. Mass Murder: the indiscriminate killing of any person or people by a government. Democide: The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.
As Rummel has shown in Death by Government, democide has been committed in the name of many causes, beliefs and ideologies. Historically, the slaughter of entire populations has been a matter of national, racial, cultural, religious and political policy. But democide, by definition cannot be aimed at an individual. It is always the group that is the target. Democide is possible only where individuals have been defined in terms of a group identity, and where that group has been demonized and their humanity discounted and devalued. This demonization and dehumanization has been the prelude to every crime of genocide and democide in the 20th century. But where the rights of the individual are paramount, state-sponsored mass murder is unknown.
No one wages war on humanity in the name of individualism.
Yet, we now live in a nation where policies and politics of the 'progressive', Gramscian Left have been formulated expressly to promulgate class and gender warfare, ignorance, passivity, racial division, poverty, envy, and hatred of the good for being good. It is the prerequisite for the acquisition and exercise of unlimited authority and power. It is, in fact, precisely the outcome desired by Gramscian, Machiavellian marxists who now comprise our cultural elite. They are the heirs of those who had had previously helped unravel the moral and the philosophical fabric of traditional Christian Europe, creating the frightful void that communism, socialism, national socialism and fascism would fill. Eventually, demons danced on their deserted altars and in their institutions. What should give us pause is that far too many Americans openly applaud this same course. The rest of us sanction it by our silence and inaction. It is the silence of the damned.
The evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible - the evils and horrors that arise from the abuse of power far outweigh whatever good that power might achieve. Accordingly, any attempt at achieving positive cultural and societal change without risk to the right of the individual to his life, liberty and private property cannot proceed until the authoritarian power of the state has been de-fanged, muzzled, shackled and cast back into a constitutional prison.
Power seldom goes unabused. There are are, have been, and always will be those willing to commit such abuses. If they refrain from doing so it is only because they lack the opportunity and have been suitably constrained. When the opportunity arises, or when the power-lusters can create the opportunity, they never fail to step up and seize the moment. As Rummel has said, "Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely." In this nation and at the beginning of the 21st century, the face of evil is defined best by those who seek that adulterine power to control and destroy and by those who assist, applaud and enable them.
Perhaps you've seen the well-meaning, ignorant appeasers and applauders - individuals who operate upon the basis of whim and emotion and who don't care to consider the consequences of their actions and beliefs. You've seen their faces in the German newsreels of the '30s and '40s. You've seen them at the Democratic and Republican conventions of the last few decades. They've all signed up for the 'program', and in a particularly tenacious species of denial, they've mapped their own personal versions of intellectual bankruptcy and moral and ethical squalor onto the rhetoric and practice of tyranny. But don't pity them at all. We all know the fate of their German counterparts after the fall of the old Weimar Republic: how many were devoured by the same beast they whelped into the world with their ignorant approval and applause?
Be wary of the haters of mankind who've mapped their own insecurity, self-loathing and sense of inferiority onto the rest of the human race. They are merely another species of willing participant in the bonfires of human sacrifice. Their view of the world and those in it are colored in terms of spite and envy. These are the ones who've looked into the mirror that others' success and achievements present. Rather than take the challenge to raise their own state of being, they choose instead to shatter the mirror in a fit of resentment simply because they don't like what they see in the reflection of their own souls. Rather than achieve, they seek to destroy. The urge to destroy what they cannot understand or rule becomes their raison d'etre and their governing passion. This type has always found ready employment in the service of their new masters - for a time. But the sacrificial bonfires burn for them as well.
Consider the cynical and knowing apologists for tyranny and atrocity, sitting behind easy grins, excusing the worst sort of depravity and corruption with a wink and a smirk, secure in their faith that they are the new nomenklatura and are thus exempt from the 'solutions' to the messy problems represented by those of us who would resist the idea that our lives are not someone else's property. These are the ones who've looked into the mirror after they've contracted a particularly ugly and disfiguring disease and said to themselves, "Yeah, but on me, it looks good."
Finally, we come to the power-lusters themselves - the so-called 'progressive' elite. These individuals are often driven by a profound self-hatred which they direct outwards and project onto humanity in general. Their own self-loathing drives their passion to rule and to subjugate, thus opening the door to the commission and justification of the most unimaginable of atrocities and crimes against man, nature, justice and reason. Another species of power-luster seeks to impose their own overweening sense of moral rectitude upon a resisting and supposedly ignorant public. C. S. Lewis, writing in God in the Dock gave us an eloquent warning about this last type:
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the 'good' of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Eric Hoffer, noted American philosopher, grants us another perspective:
"It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression."
So this is how a long, dark age began. An age of horror and human sacrifices. Never underestimate the sheer impatience and hubris of the radical utopian 'reformers' who seek nothing less than dominion over every sphere of human thought and endeavor. Remember, these monsters want to reshape Man in their image and according to their ideals no matter what the cost. There's no room in their scheme of things for those who would disagree. Those of us with even a modest knowledge of history and understanding of human nature know where that mindset took us in the last century. It's where we're headed now, and we are headed for Hell on earth.
The time is coming when we must either begin the "long march" back through the institutions to reclaim them and to restore the principles of freedom and human dignity to their rightful place, or we must separate from the killers without conscience and those who condone them. My own world-view is contradictory to and irreconcilable with that of the criminal socialists - the heirs and disciples of Marx and Gramsci - who promote the politics of envy and victimization, and whose goal is the destruction of our culture and institutions.
"The great misfortune of the twentieth Century is to have been the one in which the ideal of liberty was harnessed to the service of tyranny, the ideal of equality to the service of privilege, and all the aspirations and social forces included under the label of the "Left" enrolled in the service of impoverishment and enslavement. This immense imposture has falsified most of this century, partly through the faults of some of its greatest intellectuals. It has corrupted the language and action of politics down to tiny details of vocabulary, it has inverted the sense of morality and enthroned falsehood in the very center of human thought."
Jean Francois-Revel, The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information
1991, Random House
We cannot co-exist in the same society with such monsters.
There seems to be a sort of 'virtual secession' is underway even as we speak. It usually begins when, one by one, we arrive at the same ideas that I have summarized so far. It's the understanding and acceptance of the fact that we can't 'just all get along' as a certain Mr. R. King once plaintively suggested. We're well past that. We're well past the point of reasoned debate, appeasement or compromise. Those who feel they have the right to dictate the terms of existence to everyone else are on a deadly collision course with those of us who understand that no such 'right' exists. The history of the 20th century stands in mute witness to the brutal tragedy of appeasement and the folly of compromise. We are in fact at war, realize it or not, like it or not. At the most fundamental level, that war is being waged not so much for control of our economic lives - although that is certainly part of it - but for the hearts, minds and souls of our children. The battlefields are: popular culture, our public schools, our institutions of higher learning, our churches and even our homes. The casualties are your kids' intellectual and spiritual sovereignty - their inner life and their freedom.
A bold conjecture: that we will descend into a Balkanized nightmare of chaos and destruction as the entitled classes, egged on by the elites, try to cash those very bad checks that liberal socialists and their 'change agent' stooges have written for years and handed out in our schools, churches, culture and inner cities. Those checks - the wages of the sins of class hatred, gender warfare, phony self-esteem and racial division are going to bounce sky high when the stuff they've been promised isn't forthcoming. The next American Civil War will be the price many of us will pay for either cheering and applauding the transformation of this society into a mob of cannibals and looters, or for simply standing silently by in de facto approval while it happened under our very noses. Some of the fence-sitters, applauders and appeasers may actually understand this and regret their choices in their last few moments as they helplessly watch the mindless mobs they've enabled rape and slaughter their families by the light of their burning homes.
Open warfare in this country is inevitable because there is no reconciliation possible with those who claim the fruits of your labor as their right. You cannot make peace with those who have demanded not only your economic submission, but your intellectual and spiritual surrender as well. The price of surrender has been and always will be more than anyone of reason and good will can ever care to pay. As Sidney Hook once wrote:
"Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person they would not betray to stay alive..."
I fully expect that our virtual secession will break out into the open in approximately the same time frame that those bouncing checks drawn on the banks of envy and phony self-esteem reach critical mass - any time from right now to another 8-10 years. There will be no turning back once this starts, and the cost in lives and property will be truly staggering. There is absolutely no guarantee that we will ever be able to recover from such a scenario. But then, and only then can we successfully engage in our own 'long march' back towards a society where human dignity and freedom aren't mere bagatelles to bartered away for a mess of liberal socialist pottage, but rather fundamental values worth living, striving, fighting - and dying for.
There are many of us, and I include myself among them, who constitute an entirely different class of humanity than these killers without conscience and their enablers. We are neither interested in power nor its abuse. We are satisfied to live our lives in peace with ourselves and with others, and we derive great satisfaction in seeing others enjoy life as we do. We believe that our lives and our minds are sovereign, and that the fruits of our labors are not forfeit to the first thug who demands them at the point of a gun. We are never the initiators of violence. We judge others solely by their competence and by their character.
The question that we will all be called to answer is this: To whom does the world belong? Does it belong to those of us who wish to live free of coercion or to the killers without conscience? Does it belong to those who uphold the principles of liberty, self-ownership and individual rights as the standard of their values, or those who uphold the standard of death?
Can those of us who are passionately committed to the ideals of life, liberty, and the sovereign state of the individual hope to persist in the face of such an inevitable tragedy? Our one hope is that this pack of snarling dogs will turn upon themselves and consume one another before they have time to get to the rest of us. Those of us with the wisdom to prepare and the courage to step forward after the fall of this republic are our best and only hope for a decent and humane civilization.
G. Warran Nutter, a late, great University of Virginia economist and proponent of liberty said:
"The greatness of a society does not come from its monuments but from the kind of people it produces. Justice, responsibility, and humanity - these are the qualities of greatness in a people. Only the humane can remain free, and only the free can remain humane..."
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