← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · kminta
Thread ID: 9553 | Posts: 13 | Started: 2003-09-05
2003-09-05 16:46 | User Profile
[url=http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/fields_pclib.htm]P.C. Libertarianism And The Jewish Taboo[/url]
By HENRY GALLAGHER FIELDS
American libertarians were once freedom-loving, truth-loving iconoclasts who took pleasure in spurning the shibboleths of Establishment pundits and intellectuals. No dogma was deemed too sacred to be safe from their skepticism, and every alleged truth was subject to examination by free minds reveling in free inquiry. They were totally outside the mainstream, and they relished that position: one thinks of giants such as Frank Chodorov, Albert J. Nock, Murray N. Rothbard, and Roy A. Childs, Jr., standing lonely but unafraid.
But libertarians today, with some honorable exceptions, are a changed breed. They shy away from the ever-multiplying taboo issues, if they do not actually celebrate the reigning intellectual orthodoxy. Libertarian principles are noticeable chiefly by their absence.
To illustrate the decline, let's look at a new star in the libertarian literary firmament: Ilana Mercer. A self-styled "wandering Jew," Miss Mercer was born in South Africa, the daughter of an anti-apartheid rabbi who fled to Israel, where she grew up. Having lived in Canada for a time, Miss Mercer is now ensconced in the United States, where she has moved to the fore among what passes as the libertarian punditry. Meanwhile, the punditocracy (a useful neologism) that accords respectful recognition to Miss Mercer carefully ignores everything that The Last Ditch produces, as our esteemed chief Mr. Strakon has noted. (Since TLD articles do attract fan support and links from conservatives, liberals, lefties, American Indians, Arabs, inhabitants of "Old Europe," Eastern Europeans, Africans, Turks, and so on, it would not seem that all of our writings are meritless, especially considering what passes for informative prose in the libertarian mainstream.)
It can't be denied that Miss Mercer has taken a few good positions that manage to elude many libertarians. Significantly, she has stood against the American imperial war on Iraq, unlike lunatic Randroids who want to nuke the Arabs. (You may acquit the Official Objectivists on a technicality if you're so inclined, since they refuse to recognize themselves as libertarians.) But despite her antiwar sentiments, Miss Mercer has more than a soft spot for her homeland, by which I do not mean South Africa.
At some point during her peregrinations she conjured up the fantasy that libertarians "loathe" Israel and that she must leap to the defense of that perpetually victimized state. To illustrate the existence of a vast libertarian anti-Israeli groundswell, Miss Mercer manages to come up with a grand total of three individual examples ââ¬â Sheldon Richman, Justin Raimondo, and Stephen P. Halbrook. The Halbrook article she cites comes from 1981, and Halbrook happens to be a Canadian, which inconvenient tidbits underscore the fact that anti-Israel feeling is hardly burgeoning among American libertarians. While Miss Mercer probably could have added to her census of sinners by pointing out a few anti-Zionist libertarian souls from the West Bank and Gaza, the bulk of American libertarians would require megadose testosterone injections before ever daring to mentally entertain, much less discuss publicly, such a taboo idea.
Miss Mercer's adoring assessment of the Jewish state doesn't gibe too well with the cardinal tenets of the libertarian canon. She holds to a historical view that Jews deserve the land of Israel, and she doesn't see much wrong with Israel's expropriating Palestinian private property and expelling Palestinian people, crimes that are still being committed, by the way. Presumably, in her mind the "collective rights" of the Jewish people trump individual rights, a position that harks back to the days a hundred years ago when "libertarian" often referred to communists of a somewhat unorthodox kidney. In any case, the notion is alien to modern libertarianism insofar as that body of thought proceeds from individualist premises.
While referring to the former white-ruled South Africa as fascistic, Miss Mercer insists that the Jewish state should be free to resist contamination by the multiculturalist contagion that an influx of Palestinians would bring. She lauds Ariel Sharon's new Israeli "security" wall (which would rightly be called an incarceration wall), finding nothing wrong with the fact that it is being built on Palestinian property, restricts the Palestinians to economically non-viable areas, and leaves more than half of the West Bank and all the water resources in Israeli hands! To Miss Mercer, the fact that all Palestinians hate Israel because of what it has done to them only demonstrates their innate savagery. Apparently we are to believe that rational, freedom-loving Palestinians, if such chimeras could exist, would joyously accept their Israeli overlords and give thanks to Uncle Ariel for letting them pace back and forth in the postage-stamp areas still left to them and sip a cup of dirty water when that precious commodity became available. Rothbard, whom Miss Mercer identifies as one of her philosophical mentors, saw the Revolutionary War as one of the few justified wars fought by the American people; but the oppression of the American colonists by the British Empire was nugatory compared to the suffering inflicted on the Palestinian people by Israel for more than half a century.
While principled libertarians will find nothing to admire in the Israeli state and much to abhor, it must be acknowledged that Israel is no worse than many of its national counterparts. But American libertarians must take special notice of the crimes of Israel because that state is supported by the American government and because it is immune from criticism, largely thanks to its American backers, who can make things very difficult for those who dare to differ. As Raimondo bluntly put it in his response to Miss Mercer's article:
It isn't Israel we loathe, it's Israel's American amen corner, typified by La Mercer. Why, we just love Israel, and would love it even more if only its leaders and supporters would commit war crimes on their own dime, without American aid and without continually hectoring us for more. Look, nobody really cares about Israel, per se: the problem is the effect that nation's knee-jerk supporters have on the American political process and the way their shrill cries distort and degrade the national debate on U.S. policy in the Middle East.
As many observers both at TLD and elsewhere have pointed out, this whole war on Iraq was spearheaded by Zionist neocons. Now, it strains credulity to believe that Miss Mercer, who has stood against the war, can be unaware of that. Offhand there is only one person of significance I can think of who is honestly oblivious to what has taken place, and it's not Miss Mercer. Her intellectual capacity appears infinitely superior to that of the nincompoopish pawn in the White House.
As is the usual modus operandi for rabid champions of Israel, Miss Mercer resorts to the "anti-Semitic" tar brush to stigmatize those who dare criticize that state, stooping so low as to indirectly smear Richman as a "Holocaust denier" because the Journal of Historical Review also criticizes Israel. By way of this guilt-by-viewpoint approach, Richman could be called a communist because communists also criticize Israel; or for that matter, he could be called an Israeli historian because Israeli historians such as Tom Segev have painted a rather negative picture of Israel's actions toward the Palestinians.
Fearing not, let's touch on that ultimate taboo: questioning the established accounts of the Jewish Holocaust of the 1940s. For Miss Mercer and other votaries of Establishment intellectual orthodoxy, "Holocaust denial" represents a radical evil. The term "Holocaust denier" itself is Establishment-invented and Establishment-approved, and it is not what the actual people so diagnosed would call themselves. Like "racism," "sexism," "homophobism," and other current demon-indictments, the charge of "Holocaust denial" is a grindingly tendentious blunt instrument. It is an un-unpackable intellectual package deal, a contradictory accusation of moral evil and mental disorder. It has about it the whiff of the psychiatric clinic: the Soviet psychiatric clinic, that is. It is designed to stop all debate in its tracks. It is designed to abruptly and definitively curtail thinking.
The Establishment advertises the Holocaust as the greatest evil in human history. The established media cite it incessantly and produce more programs on it every year. Official accounts of the Holocaust receive state support for promotion in schools and various museums. And questioning the story is absolutely verboten. But we may wonder why debate on the Holocaust has become impermissible ââ¬â why people are incarcerated in "free" Western democracies for doubting that mass killings in gas chambers occurred six decades ago ââ¬â why we see an effort to ban Internet sites that deal with the issue. Holocaustians claim that such punishment is necessary to protect truth and stop "hate." But isn't that completely contrary to libertarian concepts of freedom? Isn't it completely contrary to the enterprise of reason and science, which calls for freedom of inquiry and depends on it absolutely? Instead of punishing unbelievers, wouldn't it be better to just bring forth the documentary and physical evidence proving that millions of Jews perished in German death camps?
But then we learn that the documents don't exist, because Hitler communicated by word of mouth. And that the Nazis totally destroyed all the physical evidence of the millions of bodies, the trenches where the bodies were buried, the machinery used in the killing process, and so on. As the Holocaust expert Jan van Pelt pointed out in the Irving/Lipstadt trial, the Nazis even went so far as to painstakingly fill in the holes in the gas-chamber roof at Auschwitz, in the face of the onrushing Red Army.
And yet we still have an enormous number of Jewish Holocaust survivors ââ¬â hundreds of thousands in the United States alone ââ¬â who can attest to the wholesale extermination of the Jewish people. So many lucky survivors, including many who were children in the death camps and had no value as slave laborers. Very many survivors of an industrial death machine, especially considering that other hundreds of thousands who survived must have died peacefully in American nursing homes during the long decades since 1945 ... Well, at this point one may pause for reflection: Could it be that, from the standpoint of those with a vested interest in promoting the Holocaust, there is a definite reason that free discussion must be suppressed?
One would think libertarians would have some difficulties with the way the Holocaust is presented and that they would insist on getting to the bottom of the matter. Since the official accounts can't be questioned in the mainstream, small groups such as the Institute for Historical Review are all that exist. Does that mean that everything IHR says is correct? Obviously not. But it is only when the question of the Holocaust can be freely investigated that one can hope to learn the truth about it. Even if one disagrees with the specific historical analyses provided by IHR, it seems hard for a lover of freedom and truth to reject IHR's position that the issue of the Holocaust should be investigated in a spirit of free inquiry and with no governmental impediments or intimidation. In short, let's treat the Holocaust as we would any other issue. This should be a no-brainer for everyone, and for libertarians especially ââ¬â and that very fact is probably why a dispassionate analysis of the issue is absolutely forbidden.
To get back to Miss Mercer, it seems sufficient to describe her simply as a Jewish ethnic nationalist espousing a form of libertarianism that advances her people's interests, as she understands them. Nothing strange about that. Many Jewish leftists and liberals act the exact same way, supporting such things as racial intermarriage, multiculturalism, integration, forced equalization of income, UN supremacy, Third World preferences, and once in a while free speech, but adopting a contrary standard where Jews or Israel are involved. Blood is thicker than ideology. It is the Jewish double standard. One may wish to consult the intrepid Kevin MacDonald for a Darwinian take on the whole phenomenon.
While it may be perfectly understandable for Miss Mercer to espouse her Kosher libertarianism ââ¬â Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the ideological ancestor of the Likud, held some libertarian ideas while at the same time advocating the dispossession of the inhabitants of Palestine ââ¬â it's puzzling, at first blush, to see American gentile libertarians accept her version, much less applaud it. I can't help concluding that American libertarians, instead of sticking to principle, are simply refashioning libertarianism to fit in with what is permissible thinking, given the constricting bounds of our increasingly less-free society. What we find today, pretty much, are P.C. libertarians.
Some P.C. libertarians act out of fear ââ¬â "Hey, I'd lose my job (or wreck my fund-raising) if anyone ever found out I entertained a thought like that." In totalitarian societies, such as the United States and other Western countries have become, perhaps that response, too, is understandable. (I'm being very understanding today.) Few men ever have the courage to be martyrs; few enough even find the true grit to be heroes. If I may be forgiven an historical aside, the scene was a little different in the days when secure middle-class income and respectability weren't immediately at stake. Younger readers may not be aware that in the late '60s and early '70s, when the modern libertarian movement was coming together, libertarians were fairly prominent among those who were skeptical of the established Holocaust story. One figure of note who questioned it (and without being shouted down or slandered by his comrades) was the libertarian historian James J. Martin; but a number of ordinary, obscure libertarians didn't recognize the Holocaust as a sacred cow, either. Those were the days when they were crashing in sleeping bags at crummy apartments and pooling quarters and dimes in order to gas up that rusted VW van: back then, for most feisty young libertarians, "fund-raising" meant something quite different.
In any case, most of today's buttoned-down P.C. libertarians go beyond merely eschewing martyrdom, whether of the career or fund-raising variety. They go beyond eschewing heroism, even. The current climate is scary, to be sure; but, still, it's hardly a heroic, super-manly feat of derring-do to post a little link to an article on the war that doesn't revise the Holocaust but just happens to reside at a site opposed to shouting down Holocaust revisionists. No: the P.C. libertarians seem actually to have internalized society's reigning orthodoxies and taboos. They instinctively know what dogmas to accept without question and what ideas to black out. But, on second thought, even their internalization of orthodoxies and taboos may be understandable, and forgivable, since critical thinking and the pursuit of truth are negative Darwinian survival traits in today's world. Those possessing such traits will ultimately be weeded from the gene pool, and already many are unable to subsist economically at even a semi-decent level of poverty.
Perhaps, then, P.C. libertarianism is a perfectly understandable psychological phenomenon. It allows a man to feel good about being a rebellious champion of freedom while safely conforming to society's enforced dogmas. One is thus free to be an intellectual coward, or a complete non-thinker, and still enjoy self-esteem and brilliant repute as a fearless intellectual.
From the perspective of our rulers, such P.C. libertarians are perfectly harmless and can be left alone. They can even be allowed to flourish, as a false opposition. Today's P.C. libertarians may be nothing like the principled 200-proof libertarian truth-seekers of old. However, adherence to a belief system that is logically incoherent but psychologically comforting is probably all that we can expect of them, as Western civilization sloughs ever deeper into the garbage dump of history.
August 28, 2003
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2003-09-06 00:30 | User Profile
Good find, Kminta.
2003-09-06 11:57 | User Profile
Good article with many thought control critical phrases I'll steal, like "requiring megadose testosterone injections before ever daring to mentally entertain" and so on.
I'm confused why Sheldon Richman's name is among those who loathe Israel. He's a Jew and I havent known him to be a critic of Israel.
2003-12-05 18:31 | User Profile
Ilena has good company.
Neal Boortz.
2003-12-05 23:22 | User Profile
I have a very strong libertarian streak, and I can say this for a fact: It's impossible to support US taxpayer aid to Israel and also be a libertarian. It's just that simple.
The problem as I see it isn't with libertarianism per se; it's with a lot of people who claim to be libertarians when they really aren't. For example, Bill Maher of Politically Incorrect is purported to have claimed to be a libertarian. Either he doesn't know the difference between a "libertarian" and a "liberal" (that is, the Marxist variety of liberal), or he's just full of crap.
True libertarianism -- at least the flavor I espouse -- is the kind that was championed by Thomas Jefferson and many of the other Founding Fathers. They thought of America not only as a free nation, but also as a white nation. What we have now is neither. Unfortunately, the libertarians among the Founders did not always get their way, and that's why the Constitution was left vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation by opportunistic statists, not to mention the multiculturalists and socialists we now have to contend with.
2003-12-06 00:08 | User Profile
Almost all of the big libertarian heroes were, or are, Jewish-by-race, e.g. Rothbard, Von Mises, Rand.
2003-12-06 01:26 | User Profile
Libertarianism is by it's very nature anti-white because ever since industrialization the means have existed for capitol to move anywhere with no regard for interests of one's nation. When you say that people's material lives revolves around maximization of profit globalism and aliens taking your land is the result. If America were to kick out all aliens tomarrow but still keep capitalism you would be right back to where you are now with no more then 20 years.
Capitalism results in vast wealth concentrated in small number of institutions which allows for those institutions to obtain what Americans call lobbying strenght. That allows the state to be perverted to serve the interest of a few plutocrats whose interest maximizing profits no matter the cost to society. What means is that the property rights promoted by libertarians are undermined by the political influence that massive, and eventually transnational, capitalism use oligopic pwer which comes from unregulated commerce to suppress market forces. They do this using power of the state via lobbying and the preditory tactics of evil corprations like Wamart.
The needs of idividuals are not supreme because indivuals have meaning only within a community of one's family and the nation which is organic. Else wise you have nothing more then indiviuals seeking to benifit themselves with no sense of community but culture being nothing more then what those that control the media says it is. Those that have sense of communial responsiblity and beleive in "the soverign individual" will be conquered by those not taken by such follish suicidial thoughts.
Wise Christians and National Revolutionaries of all sorts figured out that materialism as a basis for society caused massive class conflict which was used by the left to destroy national unity. In modern times, transnational capitalism uses pop culture and greed to destroy national unity and identity. The end results are the same in that country becomes not a national community but just factions or individuals seeking to exploit everyone else with no culture and decadence the norm.
Popular economic control rather then plotocrats or state power is the alternative and syndical ownership in a closed economy is the one with the most record of success.
2003-12-06 02:14 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Franco]Almost all of the big libertarian heroes were, or are, Jewish-by-race, e.g. Rothbard, Von Mises, Rand.[/QUOTE] That may be true today, but the fundamental concepts of libertarianism go much farther back -- again, Jefferson et al were quintessential libertarians. And while I admittedly have read little or nothing by the Jewish authors you mention, my second-hand impression of their work is that it focussed heavily on economic theory, rather than the personal liberty with which I'm much more concerned.
2003-12-06 03:13 | User Profile
Olaf,
You make some interesting points, but it should be remembered that even if an individual is laboring solely for his own benefit and profit, society will almost certainly benefit in the end. On the other hand, under a more collectivist system in which rewards for good work and innovation are much more limited, people will tend to put much less effort into their labors. For all of modern America's faults, its great strength can be largely attributed to the great innovation that arises as a natural result of the capitalist system.
Although human beings are indeed social creatures and depend upon each other -- and this is more true in modern times than ever before -- human beings are nevertheless competitive by nature. Each man in a society will almost always seek to maximize his own benefit as well as that of his immediate family. Capitalism works in harmony with this fundamental aspect of human nature. Collectivism seeks to impose a different brand of human nature, and it's doomed to failure.
The problem of government-by-lobbying-power is certainly paramount, but this can be minimized or eliminated altogther by the judicious institution of clear, rigorous Constitutional safeguards -- including clearly delineated punishments for lawmakers who flout them. The absence of the latter is, in my opinion, easily the major reason for the failure of the American Constitution. Each politician takes his oath of office knowing full well that he can later break that oath and pass unconstitutional laws in order to satisfy lobbyists. The punishment of oath-breaking politicians would in no way be contrary to libertarian principles.
Regarding the issue of non-white immigration, that is precisely where I differ with the libertarian "party line." I believe in libertarian principles, but only in the context of a racially homogeneous nation. That doesn't mean that non-whites should all be enslaved or that they don't have rights, but there's no need for them to live among whites just for the sake of "diversity." Other libertarians are not as racially aware as I am, but many nevertheless agree that a policy of unrestricted immigration would be disasterous. A highly restrictive immigration policy would be enshrined in the Constitution of a white nation, and again, anyone who attempted to flout that Constitution would be punished severely for breaking his oath of office.
As for free trade with other nations, I see nothing wrong with such a policy -- such trade will generally only take place when mutually beneficial to both parties. Shipping jobs overseas is a different story. Restrictions of that practice would probably be justified even under libertarian principles, as the freedom of everyone in a nation is put at risk in the long run from foreign aggressors when that nation's economic development is severely compromised.
2003-12-06 06:30 | User Profile
You seem to confuse what I say with someone else. I am against collectivism and massive state control. It is no better in modern contexts then is capitalism for largely the same reasons I mentioned already. Both place the lives of the vast majority at the hands of a small elite that is driven by interests not community based. What I propose is a balance between private and communal interests because suppressing one destroys both.
As to society benefitting from self interest as sole basis of economic you wrong. America is awash in debt and has been for some time, your industries are dying as is white America. Fact is when your economy is based upon nothing but maximization of profit is one that creates a large, permanent under class that resents the current order and demands collectivism which I think we all reject.
Your comment ââ¬ÅThe problem of government-by-lobbying-power is certainly paramount, but this can be minimized or eliminated altogether by the judicious institution of clear, rigorous Constitutional safeguards -- including clearly delineated punishments for lawmakers who flout them.ââ¬Â is the classical American fallacy. Your constitution and legal doctrine did not stop your country from decaying because if you want 18th notions of legality you need the same societal conditions which are gone and will not return do to technological change. Economic concentration of power is a natural by product of libertarianism and that power is applied by those that have it over the state be it a social democratic, libertarian or collectivist one.
That reality means that when maximization of profits is sole basis of economy globalization and multi-racialism will follow when transport and communication technology makes it possible. The history of the last two generations proves it so if you want your country to not finish becoming a third world dump like Brazil you best start looking at how you got to where you are and that means giving up the religious dogma that pretends to be economics called libertarianism. I am sorry to say that no other way exists to describe your notion that international trade in modern world is beneficial. It does not benefit the slave laborers in the third world, the Occidentals left unemployed or with poor wages from having to compete with third worlders as is seen by any that spends time in third world or the USA. It does not benefit your fellow Americans to be dependant upon massive companies that view themselves as ââ¬Åglobal citizensââ¬Â that can export livelihoods instantly to get higher profits or your consumers that are at the mercy of third world, state supported trans-nationals that can run your markets once domestics are destroyed.
Your country used autarkic policies to become an economic giant and every nation that did so in living memory, save the miserable slave economies of Macau and Hong Kong, was far from following libertarian dreams. If you read some new right stuff you may understand why your country is dying and why libertarianism produces popular support for collectivism.
2003-12-06 17:55 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Angler]...it should be remembered that even if an individual is laboring solely for his own benefit and profit, society will almost certainly benefit in the end.[/QUOTE]
Thank you, Angler. Your post here was very refreshing, reflecting a point of view woefully underrepresented here. Well stated.
2003-12-06 21:22 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Angler]As for free trade with other nations, I see nothing wrong with such a policy -- such trade will generally only take place when mutually beneficial to both parties. Shipping jobs overseas is a different story. Restrictions of that practice would probably be justified even under libertarian principles, as the freedom of everyone in a nation is put at risk in the long run from foreign aggressors when that nation's economic development is severely compromised.[/QUOTE]
In other words, a tariff. The high tariff regime of post-Civil War America did not strangle foreign trade. On the contrary, trade increased, as did federal revenues. The government used these surplus revenues to finance an extensive pension system for Union veterans and their widows. It was the federal government's first large-scale social support (or welfare) program.
However, while trade increased, domestic industries, and the people they employed, were protected. A tariff, after all, is nothing more than a sales tax levied on imports. Many on the right support replacing the income tax with a national sales tax. Wouldn't it make more sense to tax the foreigner, not the American?
2003-12-07 00:29 | User Profile
I hope Tex realizes that us capitalism-bashers are bashing BIG capitalism/finance, not the Mom-and-Pop capitalism, which I love.