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WACO and LIBERAL CORRUPTION
by Lew Rockwell
The mainstream press is trying to ignore it, but the government's role in the fire at Waco seven years ago is finally on trial, thanks to the wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the victims' families. At last, the possibility for establishing wrongdoing now presents itself.
There is no chance, however, for true justice. The men, women, and children gassed and burned at government hands cannot be brought back to life. There will be no jail terms for those responsible. At best, the families may get some monetary compensation. And perhaps we will see an end to the blaming of the victims and the jailing of those who managed to survive.
How telling that this trial takes place while Bill Clinton is busy trying to buff up his image for the history books. Doesn't he know that after the smoke of the last eight years clears, the Waco massacre will emerge as the most significant domestic event of his presidency? He should have been forced out in the days following the incident. Congress should have impeached him then instead of pretending that his worst crime was fibbing about his White House sexual romps.
Waco will be remembered forever because it sums up key features of the political culture of the 1990s: the untrammeled power of the presidency, the complicity of the media in covering up federal crimes, the bias against religion among the power elite, and the disregard of individual rights that is habitual in our time. How ironic, how telling, that all these developments have taken place under the cloak of "liberalism," a word that once referred to the attempt to circumscribe the power of the state.
Who can forget the live pictures of the Davidian community in flames? Clearly, the government was murdering those people. For weeks, they had been fighting for life against a government that was terrorizing them. This was no doomsday cult bent on suicide. For some strange reason, and it's never been entirely clear why, the government hated those people.
After the massacre, one hoped that even liberals would have sensed the injustice. Surely the old lefties in the White House would recall their past as crusaders against federal militarization, their shock at Kent State, their sympathies with marginalized groups, and rise up to denounce this federal oppression. Surely there would be shock and outrage, even within the executive department. Resignations would follow. Clinton would be discredited, and those responsible for this outrage would be brought to justice.
It was not to be so. Over the next few weeks, the media cooperated with the Clinton administration in an amazing cover-up of what was plainly evident. Far from investigating the fire and the lies of the White House, the media cabal demonized the Branch Davidians and smeared anyone -- the "lunatic fringe" -- sympathetic with their plight.
We were told that they had probably committed suicide, or, if they hadn't, they merited no sympathy because of their crazy religion and/or child abuse and/or gun stockpiling and/or drug use. Take your pick of crimes; the Branch Davidians, most of them dead with the survivors hauled off to prison, were not in a position to defend themselves. Reno went on television to "take responsibility." How courageous she is, the news weeklies told us.
The meaning of the event had a further significance. It was the largest display in the post-war period of what has become of American liberalism: not a movement dedicated to protecting the liberties of minorities or the rights of citizens, but to defending every manner of coercion at the hands of the Leviathan state. It is for political reasons that they turn a blind eye to the crimes of states they support.
This same fanatical ideology denied that the Soviets had committed crimes against humanity in the Ukraine and the Gulag. After all, these crimes were committed in the name of progress, which to the leftist mind means collectivization and the eradication of bourgeois prejudices. This same cast of mind seeks to deny that the Clinton administration did anything wrong in Waco. Even the government's case boils down to the claim that if the Davidians had only obeyed the government, there would have been no deaths; hence, it is the fault of the Davidians.
In 1993, these American liberals, who had just finished cheering on the destruction of Iraq and would later whoop it up as bombs fell on Serbia, were willing to defend the use of military weapons against American citizens who were minding their own business. For liberals, it was enough that Janet Reno had decided to move against those people. That alone was proof they deserved it. Liberalism, which embraced statism in the Progressive Era, the planned economy in the '30s, and outright redistributionism in the 1960s, has become nothing more than state worship.
How pathetic, too, to witness Congress' attempts to investigate what had happened at Waco. A committee summoned various lackeys from the administration to testify. Lie after lie went unchallenged. Witnesses with phony stories prattled on and congressmen and their staffs listened as if to the gospel. The committee disbanded with the White House vindicated. But the issue wouldn't go away, thanks to public pressure and the hard work of a handful of political dissidents.
That event also symbolized something about the present state of the Constitution: instead of the balance of power, we live under a de facto executive dictatorship. The White House never felt the need to ask permission of the Congress before it undertook the raid, and the Congress never raised a serious challenge to the White House's assertion of complete sovereignty. Our elected representatives provided the illusion of participatory government, while Reno and various anonymous and unelected underlings held the reins of government in reality.
In the old days, the American system was supposed to exemplify the ideals of democracy and self-government. Not for us the system of autocratic rule, where one man can dictate policy at the expense of natural liberty. No indeed: we had a government of laws to which even the rulers were subjected. But beginning decades ago and culminating in the Clinton administration, we have tolerated regimes in love with their own power. In the Clinton years, this has been exemplified in the executive order, which Paul Begala, the glib Friend of Bill, famously described this way: "Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool."
Kinda despotic, actually. And that kind of crack exhibits a totalitarian mentality. But it perfectly captures the willingness of the present regime to use any means to hold on to power. Thus is the state of liberalism today. There are no ideals left. There is precious little public support for their goals. There is only raw power, wielded by courts that ignore the Constitution and unelected bureaucrats who believe themselves to be a people set apart.
In the former Soviet Union and its former East Bloc, in Latin America, and in much of Europe, the term liberal refers to those who want a society and economy free from the shackles of state control. Pascal Salin of the University of Paris has just come out with a massive volume with the title "Liberalism," the purpose of which is to recapture the full sense of the term as used by Ludwig von Mises in his 1927 book of the same name .
In this tradition, liberalism means individual rights, capitalism, decentralism. The horrible reality is that in America, the term liberalism refers to the exact opposite: the unquestioned power of the executive to carry off state violence, as in Waco, and to do so with neither permission nor reprisal from any other branch of government or the media.
Political philosopher Paul Gottfried, author of "After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State," has recently noted the new vogue for the term "post-liberalism." It refers to the theory that freedom is essentially dangerous because it permits inequalities, discrimination, and secession from civic culture. The modern state cannot tolerate this.
In place of freedom, post-liberalism seeks a total state to reconstruct people's thinking, to coerce their every association, to manage every business, and to prohibit the exercise of private ownership and decision-making. Post-liberalism is also ruthless: it dreams of eradicating its enemies by any means necessary.
This is the basis of nearly every act of tyranny committed in present-day America. This is the basis of the Supreme Court's decision on prayer at sports events. It is the basis of the EEOC's relentless attack on business. It is what's behind the federally imposed curriculum in the public schools. It is what sustains the welfare-warfare state. It is the genesis of the whole of the modern statist enterprise.
If the court should rule that the Waco victims' families deserve compensation, or that those responsible for the invasion of property and the taking of life should face some sort of reprisal, it would nicely symbolize the coming turn of events: the end of the Clinton era and the possible new dawn of a day when the state is no longer permitted absolute power.
What we need is not another post-liberal regime but a new appreciation of classical liberalism in order to replace the frightening corruption of the last eight years and before. When our communities are safe from federal tanks, our property is our own, our associations are private affairs, and our businesses are permitted to serve customers and not the state, we will know that true liberalism has returned.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He also edits a daily news site, LewRockwell.com . |
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TYRANNY IS HERE
by Paul Craig Roberts
Tyranny is creeping up on us. If you don't believe it, consider the most prominent hallmarks of the Nazi and Communist regimes, which sought to supplant democracy in the 20th century.
In National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union, there were no First Amendment rights. No one could voice an opinion contrary to the politically correct views enforced by the Gestapo and the KGB. Media and education were used to instill politically correct thinking and bring denunciation upon anyone who departed from politically correct thinking.
This is precisely the situation that exists today in the vast majority of American colleges and universities. Verbal and facial expressions that are contrary to political correctness result in sensitivity training (a form of brainwashing) or expulsion for the offender, who may have done nothing more than laugh. If the source of mirth is an ethnic joke, a blonde joke or a hilarious claim by a multiculturalist, the hapless offender discovers that his constitutional protections do not exist.
In Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, there were victim groups that were championed and oppressor groups that were suppressed. In Germany, the "victims" were Aryans, who were said to be under the financial hegemony of Jews. In the Soviet Union, the hegemonic group was the bourgeoisie, who allegedly held sway over an oppressed proletariat. In both countries, victims were permitted to exercise violent language and actions against oppressors.
In the United States today, white heterosexual able-bodied males constitute the hegemonic group. Everyone else is a member of a victim group.
In Germany and the Soviet Union, the abstract and imaginary group roles of oppressor and victim were given a frightful reality by ideologues. Race and class categories became the basis for discrimination and new legal systems that favored victims' groups with preferences.
On American campuses, multicultural ideology has revived the concepts of race and class oppression, and added new ones based on gender and sexual orientation. Men oppress women, and heterosexuals oppress homosexuals.
According to multiculturalists, our culture and values reflect nothing but the arbitrary domination of society by white heterosexual males. University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Kors says that, thanks to multiculturalism, "half a century after the defeat of Nazism, we distinguish by blood and we equate blood with culture." We now think like Nazis and explain our society and culture in terms of race (and gender) hegemony.
Tyrannical states attack the family. Both the Nazis and Communists are infamous for state intrusions in family affairs. In the United States, similar bureaucratic and political intrusions come from family courts. Most Americans are unaware of the existence of these relatively new "courts." Howard University professor Stephen Baskerville is the leading authority on these courts. He says family courts are "the most dangerous institution posing a threat to constitutional rights in our society. The only parallels are the ideological-bureaucratic dictatorships of the last century."
Family courts claim immunity from the Constitution and from scrutiny by federal courts. Baskerville describes them as follows:
"Their proceedings are secret and unrecorded. Their orders are enforced by bureaucratic police who do not wear uniforms and whose sole responsibility is to conduct surveillance over families and private lives. As such, these police are akin to secret police. By the very nature of their jurisdiction, these courts and police are the most intrusive and invasive arm of government, and yet they are accountable to virtually no one. Such an institution is intolerable in a free society."
Recently a family court judge ordered the parents of a 7-year-old boy in Berne, N.Y., to put their child on Ritalin, a behavior-control drug. The alternative was to be found guilty of "educational neglect," an offense that would open the possibility of their child being seized by Child Protective Services -- a Hillary Clinton "village" institution straight from the pages of the Gestapo. The child suffered serious side effects from the drug, but parents no longer have the right to decide what is best for their children.
Tyrannical states assault the individual in the inner recesses of his consciousness. He is not permitted to think certain thoughts or to express a prohibited thought privately to anyone.
Recently, Janice Barton encountered a Spanish-speaking couple while leaving a restaurant in Manistee, Mich. She turned to her mother and said, "I wish these (ethnic slur) would learn to speak English." An off-duty deputy sheriff overheard the private remark, followed the woman to her car and noted her tag number. Janice Barton was sentenced to 45 days in jail for her thought crime.
This couldn't happen in a free country.
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Dr. Roberts' latest book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, has just been released by Prima Publishers.
COPYRIGHT 2000 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, research fellow at the Independent Institute and senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. |
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