freedom and reason

Bill Burton, a key Obama adviser, when asked why Obama disinvited his spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright to speak at Obama’s presidential race kick off, said, “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor” and that Obama wanted to “avoid having statements and beliefs” of Wright show up on blogs and conservative talk shows. So Otis Moss III was asked to speak instead. Of course, Moss’s statements and beliefs are no different from Wright’s, but then the media hasn’t pursued that. They have made this about Wright, because they believe they can—as Obama has done—dismiss him. But it’s not about Wright; it’s about Trinity United Church of Christ and black liberation theology.

At the time, Al Sharpton criticized Obama over the disinvitation saying that blacks were rightly distressed by Obama failing to stand by his pastor. Sharpton doesn’t make this criticism any more, even though Obama has failed to stand by his pastor in even more dramatic fashion as of late.

Wright understood why Obama distanced himself from church teachings. “When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli [to visit Muammar el-Qaddafi] with [Louis] Farrakhan,” he said, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.” Wright also knew that such statements as the following one could prove fatal to Obama (if, of course, the media ever harped on them): “White America and the Western world came to realize [in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks] that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.” (I guess I don’t really need to point out that this quote hasn’t been discussed at all in the current discussion over Wright’s teachings, even though it is a well known among those who are paying attention.)

Obama knew full well the character of Wright’s language, telling Wright during the disinvitation conversation: “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.” For those slow on the uptake, this means that Obama is lying when he says he was unaware of the controversial remarks. Clinton’s misremembering of events during one hour 12 years ago in a war zone goes to the heart of her trustworthiness, we are told, but no similar claim is made about Obama’s continuing and deliberate deception in hiding his spiritual mentor from the public and denying that he heard controversial remarks (a story Obama can’t keep straight).

This really is the story: Obama’s lying. But the media isn’t reporting the story this way. The corporate media angle is that his speech was the best speech ever on race and Americans for the most part believe he addressed their concerns. The media doesn’t provide the proper angle because, as it is as obvious as anything could be at this point, their goal is to see to it that Obama gets the nomination. Whether their overwhelming support for Obama stems from the desire to ameliorate the guilt they feel as whites over racism or sabotage Hilary Clinton’s chances is a matter of interpretation. (Maybe it’s both.)

Wright has cancelled many of his appearances of late, one suspects because the attention they would receive would prove embarrassing to Obama. But one wonders why Wright, who once said that Obama was “the hope of the world,” continues to do Obama’s bidding. Wright warned both Obama and Moss years ago that an Obama presidential campaign would make criticism of Trinity inevitable. I’m sure he didn’t expect Obama to turn his back on the church and reduce its preacher to a crazy old uncle who says bizarre things when that inevitability manifested itself in the clips of Wright’s sermons shown on YouTube.

Obama now says he would have quit the church if Wright hadn’t retired. “Had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying there at the church.” But that’s not what Obama said in the “greatest speech ever.” Remember what he said then? “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” 

Obama can’t get his story straight. He says he never heard controversial remarks despite being a member of the church for twenty years. Then he says in his speech he did hear controversial remarks. Then he says after his speech that he didn’t hear controversial remarks, that he wasn’t there those days. Then we learn that he didn’t let Wright speak at the ceremony announcing his run for the White House because of Wright’s controversial statements. He says Wright is family and he can’t disown him and that’s why he didn’t leave the church. Now he says that had Wright not retired he would have left the church.

Obama knows that, if white America ever realizes that for two decades Obama faithfully, willingly, and enthusiastically attended a church where the minister preached the things Wright preached week in and week out, Clinton will likely be the nominee of the Democratic Party. But the truth is that this is exactly what happened. So rather than simply admit it and take this opportunity to explain to America what Trinity United is all about, Obama lies. And the media covers and spins.

Wright and Trinity United got attention a while back when another member of the church, Oprah Winfrey—who says that “Obama is the one we’ve been waiting for” (The Matrix?)—actually stopped attending the church (she hasn’t been a member for nearly a decade), because she didn’t like Wright’s rhetoric—again, rhetoric Obama has always known about but which he denies knowing. Wright didn’t take Oprah’s leaving well. When asked about it, he said, “She has broken with the (traditional faith)…. She now has this sort of ‘God is everywhere, God is in me, I don’t need to go to church, I don’t need to be a part of a body of believers, I can meditate, I can do positive thinking’ spirituality.’ It’s a strange gospel. It has nothing to do with the church Jesus Christ founded.”

Although Obama never left the church, he has turned his back on the church’s teachings. As readers of my blog know, Wright advanced what he called a “Black Value System,” one of the tenets of which is the rejection of “middleclassness.” This value issues from the Marxist character of black liberation theology. Obama has fully embraced the middle class lifestyle, pitching his campaign specifically to the middle class voter—the white affluent college-educated liberal who wants desperately to vote for any black man to prove to themselves that anything is possible in America. Working people (except working class blacks, who are tragically voting on the basis of identity politics and not on the basis of their objective interests during this campaign season) get this and therefore are supporting the candidate with the practical policy and program proposals (who has the added bonus of potentially beating McCain in November).

You can’t trust Obama. He has either sold out completely or he was always lying to the south side of Chicago. In any case, he has been lying to Americans all along and he won’t stop lying about all of this.

Obama is getting a free ride from the corporate media. Obama tells the public that any statement his preacher made that offends them he did not personally hear (because he wasn’t in church on those days) and he categorically condemns and denounces it. Then he says he heard controversial statements made by Wright while sitting in the pews of Trinity United. Then he says he didn’t. Now Obama says he would have left the church had Wright not retired. But Wright was making these remarks at least throughout the present decade.

Did Wright tell Obama he was going to retire in 2008 way back in 2001 when he gave his “Chickens coming home to roost” sermon and Obama rode it out until then? Oprah left because of what Wright said and there was a public war of words over the matter. Why didn’t Obama do the same? Is the new minister (Otis Moss) acceptable to Obama since Obama remains a member of the church? The press is not pressing Obama on any of these things. Nobody who gets anywhere near him is openly challenging his obviously absurd answers to the questions he asks himself. 

Electability is the central issue in this campaign, yet the media is too busy piling up Democratic voices on one side calling on Hillary to step aside and marginalizing those voices that point out how close the contest is. They want to stop the fight before the final bell because they the fear that Obama will stick out his chin and Clinton will land a knockout blow. They suspect there’s more in Obama’s past hanging over his candidacy and they desperately want Clinton to concede before that information gets out. They couldn’t contain the Wright sermons and they don’t want a repeat of that debacle before the big primaries coming up. While they were able to make a confusing speech appear to the public as a special speech by hyping it, there’s no guarantee that they can spin future speeches in the same way. 

The problem is not so much with what Reverend Jeremiah Wright has said, but with how Barack Obama has reacted to the controversy. For twenty years, Obama was a member of a church that preached black liberation theology, a Christian worldview with roots in Marxism. Yet, when he needed to appeal to white voters, Obama denied he knew about the character of Wright’s theology, denounced church teachings, and reduced Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his spiritual advisor, the man who put him in touch with his black identity, to a rough-and-tumble style preacher. Obama didn’t stand up for the black community or for black liberation theology. He gave a speech in which he treated racism for the most part as a thing of the past. He depicted the radicalism of Wright and others as anger and frustration held over from the 1950s and 1960s. It was a remarkable moment in which a politician believed to be something different was revealed as little more than a superficial and willing pawn of the establishment.

There are some who are claiming that Barack Obama is being subjected to a Willie Horntoning. They defend the reverend, but also cast Obama as the victim. He’s not. Obama is pulling a Sister Souljah. The progressive community should be out front in condemning Obama for this. The media’s reaction to Wright’s comments was predictable. Obama’s reaction to Wright’s comments were despicable.

Recently, The Washington Post interviewed Peter Paris, professor emeritus of Christian social ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary. Paris worries that Obama’s condemnation of some of Wright’s words could hurt him in some black churches. It is interesting that, instead of condemning Obama for his betrayal of the church, many progressive theologians are concerned about how Obama’s speech plays among black church goers with respect to how it helps or hurts Obama.

“So many black churches understand the role of prophetic speech alongside of pastoral speech, and I don’t think that Obama helped…communicate that strongly enough,” Paris said. “I hope that he doesn’t find black churches moving away from him in that respect.” Paris said that Wright’s comments about past slavery and modern-day segregated schools are not, as Obama claimed, “distorted.” “Jeremiah Wright is seen as a major prophetic voice in the black community,” Paris said, “and there are many people who adore him.”

Yet Paris, who was a divinity school classmate with Wright in the 1960s, is an Obama supporter. Why, if Paris and others realize that Obama’s characterization of black liberation theology as distorted is wrong, do they support him? Do folks still think Ferraro was wrong to say that the reason why Obama is doing so well is because some Americans are caught up in the idea of a black president?

I think people have to understand Obama’s motive. Either he joined Trinity United because he believes in black liberation theology and its black Christian Marxist roots or he used Trinity United to find his black identity and build a constituency. It doesn’t appear that Obama ever believed in black liberation theology. He used the church as a stepping stone and then when he got to where he wanted to be—at the threshold of the Democratic nomination—he turned his back on them.

Even if Obama still holds to black liberation theology and is denying it because he knows he couldn’t get elected otherwise, then he’s perpetrating a fraud of mega-proportions. If you know people won’t like you because of what you believe, and you have the courage of your convictions, then you don’t pretend to be something else; you tell them what you believe and let the chips fall where they may. Obama is too busy feeding everybody what they want to hear to have any convictions.

As an aside, I wonder how much press this latest thing about Italians with their “garlic noses” will get. Wright is big on this metaphor of Rome as the United States. No way did Barack Obama not know about this thread. It pops up over and over again. Two days ago Obama discussed the “very objectionable things [said] when I wasn’t in church on those particular days.” How convenient. If Wright says anything objectionable, just assume that Obama wasn’t in church that day. That may work for Obama true believers, but to rational persons it’s ludicrous.

If the press was going after Obama the way it’s going after Hillary this race wouldn’t be close. Seriously, I would really like to see a video of Obama laughing and clapping in the pew over one of Wright’s objectionable comments. Trouble is, they’re likely hiding that evidence. For some reason or another, even though Obama threw Wright and Trinity United under the bus, they’re still protecting him.

If you are a person who believes that what Jeremiah Wright said about 9-11 and white America is false and wrong, then you probably should not on principle support Obama since he approved of those statements by not leaving the church or by encouraging the removal of Wright as its pastor. Folks who sit in church silently while their minister is damning America for tolerating homosexuality endorse those statements when they fail to sack the minister or leave the church. Obama can offer no justification for why he did neither. He has admitted he lied when he claims to never have heard the statements.

If you are a person who believes that what Wright said about 9-11 and white America is true and right, then you probably should not in principle support Obama since he condemned those statements, denigrated Wright the person, and turned his back on the community. Obama gave a speech in which he came out in favor of the convenient understanding of racism, a speech aimed at making white people feel good about his presidency by making racism appear for the most part as residual anger among older black Americans. Obama betrayed Wright’s teaching. So if Wright is somebody you admire, then Obama offends you. And you see the speech for what it was: a superficial, self-serving attempt to confuse the issue.

Obama sought to walk a tightrope, as the media was constantly reminding us. But there is no tightrope to walk. There are only two ways to feel about this if you operate on principle, each rooted in your political worldview. These worldviews are represented by the establishment standpoint, on the one hand, and the popular standpoint on the other. If you are of the former, then Obama’s failing is that he is a member of a radical black anti-American church. If you are of the latter, then Obama’s failing betrays your core values as an advocate for social justice.

Following Obama’s lead, the media used empty words to make a speech that couldn’t possibly work appear as if it did. They manufactured an illusion, one that millions of the believers sitting at the feet of the Obama cult of personality needed no prompting to believe. Why can I see the speech for what it is? Because I am consistently justice oriented. I can see what Obama is up to. He’s the establishment’s black candidate.

But others who adhere consistently to the establishment standpoint also see through the speech. They can see how he changed the subject from the problem of his minister’s anti-Americanism to the problem of racism in America, a switch he exploited to gain traction among liberals seeking satifaction on the question of race. Obama’s speech was an object lesson in the importance of developing a consistent worldview rooted in principle, as well as why bipartisanship is an undesirable goal and centrism is an extremist ideology.

By the way, have you noticed that white Christian ministers can say all sorts of nasty things about America, but when a black Christian minister does it he is a racist anti-American demagogue?

The communitarian critique of liberalism rests in essence upon the argument that one cannot derive a moral theory from the position of individualism. Morality must exist beyond the individual, say communitarians. Communitarians locate morality in normative actions rooted in community and tradition. This means that morality usually comes rooted in religious rules, or at least religious-like rules.

However, whether religious or secular, communitarianism ultimately leads its proponents into relativism. This is not accidental; communitarians challenge the liberal claim of universalism. The problem of particularism versus universalism has already been solved (albeit the solution is pending), and this solution issues from the historical materialist conception of the relationship between the individual and society.

Specific moralities, whether rooted in religious or secular notions of bad and good, right and wrong, are, to a substantial degree, expressions of alienation under power. While concrete moral systems sometimes reflect universal morality, rules and values are articulated through the commands of estranged and oppressive systems. The objective core of alienation and oppression is the unequal condition of human existence in segmentally-arranged societies. Whenever the individual is prevented from performing the definitive role in shaping her destiny, and a social system is prevented from working to each individual benefit—that is, when some individuals, alone or organized into groups, systematically enjoy advantage and other individuals or groups suffer disadvantage—then the moral system will always be constrained and distorted.

Now I come to the solution: the elimination of segmentation and the creation of a substantively egalitarian social order, one in which benefit to the one comes with the benefit to all. Only when such an order is established—or, more precisely, restored—will an undistorted universal morality exist.

To put this another way, liberty and universal morality are achieved through equality. It is in the demand for justice that liberalism, at least as currently articulated in all its many forms, is revealed as inadequate, as the emphasis on negative freedom and minority ownership and control over the means of production runs counter to the establishment of a social order based upon democracy and personal liberty.

An argument with which you may be familiar concerns the objectivity of morality. Many persons of religious faith believe that any moral claim or action ultimately must issue from a transcendent source, which they define as a supernatural agent or force. Without a supernatural entity or force, which exists as a universal and timeless thing, morality is merely the product of the subjective mind and, as such, its advocates can claim no final objective authority over the behavior of the individual. Thus secularists, while they may articulate moral sentiments and advocate rules appealing to their attendant values, have no real foundation upon which to build an ethical and legal structure. Societal arrangements change over time and space (they are culturally and historically relative), whereas the supernatural agent or force, which we shall call “God,” is intransitive. In short, no religion, no morality. It follows, therefore, that, without “God,” there is no reason to be or do good.

I know of no claim that suffers from greater invalidity and unsoundness. When one examines culture and history, he finds, among the many things that a particular people produce, concrete religious systems. The first thing that strikes the observer, after examining a handful of different cultures, is the great degree of cross-cultural variability in religious systems and associated aspects of the moral order these religious systems are alleged to underpin. With different religions come different moral systems, which mean there are different ideas and motives for a person to be or do good (or evil). Thus, the evidence demonstrates that appealing to supernatural agents or forces does nothing to make universal or immemorial any particular moral order. On the contrary, on the surface, morality is found to be as culturally and historically relative as religion.

The only way out of this relativity problem, from a religious perspective, is to assert (and assert one must, since one cannot prove) that one religion is the only true religion, while all of the others are false religions. But such an assertion is self-evidently subjective, and thus cannot be the objective grounds for arguing that religious morality is superior to secular morality. Belief in the supernatural is, after all, a matter of faith. Indeed, what we find when we look at several specific religions—each of which claims to be the one true religion—are practices accepted and even encouraged by religious leaders and texts that are recognized as moral wrongs in the present day.

The Judeo-Christian Bible, for example, advocates the killing of defiant children, homosexuals, and infidels, acts that widely recognized as criminal acts. The Bible also justifies slavery. Yet virtually every Christian and Jew opposes slavery. How is it possible that people recognize the immorality of prescriptions in the Bible if the Bible is the sole source of morality for adherents to this religion? Does the obvious truth that religion provides no objective foundation for morality mean that morality is doomed to relativism and subjectivism?

For a very straightforward reason, I believe the answer to this question is no. Here, social science (a secular system of thought) provides us with the needed tools to identify objective features of morality. A moral order is an emergent property of human society irrespective of any religious sentiment. Each Homo sapiens, as an accident of biological evolution, must live in society to become human in the moral sense. Morality is, at its core, the rules that organize individual action or behavior sufficient for the existence of human being and that make the continuation of society possible. Thus a universal morality is to be found in the universal features of human interaction and relations.

Sometimes a particular religion will reflect these transhistorical features of human society, such as is seen in the so-called “golden rule,” a prescription found, if only ideally, everywhere. Oftentimes, however, religious sentiments disrupts the basic decent human impulses given to us by deeper societal relations. Here we find those religious texts advocating killing and oppressing human beings in the name of a god or gods.  What we find when we study the matter from a position external to the religious system is that the leaders and scriptures are justifying power relations peculiar to a concrete social order; in other words, they wrap exploitation and oppression in the language of morality. The religiously-devoted in these instances are not oppressing others for the sake of morality, but for the sake of maintaining power and wealth, that is, perpetuating an unjust, or immoral, if you will, state of affairs. In this way, religion can be, although this is not always true, the epitome of immorality.

It seems no matter where I am, I am called upon to become the teacher of introductory students of American government. In this entry, I will instruct some of those who visit the blog about the distinction between “powers” and “rights.” Most of you already know this, but you may find the argument helpful in dealing with those who don’t—of which there are many.

Powers concern state action not forbidden by federal judicial interpretation of the US Constitution. In contrast, rights concern freedoms governments, state and federal, cannot legally curtail.  

Let us examine the text of the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which is, with the possible exception of the Second Amendment, the most misunderstood and misapplied amendment: 

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

You will note that nowhere in the amendment is any reference made to rights. Read it again. The amendment concerns powers. The meaning of the amendment is explicit: if the federal government amends the Constitution, or if through closer examination the federal judiciary reveals more powers inherent in the Constitution, then the power of states and of the people may be restricted; but if this does not happen, then the states and the people enjoy the balance of (theoretically unlimited) powers. 

This is something quite different from the question of rights, which neither state nor federal governments may curtail without good reason; indeed, state and federal governments are required to protect and preserve our rights.

Let us now examine the text of the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This amendment, unlike the Tenth Amendment, does concern rights. Please read it again and note that nowhere in the amendment is anything said about states. The reason for this is obvious: states have no rights; only people do. This amendment exists to accommodate state-level bills of rights that are more expansive than the federal bill of rights. The people of the various states were concerned that, if rights were outlined in a federal bill, this might restrict rights listed in state bills. Those drafting the federal bill wanted to assure the people of the various states that the act of drawing up a federal bill should not be construed as restricting state bills.  

The Ninth Amendment also means that citizens living in states that either do not have a bill of rights or have a more restrictive bill enjoy rights recognized by the federal government that states cannot restrict. Indeed, the key dynamic in the history of freedom in the United States is the progressive incorporation of all the states within the US Bill of Rights so that all citizens have the same rights everywhere at all times.

Here’s the bottom line: any state that restricts a constitutionally-guaranteed right, even if no judgment has been made by a federal court invalidating that restriction, is exhibiting tyrannical behavior. Case in point: the Texas Homosexual Conduct Act. The victims of this act of tyranny sought relief from the Supreme Court (Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472 2003). The law did not suddenly become an act of tyranny because the Court overturned it. Indeed, any court failing to overturn the conviction and invalidate such a law was perpetuating that act of tyranny.

Neither God nor gods give you liberty. People successfully organized against tyranny give you liberty. Freedom concerns what you control, not what Mitt Romney imagines an invisible man in the sky controls. Politicians aim to exploit the blind faith that usually results from belief in the supernatural; they mean to control you through religion. Romney’s speech sounds like an ayatollah’s sermon, not the words of a man who may govern a secular country. Romney doesn’t believe this is a secular country. He fallaciously claims that secularism is a religion, then, hypocritically, rejects it.  

Secularism is the belief that public institutions shall exist free of the influence of religious belief. Secularism is not a religion; it is belief in freedom of religion. Secularists recognize that, since there are different religions with exclusive doctrinal elements, if government does not exist free of religion, then religious influence on government will inevitably fall to one sort of religion or another. Under such conditions, followers of other religions and nonbelievers will be less free.  

The problem of religious pluralism (not an ideology but a fact) is the reason why the first right guaranteed by the US Bill of Rights is religious freedom, i.e., secularism: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” Mitt Romney is of course free to privately practice his religion; however, as a public employee, he is not free to impose his religion on us. No politician can be free to be a tyrant. Yet Romney is arguing precisely for such a tyranny of religion when he claims that the US Constitution was established for a religious people.

Romney supports his case by selectively quoting John Adams. What happens when we bring in two other founders of our secular republic, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? Romney may not know it, but it was well known in the day that these men were free thinkers; you knew by the hysteria of the Calvinists of the day who, to quote Susan Jacoby, “denigrated [them] as atheists, heretics, and infidels.” But, just as Lincoln refused to join a church despite the pleadings of his advisers, public pressure didn’t deter Jefferson and Madison from their secularism.  

Thomas Jefferson wrote,

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What have been the effects of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and terror all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand.

With history and the fact of religious pluralism in mind, Jefferson wrote to one religious association, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.” 

James Madison also sought “total separation of the church from the state.” This was good for both the people and religion, for “practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government is essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”

Mitt Romney soils the memory of our founders work by failing to praise them for creating the first country in history to disestablish its government from religion. He betrays the vision of the founders. He is a Christianist, and his presidency represents a danger to our democracy.

Moreover, Romney’s arguments are a form of bigotry. Surveys show that nonbelievers in US society outnumber black Americans. Any government practice compelling all black Americans to observe the desires of the white majority against the interests of black Americans is discriminatory. We call this racism, and it has been a problem throughout our history. It follows, then, that any government practice compelling all nonbelievers and non-Christian believers to observe the desires of the Christian majority is discriminatory. That makes Mitt Romney is a bigot.

Note 6.8.2022: I no longer agree with either my assessment concerning Scandinavian states or the merits of Hayek’s work. Part of my shift in opinion is because the character of European social democracy has changed considerably since I wrote this blog in 2007. But I have also changed my judgment with respect to Hayek. Indeed, I should not have a “but” in there, since the emergent authoritarian character of European social democracy suggests the predictive validity of Hayek’s argument. And it is not just Europe suffering from the overgrowth of elite planning; the American republic is suffering, as well.

What was the joke Paul Sweezy used to tell? Something to the effect of Hayek’s theory posits that if there is an overproduction in baby carriages, then the central planners will order the population to have more babies. A joke to be sure, but dead to rights.

The premise of The Road to Serfdom, “planning leads to dictatorship,” is on its face absurd; but more importantly, it has been empirically falsified. To be sure, planning by a corporate-state sharply increases the likelihood of authoritarian rule, such as, most obviously, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and, less dramatically but nonetheless obviously, in the United States. However, planning in contexts where workers have a substantial say-so in what happens in economic life (that is, democracy), such as in the Scandinavian states, increases personal freedom. Indeed, most European states have far greater levels of personal freedom than the United States, and the European countries that are most free present with a much greater degree of planning.

We don’t need to speculate on whether Hayek’s claims are sound; the evidence refutes the thesis of his book.

If you want to read more of Hayek’s immoral ideas, read The Constitution of Liberty (1960). If we stay true to the man’s logic, handicapped parking discriminates against the able-bodied. Only ideologues cling to his words any more. Unfortunately, ideologues, in contrast to rational minds, are never in short supply.

In this entry I wish to take up the issue of holocaust denial.  

In 1763, forces led by Pontiac, a chief of the Ottawa who had been allied with the French, laid siege to the English at Fort Pitt. General Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander of British forces in North America during the French and Indian War (1756-1763), wondered in a letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet, “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.” Bouquet wrote to General Amherst, in a letter dated 13 July 1763:

I will try to inocculate the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care however not to get the disease myself. As it is pity to oppose good men against them, I wish we could make use of the Spaniard’s Method, and hunt them with English Dogs. Supported by Rangers, and some Light Horse, who would I think effectively extirpate or remove that Vermine.

Amherst responded to Bouquet, in a letter dated 16 July 1763: 

You will do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present.

A third letter on 26 July 1763 from Colonel Bouquet acknowledges receipt of the approval:

Sir, I received yesterday your Excellency’s letters of 16th with their Inclosures. The signal for Indian Messengers, and all your directions will be observed. (Emphasis mine.)

In subsequent letters Amherst and Bouquet state that extermination of American Indians was necessary.

In response to this damning proof of conspiracy to commit genocide, holocaust deniers claim that there is no proof that the conspiracy was actually carried out. Of course, when proof of genocide having actually been carried out is presented, holocaust deniers claim that there does not exist evidence of intent found in the letters of Amherst and Bouquet.  

The denial argument is corrupt on many levels. There is a deliberate effort to disconnect the intent from the act, so that either one can show one or the other but not both, therefore no genocide. The argument is identical to that of those who deny the holocaust of European Jews. They claim that, because there are no orders from Hitler commanding the extermination of Jews, there was no intent to bring about the destruction of world Jewry. Moreover, there is a deliberate attempt to emphasize the alleged debunking of the germ warfare cases for the purpose of distracting from the other means of genocide – guns and sword, starvation, and cultural reprogramming.  

Furthermore, deniers are highly selective in their recognition of evidence. With respect to the Fort Pitt incident, we know that, by the following spring, smallpox had spread rapidly through Indian populations in the vicinity. We know that Captain Simeon Ecuyer had sent smallpox-infected blankets and handkerchiefs to the Indians surrounding the fort, and that Amherst told Bouquet that Ecuyer told him that there were smallpox cases at the fort. We know this because of a journal entry by William Trent, dated May 24, 1763 in which it was reported that Ecuyer “gave them [Indians] two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” These facts connect intent, action, and result. It also shows that people in positions of power were either independently or collaboratively thinking and acting along parallel lines.

Harold B. Gill, Jr., in an article titled “Colonial Germ Warfare,” published in the Army Chemical Review, Oct. 2004, makes several points that holocaust deniers should keep in mind. He writes that the “Fort Pitt incident is the best-documented case of deliberately spreading smallpox among unsuspecting populations, but it was likely not the first time such a stratagem was employed by military forces….” He provides the following cases:

In 1623, Dr. John Pott, a physician at Jamestown, Virginia, was said to have poisoned Indians in retaliation for a Powhatan uprising in which 350 English died. On 22 May 1623, Captain William Tucker and 12 other men went to the Potomac River to secure the release of English prisoners held by Indians. To conclude the peace treaty, the English invited the chief and his men to drink a sack prepared for the occasion. But the Indians demanded that the English interpreter take the first drink, which he did from a different container. Afterward, a group of Indians, including two chiefs, were walking with the interpreter when the interpreter suddenly dropped to the ground while the English soldiers discharged a volley of shots into his Indian companions. The English estimated that about 200 Indians died of poison and 50 from gunshot wounds….”

Indians were not the only targets of germ warfare:

Almost from the beginning [of the colonial war for indpendence], Americans suspected that the British were trying to infect their army with smallpox. Just before Virginia’s last royal governor, Lord John Dunmore, departed from his base at Norfolk in 1776, the Virginia Gazette reported that his lordship infected two slaves with smallpox and sent them ashore to spread the virus….

Most British troops were inoculated or were immune to the virus due to previous illness. In Europe, smallpox was endemic. Nearly everyone was exposed to the virus at an early age, so most of the adult population had protective antibodies. On the other hand, most American soldiers were susceptible to the virus. Due to the sparse population. Americans often reached adulthood without coming in contact with the smallpox virus.

When the American siege of Boston began in April 1775. smallpox was epidemic among civilians living there. Most British soldiers were immune to the virus, but General Washington suspected that some of the civilians leaving the city had been infected in hopes of spreading the virus in the Continental Army. In December, deserters coming to the American lines confirmed those suspicions. One week later. General Washington informed John Hancock of the enemy’s malice intentions. A Boston physician later admitted to administering the virus to people leaving the city. Rumors and suspicions of British efforts to spread the virus were persistent throughout the war.

This tactic of sending infected people into populations of healthy people is the most effective way of transmitting the disease. This raises awareness about a very important reality concerning responsibility for genocide by disease. Clearly white people were aware of the problems of smallpox and acted to prevent the spread of the disease among their own populations. Sending infected Indians to their villages or otherwise failing to prevent the spread of the disease among Native American populations is no less deliberate germ warfare than giving Indians infected blankets. 

Gill writes, that smallpox played a role in the failure of American forces to capture Quebec. He writes that

General Guy Carleton, the British commander in Quebec, deliberately sent infected people to the American camp. Thomas Jefferson was convinced that the British were responsible and later wrote that he was informed by officers that the virus was sent into the Continental Army by the British commander. After the defeat at Quebec, American troops gathered at Crown Point where John Adams found deplorable conditions with disease and few, if any, provisions.

Gill documents another case:

When the British sent an expedition to Virginia in 1781, General Alexander Leslie revealed to General Charles Cornwallis his plan to spread disease among the Americans by sending 700 Negroes down the river with smallpox to infect the plantations.

He also notes a book, published in 1777, Military Collections and Remarks, in which a British officer, Robert Dunkin, suggested “dipping arrows in the smallpox virus and shooting them at the Americans in an effort to disband the rebels.”

Given the evidence in this brief essay, it becomes difficult to sustain the claim that germ warfare against the Indians was not a widespread practice.

Ayn Rand is a pseudo-intellectual charlatan of the first order of magnitude. Her boring dime store novels and forced bits of sophomoric sophism are eagerly consumed by college Republicans who desire anything remotely intelligent-sounding for the purposes of cloaking their anti-social reactionism in a veil of false authority. 

Rand fandom is the mark distinguishing the intelligent person from the wannabe smart person. Love of Rand separates brains from hacks. Those who study philosophy and the sciences laugh at Rand worshippers behind their backs (sometimes to their fronts). As soon as we find out a person is a Rand devotee, we know immediately that the person is a intellectual lightweight, a self-important newbie to the world of thought. We sometimes wonder why Rand fans aren’t L. Ron Hubbard fans. At least his novels were interesting. At least he could smile without it looking like his face was going to twist up into a knot. 

Here’s an instance of Ayn Rand’s “brilliance” on display. In the late 1940s, Rand was writing screenplays in Hollywood and gaining a following for her book The Fountainhead (a book that was so bad it was rejected by twelve publishers and then almost uniformly panned by reviewers when it finally found an outlet). In 1947, she appeared before the House Un-American Affairs Committee to protest a film she believed falsely portrayed life in the Soviet Union as enjoyable (Rand was Russian).

She claimed the film was a piece of propaganda and so she defined propaganda, saying, “I use the term to mean that communist propaganda is anything which gives a good impression of communism as a way of life. Anything that sells people the idea that life in Russia is good and that people are free and happy would be communist propaganda.”

Immediately we can see how silly this is. It’s a simple fact that many millions of Russians found life enjoyable during this period. One might have simply asked the majority of those who had lived under the Czar how much better life was after the Revolution. One might have asked them if they were more free under the Czar. Depicting Russians as happy wasn’t propaganda at all; it was a truth that Rand dreaded because it contradicted her propaganda, namely, that nobody in Russia was happy. It would have been propaganda to have censored images of and testimony concerning happiness and freedom.

Just listen to what she said in response to John McDowell’s question. “You paint a very dismal picture of Russia. You made a great point about the number of children who were unhappy. Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia any more?” She responded, “Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no.” She claims that literally the Russian people pretty much don’t smile. When asked to clarify, she says, “If they do, it is privately and accidentally. Certainly, it is not social. They don’t smile in approval of their system.” This is propaganda. Russians did smile publicly then, They did smile in approval of their system. 

McDowell milked it for all it was worth, unintentionally allowing Rand to make an even bigger fool out of herself. “That is a great change from the Russians I have always known, and I have known a lot of them,” he said. “Don’t they do things at all like Americans? Don’t they walk across town to visit their mother-in-law or somebody?” Rand answered, “Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman.”

The “totally inhuman” characterization doesn’t jibe with objective accounts of Soviet life. Nor does this: “Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it.”

Then McDowell asks, “You came here in 1926, I believe you said. Did you escape from Russia?” Rand answers, “No.” McDowell asks, “Did you have a passport?” Rand, “Strangely enough, they gave me a passport to come out here as a visitor.” So we are to believe that this “totalitarian dictatorship,” in which everybody lives in “constant terror from morning till night,” “where you are afraid of anything and everybody,” “where human life is nothing,” even “less than nothing,” gave Ayn Rand a passport to visit the United States?

For centuries, libertarianism has meant freedom from inequality and hierarchy. This understanding of libertarianism is synonymous with anarchism. As Alexander Berkman, perhaps the brightest mind of US anarchists, noted in Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1929), “the greatest teachers of Socialism – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – had taught that Anarchism would come from Socialism. They said that we must first have Socialism, but that after Socialism there will be Anarchism, and that it would be a freer and more beautiful condition of society to live in than Socialism.” Of the Bolshevik movement he wrote, “their greatest teacher, Lenin, had said that Anarchism would follow Bolshevism, and that then it will be better and freer to live.”

(Unfortunately, the Revolution was from the beginning put on the defensive by capitalist encirclement and invasion, forcing it into a siege socialist posture, and then betrayed by reformers before it arrived at communism. Capitalists had to make sure that the Soviet Union did not succeed in the long run because they knew that not only did socialism work, but that its end game, communism, would mean the end to the capitalist life of living off the work of the people.)

Berkman said these things because he knew that anarchism and communism are in essence the same thing: people controlling their own lives without classes and the state. To make sure people understood this, he and many others called themselves anarchist communists or communist anarchist. These terms, along with the most recent libertarian socialism, have the same meaning as the term democracy in its non-restricted sense, namely rule by the people.

But in order to move towards democracy, the working class must recognize the limitations of liberal (bourgeois or capitalist) democracy and then struggle to replace it with a libertarian order, i.e., proletarian democracy. One of the barriers to this is propaganda that confuses the people about the meaning of words. “Libertarianism” as is currently used by bourgeois politicians and the media is really one rhetorical aspect of a propaganda strategy adopted in the 1950s by the enemies of the “New Liberalism” (limited social democracy) of Roosevelt and the New Dealers. This attack was led by such social darwinists as F. A. Hayek at the intellectual level. Today, states rights conservatives such as Ron Paul claim to be libertarian.

Those who study political and economic history and theory, and who are truthful about such matters, know this is not what libertarianism means. After all, Ron Paul’s beliefs are antithetical to liberty. If you wish to speak truthfully, and not talk in spin, then you don’t use “libertarianism” to refer to the philosophies of authoritarian capitalism or social darwinism. These philosophies and practices are fundamentally opposed to liberty.

The right-wing intellectuals and politicians presenting themselves as libertarian are in really anti-libertarian. Indeed, they are an authoritarian. Such is the state of the Orwellian world in which we live. They support capitalism, which is a system of controlling people for profit. Capitalism, like slavery and feudalism, is a hierarchy of control. Libertarianism, in contrast, is about individual freedom, and such freedom can only come when there are no hierarchies of control.

Here’s the hard truth of the matter: The capitalist class is a parasitic social stratum that must be eliminated in order for liberty to exist in its fullest sense. People cannot be free where the few exploit and control the many. No person who is forced by unequal and unjust circumstances to rent himself to survive is free. Any person who profits from a situation in which other persons are forced by unequal and unjust circumstances to rent themselves to survive is a parasite. Capitalists must be dispossessed of their control over the means of production and come work alongside the people who actually reproduce the world everyday. Capitalists and their managers must be metamorphized from parasites to contributing members of society. There are no vampires in a free world.