A HINDU ABOUT SWASTIKA

A HINDU ABOUT SWASTIKA

Swastikam Symbol of Auspiciousness

O BACK FIVE THOUSAND YEARS IN HISTORY. AT the port of Lothal on India's northern coast of the Arabian Sea, tons of cargo lines the wharves. A trader, inspecting his goods before voyaging to the Sumerian cities on the Tigris River, turns an imprinting seal over in his hands, feeling its upraised image of a cross with arms sweeping ninety degrees leftward from each endpoint of the cross. Swiftly he presses the seal into a soft clay tag anchored to a bundle of cotton. The impression is a mirror image of the seal, a right-hand facing swastika.  THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION SWASTIKA SEALS (British Museum) The symbol, so evocative of unending auspiciousness, is sewn into his sails, as the swastika would later also adorn the sails of a ship described in the Ramayana. The trader is from Hinduism's most ancient known civilization: the Indus Valley in northwest India. The seal rests today in a museum and is the oldest surviving representation of the swastika, a Sanskrit word meaning "good being, fortune or augury," literally "conducive to well-being," derived from su, "well" and astu, "may it be," or "be it so." For Hindus the swastika is a lucky cross associated with the good fortunes given by Lord Ganesha. It also represents the sun and the cycle of life. This ancient benign symbol is used today by housewives to guard thresholds and doors, by priests to sanctify ceremonies and offerings and by businessmen to bless the opening pages of account books each New Year's day. No ceremony or sacrifice is considered complete without it, for it is believed to have the power to ward off misfortune and negative forces. A series of small swastikas is a favorite border pattern for textiles. In Maharashtra the rainy season is especially devoted to its honor, when it is drawn on the floor in elaborate patterns using colorful powders and flower petals. It is said that the swastika's right-angled arms reflect the fact that the path toward our objectives is often not straight, but takes unexpected turns. They denote also the indirect way in which Divinity is reached -- through intuition and not by intellect. Symbolically, the swastika's cross is said to represent God and creation. The four bent arms stand for the four human aims, called purushartha: righteousness, dharma; wealth, artha; love, kama; and liberation, moksha. Thus it is a potent emblem of Sanatana Dharma, the eternal truth. It also represents the world wheel, eternally turning around a fixed center, God. The swastika is associated with the muladhara chakra, the center of consciousness at the base of the spine, and in some yoga schools with the manipura chakra at the navel, the center of the microcosmic sun (surya). The swastika is a sacred sign of prosperity and auspiciousness, perhaps the single most common emblem in earth cultures. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica explains, "It was a favorite symbol on ancient Mesopotamian coinage; it appeared in early Christian and Byzantine art (where it became known as the gammadion cross because its arms resemble the Greek letter gamma); and it occurred in South and Central America (among the Mayans) and in North America (principally among the Navajos). In India it continues to be the most widely used auspicious symbol of Hindus, Jainas and Buddhists." When Buddhism emerged from India's spiritual wellspring, it inherited the right-angled emblem. Carried by monks, the good-luck design journeyed north over the Himalayas into China, often carved in statues into Buddha's feet and splayed into a spectrum of decorative meandering or interconnecting swastikas. On the other side of the planet, American Indians inscribed the spoked sign of good luck into salmon-colored seashells, healing sticks, pottery, woven garments and blankets. Two thousand miles south, the Mayans of the Yucatan chiseled it into temple diagrams. Once moored to the ancient highland cultures of Asia Minor, the emblem later voyaged around the Mediterranean, through Egypt and Greece, northward into Saxon lands and Scandinavia and west to Scotland and Ireland. Nineteenth-century Americans picked up the symbol from the American Indians. Boy Scouts wore brassy swastika belt buckles, and a US World's Fair early this century minted flashy swastika commemorative coins. It was displayed in jewelry and inscribed on souvenirs, light fixtures, post cards and playing cards. In the 1920s and early 30s the swastika was the emblem of the United States' 45th Infantry Division, proudly worn by soldiers on their left shoulder as an ancient good-luck symbol, in yellow on a square red background. The emblem was changed to an Indian thunderbird during the 1930s. Canada has a town called Swastika, 360 miles north of Toronto, named in 1911 after a rich gold mine. When WWII broke out, the townsfolk withstood pressures from the federal government to change the name to Winston. In the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler's Nazi Third Reich rose to power in Germany and engulfed the planet in World War II, the fortunes of the swastika declined. From September 1935 to the fall of the Nazis in 1945 it was displayed on the Reich's official flag, a black swastika in a white circle against a red field. German soldiers also wore the hackenkrenz ("hooked cross") on their uniforms, in a circle beneath an eagle, and displayed it on their armory. In the West it became an infamous, hated symbol of fascism and anti-Semitism and was banned by the Allied Command at the war's end, though the swastika's history is as extensive in the West as in Asia. The swastika has throughout history mutated into a wide diversity of forms and meanings, but in its Hindu usage the right-hand swastika is far more prevalent and ancient than its left-hand counterpart. Next to the Indus seal, the oldest Indian swastika motif appears abundantly on the early Buddhist sculptures, a period when Buddha was not depicted in human form -- only his foot prints surrounded by dozens of right-hand swastikas. Similarly, the Jain emblem for their seventh Tirthankara (path finder) is the symbol of the sun, the right-turning swastika. In Malaysia the Sikh shrines all have right-hand swastikas as mystical ornamentation. In some sources neither swastika was assigned a negative connotation: the right-hand was a spring solar, male symbol and the left was an autumn solar, female mark. As the tantric sciences of Saivism and Shaktism bifurcated into a left-hand and right-hand path (the vama and dakshina) the swastika may have followed into black or white mysticism and magic. The search for a pre-World War II treatise on the swastika struck gold with a book entitled The Swastika: the Earliest Known Symbol and its Migrations, by Thomas Wilson, a curator of the US National Museum. It was written in 1894 for the Smithsonian Institute. The work opens with a right-hand swastika on the title page and presents an exhaustive survey of the global dispersion of this symbol, from the Navajo tribes of North America to Egypt, ancient Troy and the Taoists of China. Among other Oriental scholars quoted in the book is Max Muller, the German professor at Oxford and Veda translator who introduced the word Aryan to the European intelligentsia. It was through Muller that Aryan was first imbued with a sense of race rather than an attribute of virtuous, spiritual nobility. Wilson writes, "Prof. Max Muller makes the symbol different according as the arms are bent to the right or left. That bent to the right he denominates the true swastika, that bent to the left he calls suavastika, but he gives no authority for the statement." After examining the positions of dozens of scholars Wilson concludes, "Therefore, the normal swastika would seem to be that with the ends bent to the right." Wilson's book pictorially surveys the dispersion of the swastika symbol, region by region. Indeed, so broadly cast is the symbol in the early ages of human society that Wilson determines it is impossible to trace the swastika's origin. Wilson's exploration of European use of the swastika prior to 1894 is an eye-opener. In the section "Germany and Austria" we are treated to ten samples of the swastika (now displayed in museums) that are designed into filigree screens, used to ornament burial urns and spearheads, and fashioned into broach and pin jewelry. They orient both right and left, with a preference to the right. The entirety of runic Europe was covered with swastikas, both in ornamentation and in some of their best-preserved Teutonic inscriptions to the old Gods. The swastika is an emblem of geometric perfection. In the mind's eye it can be stable and still or whirl in perpetual motion, its arms rotating one after another like a cosmic pinwheel. It is unknown why and how the term swastika, "may it be good," was wedded to this most ancient and pervasive of symbols. Most authorities designate the right-hand swastika as a solar emblem, capturing the sun's path from east to west, a clockwise motion. One theory says it represents the outward dispersion of the universe. One of its finest meanings is that transcendent reality is not attained directly through the logic of the mind, but indirectly and mysteriously through the intuitive, cosmic mind. Though Hindus use the swastika straight up and down, other cultures rotated it at various angles. The left-hand swastika appears in many cultures, including Hindu. It often is used interchangeably with the right-hand version, though the majority of Hindus employ the right-facing form. One school sees this swastika as that which rotates clockwise because a wind blowing across its face would catch the arms and rotate it to the right. But this is an unusual interpretation. Most see it as rotating anti-clockwise, as the arms point as such. Some say this form signifies the universe imploding back into its essence. It has been associated with the vama, left-handed, mystic path that employs sensual indulgence and powerful Shakta rites, with night, with the Goddess Kali and with magical practices. Another interpretation is that it represents the autumn solar route, a time of dormancy. Because of its infamous association with the Third Reich, the swastika was and still is abhorred by many inside and outside of Germany, still held in disparagement and misunderstanding, which itself is understandable though unfortunate. Now is a time for this to change, for a return to this solar symbol's pure and happy beginnings. Ironically, even now Hindus managing temples in Germany innocently display on walls and entryways the swastika, the ancient symbol of Lord Ganesha and more recently the hated insigne of Nazism, alongside the shatkona, six-pointed star, the ancient symbol representing God Siva and Lord Karttikeya and as Star of David, the not so ancient but cherished already for centuries emblem of Judaism. From a mystically occult point of view the swastika is a type of yantra, a psychic diagram representing the four-petalled muladhara chakra located at the base of the spine within everyone. The chakras are nerve plexuses or centers of force and consciousness located within the inner bodies of man. In the physical body there are corresponding nerve plexuses, ganglia and glands. The seven principal chakras can be seen psychically as colorful, multi-petalled wheels or lotuses situated along the spinal cord. The seven lower chakras, barely visible, exist below the spine. The following is a list of the fourteen chakras, their main attributes and location in the body. CHAKRAS ABOVE THE BASE OF THE SPINE 14) sahasrara crown of head illumination 13) ajna third eye divine sight 12) vishuddha throat divine love 11) anahata heart center direct cognition 10) manipura solar plexus willpower 9) svadhishthana below navel reason 8) muladhara base of spine memory/time/space CHAKRAS BELOW THE BASE OF THE SPINE 7) atala hips fear and lust 6) vitala thighs raging anger 5) sutala knees retaliatory jealousy 4) talatala calves prolonged confusion 3) rasatala ankles selfishness 2) mahatala feet absence of conscience 1) patala soles of feet malice and murder Sivacharya priests, adept in temple mysticism, testify that when they tap the sides of their head with their fists several times at the outset of puja, they are actually causing the amrita, the divine nectar, to flow from the sahasrara chakra at the top of their head, thus giving abhisheka, ritual anointment, to Lord Ganesha seated upon the muladhara chakra at the base of the spine. Meditating on the right-facing swastika, visualized as spinning clockwise, is a key to ascending to the seven higher chakras, which likewise spin clockwise. Meditating on the left-facing swastika, spinning counterclockwise, takes consciousness into the seven lower chakras, which spin counterclockwise. Devotees sometimes ask, "Why is it that some souls are apparently more advanced than others, less prone to the lower emotions that are attributes of the lower chakras?" The answer is that souls are not created all at once. Lord Siva is continually creating souls. Souls created a long time ago are old souls. Souls created not so long ago are young souls. We recognize an old soul as being refined, selfless, compassionate, virtuous, controlled in body, mind and emotions, radiating goodness in thought, word and deed. We recognize a young soul by his strong instinctive nature, selfishness, lack of understanding and absence of physical, mental and emotional refinement. At any given time there are souls of every level of evolution. My satguru, Sage Yogaswami, taught that "The world is a training school. Some are in kindergarten. Some are in the BA class." Each soul is created in the Third World and evolves by taking on denser and denser bodies until it has a physical body and lives in the First World, the physical plane. Then as it matures, it drops off these denser bodies and returns to the Second and Third Worlds, the astral and causal planes. This process of maturation, occurring over many, many lifetimes, is the unfoldment of consciousness through the chakras. First the young soul slowly matures through the patala, mahatala, rasatala and the talatala chakras. Such individuals plague established society with their erratic, adharmic ways. Between births, on the astral plane, they are naturally among the asuras, making mischief and taking joy in the torment of others. When lifted up into jealousy, in the sutala chakra, there is some focus of consciousness, and the desires of malice subside. Finally, the patala chakra sleeps. Later, when the sutala forces of jealousy are thwarted, the young soul arises into anger, experiencing fits of rage at the slightest provocation. As a result of being disciplined by society through its laws and customs, the individual slowly gains control of his force; and a conscience begins to develop. It is at this stage that a fear of God and the Gods begins to manifest. Now, totally lifted up into the atala chakra, seventh of the fourteen force centers, the individual emerges into the consciousness of the muladhara, the seat of the elephant God; and several of the chakras below cease to function. Here begins the long process of unfoldment through the higher chakras , a process outlined in Saiva Siddhanta as the progressive path of charya, kriya, yoga and jnana. Thus, through hundreds of lifetimes and hundreds of periods between births, the asura becomes the deva and the deva becomes the Mahadeva until complete and ultimate merger with Siva, vishvagrasa. Individuality is lost as the soul becomes Siva, the creator, preserver, destroyer, veiler and revealer. Individual identity expands into universality. Our loving Ganesha, sitting on the muladhara chakra, signified by the swastika, is "there for us'' throughout our evolution from one set of four chakras to the next until all seven of the highest are functioning properly. He and His brother, Lord Murugan, work closely together to bring us all to Lord Siva's feet, into His heart, until jiva becomes Siva. -------------------------------- COMMENT: INDEED! The swastika is an emblem of geometric perfection.The Swastika in its true shape is the embodiment of phi (φ —the golden section)

Steven Yates - The Great Struggle: Republic Or Empire?

The Great Struggle: Republic Or Empire?

by Steven Yates

I smell fear. Teddy Chappaquid – I mean Teddy Kennedy, of course – didn’t like John Ashcroft at all. Not long after the hearings were under way, it was revealed that Ashcroft had once made some highly politically incorrect remarks about the threat of "tyrannical central government," and also expressed sympathy toward issues of state sovereignty and even Southern heritage. He has spent his career opposing the centralization Kennedy and his ilk have been building up. Ashcroft got confirmed – by a vote of 58-42 in the U.S. Senate. But Kennedy’s leftist buddies have put the Bushies on notice: you have your token "right winger"; don’t try this again!

Kennedy, who has never worked outside of government in his life, illustrates as well as any one person how the dominant philosophy of government in America’s centers of power has reversed since the country’s founding. I’ve no doubt that the Framers would be horrified by the kind of career politician Kennedy exemplifies. And they would have been right. Career politicians spend their lives (and millions of taxpayer dollars) betraying this country’s founding document, which was intended as a permanent and absolute (not a "living, evolving") limitation on central power. So again, I smell fear in the liberals’ attacks on Ashcroft. They tried – unsuccessfully – to get him because they fear he will not enforce laws that are unconstitutional and should never have been passed in the first place. He has said otherwise. He has promised to uphold the laws of the land regardless of his beliefs. It is too bad that he doesn’t go further in the direction of freedom the liberals fear. But then again, if he did, he would have had no chance at all.

The Ashcroft hearings offer just one more roadmap toward the Great Struggle currently underway – the struggle to define this country. Newly minted President Bush Jr., whether he knows it or not (and I’m not sure he does) is caught right in the middle. Here is the question of our historical moment: Do we want to live in a federation of sovereign states where the locus of control is, indeed, local, and in which law-abiding adult citizens have sovereignty their lives, personal resources, businesses and communities? Or do we want to live in a centralized, bureaucratized empire, where what isn’t micromanaged by the central government is controlled by government-favored international megaconglomerates, all paid for through ever-higher rates of taxation?

When Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, it was a declaration that the original 13 colonies were seceding from an empire, that of the British. The Framers, when they wrote the U.S. Constitution, attempted to give us a federation of sovereign states: as Benjamin Franklin put it, "a republic, if you can keep it." The authors of the Bill of Rights then purposefully gave us the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to keep the power of the central government in check.

A Republic. A federation of sovereign states.

But with apologies to George Lucas, Empire keeps striking back. Thomas Jefferson spent the rest of his life issuing warnings about how centralized government tends to increase its power. He issued warnings about the need for a vigilant public.

It is possible to show (as Charles Adams does in his brilliant tract When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession) that the war 140 years ago boils down to a contest between Republic and Empire. I am aware, of course, that it is now politically correct to say that that war was fought over slavery – because, after all, when Lincoln’s minions defeated Jefferson Davis and Gen. Robert E. Lee, Empire won its first major battle on U.S. soil. Secession was not merely rejected as a viable means of checking its growth, but the numerous discussions of the topic and even threats to carry it out that arose between 1787 and 1860 were literally purged from the history books. Not noticed was how the issue had been decided not legally or Constitutionally but by brute force.

Empire has been growing ever since. The next quantum leap occurred with the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, the acceptance of the 16^th Amendment into our Constitution on the basis of a very dubious ratification scheme, and the adoption of the progressive income tax system. Previously, Empire had been effectively blocked from flexing its muscle too much on American shores, because it lacked the resources. Very shortly, that would change. Not coincidentally, the era of U.S. involvement in foreign wars began right after. Empire, after all, cannot stay out of wars. It is its nature to try to mind the rest of the world’s business.

Fresh quantum leaps in Empire-building occurred during the Roosevelt era, with the rise of the welfare-warfare state during the Great Depression. This period occurred mainly because of the efforts to centralize and micromanage the economy during the 1920s that the Federal Reserve made possible. We can read all about it in Murray Rothbard’s two magnificent tracts America’s Great Depression and The Case Against the Fed. Empire claimed to have the solutions to problems it had created, and a desperate, uninformed public believed. Welfare happened, and warfare grew.

The most recent quantum leap was with the so-called civil rights movement of the 1960s. It became possible for Empire to dictate hiring practices to obtain politically acceptable ratios of blacks to whites, women to men, according to the rapidly rising Gramscian ideology of victimology. No one pointed to the exact clause in the Constitution that empowered the federal government to dictate hiring practices. The closest anyone could come was that unspecific clause about "promot[ing] the general welfare" which hardly meant build a welfare state.

In fact, freedom of association is one of those commonsense "rights retained by the people." What else can it be? If nothing in the Constitution empowers the federal government to tell people how to associate, then it follows that Constitutionally, this must be left up to them. A freedom to associate, however, implies a freedom not to associate – a freedom exercised every day when whites congregate mainly with whites and blacks mainly with blacks, at least when they are not at work. In a free society, some businesses would be all (or primarily) white, and dealing mainly with a white customer base; others would be all (or primarily) black, and have a black customer base; still others would be all (or primarily) Hispanic, with an Hispanic customer base; still others would be fully integrated in all ways if that is their owners’ and customers’ agreed-upon choice. This would be accepted as the norm. In a free society, neither central government nor activist busy-bodies feel compelled to mind everyone else’s business.

Empire has continued to grow since the civil rights era, and it has chosen its targets well. The political correctness movement targets free speech and freedom of thought – in response to the mounting criticisms of affirmative action that came of age during the 1980s. Well-organized activists have attempted to gut the Second Amendment with such measures as the Brady Bill, fully supported by a Clinton Regime which didn’t mind bombing the daylights out of little countries overseas (usually to distract the country from however much trouble Billy Boy was in here at home). So-called scholars in the universities have analyzed the basic phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" out of existence. It is clear from history that if the purveyors of Empire can disarm the citizenry of a country, they can do with that citizenry as they please. One of the first things Adolf Hitler did when he came to power was to enact the strictest gun control laws then in existence. A disarmed citizenry is a powerless citizenry, and every would-be tyrant knows it.

Today, in the politically correct American Empire, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are forgotten, except by a few "extremists" who insist that the central government obey its founding document. Patriot, which was a good thing to be when I was a kid, has become a dirty word, synonymous with "antigovernment hate." In the halls of power in the Empire’s capitol, the Constitution is remembered in name only. Today, of all those in Congress, only Ron Paul (R-TX) will ask outright of any piece of legislation, "Where does the U.S. Constitution authorize the federal government to do this?" He usually doesn’t get an answer.

But the fundamental question hasn’t gone away: Republic or Empire? Sovereign states or conquered, subordinate serfdoms? Empire has grown by leaps and bounds, and is going more and more international – as I have argued elsewhere and provided extensive details and links. (And it is getting more and more expensive. If you think your taxes are too high now, just wait until the New World Order institutes a world tax to support its international criminal court and international welfare programs.)

The fact that we heard not a word about such fundamentals last year during Election Campaign 2000 speaks volumes about where we stand, when the two divisions of the Washington Party are supposed to be so different ideologically. Those who raised such issues as fundamental limitations on the federal government were either ignored or dismissed out of hand. At present, the Empire-builders are on top, and they know it. They would have preferred Gore over Bush Jr., I am sure. Bush Jr. is basically well intentioned and will drag his feet – his choice of people like Linda Chavez and John Ashcroft shows that. With Gore, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. But the fact that Bush Jr. was the Republican nominee alone indicated his acceptability to Empire’s power brokers. This rightly bothered those who questioned my very reluctant endorsement of Bush Jr. The reception of the only three genuine conservatives George W. Bush Jr. has nominated for his cabinet shows this. Chavez was driven off in the latest campaign of personal destruction. Ashcroft and Gale Norton hung on by the skin of their teeth. Leftist litmus tests are very much in force. They attack anybody they do not believe will further their agenda for the country. I am encouraged, however, that they do not always win. They are not all-powerful, and this is significant.

The issues must be discussed, one way or another. What kind of society do we want, a Republic or an Empire? And what, if anything, can we do about it?

We who prefer to live in a Republic do have some aces in the hole – even if we are presently outorganized and outfunded. First, for Christians, is the realization that this is, in the last analysis, God’s universe. The world does not belong to the Empire builders. Not really. Empire-building, in this view of the world, signifies the sinfulness inherent in human nature. A small minority of the human race is drawn to power. The rest are at a disadvantage because not only have they little interest in power as an end in itself, they don’t really comprehend this motive. But if we are on God’s side we are on the right side, and He will see us through this in His own way, and in His own time. This He promises, even if we are in for a rough ride in the meantime. And it is very possible that we are in for a rough ride. Even if we are approaching the End Times, as I hypothesized in an earlier article, there is no guarantee that we will be supernaturally taken off this world in a rapture-like event. Interpreting Scripture is not mechanical and straightforward. Christians who believe in a forthcoming Rapture may well be wrong. If Christianity is true, however, then the End Times are coming – with or without a Rapture. The New World Order will be built. It is useful to remember that God does not ask Christians to defeat the New World Order. What He asks for, and rewards, is faithfulness to Him, even in the face of death. Read Hebrews 11.

However, if we leave Christianity aside, we have a second ace in the hole. For those educated in Austrian school economics: this is a universe in which political centralization and micromanagement of an economy by the powerful simply doesn’t work. The most the latter can do is employ a variety of machinations and quick-fixes to stave off the inevitable as long as possible. The Federal Reserve, for example, can flood the economy with credit and create a "bubble" of pseudo-prosperity. But eventually, the piper must be paid. The fundamental principles: human beings must take action to produce their means of their survival; andwealth cannot be pulled out of thin air. (These are actually the same principle, worded two different ways.) The entire human science of economics follows as a matter of deduction. Read Ludwig Von Mises’ great treatise Human Action.

Now how does this make Empire impossible over the long run? Mises gave the answer, and his student Friedrich A. Hayek expanded the answer still more: human society is too complex. Simple as that. Millions of human beings taking the actions they believe will benefit them – buying, selling, hiring, etc. – this equals theeconomy. The latter is not the sort of entity that can be overseen from some central point. It is an inherently decentralized system, and no human being – indeed, no committee of human beings – can see all of it at once, or anticipate how it is going to develop and change. Even our most inventive science fiction writers have failed at this. Arthur C. Clarke dreamed up HAL for his classic 2001 but never thought of Microsoft. Could anyone have predicted what the World Wide Web was going to do in the 1990s? Economic systems are not like organisms that can regulate their components from a brain and central nervous system. We are talking about a much higher level of complexity here – the complexity that results when self-directed human beings with brains and central nervous systems begin to interact, compete and cooperate.

Empire, then, tries to do the impossible. It imposes taxes, myriad regulations, etc., on acting persons, all to service endeavors those persons might or might not have supported voluntarily. It thereby leaves us with a disincentive to produce. It interferes with the productive process, directing it in ways it would not go on its own. It supports projects that would otherwise die on their own (and in some cases, good riddance). Or it builds up endeavors that would develop rarely if at all in a system of genuine free enterprise for all – such as international megaconglomerates, products of corporate welfare.

Empire, then, is in the long run, futile, and we can know this. Left to its own devices, it will lower the overall standard of living when it begins to run out of quick-fixes and people to sponge off of. A worldwide Empire – call it the New World Order or whatever you want – is a good recipe for worldwide poverty.

So what can we do? Among other things, continue promoting getting this country back to its founding document, the Constitution. This includes reminding the Bushies what all those red states in the infamous map really meant. We put them in charge for four years, and supported men like John Ashcroft who have shown from past words and deeds that many of their ideas are the right ones. But we should hold their feet to the fire. If Bush Jr. sells us out, his will be a one-term presidency just like his old man’s was.

And if President Hillary is the only alternative, the time will have come to talk seriously about repeating Thomas Jefferson’s brave act of 1776, and telling the Washington Empire bye-bye.

February 3, 2001

Steven Yates - The Oklahoma City Bombing

The Oklahoma City Bombing:
A Morass of Unanswered Questions

by Steven Yates

It is official: for whatever reason, thousands of FBI documents related to the Oklahoma City bombing did not make it into the hands of Timothy McVeigh’s defense team. Some are calling for a full investigation into the FBI’s handling of what was their most important and visible criminal investigation of the last decade. As of this writing, McVeigh himself is toying with the idea of fighting his execution by the federal government, postponed by Attorney General John Ashcroft until June 11.

The question comes up: are the missing FBI documents the product of a foul-up of monumental proportions even for a government agency or the result of deliberate concealment? A lot of conspiracy theories have circulated around the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, not all of them consistent with one another, some of them plausible, none of them proven. Although I have no specific theories of my own, I’ve had the suspicion from the start that someone in the federal government had advanced knowledge that something nasty was going to happen in Oklahoma City that day. As to the details, I am as much in the dark as anyone who wasn’t there. Compounding the matter is the fact that – so far, anyway – McVeigh himself isn’t talking. He seems to have dismissed all conspiracy theories and reports of "John Doe No. 2’s" with the remark in a recent interview that "You can’t handle the truth. And the truth is that it is pretty scary that one guy can do this all alone."

Perhaps McVeigh temporarily forgot about his official partner Terry Nichols. But is he covering for others who have never been identified, at least not publicly? Several of the FBI documents apparently refer to a mysterious figure named Robert Jacques (sometimes the name appears as Jacks). There are allegations of connections with a white supremacist compound named Elohim City, near the Oklahoma-Arkansas. I am rather dubious that this is significant, because Terry Nichols was twice married, once to a Mexican woman and the other time to a woman from the Philippines. This doesn’t sound like white supremacist behavior to me. Other allegations connect the Oklahoma City bombing with Osama bin Laden, the Middle East terrorist. Multiple allegations insist that McVeigh was sighted the morning of the bombing, and was never by himself. The FBI allegedly has 22 or more surveillance tapes from cameras mounted on the front of the Murrah Federal Building that survived the blast and would have shown the front of the Ryder truck itself including the driver’s and rider’s seats – presumably revealing whether McVeigh was alone or in the company of others up to the final seconds before the blast. The FBI has refused to release these tapes, although an independent investigator named David Hoffman has sued to obtain them under the Freedom of Information Act.

Does McVeigh even know all the players? It is clear, first of all, that McVeigh held the federal government responsible for the holocaust at Waco. His own anger was enormous. Could it have been used by others, some of them having infiltrated his circle of associates to learn of his plans and then acting without his knowledge? These questions are rhetorical, obviously. We just don’t know – at least, not yet. At least one item that was circulated my way on the Internet suggests that McVeigh cut a secret deal with the feds some time ago. In exchange for his continued silence, the federal government would spare his life at the last minute. I don’t find this idea all that plausible, either. I have a hard time seeing McVeigh, a soldier who faced death in the Gulf War, cutting deals with a government he despises to save his life here. Clearly, whatever one thinks of him, there are things of more value to him than his own life. Perhaps he sees himself as either a martyr or a prisoner of what he perceives to be the cold war going on between patriots and an out-of-control federal government. (Of course, the explanation for McVeigh’s silence could be more prosaic, relatively speaking: a desire to protect his family from possible retaliation.)

John Ashcroft has pledged not to delay McVeigh’s execution again. But if by some chance it should become clear that others – perhaps agents of the federal government itself – were involved in the worst bombing ever to occur on American soil, a bombing that killed 168 people including 19 children and injured hundreds more, heads will roll. The execution of Timothy McVeigh could well be postponed indefinitely as his lawyers demand a new trial. This, of course, is yet another ‘if,’ and we may seem to be piling still more rhetorical questions on top of speculations here. But there are an awful lot of unanswered questions floating around. I tend to think many people dismiss "conspiracy theories" as a kind of reflex, because they have been trained to do so. Some readers may have seen the Internet tract entitled Thirty Oklahoma City Bombing Questions That Demand an Answer Now! This tract raises questions no one has yet addressed, and about which there has been dead silence. Here is a sampling of unanswered questions that suggest that the federal government had advanced knowledge that the Oklahoma City bombing was coming, and that it could not have happened the way the official accounts say it did.

1. A number of federal employees were killed in the explosion, but no BATF employees. There were, as everyone knows, BATF offices in the Murrah Federal Building. But very shortly after the bombing, we learned that no BATF personnel were even injured – because none were in the building. Why were all BATF personnel away from their desks on a regular weekday morning? Did someone tip them off in advance? This, obviously, would have required advance knowledge of what would take place that morning. (One story of BATF "heroism," that of a Resident Agent Alex McCauley who supposedly fell three floors in an elevator and then helped rescue others, turned out to be a hoax; there is such a person, but like the rest of the BATF personnel he was nowhere near the building when it exploded.)
2. At least one independent report cites "over 70 witnesses" who claimed to have seen Timothy McVeigh on the morning of the explosion in the company of others who were never identified. This includes those who rented McVeigh the Ryder truck in Junction City, Kansas. The manhunts for "John Doe No. 2" were finally discontinued. Some of the composite sketches of other "John Does" seemed to be people of Middle Eastern origin. Who were these people seen by dozens of witnesses, and why did none of these witnesses testify at McVeigh’s trial? Was there a behind-the-scenes campaign to block the airing "conspiracy theories"?
3. U.S. Judge Wayne Alley, whose office was located in the Federal Building, reported the next day of having been warned in a Justice Department memo about an unspecified "terrorist act" to be directed against the Federal building? Who issued this memo, and what happened to it? Judge Alley’s statement was published in the Portland Oregonian. Since then he has refused to repeat the allegation and refused all requests for interviews. Why? Along very similar lines, the Oklahoma City Fire Department was allegedly warned by the FBI the weekend before the bombing to be on alert for something that would take place over the next few days.
4. "Norma" (not her real name), a witness who worked down the street from the Federal Building, reported seeing what appeared to be bomb squad personnel in the area at 7:45 a.m. – over an hour prior to the explosion. Were these really bomb squad personnel, and if so, what were they doing there if no one had advanced knowledge that the Oklahoma City bombing would take place? Other witnesses claimed to have seen bomb squad personnel around that morning, and still others claimed to have seen suspicious activity in the Federal Building itself the day before – which fits with the idea that someone had planted explosive devices inside the federal building. It might be worth noting that according to Thirty Oklahoma City Bombing Questions "Norma" was one of several such witnesses who have since quit their jobs and relocated, also refusing to talk about the incident any further. Were these people threatened?
5. Geophysicist Charles Mankin, Director of the University of Oklahoma’s Geological Survey in Norman, just southeast of Oklahoma City, contended that according to two different seismographic records in the Oklahoma City area there were two distinct explosions, the second coming approximately eight seconds after the first. Along these same lines, several witnesses reported two distinct events, describing how the first event enabled them to dive for cover before the Ryder truck exploded, possibly saving their lives. Within 24 hours such reports would also vanish from the official accounts. Why? Again, no one alleging a two-explosions account of the Oklahoma City bombing was called to testify.
6. It seems clear that Timothy McVeigh wanted to be caught. According to one account, he actually stopped and asked directions to the Murrah Building, placing himself on the scene. Within 48 hours after the explosion, he was stopped by police while speeding toward the state line at almost 100 miles an hour in a car with no license plate. Why has he done so little to defend himself this whole time, knowing full well that silence and inaction could cost him his life? (We may well have answered this above.)
7. Very damning to the government’s conclusions was the revelation that McVeigh used an ANFO (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) bomb. According toMilitary Explosives, a Department of the Army and Air Force Technical Manual No. 9-1910, an ANFO requires a 99% or greater purity of ammonium nitrate, as well as a specific dryness, before it can be mixed with the fuel. FBI testimony held that McVeigh used 50 bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which comes in much weaker concentrations than the 99% purity necessary for explosives. From this one can infer that that even under ideal conditions, McVeigh’s concoction could not have created a blast capable of destroying the Murrah Building’s concrete structure, nor would it leave a crater the size of the one at the Murrah Building. In other words, the government’s own source materials lead to the conclusion that the Oklahoma City bombing could not have happened in the way the FBI says; it is physically and chemically impossible. Are the details here correct? No one in the government has to my knowledge come forward with a refutation of this account.
8. Still more damning is the testimony of Retired Air Force Brigadier General Benton K. Partin, former Commander of the Air Force Armament Technology Laboratory, a demolitions expert with 25 years experience in the design and development of explosives and bombs. He stated, "When I first saw the picture of the truck bomb’s asymmetrical damage to the Federal building…, my immediate reaction was that the pattern of damage would have been technically impossible without supplementary demolition charges at some of the reinforced concrete bases inside the building, a standard demolition technique." Partin went on: "[R]einforced concrete targets in large buildings are hard targets to blast. I know of no way possible to reproduce the apparent building damage through simply a truck bomb effort." In other words, again the truck bomb alone couldn’t have done it. Interestingly, General Partin’s lengthy statement earned him a smear, a false accusation associating him with the John Birch Society when his report was picked up and reprinted by the John Birch Society publication The New American – something not of his doing. General Partin had to threaten lawsuits to end the smear campaign. His detailed evaluation was entered into the Congressional Record, but has been completely ignored by federal investigators and by the news media. Why?
9. Also demonized as "cranks" and "right wing extremists" were other explosives experts and professional demolition contractors (such as former FBI agent Ted Gunderson) who reviewed the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the Murrah building and concluded that it was a professional job, with top-grade explosives and devices planted inside the building. No one I know of has come forward to refute the substance of these allegations.
10. The reaction to the bombing by both the Clinton Regime and the Republican-controlled Congress was swift. The former immediately blamed "right wing" talk show hosts and militias – despite no evidence connecting Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols with either. We saw long articles in leading newspapers like the New York Times dragging "angry white males" (critics of affirmative action) into this thing. A number of "domestic terrorism" bills were introduced in Congress in a matter of days, covering such topics as the banning of firearms to authorizing Federal wiretaps on private citizens and monitoring their activity on the Internet. The million dollar question: was this a pre-arranged and carefully organized response to a tragedy deliberately planned at the highest centers of power to discredit the militia movement and other critics of the federal government’s progressive abandonment of Constitutional government? Was it part of the ongoing campaign to disarm U.S. citizens through so-called gun control laws? Did the federal government sacrifice some of its own employees (and their children) and ruin the lives of many other people just to discredit its critics? The militias were among the first to denounce the bombing. Their leaders took no credit for it, wanted nothing to do with it. They reiterated that their posture was defensive. But since 1995 the number of citizens’ militias has dropped from over 500 to under 200, suggesting that if this was the motive, it worked.

There are additional allegations of curious events taking place when rescue workers first appeared on the scene following the blast. Some of these allegations involve sightings by rescue personnel of unexploded devices being removed from the debris. Others involve a severed leg that was never matched to any of the known victims. It is difficult to verify these accounts completely. The federal government sequestered the area immediately; no one who did not have official approval was allowed in. Eventually, of course, what was left of the building was bulldozed to the ground, its secrets (if there be any) buried.

One of the first rescue workers on the scene, an Oklahoma City police officer named Terrence Yeakey, had expressed deep concern about some of the things he saw to family members. One day not long after he turned up dead. His death was ruled a suicide. Shades of Vince Foster: a very unusual "suicide" it was. The man apparently cut his wrists, made another cut on his elbow and then cut both sides of his neck around the jugular vein. Having already lost a great deal of blood, he was able to walk out into a fenced-off area at the outskirts of the city where he shot himself. His service revolver was not the weapon used. No autopsy was done, despite it being standard procedure to do an autopsy when a police officer dies under unusual circumstances. The obvious question: was Officer Yeakey about to reveal information about the Oklahoma City bombing? Members of his family think so, but of course no one can prove it. Officer Yeakey’s briefcase had disappeared. It turned up later, but had been in the hands of the police who did not want to release it to his family. There was plenty of time and opportunity for someone so inclined to have removed incriminating documents or photographs. It should be added that Officer Yeakey had the respect of his fellow police officers and those in the communities he served. He was not a nut.

While the federal government has more and more relied on brute force to accomplish its goals, domestic as well as foreign, it is still hard for most ordinary people to believe that even the Clinton Regime or Janet Reno’s Justice Department could be involved in something as evil as this. I cannot blame people for being skeptical. These were the federal government’s own employees – and their innocent children – not to mention the countless other people working there or who just happened to be in the building or in the vicinity when the bomb(s) went off. Many skeptics will dismiss this as paranoia gone out of control. A flip response is that a little paranoia never hurt anybody, and that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone is not out to get you. Seriously, I would prefer that the skeptics be right, but I am not convinced they are.

The problem is that the official account of what happened in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, has more holes than Swiss cheese. Every independent investigation I am aware of has concluded that others besides Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were involved, though they diverge on the details. Some pick up on obscure remarks in McVeigh’s recent letter to Fox News as pointing to a connection between the bombing and the leading terrorist Osama bin Laden, suggesting that Terry Nichols met with bin Laden’s agents in the Phillipines two months earlier to help plan the bombing. Jayna Davis, an NBC reporter in Oklahoma City, claimed to have turned up evidence that McVeigh was involved with Iraqi immigrants. There was a group of around 5,000 Iraqi soldiers who had deserted Saddam Hussein’s army and were able to win asylum in the United States following the Gulf War. One such group was settled in Oklahoma City. It was this group that had become the target of Miss Davis’ investigation. She was sued by one of its members. The federal lawsuit went on for two years. Jayna Davis finally won. Neither the lawsuit itself nor the outcome was ever reported in any national media.

McVeigh’s silence is admittedly the most troublesome aspect of all the theories we have. There is no way to get inside his head and divine his motives. But we have already seen that there are reasons why he would be silent. His claiming sole credit for the Oklahoma City bombing doesn’t make it so. Exactly what is the truth here? Did the BATF have advanced knowledge of the Oklahoma City bombing? Had they perhaps infiltrated a local terrorist cell and simply allowed the terrorists and McVeigh to do their dirty work for them, knowing that the Clinton Regime and the media were ready to blame it on militias and "right wing extremists"? Again, I would insist: we don’t really know. But the best thing the FBI could do at this point is come clean about what we haven’t been told about the Oklahoma City bombing, and to do so now – because obviously the official story doesn’t add up. If by some chance there is a connection to terrorist movements originating with immigrants or even overseas, members of the public have a right to know about it! It could significantly impact the public’s willingness to tolerate continued open immigration. As an alternative, the least the FBI and the media can do is consider allegations such as those above and show in detail that they are erroneous – or at least discuss the issues they raise. Anything is better than the official silence that has been in place now for six years running.

May 19, 2001

Steven Yates - What’s Wrong With the New World Order?

What’s Wrong With the New World Order?

by Steven Yates

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

~ the Wizard, to Dorothy
The Wizard of Oz

These days I get quite a bit of email, some of it from readers of my columns here on LewRockwell.com. Judging from the vast majority of the responses, it is gratifying to know that however politically correct the dominant culture gets, there is intelligent life on the Internet. I try to answer whatever is sent my way personally. I don’t always succeed. A few of my articles have elicited as many as 60 emails in less than 24 hours, and for one or two, the number went well over a hundred. When this happens, demands on my time don’t permit me to reply to everyone; I’m a "one man operation" here, and nothing else would get done. I sincerely regret this, but I do read everything sent to me. Eventually.

One of those unanswered waifs concerned an article I wrote a few months back on Carroll Quigley’s detailed documentation of the rise of what some of us have been calling the New World Order: a diabolical triad of global government, global economics (masquerading under such labels as "free trade"), and global, ecumenical religion (which would be resolutely hostile to Christianity). This article was one that received a flood of email. I answered what I could, but at some point had to give up. Received long after this point was a brief missive with two questions: "What’s wrong with the New World Order?" And then: "Don’t you think it will make the world a better place for the majority of people on the planet?"

On the one hand, these questions are refreshingly direct. On the other, they are scary. After the past ten years researching political correctness and turning up abundant evidence of increasing control of global politics, financial resources and information by a superelite with no loyalty to anything except money and power, I receive a well-meaning query from someone who not only senses no danger but wonders if such control might not be a good thing. There are no doubt others who believe that if we could just set aside all the differences represented by such things as national boundaries and regional loyalties, it really would issue in global peace and prosperity.

I left the email to sit in a subdirectory. Where, after all, do I begin? But the questions ring with fundamental concerns of those sort that don’t often get raised, and are almost never raised in the dominant media today. Asked in good faith, the questions are worth taking up and answering, if only because few others will do it. I do so here.

Perhaps the best place to begin is by reviewing the nature of government. Is government a "good thing," a "bad thing," or somewhere in between? To answer this question, many writers refer to the oft-quoted statement by George Washington, our first President: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

George Washington, of course, was an entirely different breed from the kind of opportunist that tends to inhabit the land of politics today. He had a healthy sense that government was indeed a danger to freedom. And why not? After all, he’d just played a central role in the war of secession from the British Empire, which at the time was out-of-control centralized government at its greatest height. Government has been properly characterized by libertarian writers as having a legal monopoly on the use of force to achieve its ends. The Framers of our Constitutional republic realized this, and took steps to limit government’s growth. This was what the U.S. Constitution was all about. It had its critics who favored a still more limited, weaker central government: history has mislabeled them the "anti-federalists."

It goes without saying that this is not the vision of government presented in today’s "public schools." As products of government, they are places where students are brainwashed into near-worship of government. Students "learn" that government is fundamentally benevolent, if only the "right people" can get elected (the "right people," of course, are always purveyors of centralization ready to loot the wallets of productive, independent citizens).

Nor is George Washington’s the vision of government presented in today’s dominant media, populated with graduates of those "public schools" and today’s J-schools. The leading editorialists and other writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post – including many so-called conservatives – debate the best ways the government ought to spend the money it has looted from taxpayers, and what agendas it ought to pursue. They do not debate whether it should loot the taxpayers’ hard-earned money at all, or pursue any agendas not specifically authorized by the Constitution (and there are very, very few!).

Moreover, atrocities such as what happened at Waco are systematically whitewashed, including by some so-called conservatives. Evidence of the worst criminal atrocities by our so-called leaders is carefully buried, with the full cooperation of the media (example: Vince Foster, whom I have never believed committed suicide). The American public isn’t even aware of much of this. After eight years of watching Bill Clinton’s very public adventures in criminality, however, very little shocks us anymore. Hardly anyone in the political mainstream blinked when the Clinton Regime cooperated closely with a communist dictator to send a little boy back to a life of socialist deprogramming. After this, the only two contenders for the presidency to have had any chance at being elected did not discuss the relationship between the federal government and the Constitution. They did not debate whether our government should join other governments, internationally, to bomb little countries that never threatened our legitimate interests back into the Stone Age. What they debated was prescription drugs for senior citizens and other trivialities.

Finally, the government-serving schools and media serve up a steady stream of distractions in the form of mindless entertainment and sports events. One can hardly turn around without encountering a reference to Survivor or Temptation Island, the two worst television shows of our time. The economy is micromanaged in such a way as to serve up mostly meaningless "busywork." One of the dirty little secrets of the so-called economic boom of the 1990s was the number of low-paying cubicle-dweller jobs created here at home versus the number of good paying manufacturing jobs that went to Mexico or overseas following NAFTA and GATT – this is global economics, which has little to do with genuine free markets and everything to do with enabling the superelites to line their pockets at ordinary Americans’ expense. Between the steady stream of entertainment and the new-economy "busywork" jobs, many who are not too distracted to think about anything important are mentally too exhausted.

And of course. Were all this to come under sustained public scrutiny, it might dawn on a sufficient number of members of the public that our government is not fundamentally different from any other empire that has ever existed. The government and, increasingly, huge corporations, have a vested interest in keeping the sheeple in line, and the dominant media is more than willing to cooperate. If anyone notices what the elites are up to, they are answered in the way Dorothy was in that charming classic The Wizard of Oz. Only, our "man behind the curtain" is considerably more powerful and dangerous than the kindly old Wizard.

Now – imagine every bit of this moved up a scale, from the national to the international level. Imagine national sovereignty having been not so much destroyed in name but in fact, rendered meaningless by a web of regulations, treaties, etc., worked out by global elites in international conferences barely reported by the media, e.g., the proposed International Criminal Court. If government is force and deception, then international government will be force and deception on an international scale – and with the capacity for surveillance and control provided by today’s technological developments it will have a level of power that is unprecedented in human history.

This agenda, as I explained in my essay, is hardly new. It has been in motion for decades. Arguably the first stirrings on behalf of world government date back to near the end of the 19th century, when Cecil Rhodes, the diamond tycoon, willed a portion of his fortune to the creation of a secret society motivated both by the idea that world government would be the key to world peace and that it could only be accomplished incrementally, in stealth moves, by well-financed elites operating behind the scenes. The Rhodes Scholarship program grew out of this effort, as did the rise of powerful, secretive groups in the U.S. like the Council on Foreign Relations.

What is scary is that so many Americans seem to have no more grasp of the danger this represents than they have of the true nature of our own government. Our national elites in both government and gigantic corporations are cooperating with the United Nations to help create "global governance," and even Jesse Helms’ once resolute opposition has begun to weaken. Those who really believe we can trust huge corporations or those running them should take note of the millions that Ted Turner, the Atlanta-based media mogul, has donated to the UN.

Today, with the World Wide Web, it will hardly do to call this a conspiracy. It’s only a conspiracy if it is hidden, and this one isn’t. All one has to do is navigate around on the UN’s own Millennium Assembly website for abundant information on where the global-government agenda presently stands. Of course, the UN tends to overwhelm the casual web-surfer with information that is presented in a sugar-coated fashion. There is much there that can make the idea of world government look attractive to those who do not know any better, such as the talk of universal "human rights," likely to be used to justify massive transfers of wealth from the United States (i.e., from working taxpayers) to the Third World. As I argued in a different essay recently, highly-paid philosophy professors in influential, Ivy League universities have already produced pseudo-ethical defenses of just this.

World government is just not a workable proposition. It can lead down no other road besides tyranny. To those who understand economics, the reasons are not hard to follow. One of the primary laws of economics is that wealth does not simply fall out of the sky; it has to be produced by someone. The argument should be familiar: if those who produce are allowed (by governments) to keep the fruits of their labors and trade freely with others, they will produce more, and genuine prosperity will ensue. If the fruits of their labors are looted and put in the service of agendas they don’t support, incentives to produce will diminish, along with prosperity. The government, being supported by the fruits of legal looting, may proceed with a sequence of economic quick-fixes, such as avoiding gold-backed currency with a fixed value like the plague in favor of expanded, fluid, easy credit to maintain an illusion of prosperity. But eventually the piper will have to be paid. Just as in physics, you cannot get something from nothing. In economics, though, you can pretend. For a time. The pretense is enhanced if draped in pseudo-moral language about our "obligations to the poor" (for example).

World government, again, takes the pretense to a global stage. It promises that global cooperation (between governments, of course, and megacorporations such as Wal-Mart) will create prosperity in third world countries – mostly socialist tyrannies. Transfers of wealth will not benefit the impoverished masses of those countries; it will prop up the tyrannies and enable them to further enslave their masses. The tyrants may, of course, may have formed close relationships with the megacorporations as co-beneficiaries, propagating an illusion of "free markets" or global "free trade." It is an illusion because it will be technically illegal for anyone to compete without the explicit approval of the tyrants, which is unlikely to be given under the circumstances. (Given the government paperwork, fees, etc., imposed on those beginning a small business in the U.S., we are further down that road right here most people think.)

None of this, I submit, will leave us with a planet that is a "better place for the majority of people" on it. If anything, it is a recipe for what would be the most brutal dictatorship ever. And the sudden, grinding poverty of a worldwide depression, if the economic bubble the international financial superelite will have created bursts.

Finally, just ask what happens to the people who want nothing to do with the brave new world being proffered here. Would they be allowed to go their own way and be left alone? Of course not, because dictators cannot tolerate those who would be independent; the result would be a mass exodus to whatever parts of the country or world are still free! The dictators would not take the risk. Given the chance, they will extend their reach as far as possible. Whether those who want to be independent in America would find themselves actually hunted down and murdered is still an open question. It is just as likely that before it came to that, they would find themselves unable to earn their livings legally in the "global economy," and would eventually run afoul the law when they were forced to go underground. With surveillance technology, they would find very few places to go. Many independent minded folks with families will undoubtedly give up and cave in, if they do not want their children to starve! (But of course, if they have already caved in to the "gun control" crowd, they will have asked for this!)

I trust this answers the questions, for anyone with remaining doubts, of what is wrong with the New World Order. It would not be good "for the majority of people on the planet." It would be a system run by and for a cadre of superelites: that minority of the world population that finds itself obsessed with power and is compelled to build empires. The rest of us would be little better than livestock, no matter our economic status. Do any of us have the resources to stop this juggernaut? I don’t think we have any choice but to try. And as encouragement while we are trying, it might be helpful to remember the fate of all previous efforts to build the Tower of Babel, including the original.

March 3, 2001

Steven Yates - The Strange Delusions of Leftist Academic Philosophers

The Strange Delusions of Leftist Academic Philosophers

by Steven Yates

"When reason goeth against a man, a man goeth against reason."

~ Thomas Hobbes

A few weeks ago my one-time colleague Professor Tibor R. Machan emailed a prospective letter to the editor of a British philosophy journal to a number of us in his address book. His letter quotes a leftist British philosopher named Jonathan Ree, writing in the Winter 2002 issue of The Philosopher’s Magazine devoted to the events of September 11 and their aftermath, that "philosophy as a whole has been solidly and securely right-wing and libertarian in the last thirty years. I don’t think that leftist anti-Americanism has been exactly the majority view."

Professor Machan, perhaps the most widely published libertarian philosopher in the English-speaking world and more than competent at analytic philosophy generally, found Ree’s remark confusing and flabbergasting. Confusing, because "philosophy as a whole" could be almost anything. What it means to characterize areas of the discipline such as, say, philosophy of mind or of science as "right-wing" or "libertarian" is anyone’s guess. However, if Ree is referring to areas of philosophy where applying such categories at least makes sense, then as Professor Machan puts it, "Professor Ree is telling us something that is blatantly false."

Baffling is more like it. Of American philosophers who have made major contributions to libertarian thought, only the late Robert Nozick was positioned to be influential, having been at Harvard. Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia got libertarianism on the philosophical radar screen. Besides Nozick, the list of professional philosophers who have made worthy contributions to libertarian, Objectivist (Ayn Rand’s philosophy), neo-Aristotelian, or Austrian School thought, or somewhere in between, is fairly substantial. It includes (besides Machan): John Hospers, John O. Nelson, David Gordon, Jan Narveson, Barry Smith, Douglas Rasmussen, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Eric Mack, David Kelley, Fred Miller, Jeffrey Paul, Ellen Frankel Paul, Barry Smith, N. Scott Arnold, James Chesher, Loren Lomasky, Daniel Shapiro, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, as well as up-and-comers such as Tara Smith, Gregory Johnson, Roderick Long, Aeon Skoble, and myself.

Not a one of us is at a prestigious Ivy League or Ivy League-type institution. Moreover, many would-be up-and-comers have hung onto livelihoods by their fingernails, keeping their mouths shut about their libertarianism or Objectivism while they had to change university affiliations every one to three years and hoped. Others are at "think tanks" (occasionally, I observe in fairness, this is by choice). But some have been forced to seek employment outside intellectual professions altogether (this, to a scholar, is almost never voluntary).

All this stands very much in contrast to the major liberal and leftist philosophers of the past 30 years: John Rawls (Harvard), Ronald Dworkin (Harvard), Richard Rorty (Stanford), Peter Singer (Princeton), and so on. Harvard is notorious for courting the most radical leftist writers in the country in whatever discipline, having once made a bid to hire militant feminist "legal theorist" Catharine MacKinnon away from Michigan. Harvard’s Afro-American Studies department has, of course, gained recent notoriety due to the antics of its members.

What is clear is that these people can return to Princeton whenever they want. Or go back to Duke, for that matter. They would be welcomed with open arms. Ree, of course, is not in this category. He is one of the "footsoldiers" who can be counted on to say the right things. Such people, I am more than convinced, are far more likely to integrate into the vast majority of philosophy departments in the English-speaking world simply because it is common knowledge that in these departments liberals and leftists predominate. All one need do to test this claim is get the issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education which surveys political affiliations. Liberals are the majority. Leftists with more radical views than the liberals come in second, and as statists, the two usually get along smashingly. Libertarians are well down on the charts, and conservatives in academe are virtually an extinct species.

In other words, all we need do is compare the comfortable situations for academic leftists and liberals with scholars of the various libertarian, Objectivist and Austrian-school orbits. We find that those Jonathan Ree labels "right-wing" and libertarian, far from dominating the profession "solidly and securely," are barely visible at all. Many are barely surviving. As a veteran of the multi-year academic job search, I can certify that association with such perspectives is often a kiss of death.

Some time ago I noted a delusion that seems unique to our times, in which leftists are able to portray and possibly actually perceive themselves as a beleaguered minority surrounded by the academic equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s "vast right wing conspiracy." Perhaps the purveyors of tolerance really do not want any voices in the academy except their own. Or perhaps it is more than even that, and we are seeing one long-term effect of the warping of higher education itself, resulting in a literal inability of some so-called scholars to perceive reality correctly, much less investigate and evaluate ideas and stances other than their own fairly and responsibly.

To investigate this point further, I draw attention to a letter to the editor that appeared in the November 2001 issue of the American Philosophical Association’s Proceedings and Addresses. The letter was a response to a link I published to my article on the current state of academic philosophy. I discuss this not to win anyone’s sympathy but because the letter is a textbook illustration of the paucity of thought that might explain delusions about a libertarian or right-wing dominance of professional philosophy. The author of the piece, Colin Allen of Texas A & M University, had little to say about the issues I raised. Rather, he attacked organizations I am or have supposedly been associated with, to insinuate that since I must be a covert racist, my criticisms of academic philosophy can safely be ignored. In other words, Allen attacked ad hominem – a strategy I used to teach logic students was fallacious and to be avoided in responsible debate. Moreover, his ad hominem also supplied information that was simply wrong. For example, he wrote that the site "hosting [my] web pages" is named for "one of the founders of the League of the South." Lew Rockwell, however, is not a founder of the League of the South. Nor does the Mises Institute mechanically "advocate secession" – though many LewRockwell.com writers (myself included) are willing to examine the potential of secession as a strategy for checking otherwise unlimited government power. This sort of live-option treatment does not equate to advocacy – something liberals appear to understand if the topic is something dear to their hearts, like abortion.

Let us dwell on the idea of secession for a moment. Allen certainly has a hornet-sized buzzing critter in his bonnet about the subject. State-worshipping liberals and leftists (and probably all neocons as well) regard it as taboo. They seem literally unable to discuss it rationally and analytically. Allen thus fails utterly to note a distinction implicit in my earlier discussion between the concept of secession itself and particular secessions. The former has an explicit definition: secession is the act of jurisdictional separation by a distinct people from an established government to achieve self-rule. It is therefore to be distinguished from civil war, in which two factions fight over control of a single government. In this case, our use of the term Civil War is a straightforward misnomer. The Northern states and the Confederacy were not fighting for control over the Washington government; the Confederacy was fighting for freedom from that government. Secession and civil war are therefore separate categories.

The separation of the Southern states and formation of the Confederacy is not history’s only act of secession; it is not even the only secession in our history. The separation of the original 13 colonies from the British Empire, formally announced in the Declaration of Independence, was an act of secession. Other acts of secession occurred more recently when the Baltic States (Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia) achieved independence from the former Soviet Union, when Slovenia separated from the soon-to-disintegrate Yugoslavia, and when regions such as the Ukraine and Byelorus became separate countries instead of parts of Mother Russia. Efforts at secession do not always succeed, of course. The Confederacy did not survive the North’s assault; so far, Chechnya has failed to gain independence from Russia, Tibet is still a part of Mainland China, the Kurds are not free of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and Quebec is still part of Canada. Secession is contemplated whenever a distinct people with a distinct culture desires freedom from a larger government and culture perceived as hostile to its interests. Notice that it is possible to discuss secession in this general way without mentioning chattel slavery. But if anyone is enslaved, it is a people forced to live under, and pay taxes to support, a regime not of their choosing.

Perhaps, though, just to raise such a topic before the Colin Allens of the academic world is to invite automatic associations with "neo-Confederate hate groups" and calls for monitoring by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is symptomatic of the cognitive malaise that has fallen over much of higher education over the past 40 years or so. It is part of what has turned campuses into war zones. In my book Civil Wrongs (ICS Press, 1994) I connected the rise of affirmative action as a systematic policy offering federally-mandated race and gender preferences to the rise of multiculturalism, militant feminism, and political correctness. One of the primary raisons d’etre of the latter was to silence the mounting criticisms of preferential policies, after all. Given the irrationality inherent in snowballing "feminist critiques" of this or that, we saw further assaults on standards of objectivity, truth, rationality, and on the concepts of merit and desert.

The egalitarianism inherent in affirmative action ideology required attacks on these standards, because their consistent application solidly refutes egalitarianism. Hence the Hobbes quote at the outset. Of course, denials that anyone is ever "really" objective, rational or acquires at least some truth literally do not make sense. They involve the logical equivalent of a boomerang, having implications for themselves. The radical feminist who dismisses objectivity as a "male-biased" superstition, for example, is implicitly denying that she is ever objective. In that case, there is little reason to take her seriously. Such arguments were once a staple of the best of traditional Western philosophy going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. The classical philosophers developed them in great detail and wielded them with great skill against such notions as Protagorean relativism, the remote ancestor of today’s postmodernist sophistries. Such reasoning is not often seen today, and when someone does employ it, he often receives blank stares of noncomprehension. This, too, goes along with the demise of the modern academy.

With the rise of the leftist notion that everyone should be economically and educationally equal, no other results could have been obtained than a general dumbing down and the production of a delusional consciousness. The left-liberal axis has lowered educational standards across the board and created a kind of insular environment in which a leftist or liberal, just sane enough to perceive that not everyone thinks the way he does, can imagine a "vast right-wing conspiracy." The facts don’t matter, because in this environment there are no "facts," no one is ever really objective, and (with a nod to Bill Clinton, for whom the majority of academic philosophers voted twice) it all depends on what the meaning of "is" is. In this environment, a Jonathan Ree can contend, with all seriousness, that American philosophy is "solidly and securely right-wing and libertarian," and a Colin Allen can go off the deep end about slavery and "neo-Confederate hate groups" when someone such as myself treats secession as a valid concept for philosophical examination and a potential strategy for achieving freedom from repressive regimes.

March 9, 2002