What is a Rogue State?

A few days ago, I was flipping through the TV channels looking for something interesting to watch between football games.  Golf just doesn’t do it for me.  I zoomed past C-SPAN, which can be interesting at times, even if it’s also annoying.  I was on this channel long enough to hear some Republican congressman whipper-snapper use the term “rogue state.”

“What is a rogue state?” I thought to myself.  In the eyes of the U.S. government, a rogue state is a government that enjoys a monopoly on violence which refuses to do the bidding of America.  Certain governments are not allowed to do what all governments naturally do:  make weapons, enforce monopolies, engage in conquest, etc.  These governments are referred to as rogue states by the arrogant quacks who run the American machine.

In essence, however, the “good governments” are no worse than the bad ones.  They use the same monopoly on violence to drive weaker nations and peoples into submission.  A rogue state has simply suffered the misfortune of getting on the bad side of the sanctimonious oligarchs in Washington, DC.  Many of these “rogue states” were victims of American baiting and switching.  Saddam Hussein, were he still alive, would be able to testify to this.

A more basic question, however, is, What is a rogue?  A rogue is a criminal, a thief, gangster, mobster, murderer, etc.  So are all governments.  They steal the money of innocent civilians under threat of penalty as if the fruits of a man’s labor are not his own; force young men into military service as if the bodies of the citizenry are owned by the state; erode private property rights almost to the point of meaninglessness; go on conquest to enforce oil monopolies; and install puppet governments in far away lands against the consent of the people who live there.

In other words, all states are rogue states.  To use this term is redundant; it is like saying “yellow canary” or “red cardinal.”  The politicians get away with it, however, because most of us are unwilling to re-examine the assumptions that were taught to us in school.  Recently Sen.Harry Reid claimed that taxation is “voluntary.”  There should have been protests everywhere, but the remark went nearly unnoticed.  If memory serves, not even Matt Drudge took note of it.

The sad part of this whole story of “man’s inhumanity to man,” as Ronald Reagan called it, is that this kind of violence reigns on the throne of human ignorance and indifference.  If even a tithe of the citizenry were wide awake, most of the awfulness we see today wouldn’t be happening.  This leads to the most sobering lesson of all:  Most countries end up with the government they deserve.

“Do you remember the good old days when the dollar was worth forty-nine cents?”

Thus Victor Borge once began his famous routine called inflationary language.  In a slight, albeit innocent, misinterpretation of the matter, Borge said that during inflation, prices go up.  Therefore, we have to adjust our language accordingly:  before becomes “be-five”; create, “cre-nine”; and a lieutenant would be called a “leut-elevenent.”

The American dollar has been weakening for years.  In the early days of the Euro I remember the fretting that went on about what this would do.  But the dollar is really the victim of American inflationary monetary policy, which is used to finance unpopular initiatives such as illegal wars of foreign aggression and the socialization of the car industry.  Sooner or later, after all this mess, warned Ron Paul in 2008, other countries are going to dump the dollar as the world reserve currency.

The establishment laughed.

Then Vladimir Putin called for this very thing, followed by China, which instigated a parade of U.S. officials (oblivious to the irony, given their mocking attitudes less than a year before) visiting China, begging and pleading them not to dump the dollar and send the U.S. economy into a tailspin.

The plot thickens.  Now India has joined the Dump the Dollar Chorus.

Hillary Clinton threatens new orgy of war crimes in Iran

Some of us listened to Barack Obama pull back from his dovish stance during the general election, and we are not surprised that his administration has taken on more martial tones than expected.  Many, however, are surely taken aback by some of the hawkish declarations coming out of the new administration, and certainly many more still haven’t caught on.  These developments were all but a guarantee, given the appointments of people like Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emmanuel.  

The latest installment in America’s long nightmare of death and destruction comes from Hillary Clinton, who indicated a strong possibility that Iran could be attacked if it fails to dismantle what it says is a peaceful nuclear energy program.  Anti-war has the story.  

There is a grave error in the thinking of the Americanist war machine rhetoric, and that is that since “we” are “good,” we can have nuclear weapons, and that since “they” are “bad,” they cannot.  (This assumes, of course, that this is what they’re really doing with their nuclear energy.)  There is in this, of course, mountainous dungheaps of hubris.  More relevant, however, is the complete blindness to human nature in general, the idea that somehow “we,” the “good guys,” know how to handle our deadly weapons and will never make a tactical or ethical blunder (cough, cough), but “they”, the “bad guys,” would be so much worse than we are.  Human error applies to the enemy, but it does not apply to us.  Evil is in our enemy, but it is not in us.  This kind of Americanist fundamentalism keeps the world sufficiently stirred up so that politicians and weapons makers never have to worry about genuine peace and happiness putting them out of business.  

Near the end of this blog, Jason Ditz rightly asks how the Obama Administration thinks it could possibly handle yet another war with two already going on.  I must wonder:  Will the American government count on Israel to take care of Iran?  Won’t that spark a regional war, and won’t that make our situation even far more precarious than it is now?  Or will the collectivists on the Left and the Fascists on the Right get together and reinstitute the draft, stealing baby-faced young men from their mothers in order to go die in a desert while doing the bidding of a couple of greedy oligarchs?  

Why can’t the government just admit that for a century it has been screwing up the world, making the world safe for tyranny (Hitler, Stalin, the Ayatollah, Hussein) with its wars of foreign aggression?  The world would be much safer if the American Empire admitted its mistakes and vowed to work toward employing a new grand discourse.  The position of governments, however, would be much more precarious, since the State thrives on making people fearful, which convinces them that they need a paternal protector.  As Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the State.”  We could turn that around and say that peace is the health of humanity.

Ron Paul on American myopia

I have had more than one conversation with others who, in the discussion of policy, want to draw a magic line through history and say, “This is what we have to deal with; it doesn’t matter what should have been done.  This is where we are.”  The apparent pragmatism in this approach seems to satisfy a lot of people, but it is really disastrous.  It is impossible, after all, to improve the current state of affairs without understanding the mistakes that got us into our present messes.  

This very simple, very obvious truth seems to be the main theme of one of Congressman Ron Paul’s more recent locutions on the House floor (hat tip to the DailyPaul):

The Obama Administration: Change in pennies, part 6,437

“This time, it’s different.”

How many times have we heard this before?  Oh yes, the mainstreamers say, all those other decisions—Vietnam, Korea, the Bay of Pigs, Iraq II, etc.—were mistakes, and the United States should never have stuck its nose into those situations.  But this time, it’s different.

In the video below, Congressman Ron Paul explodes U.S. foreign policy in front of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who, having listened—or at least remained silent—during Paul’s remarks, says, “Afghanistan is not Iraq.”  Then he pulls one of Dick Cheney’s rabbits out of his hat:  ”September 11, 2001…..”

This man works for the administration of Barack Obama, the candidate of “change.”  Before the election, I warned people not to expect any real change from Obama.  ”Oh, you’re being pessimistic,” I was told.  ”Yes, every other president in the past two generations has backed away from his campaign promises, but…….(drumroll, please)……this time, it’s different.”

So much for that.  

Such lunacy will continue to the end of the world, so long as people allow themselves to be hypnotized by these mountebanks each time the olympiad rolls around.  It could change, but I doubt it ever will.  Human nature is flawed, and one of those flaws is gullibility.  One of the evils of the State is that the gullible, who elect these clowns, bring down the rest of us with them.  Maybe someday this will be different, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Hat tip to LRC.

Obama and prospects for change

Thanks to the Young Fogey, I found this piece from Justin Raimondo on the bellicose foreign policy team which Barack Obama is presently trying to assemble.

A few months before the election, I was sitting in one of my favorite Belgian bars here in Philadelphia, batting the breeze with a friend. In a casual sort of way, the election came up, and it seemed like we’d be moving along from the subject rather quickly when some chic in the corner invited herself into our conversation. She wanted to quiz us on who we’d be voting for. You all know what my answer was. I was then subjected to a five-minute long tract of pious, somniferous, Statist claptrap which claimed that it was my duty to vote, and to choose between the lesser of two evils, if necessary. Our uninvited interlocutor went on to lament that she, having emigrated from Ireland and not having become a citizen, does not have the right to vote. Well, if it’s that important, I suppose she’d become a citizen.

But she hasn’t.

Friends, this girl badgered me; I do not exaggerate. She would not let the subject go. My friend and I wanted to get on to the Detroit Tigers and the Philadelphia Phillies. We were finally rescued by one of her cigarette breaks.

Now Obama has been elected, and change is supposed to be on the way. Amen, iterum dico vobis: Don’t hold your breath, or you’ll suffocate. If we get any change, it will be in pennies.

Learning the lessons of August 15

Today, September 11, is a day of much State-sponsored solemnity in memory of the terrorist attacks that took place here seven years ago. One will read and hear much pious civic claptrap, but undoubtedly there will be little soul-searching as to what might have motivated people to come halfway across the world to kill innocent Americans who had nothing to do with the government policies which inflamed the terrorists.

The only time there seems to be any “reflection” about that azure, late summer day is when Rudy Giuliani and his Republican friends try to score political points with it. Even at this year’s convention, Giuliani pumped up McCain by saying that he “understands the lessons of 9/11.” On the contrary, we have, if anything, repeated many of the same mistakes after 9/11 which goaded the terrorists into their evil deeds in the first place.

Americans generally seem to think that September 11, 2001 was a watershed moment in the history of our country, a new “start” from zero. This view is hopelessly myopic and merely an excuse to engage in flag-waving.

So what did lead up to September 11? One could cite any number of events, from the stationing of Marines in Lebanon, to the time the H.W. Bush administration turned its back on Saddam Hussein, to our stationing of military forces in Islamic holy lands. Surely all of these are factors which aggravated the Muslim world–and we need not condone the actions of terrorists in order to see that one should not take a swing at the hornets’ nest in the first place.

But what made all this possible? Why, profligate government spending, of course! The U.S. can’t run the world without having gobs of money to dump into the military-industrial complex. “Yeah, that’s right, no wonder we have all these high taxes,” you might say. Well, not exactly. When it comes down to it, income taxes are petty theft compared to the way the government really gets its funding, which is by having the Federal Reserve print money out of thin air.

So money does grow on trees? Well, only on government trees and only for the State’s benefit. For the rest of us, this amounts to robbery. Here’s how. Imagine that you have a Mickey Mantle baseball card, one of a kind; there is no other like it. It will, based on its rarity, be worth an incredible sum of money. Let’s say, however, that someday it’s discovered that there are actually 2 million of these Mickey Mantle baseball cards. The value of yours will plummet. It will become a glorified bookmark.

The same is true with the money supply: fewer dollars in circulation means that each dollar will be worth more. When the Federal Reserve prints more dollars to pay for some State-sponsored conquest, the value of each dollar goes down. The net result of this is that your spending power, and your real savings, are greatly compromised. Inflation is not a fact of life, as many believe; rather, it is a result of the depredations of the U.S. government.

This is in fact how the government pays for its foreign policy operations, the very ones which got us mired in the Middle East in the first place, and the very ones which p*ssed off the terrorists. Tax revenue wouldn’t even come close to taking care of this.

Now, for much of the history of government inflation of money, the citizen still had something of a safety net in that he could redeem his dollars at any time in exchange for gold. On August 15, 1971, however, Richard M. Nixon severed this relationship completely. You are now stuck with these worthless pieces of paper. The government can debase the currency as much as it likes, and you are stuck paying the bill while the government goes on its bombing runs.

It seems to me, then, that we need to spend less time listening to Rudy Giuliani and his mob rehearse the supposed “lessons of 9/11″ and spend more time pondering the lessons of August 15.

What Michael Phelps teaches us about America

I swore to myself, and even indicated to my readers, that I wouldn’t be watching the Olympics. Too often these games come across as a nationalistic orgy which thoroughly offends my sense of anti-Statism. It was only the second day, however, when I caught myself being mesmerized by the amazing feats of Michael Phelps, and I couldn’t take my eyes off this spectacle. How inspiring it was to see an athlete achieve such incredible feats! If you could watch it with a dry eye, you’re a better man than me.

As last week progressed, and more and more gold medals were being hung around Phelps’ neck (I wonder if the U.S. Treasury Department will allow him to keep them), I began to get the feeling that maybe the frenzies of the 29th Olympiad weren’t such a bad thing after all. For too many years now, “America” has stood for monstrous things such as wars of foreign aggression, fear-mongering, intimidation, and the like. We have spent our cache of good will like drunken sailors, and it has all been for naught, really, since we’re going about our foreign policy problems, including terrorism (especially terrorism!), in the wrong way. So many people the world over, including Americans, have begun to think of this country, or at least the government, as a giant ogre.  They are, of course, right, at least insofar as the State is concerned.

Enter Michael Phelps. What did Michael Phelps do for Americans and for the world? He showed us what that 18th century dream was really about: achieving great things through hard work and self-determination. Phelps did not enter the Olympics at gunpoint, unlike his competitors from China, but chose this way of life for himself, and he made all the best of it. What a great relief for a story like this to be showcased before the world in a time when we most needed it, in a time when the “face of America” is a failed oil businessman become failed president.

Maybe now the world will be reassured that America is not fundamentally about the State-sponsored promotion of “democracy” at gunpoint, but rather about freedom from the State, the ability of each man to organize his life as he sees fit, so that he might achieve what was once unimaginable.