10/15/2014

Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire...

This is a plug for Rockwell´s “Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card…”. What follows is a quote from Rockwell´s website. 

Lew Rockwell himself

“The respectables of left and right do not deign to show where we’re wrong, of course. The very fact that we’ve strayed from the approved spectrum is refutation enough. That’s why I’ve called these people the thought controllers, the commissars, or the enforcers of approved opinion.

Let me modify that: once in a while they do try to show where we’re wrong, but they can almost never manage even to state our position correctly, much less muster an effective argument against it. These purpose of these alleged replies is not to shed light, but to demonize libertarians in the public mind.

In Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion – my first book in nearly four years – I take aim at these critics and their arguments.

Part I covers foreign policy and war. The regime has fostered more confusion among the public over these issues than any other. Conservatives, of all people, wind up supporting courses of action that (1) expand the power of the state over civil society; (2) are justified on the basis of propaganda they’d laugh at if it came from the mouths of Saddam Hussein or Nikita Khrushchev; and (3) violate the absolute standards of morality that conservatives never tire of telling us are under assault. The antiwar reputation of left-liberals, meanwhile, is almost entirely undeserved; the mainstream left supported every major U.S. war of the twentieth century.


Conservatives no doubt consider themselves cheeky and anti-establishment for supporting U.S. military interventions, yet virtually all major U.S. newspapers supported the two wars in Iraq and have called for a belligerent posture against Iran. If conservatives think they’re sticking it to the New York Times by supporting the federal government’s wars, they are deceiving themselves. It was the New York Times’ Judith Miller, for instance, who later became notorious for her uncritical acceptance of war propaganda. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were every bit as belligerent as George W. Bush – Kerry even said in 2004 that he would be less likely than Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq, and proposed sending an additional 40,000.

The BBC comes partially clean: The Iraq invasion was a 
huge blunder, backed by Democrats, Republicans, 
and European poodle regimes. 

Against this bipartisan consensus, anyone advocating a consistent policy of nonintervention abroad – the correct libertarian and conservative position, if you ask me – can expect to be marginalized and ignored. Meanwhile, the interventions of the past dozen years have backfired spectacularly, as Ron Paul and other noninterventionists predicted they would.

I put this part of the book front and center because I myself have so much penance to do. As a younger man I was a Rush Limbaugh listener and a garden-variety neoconservative. I cheered on every government intervention abroad, I accepted all the official rationales, and I demonized opponents and skeptics as America haters. I then realized I was just the flipside of a typical left-liberal, who cheered on every government intervention at home, accepted all the official rationales, and demonized opponents and skeptics as haters of the poor.

With both left and right cheering on the state in one capacity or another, the prospects for scaling it back are dim. The whole package, the whole tissue of lies, needs to be confronted.”

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