The Highway to Serfdom

A state-organized mob led by a Chekist (secret policeman) calls for the extermination of "kulak" farmers in Soviet Ukraine during the early 1930s.
















"[T]he theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." -- Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Anastasio Prieto, a truck driver from El Paso, Texas, doesn't trust banks and prefers to carry his savings with him in cash. While this is a dangerous way to manage one's money, a cursory glance at recent headlines tends to validate Prieto's concerns about the stability of the fractional-reserve banking system.

During a stop at a weigh station in New Mexico on August 8, Prieto made a critical mistake: He cooperated with the police, assuming that as a law-abiding individual he had nothing to fear from them.

Never make that assumption.

A New Mexico state trooper asked Prieto for permission to search his truck for contraband, such as needles or cash in excess of $10,000. Displaying an ingenuousness that breaks my heart, the truck driver consented, informing the officer that he was carrying nothing illegal -- but admitting that he had $23,700 on board.

Never consent to a police search, for any reason.

Never admit to a police officer that you are carrying large amounts of cash.

Always assume that a police officer would make the same use of that information that would be made by any other armed and potentially violent individual: He would find some way to steal your money.

And that is exactly what the officer did to Prieto, with the help of comrades from the federal Staatspolizei -- agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Border Patrol. Over his objections, Prieto was detained for several hours, photographed, and fingerprinted, while his truck was searched by agents with drug-sniffing dogs.

As Prieto had explained, his truck was devoid of contraband. So the police apologized profusely, returned his money, bought him a cold drink and sent him away with a friendly smile and a wave.

Oh, stop it! You're killing me! What country do you think we live in, anyway?

The police "forfeited" -- that is, stole -- Prieto's savings. The DEA agents who presided over the theft "told Prieto he would receive a notice of federal proceedings to permanently forfeit the money within 30 days and that to get it back, he'd have to prove it was his and did not come from illegal drug sales," reported the Houston Chronicle.

You see, under existing laws and recent legal decisions, "possession of a large sum of money" by a motorist "is `strong evidence' of a connection to drug activity."

So ruled the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in a decision handed down almost exactly a year before Prieto was robbed at gunpoint in New Mexico. The case was entitled "United States of America v. $124,700 in US Currency" (.pdf).

You see, it's not necessary to find the owner of the money guilty of anything; the money itself can be convicted of involvement in criminal activity and "punished" by being permanently taken into government custody.

Prieto has been told it will take a year for him to recover his stolen money, should the regime condescend to give any portion of it back. Meanwhile, he is apparently left penniless, with no funds to maintain the truck that is the source of his livelihood. The collectivist State ruling us treated Prieto in much the same way the Soviet state treated Ukrainian kulaks -- at least those kulaks who were permitted to live, anyway.

If our money can be seized from us simply because some agent of the State wants to, in what sense is it our property?

Summary seizure and "forefeiture" of property -- including cash -- by police is one of the larger gifts bestowed on our society by the murderous fraud called the "war on drugs." Ten years ago, Congress enacted a "reform" measure intended to rein in the practice, but as we see it is pointless to attempt to reform a practice that should be abolished outright.

Invariably, "forfeited" cash and goods are depicted as the ill-gotten gains of narcotics trafficking; it's never explained, however, how those supposedly dirty proceeds are magically cleansed once they are handed over to the police. The bounties seized by police are often used to buy the latest in tyranny tech, such pimped-out SWAT vehicles and other goodies for the jackbooted pests who are deployed to bring in the loot; this makes a nicely self-sustaining system of official corruption.

As the clip below documents, it's just nice to have some extra money to blow on kewl gadgets with little practical value:





Thanks to asset forfeiture, the Bridgeport, Connecticut police can simply steal the money to buy such cool toys without having to request it from officials who are expected to represent the interests of the local taxpayers.

In fact, asset forfeiture has made it possible for corrupt police departments (or do I repeat myself) to cut out courts and juries and get straight to the business of plunder.

To expedite the process, Bradenton, Florida's Police Department devised a "Contraband Forfeiture Agreement" (.pdf) for use by officers carrying out drug enforcement raids. Citizens who sign such agreements surrender their property -- such as cash or cars -- "to the DEPARTMENT free and clear of all claims or liens"; they also waive their due process rights. In exchange, the police agree not to prosecute.

Janie Brooks, a local resident in her mid-50s, was taken into custody by police who claimed to find drugs in her car. The automobile and $1,200 in cash were confiscated, and Brooks was intimidated into signing the agreement.

"He [the officer] kept rushing me, like, `Go ahead, things will be better if you did," recalled Brooks. "It was like, there's gonna be some big time stuff that happens to me if I don't sign it."

Asked for his expert opinion of the practice, law professor Joseph Little of the University of Florida overcame a tragic handicap -- decades of legal training -- to offer a sensible assessment: "It sounds like robbery to me."

Indeed it does -- robbery coupled with extortion and more than a hint of terrorism. And it was immensely profitable: The county's asset forfeiture fund at one point topped $150,000.

Using almost exactly the same methods -- traffic stops, contrived searches, and armed extortion in lieu of prosecution -- the Dallas County, Iowa Sheriff's Department sucked up $1.7 billion from motorists traveling along I-80 between 2002 and 2006. This profitable racket had to gear down just a bit after Sheriff Brian Gilbert was convicted of stealing $120,000 in stolen money.

But Gilbert's lenient sentence -- a $1,000 fine, a year's probation, and a brief term of "community service," rather than a prison term -- suggests that his comrades have a license to steal from the general public, as long as they don't skim from the State's take.

The same priorities governed the Soviet Union, of course: The police were free to expropriate the bourgeoise at whim, but stealing from the State was a capital offense.


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September 11, 1857

"You guys do know what that movie is about, don't you?" inquired the friendly young lady in the admissions booth as Korrin and I bought tickets to see September Dawn.

"Yes, of course," I replied, a twinge of puzzlement creasing my care-worn brow. "Are you required to offer a disclaimer of some sort for some reason?"

"No," she answered. "It's just that some people have been offended by the subject matter."

As we entered the theater in Nampa, I commented to Korrin that it seemed oddly fastidious of the management to express concerns about the content of that particular film, when elsewhere in the multiplex patrons -- by their own informed choice, one assumes -- were enduring an onslaught of adolescent sex humor (Superbad), reveling in hyper-violent revenge fantasies (War), or otherwise spending a couple of hours immersed in Hollywood-issue degeneracy.

I suspect that the reason September Dawn was singled out in this fashion was because it has been quietly but effectively branded an offense against "tolerance."

This is unfortunate: Of the films presently on offer, September Dawn is the only one representing a serious and commendable attempt to dramatize actual history -- in this case, the systematic, premeditated murder in southern Utah of 120 members of a California-bound wagon train.

The definitive (thus far) treatment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is Will Bagley's award-winning book Blood of the Prophets. The following clip offers a concise summary of the episode:




The victims were Arkansans led by Alexander Fancher, whose Hugenot ancestors had fled France following the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The perpetrators were militiamen and Paiute Indians whose efforts were organized and directed by local Mormon leaders. The atrocity was a calculated act of terrorism carried out in the context of the Mormon leadership's asymmetrical war with the federal government, which was becoming acute at the time the ill-fated wagon train arrived in Utah: President James Buchanan, believing (with some reason) that Mormon Prophet and territorial governor Brigham Young was bent on establishing a hostile theocracy, had dispatched a military force ("Johnson's Army") to remove Young and install a territorial government more to Washington's liking.

Critics have ruthlessly panned the film, many of them complaining that its depiction of fanatical Mormon murders and winsome Protestant victims is childishly one-sided. This criticism is sound, and the film -- as a work of entertainment -- would have benefited greatly had the director not been a stranger to subtlety.

But the problem here is with the story itself, which isn't fraught with ambiguities and complexities. The matter really was quite simple: Mormon priesthood leaders (the church has a lay priesthood), acting on oaths to avenge the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith and in accordance with the doctrine of "blood atonement," conspired to annihilate an entire wagon train of innocent, inoffensive people. They did so in the belief that they were doing God's will, and that the killings had been ordered by their religious leaders, who were for all intents and purposes infallible.

In recent months, the Mormon leadership has finally admitted that local church leaders were involved in the massacre; this concession comes after 150 years of stolid stonewalling on the subject, beginning with Brigham Young's cover-up campaign in which he acted as an accessory after the fact to mass murder. Roughly two decades after the event, John D. Lee, an adopted son of Brigham Young who had a hands-on role in the killing was the only one to be convicted and executed for the crime.

A tribute to a mass murderer: A statue of John D. Lee, the only individual convicted and punished for the killings at Mountain Meadows, can be found in downtown Washington, Utah.


Bagley contends -- convincingly, in my view -- that the crime itself was ordered by Brigham Young. September Dawn embraces that perspective, and in one of the few instances the film embraces nuance, the order from Brigham is portrayed more along the lines of "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" rather than as a blunt directive from a standard-issue cinematic villain.

Given the vilification of the Arkansans in Mormon folk mythology, there is some irony in current protests from Mormon media figures that September Dawn demonizes the Mormon assailants and beatifies the victims.

Folk accounts of the wagon train depict it as a cross between a pack of Hell's Angels in Conestoga Wagons and a traveling brothel: The women were slatternly, the men uniformly violent and abusive, the children little more than curs. Included in the company (once again, according to myth) were Missourians who had helped drive out the Mormons during the so-called Mormon War of 1838 -- and one of them boasted of having the very gun that killed Joseph Smith. By this account, the wagon train arrived in Utah and immediately began heaping abuse on the Mormon settlers and poisoning livestock in order to rile up the Indians.

To their credit, contemporary Mormon historians reject this depiction of the victims, even though they still try to compartmentalize blame for the massacre by laying it exclusively at the feet of local Mormon leaders. As September Dawn tells it, Brigham was "in the loop," but left it to his followers to handle the details. This strikes me as a very plausible depiction.

Writer-Director Jonathan Cain does a suitable job establishing his setting, in which he presents a personalized drama involving four key fictional characters: Bishop John Samuelson (Jon Voight), his sons Jonathan (Trent Ford) and Micah (Taylor Handley), and Emily Hudson (Tamara Hope), an Arkansan who falls in love with Jonathan.

Bishop Samuelson is a polygamous husband to eighteen women. His younger son Micah has already started a seraglio of his own, but Jonathan -- who believes that marriage should be the product of genuine love, not dutiful compliance to doctrine -- has no interest in marrying anyone, at least until he sees Emily. Tasked by his father to spy on the emigrants, Jonathan finds himself spending time with Emily, with predictable results: They quickly fall in love, despite the cultural chasm separating them.

Emily is a Pastor's daughter, which puts her in a position analogous to Jonathan. They have a brief but illuminating conversation in which the stark differences between their faiths are quickly sketched out: To Jonathan, the emigrants, like all non-Mormons, are "gentiles," and it puzzles him that Emily's father doesn't seek to control those under his pastoral care. Emily, apparently believing Mormonism to be simply another variant of conventional Christianity, is just as puzzled by Jonathan's casual acceptance of authoritarian notions and his unfamiliarity with the Beatitudes.

This scene, although somewhat overbroad and anachronistic in tone (Emily sounds a bit too much like a 21st Century Megachurch Evangelical, rather than a mid-19th century Protestant pioneer), does offer a useful illustration of the distance that separates Mormonism from mainline Christianity in terms of doctrine and practice. This is particularly true of the high-octane, theocratic version of Mormonism taught and lived in Brigham's Caliphate.

When in the film Jonathan casually tells Emily that his father considers the beliefs of the emigrants to be "abominations," the character is accurately giving voice to the Mormon perspective on mainline Christianity. When the film's version of Brigham Young (Terrance Stamp, whose experience in playing the Kryptonian megalomaniac Zod offered valuable training for this role) speaks of blood atonement -- shedding the blood of those whose sins supposedly aren't covered by the blood of Christ, so as to give them an opportunity for exaltation among the "Gods" -- his dialogue is taken directly from documented sermons and writings.

And when Bishop Samuelson insists that his Mormon priesthood leaders are immune to error, he is preaching sound and unassailable doctrine -- from the Mormon perspective, then and now.

The atrocity at Mountain Meadows was the predictable product of a familiar set of ingredients: A power-obsessed, authoritarian leadership that cultivated a siege mentality among its followers; a murderously perverted form of altruism in which lethal violence directed at the targeted victims was depicted as a form of compassion (it would expunge their sins, after all, and give them a chance for salvation); and a doctrine of obedience that relieved followers of moral responsibility for carrying out the orders of their leaders.

Every time, and any time, those ingredients are combined, people will die in large numbers. This was true of the wars of revolution and empire following the Jacobin revolution in France; it was emphatically true of the quasi-genocidal campaign to "civilize" the American Indians (somebody really should make a film about the Sand Creek Massacre); and it was true at Mountain Meadows.

But it is also true of the ongoing war in Iraq, as well. There is no moral or material difference between Brigham Young infecting his followers with war fever and then turning them loose on helpless Arkansans, on the one hand, and the cynical exploitation of terrorism by Bush and Cheney to manipulate our nation into invading Iraq, on the other.

After all, we're told, the president knows so much more than we do, and those who carry out his orders -- whether to destroy a city or sexually torture a child -- partake of the president's moral immunity. And the Iraqis should be grateful to us for the humanitarian violence we've inflicted on them: Don't they know this is their only chance to embrace the gospel of democracy?

Double Video Bonus

Gratuitous as it might seem, I'm offering clips of two incendiary performances by the incomparable Thin Lizzy. The songs selected are on-topic: They deal with the bloody consequences of fanatical self-righteousness.

"Massacre"

"If God is in heaven, how can this happen here? In God's name they used weapons for the massacre...."



"Holy War"

"We are chosen; we are one; we are frightened of no one ... and no one will win this war -- this is the way, this is the law."



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The Last Full Measure ... Of Murderous Opportunism

An armored vehicle patrols "liberated" Fallujah.


"If the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it...."


John Kreisel of Vadnais Heights, Minnesota lost both of his legs in Fallujah last December. A roadside bomb detonated beneath his Humvee, killing two of Kreisel's buddies, Spc. Bryan McDonough, and Spc. Corey Rystad. Kreisel is a man in his mid-20s; he has a lovely wife, Katie, and two disarmingly cute sons, Elijah and Broden. A foundation has been established to help Sgt. Kreisel's family, which will have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a handicapped-accessible home.

Thanks to a newly inaugurated ad campaign, Sgt. Kreisel will soon become a national celebrity of sorts. A Republican front group calling itself Freedom's Watch has created a campaign featuring Kreisel -- along with other wounded Iraq veterans, and relatives of troops lost in Iraq -- intended to fortify support for continuing the war.

The ads will not be directed at the unpersuaded public: Most of them will run on Fox "News" and national radio programs that already retail the White House line -- such as Sean Hannity's daily three-hour "You're A Great American" circle-jerk. The purpose of the campaign is to pressure wavering Republicans in Congress to resist any effort to end the occupation of Iraq.

At the end of the ads viewers and listeners are provided with a toll-free number (1-877-222-8001). When I called it, I heard the following recorded message: "Thank you for calling Freedom's Watch. Our operators are currently helping Americans call Congress in support of our war on terror. We will get to you as soon as possible."

An activist who actually contacted a live operator has reported that once this happens "you're expected to take part in a survey before she puts you through to Congress. But there's a catch. The question asked goes something like this: Do you believe the Iraq war is important to the war on terror?... If you say no, the operator immediately thanks you but doesn't connect you to Congress."

The "Freedom's Watch" campaign is fronted by former White House spokesliar Ari Fleischer and funded by, among others, Mel Sembler (a major Republican fundraiser who headed the Scooter Libby Defense Fund and also founded a chain of "drug rehab" clinics that specialized in child torture). It is being conducted as a counterpoint to the anticipated release of the report documenting the "success" of the "surge," which will be presented by the Military Messiah du jour, David Petraeus -- even though it is being composed by the White House propaganda directorate.

It is a reflection of George W. Bush's omnivorous sense of entitlement, and the depraved ingenuity of the War Party's propagandists, that this campaign's first advertisement features Sgt. Kreisel, who displays the same misplaced devotion to Bush that Nicolas Chauvin purportedly demonstrated toward Bonaparte. By using Kreisel and others who have suffered in this needless war, Bush and his handlers are neatly inverting the warning from Henry V: The cause must be good, precisely because men have lost their limbs, minds, and lives in its service.

It wasn't enough that these corrupt, craven creatures -- none of whom has ever sacrificed anything on behalf of anybody -- staged an unnecessary, immoral war that deprived Kreisel of his legs, thereby leaving his young sons with an invalid father. Now they wish to extract from Kreisel's tragedy the last full measure of political advantage by using him to reinforce the prejudices of the Dear Leader's dwindling cohort of cult followers:





This squalid exercise perfectly encapsulates "Freedom" as defined by the Bushcisti:

Freedom consists in adhering to the Dear Leader's will in all things -- at whatever cost to you and your family; and since only those who echo the Dear Leader's voice are truly free, they alone should be allowed to participate. The purpose of the legislature is to ratify the Leader's decisions, and to appropriate money to carry them out.

Every totalitarian movement -- and by now it is clear to any honest and rational person that Bush-era "conservatism" deserves that description -- depends on the eager and energetic participation of the willfully ignorant; as the doxology of Orwell's dystopia recognized, "Ignorance is strength." The invincibly ignorant people who compose Bush's core constituency will have no difficulty swallowing and regurgitating the refrain "They attacked us" as a rationale for continuing the war on a country that had no connection whatsoever with 9-11. The only connection between Iraq and 9-11 is the outrage provoked in the Arab world as that country absorbed ten years of war (including criminal attacks on civilian infrastructure), bombing campaigns, and murderous sanctions dealt out by Washington.

As Orwell -- who understood the difference between patriotism and nationalism -- pointed out: "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

Because of the White House agitprop campaign, millions of people who already support the Dear Leader's war will "know" that Sgt. Kreisel lost his legs in a "terrorist" attack in Fallujah. Not one in ten thousand of them will know, or care about, the thousands of families living in that city who have been killed by American weapons since February 1991.


Hey, cheer up, kid -- you're being liberated!

An Iraqi child, oddly ungrateful for America's generosity and sacrifice, laments the death of his friends from a U.S. airstrike against Fallujah.

For such people, outrage over the roadside bomb that mangled Kreisel and killed two of his friends cannot co-exist with disapproval of the indiscriminate killing of Fallujans in 2004 in a campaign to "pacify" the city. That act of "liberation" included the use of White Phosphorus as what an official Defense Department essay called "a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents...."

White Phosphorus is a hideous high-yield chemical weapon: A WP munition can create a kill zone as much as a quarter of a mile wide, within which victims are burned and suffocated. A U.S. soldier who witnessed the use of that weapon in Fallujah recounted: "It seemed like just a massive killing of Arabs.... Burned bodies. Burned children. Burned women. White Phosphorus kills indiscriminately."


They made a desert and called it "liberation":

Fallujah, as seen from space, shortly after "Freedom" arrived in the form of White Phosphorus bombs and other high-performance explosives.


In the Bu'ushist lexicon, it is "terrorism" to employ improvised weapons against occupation troops in Fallujah, while the use of high-yield chemical weapons by occupation forces against the city's civilians is "liberation." Just before commencing the "liberation" of the city, Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, a Marine commander in Fallujah, explained the matter with admirable concision: "What is coming is the destruction of anti-coalition forces in Fallujah. They have two choices: Submit or die."

It is in the service of that vision of "freedom" that Sgt. Kreisel lost his legs.


(My thanks to Eric Larsen for providing me with the indispensable term "Bushcisti.")

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