Santorum: State Murder as a "Moral Enterprise"

“God did not just give us rights,” pontificated His High Holiness Rick Santorum during a January 17 campaign stop in Lexington, South Carolina. “He gave us a moral code by which to exercise them. See, that’s what Ron Paul sort of leaves out. He leaves out [that the] rights and responsibilities that we have come from God…. And he says, `No, we just have rights, and then that’s it.’ No, we don’t. America is a moral enterprise.” And morality, Santorum believes, is best instilled through State coercion, including officially sanctioned murder.

Santorum presented that assessment just a few hours after a GOP debate in which Dr. Paul precipitated torrential booing from the pious Republican crowd by insisting that government is bound by the central tenet of the Christian moral code – the Golden Rule. 

According to Newt Gingrich – whose General Urko act drove the assembled Republicans into a simian frenzy of bloodlust – it is “irrational” of Paul to insist that there are limits on the government’s powers of discretionary killing. 

Elaborating on that idea in a January 18 interview with South Carolina pastor Kevin Boling, Gingrich asserted that Dr. Paul’s insistence on applying the Golden Rule to foreign policy demonstrated that he had absorbed the “anti-American, self-hating attitude of the American Left.” 

That accusation of moral lassitude against Dr. Paul – who served in the military as a young father with two small children – dribbled down the multiple chins of an impenitent Chickenhawk who used his wife as a draft deferment, then spent the last few years of the Vietnam Era schtupping college girls. ("We would have won in 1974 if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing [a young volunteer] on the desk,” lamented his congressional campaign director.) 

 In the same interview, Newt -- who is the Hogarthian embodiment of several of the deadly sins – reiterated the indolent smear that most of Paul’s core supporters are young people obsessed with recreational drug use (something in which Newt indulged before emerging as the self-appointed “Teacher of Civilization”). Perhaps inspired by Santorum’s example, Newt used that caricature as the basis for his own little collectivist homily.

“We have been endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, but that means we have to be citizens,” Newt decreed, claiming that “a heroin addict or a methamphetamine addict [has] lost the ability to be a true citizen.”

There is nothing in the Declaration of Independence that describes rights as contingent on citizenship. According to that document, individual rights are innate and unalienable; government, on the other hand, enjoys a contingent existence, and can be altered or abolished whenever it imperils those rights. In that scheme, the purpose of citizenship is to restrain the government, rather than to submit to its supposedly ennobling influence.

Like most of the people who support him, Dr. Paul has no interest in drug consumption, recreational or otherwise. He simply understands that the federal government has no constitutional authority to wage war on drug consumption, and that no government anywhere has the moral authority to regulate what individuals choose to ingest. He likewise understands that prohibition always engenders lethal violence – something vividly illustrated by the horrendous death toll exacted by Washington’s proxy drug war in Mexico, which has claimed more than 40,000 lives since 2006.

Once again, Dr. Paul’s perspective on this question is informed by the New Testament: “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man…. Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceedeth out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, thefts, false witness, blasphemies....” (Matthew 15:10-12, 16-19) 

While Jesus of Nazareth never uttered a syllable endorsing drug prohibition, He had a great deal to say denouncing war and related violence. To judge from the priorities and behavior of the “Christian” Right, one would assume that exactly the opposite were the case. 

Although Rick Santorum’s politics are detestable, he is a robustly decent husband and father. That certainly isn't true of the human pustule called Newt Gingrich. Although sharply different in terms of their personal deportment, Santorum and Gingrich share a totalitarian worldview: They assume that while nobody is virtuous enough to govern himself, they belong to a consecrated caste that is holy enough to rule over others. 

Reaching for a big historical idea and falling badly short, Santorum attempted to depict Dr. Paul as a Jacobin:

“I would argue that [Dr. Paul’s] understanding of the Constitution was similar to the French Revolution…. Their founding watchwords were the words, `liberty’ and `fraternity.’ Fraternity. Brotherhood. But no fatherhood. No God. It was a completely secular revolution. An anti-clerical revolution. And the root of it was, whoever’s in power rules.”

Bear in mind, once again, that Santorum offered that description of the candidate who – just hours earlier – had been publicly ridiculed for insisting that God’s law, the Golden Rule, applies to everybody, including those who preside over the criminal enterprise called the State. Furthermore, among the current GOP presidential contenders, Dr. Paul is the only candidate to extol the Constitution as a law that restrains the government. Santorum, on the other hand, consistently seeks to restrain the individual and emancipate the State. While he insinuates that Ron Paul is an anarchist (he isn’t -- none save One was perfect, after all -- but he should be), Santorum has giddily celebrated State lawlessness. 

During an October visit to South Carolina, Santorum endorsed assassination as an instrument of policy when employed by the U.S. government.

“On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead," he explained, broadly intimating that the U.S. government was responsible. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly….I think we should send a very clear message that if you are scientist from Russia or North Korea or from Iran, and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a nuclear bomb for Iran, you are not safe."

Santorum, who is regarded by some misguided conservatives as a champion of the pro-life cause, warned those who doubt that the U.S. government would assassinate civilian scientists should take heed to the way it treats American citizens designated enemies of the State: "When people say, `You can't go out and assassinate people' — well, tell that to al-Awlaki…. We've done it. We've done it to an American citizen."

Actually, the Obama administration not only assassinated U.S.-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki — who was never charged with a crime of any kind, let alone convicted and sentenced by a court -- but also al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Adbdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in Yemen while he was having dinner with a cousin (who also perished).


The Obama administration circulated the story that the 16-year-old was actually an adult “suspected” of being a “militant,” thereby redefining the killing as a strategic success. But the family was able to document that the youngster — who had gone to Yemen in a frantic search for his father, known to be on a U.S. assassination list — was born in Colorado in 1995.


Behavior of this kind is generally associated with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. Proponents of an aggressive foreign policy often characterize the regimes ruling countries such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea as despotisms that routinely "murder their own citizens," and thus pose a threat to the peace of the world. Yet Rick Santorum — who yields to nobody in his zeal to wage war against distant and relatively powerless regimes — openly celebrates the summary execution of U.S. citizens, and describes it as a model for similar "wet work" operations against citizens of other countries. 


For Santorum, the defining principle of politics is power, not liberty. His chief ideological inspiration is not the imperfectly realized individualist James Madison, or even the centralizing constitutionalist James Madison, but the arch-authoritarian Joseph de Maistre, the 18^th Century apostle of absolutism. His role model in policy terms could well be the murderous “Operative” from the film “Serenity.”


Maistre taught that “all greatness, all power, all social order depends on the Executioner; he is the terror of human society and tie that holds it together. Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears." 


Santorum visibly shares the fear that society will disintegrate if the State is deprived of the discretionary power to kill people. In the film “Serenity,” the Operative acted as Maistre’s Executioner on behalf of a galaxy-spanning bureaucratic empire called the Alliance. He spent most of the film pursuing River Tam, a brilliant and irrepressibly individualistic young girl with psychic abilities who had been abducted by the regime and programmed to be an assassin.


River’s brother, a gifted physician named Simon, sacrificed his future to free River, and the two of them wound up aboard the Serenity, a merchant ship commanded by a noble but embittered man named Malcolm Reynolds. Years earlier, Malcolm (or Mal) had fought with the “Browncoats,” a group of separatists who waged a valiant but losing battle for impendence from the Alliance. 


In his pursuit of River and Simon, Alliance forces commanded by the Operative lays waste to an outpost called Haven, where Mal and his crew had briefly found refuge. Similar Alliance attacks have destroyed every other colony where Mal might have taken cover.
“I’m sorry,” the Operative explains to Mal following the massacres. “If your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to…. [D]id you think none of this was your fault?”


“I don’t murder children,” Mal replies with frigid disgust.


“I do,” the Operative unblinkingly replies. “If I have to.” 


“Why?” Mal demands. “Do you even know why they sent you?”


“It’s not my place to ask,” the Operative wearily explains. “I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.” 


Although he possesses none of the Operative’s fearsome martial prowess, Rick Santorum likewise believes it is possible to build a better world through State murder – not just Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani, and (soon) Iranian children, but American children like Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. 


It’s little wonder that Santorum – like Newt Gingrich and the death cult adherents who compose much of the GOP’s rank and file -- finds Ron Paul’s devotion to the Golden Rule to be morally unsatisfactory. 

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Militarists, Drug Warriors, and Heresy-Hunters: The Anti-Ron Paul Axis of "Decency"

Toxic smugness: Google the term "Backpfeifengesicht."

Newt Gingrich, lapsed adulterer, impenitent warmonger, and self-appointed “teacher of civilization,” has excommunicated Ron Paul and his supporters from the ranks of human decency. A similar anathema has been pronounced by left-wing heresy hunter David Neiwert -- a former sidekick to the degenerate fraud named Morris Dees – and many other self-appointed political “watchdogs.” 

Those banishment decrees condemn Dr. Paul and his supporters for rejecting the fundamental tenet of statism – the belief that officially sanctioned lethal coercion is the key to social progress. 

"I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American," insisted Gingrich in a CNN interview. Although Gingrich alluded to the manufactured controversy over decades-old newsletters published by Dr. Paul that contained supposedly offensive material dealing with matters of political correctness, Gingrich’s chief complaint – which he has reiterated on many occasions – is that Dr. Paul seeks to end America’s interventionist foreign policy and the God-awful wars that policy entails. 

Gingrich has also dismissed Dr. Paul’s constituency as being limited to “people who want to legalize drugs.” Unlike Gingrich – who used government-proscribed canabinoids as a young adult – Ron Paul has never used such illicit substances nor condoned their non-medical use, while understanding that no government has the moral right to punish individuals who consume them as they see fit. In 1988 – at a time when, according to Gingrich and other detractors, Paul was peddling racist propaganda – Dr. Paul was denouncing the racist roots of the so-called War on Drugs. Gingrich, on the other hand, has endorsed the execution of first-time drug offenders who possess trivial amounts of narcotics. 

For Gingrich and the dominant militarist wing of the GOP, it is rank indecency to oppose the mass murder of foreigners through aggressive war overseas, and to leave individuals free to choose what mood-altering substances they consume, if any. For “Progressives” of Neiwert’s ilk, it is similarly uncivilized to treat Americans as adults capable of managing their own affairs, and choosing their own associations, free from the directives of bureaucrats and social engineers whose mandates are backed by the threat of deadly force.

Neiwert volubly disapproved of foreign war when George W. Bush was in power, but found other things to complain about once Obama ascended to the Imperial Purple. A deeper problem than such facile and predictable hypocrisy is the insistence – which Neiwert shares with many other figures on the academic Left -- that war and military occupation are morally superior to peaceful, market-centered action in dealing with institutionalized bigotry. 

“The hand-wringing about whether Paul is a racist or not really is beside the point,” declared Neiwert in a typically sanctimonious outpouring. “Labels really become inconsequential when the real issue is how their politics would play out on the ground if they achieved power.” He denounces a supposed “monstrous bind spot in libertarianism – namely, their apparent belief that the only element of American political life capable of depriving Americans of their rights is the government….”

Actually, the core libertarian tenet is the non-aggression axiom (an application of the Golden Rule), which recognizes that it is an unalloyed wrong for anybody to commit aggressive violence against the person or property of another human being. Libertarians do not exempt private actors from that principle. We refuse to exempt the government from it, as well – and this is what is deemed unacceptable by collectivists of Neiwert’s ilk, who believe that all good things in life begin with officially sanctioned coercion. 

Consider, for example, Neiwert’s claim that it was libertarian-leaning conservatives (or their philosophical ancestors) in the aftermath of the War Between the States, who “led the resistance to Reconstruction that overturned the verdict of the war….” 

Neiwert’s use of the term “verdict” in this fashion resonates with the view expressed by Thrasymachus, the notorious sophist depicted in Plato’s Republic – namely, that “in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.”

In Neiwert’s moral universe, only incorrigibly hateful people question “verdicts” imposed through mass slaughter and property destruction.

The “Reconstruction,” it must be remembered, was an undisguised military occupation of the conquered South, in which “wholesale corruption, intimidation of new voters by the thousands and tens of thousands, political assassinations, riots, [and] revolutions … were the order of the day,” as Dr. Paul Leland Haworth wrote in his 1912 study Reconstruction and Union, 1865-1912. 

The objective that inspired Reconstruction was not a vision of civic equality, but rather a desire to destroy the troublesome Southern aristocracy, which was seen as an impediment to the designs of the Northern corporatist elite. 

“I was satisfied, and have been all the time, that the problem of war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory,” wrote General Sherman to his wife (in a letter quoted in Victor Davis Hanson’s book The Soul of Battle). In what Hanson approvingly called Sherman’s war of “terror” against the South, the General warned that those who refused to display a properly submissive posture would be “crushed like flies on a wheel.” 

"Good Indians," by Sherman's definition, at Wounded Knee.

Sherman, and his fellow state terrorist Philip Sheridan, would follow the same approach in dealing with the Plains Indians, who also had the temerity to claim a measure of independence from the supposed authority of the Central Government. Neiwert, interestingly, addresses that horrifying historican episode in his recent book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.

In a chapter dealing with "Eliminationism in America,” Neiwert describes some of the atrocities committed against the Plains Indians by U.S. military forces commanded by  Sheridan and Sherman. He then devotes the rest of the book to ritual execration of "neo-Confederates." That category must include anybody who understands that war to reclaim and “reconstruct” the South was a bloody prelude to the slaughter of the Plains Indians, the imperial war of conquest in the Philippines, and contemporary campaigns of humanitarian bloodshed that have blessed the lives of “people of color” in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Neiwert, who is consistently oblivious to the implications of his own research, also points out that the Ku Klux Klan’s early-20^th Century revival began when it was embraced by local governments (including some in the Midwest) as "an auxiliary police outfit" to enforce laws against bootlegging. The Klan, of course, is the marquee hate group that has served as such a profitable foil for Neiwert’s mentor, Morris Dees – and it’s quite possible that group would have disappeared permanently had it not become a government sub-contractor in the first War on Drugs. 

This brings up a very important point: If Morris Dees and his comrades at the SPLC are genuinely agitated over institutionalized discrimination, why have they never publicly uttered a syllable of condemnation for the patently racist “War on Drugs”? 

One possibility is suggested by the fact that the contemporary SPLC, like the Ku Klux Klan of roughly a century ago, is a quasi-private adjunct to law enforcement agencies that profit extravagantly from Prohibition. Dees is too canny and cynical to disturb that lucrative arrangement by protesting about the costs inflicted by Prohibition in terms of the lives and liberties of black and Hispanic Americans. After all, complaints of that kind are the sort of thing one hears from indecent, irresponsible extremists like Ron Paul. 

David Neiwert and other self-anointed custodians of social justice insist that Ron Paul and his supporters have somehow inherited the sins of bigoted people who died long before they were born, and prospectively share the guilt of those who might do horrible things if federal power were curtailed. Meanwhile, the president supported by Neiwert and his ideological kin is massacring innocent “people of color” in at least three countries, and escalating a domestic Drug War that is rife with racial profiling and racial disparities in sentencing guidelines.  

 The mass slaughter of brown people abroad, and mass incarceration of brown people at home, are a price Neiwert and his ilk are willing to pay to preserve a system that can regiment societal arrangements to their liking. In that system, as Neiwert candidly admits, social “verdicts” are imposed and upheld through state-licensed murder, rather than achieved through peaceful cooperation. 

Professor George P. Fletcher of Columbia Law School provides an incisive description of the ideological foundation of that system in his valuable book The Secret Constitution. 

Fletcher, an unabashed Marxist, is difficult to dismiss as a “neo-Confederate,” yet he agrees with the revisionist view that the war waged by the North was not an effort to "preserve the Union," to emancipate the slaves, or (as Lincoln absurdly claimed) a crusade to restore the pre-war constitutional order. Instead, that war was intended to consolidate a confederation of states into a unitary regime governed by what Fletcher calls a "New Constitutional Order." The founding premise of that New Order is that "the federal government, victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive intervention in the lives of its citizens." (Emphasis added.) That "aggressive intervention" inescapably involves the threat -- and, increasingly, the exercise -- of deadly force.

Newt Gingrich and David Neiwert -- and the ideological cliques they represent -- disagree about a great deal, but they agree that “decency” in political affairs is measured by one’s willingness to support State-sanctioned murder as the central organizing principle of society.

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"Rising" to Empire, Falling from Grace

The following article is adapted from my contribution to a forthcoming collection of essays addressing America's descent into imperialism.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

This panegyric to what is commonly called “American Exceptionalism” could have been composed by any of a number of GOP-aligned media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, or their legions of local imitators. Those words were actually spoken by Madeleine Albright in 1998, when she was the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State. She was defending the U.S. role in enforcing an embargo on Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991.

Albright had memorably addressed that issue in a different fashion three years earlier during an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes. 

“We have heard that a half million children have died,” observed interviewer Leslie Stahl. “I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Without challenging the statistics, or displaying even a tremor of remorse, Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.”

By reconciling Albright’s statements we learn that when “we have to” impose policies that result in the avoidable death, through starvation and disease, of hundreds of thousands of children, “it is because we are America.... We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

For some reason, the self-styled seers and visionaries who defended the Iraqi embargo didn’t foresee how that policy, coupled with decades of U.S. meddling in the Middle East, would cultivate and nurture the seeds that bore murderous fruit on September 11, 2001. 

To ordinary people not blessed with Albright’s oracular insight, it seemed obvious that some variety of murderous blowback would be the inevitable product of a foreign policy that featured deliberate mass starvation punctuated with bombing raids. However, the custodians of permissible opinion have decreed that history began on the morning of 9/11 – that nothing the U.S. government did prior to that date has any organic connection to the motives and actions of those who carried out the attack (at least as that attack is described in the officially sanctioned narrative). To suggest that Washington’s policies had some relationship to anti-American sentiment in the Middle East is to commit a grave blasphemy against American Exceptionalism – the official creed of the ruling Establishment, irrespective of party.

What makes America exceptional, from this perspective, is not the blessings we have been allotted by Providence, or the individual liberties promised by our country’s founding documents. America is exceptional because of the power of the government that rules us, as manifest in its ability to kill people in distant lands. 

Death-dealing herald of empire: A Global Hawk drone.

That view, once again, is not limited to bellicose left-wing internationalists like Albright. On several occasions, Rush Limbaugh – who, like fellow late-blooming militarist Dick Cheney, had “other priorities” when he was of draft age during Vietnam – has related an anecdote about witnessing a military fly-over during a Super Bowl in the 1980. Aroused by the spectacle to the point of rapture, Limbaugh (by his own account) was moved to exclaim, “How can you see something like that, and be a liberal who hates your country?”

Offensive as it would be to both Limbaugh and Albright, a compelling case can be made that their reflexive militarism is a repudiation of our country’s founding principles. The Framers of the Constitution, painfully familiar with the uses to which large military establishments could be put, never intended for the united States of America (in Congress assembled) to have a standing, centralized army. While they did have the lamentable intention of creating a consolidated central government -- and pretty clear ambitions for territorial expansion to the West -- they did not entertain grandiose ambitions of policing the world. 

The most admirable members of the Founding Generation understood that love of country was not measured by one’s enthusiasm for government-inflicted bloodshed. That’s why Washington’s Farewell Address emphasized both adequate provision for defense and the compelling necessity to avoid entanglement in the affairs of other countries. 

Imperialism by joystick: A drone operator carries out an attack.

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” observed John QuincyAdams in his 1821 Independence Day Address. “But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” (Emphasis added.) 

Unlike the supposedly far-seeing Madeleine Albright – who couldn’t foretell how her arrogant endorsement of genocide in 1995 would help catalyze the enmity that led to the devastating 9/11 assault six years later – Adams displayed uncanny foresight in describing the degenerate state of American “patriotism” today, 190 years after he delivered his warning against interventionism: “Patriots” today celebrate force, not liberty.

Today, what Adams and his generation called “Independence Day” is simply called the Fourth of July. Rather than being a celebration of individual liberty, the “Fourth” has become an annual orgy of militarism, often involving saturation-level barrages of propaganda in the form of televised war “movie marathons” and military parades that wouldn’t be out of place in Pyongyang. 

Lest it be forgotten, Independence Day originally commemorated an act of insurrection against the “legitimate” government – an incomparably powerful globe-spanning empire on which the sun never set. The men who committed that act of rebellion would probably consider it perverse that they are “honored” by public rituals extolling the imperial power of a government that is more corrupt and oppressive – by several orders of magnitude – than that of George III.

America was unique because of its origins in principled rebellion against lawless rule, and because of a set of founding political instruments that, while imperfect, did provide individuals some protection against government aggression. Those traits that are typically celebrated as tokens of “American Exceptionalism” – an interventionist foreign policy; a Chief Executive with unqualified power to kill, imprison, and torture people at whim; a badly overgrown military establishment – are, in a specific sense, un-American. 

A commercial republic in which both citizens and their elected representatives are governed by law, and individual liberty is regarded as the highest political good, would be truly exceptional. A sprawling empire ruled by a corrupt oligarchy that plunders both the national treasury and the resources of distant lands is actually quite commonplace. 

 To catch a glimpse of the America that could have been, it's useful to pay a brief visit to the period between the end of the War for Independence and the mercantilist counter-revolution in Philadelphia that abolished the Articles of Confederation and created a more centralized constitutional Union.

 In 1782, a year after the British surrender at Yorktown and one year before the Treaty of Paris finalized American independence, a former French Lieutenant named J. Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur composed a series of essays entitled Letters from an AmericanFarmer. Six decades before Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, Crevecoeur devoted his considerable literary gifts to an examination of the question: “What, then, is the American, this new man?” 

Unlike Europe, a continent plagued by entrenched elites, there were “no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one” in America, he wrote. The inhabitants of this new-born confederacy of constitutional republics were “a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory … united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are equitable.” (Emphasis added.) 

At its best, the "mild" government to which Crevecoeur referred was self-government; it was the spontaneous cooperation of productive people, rather than the imposed order of a parasitical elite. This state of affairs was hardly uniform throughout the confederation, of course, but that it existed at all was something truly inspiring.

On "Evacuation Day," November 25, 1783, British troops ended their occupation of New York. In comments recorded by the New York Packet newspaper, a departing British officer expressed a bemused admiration for the Americans, who distinguished themselves by their unwillingness to be ruled:

“Here, in this city, we have had an army for more than seven years, and yet we could not keep the peace of it. Scarcely a day or night passed without tumults. Now we are [leaving] everything is in quietness and safety. These Americans are a curious, original people; they know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”

The promise of the War for Independence was the establishment of a system of individual liberty protected by law – and, at least at that early stage, that promise was being kept. That genuinely exceptional America earned the admiration of the world – not because its government possessed the power to murder people by remote control, or annihilate entire continents in a nuclear paroxysm, but rather because its people were free and independent, and its society -- although displaying all of the imperfections to which fallen man is heir – aspired to be governed by the Golden Rule. 

 

Tragically, "our" government’s rise to global power has meant our country’s fall from grace. 

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Steven Pinker's Statist Gospel

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who has said that he never “outgrew my conversion to atheism at thirteen,” has written a theodicy – a tract intended to validate the redemptive power of the Leviathan State. In his new book The Better Angelsof Our Nature, Pinker insists that humanity has “evolved to become less violent” through the ministry of elites who employ the State to evangelize on behalf of what he calls “enlightenment humanism.” 

According to Pinker, since the emergence of the modern secular state in the 18th century there has been a dramatic decline in primitive expressions of aggressive violence. People who live in contemporary developed societies “no longer have to worry about abduction into sexual slavery; divinely commanded genocide; lethal circuses and tournaments; punishment on the cross, rack, wheel, stake, or strappado for holding unpopular beliefs; decapitation for not bearing a son; disembowelment for having dated a royal; pistol duels to defend their honor … or the prospect of a nuclear world war that would put an end to civilization or to human life itself,” Pinker asserts. 

The precipitous decline in private violence, which Pinker heralds as “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history,” is a triumph of the “social contract,” an arrangement in which political government asserts a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. By over-awing those inclined toward individual acts of violence, the State supposedly suppresses “demonic” impulses – such as greed and sadism – while emancipating the “better angels of our nature” – empathy, self-discipline, and peaceful cooperation.

"Oh Divine State, protect us from the unenlightened...."

 As is the case with most religious doctrines, Pinker’s theology of the divine State is built on a paradox – in this case the idea that the human tendency toward violence can be eradicated through the scientific application of the same by enlightened people who have supposedly transcended such primitive impulses. 

Given that Pinker is one of the leading exponents of the “box with wires” view of the human brain, there is also a rich vein of irony in Pinker’s unabashed use of the terms “demons” and “angels” in describing a conflict over competing visions of morality. 

In an interview given more than a decade ago, Pinker described human beings as “nothing more than a collection of ricocheting molecules in the head.” Like others who subscribe to that view, Pinker has yet to submit a schematic explaining how morality is produced through molecular reactions. And like theologians from other traditions, Pinker is content to leave such matters undisturbed in the unfathomable depths of mystery. This would be a perfectly acceptable arrangement – were it not for the fact that Pinker, like fundamentalists from other traditions, embraces the use of sanctified coercion as a means of purifying those less enlightened than he.

As a child, Pinker, says, he thought as a child, embracing anarchism at about the same time he converted to atheism. But as an adult, he has put away childish things: “I was a Rousseauan then; now I’m a Hobbesian.” What this means in practice is that he merely abandoned one sect of totalitarian statism for another.

Rousseau, it should be remembered, was  was the author of what he called "The Civil Religion" — a doctrine that would enable the masses, in Rousseau's phrase, to "bear with docility the yoke of the public good." 

The most important article of Rousseau's Civil Religion was the absolute divinity of the State; the gravest transgression was "intolerance," which was regarded as evil not because it injured the rights of individuals, but because it challenged the State's authority.

According to Rousseau, the ideal social arrangement would be a "form of theocracy, in which there can be no pontiff save the prince, and no priests save the magistrates.... [W]hoever dares to say, 'Outside the church is no salvation,' ought to be driven from the State, unless the State is the Church, and the prince the pontiff."

The State would make belief in its dogmas compulsory, even as it denied it was doing so: "While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the state anyone who does not believe them…..” Apostasy would be a capital offense: "If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death -- he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law."

Rousseau believed that man --until corrupted by traditional institutions -- was intrinsically good. Thomas Hobbes – not to put too fine a point on the matter – didn’t share that opinion. He did agree that the State, as the embodiment of what could be called the “general will,” should combine the civil and ecclesial functions and exercise unlimited power to regiment the lives of its subjects. The objective wouldn’t be to save people’s souls, or elevate their morals, but merely to impose order.

Pinker claims to be “eclectically, non-dogmatically libertarian” in his political outlook. Given his unbuttoned embrace of Hobbesian absolutism, that’s a bit like claiming to be an “eclectic, non-dogmatic vegan” while subsisting on a diet of steak tartare.  

Although Pinker began his academic career in a Montreal counter-cultural milieu “dominated by hippies ... and US draft dodgers,” he has endorsed the exercise in State-inflicted violence called the “War on Drugs” in terms that would earn Hobbes’s approval:  “A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will get a certain number of violent people as a by-catch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets.”  

This process involves filling the streets with State-licensed “violent people” in military attire, and granting them a plenary indulgence to loot and terrorize the public. The “by-catch” gathered by thegovernment’s trawling net includes perfectly innocent people. But it is not our place to question the inscrutable wisdom of the divine State, which causes the pain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike.

Leviathan's "by-catch": A 71-year-old victim of a wrong-door drug raid.

 There is also the matter of quo warranto: By what authority does the State assault and imprison people who peacefully ingest mind-altering substances? 

This is where Pinker’s Rousseauist background comes into play: It’s not necessary for subjects to understand the logic of the State’s decrees; they simply must have faith in its bottomless competence and unalloyed goodness – or suffer the penalty for their apostasy. 

All religious belief requires the acceptance “of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Pinker’s dogma requires that we ignore the evidence of things that are clearly visible in order to embrace his vision of something yet to materialize. The most compelling argument against Pinker’s claim that humanity has evolved beyond violence is the systematic slaughter during the 20^th Century of at least 170 million people by governments claiming and enforcing a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. 

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker – to his credit – does recognize R.J. Rummel’s pioneering research into the phenomenon of "democide." Given the body count compiled through war and politicized mass murder during the 20^th century, and the persistent bloodshed in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, the idea that humanity has progressed beyond violence “seems illogical and obscene,” Pinker admits. This is something else we simply have to take on faith as well, it appears. 

The rampages carried out by totalitarian states were a tragic prelude to the “Long Peace” that has prevailed since WWII, Pinker insists. We’ve reached a point at which mass violence only among those sub-populations that have resisted signing on to a “social contract that [gives] government a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” That heathen population, he points out, includes Americans who reside in the southern and western states, where people “retain the right to bear arms [and] believe it is their responsibility, not the government’s, to deter harm-doers.” This means that “private citizens, flush with self-serving biases, [can act] as judge, jury, and executioner….”

Of all the impious nerve! Such power can only be exercised by those duly anointed as emissaries of the divine State – beginning with the Exalted One in the Oval Office, who commands the power to imprison, torture, or execute anybody  on the face of the planet. 

In a 2007 TED lecture, Dr. Pinker urged Leviathan’s subjects to count their blessings: A mere century ago, he pointed out, some of them may have been “burned at the stake for criticizing the king, after a trial that maybe lasted ten minutes.” Today, by way of contrast, a U.S. citizen who condemns Washington’s imperial aggression can be summarily executed by way of a drone-fired missile without the benefit of a trial. The latter approach is acceptable to at least some people of Pinker’s persuasion because the State’s priestly caste possesses the mystical power to transubstantiate violence into “policy.” 

Although he followed a different vector, Steven Pinker, a proudly irreligious cultural Jew, has arrived at the same destination as the reactionary 18th Century Catholic writer Joseph de Maistre, who insisted that "all greatness, all power, all social order depends on the executioner; he is the terror of human society and tie that holds it together. Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears." While Dr. Pinker criticizes the death penalty, his view of social order ultimately rests on the supposed authority of State functionaries to kill those who refuse to submit to them.

The modern material and ethical progress Pinker properly celebrates are not the product of State coercion. They are the result of private, mutually beneficial action based on reciprocal respect for individual rights -- in other words, the application of the Golden Rule, which Pinker acknowledges in passing while pointedly ignoring uncomfortable questions about its provenance and most notable Exponent. 

To use Pinker's categories: The impulses unleashed by the State are demonic, not angelic. 

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Abolish the Police, Arm the Citizens: The "Sagra Model" of Privatized Security

No surrender, no retreat: Andrei (l) and Viktor Gorodilov at the bridge.

 “What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? Or, if during the periods of mass arrests ... people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?"

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

  

“They are coming to kill us!” exclaimed a young resident of Sagra, Russia as he spied a column of vehicles approaching the tiny village at the feet of the Ural Mountains. Responding to the alarm, several dozen residents mustered near the town entrance, bearing whatever weapons they could find. Some of them grabbed pitchforks, chains, or knives. Three men arrived on the scene with shotguns.

The leader of the approaching convoy was Sergei “The Gypsy” Lebedev, head of a criminal gang that had tormented Sagra for months. Lebedev's followers swiped anything of value that was left unguarded.  Power tools, appliances, and other household property disappeared; homes were vandalized as copper tubing and wiring were ripped out to be sold to scrap metal dealers. An onslaught of shoplifting threatened the survival of the village’s only significant retail store. 

Exasperated citizens complained to the police in nearby Yekaterinberg, only to be treated with a mixture of amusement and impatient annoyance. Mounting hostility against Lebedev and his underlings prompted the gangster to withdraw – but only to gather reinforcements.

Lebedev was no petty cut-purse; his entourage included at least one vory v zakone (“thief in law”) – that is, a member of a politically protected mafia. 

The gang leader’s intent was to seize control of the village as a base of operations for a drug operation, and he clearly enjoyed the covert support of the region’s “law enforcement” establishment. Thus it was that late in the evening of July 1, Ledbedev assembled a contingent of about 60 armed thugs and mounted a punitive expedition against the village of 130 people.

As the headlights from the 15-vehicle convoy probed the gathering darkness, the men of Sagra formed a human roadblock across the bridge at the entrance to their town. The infernal column came to a halt, while its leader tried to decide how to deal with the unanticipated resistance. Suddenly a voice from behind them exclaimed, “Grenade!” An object that appeared to meet that description landed in the midst of the raiders, causing several to bolt in panic.

 

In fact, the weapon was a pine cone that had been hurled by Andrei Gorodilov, who had taken cover beside the road. At that signal, the air erupted in curses and insults hurled by many of the women of the village, who had hidden themselves behind trees. 

The resulting diversion was brief, but effective: Andrei’s father, Viktor, let loose a blast from his shotgun. Two other defenders followed suit. The rest, bearing whatever improvised weapons they had found, lit into Lebedev’s hired killers with the unalloyed ferocity of men fighting on their own soil with their backs to their homes. 

One of the invaders was killed, several more were wounded, and Lebedev was forced to retreat. At some point in the skirmish, Sagra resident Tatyana Gordeyeva contacted the police, who – displaying the efficiency and timeliness for which their profession is known – arrived long after the battle was over, and immediately began to treat the defenders as criminal suspects. Their first priority was not to pursue and arrest Lebedev and his cronies (who were eventually taken into custody), or to collect evidence for their eventual prosecution; instead, they attempted to clamp down a cover-up of the matter. They didn’t succeed. 

Within a few days, news of the battle had been propagated throughout Russia, and Sagra quickly became “a catchword for a spate of violence around the country in which people have banded together to defend themselves in the absence of police protection,” noted the New York Times. An entrepreneur captured the public mood in a commemorative t-shirt with the inscription: “If the government can’t help people, it doesn’t have the right to forbid them from defending themselves – Sagra 2011.” 

Thanks for nothing: Russian police at Sagra following the battle.

 “What’s going on in this country is that the government isn’t protecting anyone,” observed Mr. Gorodilov, who spoke with the invincible authority of personal experience. That assessment was seconded by Konstantin M. Kiselyov of Ykaterinberg’s Institute of Philosophy and Law: “The police are corrupt or lazy or politicized, and it’s the same all across the country. So people must protect themselves. They can’t count on the government or its structures. That is why the country is turning into one big Sagra.”

The most remarkable reaction to the Battle of Sagra came from Alexander Torshin, the Speaker of the Federation Council (a position roughly analogous to Senate Majority Leader). Invoking the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Torshin announced that he would propose an amendment to the Russian Constitution guaranteeing “that a Russian citizen has the right under the law to bear arms.”

“We must give our citizens a chance at survival,” Torshin told the Interfax news agency, insisting that widespread private gun ownership doesn’t lead to “a surge in killings,” but rather “the reduction in street crimes and the murder rate.” 

 What makes Torshin’s stance all the more remarkable is the fact that roughly half a year earlier he had expressed support for banning private possession of “non-lethal” handguns. 

It’s possible that this dramatic volte-face was the product of a sincere conversion. It’s likelier that Mr. Torshin knew which way the winds of public outrage are blowing, and aligned his sails accordingly. In any case, Torshin’s proposal is tangible evidence of a growing -- and thoroughly commendable -- Russian contempt for the very institution of government. 

Totalitarianism is based on the assumption that human nature can be permanently altered through the systematic application of state terrorism. Lenin described his regime as a “scientific dictatorship” exercising “power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.” Within a generation or two, Lenin believed, his dictatorship would beget a new creature – homo sovieticus, the selfless, state-focused New Soviet Man. The gulag state would act as an alembic, refining troublesome individualism out of the species, even if this meant pitilessly liquidating millions of specimens regarded as unsuitable for the collectivist future. 

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Communism wasn’t a scientific doctrine for the perfection of the human species; it was, in R.J.Rummel’s phrase, a “plague of power.” After the Hammer and Sickle was furled in 1991, the plague of ideological Communism mutated into form of state gangsterism incapable of reproducing itself beyond Russia’s borders. The Party Nomenklatura abandoned the conceit that they were History’s infallible vanguard, and settled into a very comfortable new role as Russia’s crony capitalist oligarchy. 

While Russia’s criminal oligarchy has little use for ideology, they still embrace the idea of “power without limit, resting directly on force.” Valery D. Zorkin, chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court, laments that Russia’s contemporary political model is based on “the fusion of government and criminals,” with the country increasingly “divided between predators, free in the criminal jungle, and sub-humans, conscious that they are only prey.” 

In his November 2010 State of the Nation speech, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev acknowledged that in many parts of the country local governments have entered into a “direct merger with criminals” at the expense of the rights of law-abiding individuals. While this will surprise nobody who understands that the State is, and has always been, a criminal enterprise, this admission is striking when offered by a 46-year-old political leader who graduated from Leningrad State University. 

One acutely horrifying example of the merger described by Medvedev was provided by a November 2010 massacre in Kushchevskaya, a city of 35,000 about 700 miles from Moscow. The city was the site of several major state-controlled collective farms during the Soviet era. After the USSR was dissolved, the local branch of the Nomenklatura created a quasi-private agricultural firm called Arteks Agro, which was controlled by a career Party functionary named Sergei Tsapok.

For the past decade, a criminal clique headed by Tsapok, and that included current and former members of the city government, conducted a reign of terror in Kushchevskaya, plundering and raping as they saw fit and killing anyone who complained in a voice louder than a whisper. 

Complaints to the police availed nothing, since their duty was to maintain “order” – that is, to enforce the will of the local elite – rather than to protect the rights of the innocent. At public meetings, terrified and outraged local citizens would barrage municipal leaders with protests about the criminal onslaught, only to be told that “There are no criminal groups here.”

Last November 4, Tsapok’s gang invaded the home of Server Ametov, murdering him and eleven others, including four young children. The victims were stabbed, strangled, and set on fire. Ametov was a successful farmer, and since about 1998 Tsapok’s gang had been carrying out a modified version of Stalin’s collectivization program by driving small farmers off their land, murdering those (including Ametov’s brother) who resisted. 

The ensuing outcry was sufficient to prompt official intervention, leading to Tsapok’s arrest. For millions of Russians, the Kuschevskaya atrocity demonstrated the fatal futility of seeking protection from the enforcement arm of the ruling criminal elite. The Russian disaffection toward government has grown so widespread and intense that the ruling establishment is actually reducing the size and power of its law enforcement apparatus. This a development without precedent in the country once terrorized by the Oprichniki, the Okhrana, and the Cheka.

Two victims of the Kuschchevskaya massacre.

In Russia, as elsewhere, the role of the police “is to control situations and to control the people rather than help them,” observes Leonid Kosals, a professor of economics at Moscow’s National Research University. As a result, people “turn to their neighbors and to relatives and local networks to solve their problems by themselves…. [I]n Russia we have thousands of such cases.” 

The trend toward privatization of security in Russia is likely to grow as a result of President Medvedev’s recent initiative to reform the country’s militia – that is, its police force – by purging about 200,000 officers from the ranks. Sociologist Mikhail Vinogradov, who estimates that one-third of Russia’s police force is composed of alcoholics and psychopaths, points out that in 1991, the militia was reduced by about thirty percent – and the result was a sharp reduction in the crime rate.

During the past decade, the crime rate in the United States has declined, terrorism has been all but nonexistent – and the country has been transformed into a fair approximation of a high-security prison, complete with full-spectrum surveillance of the population and undisguised militarization of “local” police departments. At the same time, the political elite in charge of the former Soviet Union is addressing a legitimate crime crisis by drawing down the police force and recognizing (however tentatively) the right of citizens to armed self-defense. 

For all of its problems, Russia clearly is no longer the land of Lenin. For all of our advantages, it’s just as clear that the United States of America is no longer the Land of the Free. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!