Pick-Pockets, Leg-Breakers, and Bigots: One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

“[O]ur rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1782)

For about a year while I was in college I roomed with a young man who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. To my considerable relief, he didn't swan about in the idiotic habiliments of that organization, although he did wear a Klan insignia ring with a certain peculiar pride.

The second oddest thing about this housing arrangement was the fact that Charles (not his real name, but close) is the one who invited me to be his roommate. The oddest thing about our off-campus housing arrangement was the fact that we were living in the back of a mortuary. We shared a small apartment rent-free in exchange for doing custodial work and manning the phones from time to time.

One evening, after Charles had consumed a couple of wine coolers, he explained to me -- in as matter-of-fact a voice as he could muster in his partially inebriated condition – the racial hierarchy as he understood it. In what he probably considered an act of tremendous magnanimity, Charles explained that though I'm dark brown guy of Latino heritage (who has passed for everything from Egyptian to Basque), I was to the “safe” side of a racial dividing line that is obvious only to people who share his tragic obsession with melanin content.

What was even more perplexing was the fact that this proud young Klansman had a very close friend who was (and, I think it's safe to say, still is) black. My memory fails me as to this fellow's name, but I recall that he ran for a position in the student government and Charles eagerly helped with his campaign.

Charles wasn't a bad kid -- confused and somewhat self-destructive, certainly, but I never knew him to act on his professed racial views. To the best of my knowledge, he never did any injury to anyone but himself: A diabetic, he twice drank himself into an insulin coma (chugging wine coolers wasn't the best treatment protocol for his condition), the second time nearly killing himself. (I had to call the paramedics on both occasions, and the second time I had to give him an injection – which, if Charles had become a genuinely bad guy, might have put me in the same ironic position as Jay Sherman when he invented his eponymous “oil.” Take the time to watch that episode to the end, and you'll see what I mean.)

Samuel Johnson famously pointed out that no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures, and I think a similar principle applies to prejudices of various kinds. In Charles' case, some of his chosen associations – with his invited dark-skinned Latino/Irish/who-knows-what else roommate, and his black friend – made him a hypocrite, at least as far as his racial ideology was concerned.

This type of hypocrisy is entirely commendable, and I suspect it's more common than most people think. Twain seemed to brush up against this reality when he penned Huckleberry Finn's anguished but triumphant exclamation, “All right, I'll go to hell!” because he couldn't find anything sinful in regarding the slave Jim to be his equal, and helping him escape.

And I'm sure each of us knows some hidebound guy who occasionally salts his conversation with ethnic humor, but is functionally color-blind when it comes to helping people in need. (If you've never met a person of that description, your life is poorer for it.)

To be sure, there are genuine bigots in this world. I've run into a few, although nowhere near as hard as I'd like to if given the chance. (Just kidding. Sorta.)

For example, I was accosted by an authentic bigot while jogging in Mobile, Alabama a number of years ago. This seedy guy, who was missing both an upper lip and, apparently, everything but his reptilian brain, seems to have confused me with a local black power militant, and he threatened unspecified harm to me for jogging “in the wrong neighborhood.” I was perplexed, amused, and a little disgusted, but since I was leaving in about an hour (I was touring the Southern States with a musical group), I wasn't particularly concerned about it.

I had the same reaction to an early morning phone call I received just a few days ago from someone who very thoughtfully informed me that I'm “nothing but a f*****g n*gger.” The only distress caused by that phone call was the fact that, owing to a nasty bout of viral bronchitis that made it nearly impossible for me to speak, I couldn't correct the record by pointing out that I'm actually a f*****g sp*c. It's a small matter, of course, but certainly large enough to fill to capacity the minuscule brain of someone who'd make a phone call of that kind.

Every human being is, to use Will Durant's phrase, a colorful medley of discordant fragments. Each of us has his prejudices; most of them are benign, some of them invidious, and none of them of any consequence to others as long as they are not coupled with deceit or coercion. It is when force or fraud is introduced in a way that impinges on individual rights that we should take alarm over prejudice.

This doesn't happen, for example, when a business owner is willing to forego profit by banning customers of a certain ethnic background, or who speak a language he doesn't like: The business is his property, and if he's willing to factor a prejudice premium into his business expenses, if he's more concerned with the hue of a potential customer's skin than the color of his money, let the fool alone.

That's how things would operate in a free society. It's decidedly not how it works in the society we inhabit, however – one in which the central government and its affiliates, in the name of “civil rights,” claim a mandate to regulate daily interactions that should be defined by the market.

After all, even bigots have rights. And that's a fortunate thing, too: Given the frailty of the human condition, and the perverse creativity of self-appointed custodians of tolerance, all of us at some point will be tagged with that epithet by someone.

It does me no injury for my neighbor – or college roommate – to say that brown people are innately inferior to people his color. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. The same can't be said of government, which incessantly plunders my earnings while holding over my head the prospect of lethal violence, should I transgress any of the myriad enactments the political class is pleased to call “laws.”

Any government that gets into the business of policing private attitudes – however pernicious the attitudes, and however apparently unobtrusive the policing might be – is totalitarian in principle. The only excuse for the existence of government is to protect the innocent from the depredations of pickpockets and leg-breakers, if I might paraphrase Jefferson yet again. Unfortunately, all that government does is to pick pockets and break legs, and governments that assert the power to regulate what goes on inside the minds of their subjects tend to use such violence promiscuously.

I am inclined to think that one's perspective on this subject qualifies as a “shibboleth/sibbolet”-style defining question regarding his true beliefs about government. And the contrived furor over the most recent re-discovery of Ron Paul's ancient newsletters – the yellowing, curling pages supposedly saturated with "bigoted rhetoric," including racism and the attitude dishonestly called “homophobia” -- and the publicity given to carefully framed excerpts therefrom by a small clique of foundation-funded Beltway “libertarian” figures.

Since the most recent paint-by-numbers hit piece was published in The New Republic two weeks ago by the precious little Jimmy Kirchick (a writer of unremarkable skills who looks like the tragic issue of a disowned carnal transaction between David Frum and a chipmunk), most of the discussion has focused on whether or not Dr. Paul knowingly allowed his name to be attached to various “bigoted” statements.

Let's get this straight, shall we? You see these kind people rallying on behalf of "liberty, prosperity, and peace" -- folks who oppose centralized power, collectivism, and military aggression? They are obviously not neo-Nazis....

Reading everything I can find about this entirely manufactured controversy, I've yet to find a single example in which “bigotry” was attached to a policy proposal that would enhance the power of government to transgress individual rights.

Nor have Dr. Paul's critics cited such an example from his voting record, or his current campaign platform. Nor can they.

... on the other hand, these folks are neo-Nazis (the swastika flag being something of a clue)...

Just as one can't be a hypocrite in his pleasures, a politician can't be a hypocrite in his record, however duplicitous his rhetoric may be – and Dr. Paul's record is that of a constitutional purist who believes that individual liberty is the supreme political good.

Dr. Paul's mistake, and it was a significant one, was to franchise his name to other people whose priorities weren't necessarily the same and whose editorial voice was entirely different from his. He has pointedly and explicitly owned up to that lapse. That having been said, I have to confess that nothing I've read in the supposedly scabrous newsletters has caused me to swoon like a Victorian maid when first exposed to the gamier passages of Fanny Hill.

... and these charming people, whose bloody handiwork has been pointedly criticized by Dr. Paul, richly deserve the "neo-Nazi" label, as well: While many of them wouldn't pass the Third Reich's ridiculous tests for Aryan "purity," their agenda -- centralize power in the Executive, propagate foreign wars without end, create detention camps in which people can be held indefinitely, tortured, or summarily disposed of -- certainly bears a family resemblance to the policies of the Reich.

Yes, there was discussion – in the aftermath of the “Rodney King Riots” -- of a possible race war that didn't materialize (thank God). But the tone was monitory, not incendiary; the concern was that collectivist policies imposed by Leviathan would result in the kind of Hobbessian tragedy that has consumed other multi-ethnic countries, from Lebanon to Yugoslavia to Iraq. And the emphasis was on the need to end those collectivist policies, rather than mobilizing government power on behalf of different collectives, such as “Euro-Americans.”

(By the way -- does anybody else remember that the late Carl Rowan, a couple years after the publication of the purportedly vicious Ron Paul newsletters, published a book entitled The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call? It would be difficult to accuse the late Mr. Rowan of harboring latent white supremacist sentiments, although about twenty years ago he did prove to be a crypto-NRA symp.)

In his capable demolition of the anti-Paul smear campaign, Justin Raimondo points out that those elements of the Washington libertarian Establishment that are behind it are “really threatened by the existence of a mass libertarian movement – because it's a movement over which they have no control.” The smear-and-purge routine is the option of first resort for self-appointed Gatekeepers seeking to reassert control over a movement no longer under centralized discipline.

It is immensely revealing that for the Beltway libertarian clique, the priority is to traduce Ron Paul and his supporters, rather than directing their efforts at the Regime.

Our country is rapidly descending into the mire of literal fascism – imperial executive power, permanent warfare, summary suspension of due process, institutionalized torture, ubiquitous surveillance, the emergence of a “Your Papers, Please” system of travel restrictions. And the “libertarian” affiliate of the Smearbund is investing its efforts in trying to convince the public that the Paul campaign's focus on “liberty, prosperity, and peace,” the candidate's lifelong record of defending individual rights, and his amply attested personal kindness to people of all backgrounds is simply an elaborate and very clever disguise, and that the fundamental “truth” of what Ron Paul represents is found in a handful of supposedly scandalous statements – orphaned from their context – found in yellowing and long-forgotten newsletters.

Given all of this, it's an indigestibly rich irony that one of the accusations spewed at Paul by Kirchick is that he's a “conspiracy theorist.”

For “libertarians” of the sort under discussion, Dr. Paul's all-but-flawless record of support for individual liberty is less important than his failure to burn incense to the State's official deities (such as Lincoln and Martin Luther King) and his willingness to associate with people who say and write things that violate the canons of political correctness.

Their perspective can be summarized in a gloss on the familiar nursery rhyme: The State and its goons may break our bones, but "bigoted" words alone can hurt us. That's a peculiar kind of “libertarianism,” but it's one that's perfectly harmless to the Imperial State – which is why, in the final analysis, those who subscribe to it are so welcome and comfortable in the Imperial Capital.

Dum spiro, pugno!

An American Pugilist

Like countless six-year-old boys before him, and countless who will come after him, Joey Hughes got in trouble for fighting at school. It was nothing serious, just random, unfocused scuffles that messed up clothes and hair but left no permanent marks. Nonetheless, Joey's mother Audra was furious at the news, and she warned Joey that her husband Matt would be angry as well.

Sure enough, when Audra contacted Matt – who was away on business -- he was angry.

“Is he there?” Matt growled into his cellphone. “Put him on. Let me talk to him.”

No doubt palsied with terror over the prospect of a tongue-scourging, Joey picked up the phone and meekly greeted his adopted father.

“Joey, what happened?” Matt asked with an edge to his solicitous tone.

“Us kids were playing,” Joey began earnestly, if ungrammatically, “and we started kicking and pushing. Everybody was doing it!”

This excuse – foolishness is excusable because it's ubiquitous -- cut as little ice with Matt as it would with most fathers. Joey was being raised differently, and there was a higher standard he had to meet.

“Joey,” Matt began, striving to retain his composure, “were you using your toe? Or your shin?”

“Toe,” Joey replied in an all-but-inaudible voice.

“Joey, you can't do that!” Matt exclaimed as he erupted in frustrated indignation. “If you're going to kick somebody, you've gotta use your shin. You're going to break your toe.”

“I know,” whimpered Joey beneath the paternal rebuke. Audra, who overheard the conversation, snatched the phone from her son's hand and delivered a rebuke of her own.

“Matt, I'm trying to teach him that he shouldn't be getting into trouble, not which way he should be hitting the other kids!”

Matt Hughes hoists Frank Trigg en route to a body slam KO.

That may prove to be difficult, since Joey Hughes' father Matt is a nine-time Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) welterweight world champion who, at 34, has spent the better part of three decades immersed in single combat – first amateur wrestling, and then mixed martial arts (MMA).

So you want to pacify Joey's pugilistic streak, Audra? Hey, good luck with that.

The original title of Matt Hughes' recently published memoir Made in America was “Fighting Solves Everything.” While that statement isn't true, it would have made a much better title, and been a more accurate reflection of Hughes' life story thus far.

He arrived as part of a matching set on October 13, 1974, born to a farmer from Hillsboro, Illinois (current population circa 6,200). Matt and his identical twin Mark spent the first two decades of their lives doing exactly the same things as tens of millions of other boys from the Midwest. Exploiting the plentiful opportunities offered by growing up on a farm, Matt and Mark found endless inventive ways to get into trouble. Some of them – using the spillway of a local dam as a waterslide, for example -- proved fatal to some of their friends. (This is an appropriate time to remember the old saw about the proverbial Redneck's Last Words: “Hey, watch this!”)

As was the case with too many Midwestern farm households in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Hughes family was financially ruined by decisions made in Washington.

The Soviet grain embargo cut the price of wheat by more than half; at roughly the same time, the Federal Land Bank, which set the prices and mortgage rates on farm loans, was jacking up its interest rates. During the early 1980s, “the farms started falling like dominoes,” Matt recalls, and his parents were among the casualties. In an effort to stave off bankruptcy, Matt's father started to sell off farm assets, then parcels of land. Eventually both parents were driven to take outside jobs, and the marriage collapsed.

Midwest born and bred: Matt Hughes (left) with his twin brother Mark and three canine friends on Matt's farm in Illinois.

By this time, the Hughes twins had become athletic standouts at the local high school. Like many farm boys, Matt and his brother Mark were blessed with natural strength and an appetite for manual labor – and, as a result, they excelled at wrestling, the purest of all sports. Matt was a two-time Illinois class A state champion who went on to become a two-time Division I All-American for Eastern Illinois University.

The personality that reveals itself in the pages of Hughes' memoir (written with the help of a co-author identified as Michael Malice) could be described as Midwestern Stoic. His disposition is well-suited to both farming and MMA. It's captured best in his description of nearly dying in the spillway while trying to rescue a drunken friend:

“For almost ten years I had been throwing people around on mats; I had been lifting weights to build up my strength; I had been swimming my entire life. But all these things were a joke compared to the power of that rushing water. My body flew all around that spillway. I couldn't control where I was going. I didn't have a choice as to where I was going to end up. It was a feeling I had never experienced before or since: complete helplessness.

The water took me down at first, and then it took me back a little ways. I pushed off the concrete floor.... I shot up off the bottom, and the current took me back to the center of the spillway, and then it sucked me down again. I didn't know when I was going to pop up; I didn't know when I was going to get pulled under.

After three cycles of this, I thought, There's nothing you can do. This is it. You're going to die.”

Matt kept his wits intact, curled up in a ball, and was shot downstream out of the whirlpool like a projectile. He later reflected that “I had been as close to my own death as I could have possibly gotten, but I hadn't found it to be such a horrible thing. It wouldn't have been a peaceful death, but it wouldn't have been an unspeakable tragedy. It wasn't something for me to be afraid of.”

That sense of composure, when added to Matt's preternatural athleticism, made him all but unbeatable in the ring, cage, or octagon. There is little subtlety to Matt's fighting style, which could be described as “ground-and-pound” leavened with a few submissions.

At 5'9” and 170 pounds, Matt can bench press roughly twice his bodyweight. He has the neck of an NFL nose tackle twice his size; that attribute, along with his demeanor, austere training methods, and devotion to farm life reminds me of another Midwestern wrestling legend, Iowa's Martin “Farmer” Burns. Matt's preferred game plan is to pick up his opponent, carry him across the ring, and body-slam him as hard as he can. (See the photo above for a suitable illustration.)

Matt drifted into MMA almost as a lark. As he points out, collegiate wrestling standouts don't have terrific career prospects. As a Division I All-American, Matt was one of the country's eight top collegiate wrestlers when he graduated. “The top eight football players to graduate college every year are instant millionaires,” he writes. “This top eight wrestler who graduated college in 1997 got to stay on as assistant wrestling coach at Eastern, as well as to do electrical work on the side for $14 an hour -- $28.88 if it was a state job, time and a half for overtime. But it was work, and I was using my hands, so it didn't bother me.”

As for making a living in the sport at which he excelled: “There is no venue for wrestlers after we graduate, except for the low-paying, constantly traveling world of the United States Army team. Professional wrestlers are talkers first, bodybuilders second, and stuntmen third.” He drifted into MMA by way of a friend who recruited him to be a training partner.

Grappling legend Martin "Farmer" Burns.

Matt soon found himself fighting in small clubs in Wisconsin, and in arenas in Japan. His grappling career took him as far as the United Arab Emirates, where he took part in the Abu Dhabi Combat Club submission wrestling tournament – an event created by Sheik Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nayan, the son of the former UAE president.

During his first MMA bout, Matt was talent-spotted by the referee, who just happened to be UFC welterweight champion Pat Miletich. Eventually Matt would join Miletich's MMA stable in Bettendorf, Iowa, which trained in an unadorned brick building that “was the simplest thing you could still call architecture.” Thanks to the technical skills and discipline he acquired under Miletich's tutelage, Matt became one of three world champions produced by Miletich Fighting Systems.

For reasons I can't identify, Matt is considered arrogant and sanctimonious. That impression is difficult to sustain in the face of the candor and self-deprecating humor on display in his memoir.

After his likeness had been included among UFC standouts in the organization's first video game, for example, Matt reflected that “Kids all over America and the world would be able to skip over me when picking Mark Coleman or Kevin Randleman to be their character.” Referring to a match he lost because he left his neck open to a triangle choke, Matt's praire-dry wit strikes again: “There's a term in Brazilian jiu-jitsu for someone who notices an opening and leaves that opening there for their opponent to exploit. That term is idiot.”

Clearly, although Matt Hughes – like anyone else who competes in combat sports for a living – has an ego, albeit an unexceptional one by the standards of his profession. His reputation as a stuck-up jerk might be an untutored and undeserved reaction to his conversion to Christianity, which took place during a visit to Juarez, Mexico shortly after his wedding in 2004. Matt, his brother Mark, and several others went to Mexico to build an addition to an orphanage. Matt went along because he the prospect of several days of pouring concrete struck him as a pleasant vacation: “If we're doing manual labor, I guess I can have a good time.”

Matt, who had been attending church to please his new wife and reading the Bible as a curious skeptic, found himself drawn into a spiritual current as irresistible as the whirlpool that had nearly killed him years earlier. He found himself praying to Christ for forgiveness and salvation, and then feeling “like I was a candle which had just been lit for the first time.”

He describes a similar experience that took place as he and his support crew prayed before his 2006 UFC match against Royce Gracie. As a chiropractor nicknamed the Witch Doctor prayed, Matt felt himself “spiritually in another place” as some thoughts not typical of a professional fighter coursed through his mind:

“I'm not worthy of all God's blessings.... I don't deserve to have such a great family. I don't deserve to never have to worry about putting food on the table and clothes on my kids' backs. I don't deserve to have such total support from my family and friends. I don't deserve to be able to do what I love, all the time. I don't deserve all these things, God. Why have You chosen me?”

One of the larger blessings in Matt's life was the failure of the political class to kill off mixed martial arts. In 1996, the year Matt started competing, Senator John McCain began a jihad against the sport, denouncing it as "human cockfighting" and using what influence he could to have state athletic boards shut down UFC and other MMA events.

McCain, who can countenance wars of aggression that slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, denounced MMA competition -- in which most matches end through submission -- as "barbaric." Oddly enough, he has no similar scruples about boxing: The Senator and all-purpose moral scold was ringside at the 1995 fight during which Jimmy Garcia was killed in the ring.


Apparently, McCain considers MMA a scandalous waste of aggression: Why let young athletes compete for money and individual acclaim, when they could be stuffed into uniforms and sent abroad to kill foreigners on behalf of the State?


By the late 1990s, thirty-six states had banned MMA events. The UFC, by far the largest promotion, was practically bankrupt when it was bought by an investment group fronted by former boxer and college dropout named Dana White, who is the organization's current president. White has proven to have a tremendous gift for promotion: He imposed strict drug-testing standards on UFC athletes, emphasized the sport's safety precautions, and -- most importantly -- developed a Spike TV "reality" show to promote the organization and cultivate new fighters.


The appeal of MMA goes well beyond prurient interests of various kinds. A lot of it has to do with simple admiration for the athletic excellence displayed by successful MMA competitors, who must master the rudiments of several combative arts -- wrestling, boxing, kick-boxing, and some form of submission grappling, such as jiu-jitsu.


"Imagine that you had to be great at all the primary baseball skills, great at all the primary football skills and great at all the primary basketball skills, and you had to perform them all at the same time just to be able to compete," explains Eric Lawson, a part-time MMA competitor from California. "That gives you an idea."


When he's not competing, by the way, Lawson works as a mortgage planner. Given the collapse of the housing bubble, Lawson is fortunate to have a career "Plan B" of some kind. In similar fashion, MMA proved to be a blessing for Matt Hughes, the product of a family that was financially ruined by the capricious decisions of the corporatist Power Elite.


That there is a "Bread and Circuses" flavor to the UFC, no honest person can deny. But after one pares away the extraneous marketing elements, what remains is an updated version of the world's oldest contact sport. While refined people may consider MMA unseemly, it really isn't that different from the variety of "Catch" Wrestling practiced by George Washington, who at age 47 (easily the equivalent of 65 today) once wrestled and defeated seven straight opponents.


In its eclecticism and individualistic nature, mixed martial arts is every bit as innately American as baseball or basketball (the latter of which, remember, was born here). And the aptitudes it cultivates in participants may prove indispensable as our illusive prosperity evaporates, tyranny coalesces, and times become grim.


For Matt Hughes (whose career may be over after a recent loss to Canadian Georges St.-Pierre), MMA offered a chance to earn a living doing what he loved. What could be more American than that?

Dum spiro, pugno!

The ADL's Holocaust Denial

What happens when the State has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force: The Anti-Defamation League agrees with the late, unlamented National Socialist regime that this Jewish woman about to be murdered holding her child had no right to take up arms against the government that ruled her.

If our nation were to descend into the abyss of genocidal state terror, the so-called Anti-Defamation League (ADL) would remain a dutiful instrument of state policy for as long as the ruling class had use of that despicable organization.

If a mass-murdering oligarchy arose that made optimal use of the existing instruments of regimentation, repression, and liquidation, the ADL's leadership would slavishly ingratiate itself with that clique.

Under the circumstances I describe, the ADL's top leadership would scruple at no compromise of its professed principles. If this meant winnowing out “anti-government” elements from within the Jewish community, so be it: Foxman and his comrades would eagerly help to cull out those Jews who worship the God of Abraham rather than the Almighty State (as politically protected collaborators did during World War II).

Had they been present in the Warsaw Ghetto, Foxman and his comrades would have done what they could have to prevent the heroic uprising against the Nazis. At no point would the ADL's leadership have countenanced, much less organized, any effective armed resistance to genocide.

I am not engaging in facile speculation. I am taking the ADL at its word and applying the principles contained in the amicus curiae brief submitted by that organization (in collaboration with many others of its ilk) in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller.

Under the civilian disarmament ordinances of the District, Dick Anthony Heller, a police officer, was permitted to carry a firearm while on the clock as a government employee, but not to own and use a handgun or rifle for self-defense as a civilian in his own home. (.pdf) (Heller's specific job, incidentally, is guarding federal judges.) He challenged the District's law in court, losing the initial trial but winning in federal appeals court.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on this case later this year, and the decision it will render is expected to be the most significant ruling on the right to armed self-defense since the US v. Miller decision seven decades ago.

As I see it, the Heller case uniquely lays bare for inspection the often concealed premise of all civilian disarmament laws: Since the State must have a monopoly on the use of force, only agents of the State can be permitted to carry weapons. Thus only when Heller was dressed in a State-issued costume was he was permitted to pack a gun. When dressed more respectably in the clothes of a productive private citizen, Heller lost whatever magical property inheres in those who work for the tax-consuming class, and was thus forbidden to carry a firearm.

This arrangement is a nearly perfect inversion of the social order envisioned in the Second Amendment.

By recognizing a right inherent in “the people” to own and carry arms – a right as innate to the individual as freedom of speech or religion -- the Second Amendment unambiguously denied government, whether state or federal, a monopoly on the use of force. By specifically reserving to each state the power to create a “well-regulated militia” (which can, under certain circumstances, be called into the service of the “united States in Congress assembled”), the amendment was intended to preserve the means for the states to protect their inhabitants from invasion, insurrection, and the aggression of the central government.

In its brief, the ADL sniffily dismisses the idea that the Second Amendment “protects a right to overthrow the government when some unspecified number of individuals, in their unguided discretion, decide that the government is `tyrannical.'”

The Warsaw Ghetto, prior to the Uprising: Bucket-headed government officials had the guns, innocent civilians had none -- just as it should be, according to the ADL.

Are these people even dimly aware of the fact that this is exactly what was done by the American Patriots of the former British Colonies? And, given the recurring totalitarian horrors of the past century, is it impossible for these people to imagine circumstances in which armed revolt would be the only alternative to genocide?

The ADL brief insists that “any effort to overthrow the government is `treason' punishable by death” and snarks that we “ought not to read the Second Amendment as arming the populace to commit what the Constitution itself deems a capital offense.” Here the authors of the brief are being deliberately obtuse, I suspect: “Treason” as defined by the Constitution refers to adhering to the enemies of the united States, not in withdrawing one's consent to be ruled by the central government. And the “enemies” referred to in the text can include – indeed, always include – those in Washington who work to subvert the Constitution.

James Madison, who obviously knew more about the Constitution than does anybody in the employ of the ADL, pointedly acknowledged that one explicit purpose of the Second Amendment was to enable the states to mount an insurrection against the central government should doing so be necessary in order to protect individual liberty.

April 19, 1775: Anti-government extremists riot, firing on the constabulary sent to enforce a ban on illegal assault weapons. Or at least, that's how the ADL must view the events that took place at Lexington and Concord.

In Federalist essay number 46, Madison acknowledges the validity of this “Insurrectionary Theory” of the Second Amendment. In the event that “traitors” -- that's Madison's word – aggrandize the central government's power “beyond the due limits” and buttress their position with a standing army, the individual states and the armed citizens thereof would have the means to conduct a successful rebellion:

“Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men [at the time Madison wrote those words]. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it.

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.” (Emphasis added.)

A vital and little-appreciated application of this principle is the right of state militia to withdraw their participation in wars not waged for the defense of the united States. Witness what happened in the War of 1812 when many state militia units, whose members were eager to repel British aggression, refused orders to invade Canada in what they properly considered a venture in cynical, opportunistic aggression.

That revolt prompted war hawks in Congress to consider a conscription bill, the prospect of which prompted Daniel Webster – yes, that Daniel Webster – to extol the principle of states' rights. The threat of conscription helped precipitate the abortive Hartford Convention of December 1814, in which New England states threatened to secede from the Union.

It might have struck war-battered President James Madison as acutely ironic that his government was dealing with something similar to the scenario he outlined in the forty-sixth Federalist essay. But all of this makes perfect sense when it's remembered that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were produced by men who had fought and won a war that began when an informal but well-armed citizen militia forcefully repelled an effort by their government to confiscate their firearms.

The ADL, however, perceives the only “right” protected by the Second Amendment to be that of each state to exercise a monopoly on force – or, better stated, a federally guaranteed exclusive franchise on force within its boundaries. Citing the conclusion of a justifiably obscure historian, the ADL's brief insists that “the rebellion of a people against a government established by themselves is not justifiable, even in an extreme case....”

If the ADL had its way, the Bucketheads would once again have a monopoly on the ownership and use of firearms.

Those are words that would have warmed what passed for the hearts of the Nazi officials who presided over the perfectly legal and orderly extermination of millions of people – disarmed people, of course.. Those words compose a pious admonition to servility that could have been preached by any of the prostitute pastors in the Nazi-dominated church of “Positive Christianity” -- the founding text of which was an artfully dishonest reading of Romans 13. And tragically, those words are probably a faithful recreation of advice given by German Jewish leaders to their followers even as the death camps took root and the cattle cars started to run.

As Benjamin Ginsberg points out in his utterly indispensable book The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, “to the very end, many German Jews could not believe that the German state would fail to protect them from the excesses of Nazi fanatics. The historical dependence of Jews upon the state .... gave rise to a Jewish philosophical tradition, beginning in the 17^th century with Spinoza ... in which the state is glorified and seen, essentially, as a kind parent worthy of total obedience” (page 13, emphasis added).

What if German Jews had not been indoctrinated with this dogma of “total obedience” to the State? It's impossible to see how things could have turned out worse for them had they been taught to resist the encroachments of a criminal government, rather than entrusting their fate to it. And it is the latter option that the ADL would endorse.

As expressed in a press release, the ADL's view of the Second Amendment dictates that state governments must “protect their citizens' lives, liberty and property by regulating the purchase and possession of firearms.” For “regulating” we might as well read “forbidding.”

You see, in the mental universe inhabited by the ADL, government does not threaten the “lives, liberty and property” of the citizenry; this is the exclusive business of “bigots” and “extremists” in the private realm, categories that are best defined as “People the ADL doesn't like and wishes to suppress, including – but hardly limited to – actual bigots.”

“Gun violence and the caching of dangerous weapons are commonplace among extremists,” lisps the ADL press release (and yes, it is possible for written prose to lisp). “If states lose the right to regulate firearm ownership, it would help violent bigots in their efforts to create an America based on hate and intolerance.”

This assumes, of course, that government policy-making and law enforcement organs have been entirely purged of people inclined toward “hate and intolerance” -- a happy assumption to which practicing adults are immune. And it must be noted that the ADL, to the best of my knowledge, has never condemned gun violence perpetrated against innocent people by state agents.

One would think that the ADL would take an interest in the epidemic of government-inflicted gun violence against black Americans carried out via the “war on drugs.”

One would think such a thing, that is, were he foolish enough to credit the ADL's sincerity and honesty.

Those willing to grant the organization the benefit of the doubt should read its Heller brief, in which the ADL – after spending decades execrating the supposedly invidious motives of those who support federalism (in its original meaning) and protecting the reserved powers of the states – suddenly emerges as the self-appointed defender of “states' rights.”

That's right: The urbane sophisticates at the ADL have gotten their Bull Connor freak on. They've stuck a wad of chaw in their cheeks and defiantly hoisted the “State's Rights” banner. Sure, next week they'll probably return to form, denouncing Ron Paul as a crypto-Klansman because of his defense of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. But for the nonce, the ADL is firmly in favor of “states' rights”– at least for the purposes of defending the “right” of a state, acting as a fully owned subdivision of the federal government, to disarm its inhabitants by force.

(Continues after the jump.)

Mark Pitcavage, head of "fact-finding" for the ADL, was employed by the "SLATT" program of the Justice Department's Institute for Intergovermental Research. Through SLATT -- State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training -- Pitcavage helped indoctrinate state and local police about the supposed dangers posed by "right-wing extremists."

Behind its facade of respectability, the ADL has always acted as a quasi-private secret police agency, compiling dossiers on people both public and private and urging various punishments on those it considers its enemies. In recent decades it has helped to inflict Orwellian “hate crime” laws on many communities, and worked alongside other self-appointed “watchdog” groups to indoctrinate police about “hate” groups (which in practice means any group of people hated by the ADL). So it's hardly surprising, in a way, that it would embrace civilian disarmament with such intemperate fervor. Clearly, their priority is to enhance the power of the State to deal with their enemies.

This perspective is an outgrowth of an attitude that can properly be called a species of Holocaust denial – not the denial of the event, mind you, but of the mechanism that produced the mass killing of Jews and others by the National Socialist regime. As High Church Statists the ADL wants to privatize that atrocity by blaming it entirely on the bigotry of hateful individuals; meanwhile, the organization works diligently to build the Total State and equip it with everything it needs to carry out future endeavors in political mass murder.

A reminder: My new book Liberty in Eclipse is now available.

Dum spiro, pugno!