Level Setting

Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

The time has come to have the most serious talk in a hundred years, a talk that is overdue by at least a hundred years. It needs to be discussed, history needs to be known, and we need to change course as fast as possible.

I don’t know at this point whether we can—or should—more on that later—avoid the butcher’s bill. But I know the sooner we have this talk and change course, the smaller that bill will be. And the less time will be lost. And, hey, perhaps we can avoid, at least for a time, the reiteration of a murderous cycle that has already swallowed a century of history.

First let’s talk about levels. And getting off level. First of all, if I don’t use a level, everything I do tilts to the right (stop laughing) since I had major concussion. I don’t realize it, until I see the results later on. Then there’s the time I had a massive “silent” ear infection. I’m known for them, and won’t realize sometimes for weeks. One of the things it messes with is my balance. I start tilting slowly, until I’m walking almost sideways, still convinced everything is normal. (This is usually when husband corrals me and drags me to the doctor.)

What I mean here is that it’s easy for humans, individually or collectively, to get out of plumb and while thinking they are still completely normal tilt more and more until they’re doing something in a bizarre—or for society’s often monstrous—way, without realizing it.

Do you think that Germany woke up one morning and went “Hey, let’s kill six million people—men, women and innocent children—and use their body parts to make stuff? And treat them worse than we’d treat any animal?

No. Of course not. It started with what everyone knew and acknowledged as only sensible. They had just enough biological knowledge that eugenics seemed super-sensible. They’d also lost a war, were under financial pressure due to wretched leaders, but believed that “the best people should lead” and it was easier to turn on a minority in their midst than to confront their failures as a people, since part of their ideology (and still that of most of Europe) was that their nationality was a race, and superior to all others. (The only thing different between them and the rest of Europe is… well, nothing. Every European country considers itself the “master race” even if they don’t voice it most of the time. Turning on a minority, treating people as things, invading and plundering their neighbors: all of that was easier than confronting the bizarre and inherent contradictions in what “everybody knew.” But they didn’t decide it overnight. They did it a little bit at a time, to relieve psychological pressure, until they were full-on-monsters and still lying to themselves. Those people who said they had no clue what was happening down the street? Well, they weren’t precisely lying. Of course they knew, they could smell the smoke. But they couldn’t tell even themselves the truth.

Which brings me to the situation we’re in. There are now people who aren’t me (mostly because I didn’t say it, even when I thought it, except I think once at instapundit) saying that we need Nuremberg trials for the people—worldwide—who used a virus that they may or may not have cooperated in creating and unleashing as an excuse to make war on their own citizens.

Are they right? Have the crimes committed against the world reached that point? I don’t know. But I know the path we’re threading. And if they’ve not, they soon will.

These people have knowingly and with malice aforethought unlawfully imprisoned the citizens of their country; restricted them in the earning of a living and commandeered their private property and businesses through enforcement of mask laws which have no basis in science; closure of eating establishments, which ditto; closure and curtailment of the operation of stores. They have barred citizens of the use of parks, public buildings, and other community property financed from those citizens’ taxes. They have refused to allow their citizens the exercise of religion. They have forbidden the use of medicines which might or might not be effective, but seem to work in the rest of the world (and are not, at any rate, sufficiently harmful to be forbidden.) They have forced on a vast majority of the population an untried gene therapy and then at the same time hid the deleterious side effects while forcing people to take it to be allowed some measure of liberty.

They have done all this, not just with lack of proof, but in full contravention of proof that it does nothing. The highest vaccinated states have the same rates of hospitalization and death as the least vaccinated; the states that are ordering full masking and lockdown have the same effects as those that haven’t.

Perhaps less important—except to those affected—they have effectively banned international travel unless you take said untried gene therapy (Yes, I would like to see my father, thank you so much. No. I’m not going to mess with my wonky immune system for something that doesn’t protect anyone from illness and is insufficiently tried.) They have unnecessarily terrified anyone within reach of their mass media leading them to believe a “bad flu year” is the equivalent of the black plague. They have caused seniors in their final years to be deprived of contact with their family and friends, causing rapid cognitive decline and often death.

They have laid off health care workers and closed hospitals, denying critical treatment to those in dire need of it, and deeming everything that didn’t have to be done right then “elective.” Yes, this included cancer surgeries. No, this wasn’t while the hospitals were full. In fact most hospitals are more empty than they’ve ever been. Also least staffed. But fear not, they are importing Chinese doctors (And others, but a truly spectacular number of Chinese) by the plane full. As we know it is a culture that respects human rights and freedoms and would never use humans as experimental animals, so you have nothing to fear. (And I wish to make clear for idiots reading this, I have nothing against people of Chinese ancestry who have been raised as Americans and are doctors. I do have issues with our recent training of doctors, but they’re not worse than anyone else. On the other hand, people raised in the post-Mao and now Xi-poisoned culture of China have been poisoned by the same authoritarianism that has galloped through the west these last two years.)

Are these crimes worthy of Nuremberg trials? How many people have they killed and treated like penned animals?

We don’t have a count, and we’re never likely to, since, unlike the Nazis, they don’t keep accurate records. (Perhaps because they learned, perhaps because they are unable to find their own butthole with two hands and a seeing eye dog, being in fact 4th generation Marxists, which is to say idiots.)

But if treating all of your citizens as enemies, attempting to torture them, intending to destroy their economy, culture and long-accustomed ways and force them into an unnatural pattern of living and having—as has been stated often—the intention of reducing their numbers and their standard of living is not a crime comparable to those that led to the Nuremberg trials, then we owe the monsters there tried an apology. Because their errors were of the exact same quality and perhaps less ambitious in scope, since they didn’t make war and terror on the vast majority of the population of their country. (Well, they did, in a way, but that was not their aim.)

However that is not the level we must set; the conversation we must have.

It is important to realize why this keeps happening. By the numbers. In vast quantities. Over and over. If you want to go back far enough, I’d say since the French revolution. People in power imposing bizarre, insane rules on the rest of the population, and making people cosplay illusions and philosophical theories that have no basis in reality.

Just like the French revolutionaries forced everyone to give up the names of the normal days of the week, or attend temples to “reason” or other insanity, our would be lords and masters whimsically suggest double masking, or tell you to stay home, as if your car were contaminated, or make you give up Christmas and cancel fourth of July celebrations, because fireworks carry cooties, or–

All this: a small group turning a vast mass of people into experimental animals, whether social or biological; treating free citizens as widgets and things; demanding you conform to their internal psychodramas is rooted on one thing: the belief that a small number of people knows what’s best for society and can tell you how to live and what to do.

This has been particularly in evidence in the twentieth century, which is why it’s probably the largest graveyard of history. The experts knew what you should eat and what you should wear, what you should learn and what you should buy and how much you should pay for it. And always, even now, the experts knew which lives were worthy of life, and which… weren’t.

As long as that goes on, Nuremberg-like trials will be needed again and again and again, even if they aren’t in fact enacted. I still say we should have hanged Putin and all his ilk from their own rotten guts. Because it’s important for the monsters to die. And it’s important to know they were killed for crimes against humanity. We should have hunted down every petty Marxist, every bureaucrat, here and aboard, and tried them for their share of the 100 million dead at the hands of their ideology (and that’s those directly killed, not counting other casualties.) We should have rubbed their faces in the misery, death and deprivation their grandiose theories and their demand people enact them created. Yeah, some of them were merely idiots and not deserving of death. But they should have been tried, and made to feel their guilt.

We didn’t. And we didn’t—and this is very important—repudiate the poisonous and horrifying idea that a small number of people should have the power to enact vast, sweeping changes in the way the mass of people live their everyday lives.

Yes, there are times—rare—in which the common defense demands unified response. That was the lesson the Romans learned from Hannibal’s attack.

They are rare, they are limited in scope, and they should be restricted to those occasions in the Constitution (in America. Part of letting go of the poisonous idea of centralization is to say I neither know nor care how the foreigners choose to live their lives. I will have opinions, but so long as they leave us alone, it’s their bailiwick.)

All other powers should be exercised at the most regional level possible. And the rights, judgement and ability to choose how to live of the citizen shall not be infringed unless they are affecting someone else (and this would need proof. None of this “you wear a mask to protect me.”)

There might be a time a city block or a house needs to quarantine. Locking up an entire country is not quarantine. It’s false arrest and an act of totalitarianism. And it must be punished, but more importantly, all of them—every one, from the people who corrupted our legal institutions, to the journalists who propagandized fear and panic-porn—must be made to know what they did wrong and must make restitution. Let’s not make the same mistake we made with the fall of communism.

And let’s restructure. The Constitution was written by men who understood well the power and fear of epidemic disease, but they did not put a clause in there saying all our rights are suspended in case of a bad epidemic respiratory illness, nor did they create a post that allows some bureaucrat to play doctor to people he doesn’t know and whimsically dictate what they can and can’t do.

It’s time to get back to government by the people for the people, and to most rights devolving to states, municipalities and ultimately individuals.

Or we will need to hang monsters again and again and again. And millions will be sent to their graves in terror and abject horror again and again and again.

Centralized power kills. Efficiently or stupidly, but it kills.

Give no small group of humans the power kill millions. Start spreading the word. It’s time to level set. You know the tune:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
–The Declaration of Independence

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for January 28, 2022