You may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.
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Author: Redactor
It’s an old tradition, and not just relegated to “the fringes”:
Jesse Walker’s book is now available. Here’s an excerpt. Here’s an interview for reading, and here’s another.
Walker works for Reason magazine, and you know what that means — Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie interviewed his comrade:
And here he is, reading from his new book, at Politics & Prose:
Secrecy in diplomacy and intelligence-gathering is supposed to protect the nation. But secrecy also protects bad policy . . . including great crimes that undermine our security.
This week, the National Security Archive released onto the Web the first official admission that agents of the United States government brought down — by assassination and violent coup — Iran’s democratically elected president, Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, 60 years ago:
The explicit reference to the CIA’s role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 . . . but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release.
The sunsetting of the secrecy provisions on the information finally provides sunlight, transparency, to this crucial moment in history.
Crucial, because it involved public American support for Masaddeq’s successor, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, “the Shah of Iran.” The Shah became quite brutal in his embrace of “modernism” and (this is hard to write with a straight face) “Western values,” including the suppression of religious dissidents. This led to the fundamentalist Muslim backlash, with Mid-East Muslims widely interpreting American intervention and support for the Shah as both imperialistic and anti-Islamic, setting up the current “clash of civilizations” . . . in which neither side ends up looking good.
It’s interesting to note that much of the secrecy about the event not only covered up American crimes, but British ones.
America’s foreign policy seems so un-American. In so many ways.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Rose Wilder Lane
I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.
— Rose Wilder Lane
Were Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, the mother-daughter team who crafted the popular Little House on the Prairie books, eager to distort pioneer life to advance an anti-FDR libertarian agenda?
So alleges author Christine Woodside in a tendentious article for the Boston Globe, citing “strategic commissions and omissions” deployed to produce a “testament to the possibilities of self-sufficiency rather than its limitations.”
No testament to the limitations, eh? Sounds nefarious.
One alleged omission pertains to the 1862 Homestead Act, without which the pioneers supposedly could not have pioneered. The books insidiously pay scant attention to this “federal largesse.”
First, what “largesse”? The Act merely permitted what people have a right to do anyway (setting aside cases of prior Indian settlement): make an un-owned piece of land one’s property by mixing one’s labor with it. Such land was certainly not owned by right by government. Second, Megan McArdle reports that contra Woodside’s claim that the Prairie books “barely mention” the relevance of the Homestead Act, “there are many lengthy passages explaining the Homestead Act, and how it works, including the granting of the land to the family by the government.”
Woodside is the type of writer who regards eloquent passion for liberty as “strident” (her adjective for Lane’s Discovery of Freedom), and the self-reliance involved in hardscrabble survival as part of an American “myth.” So many dubious assertions, so little time. Fortunately, McArdle has done much of the pioneering work in this area for us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Rose Wilder Lane
The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.
Maine’s small farmers had held out great hope for LD 1282, explained the Bangor Daily News a few months ago. The bill, if made law, would have allowed “unlicensed farmers whose facilities are not under inspection to sell up to 20 gallons of raw milk per day directly to consumers, so long as the product was clearly labeled.”
For small farmers, a traditional freedom, a niche in the system.
For big farmers it presented an unwelcome double standard, allowing something for the little guy that the big guy couldn’t match. And yes, the bill did suffer from this kind of inconsistency, but only because current regulations all stack against small farmers.
The bill passed, but last month the governor vetoed it . . . and the veto was not overridden. No legal raw milk in Maine.
For some in the state’s Republican Party, including national committee member Mark Wilson, that was just too much. “We want our God-given rights to buy, sell and consume what we want protected by the law — not restricted by FDA or USDA directives.” Citing lack of principle on the federal level, too, they resigned from the party, choosing to focus on helping their “fellow Mainers outside of party politics.”
The story hit the papers.
Can they accomplish more good outside the GOP? Probably. The state’s initiative and referendum process rated a C in Citizens in Charge’s 2010 report; most states rate an F. But there’s no point in even trying to rate partisan politics. It’s that bad.
And direct citizen action is certainly less frustrating. It’s hard when you must fight not only the opposition party, but your own team as well.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Henry David Thoreau
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Somewhere, recently, I saw the Lord Acton maxim about power (how it corrupts, and, if absolute, corrupts absolutely) referred to as a “cliché.”
Just because a phrase is common doesn’t mean it’s cheapened by repetition. Some expressed truths are that profound.
If anything, we need to repeat the Acton Axiom more often, and louder. For we live in a time when the federal government usurps power, denigrates, evades and undermines the rule of law, and appears “hell bent” (now that’s a cliché) on accumulating power in concentrated form . . . you know, like Sauron did with the ring of power in The Lord of the Rings. (Another possible cliché, eh?)
The NSA spying program story, as it unfolds, exemplifies the typical pattern:
- Information gets leaked.
- The government denies it.
- Further information comes out, establishing the lying nature of the denial and
- Adding more details of even more shocking nature.
- The government makes further denials . . .
And repeat ad nauseam.
Retired Lieutenant General James R. Clapper still serves the president as Director of National Intelligence, even after lying directly to Congress about the existence of NSA “metadata” collection system.
Meanwhile, the long arm of the secrecy establishment has retaliated against journalist Glenn Greenwald (who helped break Snowden’s first and subsequent leaks) by detaining the journalist’s partner without charge for the legal maximum of nine hours in Great Britain, upon coming home from a trip.
And the gentleman I reported on last week, who shut down his encrypted email service and erased his records rather than fork it all over to the government, says he has been repeatedly threatened with imprisonment.
Typical modus operandi of tyrant wannabes. Don’t worry about “cliché”; worry about tyranny.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Herbert Spencer
A life of constant external enmity generates a code in which aggression, conquest, revenge, are inculcated, while peaceful occupations are reprobated. Conversely a life of settled internal amity generates a code inculcating the virtues conducing to harmonious cooperation — justice, honesty, veracity, regard for other’s claims. And the implication is that if the life of internal amity continues unbroken from generation to generation, there must result not only the appropriate code, but the appropriate emotional nature — a moral sense adapted to the moral requirements. Men so conditioned will acquire to the degree needful for complete guidance, that innate conscience which the intuitive moralists erroneously suppose to be possessed by mankind at large. There needs but a continuance of absolute peace externally and a rigorous insistence on nonaggression internally to ensure the molding of men into a form naturally characterized by all the virtues