by L. Neil Smith
Robert LeFevre (1911-1986) was a philosopher, lecturer, and uncompromising advocate of individual liberty. He also used the English language more precisely than anyone I’ve ever known. You can read about his life and works in Wikipedia, but take what you see there with a block of salt: Bob was a spell-binding teacher, implacable enemy of the United Nations, and not likely to receive accurate and objective treatment by that particular online source. Carl Watner’s amazing biography of Bob is a far better resource. Bob was one of two truly great men that I have known in my life, the other being JPFO founder Aaron Zelman.
I already considered myself a libertarian — of the Randian variety — when I first met Bob in 1972, at a seminar he delivered in Wichita, Kansas, sponsored by the Love Box Company and the local 7-up bottlers. I spent five magical 8-hour days in a motel basement meeting room, with about forty other people, listening to Bob’s moral, historical, and economic observations. Nearly half a century later, I can still remember large swatches of them, virtually verbatim. Bob reminded me of Frank Morgan in _The Wizard of Oz_. I didn’t agree with everything the Wzard of Libz said and thought (most notably, Bob was a Ghandian pacifist, while anyone who knows me or my work will tell you that, I, decidedly am not.)
But it was Bob’s unique view of history that won me over and changed my life. There are only three ways, he said, for human beings to organize themselves: (A), one guy tells everybody what to do; (B), everybody tells everybody else what to do; and (C) nobody tells anybody what to do. The last, he insisted, is the very definition of libertarianism.
Inevitably, Bob was an advocate of (C), and so was I, once he had rid me of the cob-webs in my head and the myth of “limited government”, which, he pointed out, somehow never manages to _stay_ limited. Option (A), he suggested, was the way that the world had turned for ten thousand years or longer.
(B) is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of sociopolitical arrangements. It encompasses various forms of collectivism, including socialism, fascism, and the most dangerous of all, democracy, under which you are encouraged to believe that you’re free, but your neighbors can vote to control your life and impoverish you any time they want. As Robert A, Heinlein (a friend of Bob’s) put it, “‘_Vox populi, vox dei_’ usually means ‘How the hell did we get into this mess?'”
The violent transition to (B) in 1776 accomplished two important things. It may yet prove to be a pathway to real liberty (no, I’m not holding my breath). In terms of what I’ve written here, it also pissed off all the right people. It schmussed humble pie in the face of the insane King George III and the rest of his inbred, slithery, pampered ilk. And when British General Corwallis surrendered his sword to George Washington, the band (where the hell did that come from?) played a little ditty called “The World Turned Upside-down.”
Most of history since then, according to Bob, has been a series of attempts — the War Between the States, public schooling,World War I, the Federal Reserve banks and the income tax, World War II, the United Nations, communism’s rise in Europe and Asia, the overpopulation and Global Warming hoaxes, the Silicon Valley commisars, the socioeconomic war on the Productive Class — by the pre-Revolutionary elites (who all seem to be related to each other) to regain the power they once wielded over the rest of the human race.
Aside from what I’ve written in _The Libertarian Enterprise_ about the political significance of gun ownership, if you want to see who’s really on what side, take a look at the war on cattle and red meat. For centuries, the aristocrat class have hunted, and they have dined lavishly on animal protein, while trying to forbid the peasantry — us deplorables — the same rights and forcing them to subsist on boiled turnips. There s a good reason for this: _meat is mind_. If you remembver nothing else of what I’ve said here, remember that: meat is mind. It contains certain components that let you build a strong and efficient nervous system (look up myelin), creating uppity peons, the last thing any right-minded upper cruster wants.
For decades, these creepy, perverted parasites have been sneaking up on us, falsely calling themselves “Progressives”, hoping to reverse the American Revolution and everything it has meant to humanity. Since socialism was invented in the early 19th century by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, they’ve made more and more of what they regard as “progress”. By the beginning of the 21st century, they thought their victory was inevitable — until it was rudely snatched out of their blood-soaked hands by those uppity meat-eating peasants, eventually led by Donald J. Trump. The patricians and their surrogates are the swamp Trump wants to drain.
Which is why the man now finds himself being “impeached” by the mad Red Queen (“Off with his head!”) and her vile, belly-crawling minions. Nancy Pelosi is the leader of defenders of black chattel slavery and the progenitors of the Ku Klux Klan. Trump threatens their long-sought recovery of power, threatens to take even more power away from them, and has turned all of their fantasies of a socialist Utopia to dust. No wonder they mindlessly detest him.
I, for one, am not going back to the 18th century, and there are tens of millions of Americans like me, who do not want to live under the thumb of some latter-day ragtag king, no matter what he’s called. We could be headed for another Lexington and Concord, and when the forces of state slavery fail again, we should adopt, as our secondary anthem — and as a warning — “The World Turned Upside-down”.
Award-winning writer L. Neil Smith is Publisher and Senior Columnist of L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise and author of over thirty books. Look him up on Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com. He is available at professional rates, to write for your organization, event, or publication, fiercely defending your rights, as he has done since the mid-60s. His writings (and e-mail address) may be found at L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise, at JPFO.org or at https://www.patreon.com/lneilsmithHis many books and those of other pro-gun libertarians may be found (and ordered) at L. Neil Smith’s THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE “Free Radical Book Store” The preceding essay was originally prepared for and appeared in L. Neil Smith’s THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE. If you like what you’ve seen and want to see more, he says, ”Don’t applaud, throw money.“
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal
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