Hello All,
This passage from Butler Shaffer's piece speaks to the reality that is ALL
Government.
An excellent piece sir!
Vic
"It is at this point that memories from one's high-school civics class are
stirred, and the question gets asked: why can't truthfulness prevail in
politics? Why do lies, deceit, and cover-ups have to dominate political
systems? Why can't the system save itself so much difficulty and embarrassment
by being forthright in every thing that it does?
The question answers itself: because all politics is grounded in lies and
distortions of reality. We have been conditioned to believe that governments
are necessary to protect our lives, property, and liberties, and yet it is our
lives, property, and liberties that are under constant attack by the state from
its very beginnings. The state confiscates our property through taxation and
eminent domain; restricts our liberties through Byzantine networks of
regulations; and kills us through the wars that aggrandize its powers. Every
government is a racket that allows those with access to its coercive powers to
foster their interests at the expense of others. The state is able to
accomplish these purposes only through a pyramid of the most absurd lies taught
us in government schools and reinforced through the operant conditioning of the
media."
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Scapegoating on a 'Scooter'
by Butler Shaffer
by Butler Shaffer
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
~ Mark Twain
It is always amusing to observe members of the political
establishment - or any other unholy alliance of scoundrels - scurrying for
cover like roaches when a light is suddenly shone upon them. For many months,
the Internet, foreign news sources, and a handful of American journalists, have
provided sufficient evidence of material wrongdoing in the Bush administration
to force the political establishment into a damage-control mode. In an effort
to prevent the ship-of-state from sinking, its owners began throwing overboard
the least-valued freight. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was the first over the side.
Libby's indictment on charges of perjury, making false statements,
and obstruction of justice has given a false sense of hope that the Bush
administration's lies, duplicity, corruption, and crimes against humanity, are
about to get a more formal public airing. The idea that the established order
has any interest in ferreting out the deeper truths of Washington criminality
fails to understand the nature of politics. No more wrongs are to be
acknowledged by state authorities than are necessary to maintain or restore
public confidence in the system.
Just as an ant colony will, when endangered, rescue and protect its
reproductive center, the queen, so too does the political establishment insist
upon protecting the image and machinery of the state as its primary concern.
Anything that diminishes respect for the state apparatus or its purposes
weakens the popular sanction upon which all political power ultimately rests.
Defenders of statism will undertake any action and against as many
people as necessary to safeguard the basic structure of the state. Even the
figureheads atop the totem pole may be sacrificed if need be. The Nixons,
Clintons, and Bushes are all fungible, each capable of replacing one another.
This is a principal reason that elections always come down to a choice between
standardized, indistinguishable candidates; and why, no matter who you vote
for, the political establishment always gets elected. This is also why you have
heard so little objection from the Democrats to the Bush administration's
depraved policies and moral transgressions: they don't want to do or say
anything that would denigrate the system they hope to control one day.
The Washington poker game has begun, and the state system has anted
with "Scooter" Libby, in hopes that public criticism of this administration
will be satisfied with a low-stakes game. But disapproval of governmental
practices may insist upon deeper inquiries: perhaps into authorship of the
Niger yellowcake forgeries; or into the events preceding 9/11; or into the
identity or purposes that were insistent upon war with Iraq. Such questions may
raise the stakes far beyond the charges now faced by Mr. Libby, arising from
the relatively innocuous offense of Valerie Plame's outing.
The media has made numerous allusions to Nixon's Watergate fiasco,
reminding the public of the alleged offense known as a "cover-up." But what
gets politicians and government officials into trouble is not the covering up
of their misdeeds, but their failure to do so. It is the failure to hide or
disguise official wrongdoing that brings the state into disrepute by allowing
evidence of political dishonesty to become public knowledge, thus weakening
popular sentiments about the allegedly noble, public-serving purposes of
political systems. The sanctity of the state apparatus itself must be
protected. The threat of "cover-up" is, for government functionaries, akin to
the warnings airline passengers encounter about making jokes regarding bombs.
It is at this point that memories from one's high-school civics
class are stirred, and the question gets asked: why can't truthfulness prevail
in politics? Why do lies, deceit, and cover-ups have to dominate political
systems? Why can't the system save itself so much difficulty and embarrassment
by being forthright in every thing that it does?
The question answers itself: because all politics is grounded in
lies and distortions of reality. We have been conditioned to believe that
governments are necessary to protect our lives, property, and liberties, and
yet it is our lives, property, and liberties that are under constant attack by
the state from its very beginnings. The state confiscates our property through
taxation and eminent domain; restricts our liberties through Byzantine networks
of regulations; and kills us through the wars that aggrandize its powers. Every
government is a racket that allows those with access to its coercive powers to
foster their interests at the expense of others. The state is able to
accomplish these purposes only through a pyramid of the most absurd lies taught
us in government schools and reinforced through the operant conditioning of the
media.
Truthfulness in politics would destroy the system! This is why so
many members of the war party label as "treasonous" the acts of telling the
truth about the war in Iraq.
The state's war against truth has been assisted by various means:
classifying embarrassing information as "top secret" and redacting much of what
is made public; holding "closed sessions" of Congress; secret courts whose
decisions are kept secret; and outright censorship are among the better-known
tactics. The occasional honest government employee who might be tempted to
publicize political transgressions (i.e., the "whistleblower") can often be
dissuaded by threats of reassignment from Washington, D.C., to field offices in
Williston, North Dakota, or Winnemucca, Nevada.
But when all of these efforts to filter truth out of the minds of
people fail, and the egregious wrongs of the state become common knowledge, you
can be assured that one or more people will be offered up as a sacrificial
scapegoat to atone for the sins of the system. It is an act of purification
known to our earliest ancestors who would sacrifice a child to appease angry
gods.
This is not to suggest that the person offered as a scapegoat is
necessarily innocent of wrongdoing. In this age of empirical evidence and due
process, it would be a terrible blunder for the state to try to make scapegoats
out of innocent men and women. This is why using the Iraqi people as scapegoats
for 9/11 has proven so offensive to decent people everywhere.
Even the post-World War II "Nuremberg trials" served the cathartic
purpose of cleansing the German state for having committed horrible crimes
against human beings. The German officials who were convicted were hardly
innocent of the systematic butchery in which they participated on behalf of a
government that was, itself, using Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other
minority groups as scapegoats for the post-World War I plight of Germany.
Underlying the rage for justice that energized these trials was the
same political motivation at work beneath the surface of modern war-crimes
trials: the need to protect the sacred image of the state. The political system
will not long survive if the state is seen as being capable of the wholesale
dehumanization, torture, and butchery that ended in the deaths of 200,000,000
people in the century just ended. Far better - from the state's perspective -
that such atrocities be explained away as the acts of depraved madmen.
And so, the scapegoating has begun. Mr. Libby may well be proven to
be guilty of the charges against him but, like the charges leveled against Bill
Clinton in his impeachment, they are de minimis in contrast with the greater
wrongs practiced by the current administration. If - like lies about dress
stains - Americans are satisfied that "Scooter's" alleged perjuries go to the
heart of the iniquities of the present regime, the state will recover
relatively unscathed from all of this. As H.L. Mencken so aptly expressed it:
"No one in this world, so far as I know . . . has ever lost money by
underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
But perhaps hope can be drawn from even this narrow a bill of
particulars. If perjury - knowingly false statements made under oath - is to
become a sufficient offense with which to charge even presidents, it may serve
the public interest to require politicians and government officials to make all
of their public pronouncements under oath. Any statement made without the
taking of such an oath would be presumed to be a lie. Those who knowingly made
false statements under oath (e.g., about weapons of mass destruction,
yellowcake purchases, or purposes for going to war) would be charged with
perjury and face prison time under the same mandatory sentencing guidelines
that now send teenagers to prison for smoking marijuana. If it's good enough
for "Scooter" it ought to be good enough for his bosses!
November 2, 2005
Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern
University School of Law.
Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com
Butler Shaffer Archives
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