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January 14, 2005
Natural Disasters vs. Political Disasters
Joseph Sobran contrasts nature's tsunamis with government's tsunamis--and the contrast is not flattering to government, or to most people, who approve of their government's tsunamis. Here's a choice quote, but you really need to read the whole thing:
In its helplessness, the mind gropes for comparisons. Other natural disasters have claimed more lives. Less flatteringly to the human race, so have our wars, even in recent memory. It’s horrifying to reflect that we deliberately prepare to inflict on each other worse calamities than the one we are now deploring. And we do it in the name of “defense” and “freedom.”
Maybe that’s the only moral to be drawn from this awesome display of nature’s amoral power: that modern man — specifically, the modern state — has learned to surpass nature in destruction. So far the tsunami’s death toll hasn’t even reached that of the first atomic bomb in 1945.
Today we all live under a threat of death at the hands of other men who are as nearly beyond our control as nature is. Is it any comfort to say that we are protected from our rulers by “democracy”? Ultimately, and often as a practical matter, we are their slaves. We must obey them. We are at their mercy. Nuclear weapons are only one of many forms of their power over us, one it may be inconvenient for them to use against us. But it’s there, the final instrument and symbol of their authority.
(Thanks to LewRockwell.com for the link.)
Posted by Mike Tennant at January 14, 2005 09:49 AM
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