by Manuel Miles

Note to anti-police-state/antiwar activists everywhere: the “new McCarthyism” is nothing new, as its name might even suggest.  It’s as Amerikan as apple flag and The Pie.  The USA has been a goose-stepping, imperial state since at least the early nineteenth century, and it’s not the first state of its kind in history either; not by a long shot.

Witch hunting, as its name also suggests, is not a new practice in the USA.  The Salem trials were the instrument of statist mass hysteria of their day.  History then hurls the Alien-Sedition Act at us, followed by the Trail of Tears, Lincoln’s mass imprisonment of dissenters and dissolution of the legal government of Maryland, the persecution of German-Americans in Part One of the World War and of the Japanese-Americans in Part Two, Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the left/right coalition against them dirty hippie peaceniks during the War Against Viet Nam, and numerous other rounds of totalitarian terror campaigns which I haven’t the time and space to even summarise because it’s the entire history of the USA.

So wake up and smell the decaf; this is no change of direction or sudden loss of imagined freedoms which the Imperial USA State never deigned to grant its serfs in the first place.  A slight lessening of the harassment of dissenters occurs when the Empire is not feeling either particularly rambunctious or particularly threatened, but as soon as it hits one of its expansionist peaks, the pretence and the gloves both come off.  Both wings of the Empire’s ruling oligarchy have dropped their masks recently, much to the apparent astonishment of Libertarians and peaceniks who should not have been surprised in the least. 

First, it was “discovered” with great cries of shock that liberals were suddenly become gung-ho warmongers, as if there were no historical record of Wilson, FDR and LBJ--all three of whom had campaigned as “peace candidates”!

Next came the “shocking revelation” that the so-called neo-cons were actually not opposed to massive expansion of government powers (even in the domestic arena of education where Bush, with the collaboration of a major Democratic Senator, is poised to sign the biggest, most expensive federal-interference-in-education bill in US history).  As for the absurd self-deluding hopes that the neo-cons would actually oppose imperial wars of expansion, the recent bloodthirsty, fascistic positions of the fifth columnist “libertarian/neo-con” Cato Institute and Free[sic]Republic have revealed any such pipe dreams to be just so much political opium smoke.

Now, all over the Internet, one can read of how shocked the naive among the antiwar forces are.  This doesn’t speak well for how well we have educated ourselves, especially in world and USA history.  I can only conclude that too many of the younger generation of Liberty-lovers have not read enough history and that, worse still, we older ones have not bothered to educate them.

Look for that to change.  We need a massive, ongoing “teach-in” for ourselves and the rest of society as well, and I am starting it.  Your first assignment, peaceniks, is to read MANY histories of Rome.  If you fail to see the parallels to the Amerikan Empire (and all others), then you should drop out of the school of Liberty; you belong with the fifth columnists at the Cato Institute for Imperial War and Expansion.

For those who want to read ahead, after you have done your research into ancient Rome, try reading actual USA history.  Surprisingly enough, there is some of it out there, buried among the gloss-overs and paeans to the glory of the Imperial State(s).  If you have any desire to be nostalgic for the wonderful American past of freedom and opportunity, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah, then you had better not poke your nose into the snake pit that is historical Amerika.

Consider this to be fair warning; more will follow. 

January 10, 2002