George Orwell explained in his novel 1984 that a rational society must include “the right to say that two plus two equals four.” In The Crown Versus Joseph Pierce, 1987, the British court ruled to send a man to prison under the Hate Laws by declaring that “The truth is no defence.”
This phrase, “The truth is no defense,” has a long and disreputale history. In 1796, due to the support of George Washington, John Adams became the last president elected on the Federalist Party ticket by a hair’s breadth, beating Jefferson by three electoral votes.
In 1798, the Federalist Party won its last national victory. Due to the XYZ Affair, it carried a huge majority of both Houses of Congress. It passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1799, which largely outlawed criticism of government policy. It saw the first amendment as gun controllers see the second amendment today, as something that wasn’t really there.
After 1798 Jefferson did his critiquing anonymously. Publishers and editors went to prison in droves. One of their major demands was to get rid of the British-derived doctrine that, when it came to the King and His policies, “The truth is no defense.”
In 1800, the Federalist Party was defeated at every level. It began its steady slide into nonexistence. The PEOPLE, not the courts, got rid of that whorish doctrine, “The truth is no defense” in America.
Now we accept the idea that the truth is no defense in fact, if not in words. I lived with that for decades as scholar after scholar was ruined for telling the truth about innate racial differences. When he was fired, the screaming New York Jews and those who learned from them cowed the Masturbation Generation by screaming, “Six Million Jews!!!!”
We won, now that even the New York Times says that, “the hereditarian view of racial differences is far more acceptable today than it was” (previously). But the cost was staggering and the heroes forgotten.
And the LESSON is forgotten.
In the 1960s I listened quizzically as libertarians went into great detail about how Ayn Rand or LeFevre or some other Libertarian Truth had justified freedom in a tome. I thought how EUROPEAN this was. Screamers had crushed the old American idea that I have freedom because I will do what I damned well please.
The AMERICAN version of freedom is Grandma sitting on the front porch with a shotgun waiting for the government to run over her house to build a road. The AMERICAN version of freedom of speech is not a tome and a Wordist doctrine justifying freedom, but “two plus two equals four.”
Like everything in life, freedom is not a doctrine, it is a matter of sense. I will do anything I damned well please. If you say my money should go to “something worthwhile” instead of what, IN YOUR OPINION, is a “trivial” thing, I don’t give a damn, no matter how loud you shriek.
So the Objectivists tried to shout ME down at the University of Virginia for my racism. It didn’t work, by a long shot. So they stopped speaking to me. Since all they would have had to say to me was already in a book, that was no sacrifice.
I keep begging you to drop all that Wordism. ALWAYS INSERT “IN YOUR OPINION” when the shriekers shriek. We don’t need a Russian Jewess, bless her heart, to tell us THAT. Ayn Rand was just the only one who had to guts to shriek down the New York shriekers in the age of the Masturbation Generation.
When they shriek “racism” no one dares ask, “What, IN YOUR OPINION, IS Racism?” No respectable conservative EVER presses that question, or even ASKS it.
The anti-racists (anti-whites) were shouting, and for the obedience-trained Masturbation Generation, that was enough. They learned In World War II that the highest honor was to obey a sergeant who screamed in your face. Their children learned from them, and their libertarian children needed a BOOK to deal with the shouters.
Once it takes a BOOK to justify freedom, it doesn’t EXIST any more.
#1 by Prometheus on 07/14/2007 - 10:13 pm
I had always wondered why Jesus never said anything which people COULDN’T have known. Back then, people would have already known the golden rule, it needed no explanation.
Dealing with the incessant shriekers, those foul liberals of exaggerated indignance, again, requires nothing we don’t already know.
Every kingergarten student will be able to tell you that if you can’t do what you want, then you aren’t free.
Our education is based on giving us books, books and scriptures to make us forget what we knew, to cloud our judgement. To make us think we CANNOT know, and we MUST turn to the established authorities for facts, for meaning, for definitions. That was my experience. Race doesn’t exist because WE SAY SO. The difference between sexes doesn’t exist because WE SAY SO. What YOU observe is wrong. What you THINK is wrong. It is WRONG because you are NOT one of the established.
You are not supposed to use your values. We have the books and you dont. Your judgement, your opinion, was of no value if you didn’t have the books and the authority.
This is why I’ve hearn hundreds of philosophers babble about ‘freedom’ and never make a point. This is why I’ve heard gun control nuts talk about how we need gun control to be free. It’s all based on words and NOT you and I, and no one ever questions it.
I went to a philosophy event where six philosophers argued about the philosophy of happiness and what it means to be happy, and how to achieve it.
Kindergarteners don’t need 6 professors to tell them what would make them happy. This puts them head and shoulders above everyone who went to that lecture expecting some form of answer.
#2 by mderpelding on 07/14/2007 - 10:14 pm
Marxists, Libertarians, Objectivists, and other such philosophers have soft hands.
Courtesans all.
#3 by Dave on 07/14/2007 - 10:32 pm
How could our overly domesticated population of Americans possibly know that the “six million Jews” shrieking that began in the spring of 1945 was part of a “war atrocity claims game” that is as old as war itself, truth, as always and forever, “being the first causality of war”.
And how could they also possibility know that there is never and beginning and ending to war and its trajectory, the trajectory changing manifestation in forward linear time, but nevertheless one continuous trajectory from the horizon of the forgotten past to the horizon of what is impossible to ignore in the here and now.
Accordingly, WWII did not end in 1945 and continues today. It all continues, in the endless trepidations of the State of Israel, in a castrated Germany, in the generations of refugees infesting Dehli, Moscow, Cairo, Khartoum, Berlin, London, New York, cities ringed and inundated with populations of countless millions still floating in the same of old tide forcible evictions, economic desperation, and nationlessness.
Who in America really understand the continuous nature of these trajectories to see through today’s manifestations to the whole cloth of one conflict tumbling into another, the residue of the past’s reality ever present in the here and now?
And Americans crippled by one, and only one, atrocity claim? Not knowing that there have ten thousand of these in history, no less compelling in scope and ghastliness? These going back to antiquity into every age that has ever been, these claims being an integral part of war?
Americans are not and have never been up to this. They simply have not and do not have the street smarts or the “leather”.
But that will change as the current generation of weaklings and schmucks in their wholesale dereliction brought the whole cloth of the larger world and its tragic history to America with their fabulous and millennial doctrines of multi-racial and multi-ethnic harmony, doctrines only the weak, corrupt, sheltered, and pampered could possibly entertain.
They are now destined to learn the true meaning of their doctrines in radiant pain and suffering, and fated to be as steeply learned these matters as such “old world” peoples as the Sikhs in their eviction from their Indus Valley homeland, and the Serbs in their eviction from Kosovo, and the Tibetans in the Chinese usurpation of their homeland. I could go on with endless examples.
How is it possible that American people could be so utterly stupid as to let this happen? But happen it has. I see it every day in an America that is no longer American, and won’t be tomorrow and never will be again.
America is now immersed in the whole of the world and what it has always been in all of its tragic and horrible suffering, an endless trajectory of racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts.
Accordingly, the time for dumb, soft, sheltered, pampered, and no street smarts Americans is over.
#4 by Hardric on 07/15/2007 - 9:08 am
The issue with freedom is similar to the issue with money. Give too much of it to the wrong people and the results can be disastrous. Give too much of both to the wrong people and the results can disastrous beyond belief.
To see this in practice, look around you at America today.