-Caveat Lector-
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sobran/sobran122.html
Meet Your Enemy
by Joseph Sobran
It has now been 59 years since the Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor, and the debate continues: Did Franklin Roosevelt know of
the attack in advance and deliberately refrain from informing the
American commanders in Hawaii?
The controversy has been renewed by Robert B. Stinnett's recent
book, Day of Deceit, which argues that Roosevelt did know and
did withhold the information for the purpose of allowing the United
States to be drawn into the war the great majority of Americans
passionately wanted to stay out of. The interesting thing is that
Stinnett thinks Roosevelt was justified in doing this, on grounds
that only the United States could prevent a German victory in the
war and had a duty to do so.
Critics retort that Stinnett hasn't fully proved his case. Roosevelt
did try to provoke the Germans and Japanese into some military
strike that would inflame American opinion and lead to war, they
agree, but he didn't necessarily know that Pearl Harbor would be
the site of the crucial incident. Besides, he couldn't have known
that Adolf Hitler would be foolish enough to declare war on the
United States a few days later, thereby giving Roosevelt license to
enter the war in Europe.
What nobody now disputes is that Roosevelt lied to the American
public for two years when he continually insisted that he was trying
to keep America out of the war. He was secretly scheming with
Winston Churchill for precisely the opposite purpose, and he told
his advisor Harry Hopkins that he could be impeached if the extent
of his illegal aid to the British were discovered. Roosevelt knew very
well what he was doing.
Apart from being diabolically treacherous, keeping the people in the
dark about the fateful decision to go to war is the antithesis of
everything democracy is supposed to be. Like most demagogues,
Roosevelt flattered the people and pandered to them while holding
them in profound contempt. Those who defend him are forced to
defend lies that are no longer deniable.
The alleged "lesson of Pearl Harbor" is that we must always
be ready for war. But the real lesson is broader: your own
government is your natural enemy. Those in power can't be trusted.
They will take your money, your freedom, and if necessary your life.
That's why we have constitutional safeguards, dividing power to
prevent the sort of one-man rule Roosevelt, like Hitler, Stalin, and
so many others, aspired to. One of the evils of monarchy, as
opposed to the republican form of government envisioned by the
Framers of the U.S. Constitution, was that a king could, by his own
arbitrary will, plunge his nation into war. Roosevelt saw the
Constitution purely as an obstacle to be surmounted.
But the wars of the old kings were minor skirmishes compared with
the total wars waged by modern rulers who don't call themselves
kings. Men like Stalin and Roosevelt didn't wear jeweled crowns
and ermine robes; they styled themselves "men of the people." But
they were far deadlier than any George III or Ivan the Terrible.
Over two centuries our rulers have learned to outflank, ignore, or
destroy many of the limits on their power. They pose a greater
threat to us than the foreign countries and "terrorists" they warn
us against and claim to protect us from. It's not a hypothetical
threat, either: by expanding the taxing power and debasing money,
they have made government a system of organized plunder.
The most successful terrorist organizations on earth are
government tax agencies, which are called revenue "services."
When the government gives things names, you should keep your
sense of irony handy. These "services" serve only the state; they
control the rest of us by force and fear.
There are many evil governments around the world, but they are
chiefly the enemies of their own subjects. By the same token, our
own enemies are not in Baghdad or Tehran or Peking, but in
Washington. That is where the immediate peril to our freedom
resides. Saddam Hussein may be a beast, but you aren't forced to
work for him five months of every year.
Fifty-nine years ago the real enemy of the American people was
not Hitler or Hirohito. It was the man they had elected to a third
term as their president.
December 23, 2000
--
We are just like second-century Rome and Greece. We are declining as a nation because
our leadership and our government now use
force to state their cases, and there are too few people who are willing to stand up
and challenge that, including the media.
Consequently, the very tenets of our liberty are going
to be taken away. --Rep. Tom Coburn
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