| | As I said and reiterate, it is uncertain whether Mr. Buker is actually under any FBI surveyance. I could believe this is just a prank and a mistake; I can also believe such surveyance exists and that campus ROTC is one of the venues of this surveyance.
But Linz wrote:
All I can say is - if the FBI regard SOLO as subversive and radical and worth worrying about (which I doubt), I'm reassured and gratified! In the unlikely event that they're reading this, I say to them: gentlemen, I hope you're also sufficiently astute to realise that SOLO is, in a very profound sense, on your side, dedicated as it is to the uniquely American values of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." For that very reason, no SOLOist poses a threat to anyone's life, liberty or property. In that sense, we are *not* worth worrying about, and you can safely focus your attention elsewhere. With all due respect, and rather charmed by your reassurance and gratification above, with regards to the alignment of the FBI...
Linz, what planet are you on?
'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' may or may not be American values, but they are only applied to 'good citizens', and real or alleged subversives certainly fall outside of such organizations. In the recent past, the state has infiltrated the anti-war left (during the Vietnam war era), the hard patriot right (during the 1990s), and the anti-Globalist left (during the late 1990s and early 2000s). We (Americans) are at war now, in a fiercely culturally divided climate, under an administration that has shown no respect for the civil liberties- as witnessed by the PATRIOT act, Guantanamo Bay, and its policies in occupied Iraq, not to mention uttering public statements such as 'be careful what you say.' In our current environment, (most) libertarians and (most) progressives constitute those opposed to the state's agenda, and that includes at least some libertarians on this site. It is true that the state is probably fuzzy on the difference between Objectivists and non-Objectivist libertarians, but that's not the point. These times are precisely the kind of times in which the state, to give a charitable assessment of its intentions, believe it has to burn the 'American way' to save it. We are at war. Study history and beware what states will do in wartime.
I was on the progressive protest circuit for a year or two during the time of the worldwide antiglobalist protests (though I did not participate in those particular protests as I am a free-trader, though not in love with global corporate mercantilism either). Anyway, the state on all levels had no hesitation whatsoever of harassing completely peaceful protesters. I knew people who were arrested in cordoned off blocks for walking down the street peacefully, people who were sprayed with tear gas for opening car windows to police officers, and one friend- a very intelligent English/history/polisci triple major -and a libertarian- who was jailed and taunted in jail with being 'offered' to the hard core prisoners in the adjoining cell block (I expect this was just to scare him, but it shows the authorities' mentality). The police also regularly abused fire codes and zoning provisions to try to lock out or temporarily arrest protesters to disrupt their gatherings prior to protests.
I also read articles, which fit perfectly with my experience, where the state infiltrated progressive organizations for the purposes of recoding the names of all involved. In the particular case I read in most detail, I will allow myself to be amused. The people who turned out to be police agents sounded kind of fake to the progressive organizers, so the agents got volunteered to build the protest puppets. Well, the main thing the leftists commented on afterwords was how impressed they were at the hard work at carpentry the infiltrating agents were doing. The attitude was something like "wow, man, we've never seen such hard work... maybe we should try it!" (no, not all progressives are like this... but it is amusing).
Quite seriously, my point is that state infiltration does happen. And let us remember that leftists and lazybutts dsereve the same protections of individual rights and any others.
Furthermore, are libertarians here truly, fully conscious of the scope of the drug war? America now imprisons more persons proportionally than any other country on the planet, and the majority of the these people are nonviolent drug offenders. Objectivists should take this seriously. Yes, I know Objectivists believe in the right to use drugs, but most of them have an irrational moral hesitation if not outright condemnation for illegal drug use they do not employ towards the consumers of, say, alcohol. There have been articles on this site recently extolling the value of wine, yet many on the social left treat marijuana and ecstasy precisely the same way, and I personally have known at least one person who used crystal meth is a rational, purposeful, and civilized manner... specifically, the person was a professor of business ethics enjoying a private celebration; he had been invited to give a month of lectures in Ireland.
I say this because many Objectivist easily denounce drug users as 'those people' and do not seriously stop to think of the millions of people being persecuted in their midst. But millions are in people are in jail and have hurt no one. In this country, and with the support of the majority of the American populace who views drug users as 'those people' and believes that their subversion of the values they wish to instill in their children justifies the suspension of individual rights.
This is also America. This is real. I could site other examples, including some jaw-dropping cases of hypocrisy. But the point is the America Objectivists believe in is not applied to social dissidents. Anyone here who has been GLBT in the wrong era or in the wrong part of the country knows what I am talking about... in the neighboring city to which I lived for most of the last six years, the favorite sport of the local police department was cruising certain areas of town, picking of men and entrapping them into public statements of intent to commit acts of sodomy... this stopped and stopped only because of liberal "judicial imperialism" from the bench of the Supreme Court.
The same double standard of treatment applies to anyone outside of mainstream America. At various times, this means drug users, progressives, homosexuals, youth culture, sexual radicals, and the ethnic group of suspicion of the moment. I am amazed to the degree that 'good citizens' go through every day, not realizing that if they were dressed a bit differently, they might suddenly find themselves scared to stop on the street because they had lost the directions to a party to which they were going and were trying to remember the address. Yet I know some wild friends who have been harassed by police officers for this very crime.
The American Way is not simply life, liberty, and property. That is one American way, I grant, but it is not the American way believed in by our dominant political or cultural institutions. The essence of that America is a Calvinist 'American Dream' whereby respectable, middle class people busily engaged in suburbanity-chasing are a social core of good citizenship which mist be protected from cultural erosion, both by protection of their rights and the denial of the rights of others who, if able to safely get a public forum, would disrupt these prized cultural institutions. Once the line is drawn that one is socially 'other', American society can be very intolerant. Now that the country is on a war footing, in a war explicitly in defense of an 'American Civilization', those who doubt a war fought largely on cultural grounds might well have the same standards applied to them. It has happened before. I find it completely plausable- though hardly certain- that this time libertarians could fall until the rubric of suspicion.
Frankly, if libertarians, whose ranks include many classes of people the government- and most of America- considers social cockroaches, find it difficult to believe that the state would harrass and intimidate cultural dissidents, then I fear libertarians share too much with Republicans who also partially derive their good attitude towards America from its peculiar treatment of 'respectable' citizens and think nothing of the fact that large groups of peaceful Americans are treated in the same mental category as predatory criminals. In Republicans case, they smugly support it.
And honestly, I find it kind of silly to be a radical who would never think of getting into trouble with the law. Percy Bysshe Shelley, to my knowledge, infringed no statutes, and lived in a very free country for his times, yet he had no trouble thinking of the powers that be as essentially enemies. Where is that spirit of rebellion among today's Objectivists? Do you truly think the lust for control among the social, political, and moral establishment truly ended circa 1789? Do you truly believe that the gendarmes and police-spies act very differently now than the police who harassed labor unionists, anarchists, or Vietnam War protesters in the past?
Howard Roark, Francisco d'Anconia, and Ragnar Danneskjold would all fall under the anti-terrorist provisions of our current laws.
When will Objectivism stop trusting Monseuir Inspector Javert?
Bob Dylan:
Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
And the country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.
....
In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ was
Betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.
This too is 'America'.
Dominique Venice
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