where are we

Another masterpiece from Claire Wolfe. Click on the link below to read it with all the supporting footnotes.

Illegitimate
Sunday, July 14th, 2013

I’ve been struggling several days to find the right way to say something. Still haven’t gotten there.

It would help to be drunk or stoned, I think. Words flow more freely then; connections connect more connectedly. But I’m as sober as a judge I usually am, which is a handicap.

Partly, it’s that the thing I’m aiming to say is both huge and … nothing. Both burning with enormity and outrage … and a great big ho-hum. It would shock the bejabbers out of Joe Average (if Joe Average were willing to consider it), but most people reading this blog would probably say, “Why are you even bothering to bring that up? Old news. Get over it.”

—–

This thing I don’t have the right words to express is that there is no legitimate U.S. government — merely a clever puppet show of one. There is no federal government to which anyone, anywhere owes the slightest allegiance. The country is run by its “security” apparatus. (Yes, and its federalized banking cartel and its unelected bureaucrats and all the Usual Suspects, but it’s the power of the secret “services” that’s (relatively) new and most alarming.)

You see? My good old fellow free-market anarchists, denizens of intellectual Ancapitstan already know this. You can go on as fervently as I about unanimous consent and Lysander Spooner. It is OLD freakin’ news that Those Who Would Govern Us have no legitimate authority as long as one peaceable individual denies consent.

That is, it’s old news to us out here on the fringe, the readers, the ponderers, the Outlaws, the rebels, the individualists.

Joe and Josie? Obviously, millions of Mr. and Ms. Averages have been edging for years toward the realization that something’s terribly, terribly wrong. But to whatever extent they articulate it, it’s usually in terms of bigness or unaccountability. The federal government is “too big” (which of course it is). Bureaucrats are “unaccountable” (also a no-brainer). Big government is run by and for “big money” (yup). The Averages are even beginning to grasp that their old beliefs that “electing the right people” and “reforming the system” are chimeras.

But what comes after?

What if you could sit Aunt Lyda and Uncle William and all the other members of the Average family down and point out to them that a government that’s ridden with enormous secret agencies operating under secret law interpreted by secret courts is not, cannot be, and will never be, a democracy or a republic or whatever form you’ve been taught all these years to salute?

This government is a foreign thing. And all those people you think you’re electing merely dance at the end of its strings. And it will never be “reformed” or “held accountable” because by its very nature it is totalitarian. It exists to rule you, period. And as long as your money and your belief feed it, rule you it will.

—–

I don’t know if it’s true that John Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA. I don’t know if it’s true that Barack Obama lives in terror of assassination at the hands of U.S. “security” services.

But it makes sense. We know that the CIA never really was an “intelligence” agency. From its inception it was about assassinations and coups; its “intelligence” was usually faulty and always politically motivated. We know that, even before the monstrous growth of secret “security” agencies following WWII, at least one unelected, unaccountable agency held presidents, congressthings, and senators in its thrall.

But of course the FBI and even the CIA are now old hat. Amateur hour. We’ve got “security” agencies we surely don’t even know about. And we’ve got ones whose existence has been reluctantly and gradually revealed doing things whose scope we can’t even guess at. And we know that we are the real target of it all. We, that is, as in We the People. And we know the process of being governed increasingly works against us.

—–

Bigness and unaccountability are bad enough. We should know. We’ve lived with them and our parents and grandparents lived with them clear back to the days of Roosevelt II or Wilson (at least).

But being governed by secret and hyper-secretive “security” agencies is a whole ‘nother thing. A whole different level of tyranny and peril.

And it’s this that Joe and Josie and Aunt Lyda and Uncle William don’t get yet. They’re still happy to believe that the NSA’s omni-scooping and the unnamed activities of yet-undiscovered “security” agencies are all for our protection.

They don’t yet know that they are the targets. They don’t yet know that, when you have this level of secret control, you no longer have even a serious pretense of government “by the people.” You have the forms — empty. You have a substance that’s something altogether else, and altogether terrifying.

—–

Writing about Edward Snowden the other day, Justin Raimondo noted that in in the old Soviet Union, people so despaired of ever learning any actual truth from those in power that they eventually resorted to a form of mental shorthand; they assumed that the truth was simply the opposite of whatever the government claimed.

If the government labeled a man a traitor, a wrecker, a saboteur, then it followed that the man must actually be a hero.