Politics and Medicine - On Resisting Evil - by Murray N. Rothbard the Original Anti-Neoconservative:

Author

On Resisting Evil - by Murray N. Rothbard the Original Anti-Neoconservative:

Kathleen

2006-05-07, 1:28 am

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard120.html

Murray Rothbard- the Original Anti-Neoconservative:

On Resisting Evil - by Murray N. Rothbard
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

FIGHT EVIL.

People who step up to the plate every day to fight against evil to
protect human rights and welfare, and the sanctity of life, are Satan's
worst enemies.

*BE* ONE.

Kathleen
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
First published in the September 1993 Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

How can anyone, finding himself surrounded by a rising tide of evil,
fail to do his utmost to fight against it? In our century, we have been
inundated by a flood of evil, in the form of collectivism, socialism,
egalitarianism, and nihilism. It has always been crystal clear to me
that we have a compelling moral obligation, for the sake of ourselves,
our loved ones, our posterity, our friends, our neighbors, and our
country, to do battle against that evil.

It has therefore always been a mystery to me how people who have seen
and identified this evil and have therefore entered the lists against
it, either gradually or suddenly abandon that fight. How can one see
the truth, understand one's compelling duty, and then, simply give up
and even go on to betray the cause and its comrades? And yet, in the
two movements and their variations that I have been associated with,
libertarian and conservative, this happens all the time.

Conservatism and libertarianism, after all, are "radical" movements,
that is, they are radically and strongly opposed to existing trends of
statism and immorality. How, then, can someone who has joined such a
movement, as an ideologue or activist or financial supporter, simply
give up the fight? Recently, I asked a perceptive friend of mine how
so-and-so could abandon the fight? He answered that "he's the sort of
person who wants a quiet life, who wants to sit in front of the TV, and
who doesn't want to hear about any trouble." But in that case, I said
in anguish, "why do these people become 'radicals' in the first place?
Why do they proudly call themselves 'conservatives' or 'libertarians'?"
Unfortunately, no answer was forthcoming.

Sometimes, people give up the fight because, they say, the cause is
hopeless. We've lost, they say. Defeat is inevitable. The great
economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942 that socialism is inevitable,
that capitalism is doomed not by its failures but by its very
successes, which had given rise to a group of envious and malevolent
intellectuals who would subvert and destroy capitalism from within. His
critics charged Schumpeter with counseling defeatism to the defenders
of capitalism. Schumpeter replied that if someone points out that a
rowboat is inevitably sinking, is that the same thing as saying: don't
do the best you can to bail out the boat?

In the same vein, assume for a minute that the fight against the
statist evil is a lost cause, why should that imply abandoning the
battle? In the first place, as gloomy as things may look, the
inevitable may be postponed a bit. Why isn't that worthwhile? Isn't it
better to lose in thirty years than to lose now? Second, at the very
worst, it's great fun to tweak and annoy and upset the enemy, to get
back at the monster. This in itself is worthwhile. One shouldn't think
of the process of fighting the enemy as dour gloom and misery. On the
contrary, it is highly inspiring and invigorating to take up arms
against a sea of troubles instead of meeting them in supine surrender,
and by opposing, perhaps to end them, and if not at least to give it a
good try, to get in one's licks.

And finally, what the heck, if you fight the enemy, you might win!
Think of the brave fighters against Communism in Poland and the Soviet
Union who never gave up, who fought on against seemingly impossible
odds, and then, bingo, one day Communism collapsed. Certainly the
chances of winning are a lot greater if you put up a fight than if you
simply give up.

In the conservative and libertarian movements there have been two major
forms of surrender, of abandonment of the cause. The most common and
most glaringly obvious form is one we are all too familiar with: the
sellout. The young libertarian or conservative arrives in Washington,
at some think-tank or in Congress or as an administrative aide, ready
and eager to do battle, to roll back the State in service to his
cherished radical cause. And then something happens: sometimes
gradually, sometimes with startling suddenness. You go to some cocktail
parties, you find that the Enemy seems very pleasant, you start getting
enmeshed in Beltway marginalia, and pretty soon you are placing the
highest importance on some trivial committee vote, or on some piddling
little tax cut or amendment, and eventually you are willing to abandon
the battle altogether for a cushy contract, or a plush government job.
And as this sellout process continues, you find that your major source
of irritation is not the statist enemy, but the troublemakers out in
the field who are always yapping about principle and even attacking you
for selling out the cause. And pretty soon you and The Enemy have an
indistinguishable face.

We are all too familiar with this sellout route and it is easy and
proper to become indignant at this moral treason to a cause that is
just, to the battle against evil, and to your own once cherished
comrades. But there is another form of abandonment that is not as
evident and is more insidious - and I don't mean simply loss of
energy or interest. In this form, which has been common in the
libertarian movement but is also prevalent in sectors of conservatism,
the militant decides that the cause is hopeless, and gives up by
deciding to abandon the corrupt and rotten world, and retreat in some
way to a pure and noble community of one's own. To Randians, it's
"Galt's Gulch," from Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. Other libertarians
keep seeking to form some underground community, to "capture" a small
town in the West, to go "underground" in the forest, or even to build a
new libertarian country on an island, in the hills, or whatever.
Conservatives have their own forms of retreatism. In each case, the
call arises to abandon the wicked world, and to form some tiny
alternative community in some backwoods retreat. Long ago, I labeled
this view, "retreatism." You could call this strategy "neo-Amish,"
except that the Amish are productive farmers, and these groups, I'm
afraid, never make it up to that stage.

The rationale for retreatism always comes couched in High Moral as well
as pseudo-psychological terms. These "purists," for example, claim that
they, in contrast to us benighted fighters, are "living liberty," that
they are emphasizing "the positive" instead of focusing on the
"negative," that they are "living liberty" and living a "pure
libertarian life," whereas we grubby souls are still living in the
corrupt and contaminated real world. For years, I have been replying to
these sets of retreatists that the real world, after all, is good; that
we libertarians may be anti-State, but that we are emphatically not
anti-society or opposed to the real world, however contaminated it
might be. We propose to continue to fight to save the values and the
principles and the people we hold dear, even though the battlefield may
get muddy. Also, I would cite the great libertarian Randolph Bourne,
who proclaimed that we are American patriots, not in the sense of
patriotic adherents to the State but to the country, the nation, to our
glorious traditions and culture that are under dire attack.

Our stance should be, in the famous words of Dos Passos, even though he
said them as a Marxist, "all right, we are two nations." "America" as
it exists today is two nations; one is their nation, the nation of the
corrupt enemy, of their Washington, D.C., their brainwashing public
school system, their bureaucracies, their media, and the other is our,
much larger, nation, the majority, the far nobler nation that
represents the older and the truer America. We are the nation that is
going to win, that is going to take America back, no matter how long it
takes. It is indeed a grave sin to abandon that nation and that America
short of victory.

But are we then emphasizing "the negative"? In a sense, yes, but what
else are we to stress when our values, our principles, our very being
are under attack from a relentless foe? But we have to realize, first,
that in the very course of accentuating the negative we are also
emphasizing the positive. Why do we fight against, yes even hate, the
evil? Only because we love the good, and our stress on the "negative"
is only the other side of the coin, the logical consequence, of our
devotion to the good, to the positive values and principles that we
cherish. There is no reason why we can't stress and spread our positive
values at the same time that we battle against their enemies. The two
actually go hand in hand.

Among conservatives and some libertarians, these retreats sometimes
took the form of holing up in the woods or in a cave, huddling amidst a
year's supply of canned peaches and guns and ammo, waiting resolutely
to guard the peaches and the cave from the nuclear explosion or from
the Communist army. They never came; and even the cans of peaches must
be deteriorating by now. The retreat was futile. But now, in 1993, the
opposite danger is looming: namely, retreatist groups face the awful
menace of being burned out and massacred by the intrepid forces of the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in their endless quest for
shotguns one millimeter shorter than some regulation decrees, or for
possible child abuse. Retreatism is beginning to loom as a quick road
to disaster.

Of course, in the last analysis, none of these retreats, generally
announced with great fanfare as the way to purity if not victory, have
amounted to a hill of beans; they are simply a rationale, a half-way
house, to total abandonment of the cause, and to disappearance from the
stage of history. The fascinating and crucial point to note is that
both of these routes - even though seemingly diametrically opposite,
end up inexorably at the same place. The sellout abandons the cause and
betrays his comrades, for money or status or power; the retreatist,
properly loathing the sellouts, concludes that the real world is impure
and retreats out of it; in both cases, whether in the name of
"pragmatism" or in the name of "purity," the cause, the fight against
evil in the real world, is abandoned. Clearly, there is a vast moral
difference in the two courses of action. The sellouter is morally evil;
the retreatist, in contrast, is, to put it kindly, terribly misguided.
The sellouts are not worth talking to; the retreatists must realize
that it is not betraying the cause, far from it, to fight against evil;
and not to abandon the real world.

The retreatist becomes indifferent to power and oppression, likes to
relax and say who cares about material oppression when the inner soul
is free. Well sure, it's good to have freedom of the inner soul. I know
the old bromides about how thought is free and how the prisoner is free
in his inner heart. But call me a low-life materialist if you wish, but
I believe, and I thought all libertarians and conservatives believed to
their core, that man deserves more than that, that we are not content
with the inner freedom of the prisoner in his cell, that we raise the
good old cry of "Liberty and Property," that we demand liberty in our
external, real world of space and dimension. I thought that that's what
the fight was all about.

Let's put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties,
our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never. Let us act in
the spirit of that magnificent hymn that James Russell Lowell set to a
lovely Welsh melody:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was the author of Man, Economy, and
State, Conceived in Liberty, What Has Government Done to Our Money, For
a New Liberty, The Case Against the Fed, and many other books and
articles. He was also the editor - with Lew Rockwell - of The
Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

Copyright =A9 1993 Ludwig von Mises Institute
All rights reserved.

Murray Rothbard Archives

Stuart

2006-05-07, 11:28 am

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stuart hyderman
stuart hyderman
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stuart hyderman

Kathleen <kmdickson0308@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1146970596.610255.133660@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard120.html

Murray Rothbard- the Original Anti-Neoconservative:

On Resisting Evil - by Murray N. Rothbard
======================

FIGHT EVIL.

People who step up to the plate every day to fight against evil to
protect human rights and welfare, and the sanctity of life, are Satan's
worst enemies.

*BE* ONE.

Kathleen
====================
First published in the September 1993 Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

How can anyone, finding himself surrounded by a rising tide of evil,
fail to do his utmost to fight against it? In our century, we have been
inundated by a flood of evil, in the form of collectivism, socialism,
egalitarianism, and nihilism. It has always been crystal clear to me
that we have a compelling moral obligation, for the sake of ourselves,
our loved ones, our posterity, our friends, our neighbors, and our
country, to do battle against that evil.

It has therefore always been a mystery to me how people who have seen
and identified this evil and have therefore entered the lists against
it, either gradually or suddenly abandon that fight. How can one see
the truth, understand one's compelling duty, and then, simply give up
and even go on to betray the cause and its comrades? And yet, in the
two movements and their variations that I have been associated with,
libertarian and conservative, this happens all the time.

Conservatism and libertarianism, after all, are "radical" movements,
that is, they are radically and strongly opposed to existing trends of
statism and immorality. How, then, can someone who has joined such a
movement, as an ideologue or activist or financial supporter, simply
give up the fight? Recently, I asked a perceptive friend of mine how
so-and-so could abandon the fight? He answered that "he's the sort of
person who wants a quiet life, who wants to sit in front of the TV, and
who doesn't want to hear about any trouble." But in that case, I said
in anguish, "why do these people become 'radicals' in the first place?
Why do they proudly call themselves 'conservatives' or 'libertarians'?"
Unfortunately, no answer was forthcoming.

Sometimes, people give up the fight because, they say, the cause is
hopeless. We've lost, they say. Defeat is inevitable. The great
economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942 that socialism is inevitable,
that capitalism is doomed not by its failures but by its very
successes, which had given rise to a group of envious and malevolent
intellectuals who would subvert and destroy capitalism from within. His
critics charged Schumpeter with counseling defeatism to the defenders
of capitalism. Schumpeter replied that if someone points out that a
rowboat is inevitably sinking, is that the same thing as saying: don't
do the best you can to bail out the boat?

In the same vein, assume for a minute that the fight against the
statist evil is a lost cause, why should that imply abandoning the
battle? In the first place, as gloomy as things may look, the
inevitable may be postponed a bit. Why isn't that worthwhile? Isn't it
better to lose in thirty years than to lose now? Second, at the very
worst, it's great fun to tweak and annoy and upset the enemy, to get
back at the monster. This in itself is worthwhile. One shouldn't think
of the process of fighting the enemy as dour gloom and misery. On the
contrary, it is highly inspiring and invigorating to take up arms
against a sea of troubles instead of meeting them in supine surrender,
and by opposing, perhaps to end them, and if not at least to give it a
good try, to get in one's licks.

And finally, what the heck, if you fight the enemy, you might win!
Think of the brave fighters against Communism in Poland and the Soviet
Union who never gave up, who fought on against seemingly impossible
odds, and then, bingo, one day Communism collapsed. Certainly the
chances of winning are a lot greater if you put up a fight than if you
simply give up.

In the conservative and libertarian movements there have been two major
forms of surrender, of abandonment of the cause. The most common and
most glaringly obvious form is one we are all too familiar with: the
sellout. The young libertarian or conservative arrives in Washington,
at some think-tank or in Congress or as an administrative aide, ready
and eager to do battle, to roll back the State in service to his
cherished radical cause. And then something happens: sometimes
gradually, sometimes with startling suddenness. You go to some cocktail
parties, you find that the Enemy seems very pleasant, you start getting
enmeshed in Beltway marginalia, and pretty soon you are placing the
highest importance on some trivial committee vote, or on some piddling
little tax cut or amendment, and eventually you are willing to abandon
the battle altogether for a cushy contract, or a plush government job.
And as this sellout process continues, you find that your major source
of irritation is not the statist enemy, but the troublemakers out in
the field who are always yapping about principle and even attacking you
for selling out the cause. And pretty soon you and The Enemy have an
indistinguishable face.

We are all too familiar with this sellout route and it is easy and
proper to become indignant at this moral treason to a cause that is
just, to the battle against evil, and to your own once cherished
comrades. But there is another form of abandonment that is not as
evident and is more insidious - and I don't mean simply loss of
energy or interest. In this form, which has been common in the
libertarian movement but is also prevalent in sectors of conservatism,
the militant decides that the cause is hopeless, and gives up by
deciding to abandon the corrupt and rotten world, and retreat in some
way to a pure and noble community of one's own. To Randians, it's
"Galt's Gulch," from Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. Other libertarians
keep seeking to form some underground community, to "capture" a small
town in the West, to go "underground" in the forest, or even to build a
new libertarian country on an island, in the hills, or whatever.
Conservatives have their own forms of retreatism. In each case, the
call arises to abandon the wicked world, and to form some tiny
alternative community in some backwoods retreat. Long ago, I labeled
this view, "retreatism." You could call this strategy "neo-Amish,"
except that the Amish are productive farmers, and these groups, I'm
afraid, never make it up to that stage.

The rationale for retreatism always comes couched in High Moral as well
as pseudo-psychological terms. These "purists," for example, claim that
they, in contrast to us benighted fighters, are "living liberty," that
they are emphasizing "the positive" instead of focusing on the
"negative," that they are "living liberty" and living a "pure
libertarian life," whereas we grubby souls are still living in the
corrupt and contaminated real world. For years, I have been replying to
these sets of retreatists that the real world, after all, is good; that
we libertarians may be anti-State, but that we are emphatically not
anti-society or opposed to the real world, however contaminated it
might be. We propose to continue to fight to save the values and the
principles and the people we hold dear, even though the battlefield may
get muddy. Also, I would cite the great libertarian Randolph Bourne,
who proclaimed that we are American patriots, not in the sense of
patriotic adherents to the State but to the country, the nation, to our
glorious traditions and culture that are under dire attack.

Our stance should be, in the famous words of Dos Passos, even though he
said them as a Marxist, "all right, we are two nations." "America" as
it exists today is two nations; one is their nation, the nation of the
corrupt enemy, of their Washington, D.C., their brainwashing public
school system, their bureaucracies, their media, and the other is our,
much larger, nation, the majority, the far nobler nation that
represents the older and the truer America. We are the nation that is
going to win, that is going to take America back, no matter how long it
takes. It is indeed a grave sin to abandon that nation and that America
short of victory.

But are we then emphasizing "the negative"? In a sense, yes, but what
else are we to stress when our values, our principles, our very being
are under attack from a relentless foe? But we have to realize, first,
that in the very course of accentuating the negative we are also
emphasizing the positive. Why do we fight against, yes even hate, the
evil? Only because we love the good, and our stress on the "negative"
is only the other side of the coin, the logical consequence, of our
devotion to the good, to the positive values and principles that we
cherish. There is no reason why we can't stress and spread our positive
values at the same time that we battle against their enemies. The two
actually go hand in hand.

Among conservatives and some libertarians, these retreats sometimes
took the form of holing up in the woods or in a cave, huddling amidst a
year's supply of canned peaches and guns and ammo, waiting resolutely
to guard the peaches and the cave from the nuclear explosion or from
the Communist army. They never came; and even the cans of peaches must
be deteriorating by now. The retreat was futile. But now, in 1993, the
opposite danger is looming: namely, retreatist groups face the awful
menace of being burned out and massacred by the intrepid forces of the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in their endless quest for
shotguns one millimeter shorter than some regulation decrees, or for
possible child abuse. Retreatism is beginning to loom as a quick road
to disaster.

Of course, in the last analysis, none of these retreats, generally
announced with great fanfare as the way to purity if not victory, have
amounted to a hill of beans; they are simply a rationale, a half-way
house, to total abandonment of the cause, and to disappearance from the
stage of history. The fascinating and crucial point to note is that
both of these routes - even though seemingly diametrically opposite,
end up inexorably at the same place. The sellout abandons the cause and
betrays his comrades, for money or status or power; the retreatist,
properly loathing the sellouts, concludes that the real world is impure
and retreats out of it; in both cases, whether in the name of
"pragmatism" or in the name of "purity," the cause, the fight against
evil in the real world, is abandoned. Clearly, there is a vast moral
difference in the two courses of action. The sellouter is morally evil;
the retreatist, in contrast, is, to put it kindly, terribly misguided.
The sellouts are not worth talking to; the retreatists must realize
that it is not betraying the cause, far from it, to fight against evil;
and not to abandon the real world.

The retreatist becomes indifferent to power and oppression, likes to
relax and say who cares about material oppression when the inner soul
is free. Well sure, it's good to have freedom of the inner soul. I know
the old bromides about how thought is free and how the prisoner is free
in his inner heart. But call me a low-life materialist if you wish, but
I believe, and I thought all libertarians and conservatives believed to
their core, that man deserves more than that, that we are not content
with the inner freedom of the prisoner in his cell, that we raise the
good old cry of "Liberty and Property," that we demand liberty in our
external, real world of space and dimension. I thought that that's what
the fight was all about.

Let's put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties,
our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never. Let us act in
the spirit of that magnificent hymn that James Russell Lowell set to a
lovely Welsh melody:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was the author of Man, Economy, and
State, Conceived in Liberty, What Has Government Done to Our Money, For
a New Liberty, The Case Against the Fed, and many other books and
articles. He was also the editor - with Lew Rockwell - of The
Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

Copyright © 1993 Ludwig von Mises Institute
All rights reserved.

Murray Rothbard Archives