A Monthly Newsletter

Do you ever get the feeling that the rest of the world is crazy and that you are one of the few sane people in it? I suppose that psychologists would consider such a feeling a sign of deep neurosis — except of course if you happened, empirically, to be correct. And reading the daily press is enough to induce such a feeling in even the sanest amongst us. In particular the stream of pronouncements emanating from the Nixon Administration. Every President, every Administration, has lied, lied grossly and systematically, to the public; but surely none before Nixon has elevated the Lie, big and small, to the constant and the universal. There used to be the charge against Hitler that he used the technique of the Big Lie; yet Nixon lies continually and habitually, on virtually every issue, and the horrendous problem that arises is: how can he get away with it? Why don't the American people laugh him off every public forum?

Take for example the unemployment statistics. Every month a new statistic emerges, and the Nixonian experts anxiously examine its entrails for signs and omens. Always, and invariably, and whatever happens, the omens are pronounced to be superb. Thus, in one month, the unemployment falls by one-tenth of one per cent. So small as to be meaningless, right? Wrong, for Nixon's crew will pronounce this to be the beginning of recovery from our recession. And then, the next month, the unemployment rate rises again by one tenth of one per cent. What does the Nixon team do? Do they admit that by their own logic things are looking gloomy? Do they at least have the good taste to keep their mouths shut? Not on your tintype. For there they are again, saying: Yes, this is a very good thing, for it shows that "unemployment is bottoming out."

Better is good; worse is good; whatever happens is terrific. On this Orwellian logic rests the rock of our Republic. There is first the Nixonian expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, each time proclaiming that, of course you ninny, this is how you "wind down" the war; any dolt knows that the way to phase out a war is to expand it. In Orwell's world, the Ministry of War has become the Ministry of Peace, and so in the world of Tricky Dick. And the Laos invasion: we were going to nip into Laos, "cut the Ho Cho [Chi] Minh trail" — as if this "trail" were some sort of superhighway which we tear up (It is, in fact, an enormous, thirty-fifty mile wide network of jungle trails) — capture the base of Schepone, and maybe even stay there permanently to keep the trail "cut". So then we get bogged down, and the military genius of Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dienbienphu — turns the American-Saigon invasion into another Dienbienphu, a veritable disaster, in which the cream of the Saigon puppet troops get chopped up, from which the remainder barely escaped with their lives, and in which we lost many hundreds of helicopters. And our reaction? It was a great victory, we did just as we meant to do, we never, er, never meant to capture Schepone, or even to cut the trail — but by George we delayed their "timetable"! And since no one is privy to this mystic timetable, or even whether it exists at all, any thing can be said about it without fear of contradiction. So it doesn't matter whether we win, lose, or whatnot — whatever happens, it was a glorious victory. How can we put up for another minute with this systemic fabrication and falsehood?

Or take Mr. Nixon solemnly proclaiming that all his life he has been "a deeply committed pacifist"! How can he say this, how can he dare, this mass murderer, this supporter of all of America's wars and chief murderer of the current war? Whether one is a pacifist or not, this is surely a new height of affront.

Or Nixon's gall in coming out against abortion because he is deeply committed to the "sanctity of human life". Again from a mass murderer, a man who can order the systematic bombing of thousands upon thousands of innocent peasant women and babies, this killer and bomber and napalmer has the unmitigated gall to pout because women are ejecting fetusus [fetuses] from their bodies! For shame!

And then Nixon, the self-proclaimed champion of law and order, rushes in to interfere with the judicial process because of his "compassion" for the convicted little mass murderer Calley. Mr. Nixon was indignant enough about the mass murderer Manson to interfere against him in the judicial process. But Calley killed far more people than Manson, and yet here Nixon intervenes in the murderer's favor.

Here it must be conceded that large numbers of Americans participated too in the mass outpouring of "compassion" for this convicted butcher. Orwell lives here again, for this was

Beauty is Youth, Youth Beauty . . . From Harriet Van Horne's column (New York Post, April 16): "When we tune in a Late Late Show and see young players named Ingrid Bergman, Henry Fonda, Joan Bennett and such we feel we are looking upon a lost super-race. They had shining hair and fine bones and the whites of their eyes were always clear. Their diction was crisp, they moved through terrible plots with innocent goodwill. They stood straight and they laughed beautifully. By comparison, today's young people look messy, dull and terribly uninteresting."

by John P. McCarthy

Although virtually unnoticed until quite recently, the Northern Irish Government's record of maltreatment of its Catholic minority is now obvious to any well-informed person, particularly to anyone of libertarian sentiments. At the same time many libertarians might be unaware of the situation in the rest of Ireland. There things are much more pleasant, especially in the matters of minority treatment and social harmony, although certain criticisms are in order. Possibly the following analysis by a non-libertarian, or at least a non-anarchist who has, however, certain libertarian instincts, might be of interest.

Back in the ideologically uncomplicated days of the late 1950's and early 1960's Robert Welch was able to give mathematical percentages indicating the degree to which nations were under the "operational control" of International Communism. One of the nations, along with the Union of South Africa, Portugal, Spain, South Korea, and Nationalist China, that he found all but completely free from Communist influence was the Republic of Ireland. Admittedly, the dozen or so members of the Irish Communist Party of that time did not swing much political clout, and in that sense Welch's ratings can be considered legitimate. However, one cannot avoid the suspicion that Welch rated Ireland, which was put in most inappropriate company, by a most second-hand evaluation that drew very little from actual knowledge of the conditions in the nation. Probably Welch gave Ireland a good rating for the simple reason that his enemies — the "Comsymps" and the "Globaliberals" — disliked Ireland. But their views were as unfounded, and were based not so much on the situation in Ireland as on both Establishment Liberalism's inherent Anglophilism and the decided anti-Establishmentarianism of pre-Kennedy Irish-America with its reputation of isolationism, McCarthyism, and pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

In point of fact, the Irish socio-political situation, then and now, does not fit the simplistic black and white categories of either the Birchers or the Liberals. For instance, the Irish were among the pioneers in the revolutionary nationalist tactic of guerilla [guerrilla] warfare, yet the Republic of Ireland almost uniquely has permitted the old ascendant class — the Anglo-Irish Protestants — to maintain their predominant status in the economic and social structure of the nation, as well as preserve an inordinate degree of political influence. Furthermore, while the Irish Government has had a record of imposing certain moral regulations on the population, such as literary censorship (greatly relaxed of late) and prohibition of the sale of contraceptives, it has scarecely [scarcely] penalized or inhibited Protestants as such from the free exercise or propagation of their religious beliefs. (One might argue that Protestants are more desirous of the prohibited literature and the contraceptives, yet the prohibitions apply to everyone and are not specifically designed to discomfort Protestants.)

The Irish Government did not join the Soviet Union, the Republic of China, Great Britain, and the United States in the democratic anti-Axis crusade of the 1940's. Yet her record as a functioning, multi-party, proportionally-represented, functioning parliamentary democracy has few rivals in the twentieth century, and she is rather dissimilar to the authoritarian regimes that had similar strongly non-Communist ratings in the Birch score card. Her neutrality has been consistent throughout the Second World War and the Cold War, as she envisions herself — only recently a European colony — as having a special relationship with the recently independent Afro-Asian nations. Indeed, Ireland even takes the United Nations seriously — so seriously that her representatives, to the disappointment of most Irishmen, have hesitated to mount the U. N. soap-box over the Northern issue even though most members use the General Assembly for such purposes. The record of Conor Cruise O'Brien, the scholar, academician, and former Irish diplomat (probably most famous for his Congo adventurism, but more deserving of fame for permanently deflating Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a television debate concerning the C.I.A.), was not really a departure from an Irish diplomatic tradition that places primary emphasis on questions like the inviolability of neutral and small nation rights against big power pressure. Irish compassion for Biafra is a more recent manifestation of this tradition.

Cruise O'Brien has now become the most celebrated member of the Irish Labour Party, a group that was red-baited by the governing Fianna Fail Party in the last general election because of its espousal of an "alien" ideology — socialism. Paradoxically, one of the seventeen Labour representatives in the 144 seat Dail (the Irish National Assembly) in addition to Cruise O'Brien is Stephen Coughlan, the former Mayor of Limerick, whose political views and manner are somewhere between those of Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy. Actually, very few in Ireland find anything wrong with socialism, and public corporations occupy a greater role in the economy there than in almost any nation this side of the Iron Curtain. It is only the name, which suggests atheism and materialism, that offends. But even that is changing, as in the last few years the Catholic Church in Ireland has become taken up with an interest in socialism. Church-sponsored seminars have started to emphasize the compatibility of Christianity and Marxism.

Irish students, emerging from a period of political indifference and careermindedness, like students everywhere have been taken up with the charm of socialism. As might be expected they identify the Irish state-capitalism with capitalism, and when pressed for an example of socialism suggest various voluntary cooperatives like that organized by Father James McDyer at Glencolumbkille, Co. Donegal, where local peasants, combining their capital with donations from exiles in America, have had relative success in setting up a weaving factory and a vegetable processing plant. But many of the leaders of these highly decentralized cooperative movements, like Father Patrick Campbell, who is connected with the Achill, Co. Mayo cooperative, prefer to avoid association with the state and, possibly unconsciously, are much closer to the free economy ideal than the state-capitalism condemned by the students.

There have been two major phases in the state-capitalist record of the Irish Government (which has been controlled by the Fianna Fail Party since 1932, with the brief exceptions of 1948-1951 and 1954-1957). The first phase was the attempt between 1932 and 1959 to implement the revolutionary ideal of national economic self-sufficiency with the usual weapons of protective tariffs, subsidized industries, and state corporations. Much of this, of course, grew out of Prime Minister (the Taioseach [Taoiseach]) Eamon DeValera's aim to complete the severance of any ties with Great Britain. DeValera's opposition, the Old Free State Party (now known as the Fine Gael Party) that he had ousted from power, naturally was hostile to this unrealistic effort of Ireland to end her economic relationship with England. Appropriately, larger Irish businesses with international outlets sympathized with that party. However, aside from this historic opposition to the economic self-sufficiency dreams, Fine Gael is scarcely opposed to state-capitalism on general principle.

The second phase of Fianna Fail's state-capitalist policy began in 1959 when DeValera moved upstairs to the honorific Presidency of Ireland, being succeeded as Taoiseach by

By Robert LeFevre

John Chamberlain, appearing in the New Haven (Connecticut) Register, recently unsheathed his pen and took a stab at the growing libertarian movement. He chose as his bete noir Karl Hess, of Goldwater fame and misfortune. According to Chamberlain, Hess may be a general of a libertarian cause, but this general lacks an army. In the course of putting down the libertarian movement he linked Hess with "his brother-in-merry-anarchism" Murray Rothbard and then stated: "Here and there a shy libertarian bloom pokes its head above the snows. But it is a delusion to think that an army is following Karl Hess."

Now I am among those who did not approve of Karl's boisterous insistence that the way to attain freedom is to "man the barricades" in the streets and to use any type of violence necessary to destroy political office holders. As a matter of fact, at USC a year ago, when Karl had made just such an appeal, I followed him to the platform and in large measure "turned off" the libertarians present. Since then, so far as I am able to learn, Karl has moved toward the position of Progressive Labor or even the Trotskyite camp, and apparently has disclaimed the libertarian position. If Karl is calling himself an anarchist, it is certainly not the anarchism of Murray Rothbard, who proclaims unceasingly the validity of private property and a market without intervention.

But the real purpose of Chamberlain was not to attack Karl Hess. Rather, it was to link the libertarian movement to Hess, who may be a falling star, and by this process to sweep the deck clean of any riff-raff who don't buy the Conservative position of "I hate and fear Russia"; "I hate and fear China"; "I hate and fear Cuba"; etc., ad nauseam.

Now, it is no wonder that John Chamberlain has not been able to sniff many new libertarian blooms lately. He hasn't been in the garden where they grow. So I want to encourage John to go out of his office so he can learn just what is happening. Apparently he is hoping for a resurgence of a love of liberty on campus. At least it is possible to glean this bit of grain from the bushel of chaff that accompanied his article. The steam behind the "New Left," so called, may very well be subsiding.

After all, the sop thrown to many campus lefties by the Nixon administration by legalizing the ballot for eighteen-year-olds may very well have brought a substantial number of New Left people into the arms of the Establishment. But you don't look for libertarians among those who slavishly manipulate the ballots and hope the monster will spew a few crumbs from its table. You'll find libertarians among the rapidly growing number of campus people who don't want to play political darts and in consequence aren't going to vote at all.

Now in THIS area, if John cares to look, he may find the beginning of an army. It wears many cloaks and it marshals under a number of banners. And it isn't following Hess or anyone else to the barricades. It is insisting on reason and logic and a revolution of the mind that impels individual rejection of the coercion of government per se.

A recent dispatch from Berkeley (Doug Shuit, "Expert Switches, Sees Harm in Pot," New York Post, Mar. 29) reports that the distinguished psychiatrist Dr. D. Harvey Powelson, director of the Student Psychiatric Clinic at Berkeley, has changed his mind about the "harmlessness" of marijuana. His previous Polyanna [Pollyanna] view, he reports, was based on a limited sampling of students; but now, after observing 500 students in the last five years, Dr. Powelson has changed his mind.

What Powelson reports is what most of us, observing kids on drugs, have also seen with our own eyes: for example, that pot has a "cumulative effect, and that prolonged use . . . could result in chronic changes similar to those seen in organic brain diseases — islands of lucidity intermixed with areas of loss of function." Furthermore, use of marijuana often results in a "disorder of thinking characterized by a general lack of coherence and an exacerbation of pathological thinking processes." Regular pot-users often become "will-less — anomic", "to do anything requires a gigantic effort". As to the contention of the drug-enthusiasts that marijuana "heightens perception", Powelson retorts: "It affects you in the same way any kind of delirium does. It focuses your attention. But it's pathological in a sense because it results in cutting out all the peripheral things a person looks at. When an ordinary person looks at something, he sees everything, all the peripheral things. But when you're in a delirium and you see, for example, a shadow, you have a heightened sense of the shadow because all your attention is focused on the shadow and you see nothing else."

Powelson adds that one reason that drug users claim that there are no harmful effects from pot "is that often a person high on marijuana cannot determine the changes that occur in his thinking. One of the first things that's impaired is your judgement of your own system."

No doubt out [our] drug-enthusiasts can come up with some psychiatric swinger or other to deny this point. But this overlooks a vital point. And that is the curious and brusque dismissal of the judgement of the overwhelming majority of the medical profession. The usual rebuttal by our drug fans is that the doctors are engaged in some sort of Calvinistic conspiracy against enjoyment, as embodied in pot and other psychedelic drugs. Now I am the first one to concede that there are many political conspiracies around, and that there are monopolistic collusions in the medical profession. But what earthly reason would there be for such a "conspiracy"? What would doctors have to gain? And as for Calvinism, we have not been living in a Calvinist culture for a long, long time. The entire emphasis of our culture is hedonic, sensate, pleasure-loving. To postulate some sort of mass Calvinistic throwback among conspiring physicians is too grotesque to warrant the slightest consideration.

And moreover: suppose we concede for a moment that all the returns are not yet in, that there are two points of view, that there is a great need for further study in this area. So what? Surely the sensible and rational person, confronted with a new, powerful, and unstudied drug which a large body of physicians claim is harmful, surely such a person will abstain from this needless danger until all the returns are in? What is the masochism that leads our youth to rush pell-mell into the grave risk of destruction of their mind and consciousness? From whatever angle we look at the problem, once again the instincts of Middle America are right, and the anti-culture is tragically wrong.

The glorious triumph over the SST was not only an important victory for liberty over the Leviathan State and the military-industrial complex; it was also an instructive lesson for libertarians on who our natural political allies may be in the present historical period. Who favored this billion-dollar boondoggle? The Nixon Administration, the war-mongers, the Conservative Movement, the entire uneconomic and submarginal aircraft industry, Big Unionism — tied in with that industry: in short, the entire Establishment force of the Unholy Triad: Big Business - Big Government - Big Unionism, working together in that unholy "partnership" that characterizes the current American political system. Who opposed the SST? First and foremost, every single economist, regardless of political persuasion, left, right, and center; and then, Left-liberals of the anti-war and anti-militarist movement; Old Right conservatives opposed to the waste of taxpayers' money; and libertarians.

One of the most amusing and enlightening aspects of this new-found unity among economists: from Friedman to Heller and Galbraith, was the Congressional testimony of the high panjandrum of Orthodox Keynesian economics, Professor Paul Samuelson. Samuelson declared that we must stop the orgy of "pyramid-building" in which we have engaged for many years. This was an "in-joke" reference to one of the most famous remarks of Samuelson's Master, Lord Keynes, to the effect that the building of pyramids is just as economically sound as any more productive expenditure, for both will increase that revered figure, the Gross National Product, by the same extent. In fact, pyramid-building is better! Samuelson's repudiation of pyramid-building, his justifiable concern for what is being done with our productive resources, signals The End of Keynes. For the Liberals have had their Keynesian Economics rule us for over thirty years; and now they are beginning to realize that what they have reaped is vast governmental waste in behalf of the GNP, the growth of a State Leviathan, and the proliferation of endless imperial wars. Yearning for pyramids, the Liberals have reaped missiles and napalm and H-bombs and germ warfare. And they don't like the results.

If we analyze the vote in the Senate, we find that the leading Conservatives voted en masse for this statist boondoggle: Brock, Buckley, Curtis, Dole, Fannin, Goldwater (ponder that, ex-Goldwaterite libertarians!), Gurney, Hruska, Thurmond, Tower, et al. They were joined by the war-liberals among the Democrats: Inouye, Jackson, McGee, Symington. But the interesting — and crucially significant — votes were those cast against the SST by a minority of conservatives: Bentsen, Byrd (Va.), Chiles, Ervin, Gambrell, Griffin, Hansen, Jordan (Id.), Miller, Prouty, Roth. (And for nostalgic Old Rightists, there was the glorious spectacle of veteran isolationist-libertarian H. R. Gross (R., Io.), that veteran guardian of the taxpayer, voting against as well.) We have it on good authority that at least two of the Senate conservative votes were shifted by the testimony before the Senate Appropriations committee of the intrepid libertarian, James Davidson of the National Taxpayers Union. And so the libertarian movement, for the first time, exercises its political muscle — not through violence or hysteria but through the use of reason and persuasion. And if we remember that a shift of three votes in the Senate would have put the SST over, we can see the importance of the libertarian "intervention" into the political scene. Onward and upward!

The fall and winter season will be a surging, glorious time for the publication of important new libertarian books from major publishers. Watch this space for developments as they occur.

One of the most important books — and one which will get major publicity — is by our own Jerome Tuccille. Stein and Day will be publishing a book by Jerry on the current right-wing and libertarian movements, and it is shaping up as a veritable blockbuster. Present plans are for the book to be a "non-fiction novelized non-fiction, the closest parallel being the witty and insightful novels of the French writer, Roger Peyrefitte. There will be a fictional hero, a Yossarian-Everyman, in search of the truth, who goes from one right-wing movement to another, and finally from one branch of the libertarian movement to another; in each group the Everyman encounters real people with real names, and they engage in fictionalized dialogue in which they present their real views, and Jerry's hero responds with the author's real reactions.

And it's going to be a blockbuster: witty, hilarious, iconoclastic, as St. Jerome rides out to slay the Dragons of Deviationism, to expose the crazies, to prick the balloons of posturing pomposity, to employ the sword-pen of satire on behalf of reason and common sense. And so: deviationists of all stripes, beware! Humorless fanatics, en garde! Jerry is out to get you! And you will probably find yourself, named and revealed, in the pages of his sparkling book. And the title — oh boy, the title — the title, my friends, is calculated to send three-quarters of the libertarian movement into an instant conniption fit. The title is: IT USUALLY STARTS WITH AYN RAND. And so libertarians, gird your loins; brace yourselves for the Tuccille blitz.

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Also this fall, Jerry Tuccille's Radical Libertarianism, so far the only book on our movement, is coming out in paperback. The hard-cover edition, which came out early last year, encountered two misfortunes: the fact that the book predated by a year the sudden publicity storm for the libertarian movement, and the early death of the book's brilliant young editor, a man highly sympathetic to the cause. But now the major publishing house of Harper and Row will be putting out the book in paper this fall, and so we can expect a major publicity push for this book as well — as well as the tapping of the vital mass paperback market.

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Coming also in the fall season is a new libertarian book by Harry Browne, author of the current runaway best seller by Arlington House, How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation ($5.95). (The book has sold a phenomenal 90,000 copies to date, largely on the strength of personal radio and TV appearances by the author.) The new book, tentatively titled How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, will be published by Macmillian, and will get top publicity — (it will have to, to recoup the amazing advance paid by the publisher.) Judging from Harry's general position, the book will probably stress how the individual (either Harry or the reader) can escape the crippling hand of the State in his own life.

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Also, Harper and Row is scheduled or rumored to be producing other paperbacks of interest in the fall: a collection of essays by David Friedman, and a reader on capitalism edited by Professor Dorothy James, which will consist of original articles from all ends of the spectrum, left and right, critical of the existing status quo. Especially featured will be libertarian authors, since Professor James (and we hope she's right!) expects libertarianism to be the wave of the future on college campuses. Included in the James collection will be essays by Rod Manis, Tibor Machan, and Murray N. Rothbard.

Considering the traditional apathy and ignorance of most libertarians in foreign affairs, I don't suppose that many have taken a stand on what the press misleadingly terms a "civil war" in East Pakistan. In fact, the situation there is scarcely a "civil war"; it is a mass movement by the people of East Pakistan — the Bengalis — to rid themselves, once and for all, of the tyranny and despotism of the Punjabi-run central government of the West.

One of the major problems blocking most libertarians from supporting national independence movements is their pettifogging semantic hangup on the phrase "national self-determination", a concept, by the way, that loomed large in that very nineteenth-century liberalism to which libertarians consider themselves the heir. "National self-determination", most libertarians patiently explain, is an erroneous concept, an equivocation on the world "self"; since the self can only be each individual, libertarians should only support "individual self-determination" rather than national. But this analysis, while philosophically correct, misses the whole essential point: the point that these national movements are primarily concerned with getting other imperial states and nations off their backs. "National self-determination" is only a harmless metaphor for a movement against imperial dictation. The point, for example, about the nascent but growing Scottish National movement is that it is concerned with ending the domination of Scotland by English imperialism, a domination which is cultural, economic, and throughout political.

The same is true for the crisis in Pakistan. For Pakistan is in no sense a genuine nation, but a geographical abortion, created by the British as they were forced to leave the Indian subcontinent shortly after World War II. The Bengalis of the East have nothing whatsoever in common, except for their religion, with the Punjabis of the West; culturally, linguistically, ethnically and by every other criteria, they are separate nations. Furthermore, the political structure of Pakistan establishes a despotism by the Punjabis over the numerically superior, and far more productive, Bengalis. The Bengalis are the merchants and the traders of India; and a large chunk of their productive earnings are taxed away by the central Punjabi government to build up a vast Punjabi-staffed army and central bureaucracy, as well as to subsidize the Punjabi large-landlord class. The Punjab government has always been a thinly-veiled military dictatorship; and it was the decision of that government to suspend Parliament in the wake of its loss in the recent Pakistani elections that touched off the current crisis. It was that suspension that finally convinced the long-suffering Bengalis that there was no hope for them to attain autonomy within the Pakistan framework, and that decided them for national Bengali independence.

The fighting in Bengal is not a civil war, but a counter-revolutionary struggle by a Punjabi army to crush the independence forces, in other words the people of Bengal. Hence the use by that army of familiar genocidal tactics, for it realizes that the entire population of Bengal is its "enemy." Hence its systematic massacre of civilians, hence its imposition of curfew and censorship, and its expulsion of all foreign correspondents from the country. The similarity with the American use of mass terrorism in Southeast Asia should be striking and expectable, for in Southeast Asia we, too, are trying to impose an external rule on an entire population, all of which therefore becomes "the enemy", to be slaughtered wherever found. Genocidal slaughter is the logical conclusion of imperial war.

Another instructive point: the Great Powers, including the United States and Communist China, are all supporting the Pakistan government, since they all have deals with that government and they all value "stability" everywhere. Which shows where Great Powers, whoever they may be, will stand when it comes to justice and statism.

HTML formatting and proofreading by Joel Schlosberg.