From a piece by Anthony Gregory called “Real World Politics and Radical Libertarianism on Lew Rockwell.

” In short, the problem was the principled abolitionists and other radicals were too few in number, and what existed throughout the 19th century was a confused political dynamic in which no major faction appeared to favor liberty above all. The Antebellum Democrats were great on trade but not so good on war and slavery. The Hamiltonians were cautious of some wars but bad on everything else. This continues to this day, when we have one party that speaks of economic freedom (but doesn’t come through) and another that speaks of personal choice but neither that embraces the full program and philosophy of freedom.

“The reason America is not as free as it should be is there hasn’t been enough principled libertarian thought in American history, and there’s where we come in. To the extent we do have freedom, it is because of the radicals of the past. To the extent we have oppression, socialism and imperialism, it is because of insufficient radicalism of the past, an attempt to mix the libertarian instincts of the American Revolution with the statist values of corporate conservatism, centralized statism, mixed economics, policed morality and continual foreign war.”

Well said. Read the article in its entirety. What I like is it’s optimistic, even upbeat, outlook and its hopefulness about where right libertarianism is and where it could go.
I share the optimism. I think, we – right (and left) libs – are not extremists (which is how we are derided) but principled.

Still, though we are not extremists, we are at the extreme ends of the debate….

Unless your thinking is completely linear, however, the principled right and left do not have to be at the opposite ends of things.

4-23-07

An article from the History News Network that supports my previous post about the Copy-Cat Effect:

By William Marina

Mr. Marina is Professor Emeritus in History at Florida Atlantic University.

I doubt that many people have ever heard of Herostratos, a Greek who lived almost 2,400 hundred years ago, but I would suggest that the similarities of Cho’s murderous rampage at Virginia Tech and Herostratos’ actions are striking. They both represent a kind of revolt against Egalitarianism, a craving to be lifted above the faceless and nameless masses, to make one’s mark on history even at the price of becoming infamous in the process.

In 356 BCE, Herostratos burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, considered one of the Wonders of the Ancient World. When asked, before his execution, why he had done such a dastardly deed, Herostratos replied that he wanted to be “famous.” Alarmed at such thinking, the Greeks attempted to blot his name from history. After Alexander the Great’s fame, it was pointed out that the Gods had caused his birth that same year to overshadow Herostartos’ act.

The Greeks were unsuccessful in their effort to purge history of Herostratos, but at least they understood his motivation—a desire for fame at any cost. This has been the prime motivation for many perverse acts in human history, especially in America.

This writer first discussed these factors some years ago in an essay, Egalitarianism and Empire, Actually, two other factors need to be included, Envy, and Equality. Alexis de Tocqueville believed that Envy was the motivating engine of what he called Democracy in America, but it is important to differentiate between Equality and Egalitarianism. The former implies an opportunity to compete, the latter a leveling distribution of results.

In the fourth century, the emerging Alexanderian Empire was an early sign of the rising tensions within Classical Civilization, which would culminate in the warfare-welfare state of the Roman Empire, to which America is increasingly compared. For men like Herostratos, God was, indeed, dead, and they had no real fear of divine retribution for their actions. Neither did Cho!

The growing sense of Egalitarianism was already evident in Jacksonian Democracy and was heightened by the Centralization prevalent after the Civil War.

In fact, the most cogent analysis of what I call the Herostratos Syndrome was offered in a New York Evening Post editorial after the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881, quoted at length in Alexander Stephens’s Pictorial History of the United States (1881). Stephens had served as Vice President of the Confederacy, and also wrote a two-volume history of that conflict, focused around the ideas of “Centralization,” and Empire. In that view, he would later be joined by Oswald Spengler, who wrote about “Civilization [Empire] as Centralization unadulterated,” and Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s teacher at Georgetown, who voiced a similar outlook.

The editorialist wanted to explain what, in picturesque 19th century prose, he called, the rise of the American “Crank,” which seemed so peculiar to our society. He attributed this to a system of business that promised that everyone could succeed, as well as to a schooling system that promised the same. But the real culprit was the press, which offered instant notoriety and infamy to these Cranks, such as Charles Guiteau, the assassin of Garfield.

Since then, of course, we have endured a number of such “Cranks,” including Lee Harvey Oswald, whose “Historic Diary” repeats his failures, or Arthur Bremer, the inept attempted assassin of George Wallace, whose diary also repeats the same word, “failure,” ad nauseum. Oswald’s whole life was an effort to draw attention to himself, as a so-called Marxist, shooting himself in the leg while in the Marines, and so on. It is clear his “Historic (by whose definition?) Diary,” was written on the boat returning to America from the Soviet Union, in anticipation of a large press conference which never materialized, as he was met by a sole representative of the State Department, which had helped pay for his return. The number of his actions intended to gain fame are too numerous to describe here. He even tried to become a critic of Communism from the Right!

In all of these Herostratics, however, perhaps the epitome is James Earl Ray, the assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Before Ray grasped what Oswald had instinctively understood in pleading his innocence after his capture in Dallas and before he was himself killed, Ray was asked by his attorney how he could have been so “damned dumb” as to leave a portable radio with his Missouri Prison number etched on it at the scene of the crime. Ray replied that he wanted the whole world to know he was the one who shot that “F***ing N****r.”

It is a terrible tribute to Ray’s skillful mendacity that before his death he was able to convince Mrs. Coretta King, King’s son, and Jesse Jackson, that he was the innocent victim of some larger, nefarious conspiracy. Instead of executing him, as the Greeks would have done, he remained in prison, expanding upon his fame and notoriety by proclaiming his innocence. And, there was no shortage among those in the media as well, adding to that chorus.

With attempts on the lives of both Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, the increased security has made it easier simply to kill masses of innocent people, whether earlier from a Tower at the University of Texas, or, for example, the murders at Columbine.

Now Cho has successfully joined the ranks of the Herostratics and made his name in history. Our media, unlike the flawed effort of the Greeks to wipe such names from history, has seen to that. Cho’s act of putting together a video presentation beforehand, attempting to justify his act as a protest against inequality, and then mailing that to NBC, is hardly the act of an irrational person under immediate stress. He knew exactly what he wished to accomplish and had planned accordingly.

There is also the question of what prescription drugs Cho had been taking. The police have not yet released the names of these drugs. We do know, however, that various drugs have been associated with some of the mass killings of recent years.

In Ancient Greece one of the “designer drugs” was hellebore. We will never know if Herostratos was into such drugs, which, when combined with alcohol, could give one quite a high. For a “nobody,” whose efforts to stand out had simply alienated many around him, that could be the final catalyst in tipping him toward an act of destruction or violence that would achieve the notoriety he so craved.

It is perhaps well to note the closing words of the editorialist in 1881, that our method of handling such events may have simply increased the possibility for more such Cranks.

My Comment:

I should add that I don’t know anything about the killing of King or Kennedy or anyone else and have no opinion on any of those subjects, one way or other. I just thought the analysis of centralization and the media was relevant.

I should also point out that Stephens – whose writings I am not familiar with – was an ardent supporter of slavery. In my view, that does not necessarily have a bearing on his critique of empire, any more than his owning of slaves affected his ability as a lawyer to get a black slave woman accused of murder acquitted.

I have Jewish friends who are able to listen to Wagner with equanimity…as I can read Kipling and accept that he was both a marvellous writer and an ardent colonialist and imperialist (those two things might indeed be tied together in some ways), but that to denounce (or ignore) all the good and the creative in people because some parts of their thinking is reprehensible (or indeed, in the case of slavery, almost incomprehensible to us) is I think, a shallow way of thinking that in the end impoverishes the debate and ultimately leads, as Mill noted, to the very evils we think we are battling. Our salvation lies in widening, not narrowing, the debate.

“You are hereby directed not to enter the College campus or any College owned property at any time for any reason”

reads a one- page letter sent through courier by administrators no more than a day after an upsetting classroom incident had come to their attention.

If you thought that was V-Tech officials getting the perp of reportedly the biggest campus massacres in the US out of the classroom, you thought wrong.

Probably nothing says more about the priorities of the political culture nowadays than the reported firing last week of Nicholas Winsett, a teacher at Boston’s Emmanuel College.

On Wednesday, two days after the Virginia massacre, Winsett enacted a little skit in his classroom to illustrate his argument that the massacre could have been prevented had the university policy allowed guns on campus

During the skit, Winsett used a marker to pretend to shoot at a student who had previously been prepped to simulate firing back. He was illustrating his point that had there been guns on campus, the V-Tech shooting might have been averted. That, of course, is debatable.

But, of course, debating things is precisely what professors do.

He seems to have made some thoughtful points:

He asked students what the impact of this tragedy on the stock market was (nil) to show that a sensational tragedy does not equate to something that has a deep social impact.

He also argued that the incidence of such killings is miniscule. You are more likely to be shot in a convenience store or struck by lightning than killed in a mass shooting.

His interpretation is open to question, of course. For one thing, I think he overlooks the importance of the twin issues of psychiatric drug use and the increase in police-state laws. But I doubt he is much off the mark on the statistics.

Here is a video he made for YouTube.

Emmanuel College claims he was making light of the tragedy at Virginia Tech. He is said to have made derogatory references to “rich, white kids.” The college is within its rights to maintain its standards – which may well have been violated by what he said. I don’t claim to know. But notice that they were quick to act without too much investigation.

Meanwhile, the President of V-Tech has yet to step down for the university’s role in witlessly enabling school shooter, Cho Seung Hui. Indeed, if we are to believe Steger, officials did all that could humanly have been done.

But this Time Magazine article calls him on that. V-Tech’s own guidelines contradict him (see my prior posts on this blog on the police response and the legal and psychiatric issues).

A glance at Dr. Steger’s professional record shows it to be an impressive one, which makes this turn in his career all the more tragic.

But this paragraph in his CV struck me as not tragic but ironic:

“Most recently, he has been asked by the Swiss Ambassador to the United States and The World Bank to serve on a committee to establish a foundation in the United States to conduct research on mitigating global natural disasters.”

Indeed.

Still, even if he resigned from V-Tech, Steger’s path is unlikely to be downward.

Right now, that’s not the case with Nicholas Winsett.

A stone that was meant to represent Cho at a memorial at VTech disappeared and was replaced with this:

“Left behind on Monday in Cho’s position at the memorial were a pile of wilting roses and carnations, burnt-down candles and days-old letters forgiving Cho and expressing sympathy with his family.

“Seung Hui, I hope that if I ever meet someone like you, I will have the courage and strength to reach out,” said one signed David.

‘You have not broken our spirits’

“We forgive you because we’ve been forgiven,” offered a Christian who signed only MEQ.

“To the family of Cho Seung-Hui: We know that you are hurting too,” said another.

But one letter to Cho, whose angry, hateful and violent pictures and statements that were shown on television after the massacre, was more defiant.

“Cho: you greatly underestimated our strength, courage and compassion. You may have broken our hearts but you have not broken our spirits,” wrote a person who signed “Erin T”.