The Libertarian Conspiracy, by Michael Gilson de Lemos -- anti-state.com

The Libertarian Conspiracy

As Americans wake up from the 9-11 hysteria and are uneasily considering the implications of anti-freedom measures, they can take heart that they are not alone.

Completely unremarked in the US press is that in the last 6 months we have seen international crackdowns on liberty, supported directly or indirectly by the US major parties. For example, in Britain, papers are alarmed at new official anti-freedom laws where detainees are denied counsel and kept in conditions described in Parliament as "barbaric."

Meanwhile, under the impetus of "fighting terrorism" through more Puritanism, the new McCain law has brought Ho-Chi-Minh to America in ways Uncle Ho might have thought too anti-freedom. According to some attorneys, it criminalizes publishing results right out of the Congressional Register describing how government officials are voting if done before a general election and even prohibits young people from making political contributions. After all, you can never tell when some 16 year old might take an interest in politics, read the Congressional Register, and seduce his legislator to the Dark Side by sending 5 dollars to a group paying for an ad denouncing his voting record on, say, public schools. Better to nip any delusions of young democracy in the bud. Chillingly, this is called the bi-partisan reform act, and it is clearly directed at anyone who disagrees with the major party leadership which its partisans denounce as "special interests."

If this is what is "free speech" in the Citadel of Freedom, citizens of foreign countries should recognize the writing on the wall.

THE NEW AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

Yes, we are seeing the war of terrorism – of a new terrorism of unanalyzed good intentions and quack social engineering where people are afraid to say boo, a terrorism of unquestioned government power masquerading as freedom. The in-joke in Washington was that Operation "Enduring Freedom" meant "Freedom Forever" to citizens but "How long do we have to put up with freedom?" to the in-crowd.

This Imperialism stands on four mutually supporting legs that are used to interfere and manage other countries:

Puritanical crusades such as the Drug War, eco-hysterias and prohibitionism

These are the current core excuses for "an international order" where US advisors are re-crafting the laws of entire countries.
Official Feminism and "Multiculturalism" to ridicule traditional structures

Get clear: Feminism is Imperialism. Under cover of correcting often exaggerated abuses, it is characterizing any inconvenient practice or cultural resistance as retrograde. These movements have in fact created an international legal-media attack on non-governmental local and familial institutions where they defend individual rights.
Socialist money and travel/trade schemes to create "democracy" and "transparency"

The latest variation is the call for complete disclosure of once privileged bank records into the databanks of the US Government, restrictions on personal cash for travel, a world tax, and international forfeiture on trumped-up domestic cases.

Troops and advisors

US troops, police advisors, and the new "CIA paramilitaries" are there to "assist" in enforcing the new laws in nearly every nation on earth, often bombing, murdering, torturing and simply robbing hapless locals, disrupting elections, spying on businesses and blackmailing left and right not from viciousness, but "good" mechanical bureaucratic reasons.

The backblow on the US? Each of these serves to excuse planned drafts, and more taxes, confiscations, restrictions in the US – now often justified by the fact that the US-inspired local governments do it and it is now "international" standard.

THE TRIUMPH OF TERROR

Here are some highlights including what Libertarians are doing:

*Afghanistan and Bangladesh: Libertarians, such as those inspired by Royal family member and "Libertarian Ghandi" Aslam Effendi, author of the Libertarian work Search for Truth, have been hard at work in these areas for some time, including behind-the-scences work in the Karzai government, ongoing outreach to Afghanistan by the MOER group and a struggling Bangladesh LP. Programs have included micro-loan bank conferences, anti-malaria private efforts. As the US quietly supports efforts to close ETV, the only independent TV there, an upcoming all-opposition conference in London sponsored by the Bangladesh Libertarians is slated for June. It includes figures from parliament and the Awami league.

*Argentina: Local Libertarians clustered around the Atlas Foundation warned Argentina, which unwisely got fooled again by Washington and social-schemes-bloom-eternal local politicians as it got suckered in to IMF regulatory schemes and is now backing out into financial chaos.

*Bolivia: Libertarians have helped organize the periodic blockade of the capital for months by people outraged at the traditional coca crops destruction by US advised troops.

*Britain: Libertarian Alliance – both the original and the younger group – work against the Draconian security laws that are being proposed and passed. Indeed, reading the UK papers, one would have thought that the Taliban had flown a jet into Big Ben. Meanwhile, the path is being discreetly cleared for a Clockwork Orange nightmare as jury trials are being abolished for most things in the name of "efficiency" and a pseudo-privatization of police for "free-enterprise" monopolies of gun-toting goons threatens to put paid forever on the community controlled, disarmed, ever-polite bobby.

*Costa Rica: Those wacky Libertarians insist on creating hope. An aggressive Libertarian movement has been elected to over 10% of Congress there on a program of Civil Liberties, fighting corruption through privatization and other themes. They have a standing proposal for an anarcho-Lib style province, and are being given a chance to prove themselves – against efforts by the government, said to be encouraged by the the US, to suppress them through "campaign reform" chicanery.

*Colombia: Local observers are warning that continued interference by the US in local conflicts including reports of shooting down civilian planes suspected of coca transport may lead Colombians to export their war directly to the US. Meanwhile, some coca barons, who see their power as arising from US prohibitions raising prices, are said to be praying in Church that the present DEA regime will endure.

*Guatemala: Libertarians there organized a Howard Jarvis style tax revolt, prompting apoplectic letters from the US Ambassador denouncing international Libertarian interference with the "visible hand" of indirect US taxation and local regulators. Stay tuned.

*Iraq: While some of the starvation figures coming out are doubtless trumped up, the fact is what good is the US doing there?

*Israel: There is a growing Libertarian group in Israel as a national leader is indicted abroad for US-backed atrocities...on the bright side, Israelis are demanding and receiving weapons permits in record numbers

*Pakistan: Widespread crackdowns on dissidents relieved by terror in the Kashmir and a comic-opera shouting match with India over terrorists who may be Islamic – or was it Hindu? – extremists, as the US busily signs new contracts for training on security measures.

*Philippines: The US is mounting military operations going after Muslim Communist radicals originally, let us not forget, supported by the US to justify troops in Viet-Nam (I didn't follow LBJ's logic on that one either, sorry).

*Peru: A growing Libertarian intellectual movement has run candidates, influenced policy and served as some sort of moderate opposition while Peruvians set off bombs against the Bush visit. Indeed, Libertarians there are credited by Fujimori himself with leading the overthrow of his US backed dictatorship by completely undermining its intellectual credibility.

*Russia: Pity Putin. Russian Libertarians report that, at the encouragement of the US, he is cracking down on organized crime – except this has involved measures that create phony privatizations where Communist politicos of old seize businesses and are granted monopolies, growing US suggestions that are destroying the nascent financial privacy, raising taxes, suspending civil liberties to deal with drug dealers, and most ominously, thinly veiled forfeiture of newspapers that criticize what is happening.

*Saudi Arabia: At a time when people who gave the time of day to politically correct "social criminals" and anyone under US Government suspicion is finding houses, bank accounts, and uninvolved businesses seized under zero tolerance (in the US landlords are having buildings seized because some tenant smoked dope, remember), the bin Laden family – partners at times of the family of the President in various business deals and In Like Flynn with elements in the Saudi Dictatorship (they have vast construction interests from which presumably Osama started his fortune and are contractors in the renovation of Mecca, if that provides any clues) – remain strangely immune. I certainly am no advocate of forfeiture but ask what I hope is a natural question: Why this immunity?

*Venezuela: The less than perfect hyper-nationalist government has nonetheless been doing some things that Libertarians can applaud. It has refused to participate in the US Drug War or allow the country to be used by US Advisors to kidnap Colombian citizens. It has called for a real free trade zone in the Americas as proposed by Simon Bolivar. It has tried to get out from IMF interventions. So naturally, the US Government made goo-goo eyes at, and according to local observers, supported a coup that tried to fire the entire legislature. In a dramatic turnaround, the country revolted – against the coup.

*Zimbabwe: A nascent Libertarian group there has gone to ground as protests against the initially US backed left-wing nutbar Mugabe government, which has seized White farmlands only to sell them for quick money to, surprise, White millionaires who support Mugabe – and have brought agricultural production to a standstill. There are growing fears of famine and Rwanda style ethnic cleansing as the US offers Mugabe money to join the war on terror – and US advisors are alleged to have helpfully crafted the new "Public Security Bill."

As one looks at the worldwide movement, increasingly we are seeing what looks like a vast chess or even Go game as government moves its pieces and finds far-thinking Libertarians chipping away at the board itself. In Communist China, pro-Libertarians at the Unirule groups travel the countryside instructing on democracy basics. In Italy, the Libertarissimi or "most Libertarian" hard-line anarchos have begun a campaign of publications. In Africa, there are fledgling think tanks and student groups, while the South African Libertarians have documented over 200 Libertarian improvements they've facilitated even as they struggle for expanded political rights. The upcoming Latin-themed ISIL conference focuses on Latin-Libertarian strategies such as recently documented by the HACER group, to alleviate poverty.

Government leaders are saying whoever opposes their schemes does not understand they're treasonably supporting terrorism. It is reason, and simple concern not to commit errors, that is under attack.

While Green and Socialist leaders peer out of their coffeehouses, waiting again for their moment in the Sun, in many countries a handful of Libertarians are not only at the center of the network of people moving towards freedom and aware that a new and subtler US Imperialism, strangling American and foreign citizen alike, has arisen. It is those Libertarians who are the nexus of effective action.

Libertarians around the globe are occupied less in promoting novel Libertarian solutions for the particular individual. Instead they're the main voice defending the most simple and elementary general liberties of the people: from the right to have an attorney to not being secretly taxed by a distant foreign power.

From the right, Ashcroft denounces Libertarians for breaking ranks and slowing down his plans. From the left, the New Republic's editor says Libertarians may be the one hope for saving Civil Liberties. The leaders of the world rush to protect it from phantom terrorists with a coat of chains.

Libertarians started the movement by, for example, debating the right to privatize roads and utter unusual speech. They are today fighting for the right to privately travel roads and have any political opinions at all, in a conspiracy that is effective because it is open.

April 18, 2002

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Colorful Arch-anarchon Michael Gilson-De Lemos--known as "MG"--is on the Executive Committee of the US Libertarian Party, and also co-ordinates the Libertarian International Organization. Retired as a Fortune 100 management consultant, he is working on books on management and libertarian philosophy. His other provocative articles are at www.gilson.uni.cc.