Like James T. Kirk, I refuse to accept that the only choices I have are to watch helplessly as the Kobayashi Maru is destroyed by Klingons, or to cross the Neutral Zone and be destroyed in a futile, merely symbolic suicide rescue attempt.
It’s high time someone with a Kirkian worldview and carriage hacked into the computer and re-wrote the damn program.
Here’s an excerpt from Smith’s piece, emphasis mine:
Only Cowards Compromise In The Face Of EvilGood does not compromise with evil. As stated above, there is nothing to be gained by it. I find that the people most prone to suggesting or demanding compromise with oligarchs and tyrants are usually cowards who have never faced down any legitimate struggle in their lives with any passion. But, how do they sell this stunted philosophy to others? The illusion here is one of “reason” or “objectivity”.
Fearful men often use the guise of objectivity (even if they are not) to avoid confrontation, especially confrontation with a supposed authority figure or government. Strangely, their powers of reason and deduction invariably seem to lead them to subservience to the establishment structure. Compromise, for them, is a way to protect their flailing egos by playing the role of the “even handed citizen” while at the same time crawling towards servitude.
The argument to this position would, of course, be that many in the Liberty Movement compromise with evil everyday. That we follow laws we disagree with and that we find reprehensible, and that this makes us somehow “hypocritical”. I would say that this is a very narrow and disingenuous view.
Free minded people do not “follow” reprehensible laws so much as tolerate them while working to dismantle them (“following” infers acceptance). Being honorable and generally of good will, we look for peaceful avenues of redress and change. But, if those avenues are closed to us, and if the injustices expand, the free minded become freedom fighters. Dissent and even revolution are inevitable in the face of tyranny. It is an undeniable feature of human nature.
What I find most interesting though is the conundrum that this conflict of interest creates for the skeptical establishment slave. If the Liberty Movement tolerates bad law while searching for a peaceful path towards change, they call us hypocritical. If the Liberty Movement abandons tolerance and bring force to bear against tyranny and its abuse of the law, they call us “fringe extremists”. Apparently, the only way we can be correct in the eyes of self proclaimed objectivists is if we bow to the constraints of the system, sit back, keep our mouths shut, and enjoy the bread and circuses.
POSTED BY ANN BARNHARDT – JUNE 13, AD 2012 11:41 AM MST
This article from Brandon Smith was posted earlier on NCRenegade:
The ‘Lesser Of Two Evils’ Con-Game
So, you spend 3 or 4 years railing against the Obama-Pelosi machine, and now you do the very thing that will keep them in power. I’m sure they are hi-fiving at the White House and on Capitol Hill.