Life, or Death?

Guest Post by Robert Gore

On July 16, 1945, a plutonium implosion atomic bomb was detonated in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Within a month, a uranium-based and a plutonium-based atomic bomb were detonated above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. Atomic fission, and later fusion, became the basis for the most deadly arsenal ever assembled, giving the US government the power to destroy the world several times over, making it history’s most powerful institution. The Soviet Union’s development of its own potentially earth-destroying nuclear arsenal in the 1950s challenged US power. Per Lord Acton’s famous dictum, absolute power produced absolute corruption on both sides of the Cold War.

Their leaders saw the world in terms of an amoral chess match. Other nations’ governments were pawns in their strategies for global domination and individual lives were of no consequence. Intelligence agencies rose to preeminence, employing sabotage, deception, propaganda, political manipulation, revolution, regime change, and assassination in foreign countries, supposedly excused by the imperatives of fighting the other side’s nefarious designs. Although there was a fair amount of playing one side against the other, brutally repressive autocrats willing to ostensibly align with either side received diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and military support from their benefactors.

Vietnam fully displayed the immoral depths the US government had plumbed. It engaged in regime change, assassination, deception of the American people, drug running, secret bombing of countries with which the US was not at war, false flag terrorism, torture, and war crimes—including rape and murder—against civilians. None of this was unique to Vietnam, either before or after. Estimates of the total dead range from 1.3 to 3.8 million. After spending trillions (in today’s dollars) and with 58,000 military deaths and 153,000 wounded, US forces left Vietnam having accomplished none of their objectives (its remaining partisans still refuse to use the word “defeat”). South Vietnam was eventually conquered by North Vietnam.

Vietnam has been the template for every major US military engagement since. The Soviet pawn-master resigned the match in 1991, but by that time perpetuation of US empire and maintenance of the military-industrial-intelligence complex was of far greater concern than the supposed Soviet threat. Islamic extremism was adroitly substituted for the Red Peril. The 9/11 attack served as the rallying cry against this new, supposedly mortal threat, justification for invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and impetus for the wholesale expansion of government surveillance and concomitant diminution of individual liberties. The foray into the Middle East and its ever escalating blowback may already be a bigger disaster for the US than Vietnam, and if is not yet, it will be. It has certainly been a catastrophe for the Middle East and Europe, which will soon be overwhelmed by the refugee flood.

Aside from Vietnam protests, propelled in part by fear of the draft (the protests stopped when Nixon abolished it), most Americans have docilely accepted the post WWII expansion of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and its string of disasters. The mainstream media has been co-opted by the government. Coercively extracted, redistributed largess and myriad distractions keep the populace pacified. Taxation, regulation, debt, and the government’s destructive and corrupt involvement have strangled the once magnificent US economy, stifling honest innovation and production, skewing incentives towards government-favored economic activities, and rewarding cronies. Bankruptcy looms as government policy makers maintain that patently absurd nostrums—government debt, central bank monetization, negative interest rates—will revive the patient they’ve rendered comatose.

It is time to discard the fiction that those who have brought the US to this pass have had honorable motivations. There is an understandable reluctance to state that they want what they have wrought: deterioration, destruction, ruin, and death. Many people are motivated by a desire to improve theirs and their family’s situation; find meaningful work; make friends and support a community; engage in enjoyable activities, in short, to live constructive lives as they see fit. They are reluctant to ascribe purely malicious and malignant motivations to any other human being, and they excuse failure, even repeated failure by people they detest, as stemming from the wrong political orientation, or as the unintended consequences of good, but unrealistic intentions.

This plays into the hands of the depraved. To say to them: “I’m sure you have the best of intentions,” is to lose the argument before it begins. It acknowledges the beneficence and nobility in which they rhetorically cloak themselves, when their motives are anything but beneficent or noble. Those who would oppose them are left to wonder why their irrefutable arguments and prescient predictions of failure have the same effect as pebbles bounced against castle walls. However, even when it occurs to them that perhaps the disastrous results were exactly what was intended, social opprobrium and the power of the “benefactors” generally prevents them from voicing their suspicions. Obamacare is clearly designed to fail and pave the way for a single payer system, but only a handful of its critics, and none of its proponents, will come right out and say so.

To state the truth: “They have the worst of intentions” casts the “they” as irretrievably evil, opposed to every value of human existence. It means that “they” want the decay, destruction, and death they promulgate, that “they” want to see you and everybody else who is not “they” dead. It is because she clearly and unequivocally stated this truth that Ayn Rand has been savagely denounced since Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957. She took it one step further, however. One of the most important scenes in the novel was towards the end, when the heroes rescue John Galt from the destroyers.

He [James Taggart] was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake of whatever was not. It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself the he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts. A moment ago, he had been able to feel that he hated Galt above all men, that the hatred was proof of Galt’s evil, which he need define no further, that he wanted Galt to be destroyed for the sake of his own survival. Now he knew that he had wanted Galt’s destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt’s greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy—he was seeing it as greatness by his own admission, greatness by the only standard that existed, whether anyone chose to admit it or not: the greatness of a man who was master of reality in a manner no other had equaled. In the moment when he, James Taggart, had found himself facing the ultimatum: to accept reality or die, it was death his emotions had chosen, death, rather than surrender to that realm of which Galt was so radiant a son. In the person of Galt—he knew—he had sought the destruction of all existence.

Here is what “they” want—”the destruction of all existence.” They want life or death control over you and not because they want you to live. They want to kill you because they want to kill themselves. That is the black hole that has sucked in what was once their souls, if they ever had souls.

The obliviousness that most Americans embrace is a death wish: ignore the reality of evil and it will go away. Reality doesn’t go away; it destroys the oblivious. Humanity is hanging by a slender threat and its only hope is recognizing the evil of those who would destroy it. The battle is joined when we choose to fight them. The choice is this: Life, or Death? The refusal to choose is a choice.

CHOOSE LIFE. CHOOSE THE GOLDEN PINNACLE.

AMAZON

KINDLE

NOOK