Back in 1996, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington published his much-discussed The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington, a CFR member, offered an elite, “commanding heights” perspective on the near future a half-decade after the demise of the Soviet Union—which doesn’t mean the book isn’t worth reading (it is).
Huntington saw the West as having become simultaneously the most powerful empire in history—economically and militarily—but threatened by slow, long term decline both because of the rise of energetic competitors (especially India and China) and internal problems including falling birth rates, low savings, increased crime and corruption, and social disintegration. He didn’t do much to address the role of super-elite policy in bringing these about—but few “commanding heights” treatises do.
This last offers us a good insight from which to begin. After all, a real, bona fide clash of civilizations is developing on American soil—with parallel developments in Canada.
One of the most amazing phenomena of the past few months is the largely spontaneous explosion of grassroots support for Ron Paul’s candidacy for the Republican nomination in 2008. Media talking heads wrote him off following the second so-called debate in Columbia, South Carolina, where he and Rudy Giuliani crossed verbal swords. In the eyes of We the People, though, Ron Paul won that exchange. He spoke calmly, coherently, and cogently about such matters as blowback to explain why we were attacked on 9/11 (assuming for now we can believe anything the government says on the subject).
I find it hard not to write about Ron Paul. To those of us who believe our government should stick to the letter of its founding document, the U.S. Constitution, Dr. Paul is a true American hero. He is the one Republican candidate who voted against the undeclared Iraq War—now dragging through its fifth year, the number of Americans killed now rivaling the number killed on 9/11, with tens of thousands of dead Iraqis and no end in sight. His opposition to the Iraq War was/is not based on some frivolous dislike of George W. Bush, as seems to be the case with many Democrats. He voted against the undeclared war in Kosovo back when Clinton was president. He believes, on Constitutional grounds, that we should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. He does not believe we should initiate wars to enforce nonbinding resolutions by globalist bodies (the UN). He believes our interventionist foreign policy is wrong in principle, and that it has made us more enemies than friends, the world over. An empire may rise and for a time hold sway by superior military might and superior resources, but the interfered-with cheer when it goes down in flames, often from its own internal corruption and dysfunction.
Dr. Paul’s principled stands have won him vocal support from across the land. The more the mainstream media tries to ignore him, the more this support grows. The more the elites try to suppress his views, the more they make his case for him—sometimes better than he ever could on his own. When he was refused a microphone in Iowa, he and his supporters staged a parallel rally a short distance away. More people attended the parallel rally than came to hear the “official” Republican candidates!
Just recently we saw some major backpedaling here in Upstate South Carolina. Rick Beltram, who chairs the Spartanburg County GOP based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, had called Paul a “lunatic” for his blowback remark to Giuliani in the Columbia match-up and in response to interest in a visit from Dr. Paul to the area, said he could “stay home.” Following a storm of emailed and voice-mailed protests from local Paul supporters, Beltram retreated and stated, “If we're all that naive and we all misunderstood, I think they should come on down and tell us how we're wrong, and I think the people of Spartanburg will be anxious to listen.”
He got that right! A crowd of over 400 assembled at a luncheon hosted by the Spartanburg GOP on July 21 (watch and listen here). Dr. Paul’s rousing defense of freedom as opposed to serfdom and encroaching tyranny, sound monetary policy as opposed to continued debauching of the dollar courtesy of the Federal Reserve, Constitutionally limited government as opposed to unlimited expansion of the empire, and noninterventionist foreign policy as opposed to globalist nation-building, was punctuated with a dozen or so standing ovations. That same afternoon, a crowd rivaling the 1,000 that appeared in Iowa filled the Carolina First Center in neighboring Greenville. Some of these folks had driven for hundreds of miles from all over the Southeast to hear Dr. Paul’s message (can you imagine anyone driving hundreds of miles to see Rudy Giuliani, or John McCain??). Dr. Paul’s calls to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and repeal the USA Patriot Act were greeted with cheers.
Dr. Paul is poised for national prominence since he has passed the fading McCain in the fundraising department. Shortly before the July 21 events he announced that he now has $2.4 million in the bank, versus McCain’s $2 million. This places him third behind Giuliani and Mitt Romney. Only out of sheer prejudice against his ideas can anyone still maintain that Dr. Paul’s candidacy is unserious. No amount of namecalling or milder dismissals (e.g., George Will’s once referring to him as a “cheerful anachronism”) is going to change this. After months of total silence, the mainstream media has been compelled to pay attention, with evening coverage on local television networks and front page stories in the Sunday editions of the daily newspapers of both Greenville and Spartanburg on July 22.
Surely, too, the evidence of broad-based support refutes those often-heard claims that Ron Paul’s presence especially on Internet-based polls is the work of “spammers.” Nonsense! Examination of Dr. Paul’s fundraising by the Federal Election Commission shows that 47 percent of contributions to his campaign are in amounts totaling under $200 apiece (McCain is second place in this category with 17 percent). This means that large numbers of individuals are donating money in support of his campaign. Dr. Paul does not receive huge corporate donations or PAC money because he isn’t in corporations’ or lobbyists’ back pockets. He is now first in total donations from veterans and military personnel—surprising, at first glance, but telling given the growing realization within the rank-and-file of the military that the Iraq War was a mistake from the get-go.
Dr. Paul—as I and others have said before—is the only Constitutionalist in the race. He is the only person who, all evidence suggests, means it when he speaks of strict limits on the size and scope of the federal government. As his campaign literature states, he’s never voted for a tax increase, never supported Congress’s vote to raise their own salaries, never voted for a foreign war where legitimate U.S. interests are not at stake, never supported gun control laws. He doesn’t support laws that offer privileges to some groups at the expense of others; he doesn’t support the trend toward socialized medicine; he doesn’t support the corporatism (soft fascism) of the public-private partnership system. The Constitution says nothing about education, family, marriage, or any related areas. While Dr. Paul is staunchly pro-life, he also believes on Constitutional grounds that abortion is a matter for the states to resolve and not a federal responsibility.
Those who say he is an anachronism, are saying that Constitutionally limited government is an anachronism. That’s serious business, if you think about it.
Those who take such a view are saying, whether intentionally or not, that our system of government is now no different in principle or method from any other government that has ever existed, except in its capacity to rationalize. Most of the rest of the governments in the world are ruled by dictators who do as they please because they can. Their method is brute force. Our government had developed a history of dealing in deadly force with what amount to political crimes. FBI agents massacred Randy Weaver’s family, for his thought crime of racial separatism (he wasn’t bothering anybody else). The BATF burned women and children alive at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The IRS routinely imprisoned people like Irwin Schiff who have maintained that the federal income tax is a fraud with no legal or Constitutional foundation and refused to pay.
More and more, however, the federal government is not getting away with this sort of thing. There have been no more massacres since the rise of the World Wide Web and especially YouTube, through which the entire online world can watch such events unfold. While federal agents may have surrounded the residence of income tax dissidents Ed and Elaine Brown in New Hampshire, they have not gone in with guns blazing because they know We the People are watching. When asked, in open court, to produce the statute that mandates a personal income tax, the IRS cannot do it. They are beginning to lose these cases (recent example: attorney Tom Cryer).
A movement is developing, and it is larger than Ron Paul. Millions of people now get their news from Internet sources, and are tuning out the mainstream media. They are beginning to question official pronouncements about unemployment and the need for a “core” inflation rate (the real rates of both, of course, are substantially higher than the official rates). We the People have seen Aaron Russo’s tour de force, America: Freedom to Fascism, and are looking more critically at the Federal Reserve. We are more and more turning our attention from our usual petty squabbles and toward the “commanding heights” of super-elite power. For part two click below.
[Author’s note: this is a lengthened version of an article that previously appeared in The Times Examiner, based in Greenville, South Carolina.]
Click here for part -----> 2,
© 2007 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved
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Steven Yates earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1987 at the University of Georgia and has taught the subject at a number of colleges and universities around the Southeast. He currently teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College, and also does a little e-commerce involving real free trade. He is on the South Carolina Board of The Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA.
He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994), Worldviews: Christian Theism Versus Modern Materialism (2005), around two dozen philosophical articles and reviews in refereed journals and anthologies, and over a hundred articles on the World Wide Web. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where he writes a weekly column for the Times Examiner and is at work on a book length version of his popular series to be entitled The Real Matrix (hopefully!) to be completed this summer.
E-Mail: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
