Saturday - August 07, 2004
Liberty and Power
The Instapundit linked to
another blog by someone named Tom
Bell who discusses the short career of the Roman Emperor
Pertinax.
It seems that after the corrupt and tryannical reign of Commodus was cut short
by an assassination by his praetorian guards, Pertinax was asked to wear the
Purple. Tom Bell highlights the great ideas of Pertinax to "remit all the
oppressive taxes invented by Commodus, and to cancel all the unjust claims of
the treasury; declaring, in a decree of the senate, 'that he was better
satisfied to administer a poor republic with innocence, than to acquire riches
by the ways of tyranny and dishonour.' [quoting
Gibbon]" This all sounds good to
those of libertarian leanings, but the rest of the story highlights why the
Libertarian Party is now nothing more than a dangerous indulgence by the naive
and childish. You see, Pertinax only reigned for eighty-seven days. Pertinax
failed to understand how to wield power, and that is why he was killed so
soon.
George Washington once famously said, "government
is all power." By this he demonstrated that he understood what Pertinax, Tom
Bell, and all the current crop of the Libertarian Party don't. It's all well
and good to have great ideas and want to promote liberty and justice, but when
it comes down to brass tacks, only the powerful will survive. We may not like
this arrangement but this is the way the world is. Ignoring reality is a
dangerous thing.
By failing to
consolidate control over the Praetorian Guard before enacting his reforms
Pertinax was unable to protect himself from assassination and he was thus unable
to protect his reforms. His failure was a betrayal of the trust placed in him
by the people of Rome. I don't know if his failure was because of some idealism
or simply an indication of the overwhelming power his faced, but he failed
nonetheless and he should be held as no one's hero. Ideas are good, and he was
probably a good man, but his failure precludes including him in the pantheon of
those to be held up to emulate.
There
are many other great examples to use: The Spanish Civil War was won by the
Nationalists led by Franco. But Franco wasn't very smart and he wasn't even a
great military leader. He won that war not because of his superlative ability
but because his opponents were utterly incompetent. When the Republican
government was elected to power in Spain, they failed to wield it. They had
nothing but disdain for the military and allowed their political opponents to
control every position of authority within the army and much of the navy. By
not having control of any armed forces at all, when the war started they were
helpless and it took only two years and many idiotic blunders to completely lose
control of their government, first to the Soviets and then to the Fascists. The
war could have been avoided if they had understood that to stay in power they
had to have power. But the pie-in-the-sky consortium of republicans,
socialists, anarchist, anarchosyndicalists, communists, socialist anarchists,
libertarian socialists, and other leftist and even traditional liberal parties
thought that the world's long struggle for freedom was over. All people would
now hold hands, sing Kum Baya and live in happy freedom.
The Republicans of Spain failed to
wield power and thus betrayed the trust given to
them.
Today in the United States we
have a similar cabal of leftist, traditional liberal, green, communist,
socialist, and libertarian movements who eschew involvement in the war against
Islam. Led by the likes of Howard Dean, and encouraged by corrupt money
machines like Ralph Nader, these movements have widely diverse political
ideologies in many respects, but they all converge on one idea: That our war
against Islam is wrong. They want to stop the war, forgetting that although it
takes two to tango it only takes one to wage
war.
The popular pacifist movement is
dangerous. It is right to not to wish to control others, but it is wrong not to
maintain and use appropriate power to keep others from controlling us and
robbing us of our freedom.
Wielding
power is the most important part of maintaining freedom. The whiney pacifist
movement, perhaps confused by an inability to judge right from wrong and mired
in moral relativism, fails to distinguish between the just and righteous use of
power to protect freedom and the use of power to deny
freedom.
Let's hope that in the coming
elections that these "girly men" and birkenstock chicks don't prevail. We can
see from the example of Pertinax what happens when good ideas are allowed to be
destroyed by others who aren't so squeamish about being powerful.
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