Liberty and Empire, cont'd

Jacob Hornberger writes powerful and highly readable denunciations of DC's murderous and counter-productive policy of interventionism. Yesterday, I dissented from his libertarian view that DC's de facto Open Borders policy is compatible with a free and peaceful society. He sent a gracious and thoughtful response to my earlier post on his original article. His comments are italicized, and my responses follow:

"Actually, they [demographic revolution and empire] aren't really two sides of the same coin. One, open borders, is a principle of liberty--i.e., the right of people to travel, move, associate with others, and do what they want with their own money. The other--empire and interventionism--is a violation of the principles of the liberty and a limited-government republic."

Any genuine principle has to derive from reality, from historical experience. Western ideals of liberty evolved within the Western tradition, just as other ideals of liberty arose from the experience of other traditional cultures. Throughout history, we see peoples fighting and dying to resist foreign domination. They do so because they are determined to preserve their unique culture, their way of life. Look, for example, at the Jews and Celts who chose death to subjugation by the "englightened" Romans.

Every free society -- every one -- emerged from distinct historical cultures. Representative government can only arise from a shared cultural foundation, from the shared values, common history, and common language that naturally bind people together. Nowhere in the history of the world have disconnected peoples spontaneously joined together to form a limited government -- such governments are only possible within a common culture. On the other hand, empires, and their 20th-century equivalent, ideological megastates, rely on a powerful central government to hold them together -- and the record of human rights abuse of both are dismal.

The centralizers and warmongers have understood this very well. Joseph Stalin, for example, grasped that historical cultures were obstacles to his authority since they provided the peoples of those cultures with an ingrained sense of internal regulation. Robert Conquest, in "Stalin: Breaker of Nations," wrote this of Stalin's proactive multiculturalism:

Early in 1943 Stalin had taken a decision on an operation against a section of those he had been fighting much longer than he had been fighting the Germans - his own citizens. In this case it was the smaller nationalities of the Caucasus and the Crimea who had, in Stalin's view, either welcomed or not opposed the Germans. They were now to be deported en masse.

Stalin had already, in 1941, deported the Soviet Germans, and suppressed the Volga-German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic which was their largest centre. It was now to be the Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Ingushi, the Karachai, the Balkans and the Crimean Tatars. After careful planning over late 1943 and 1944 these people were rounded up, packed into Lend-Lease Studebakers, and then sent crammed into trains to various areas of Central Asia and Siberia. Their autonomous republics and provinces were abolished.

As for his attitude to nationalities, Stalin could find in the Marxist texts a number of references to some nations being 'reactionary', and of the necessity of opposing their 'national movements'. But this deportation en bloc, and their disappearance from the list of Soviet nations, was taking this logic further than had previously been envisaged. pp. 258-9.

In fact, a centralized, interventionist government must of necessity "be aggressive abroad and despotic at home," as Robert E. Lee confided to Lord Acton.

And the US government has been exactly what Lee predicted, whether a conservative or liberal was the Commander-in-Chief. After Obama's Nobel acceptance speech, Glenn Greenwald puzzled over why Neocons and leftists praised Obama's argument for an aggressive foreign policy. I sent him this answer:

Both Neocons and liberals aim to destroy tradition and replace it with their own values and blueprints. Leftists call it “revolution,” Neocons call it “creative destruction.” The goal of each is the same. Both want to reconstruct society according to abstract, universal principles of their own making. Both believe in government interventionism as a weapon to advance their agenda. They only fuss about the target. Neocons see backward Muslim nations as the more urgent threat, while liberals focus on the American Heartland.

I also question these assertions Hornberger made:

"In fact, throughout the 19th century our American ancestors maintained a system of a constitutional republic and open immigration. That is, they didn't permit the U.S. government to go abroad, either in Europe or Asia, in search of monsters to destroy and they kept the borders open."

The United States was founded by Northern Europeans. The Founders didn't dream up the rights they fought to defend; it was for the traditional rights of British citizens that they fought and died to preserve. And the new nation sought to preserve its national character by controlling its borders. You can read the actual opinions of George Washington, John Jay, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson on the subject of immigration control here.

The Founders' views on immigration were reflected in immigration legislation. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalized citizenship to "free white persons" of "good moral character." The Chinese Exclusion Acts, passed between 1880 and 1904, denied US citizenship to Chinese.

And this is just silly:

"Also, don't forget that we don't have uncontrolled immigration here and haven't for several decades. If you don't believe me, just go down the southern border and you will see long lines of cars waiting to get abused and harrassed and searched by Border Patrol, Customs, and DEA officials."

First of all, the illegal immigrants who are pouring in don't bother with the official, for-show entry points, they're crossing at all the unguarded points in between -- that's why we have upwards of 20 million illegal immigrants in this country -- so many, in fact, that whites are predicted to be a minority in their own country by 2042.

Do you really believe Western standards of individual liberty and rights to property will survive in a country dominated by people from the Third World who violently reject those standards?

It's no coincidence that warmonger Bush was determined to provide amnesty for illegal immigrants. It's all part of the plan.