politics – Page 148

The Government Needs to Draw Up A List of Opinions We’re Allowed to Express

The Western World risks falling into confusion. Most of us have lived our lives under the impression that we were free people, at liberty to pursue happiness and to discuss ways of achieving it. As we’re now finding out, we don’t actually have the rights that we thought we had. This essay suggests a way out of the predicament.

New Zealanders have, in recent weeks, been surprised to learn that we don’t actually have the rights to free assembly and free speech. This has been demonstrated by the example of controversial speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who were forbidden from using a public hall by Auckland Mayor Phil Goff. Stating that he doesn’t believe that the political opinions of the two should be permitted to be spoken, Goff banned them from using the Auckland Town Hall.

Southern and Molyneux, whose talks frequently criticise the suicidal policy of mass immigration, have come in for a savaging from the banker-owned New Zealand media. Because the banks are the ones that profit the most from the bloated house prices and rents that come with opening the borders, they are the biggest cheerleaders for it. Consequently, their peons in the New Zealand media whipped up a mob which threatened violence to get the speakers banned.

This imbroglio has raised an important question: what are we actually allowed to talk about?

One potential solution lies in Peter Dunne’s Psychoactive Substances Act. The logic behind introducing this piece of legislation was that synthetic drug manufacturers were coming up with novel, dangerous substances so quickly that the authorities were unable to ban them all fast enough to keep the public safe. So instead of banning specific drugs that were known to cause harm, the Act simply bans all psychoactive substances.

This was a breakthrough in jurisprudence. Anyone wishing to use any psychoactive substance, no matter what it is, even if they just invented it themselves, is automatically a criminal unless they have Government permission to use that substance specifically. An entire class of actions are thereby criminalised, without any proof that actions within this class are harmful to people. They could even be helpful, but they’re still criminal.

We could apply this same logic to free speech and assembly. New ideas come and go in an ever-mutating memescape, and the Government can’t keep up with all the new ideas and opinions that people have and which might be dangerous. The spread of the Internet means that New Zealanders are frequently exposed to opinions that have been formed overseas and brought into the country by way of underground networks, such as 4chan. These new opinions have not had time to be dissected and discussed.

Why not simply ban them all?

The Government could pass a law that bans expression of all political ideas and opinions apart from those that are on a pre-approved list. This list would contain all of the speech that the Government believes is not harmful to anyone else. It could be called the Dangerous Opinions Act. It would then become illegal to express any political opinion that didn’t have an exemption under the Act.

Because talking about the effects of mass immigration on European society risks stirring up ethnic tensions and hatreds, we could simply ban all such talk in advance, thereby precluding anyone like Southern and Molyneux from ever speaking. Discussing racial differences in IQ would then be illegal. Questioning the mainstream media would be illegal. Questioning the Government would be illegal.

Perhaps the Government could create some kind of central authority that can be tasked with determining what opinions may be freely expressed and what opinions have to be criminalised and repressed for the greater good. This Ministry would be concerned with the truth and the promulgation of same, so naturally it should be called the Ministry of Truth.

All of this might sound fairly draconian, but the people would still have the right to petition the Government to allow certain opinions to be expressed. If enough people wanted to express a certain opinion, they would merely need to petition the current Minister of Truth, and perhaps get enough signatures for a referendum on that opinion. Over time, good opinions would become legal while the bad ones stayed illegal.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

The Government Religion

God was dead, but God has returned to life in the form of government. This essay examines a terrifying proposition: taken together, the number of people who are willing to do violence to others on behalf of their government greatly exceeds the number of people willing to do violence to others on behalf on any other mentality or ideology. Worship of government is its own religion.

For those who follow the Government religion, any pronouncement from the government is the same as if the clouds have parted and the voice of God had boomed from the heavens. The government simply cannot lie – its size and power makes it both omnipresent and omnibenevolent. Therefore, every law and decree passed by government is regarded by its followers as if it was written in holy scripture.

If all the available scientific and medical evidence says, for example, that cannabis is medicinal and can be used to treat nausea and insomnia, but the government says that cannabis is not medicinal, then the followers of the Government religion will say that cannabis is not medicinal. The scientific literature and all the evidence be damned – the government says it’s not medicinal, therefore it isn’t.

Before any decision can be made, the question has to be asked: does the government approve of this? This is the government-worshipper’s equivalent of the Christian question “What would Jesus do?”. All actions must be viewed through the prism of whether they serve government objectives. If not, those actions are sinful and must be discouraged.

Police officers are usually fanatical followers of the Government religion, which offers a ready excuse for them to discharge their baser, sadistic instincts on members of the public. Without the Government religion, Police officers would not have the authority to physically abuse people without punishment. The Government religion raises these people, who would otherwise mostly be criminals, into a position of prestige, and they return the favour with obedience.

Mental health workers are another. The job of a mental health worker is to determine when a person has lost touch with reality and to guide them back to it. The problem with this is that they have no natural or philosophical explanation of the nature of reality and so they rely on the government to provide one. This means that the government literally decides what reality is for mental health workers. They are consequently hopelessly mired in the religion.

Bureaucrats are a third, and arguably the worst of all three. Bureaucrats are to the Government religion what the cardinals are to Catholicism. They are the ones that seek to organise the world so that their religion might be dominant. In the case of the bureaucrat, the objective is to use Police officers and mental health workers to destroy those who oppose the religion.

If one reasons by analogy to dogs, we can see why government workers behave the way they do. Dogs are completely loyal to the people that feed them, on account of the gratitude created from that dog no longer having to worry about where its daily food comes from. In a state of Nature, the majority of creatures must live in a state of extreme anxiety on account of the pressure to acquire sufficient food resources to live. Anyone feeding a dog takes all that anxiety away, and the resulting gratitude leads to loyalty.

By the same token, the natural stress of finding enough money to live on has been alleviated, in the life of the government worker, by the government. Therefore, the government worker regards the government with the same undying, arse-licking loyalty that a dog regards its owner with. The government provides food and shelter like God provides manna from Heaven, and in exchange the government worker obeys the orders they are given.

Because Government-worshippers treat the desire of their government as if it was the Will of God, they are capable of causing immense destruction and human suffering. All of the death camp guards on both the Nazi and Soviet side were Government-worshippers, as were the Chinese mandarins responsible for the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward. Those responsible for destroying their own young people through conducting the War on Drugs on them also commit their crimes out of a sense of the holiness of government directives.

Because Government-worshippers are responsible for most of the crimes against humanity committed throughout history, the rest of us need to oppose the spread of the cult and the fanaticism of its followers, for our own good. The best way to do this is to cause the Government-worshipper to realise that the authority they worship is fallible. This is why they are extremely reluctant to consider the possibility, much like any religious person.

The discovery that the government may have actually been wrong about something is enough to shatter the life of the government-worshipper. This will cause them to have a crisis of faith, which, like the crises of faith suffered by followers of other religions, can lead to the complete rejection of the Government religion.

The more doubt a government worker has in the infallibility of their paymaster, the less likely it is that that worker will commit a human rights abuse. Therefore, causing people to lose faith in their government is essential to keeping the rest of us safe. Making Government-worshippers realise that the authority they worship is fallible is the key to undermining the Government religion.

VJMP Reads: David Seymour’s Own Your Future VIII

A Liberal Vision for New Zealand in 2017

This reading carries on from here.

The seventh chapter in Own Your Future is ‘Public Safety’. Here Seymour opens the chapter with one of the non-sequiturs that seems to be characteristic of his style. He talks about visiting a prison, and seeing the downcast faces on the prisoners there. For some reason he lurches directly from this to stating his belief in deterrence being the primary solution to the crime problem.

It’s hard to believe that Seymour is writing this chapter with a straight face. He claims to be tough on the causes of crime – yet his party supports National every step of the way in ripping down the social welfare that people need to get out of the poverty that causes crime.

Indeed, the facade soon slips, and he openly admits that ACT Policy is based around “making the consequences of committing crimes sufficiently bad that people will decide not to do it in the first place.” Within the space of a few sentences he goes from complaining about the cost of prisons to crowing about ACT success in keeping people in prison for longer through their three strikes policy.

From there, Seymour launches into a rant against burglary. Fittingly for a party that values property more highly than people, he wants to add burglary to the list of crimes that involve the three strikes law, the third offence being punished by a minimum three years without parole. Helpfully, he informs us that “The aim [of burglary] is getting more money or goods without working for them or being given them.”

At this point, Seymour serves up a genuinely good idea. Prisoners often find it difficult to return to civilian life after their sentence on account of poor literacy and numeracy, so Seymour proposes that they can get time knocked off their sentences by completing adult reading and maths courses while in prison. Any prisoner who is already educated can get time off for helping to tutor the other prisoners.

This is actually a really good policy, but it’s incredible that Seymour, as a supposedly principled libertarian, doesn’t mention cannabis law reform here. If it costs $105,000 a year to keep a person in jail, we could save tens of millions immediately just by letting cannabis growers and dealers out. He doesn’t suggest this, even though it seems like such an obvious thing for a principled, libertarian party to suggest at this juncture.

This newspaper wondered some time ago if perhaps David Seymour is the biggest coward in the New Zealand Parliament. It’s astonishing that ACT, who barely get more votes than the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, aren’t willing to support cannabis law reform as their libertarian counterparts everywhere else have done, when the entire country is crying out for it. They could take votes off the Greens and the Opportunity Party simply by offering a right-wing alternative to how to legalise cannabis.

The Holocaust Religion

Most people think that, with the decline of Christianity, there is no longer a religion that unifies the Western world. These people are in error, because the forces and social phenomena that led to the rise of every previous religion still exist, and continue to give rise to new ones. Not only has the Holocaust been mythologised to the point of being an actual religion, but this religion, as this essay will examine, is now the one that unifies the West.

Where history becomes religion is when you aren’t allowed to question it without facing strict censure. In any society, whatever it is that you’re not allowed to question is the mainstream religion, which has to be respected otherwise the transgressor will face the wrath of God.

Back in the day, you couldn’t question God or the Bible, else you be shunned and persecuted by your fellows. Now you can’t question whether or not the Holocaust happened. British writer David Irving got a three-year prison sentence for denying the Holocaust in Austria, and many Western groups would like to bring in similar laws in their own country.

There might well be piles of evidence that supports the contention that eleven million people were killed in the Nazi extermination camps, of who six million were Jews. This essay does not contest this belief. But there are piles of evidence for many historical events, yet questioning any of these is permissible – even such events as the genocide of the American Indians, involving ten times as many deaths as the Nazi genocide.

The Holocaust occupies a unique place in that it is uniquely unquestionable, taboo – sacred.

After all, you’re allowed to question everything else, no matter how obscene. You’re allowed to question whether the Earth revolves around the Sun, or whether European colonisation of the New World was a good thing, or whether ghosts exist. You’re even allowed to argue that mutilating the genitals of a newborn baby is a legitimate spiritual or medicinal practice.

But question the Holocaust and people gasp and go quiet, and a dark shadow seems to fall, as if one was playing with opening Pandora’s Box.

In this new form of Abrahamism (perhaps we could call it Holocaustianity), the Jew is Abel and the Nazi is Cain. Hitler is the devil, the Germans the Romans and the Jew is collectively Jesus: enlightened, persecuted, innocent. The creation event is World War Two, when the Allies banded together to defeat the Nazis. This was the act that bonded the West together and created the modern world.

Because of the pre-eminence of the Holocaust religion among Western political and media elites, we’re led to believe that the deaths of the six million somehow collectively won us a spiritual peace or absolution from evil. This sacrifice replaces the sacrifice of Jesus as the one that we should all be grateful for; we should all grovel before the priests because of it. Questioning this narrative is worthy of rage, disgust, social rejection.

The charge of “Holocaust denial” is a modern way of saying blasphemy, the religion so blasphemed against in this case being the Holocaust religion. To suggest that fewer than six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust is to blaspheme. This is effectively a heresy, in other words a sin against God, and deserves to be treated as such, with the utmost contempt and censure. Germany even went as far as putting an old lady in prison for questioning this sacred myth.

The reason why this Holocaust narrative was chosen and given sacred status is not because of the machinations of some Jewish conspiracy, finally triumphant. It has arisen simply because it serves the geopolitical aims of the Western ruling classes.

Israel serves very effectively as a Western colony and beachhead in the middle of the Middle East, allowing the Western ruling classes to project power into that area easily, which keeps the oil flowing. If that oil stops flowing, the world population is set to drastically decrease, because that oil is the basis of the fertilisers that grows most of the world’s food. Hence, the presence of Israel solves an immensely important strategic objective.

To that end, the Holocaust religion has been promoted to dispel the sense of outrage that the Israeli presence in the Middle East would otherwise have. The Jews must have Israel, we are told, because the alternative is Holocaust.

Central to the Holocaust religion is the belief that Jews must be completely absolved of any blame in the events of World War Two. The Holocaust didn’t happen because of things like the Jewish support for the German Revolution of 1918-19, or the Jewish influence in the Holodomor that starved ten million Ukrainians to death. The creed states that the Holocaust happened because of the inexplicable unique malice of the German people, or at least the Nazi Party.

This means that anything Hitler is believed to have said is exactly wrong and something we shouldn’t do. Note that this has no relevance to what Hitler actually did say. It doesn’t matter, for instance, that Hitler said that Islam was a natural warrior religion and would have suited his vision for an all-conquering Germany perfectly – if a person criticises Islam, that sounds like someone criticising Jews and therefore criticing Islam makes you a Nazi.

Any discussion or line of discussion that leads to even the smallest likelihood of someone raising what some like to call the “Jewish Question”, like alt-right talk, is the forbidden fruit, and media figures like Lauren Southern are the hissing serpent that wants to corrupt the minds of the innocent. This is the power that the Holocaust religion has.

The curious thing is that America has just recently become a net exporter of oil, thanks to technological advances that have driven down the cost of recovering oil from shale and from tar sands. This means that the geostrategic imperative to prop up Israel is about to disappear. One can predict from that that the grip of the Holocaust religion will also fade.