It may seem a little over heated at first, but suffice it to say the point he is making, though perhaps too forcefully, is basically this: sociopaths exist (and you gotta admit he is not wrong on that).
Here are some excerpts [all emphasis is from the original].
There will always be those who are easily seduced by the offer of wealth and unlimited power. But one of the lessons we can glean from an unflinching look at history and human nature is that power-lust inevitably trumps greed. The power to harm others – and to harm others without consequence - is irresistible to a profoundly evil subset of humanity. Real trouble begins when such people acquire power.
So here’s a bold assertion that many of you will dismiss out of hand: there are those in government - and those who seek control of your government - who simply want you dead. They would kill you if they could get away with it. Why? Because you are in their way. Failing that, they would settle for taking everything you have if they felt that they could do so without being held accountable. They would use the apparatus of the state to censor your speech, punish you for your politically incorrect thoughts, confiscate the fruits of your labor, seize your property, render you helpless and defenseless and in the end, dictate the very terms of your existence if they could do so with impunity. These are killers without conscience. We can come up with a long list of those whose outlook regard humankind as little more than chattel, but there are four individuals whose ideas connect the totalitarian dots in some interesting ways. They have a history and the ideas that animate them have a pedigree.
The auhor then gives a single paragraph summary of the contributions of four different thinkers that have been influential on totalitarian thought: Marx, Freud, B. F. Skinner and Nietzsche. It is of note that all of these men were athiests, one a suicide (Freud), and one went insane (Nietzsche).
[Nietzsche] saw God not as an invention, but as a casualty. He wrote in 1886: "The greatest event in recent times - that 'God is Dead,' that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable - is beginning to cast its first shadows upon Europe." The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way of the development of the New Man who Nietzsche said would be ‘beyond good and evil’. Nietzsche knew that in Europe, the decline of religion as a guide to conscience and morality would leave a huge vacuum.
Who or what would fill that vacuum?
Nietzsche thought that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power,' which he felt offered a better and more persuasive explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. The very concept of good and evil would be discarded as the product of weak and inferior minds.
But above all, Nietzsche believed that the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.
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And how did that 'will to power' express itself in our times? Jean-Francois Revel, writing over a century after Nietzsche, said of the Europeans in particular,
"It was they, after all, who made the twentieth century the darkest in history; it was they who brought about the two unprecedented cataclysms of two World Wars; and it was they who invented and put into place the two most criminal regimes ever inflicted on the human race - the pinnacles of evil and imbecility achieved in a space of less than thirty years."
If we have learned anything at all from the sad and sorry history if the previous century, it is this: whenever and wherever a government assumes the power to violate your fundamental rights to life and liberty, those who wish to strip you of your rights and claim your life as the property of the state will sooner or later gain control of the apparatus of the state. And they will use it, as I have noted above, without restraint or moral considerations of any kind. Regardless of the scope of that authority, they will exercise it to its fullest extent. If that authority encompasses the power to kill hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people, sooner or later, these killers without conscience will make the fullest and most horrible use of it. The history of the 20th century bears stark and irrefutable witness to this fact. The record is crystal clear in this regard: 'state actors' will use and abuse whatever power and authority they have, to whatever extent they can, and they will actively seek the means and the opportunity to do so.
It's really worth reading the whole thing. It's not overly long compared to some other pieces I've run across on freerepublic.com, and the signal to noise ratio is very high. Good stuff.
Thought provoking.
Here are some great "one liners" from this piece:
Genocide: among other things, the killing of people by a government because of their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language).
Politicide: the murder of any person or people by a government because of their politics or for political purposes.
Mass Murder: the indiscriminate killing of any person or people by a government.
Democide: The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.
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No one wages war on humanity in the name of individualism - R. J. Rummel
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"Deserted altars are inhabited by demons." - Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn on the effect of spiritual decline in Europe.
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the evils and horrors that arise from the abuse of power far outweigh whatever good that power might achieve.
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Power seldom goes unabused.
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"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the 'good' of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock
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"It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression." - Erik Hoffer
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The time is coming when we must either begin the "long march" back through the institutions to reclaim them and to restore the principles of freedom and human dignity to their rightful place, or we must separate from the killers without conscience and those who condone them. ... We cannot co-exist in the same society with such monsters.
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Those who feel they have the right to dictate the terms of existence to everyone else are on a deadly collision course with those of us who understand that no such 'right' exists. The history of the 20th century stands in mute witness to the brutal tragedy of appeasement and the folly of compromise with totalitarian monsters.
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At the most fundamental level, [a] war is being waged ... for the hearts and minds of our children. The battlefields are: popular culture, our public schools, our institutions of higher learning, our churches and even our homes. The casualties are your kids' intellectual and spiritual sovereignty - their inner life and their freedom.
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... there is no reconciliation possible with those who claim that your life simply does not belong to you. You cannot make peace with those who demand not only your economic submission, but your intellectual and spiritual surrender as well. The price of surrender has been and always will be more than anyone of reason and good will can ever care to pay.
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"Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person they would not betray to stay alive..." - Sidney Hook
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There are many of us ... who constitute an entirely different class of humanity than these killers without conscience and their enablers. We are neither interested in power nor its abuse. We are satisfied to live our lives in peace with ourselves and with others, and we derive great satisfaction in seeing others enjoy life as we do. We believe that our lives and our minds are sovereign, and that the fruits of our labors are not forfeit to the first thug who demands them at the point of a gun. We are never the initiators of violence. We judge others solely by their competence and by their character.
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"The greatness of a society does not come from its monuments but from the kind of people it produces. Justice, responsibility, and humanity - these are the qualities of greatness in a people. Only the humane can remain free, and only the free can remain humane..." - G. Warren Nutter, economist, University of Virginia
As before, all emphasis is in the original.
* here is the relevant point from BC:
reading a freeper essay last night, i was stunned by the obvious, that all the 20th century democide (death by government) has been done on the basis of identity grouping –which some malign force has been sharply re-marking in this country, after two centuries of idealizing the opposite national ethos.
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