Recommended Articles
A Passion for Life By Butler Shaffer
"Political systems do far more than diminish the material quality of our lives or deprive us of our liberties. To the degree of their power over us, they help to deplete the passion for living that gives meaning to our experiences here on earth. One sees a reflection of this inner emptiness in the zombie-like behavior of men and women who have long been accustomed to tyrannical regimes, or in the looks of detachment in the eyes of concentration camp prisoners. We have all seen newsreel footage of persons being liberated from Nazi imprisonment. One would think that being freed from months or years of dehumanized captivity would have brought looks of joy into their faces. Instead, we saw expressions of the deeper costs of tyranny that go far beyond the calculation of the dead: the breaking of the human spirit.
Statists do not want us to think in terms of how their practices erode our sense of being human. While they are not comfortable with our awareness that their systems resulted in the deaths of some two hundred million persons in the twentieth century alone, they can live with such information. After all, these are only collective statistics, abstractions which, like references to "gross domestic product," "rates of unemployment," or the "Dow-Jones industrial average," cloud the costs individuals always pay at the hands of the state. Such information may be an embarrassment to statists, but it poses no significant threat, for it is too disconnected from personal experience to rouse individual souls from their slumbers."
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Statists do not want us to think in terms of how their practices erode our sense of being human. While they are not comfortable with our awareness that their systems resulted in the deaths of some two hundred million persons in the twentieth century alone, they can live with such information. After all, these are only collective statistics, abstractions which, like references to "gross domestic product," "rates of unemployment," or the "Dow-Jones industrial average," cloud the costs individuals always pay at the hands of the state. Such information may be an embarrassment to statists, but it poses no significant threat, for it is too disconnected from personal experience to rouse individual souls from their slumbers."
...Full Article Here...
Patriotism as a Threat to Capitalism by Kel Kelly
"Having learned that the government acts in ways detrimental to its citizens economically, and by causing wars, we should ask exactly why we support our politicians, why we support most of our military operations, and why we support our very national identity. In short, we should ask ourselves why we are patriotic."
"What is patriotism? What exactly are we supporting when we are patriotic? If the answer is "our country," does that mean a geographical region that our government has artificially and arbitrarily identified as its own? If so, does our patriotism change when the boundaries change? Should we not have been patriotic toward the southwestern states before we stole them from Mexico? Should the residents there have been patriotic toward the United States once they were forced to be citizens? Should the citizens of the various countries of the Soviet republic have been patriotic to the USSR after they were forced at gunpoint to be countrymen? Should the citizens of Czechoslovakia — who were forced together by Woodrow Wilson — have been patriotic toward the Czech republic or to Slovakia after the nation split up? Geographical borders are only imaginary, temporary, lines."
...Full Article Here...
"Having learned that the government acts in ways detrimental to its citizens economically, and by causing wars, we should ask exactly why we support our politicians, why we support most of our military operations, and why we support our very national identity. In short, we should ask ourselves why we are patriotic."
"What is patriotism? What exactly are we supporting when we are patriotic? If the answer is "our country," does that mean a geographical region that our government has artificially and arbitrarily identified as its own? If so, does our patriotism change when the boundaries change? Should we not have been patriotic toward the southwestern states before we stole them from Mexico? Should the residents there have been patriotic toward the United States once they were forced to be citizens? Should the citizens of the various countries of the Soviet republic have been patriotic to the USSR after they were forced at gunpoint to be countrymen? Should the citizens of Czechoslovakia — who were forced together by Woodrow Wilson — have been patriotic toward the Czech republic or to Slovakia after the nation split up? Geographical borders are only imaginary, temporary, lines."
...Full Article Here...