1.  Empire of Lies
    By L. Neil Smith 

Special to TLE

         Presented to the Libertarian Party of New Mexico
              Albuquerque, New Mexico, June 15, 2003

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Children of the American Revolution, the great
libertarian author and teacher Robert LeFevre once told me that the first
money the United States government ever spent was a $20,000 check from a
Dutch bank, drawn on an account that didn't exist.

Hence the expression, "You low-down, _no-account_ bast -- ... " whatever.

Apparently this piece of financial chicanery was the doing of one Alexander
Hamilton, a _literal_ bast -- whatever, who also favored deficit spending
and maintaining a handsome national debt because he reasoned that if the
government owed people money, they'd have an interest in making sure it
survived.

Thus the American Empire was born in the shadow of a lie.

It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But
that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin,
the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.

Take the Civil War -- the name itself is a lie. A civil war is what happens
when two groups compete violently for control of the same government.
That's not what happened in America in the 1860s. Whatever its other
faults, the South had no interest at all in taking over and ruling the
North. What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession, a war
of independence, no different in principle from what happened in America in
the 1770s and 1780s.

What makes it different in some people's minds is that one side in the War
between the States was fighting to end slavery, and the other side,
perversely, to preserve it. The trouble with that is that what goes on in
some people's minds is often the result of a lie, and this is one of those
instances.

Both sides in the American Revolution held and used slaves -- does that
somehow make American independence illegitimate? There are those prepared
to say it does.

But the War between the States was not about slavery, at all. It was about
discriminatory taxation -- the South was paying 80 percent at the time --
and the centralization of authority. The best evidence that it was not
about slavery lies in the writings of abolitionists like Frederick
Douglass, who demanded, rather late in the war, that it be _made_ to be
about slavery. He would not have demanded that if it were already so, now
would he?

If the War for Southern Independence was about slavery, why did slavery
remain a healthy institution in the North? Why did the Union army take
slaves away from Southerners, not to free them, but to use their labor in
their war against the South? Why were slaves kept busy, all through the
war, rebuilding the capitol building in Washington, D.C., to Abraham
Lincoln's imperial taste?

Perhaps the greatest lie about the War between the States is that Lincoln
was "the Great Emancipator". Lincoln emancipated _nobody_. The
man freed not a single slave. His celebrated Emancipation Proclamation did
not apply to the North -- that might have offended too many fat Republican
industrial mercantilists who owned their own black slaves. Neither did the
Emancipation Proclamation apply to the border states, who might have been
offended enough by it to secede, along with their Southern neighbors.

The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the South, to those states
Lincoln did not control. As a result, it freed no one. It was nothing but
propaganda, which is perhaps the fanciest euphemism ever cooked up for a
plain, simple _lie_.

The horrible truth about the War between the States is that it ended with
many more individuals enslaved than when it began. Before the war, most
Americans were free. They owned their own lives. But by the time it ended,
everybody was the property of the state. Men were nothing but replaceable
parts in the machinery of war. Women were nothing but factories to replace
them. And the government could take your life -- or anything else it wanted
-- any time it wanted, for any reason it cared to offer.

Lincoln set all of the precedents for the monsters and for the monstrous
regimes that followed after him. Even today, his example is being used by
the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as an excuse to enslave and murder
Chechens.

Now I wrote about all of this, and more, several years ago, in an article I
called "The American Lenin", and, as such, it circulated on the
Internet for quite a while. Believe me, there was nothing even slightly
controversial, historically speaking, in that article. All of my facts came
from sources favorable to "Honest Abe", historians who approved
of the way that he undid the American Revolution and ravaged the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights just as his generals undid civilized
decency and ravaged the South.

When my friend Vin Suprynowicz published "The American Lenin" in
the _Las Vegas Review Journal_, though, it stirred up an even greater storm
of excrement than when I'd defended the rights of smokers. I was called
everything any columnist has ever been called, including the author of
"the single worst piece of tripe ever published in an American
newspaper". I was proud of that one, and I wore it as a .sig line in
my e-mail for months.

The really fun part came when a retired history professor from UNLV wrote
to the _RJ_ to say, "I hate to tell you folks, but Smith got every bit
about Lincoln and his war right, and them some." To my eternal regret,
the paper didn't choose to print his letter, but it gave me satisfaction,
and I felt vindicated when some time later, Thomas diLorenzo published his
monumental _The Real Lincoln_, which was everything my little article
wasn't: scholarly, respectable, and full of footnots and fresh information.

He showed me, to my surprise, that I'd been entirely too kind to a man I'd
merely called a mass-murdering megalomaniac. Of course he got exactly the
same excrement piled on his head that I had, but this is his field, and
he's better prepared -- in fact, he's an academic pit bull -- to deal with
the aggravation.

The point here is that I hadn't come up with any new information. Just
exactly as I'm doing in this speech, today, I'd simply assembled a
collection of facts that everybody already knew -- for example that Lincoln
had illegally arrested 15,000 Northerners for disagreeing with him about
the war. I then cast it in a bright enough moral light -- that's my
specialty -- so that everybody, whether they wanted to or not, must see it
for what it was. I could have called it "The American Hitler", or
"The American Stalin", because the only real limit to the
atrocities Lincoln and his henchmen committed was the technology of the
time.

Allow me to repeat something important. Nothing I'm saying to you today is
any great secret. Most of it comes from sources friendly to the individuals
and policies I criticize. If you doubt me, look it up yourself. This speech
will be posted on my site at www.lneilsmith.com. Put anything you wonder
about in your browser and see what happens. But be prepared to feel
differently about American history. The people of this country are kind and
good for the most part, hardworking and productive. The ideas around which
this country was created are the best that ever were. It is those who would
lead us -- whether we want to be led or not -- and their policies that have
brought all of it close to ruin.

In any case, the War of Northern Aggression certainly wasn't the first
conflagration kindled by a handful of lies, nor was it by any means to be
the last.

Remember the _Maine_? In 1898, a U.S. Navy warship blew up in Havana,
almost certainly due to poor boiler maintenance. But William Randolph
Hearst, an evil newspaper publisher who wanted the excitement of a war to
report in his chain of newspapers -- remember folks, "If it bleeds it
leads" -- and William McKinley, a President who talked to fairies at
the bottom of his garden, made sure that the frailest, most
poverty-stricken Old World nation this side of Turkey got the blame for it.

Thus the Spanish American War began with a lie. In the middle was Teddy
Roosevelt's mythical cavalry charge up San Juan Hill -- which was actually
made on foot against a tiny band of incredibly courageous Spanish riflemen.
The war finally ended with a lie when the Moros, people of the Philippines,
whom we'd talked into fighting on our side with promises of independence,
learned that they'd simply traded one master for another. They objected to
this, so we killed as many as we could.

But that war was merely a warm-up for what was to come in 1917, after
Woodrow Wilson had gotten himself reelected by falsely promising American
parents that their sons would never be sent to fight in a foreign war.
There happened to be a dandy one going on in Europe at the time.

A quick perusal of the Internet reveals that there are still defenders of
the statist quo (to snatch a phrase from my friend Scott Bieser) who want
the infamous Zimmerman telegram to have been the real thing. Americans
became outraged when, supposedly, Germany told Mexico that if it came into
the War to End All Wars (another lie, of course) on their side, they could
have everything back -- Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California,
Cleveland -- that they had lost to the gringos since 1846.

Today many historians -- those not subsisting on federal grants -- believe
that the Zimmerman telegram was a hoax cooked up between the American State
Department and the British government to help bring us into what Wilson
proclaimed was "the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy".

Of course the statists claim that _that's_ a hoax.

Then there's _Lusitania_, that innocent, defenseless British passenger
liner with 1500 sweet, unsuspecting American tourists aboard, cruelly set
upon and sent to Davy Jones' locker by that evil, sneaky, underhanded
German Weapon of Mass Destruction, the submarine (which happens to have
been invented and first used by an American during the Revolutionary War).

There's a big problem with the conventional interpretation of these events,
one that the British government tried to conceal for decades, even
threatening deadly military force against the folks who refound the
_Titanic_, when they got too close to doing the same thing with the
_Lusitania_. What underwater explorers were not permitted to discover,
explorers of paperwork eventually did. Under international law, the
_Lusitania_ -- which was equipped with deck guns, hidden under canvas, and
was burdened with a hold full of military munitions -- was legally a ship
of war.

And, therefore, fair game.

Step forward a generation. If you study the domestic policies of the
Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administrations, and compare
them with the policies of Adolf Hitler and his mentor, Benito Mussolini,
you will eventually come -- however reluctantly -- to the conclusion that
World War II was not a conflict between fascism and something else, as
advertised, but a conflict between competing brands of fascism.

The catchphrase of the day was that Mussolini had managed to make Italian
trains run on time. And this country -- whatever country it happened to be,
America, Britain, Germany -- needed better discipline. You still hear talk
like that today, from terminally self-impressed bucketheads, incapable of
learning from history or from other people's experience, like William
Bennet and John Ashcroft. Today, as it has been since the late 1950s, the
menace consists of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll.

Back in the 30s, it was, well, sex again -- and alcohol and jazz.
Prohibition had laid an egg, you were expected to believe, not because it
was one of the butt-stupidest political ideas in the history of mankind,
but because people had stubbornly and upatriotically refused to give up
their individuality and the choices that naturally come with it.

Even worse, Roosevelt's version of collectivism had failed as badly as
Vladimir Ilich Lenin's. With the exception of those being illegally kept
busy making war preparations when we were at peace, more Americans were
unemployed when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, than had been when
Roosevelt was elected on his promises to end the Depression.

Oh well, a good war -- and maybe nationalizing industry -- would change all
that. And there just happened to be a great war brewing once again on the
next continent over. Another catch phrase sprang (or possibly oozed) into
being: "There's a war on, over there, and America's going to be in
it!"

For the Roosevelt administration, the question was how. The answer turned
out to be, "Intrepid", a codename for a secret project under
which the British government could run a spy ring on American soil,
disguised as an import company and headquartered in plush Rockefeller
Center offices, assassinate German and Japanese agents -- or simply those
individuals they didn't approve of -- and answer no questions about it.

At the same time, the administration was doing everything it could to stir
up trouble with Japan. Roosevelt himself made radio speeches in which he
referred to them as "Japs" or "Nips" -- if I were to
use equivalent expressions in this speech, for black or Hispanic people, I
might not leave this room uninjured, and I'd certainly never be asked to
speak publicly again.

Again, illegally, Roosevelt shut off Japan's supply of imported oil which
forced them to invade other places to get it. That brought out the very
worst in the Japanese character, which was exactly what Roosevelt needed
and wanted.

Finally, after a lot of diplomatic wrangling designed to frustrate and
anger the Japanese -- silencing those among them who wanted peace --
Roosevelt bottled up the most obsolete components of the Pacific Fleet in a
harbor with a narrow, shallow mouth, put out the word that no warnings from
American ships in the Pacific or the new radar just installed above the
harbor were to reach Washington, and let the Japanese do as they wanted,
which, with enough goading and insulting, they eventually did.

You can read part of this story in John Toland's _Infamy_. When it came
out, I discussed it with my book editor at Random House, a Soviet affairs
expert, so-called, who had dismissed a prediction in my fourth novel, that
the USSR was about to collapse, as "wishful thinking". He also
dismissed Toland's book, pointing out that a critical witness Toland
mentions, one "Seaman Z" had never come forward. Unfortunately
for my editor, Seaman Z did come forward shortly after that, although my
editor never acknowledged afterward that I'd been right and he'd been wrong
in both cases.

So much for experts.

World War II ended in ... if not a lie, then certainly one of the blackest
deeds any government ever committed. The lie is of omission -- the fact
they never told you about this in public school. Under an agreement
Roosevelt made with Joseph Stalin at the Yalta conference, toward the end
of the war, American and British troops conducted "Operation
Keelhaul", in which they rounded up hundreds of thousands of Russian
refugees (Robert LeFevre told me two million), mostly in France, people who
had taken advantage of the chaos of the war to flee Communist tyranny.
American soldiers -- I know the son of one such -- loaded them on boxcars
exactly as the Nazis had done with the Jews, and shipped them back to
Mother Russia where, within hours, they were all shot to death.

Turn the page. It's hard to decide which part of what's sometimes called
the Korean conflict -- which consisted almost entirely of lies --
constituted the biggest lie. Me, I'm stuck between the Harry Truman
Administration's idiotic insistence that it wasn't a war, but a
"Police Action", and the idea that the GIs over there would have
tolerated somebody like Alan Alda for more than thirty seconds without
fragging him.

But we come now to "my generation's war", fully as undeclared as
the one in Korea, although nobody ever quite had the gumption to call it a
police action. The Vietnam war began (here's another lie -- we had
thousands of military people there already as "advisors") is said
to have begun with an "incident" in which North Vietnamese
gunboats attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The amazing
thing is that nobody at the time ever bothered to look at a map and ask
what the hell an American warship was doing in the Gulf of Tonkin to begin
with!

Be that as it may, Lyndon Baines Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin Incident,
as it came to be called, as an excuse to ask Congress (yes, they did that
in those days) to send hundreds of thousands of American troops to Vietnam
and to escalate what was going on there into a war in which we dropped more
bombs on that one tiny country than had been dropped by all sides in World
War II.

It's hard to tell what the War in Vietnam cost. Almost everybody on both
sides lied. Exaggerated "body counts" -- in which dead chickens
and pigs were reported as enemy fatalities -- were the order of the day. I
had a friend on a river patrol boat who used to call in imaginary
firefights on the radio while he and his buddies smoked dope. About 65,000
Americans died, and perhaps as many as two million Vietnamese.

I did learn to see through government lies -- "as through a glass
darkly" -- by taking the number of American B52 bombers the North
Vietnamese claimed they had shot down every month, and the smaller number
the American government admitted to, and averaging them. After the war, it
turned out that my method was correct, within one or two percent.

After the war, we learned something else, too. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
-- the reason offered by the government for destroying so many lives and
scarring so many more -- had never happened. There had been no Gulf of
Tonkin Incident. It had been made up, out of whole cloth.

Oddly enough, what's happening now in the Middle East, began with a bit of
unintended truth, when United States Ambassador April Glasby told Saddam
Hussein that the American government knew that Kuwait was historically a
province of Iraq, and that the Kuwaitis were illegally slant-drilling into
the vast ocean of oil under his country. It was perfectly okay with the
George H.W. Bush Administration, she told him, if he were to invade Kuwait.
And of course it was, to our government, threatened with an end to the Cold
War it had neither predicted nor prepared for, and therefore an end to
about 98 percent of its excuse for existing.

The Iraqui military was made by the whorish media to look powerful and
fierce. Saddam -- who had been _invented_ and placed in power by American
interests -- did his part by promising us "the mother of all
battles". But after a long buildup, the actual fighting was over in a
matter of days, Bush quickly lost any popularity it had gained him, and we
got stuck with Bill and Hillary Clinton for eight endless miserable years.

You know, aside from the little things like Waco, bombing aspirin
factories, or grabbing off mineral lands in the West for the benefit of his
Asian campaign contributors, I never could quite decide why I disliked Bill
Clinton so much. Maybe, I thought, it was his bouffant 1950s hairdo, his
cruel and crooked upper lip, his sleepy killer's eyes, his southern accent
-- why the guy was a pathological Elvis impersonator!

However as I began to write this speech, I realized what it was. It wasn't
that William Jefferson Blythe Clinton was any less truthful than his
predecessors and colleagues. No, indeed. Remember the verse, "Jimmy
Carter never lies, he always tells the truth. 'Cause every time that Jimmy
lies, he grows another tooth."

But, compared to individuals like Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln,
Vladimir Putin, William Randolph Hearst, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt,
Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler,
Benito Mussolini, William Bennet, John Ashcroft, Vladimir Ilich Lenin,
"The Man Called 'Intrepid'", Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman, Lyndon
Baines Johnson, April Glasby, Saddam Hussein, George H.W. Bush, and Alan
Alda, Clinton was just such a _bad_ liar!

But as usual, I have digressed.

Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We are expected,
for example, to believe that the awful events of September 11, 2001
happened, not because we've been murdering people's children and distorting
the survivors' lives in the Middle East for almost a century, but because
they're all evil over there and envy our freedom -- as if we had that much
left to envy.

Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We are expected to believe
that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA
Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom
is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.

Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We're expected to overlook
the fact that, although the majority of the hijackers on September 11 were
Saudis, this government chose to invade Afghanistan -- which just happens
to lie in the path of an oil pipeline George W. Bush and his friends have
been planning to build for more than a decade.

Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We're expected not to
notice that neither Osama bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein (again) has been
captured or their bodies found or even accounted for. It's quite sobering
to think that if the Truman Administration had only taken the same wise
precaution with Adolf Hitler, and not let the Russians find his body, the
Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and neither of the Gulf Wars would have been
necessary -- because we'd still be
fighting World War II!

Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We're expected not to ask
how come they haven't found any of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction. I'll predict to you right now that the only weapons of mass
destruction that ever will be found in Iraq will be those weapons of mass
destruction the US government has imported.

We are all drowning in a sea of lies. During the Vietnam War, statists in
academia and the media asserted that government has a right -- perhaps even
a duty -- to lie in order to preserve itself. And without a doubt, if you
could go back in time and remove each and every lie the government has ever
told, the United States of America -- at least as we know it -- would cease
to exist. I'll remind you all, however, that for government, existence is a
privilege, not a right. And it is a privilege that, according to Thomas
Jefferson, may be revoked at any time.

Or should be revoked at regular intervals.

Short of that, so that we don't drown altogether, I'd like to propose a
project for the Libertarian Party vastly more important than running
somebody for President, or for any other office. It's a project that could,
in fact, make the election of a Libertarian President possible, by putting
more people on our side than anything else we've ever done.

And we wouldn't even have to succeed -- just make a big, happy, noisy,
credible attempt.

I propose a Constitutional Amendment providing that, if any public
official, elected or appointed, at any level of government, is caught lying
to any member of the public for any reason, the punishment shall be death
by public hanging.

I suggest we make this amendment our own, promote it constantly, everywhere
and anywhere we go. I suggest that we corner politicians in public -- and,
even more importantly, candidates -- and ask if they'll support this
amendment. We must demand an answer and keep on demanding it until we get
one.

And then we must ask -- publicly -- why these Republicans and Democrats
think they have a right to lie to the people who not only pay their
hyperinflated salaries, but who are supposed to be running this country.

Take another step. The lie and the secret are two sides of the same coin.
The secret and the lie. The same amendment must make it a hanging offense
-- in public, and without any tasteful Lincolnian bag over the head to hide
the bulging eyeballs and swelling purple tongues -- for any member of the
government to keep secrets of any kind from voters and taxpayers, that is
to say again, from those who are forced at bayonet-point to pay for
government and who are so widely and loudly acclaimed by the apologists for
democracy -- which is another great lie -- to be its masters.

Our motto, which must be as widely heard and understood as "Remember
the Alamo" or "We shall overcome" must be, "No more
secrets, no more lies".

I repeat, no more secrets, no more lies.

As I said earlier this morning, the truth is _not_ "the first casualty
of war". The truth has to be slaughtered long before a war can begin.
Therefore, if you would have peace: no more secrets, no more lies.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Children of the American Revolution, for some
time, now, our political system has selected exclusively for evil, stupid,
and crazy bastards who can't draw a breath without telling a lie.

I say, no more secrets, no more lies.

So now we will either find out if they can tell the truth to save their
lives, or they'll publicly insist on continuing to lie, making it clearer
to the voters than ever what they are -- and by contrast, what _we_ are.

No more secrets, no more lies.

It might just turn out to be a better slogan than "The Party of
Principle". Even individuals brought up by the public schools and the
mass media will understand it -- they never seem to have understood what a
principle is. And it might just help us to _stay_ the party of principle,
as well.

No more secrets, no more lies.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Children of the American Revolution, I thank you.

--
Three-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith is the author of 23 books,
including _The American Zone_,  _Forge of the Elders_,  _Pallas_, _The
Probability Broach_, _Hope_ (with Aaron Zelman), and his collection of
articles and speeches,  _Lever Action_, all of which may be purchased
through his website   "The Webley Page"   at 
http://www.lneilsmith.com. Autographed copies may be had from the author at
lneil{at}lneilsmith.com.
                             ******
 L. Neil Smith writes regular columns for _The Libertarian Enterprise_
, _Sierra Times_  ,
and for _Rational Review_.

---