In Bill Murphy's recent Midas commentary (June 6th), he hit upon one of the more devastating condemnations that can be expressed about a people and their society.
"It will surprise no veteran Café member/GATA supporter," Murphy wrote, "that the New York Times failed to even mention GATA in their New York Times Magazine story on gold on Sunday. I have been through this drill for more than six years....
"This will give you some idea of why I rant the way I do at times -- and have been doing so for many years now. We DO NOT have a free press in the United States. We DO NOT have free markets in America. As a result of controlling the press and rigging US markets, as well as distorting the real US economic numbers, the Orwellians are taking this once great country down the chute. The coming US financial market / economic disaster is going to devastate the average American, as they won't know what hit them and why."
What makes Murphy's commentary such a devastating appraisal of our people and our society? The answer lies in the reason WHY we no longer have a free press in America. For ours is a far more ignominious usurpation of press freedom than those of our historical predecessors.
In all the dictatorships of history, the process of enslavement is always brought about through a blanket "government enforced censorship." It becomes ILLEGAL to tell the truth. It is against the law to utter derogatory statements about one's leaders. To expose the Emperor's nakedness, is punishable by fines and imprisonment. Read the accounts of all the despotisms throughout history -- from the ancient Pharaohs, to the savage monarchial tyrannies of the Middle Ages, to the Nazis and the Communists of the 20th century -- and you will find the heavy hand of the State dictating what can and cannot be uttered in the press. The press is basically nationalized in some way so that the ruling bureaucracy decides what is reported every day to the people. Those who try to report truths deviating from the accepted government line are PROHIBITED BY THE LAW from doing so.
Observe, however, the form of "truth suppression" that is taking place in America today. It is not the kind that the 20th century Germans and Russians endured under their oppressors. In fact, if one looks around today, he sees no laws stifling the freedom of the press at all. This is what allows the elites in Washington and Wall Street to present themselves to the people as legitimate governing agents rather than the sinister cabalists and tyrants that they are in reality. For there are no laws suppressing freedom of the press in America today. There is no legal censorship of the press. Yet we in the gold community know that we do not have a FREE press in this country today! So what gives? How do we explain this conundrum?
The Sanction of the Victim
The answer lies in what Ayn Rand called the "sanction of the victim." Our dictatorship in America today is coming about voluntarily. And because it is, it is the most despicable and shameful form of enslavement that there is. Our media pundits and academics are willingly giving up their freedom, their rights, and their money to the unbridled State. They are willingly muzzling themselves. Like Pavlovian dogs, they continuously react to the appropriate stimuli of the statist elites in hopes of gaining the offered rewards -- acceptance in the herd and its rituals.
There are no laws that say the punditry of America must shun Bill Murphy, or ostracize GATA, or refuse to investigate the blatant "rigging of the markets" in today's world. Yet the pundits never bring GATA's issues of gold and equities rigging up. Silence is all we get. Total silence in face of evidence any educated, intelligent person could understand. And it's not because Murphy's style is the confrontational, in-your-face kind of attack journalism. There are other pundits and journalists (John Embry of Sprott Asset Management in Toronto, Kelly Patricia O'Meara of Insight magazine, etc.) who are not possessed of the pit bull intensity of Murphy, but are equally ostracized by Planet Wall Street and its pusillanimous lackeys.
Why then is this inexcusable default on the truth taking place? Why is our press NOT FREE in a country where there are no laws dictating what can and cannot be written? Our press is not free today because its operators have CHOSEN to sanction the enslavement process that is being smuggled into our lives by the Washington-Wall Street cartel of economic fascism. They have CHOSEN to give up the essence of what makes men manly and women stalwart. They have relinquished that inner spirit that drives all strong-willed people to never bend in face of what they know to be wrong, what they know to be tyrannical, what they know to be sinister and slimy.
This is what Ayn Rand meant with her formulation of the "sanction of the victim" in her great novel Atlas Shrugged. She demonstrated quite powerfully that the modern dictatorship comes about because its victims willingly sanction it. They actually work for it; they subconsciously assist their rulers in taking away the most treasured gift they have been given -- their freedom.
How this "sanction of the victim" mindset has come about is a complex phenomenon that naturally cannot be analyzed deeply in one article. But I have written a good general overview of why and how it has been brought about in my article, Invasion of the Mind Snatchers, for any readers who are interested in delving further into the issue. And it is a very big issue -- why Americans are so readily giving up their freedom and their rights in their embrace of the deceptive sirens of the New World Order.
Suffice it to say that Rand exposed one of the most powerful tools that modern day dictatorships make use of to take people's freedom away from them. The power elites convince the populace that what they (the elites) are doing is "inevitable," "desirable," and "progressive." The pitiful thing is that it requires a servile mentality to buy into it. And regrettably there are thousands of pundits today who are just such servile mentalities.
These are the members of today's media. There are no laws that say they must obey the establishment elites and ignore all reports about market rigging. Yet this is precisely what they ritualistically do.
The Archetype Servile Mentality
Back in the 1970s, I worked in the real estate business in Las Vegas over a ten-year period. And during that decade I traveled in a social circle that included real estate agents, finance people, lawyers, stockbrokers, etc. It also included two aspiring journalists who worked for one of the secondary (or weekly) newspapers in the area. As I think back on these two media wanabees now, I see that they were very dangerous humans because of the warped philosophical and psychological drives that motivated them.
I would like to portray a brief depiction of their personas and their beliefs, for these two aspiring journalists were basically archetypes of the mindset that permeates today's media class from L.A. to New York. The difference lies only in the fact that they were never going to make it into the big leagues. But in regards to their guiding philosophy and their level of intellectual integrity, they were identical to the bigger league models.
In observing the twisted cerebral workings of these two aggravating per¬sonalities, I came to understand one of the most important reasons why freedom is always in jeopardy of being destroyed whenever and wherever it has gained ascendancy in civilization. We'll call these two past associates of mine Robo and Barry.
Robo was a short, stocky Charlie Chaplan look alike, with the personality of Cliff Claven on the TV sitcom, Cheers. Barry informed him one night over beer, that he was the "most interesting bore he'd ever met." Robo needed elevator shoes to reach five and a half feet, and apparently suffered from a complex about his shortness. All his conversations were pedantic marathons devoted to giant, detailed dissertations on every mundane subject mankind had ever chronicled in the Statistical Abstract. It was as if he hoped glib, gargantuan displays of "facts" would make him into a big man like other men. Not unlike the Orwellians of today's establishment media hoping to bamboozle the populace into acceptance of their own lie -- that they still revere adherence to truth because they portray voluminous government released data glibly and skillfully. One thinks of the bland automatons that work for each new administration in Washington (such as former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer).
Barry, on the other hand, was a big, grungy Woody Allen sort of character, with a penchant for cutting cynicism and humorous vulgarity that would put Andrew Dice Clay to shame. One of his favorite movie heroes was actually Ratso Ritzo in the 1969 trash exploitation flick, Midnight Cowboy. Oozing envy for all who displayed superior skills, Barry saw life basically in terms of what he could mooch from his friends by means of his weird wit, and coax from the government by means of his crypto socialism.
Barry could articulate thought, no doubt about that, but it was thought that squirted all over the place and lacked logical coherence. What's worse, it was adrift from moral-philosophical moorings. It was totally amoral (very much like our big league media pundits today). Vulgarized humor was the real distinctive talent nature had bestowed upon him, and he cultivated this attribute as other men practice music, or law, or athletics. Every human encounter with him inevitably turned into bouts of pornographic crudity, peppered with razor like barbs hurled at mankind's traditional values (very much like today's Rolling Stones journalists, or the rank vulgarity of Chris Rock.)
Infatuation with vulgarity was only a sideline to Barry, however. His real dream was to be an intellectual. Actually becoming one was apparently too much work, so he settled for the appearance of intellectuality, which he had decided meant the knowledge and use of large words sprinkled into collectivist diatribes against the American concept of free enterprise. He was constantly memorizing vocabulary books, as if prolific displays of "big words" would somehow make him into a thinker who was respected for his mind. Such books sat everywhere like icons of salvation in the dingy two room flat out of which he operated.
Over the years as I became more philosophically educated, I came to see that these two America haters were the ultimate result of the modern school system and its inculcation of Marxist-Keynesian irrationalism. Their brains were cognitively stunted, for they thought only in terms of the short run. (When asked once about the fact that in the long run, his inflationist monetary policies would surely wreak havoc, Keynes replied that, "In the long run, we're all dead." This kind of clever superficiality has come to pass for wisdom in today's illiterate journalistic world.)
Thus, discussing the long-range ideological forces of civilization, or the integrated nature of existence, or the "big picture" with Robo and Barry was like washing water over glass. Nothing ever soaked in. They were incapable of any vision beyond a decade, unable to carry cause and effect relationships back to first principles, exasperatingly devoid of all sense of history, impervious to reason, and obsessively enamoured with the gaucheries of materialism. Truth, idealism and the long run were not concepts to which they were able to relate.
Sophistry governed their modus operandi as instinct drives worker ants. But this was inevitable, for the dominating characteristic of the modern mind is its compulsion to evade reality. (Witness Wall Street and Washington these days.) Skillful sophistry naturally becomes the first and most important tool all media pundits need to acquire so as to maintain their evasions. Sophistry allows them to hold contradictory premises; to flaunt the facts; to choose pusillanimous paths, yet still consider themselves brave; to employ massive government coercion and dispense arbitrary privileges, yet still claim to advocate freedom and objective law. It allows them to sanction the evils of despotism yet con themselves into believing it is a "new kind of freedom."
Robo and Barry had decided early in life that any form of a free-market world was intolerable. Early on they had taken flight into the paradigmatic falsities of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Noam Chomsky. Like homing pigeons, all their ideas moved toward justifications of the leftist world-view: America is a democracy, and "the people" have a right to vote for whatever they desire. Our environment molds us, so there is no such thing as free will. The state must regulate everything in order to establish "justice." Equality demands more redistribution of the "national income," so a 90% progressive income tax would be fair. America should emulate Sweden where everyone is guaranteed happiness and security by a centralized government. Arguments for bigger government tumbled out of their brains like rats scurrying from a flushed out sewer. Their journalistic output always expressed to some degree or another their antagonism toward the ideas of freedom upon which America had been built.
Seeing that I was young and unsophisticated at the time, it took me a little while to grasp why I immediately did not like Robo and Barry. But I soon came to realize I didn't like them because they personified weakness in a world that demanded mental and spiritual strength. With their clever sophistry and incessant whining about the rigors of reality, they were violating the unwritten law of manliness that men carry ingrained in the essence of their being. These two soft, indulgent, little liberals were copping out on life's foremost duty of self-reliance -- and it was not pleasant to have to endure their relentless egalitarianism.
They Love their Servitude
What kind of nation will America of the 21st century become with recreants of this nature at the helm of our media -- so fearful of facing up to reality, so anxious to compel their fellow man to fight the battle of existence for them through more and more redistribution of wealth, so forgetful of the great truths upon which our country stands, so desirous of greasing the path of the manipulators who now rule Washington?
What kind? Read the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post, or tune into CNBC on any given day. And you will see the servile, egalitarian mindsets that are ever so eager to "sanction their own enslavement" and ease the way for a New World Order. They speak the language of free enterprise and emanate Americanism, but it is only lip service. They are not advocates of freedom. They are not in search of truth and what our country is really all about.
One of the 20th century's most percipient intellects, Aldous Huxley, had their number. In the Introduction to Brave New World, Huxley wrote, "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves WHO DO NOT HAVE TO BE COERCED, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." [Brave New World, Bantam Books, 1967, p. xii. Caps added.]
The "army of managers" Huxley was warning about is already upon us. They are the statist bankers and bureaucrats of New York and Washington. And horrifyingly, they do not have to pass any laws to censor today's press because today's journalists censor themselves. Today's journalists LOVE THEIR SERVITUDE. They have been taught to love it by the "ministries of propaganda" -- the intellectuals in our colleges.
Today's media pundits have willingly and pusillanimously chosen to relinquish their freedom. This is why we have no free press in this country! The journalists of America have chosen to live the lives of lackeys rather than free men. They have chosen popularity over principle. They have succumbed to an obsession with being liked, to being a part of the establishment's "in crowd," to being invited to elegant Washington soirees of smarmy fascist insiders and gala Wall Street bashes of the mega-bankers and financial quislings.
Such pigmy men dare not bite the hand that feeds them their obsessive desires. Such craven humbugs are not journalists; they are dutiful apparatchiks serving the menacing State. The real journalists of old -- men like H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun, Garet Garrett of The Saturday Evening Post, John T. Flynn of the New York Globe, etc. -- are turning over in their graves at sight of this display of submissive sophistry and renunciation of the journalist's creed to seek always the truth even if it brings one down outside the boundaries of respectability and popularity. This is not a pretty sight. This is the capitulation of a nation's intellectual leaders. It will bring us nothing but the ignominy of a serf's existence under the lordship of centralized Washington oligarchs.
So Bill Murphy, don't stop your rant. Keep pouring out the pit bull prose and that intensity that scalds your opponents' sensitivities. Your adversaries are seedy sycophants that are defaulting on the fundamental reason for their being. They well deserve the lambasting you give them for their contemptible groveling at the feet of their controllers.
