The Liberal Regime Flogs the Sea with Chains-Once Again
Krzysztof Rapcewicz
The following is an article by E. Michael Jones. Dr. Jones is the
editor of `Fidelity Magazine' and the article is copyrighted by
`Fidelity Magazine', 206 Marquette Ave., South Bend, IN 46617.
Subscriptions are 25 USD per year and I highly recommend the magazine.
Krzysztof Rapcewicz
The Liberal Regime Flogs the Sea with Chains-Once Again
by E. Michael Jones
On July 29, 1994, a youthful-looking ex-minister by the name of Paul
Hill approached a pick-up truck outside an abortion clinic in
Pensacola, Florida and opened fire on the truck's inhabitants with a
shotgun. By the time the police arrived on the scene, that clinic's
abortionist and his escort, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel,
were dead and the escort's wife seriously wounded. It was one of the
remarkably few fatalities in the more than 20-years history of
legalized abortion in this country (if, of course, we exempt the
unborn from the fatality statistics), but to see it simply as a
manifestation of this country's inability to either swallow abortion
on demand or cough it up would be to miss a larger point. What the
incident really reveals is a much larger pattern and a much larger
problem, namely, the Liberal Regime's inability to legislate reality.
Every time the Liberal Regime thinks it has solved a problem by
legislating it out of existence, reality reasserts itself and, more
often than not, someone gets hurt. The killings in Pensacola did more
than follow on the heels of the Clinton Administration's Freedom of
Access to Clinics bill; they were nature's veto of that bill. Reality
will not be overruled by fiat from Washington. As Aesop once said,
"Nature will out." Let me explain why. By now, the scenario has
become so familiar, I would like to attempt to formulate a law
describing its consequences. Let's call it Jones's Law of
Liberalism. As soon as Congress passes a bill, the behavior it
prohibits increases dramatically. Let's take a random example-gun
control, for instance. The prospect of imminent passage of the Brady
Bill, banning certain weapons, brought about a boom in the sales of
those particular weapons. So predictable had this become, that some
people even wondered if the gun lobby was behind the bill.
Then not long after the Brady Bill was passed, a racially obsessed
Negro by the name of Colin Ferguson boarded a commuter train heading
toward Long Island, and by the time the ride was over, nine people
were dead. The outcry from politicians and their media lackeys was
predictable and immediate-"Gun control could have prevented this"-even
though Ferguson's victims had been shot to death by a handgun for
which he had waited over three times longer than the waiting period
mandated by the Brady Bill. Gun control is an obsession of the liberal
regime because it focuses on technique and ignores character,
something which the liberal regime has been doing for some time.
Abortion is another case in point. During 20 years of protest against
legalized abortion in this country, no one got hurt except the Operation
Rescue protestors. Then the Clinton Administration took office and
started to act as if the abortion question was a settled issue, and
people started to get killed. David Gunn was shot down in Pensacola
within weeks of the Clinton Administration's removal of the Bush
Administration's restrictions on abortion. The Paul Hill case is just
another substantiation of Jones's Law in this regard. Within a matter
of weeks following the passage of the Freedom of Access to [Abortion]
Clinics act, an abortionist gets gunned down, uncannily enough in
Pensacola, Florida, which seems to have a civic aversion to the murder
of the unborn. Ten years ago, this Christmas, two young men in
Pensacola had decided that that metropolis on the Gulf of Mexico had
had enough abortion, and, as a Christmas present to Baby Jesus, blew
up the town's three abortion clinics in one night. Then within weeks
of the passage of the FACE bill, Paul Hill, one of the people who came
forward to defend the killing of David Gunn (on the Phil Donahue show,
as a matter of fact), decided to continue the tradition a year later.
The reaction to the killings was predictable. The Right-to-Lifers
deplored the violence, saying that it was antithetical to what their
movement represented. The proabortion crowd, on the other hand,
called for more investigation, more attempts to tar the antiabortion
movement with the brush of fanaticism. Before long we can expect the
inauguration of the FACE act to be followed by stricter and more
specific laws. As of this writing, Attorney General Janet Reno has
dispatched federal troops to guard abortion clinics and the
abortionists who staff them.
The question remains, though. Isn't it already illegal to murder
abortionists with a shotgun in the state of Florida? Just what
purpose do laws like the above-mentioned examples serve? In the case
of abortion, they are used to hinder dissent; they are used, as was
the recent Supreme Court decision, to abrogate the constitutional
rights of those opposed to abortion. But beyond that, it is time to
recognize as well that they also create the very behavior they set out
to ban. This is so not just with regard to abortion but with regard
to every attempt the liberal regime makes to contravene reality. The
Liberal Regime may control the congress, the presidency and the
judiciary, but it does not control human nature, which has a
resiliency that mocks any attempt to control it. No matter what the
intentions of the Liberal Regime, the results of their effort will
correspond to reality because in the long run everything must conform
to reality or perish. The fall of Communism proved the truth of this
proposition in the economic sphere; Liberalism seems determined to
prove it in the realm of morals. I predict that draconian laws
prohibiting dissent on abortion will have as their prime effect more
dead abortionists. This boomerang effect is not just true of
abortion. It will hold whenever the Liberal Regime attempts to ban
the moral order from the Republic. The repressed, as Freud once
indicated, always returns. Which is another way of saying that we
should expect more dead abortionists as long as the Liberal Regime
remains in power. Legislating reality goes to the heart of what
liberalism is and why the Liberal Regime has failed and is no longer
in a position to govern.
But let's try to explain Jones's Law first of all in regard to
abortion. Laws protecting abortion cause violence because abortion is
itself violence, and violence begets violence. At a recent prayer
breakfast in Washington, Mother Teresa put it this way: "If we accept
that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other
people not to kill one another? . . . Any country that accepts
abortion is not teaching its people to love , but to use violence to
get whatever they want."
Violence begets violence. If there is nothing wrong with a mother
killing her child because she feels it gets in the way of her career,
then why should a drug dealer feels qualms about someone who impedes
his career in a much more menacing fashion. The Liberal Regime has yet
to come up with an answer to this question. It deplores violence in
certain areas of life and subsidizes it in others and then expects the
populace at large to applaud its high moral purpose. The Liberal
Regime supports-nay, institutionalizes-violence against the unborn and
then attempts to restrain the natural repugnance people feel at this
outrage of natural justice by passing laws which stifle dissent. This
tactic, which is akin to the Persian emperor's orders that the sea
should be flogged with chains because it sank his ships, will not
work. In fact, it will increase the violence in direct proportion to
the attempt to stifle it. One of the criteria justifying insurrection
according to the Just War Theory is having exhausted the normal means
of change. The criteria of the Just War Theory are, unlike Liberal
Laws, not just an expression of the desires of the lawgivers and the
fact that they have the power to put these desires into our legal
code. Rather, they are an expression of the nature of things that can
be formulated in two separate ways. First, positively: if the
situation is intolerable and if you have exhausted all the normal
means of redress, you can use force to change the situation for the
better. But also descriptively: if people feel that all the normal
means of redress have been exhausted, they will start working outside
the law.
I am not claiming that the abortionist's assailant in Pensacola
consulted the theory of the just war when he acted (if he had been
that rational he would not have acted as he had). What I am saying is
that suppression of dissent on an issue like abortion will give people
like Paul Hill the sense that all the normal channels have been
exhausted and that it is, therefore, time to take the law into his own
hands. Abortion is, after all, a serious wrong; a crime in fact, even
if the liberal legal system says otherwise. And no action taken by the
Liberal Regime to suppress this fact can change it. In fact, those
actions will simply encourage those who think the situation is
hopeless and lead them to believe that violence is the only sensible
alternative. In acting thus, the vigilante is simply aping the
violence of the Liberal Regime. So let me issue at this point a
prediction: the more restrictive the legislation against abortion
dissent, the more abortionists will die. This prediction will remain
in effect as long as the Liberal Regime is unable to change either
human nature or the moral order or both. Which is to say, it will
remain in effect in perpetuity. The Congress can pass more laws
prohibiting this behavior accompanied by stiffer penalties, but in
this they will be like Darius flogging the sea. Their laws will not
only have no effect; they will bring about the very behavior they seek
to prohibit. In order to make clear why this is so, I would like to
explore another area where the Liberal Regime has declared nature null
and void, namely, the legalization of divorce. Divorce, you may have
noticed, is hardly a burning social issue these days. There are no
protests in Washington demanding the repeal of laws permitting it. It
is, as Judge Breyer, might have said with smugness equal to his
pronouncements on abortion, "settled law." Which is precisely why so
many people are getting killed as a result of it. The Liberal Regime
has declared that the marital bond is a contract like any other,
something which does not bind "until death do us part," but rather
something which can be terminated on the whim of one of the parties
involved. "No fault divorce" is one of the many moral oxymorons
proposed by the Liberal Regime. It has two increasingly common
consequences, which depend in large part on the sex of the
spouse. Women resort to accusations of child molestation as a way of
returning moral discourse to divorce proceedings. Since this is one
of the few acts the dominant culture still considers wrong, the female
spouse uses it as a way of restoring some semblance of moral discourse
to marriage. The men who feel that they have been wronged by the
liberal regime's deregulation of marriage tend to take a more direct
approach which usually involves killing his former wife and her new
husband or boyfriend.
Nature, as Aesop once said a long time ago, will out. Morality driven
out of marriage by judicial fiat returns in a perverse form as
accusations of child molestation. Or, it returns in its most virulent
form when the estranged spouse-usually (but not always) the man-breaks
into his former wife's new apartment and guns both her and her new
boyfriend down in a fit of jealous passion. "If I can't have you, no
one will" is the one lesson the Liberal Regime has yet to learn with
regard to the reality of the marriage bond. The Liberal Regime has yet
to learn that this marriage bond cannot be abrogated by judicial fiat
anymore than the humanity of the fetus can be eliminated by laws
proclaiming freedom of access to clinics. By passing FACE, the
Liberal Regime signed the death warrants of abortionists at clinics
across this country. By liberalizing divorce, they signed the death
warrants of women as well. Feminists in the latter instance have
tried to dominate the issue by placing the blame on men and demanding
funding for shelters for battered women. (What about shelters for dead
women?) In doing this, they beat the sea with chains and guarantee
that more women will die.
In describing these instances, we get to the heart of the Liberal
Regime. How does it work? The dynamics are simple. First, the
Liberal Regime says that certain types of behavior no longer need be
held in check by the moral law. This deregulation is generally
portrayed as "liberation." In recent times, the type of behavior
which is deregulated is invariably sexual. The Regime declares that
anyone who opposes this sort of deregulation is hopelessly out of
date. We don't need moral restraint now, they say; we now have 1)
legalized divorce, 2) the pill, 3) legislation banning sexual
harassment 4) the condom, 5) gun control legislation, 6) the metal
detector, etc., etc. In other words, a "technique" which makes moral
restraint obsolete. At this point, Phase II begins. Phase II is the
social mayhem which follows from disregarding the moral law. In South
Bend, Indiana alone, there are currently three divorce-related, "If I
can't have you, no one can" cases before the courts. One involved
murder, and the other two kidnapping and rape. Then there is the case
of O. J. Simpson, who may or may not be guilty of slashing his
ex-wife's throat. (I personally had an open mind about his guilt until
his arraignment, when he announced to the judge that he was
"absolutely,100 percent innocent.") For the culturally minded, I
recommend Bizet's opera Carmen, the heroine of which also get
dispatched by a knife, in much the same fashion as Mrs. Simpson. The
testimony of human experience is virtually unanimous on the subject:
human passion can be held in check by the moral law and by civil law
if it is congruent with the moral law. When civil law attempts to
abrogate the moral law, people end up getting hurt because social
chaos results.
"If I can't have you, no one will" is, in addition to being a direct
quote from the estranged husband in the Michelle Fox abduction case
now wending its way through the courts of South Bend, nature's comment
on the pronouncements of the Liberal Regime on divorce. It is, in
terms of the indissolubility of marriage, the return of the repressed,
the return of the truth about the marriage bond which this Liberal
Regime repressed when it legalized divorce. Which brings us to Phase
III of the Liberal Regime. After realizing that their departure from
the moral order has caused social chaos, the Liberal Regime then
passes another set of more restrictive regulations to deal with the
deviant behavior their initial set of deregulations caused in the
first place. Which, in turn, only causes more mayhem, more disorder
and more social chaos. The Liberal Regime in this instance is both
the arsonist and the fire department. After setting the fire in the
first place, they ask for more money to put it out. By decriminalizing
abortion, the Supreme Court created a problem we didn't have. Twenty
years later that problem has not gone away. Now in fact the Liberal
Regime has to send in federal marshalls to protect abortionists. Roe
v. Wade unleashed a wave of violence on this land, and violence once
unleashed tends to spread in a way that is not amenable to control.
The more the Liberal Regime tries to force the issue by passing bills
like face, the more those who are convinced that avenues of redress
have been blocked will take the law into their own hands. And the
moral reality of abortion guarantees that there will be people like
that as long as there are people.
The best and probably paradigmatic example of the Liberal Regime being
both arsonist and fire department is, of course, sex education. Sex
education invariably denigrates moral restraint. Wherever it is
introduced, sexual pathology increases. As soon as sexual pathology
increases, the sexual educators turn around and tell us "we told you
so" and demand funding for more programs to increase the very
pathology they created in the first place. Because they are
invariably based on contempt for the moral order, liberal programs
invariably worsen the situation they set out to reform. In race, in
matters concerning the family-to give two notable examples-the Liberal
Regime has become an expert at pouring gasoline on the fire. There is
no social pathology so bad that a liberal program can't make it
worse. By now it should be obvious that what we are describing here
is not some glitch in the liberal program, some bug that can be worked
out with time. No, the illusion we are describing here resides at the
heart of the liberal regime and has reached its culmination in the
Clinton Administration, which has reached a level of moral
schizophrenia unprecedented in American politics. Greater minds than
mine have recognized the illusion and described it with greater
eloquence than mine. T. S. Eliot complained of the supporters of the
Liberal Regime that "They constantly try to escape/ From the darkness
outside and within/ By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will
need to be good." In his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI
warned that there was "no social progress outside the moral order."
In a glowing eulogy to Russell Kirk, Jan van Houten wrote in a recent
issue of the German magazine Criticon, "Kirk hat immer geglaubt, dass
das Gemeinwohl letzten Endes von den privaten Tugenden abhaengt. Das
was sein Freund Malcolm Muggeridge den moralischen Fehlschluss unserer
Zeit nannte-"that collective virtue may be pursued without reference
to personal behaviour"-hat er immer bekaempft." ("Kirk always believed
that the common good was dependent on private virtue. He always
fought what his friend Malcolm Muggeridge referred to as the moral
error of our age-'that collective virtue may be pursued without
reference to personal behavior.'"
By now it's time to admit not only that the Liberal Regime has failed,
but that it never could have worked in the first place. Private vice
doesn't lead to public virtue, any more than theft and sloth led to
prosperity in the workers' paradise. President Clinton may or may not
be the Breshnev of the Liberal Regime. Whether that happens or not
depends to large extent on how well we can understand the real cause
of this country's decline and how well we can implement the truth that
there is no social progress outside the moral order.
E. Michael Jones is the editor of Fidelity Magazine, 206 Marquette
Ave, South Bend, IN 46617, which owns the copyright for this
article. He is also the author of Dionysos Rising: The Birth of
Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1993), and Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized
Sexual Misbehavior (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993)
Bob Krawczak
: The following is an article by E. Michael Jones. Dr. Jones is the
: editor of `Fidelity Magazine' and the article is copyrighted by
: `Fidelity Magazine', 206 Marquette Ave., South Bend, IN 46617.
: Subscriptions are 25 USD per year and I highly recommend the magazine.
: Krzysztof Rapcewicz
: The Liberal Regime Flogs the Sea with Chains-Once Again
: by E. Michael Jones
<long ramble deleted>
You recommend an article that justifies murder because "nature
will out"? An article that strongly implies that people are
not fully responsible for their actions, and are not, therefore,
culpable? An article that takes two murders in twenty-some
years as a "part of a larger pattern"? The law adresses
people, who have a will and who are responsible for their
actions, not a sea, which is an inantimate entity.
And who is this unidentified "Liberal Regime"? If you mean
the Democrats, ask yourself how many of the Supreme Court
Justices that recently reaffirmed Roe v. Wade were appointed
by the (presumably good) Conservative Regime. Ask yourself
which REgime was the first to nominate and elect a divorced
and remarried person as President (refering to the additional
rantings about divorce).
Sheesh.
krawz
P Halsall
should not be passed to ban abortion.
I wonder if that was the intention of the writer or poster?
Paul Halsall
RepoGuy
admire Michael Jones; now I simply see him as a racist in orthodox
clothing.
Patrick Sweeney
Chip Wilson> I find it hard for any believing Catholic to
Chip Wilson> recommend Fidelity. I used to admire Michael Jones;
Chip Wilson> now I simply see him as a racist in orthodox
Chip Wilson> clothing.
Is there a factual basis for your accusation of racism in E. Michael
Jones?
--
Patrick Sweeney
Lehman Brothers
3 World Financial Center, 21st Fl
New York, NY 10285
internet pswe...@lehman.com