To: coconutt2000
coconutt2000 wrote:
Jefferson would've been a Libertarian. He would've been the first to go and pull the trigger to kill Pol Pot.
Frankly, the author of the book making this ridiculous claim may be citing every reason why Jefferson would have admired Pol Pot, but leaves out the simple fact that Jefferson's politics were guided by his morality, and not the other way around, and Pol Pot would've offended that sense of morality on every level.
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Well said.. -- The reviewer also put it well, here:
" --- Conservative reaction has presented a far more interesting case.
Rather than defend Jefferson's anti-statist politics while deploring his Enlightenment thought, as they generally did in the past, conservatives have gleefully jumped on O'Brien's bandwagon.
Specifically, they have taken the opportunity to reassert the fundamental conservative proposition that, without religious faith, a free society will collapse into anarchy and tyranny, an idea once stated poetically by T.S. Eliot: "If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin."
That is why McDonald calls O'Brien "right on target" in identifying Jefferson's "bloodlust." And that is why it is altogether appropriate that McDonald's essay should appear in National Review, where, just forty years earlier, Whittaker Chambers declared that he heard in Atlas Shrugged a voice commanding: "To a gas chambergo!"
A journal that can hear echoes of Hitler in Ayn Rand will, by precisely the same logic, hear echoes of Pol Pot in Thomas Jefferson. -- "
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Todays self-styled "conservatives", those that see a threat in Jefferson's libertarian principles enshrined in both the Declaration & the Constitution, should be ashamed of stealing the name.
11 posted on
05/05/2005 4:57:53 PM PDT by
P_A_I
To: P_A_I
I don't think there's much doubt as to which writer (tho both contributed) NR preferred then or now, however.
21 posted on
05/07/2005 10:35:13 AM PDT by
Mach9
(.)
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