Ron Paul: “Zionism Has Played A Role In Our Post-9/11 March Toward Empire”

Former Rep. Ron Paul, the father of presidential candidate Rand Paul and past two-time candidate for the Republican nomination himself, writes in his new book that he believes “Zionism has played a role in our post-9/11 march toward empire.”

Paul’s book, Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity, was released last Friday.

“Zionism has played a role in our post-9/11 march toward empire, and its influence has encouraged extreme interference in the Middle East,” Paul writes in a chapter entitled “Making America Safe for Empire,” under the sub-chapter, “Tyranny takes hold.”

Paul was writing about how “theocracy has always been abused,” in the paragraph preceding his comments on Zionism.

Americans generally see spiritual safety as being in the realm of religion and theology and political philosophy as being determined by the professors and others who dwell on esoteric ideas. There is theocracy when the theologians gain control of the state to offer salvation and eternal life through using force to impose their will and enforce their rules. Theocracy has always been abused. The Founders feared it and worked hard to prevent it. Supporters of radical Islam frequently endorse a theocratic system. Aggressive Christian Zionists also like to use the state to promote their theological beliefs, especially in foreign policy and with social gospel teachings. Zionism has played a role in our post-9/11 march toward empire, and its influence has encouraged extreme interference in the Middle East.

Paul introduces the idea of the U.S. empire in the chapter titled, “Pursuing U.S. Empire,” in which he states, “Our obsession with expanding our sphere of influence around the world was designed to promote an empire. It was never for true national security purposes.”

Later in the chapter, “Making America Safe for Empire,” Paul writes in sub-chapter “The 9/11 boost to U.S. Empire,” that the Patriot Act was written before 9/11 “when the condition were not ripe for its passage. 9/11 took care of that.”

“The U.S. Empire received a big boost from the 9/11 attack,” writes Paul. “Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush’s first secretary of the treasury, reported he was shocked that in the very first National Security Council meeting— ten days after Bush’s January 2001 inauguration— the discussion was about when, not if, the U.S. should invade Iraq.”

“We also know that the PATRIOT Act was written a long time before 9/11, when the conditions were not ripe for its passage,” Paul continues. “Nine-eleven took care of that. The bill quickly passed in the U.S. House and Senate with minimal debate and understanding. Bush signed the bill into law on Oct. 26, 2001, a mere 45 days after the attack. Making use of a crisis is established policy.”

Paul also writes our leaders explained al-Qaeda attacked us “because of our freedom and prosperity,” to avoid “scrutiny of our foreign policy.”

“The reasons for the attack were fully described by bin Laden,” he writes. “His reasons were simple and straightforward. One: foreign troops on the holy land of the Arabian Peninsula. Two: constant bombing and lethal sanctions against Iraq. Three: favoritism for Israel over the Palestinians. There is zero evidence that the attacks were motivated by hatred of Americans because of our freedom and prosperity. The terrorists simply did not like the U.S. constantly meddling in the affairs of the entire Middle East region, defiling their holy land, and causing death and destruction for their people.”

Indeed. That's probably at least part of the reason that I tend to scorn Libertarians. But the rest of it consists in the hatchet-job that Ayn Rand — that infantile ignoramus — perpetrated on Plato's works and reputation. So many Libertarians light candles, and give their obeisance, to that very strange woman.

Very well stated.

The obsessive devotion that libertarians (and even some who consider themselves conservative) have to Ayn Rand is very disturbing. She was a devout atheist whose worldview was based on 100% selfishness and any hint of altruism was to be abhorred.

When "Atlas Shrugged" was first published, Whittaker Chambers wrote a fantastic review of it in "National Review" (back when National Review actually was conservative) where he writes:

Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.

Far too many Christians are blind to how truly dangerous libertarianism is.

Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche’s “last men,” both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria. And much else comes, consciously or not, from the same source. Happily, in Atlas Shrugged (though not in life), all the Children of Darkness are utterly incompetent.

So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character traces in the dirt, "over the desolate earth,” the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the “mysticism of mind” and the “mysticism of muscle”).

That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which “has resolved personal worth into exchange value,” “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash-payment.” The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1,168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: “And I mean it.” But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired “naked self-interest” (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment.

The above quoted from Whittaker Chamber's 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged, "Big Sister Is Watching You," from the link you provided. Thank you so much, wagglebee!

Chambers also noted this about Rand's strange monomania:

"[E]verything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to [a] most primitive story known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures."

With Ms. Rand, everything supervenes on a concept of man as the only locus or bearer of "rights." Randian man has no social context whatsoever. He is a complete abstraction: For people do not live in isolation; they live in communities, societies. And it seems to me that societies have "rights," too — those that conduce to the public good, a/k/a the general well-being and civil order of the human community.

But Rand could never accept any idea of the public good as such. For that might entail a limit on the rights of her cherished "Children of Light." Certainly, she never articulated any such notion.

I just regard her as a nutcase. It is risible to me that Libertarians seem to regard her as some kind of secular saint — and prophet.

I believe that the root of her disordered and unbalanced thinking is her rejection of the Logos — rejection of Christ's Cross....

She is an atheist's wet dream.... (Please forgive my crude way of putting it.)

JMHO FWIW.

Thank you again, dear wagglebee, for the link to Chambers' meticulous and insightful analysis of a psychiatric case.

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