www.thornwalker.com/ditch/lp_strakon.htm
 
Check out the crisis ignited
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The Department of Hate.


The Libertarian Party:
New frontiers
in free expression

Or,

Yes, Mr. Selzer, I am working for someone else

 

By NICHOLAS STRAKON

 

Ronn Neff's relentless and devastating analysis of Libertarian electoral activism — "Fifty Ron Pauls and the government with only One Law" — has been long delayed (all my fault), but it will appear on the site in just a few days. [It was posted December 28, 2001. — NS.] I thought about posting these present comments as an introduction to Neff's piece, but as, ahem, some of my writings tend to do, they would have stuck out at a 45 degree angle, so to speak, to the Matter at Hand. So I've decided a degree of separation is called for. Please regard these comments as a cross between tangent and harbinger.

On September 1, I received this e-mail from Mark Selzer, who identified himself as Southern Vice Chair of the California Libertarian Party:

If you care at all about the Libertarian Party and are not working for the Feds or some one [sic] else please remove the Holocaust denial link from your site. This is political suicide for the Libertarian Party.

The link he's talking about is on our Links page, naturally enough, and it leads to what is, so far as I know, the Web's leading Holocaust Revisionist site, that of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). [Apparently I was slumbering behind the barn, for at the time of this writing I was unaware that the Institute for Historical Review had its own site. TLD now also has a link to IHR. — NS, September 2002.]

Well, one hardly knows where to begin, does one?

In the event, I began by e-mailing a question to Mr. Selzer. I asked him whether he had set about methodically trolling through Websites identified as libertarian, in the course of his duties as Southern Vice Chair, or whether he had just stumbled upon the product of our poor efforts whilst surfing. My message was exceedingly polite and, believe it or not, succinct. I even refrained from pointing out that the TLD site is published in Indiana, not California. I did say that I planned eventually to comment on his injunction. I received no reply.

If I'd wanted to crack wise, I would have told Mr. Selzer to wait a moment while I rummaged through the closet for my Dr. Kevorkian fright mask, and then I'd be ready and eager to do even more to assist the political suicide of the Libertarian Party.

But it's a more serious matter than that.

• First, Mr. Selzer didn't bother to address the question of whether Holocaust Revisionists might have anything true or even interesting to say. He didn't even bother to hit me with that good old argument from authority, claiming that "all responsible historians agree that ..." blah, blah, blah.

Now, I don't know what you think of Holocaust Revisionism; most folks don't think much of it. But shouldn't it have been obvious to Mr. Selzer that I had put that link to CODOH there for a reason? It's not legitimate to assume that I agree with everything the Revisionists say, any more than it is to assume that I agree with everything that's said on the other sites I link to. But it is legitimate to assume that I believe CODOH should be heard — that they might just be on to something. In fact it's pretty obvious that I believe that. What Mr. Selzer did was ask me to sacrifice that obvious belief to political expediency.

I don't know or care what Mr. Selzer believes, but I believe that the Truth Is Always Trumps and that you'd better keep yourself open to it. The Southern Vice Chair asked me to go against my conscience in favor of some smelly little party line he was trying to enforce. The chutzpah of some people.

• You'd think a libertarian, of all people, even one who liked to spell the word with a capital "L," would have his antennæ set aquiver by the fact that, in many "advanced democracies," those who arrive at unpopular conclusions about the Jewish Holocaust are routinely sacked, officially denied the right of publication, stripped of academic degrees, barred from government archives, barred from entry to the country, mobbed and firebombed with the connivance of the authorities, and even jailed. To the best of my knowledge, Germans and Frenchmen and Canadians who claim that Napoleon was poisoned or that Moses never met Pharaoh don't go to jail. I don't think even Flat Earthers go to jail in the advanced progressive social democracies of Europe and the Great White North. Something very strange is going on, and it's stranger yet that so many libertarians, including (if you will) Libertarians, are oblivious to it and to its implications.

• Finally, it's now clear that, so far as Mr. Selzer is concerned, while all Libertarians are equal, some Libertarians are more equal than others. Southern Vice Chairs, for example.

In the great anti-imperialist movie "Breaker Morant," the title character (played by Edward Woodward) and a comrade in arms have been condemned to death by the British military authorities for being too beastly to the Boers (this, after those same authorities had starved quite a few Boer men, women, and children to death in concentration camps). Just before their execution by firing squad, Morant turns to his comrade and remarks, "This is what comes of empire-building."

Though I'm not the one being shot full of holes at the moment, I'm still inclined to observe, "This is what comes of party-building."

And when it comes to that kind of public-works project, brother, you can just ...

COUNT.

ME.

OUT.

December 3, 2001

© 2001 by WTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.

A related article by Henry
Gallagher Fields (August 2003).


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