I am sick of listening to people who enthusiastically supported an expensive and inadequately justified war now suddenly indignant about government spending. Last week I got one of those dittohead forwarded emails boggling over how huge a number a billion is. Why weren’t they thinking about this in 2003? Where were all the tea partiers then? Protesting this unnecessary expenditure? Or cheering it?

And these same characters, who virtually worshiped George Bush in the mid-00s, see all enthusiastic support of Obama as an alarming, fanatical cult of personality reminiscent of the Nuremburg Rally. And they wring their hands, sputter about “socialism”, insinuate or explicitly compare Obama to Hitler when Obama pushes the USA to join the majority of the civilized world in providing health care to its citizens. These same siblings of chaos repeatedly turned a blind eye to their own party’s systematic violation of countless civil liberties and human rights from 2003 to 2008. New abuses are discovered every week. But they weren’t a violation of civil liberties if they are emergency war measures enacted for the protection of American citizens!

The slippery slope is only slippery when it is tilted left, despite the fact that the feared extreme precedent was a right-wing movement.

*

If you want to be taken seriously as a citizen who truly wants small government, you must also want small government when your own party is in office.

You cannot selectively strain gnats and swallow camels and try to circumvent your principles with justification and loopholes and legalisms. If you wish to be taken for a principled person, you must sacrifice to those principles as well as benefit from them. The hypocrite dresses up his own arbitrary and shifting opinions in this principle and then that one, and therefore always has his whim and his righteousness satisfied.

If you want to be “One Nation Under God”, how about this? Serve God and stop trying to force God to serve your purposes. You’ll have the national unity you desire when you develop moral integrity necessary to earn the trust of your fellow citizens. But that’s a voluntary unity, and what you want is an coerced unity justified and enforced by “God” as you, his deputy and master, have conceived him.

*

Borges: “A Comment on August 23, 1944”
From Other Inquisitions:

That crowded day gave me three heterogeneous surprises: the physical happiness I experienced when they told me that Paris had been liberated; the discovery that a collective emotion can be noble; the enigmatic and obvious enthusiasm of many who were supporters of Hitler. I know that if I question that enthusiasm I may easily resemble those futile hydrographers who asked why a single ruby was enough to arrest the course of a river; many will accuse me of trying to explain a chimerical occurrence. Still, that was what happened and thousands of persons in Buenos Aires can bear witness to it.

From the beginning, I knew that it was useless to ask the people themselves. They are changeable; through their practice of incoherence they have lost every notion that incoherence should be justified: they venerate the German race, but they abhor “Saxon” America; they condemn the articles of Versailles, but they applaud the marvels of the Blitzkrieg; they are anti-Semitic, but they profess a religion of Hebrew origin; they laud submarine warfare, but they vigorously condemn acts of piracy by the British; they denounce imperialism, but they vindicate and promulgate the theory of Lebensraum; they idolize San Martin, but they regard the independence of America as as a mistake; they apply the canon of Jesus to acts of England, but the canon of Zarathustra to those of Germany.

I also recollected that every other uncertainty was preferable to the uncertainty of a dialogue with those siblings of chaos, who are exonerated from honor and piety by the infinite repetition of the interesting formula “I am Argentine.” And further, did Freud not reason about the real motives for their conduct? Perhaps, I said to myself, the magic of the symbols Paris and liberation is so powerful that Hitler’s partisans have forgotten that these symbols mean a defeat of his forces. Wearily, I chose to imagine that fickleness and fear and simple adherence to reality were the probable explanations of the problem.

Several nights later a book and a memory enlightened me. The book was Shaw’s Man and Superman; the passage in question is the one about John Tanner’s metaphysical dream, where it is stated that the horror of Hell is its unreality. That doctrine can be compared with the doctrine of another Irishman, Johannes Scotus Erigena, who denied the substantive existence of sin and evil and declared that all creatures, including the Devil, will return to God. The memory was of the day that is the exact and detested opposite of August 23, 1944: June 14, 1940. A certain Germanophile, whose name I do not wish to remember, came to my house that day. Standing in the doorway, he announced the dreadful news: the Nazi armies had occupied Paris. I felt a mixture of sadness, disgust, malaise. And then it occurred to me that his insolent joy did not explain the stentorian voice or the abrupt proclamation. He added that the German troops would soon be in London. Any opposition was useless, nothing could prevent their victory. That was when I knew that he too was terrified.

I do not know whether the facts I have related require elucidation. I believe I can interpret them like this: for Europeans and Americans, one order–and only one–is possible: it used to be called Rome and now it is called Western Culture. To be a Nazi (to play the game of energetic barbarism, to play at being a Viking, a Tartar, a sixteenth century conquistador, a Gaucho, a redskin) is after all, a mental and moral impossibility. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hells. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, kill and wound for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall hazard this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is collaborating blindly with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must not have been unaware that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.