Alan Watt on the US Constitution and the Founding Fathers
Ancient Religions /History CD2 Pt 7 @33mins
Jackie Patru: I have one more question to ask you and then i'm gonna be quiet for the whole rest of the time, if you believe that, umm ...because this is important to me, for our listeners.
You and i had a conversation one night and you did say this on the air when i was saying how tough it was for me to give up, if you would, George Washington as a totally honest, you know, doing everything he was doing for the good and you said "We just to have to understand and accept that every hero that we've ever had they gave us", and that brings us to our Constitution.
Because you see Alan, when people find out that our Founders were part of this, you know, being part of Freemasonry, the Illuminati, Benjamin Franklin ...
These are people who sat in and drafted our Constitution and i stand by the Constitution and so when we had that conversation my question to you was "Are you saying that they fooled us?" and you said "No, because the document itself is a very workable document, except they're not following it" but you explained that they did it cause they had to give the people something, something that they were going to accept and it was good but that they knew the people would throw it away at the first crisis.
And i wanted our listeners ... and i said all this which you said, did i say this right?
Alan Watt: Yep Yep, pretty well that's it.
This is not just Alan Watt's view, this is the view of Albert Nock and others. I do not subscribe to the fully to the view, but it has been around for over 200 years. I agree that it was a compromise, but between purists (similar to Watt) and those that were too compromised. Jefferson compromised with slavery as others did, there were many compromises. IMO, they did the best they could at the time and we have not seen something so powerful since. But that is just my view, Alan Watt has done 100x more research than me and like my belief in my creator I cannot prove it nor do I need to. Getting bogged down on the intentions of them over 200 years ago is less important than us exposing less than 10,000 psychopaths hell bent on depopulationg and enslaving the planet.
Nevertheless, this is a book everyone should read...
From Mises.org (a libertarian website)
What does one need to know about politics? In some ways, Nock has summed it all up in this astonishing book, the influence of which has grown every year since its publication.
The Mises Institute has long hoped for an opportunity to produce a new edition with a great cover. At last, the time has arrived. This edition is supplemented by a sweeping introduction by Butler Shaffer, a scholar who has written many books in the Nockian tradition.
Nock was a prominent essayist at the height of the New Deal. In 1935, hardly any public intellectuals were making much sense at all. They pushed socialism. They pushed fascism. Everyone had a plan. Hardly anyone considered the possibility that the state was not fixing society but destroying it bit by bit.
And so Albert Jay Nock came forward to write what needed to be written. And he ended up penning a classic of American political commentary, one that absolutely must be read by every student of economics and government.
Consider his opening two paragraphs:
If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.
The theory is good enough and strong enough for the forging of an entire apparatus of libertarian thought, which he does here. But then he pushes the envelope. He discusses American history in a way that you will never read in the civics texts.
He praises the Articles of Confederation as the closest model of American freedom. And he blasts the men who hammered out the Constitution as nothing but usurpers engaged in a coup d'etat. Far from heralding the drafters, he exposes them as public creditors, land speculators, money lenders, and industrialists looking for privilege. They tossed out the Articles and used unscrupulous methods to ram the Constitution down the public's throat.
It was in this stage of American history, Nock says, that the state was unleashed. Next came the party system, and the dynamics of statism that causes "every intervention by the State" to enable another so that "the State stands ever ready and eager to make" interventions through deceit and lies.
One realizes many important points about Nock when reading this. First, he was brilliant, original, and courageous. Second, he hated politics -- indeed he hated politics so much that he wanted a society that was completely free of it. This is why he is often described as anarchist. Third, he surely was one of the great stylists of the English language in the history of 20th century writing.
Those who have read Nock know that there is something about his writing that tugs very deeply on one's conscience and soul. This book will linger in your mind as you read the daily headlines. He makes his points so well that they become unforgettable.
In so many ways, it is a tragedy that years have gone by when this book has been unavailable. But here it is again, just as hot, just a revealing, as it was in 1935. It is the ultimate handbook of the political dissident. If you aren't one yet, you may find that Nock is a very persuasive recruiter into his informed army that makes up the remnant who know.
180 pages, paperback 2009
