Hippies Banning Smoke

[James A. Donald]

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On 3 May 2003 at 20:16, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> That my generation, once noted for their significant progress
> towards human freedoms, has turned into the single largest
> source of repressive laws and McCarthyesque attitude, is
> something I have sorrowfully noted for many years.  That it
> keeps getting worse and worse is the only thing that
> continually fucks with my mind :-/
>
> How did we go from libertarians to fascists?

That is of course a rhetorical question, but it has a
straightforward answer

I was in the movement during the late sixties and early
seventies and watched the authoritarianism become visible the
seventies, and eventually realized it had always been present,
but hidden by the war against conscription.

Initially, the movement started off against racist Jim Crow
laws, issues where leftism and libertarianism, and Marxism were
all on the same side.  So naturally the Marxists called
themselves lovers of liberty, and no doubt believed themselves.

With Jim Crow laws out of the way, but the draft not yet the
big issue, Marxism took the reins, and it has held those reigns
ever since, though since the fall of the Soviet Union nazism
has started to share authority.  When the draft ended, the
movement took up issues such as enslaving the third world and
political correctness.   It became visible as the enemy of
freedom and human life the seventies, when so many third
worlders were enslaved or murdered, but not many cared, because
the goal were far away. Since then, issues like the anti sex
laws in the workplace, expanding the war on some drugs to
include tobacco, and support for the 9//11 terrorists and
Saddam has caused increasing numbers of ordinary people to care
about these evil people.

When the Jim Crow laws were out of the way, but the war in
Vietnam had not yet begun to bite, caring and activist youths
cast about for new issues, and adopted "social justice",  Of
course "social justice", being a form of cosmic justice,
implies a vast authoritarian state to do good to people with
baton and gun whether the beneficiaries like it or not, so to
counterbalance that they adopted a criticism of existing state
institutions as unresponsive to the will of the people, and a
program of "participatory democracy" to make those institutions
responsive to the will of the people.

Of course the program of "social justice", and helping the poor
and oppressed brought out the Marxist in all of us.
Subconsciously we visualized ourselves holding the whips and
guns and beating in the faces of those bloody ungrateful poor
and oppressed until they showed us the gratitude we deserved. 
I observed this in myself and others in the late sixties, and
reading of earlier movement activities, I can see it the
writers, though they could not see this in the themselves.   As
Pinochet is alleged to have said, but did not, everyone is a
Marxist, but only some know it.

The actual poor and oppressed in the west sensed the
condescension, hatred, and intended violence, and rejected the
do gooders of the movement as long haired creeps, recognizing
them as the class enemies that they were.  Embittered by this
rejection, the movement turned its benevolence on those too
tightly controlled to fight back, the third worlders, and came
to identify emotionally with governments such as Castro's which
swiftly tortured anyone who was insufficiently grateful for all
the good that had been done to him with electric shocks.

So emotionally the activists were already no longer the anti
authoritarians they thought they were, but there was as yet no
contradiction between the movement's belief in itself as anti
authoritarian, and what it was actually doing.

The movement set about implementing participatory democracy
within itself.  Participatory democracy in actual practice has
a striking resemblance to Lenin's democratic centralism.  To
the extent that it actually is participatory, he with the
strongest bladder wins, but what usually happens is not
"participation" (rule by those with iron bladders and
incredible tolerance for boredom), but instead Leninist
democratic centralism, rule by a secretive and conspiratorial
organized minority.  We called ourselves "the caucus", but the
caucus was, in practice, "the party".  The movement rapidly
came to be controlled by people who thought of the themselves
as secret communists or open communists, a small conspiracy,
hostile to the existing order, aimed at taking power, acting
under a mask in a hostile world, which we expected to become
violently repressive as it entered the throws of the expected
world revolution..  Among us were many people who thought of
themselves as secret agents for an outside power, some of whom
may perhaps have accepted some small change from those who
actually were agents of that power, many of whom accepted
substantial non money benefits from China, Russia, or one of
Russia's puppet regimes.

At that point, the point where I became part of the movement,
and part of the caucus, the movement was fundamentally
authoritarian, but we believed ourselves to be libertarian, and
what we were doing did not obviously contradict that belief.

With the end of conscription however, the authoritarian mindset
of the movement became increasingly visible.  This was most
spectacularly revealed with the fall of Vietnam and Cambodia,
when the movement came out in defence of tyranny, slavery, and
mass murder, glibly forgetting the liquidation of those such as
the NLF that they had claimed to identify with. 

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         James A. Donald
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