The new thing seems to be: GASP! This man doesn’t accept the Official Version of History(tm) that we have been shoving down your throats! Don’t you trust us, citizen? Your support for this man is making us in the establishment think maybe you don’t….
Michael Gerson, former aide to President George W. Bush, has a column out today echoing the establishment line: Ron Paul refuses to accept the version of events we’ve been trying to ram down your throats since birth, so this disqualifies him. Thus he thinks there’s a teensy chance that the medical establishment might — just might! — have had something to do with government restrictions on dietary supplements. This evidently makes him crazy.
Let me get this straight: it’s considered all right to say the medical establishment inflates prices and produces dangerous drugs, claims we hear all the time, but it somehow crosses the line to say it might also do what every other industry does and use government power to crush competitors?
Then Ron isn’t showing the proper respect toward the U.S. presidents — i.e., repeating the propaganda version of their careers. He is certainly supposed to show nothing but childlike idolization of Lincoln — who, unlike everyone else who ever lived, was pure good. We’re supposed to be good little serfs, praising our lords for their great widsom and kindness.
In my days as a professor, I quickly learned never to ask students on an exam or in an essay if historical event X was inevitable. Why, yes, came the answer — every time, without fail. Everything that happened had to happen, and in precisely the way it did. No historical outcome could have been avoided or improved. Gerson is about at this level.
Leave aside that ending slavery wasn’t even Lincoln’s aim for the first year and a half of the war. Is it so awful to wonder if slavery might have been ended in a way that didn’t involve 1.5 million people winding up dead, wounded, or missing; the violation of just-war norms; and violations of civil liberties on a scale that continues to inspire today’s tyrants (who are all too happy to say, “Why, even Lincoln did thus and so”)?
Every other country in our hemisphere that ended slavery in the nineteenth century did so peacefully. Is it a requirement of American citizenship to believe your fellow countrymen to have been the only people so savage as to require mass violence and substantial collateral damage to the Constitution in order to bring about the same outcome? This is a moral requirement rather than a subject for debate among civilized people?
This is part of Ron Paul’s appeal. He doesn’t buy what his teachers taught him in seventh grade, and he doesn’t care that he’ll horrify the schoolmarms at MSNBC and FOX News by saying so. He’s too honest to do otherwise.
If you want a plastic man who will spit out the exquisitely correct version of events at you, you’ve got plenty of candidates to choose from. But if you find it vaguely creepy and Orwellian that countless issues of great importance have simply been declared closed by the gatekeepers of approved opinion, that’s why you already support Ron Paul.
These things Ron Paul believes — about supplements and slavery — are somehow “conspiracies,” insists Gerson, and this is supposed to be further reason to dislike him. I confess I don’t see how the word “conspiracy” contributes anything to the discussion, but then this isn’t supposed to be a discussion. It’s a smear.
For one thing, there have been conspiracies in world history. How else would we describe what happened when a tiny minority of Bolsheviks took over the Russian government?
But for another, Gerson himself at least pretended to buy into the story that Saddam Hussein, the secular dictator, was going to join forces with religious radicals — even with Osama bin Laden, the same man who had offered to fight against Saddam in 1990. Saddam even had an unmanned drone program, said Bush clones like Gerson, and he was going to bomb the U.S. with these drones. (This was the same Saddam Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell had previously said was safely contained, but the media made sure to forget all about those statements when it came time for those same two people to contradict them brazenly.)
Saddam’s unmanned drone program turned out to consist of a single prototype of plywood and string. Take cover, citizen!
Mikey-babe, that particular whopper of a conspiracy theory led to hundreds of thousands dead, four million displaced, and the replacement of one despotic Iraqi regime with another — except this one is friendlier with Iran, one of the other countries you warn us about.
But Ron Paul, the man of peace who spoke out against the lies, is the dangerous one. Mike, you have a long career ahead of you in the Ministry of Information.