In 1977, East Germany ransomed hundreds of its leading intellectuals and artists to West Germany, partly because it did not wish to endure public criticism by its own citizens during an International Rights Conference. In spite of the human sale, there was no general revulsion against the East German government in the international community. The East German regime was considered by many social scientists to have more legitimacy than the West German government, because of its more expansive social welfare system and its grandiose paternalist pretensions.
How many of its citizens does a government need to sell before it loses legitimacy? How many of its subjects does a government have to pawn “on the world market” before all its subjects are recognized as essentially slaves? There was no backlash by American political scientists against the East German regime for treating its own people like export chattel.
American politicians disposed of the lives of military draftees during the Vietnam War almost as cavalierly as East German communist bosses sold their intellectuals. American politicians claimed the goal of the United States was to prevent the people of South Vietnam from falling under communist tyranny. But politicians relied on conscription—which effectively gave them almost boundless power over the lives of millions of young American males. Had it not been for the military draft—and perennial government lies—Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and the U.S. Congress could not have squandered the lives of tens of thousands of Americans in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. Government officials played politics while sending legions of soldiers to pointless deaths. H.R. Haldeman’s diary, published after his death, related his conversations with Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Advisor. Haldeman said that Kissinger asserted in 1970 that “any pullout [from Vietnam] next year would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the ’72 elections. He favors instead a continued winding down and then a pullout right at the fall of ’72 so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election.” South Vietnam’s collapse was delayed until after Nixon was re-elected.
Politicians here and abroad accumulated vast power despite eloquent warnings going back almost 500 years. French philosopher Etienne de la Boetie observed in 1563, “It is fruitless to argue whether or not liberty is natural, since none can be held in slavery without being wronged.” Similar sentiments spurred English thinkers to equate boundless government power with slavery. In 1691, John Locke wrote, “Nobody can desire to have me in his Absolute Power, unless it be to compel me by force to that, which is against the Right of my Freedom, i.e., make me a slave.” John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, in Cato’s Letters in 1721, wrote, “Liberty is, to live upon one’s own terms; slavery is, to live at the mere mercy of another.” William Pitt declared that if Americans had submitted to the Stamp Act, they would “as voluntarily to submit to be slaves.” When the Continental Congress issued its formal Appeal to Arms in 1775, it declared, “We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery.” Historian John Phillip Reid wrote, “The word ‘slavery’ did outstanding service during the revolutionary controversy, not only because it summarized so many political, legal and constitutional ideas and was charged with such content. It was also of value because it permitted a writer to say so much about liberty.” Though some of the rhetoric of the 1760s and 1770s seems overheated by modern standards, those thinkers recognized how unlimited government power meant perpetual degradation to its victims.
Americans in that era had a vivid concept of governmental authorities “going too far.” The early state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights sought to craft institutions to keep government forever humbled to the citizenry. When governments were less powerful in this country, most controversies regarding sovereignty occurred over whether state or federal governments had supreme jurisdiction within their domains. But, as government power mushroomed, the issue of sovereignty became far more important. In a series of decisions by Chief Justice John Marshall, the Supreme Court invented sovereign immunity and thereby made it far more difficult to hold government officials culpable for their abuses.
Political slavery is revealed at those moments when the path of the citizen and the state cross—when the citizen suddenly becomes aware of his complete legal insignificance. Slavery is not a question of political intent. The greater the state’s legal superiority over the citizen, the closer the citizen becomes to a slave. Modern political slavery means politicians having absolute power over citizens—the transformation of individual citizens with inviolable rights into mere social, economic and cannon fodder—into disposable building blocks for their ruler’s fame and glory. The question of whether people are essentially political slaves does not turn on how often government agents beat them—but on whether government agents possess the prerogatives and immunities that allow such beatings at their discretion. The measure of slavery was the extent of the slaveowners’ power, not the number of lash marks on the slave’s back. Slavery is not an all-or-nothing condition. There are different gradations of slavery, as there are different gradations of freedom.
Because they had experienced oppression by the tools of a foreign regime, the Founding Fathers sought to craft a government that would be forever subservient to the law. If the rulers are above the law, then law becomes merely a tool of oppression. If rulers are above the law, citizens have the same type of freedom that slaves had on days when their masters chose not to beat them.
While average folks still intuitively recognize the value of freedom in their own lives, plenty of elitists tout subjugation as salvation. Almost fifty years after the East German regime pawned its intellectuals, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is championing serfdom—at least for the mass of humanity. The WEF promised young people that by the year 2030, “you will own nothing and be happy.” Recent political reforms in many nations have furthered the first promise, ravaging private-property rights and subverting individual independence. Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts warned:
“The plan of the Great Reset is that you will die with nothing. Klaus Schwab’s ‘life by subscription’ is really serfdom. It’s slavery. Billionaire, globalist corporations will own everything—homes, factories, farms, cars, furniture—and everyday citizens will rent what they need, if their social credit score allows.”
The world’s kingpins will need to tighten all the mental thumbscrews for propertyless serfs to “be happy.” Euphoria could be in especially short supply considering other policies championed at the WEF. “Individual carbon footprint trackers” are a popular panacea at Davos, and the WEF has proposed the “setting of acceptable limits for personal emissions.” How many burps will it take to get sent to reeducation camp? To assure the accuracy of personal emissions tracking, digital identification will be necessary—perhaps with an RFID chip where the sun doesn’t shine? And don’t forget another WEF pet project—Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), which will empower officialdom to financially destroy uppity citizens whenever they choose. The WEF is also a leading cheerleader for censorship—the only way to stop hecklers from referring to it as the “World Enslavement Forum.”
The COVID-19 pandemic epitomized how easily politicians can effectively take ownership over billions of citizens. After Donald Trump’s first administration saw how the Chinese government rigorously repressed its populace after the COVID outbreak, the United States adopted some of the same policies. On March 16, 2020, Trump endorsed “15 Days to Slow the Spread”—a slogan that would live in infamy. Freezing the economy and daily life and shutting down schools would supposedly magically vanquish the virus. On April 13, 2020, Trump revealed, “The federal government has absolute power. It has the power. As to whether or not I’ll use that power, we’ll see.”
Wildly inaccurate forecasts of future infections was all that it took for politicians to turn the Constitution into COVID roadkill. Hundreds of millions of Americans were effectively placed under house arrest. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a deluge of decrees in March and April 2020 after the state legislature gave him “authorization of absolute power,” as the New Yorker declared. The mayor of Louisville, Kentucky banned drive-in church services at the same time he permitted drive-through liquor stores to remain open. Nevada Governor Steve Sisloak decreed that casinos could operate at half capacity—allowing hundreds of gamblers at a time—but that churches could only allow fifty worshippers regardless of their size. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti banned all unnecessary “travel, including, without limitation, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit.” Attorney General Bill Barr aptly called the lockdowns “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery.
Rather than campaigning against Trump’s abuses of power in 2020, presidential candidate Joe Biden and other Democrats condemned Trump for not seizing far more power to pretend to keep everyone safe from everything. On March 11, 2021, the first anniversary of the COVID lockdowns, Biden donned rhetorical military epaulets and announced on television: “I’m using every power I have as the president of the United States to put us on a war footing to get the job done. Sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it, a war footing.”
To assure victory, Biden sought to seize control over every arm in the nation. Biden betrayed an earlier promise and dictated that more than a hundred million American adults working for private companies must get the COVID vaccine. (Biden had already compelled federal employees and members of the military to get the injections.) In his September 2021 televised speech announcing the mandate, Biden brazenly lied, minimizing the snowballing failure of the vaccines to prevent infections and transmission. Instead, Biden castigated the unvaxxed, declaring, “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” Biden’s declaration sounded like a dictator’s threat prior to invading a foreign nation. But Biden was only going to force people to get an experimental injection that could cause myocarditis and other heart problems, so there was no justification to caterwaul. The Supreme Court struck down most of the Biden vaccine mandate in January 2022.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito lamented that the pandemic “has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” But ravishing freedom failed to prevent more than 200 million Americans from becoming infected with COVID. Amazingly, the failure of repressive COVID decrees has done nothing to humble the political class.
Unfortunately, the government has no liability for the injections it mandates or the freedoms it destroys. Despite pervasive abuses, not a single government official spent a day in jail for the most politically exploited pandemic in American history. The crowning indignity of the pandemic occurred on Biden’s final day in office when he granted a sweeping pardon to COVID czar Anthony Fauci for everything he did in the prior ten years. But what sort of savior scientist needs a presidential pardon so sweeping that it would even protect him against charges of genocide?
Trump administration appointees are promising to open the files and expose more of the lies and abuses that permeated COVID-19 policies. But there must also be an unflinching analysis of how so many Americans’ political thinking went so far astray as to blindly trust any government official who recited the phrase “science and data.” There will never be a vaccine to protect citizens against unlimited political power.
