An article in the New York Times criticizing Rex Tillerson, President-elect
Donald Trump's nominee to be U.S. secretary of state, sums up perfectly the
collectivist mindset in our time, in the era of empire.
Tillerson is the chief executive of Exxon Mobil and, therefore, doesn't fit
the mold of the standard political or bureaucratic hack that is normally
chosen to become secretary of state. Not surprisingly, given that he comes
from the private business sector, his perspective about life is different from
that of the standard collectivist.
Just consider the opening lines to the article and you'll see exactly what I
mean:
Struggling to keep Iraq from splintering, American diplomats pushed for a law
in 2011 to share the country's oil wealth among its fractious regions.
Then Exxon Mobil showed up.
Under its chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, the giant oil company sidestepped
Baghdad and Washington, signing a deal directly with the Kurdish
administration in the country's north. The move undermined Iraq's central
government, strengthened Kurdish independence ambitions and contravened the
stated goals of the United States.
Mr. Tillerson's willingness to cut a deal regardless of the political
consequences speaks volumes about Exxon Mobil's influence. In the Iraq case,
Mr. Tillerson and his company outmaneuvered the State Department, which he has
now been nominated by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead.
''They are very powerful in the region, and they couldn't care less about what
the State Department wants to do,'' Jean-François Seznec, a senior fellow at
the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, said of Exxon Mobil's
pursuits in the Middle East.
Do you see what I mean? In the minds of collectivists, the duty of the citizen
is to serve the Empire. Serving the greater good of the state is supposed to
be the be-all and end-all of the citizen's existence.
Imagine a gigantic bee hive. The bees have one purpose in life: to serve the
greater good of the queen and the hive. That's how the collectivist views the
citizen in our age of empire. His job is to the serve the empire and
subordinate his life to the greater good of the collective.
The pursuit of happiness? The quest to make money? The freedom to live one's
life as one wishes? They are all secondary and subordinate to the needs and
demands of the empire. Just like a bee hive.
Keep in mind that we are talking about Iraq here. That's the country that the
U.S. Empire invaded and occupied under bogus and fraudulent claims that Iraq
was about to unleash a giant WMD attack on the United States, with mushroom
clouds supposedly about to appear all across America.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi people dead, maimed, or tortured. Countless homes
and businesses in Iraq destroyed. The entire Middle East set aflame in
violence, conflict, and civil war.
All this against a country that never attacked the United States or even
threatened to do so. All for the glorious imperial aim of regime change, the
forever quest of the U.S. national-security establishment to oust independent
foreign rulers from power, including democratically elected ones, and replace
them with stooges whose loyalty to the Empire is unquestioned.
Oh, and let's not forget how everyone is expected to thank the troops for
their ''service'' in Iraq. What is that ''service''? Invading and occupying a
country that never attacked the United States and, in the process, killing,
maiming, torturing, and destroying people, homes, and businesses who never did
anything against the United States.
All without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war.
And all against the provisions of the UN Charter, to which the United States
is a signatory. And all contrary to principles against wars of aggression set
forth at Nuremberg.
Nonetheless, no matter how illegal, how immoral, or how deadly and destructive
the invasion and occupation of Iraq have been, under the collectivist mindset
it is considered the duty of the citizen to rally forth in the defense of and
service to the Empire. Everything must be done to preserve the fruits of
''victory,'' no matter how much more death, injury, and destruction that
entails.
Contrast the collectivist philosophy with that of its opposite —
individualism. Why should Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobil, or any other American
citizen or company sacrifice their liberty and their pursuit of happiness for
the sake of what the Empire has done in Iraq?
Why should it matter to any American that the U.S. Empire has come up with
another of its many Rube Goldberg schemes to fix the endless woes resulting
from its endless foreign interventions, even while collectivists,
interventionists, and imperialists bewail the possibility that foreign regimes
might be intervening in America's elections by disclosing the truth about
corruption within the collectivist political movement?
Why should any American give one whit for the U.S. government's attempts to
maintain a brutal, corrupt, and tyrannical foreign regime that it has
installed into power through an illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral war of
aggression against another country, especially one that has killed, maimed,
and destroyed so many innocent people?
Indeed, why should any person ever subordinate his own life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness for the state, the empire, or the collective? Why
shouldn't everyone be free to live his life the way and pursue his own dreams
the way he wants, so long as his conduct is peaceful?
Why shouldn't the role of government be limited to protecting life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness rather than destroying them in the name of empire
and interventionism?
The New York Times article highlights, in a fundamental sense, what has gone
wrong with our country. By abandoning the philosophy of individualism and
liberty in the Declaration of Independence and embracing collectivism, statism,
and empire, America lost its way.
The only way to get back on the right track is for the American people to
reject, fully and completely, the collectivist, interventionist, and
imperialist paradigms that have destroyed liberty and killed, maimed,
tortured, and destroyed countless tens of thousands of innocent people. Maybe
Trump's nomination of Rex Tillerson and other cabinet nominees who favorably
cite Atlas Shrugged in their intellectual development is a positive sign of
things to come.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become
director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has
advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the
country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and
he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context.
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