WLP90: The Rule of Law
This week we honor William Luther Pierce, the founder of Cosmotheism, of the National Alliance, and of National Vanguard on the 90th anniversary of his birth by presenting classic articles of his, nearly all of which haven’t appeared on this site since their original publication more than two decades ago.
by Dr. William L. Pierce
WHAT ARE THE principal characteristics which distinguish a civilized society from a savage society? What outstanding features have distinguished the societies our people created in Europe from the much more primitive societies formed by other races which we encountered in Africa, America, and Australia?
We might note that our societies were literate, and the others were not. We might note that our societies had a much more highly developed technology, much more complex tools and techniques, than the primitive, non-White societies. We might note that the concepts of the individual, of individual rights and responsibilities, and of private property always were much more characteristic of our societies than of theirs. All of those are important distinguishing characteristics between civilized societies — at least, our civilized societies — and uncivilized societies. But there is one other characteristic of a civilized society which is more fundamental than anything else, and that is the rule of law. A truly civilized society, whether it is organized as a monarchy or a democracy or a dictatorship, must have a generally recognized and a generally respected set of rules or laws, obeyed by everyone, from the king or the president or the dictator down to the humblest peasant or factory worker. The laws may specify certain powers for the king or the president that the peasant or the factory worker does not have, but the king is just as much bound by the law as anyone else in a civilized society. He may no more break the rules with impunity than anyone else. In our societies the basic body of law, the common law, evolved together with the societies themselves over periods of many generations. The law reflected the nature of our people. It governed the basic structure of our society and the relationships of our people to our society and to each other.
The law, of course, is not a static thing. Even the common law changes. It evolves to meet new needs as the society evolves. And statutes — written laws crafted by parliaments or king’s councils — change even faster. But as long as the society recognizes and respects the laws and is ruled by them, then it can claim to be a civilized society. When respect for the law disappears, and powerful people or groups can break the law with impunity, then the society no longer is civilized. Even when the outward form of the law is maintained, but the respect for the law is gone and people feel only the need to make a pretense of being ruled by the law while ignoring its spirit, then their society can only pretend to be civilized. That is the situation we are dangerously close to in America today. The re-election of Bill Clinton as President is one example of the general lack of respect for law which exists in this country. Clinton is hardly the first President who is a lawbreaker, and he certainly is not the only prominent politician today who is in trouble for breaking the law. But his reelection is still the most blatant example of the widespread lack of respect for the law in this country. Clinton is a man who has been heavily involved in all sorts of illegal activity — the drug trade, money laundering, racketeering — illegal activity which was by no means a secret. When he was governor of Arkansas his brother Roger was running a flourishing drug business, selling cocaine right out of the governor’s mansion. No one in Arkansas who knows Clinton believes that he didn’t know what his brother was doing prior to his arrest and conviction for drug dealing. Many of the people Clinton ran around with and received donations from were gangsters or drug dealers.
Clinton was a draft dodger. He associated closely, intimately, with people like the late David Ifshin, who committed treason against the United States. Ifshin went to Hanoi during the Vietnam war and made radio broadcasts for the Communists, urging American soldiers to turn their guns against their officers and come over to the Communist side. Clinton considered Ifshin a close personal friend and an adviser on Jewish affairs and often had him as a guest in the White House during his first term.
And when Clinton was governor of Arkansas he used the Arkansas state police as his own personal pimp squad, sending them out to scout up women for him. One of these women was Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee, and her lawsuit against him for sexual harassment is a matter of public record.
And despite all of this, 23 per cent. of the American electorate voted for Clinton. They ignored his lack of respect for the law, because they wanted him to continue the government’s programs favoring homosexuals, feminists, Blacks, and the other minority groups which make up the Clinton coalition, and thus they demonstrated their own lack of respect for the law. It is true, of course, that Clinton has not yet been convicted of anything and sent to prison like his brother and many of his other former associates, but if there were real respect for the law in our society, a man as tainted by suspicion and association with criminals as Clinton is could not even be considered as a candidate for President.
Of course, we still have the pretense of rule by law, and so the investigations into various of Clinton’s illegal activities continue. These investigations, however, are not driven by respect for the law, but only by partisan politics. If the Democratic Party had its way, the investigations would all be halted immediately. And if Clinton were a Republican instead of a Democrat, the Republicans would not have demanded the investigations in the first place. It is not just electoral politics which becomes corrupted when a society loses its respect for the law. Eventually everything becomes corrupted, and the pretense of respect for the law becomes more and more transparent as the process of decay advances. I’ll mention a couple of more examples.
One example is provided by an American named Gerhard Lauck, who is now sitting in a prison in Germany, convicted of violating German law by publishing materials in the United States which the German government finds offensive. Another American, Hans Schmidt, was arrested while visiting Germany and charged with publishing illegal ideas in his newsletter in the United States and mailing copies of his newsletter to subscribers in Germany. Mr. Schmidt was fortunate enough to be able to escape from Germany before the German government could put him on trial.
Mr. Lauck, of Lincoln, Nebraska, was not so fortunate. Like Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Lauck has done nothing illegal in Germany. And he has done nothing in the United States which is contrary to US law either. He has simply exercised his freedom to speak and write. But because the ideas he wrote about in the United States are illegal in Germany, where there has been no freedom of speech since 1945, and because he mailed some of his publications to subscribers in Germany, the German government issued a warrant for his arrest. When he visited friends in Denmark in 1995 the German government had him arrested and extradited to Germany, where he was put on trial last August and then sentenced to four years in prison for publishing illegal ideas. Not only did the US government make no protest against this violation of an American citizen’s rights, but the US government actually collaborated with the German government in having Mr. Lauck arrested. Before Lauck was arrested, Louis Freeh, Mr. Clinton’s ambitious FBI boss, traveled to Germany for a conference with the secret police boss there and publicly expressed his agreement with Germany’s laws restricting speech. He said that it is too bad that we don’t have similar laws in the United States, because without such laws he could do nothing to stop Mr. Lauck from publishing the ideas the German government doesn’t like. What he did do, however, was furnish the German secret police with information about Lauck’s travel plans, so that they could have him arrested in Denmark.
I’m not enough of a lawyer to know whether or not Louis Freeh actually broke any US laws in helping the German government arrest an American citizen for exercising his constitutional rights in the United States. But it is perfectly clear that Mr. Freeh has only contempt for the law and contempt for the rights of American citizens. And what he has done can only lessen respect for the law among everyone else who knows of it, and that includes everyone in the secret police community.
There’s more involved in this than Mr. Freeh’s contempt for the law. Jews everywhere have been pushing for restrictions on speech, so that people cannot criticize or contradict them. They would like to make it illegal to question their exaggerated claims about the so-called “Holocaust” or their version of events in the Middle East or to talk about their role in the origins of Communism. They have been able to enforce their policies on Germany ever since that country lost the Second World War. They try to silence their critics in the United States by other means. Mr. Freeh, who obviously aims to please the people who control the media, is helping them. But the real point here is that Mr. Freeh and the government of which he is a part have no respect for the law, no respect for the Constitution which prohibits the government from interfering with free speech, and the citizens who elected that government also have no respect for the law. That is a very bad situation, a very dangerous situation for what’s left of our civilization. To better understand the significance of the Lauck case, imagine an alternative incident. Imagine that a Jewish writer in the United States, who has written some unfavorable things about the Islamic religion, say, is visiting Turkey. Imagine that the head of our FBI tips off the secret police in Iran that the Jewish writer is in Turkey, and the Iranians send a police team across the border into Turkey to kidnap the Jew and take him into Iran, where he is put on trial for blasphemy and sentenced to prison.
Can you imagine the reaction of the Clinton government? Can you imagine the reaction of the Jewish media? Can you imagine the reaction of our prostitute politicians in the Congress? They all would be screaming for blood. The politicians would be on television every day demanding action. The Clinton administration would be threatening war. Our armed forces would be mobilized for an all-out assault on Iran. The head of the FBI would not only lose his job, he would be facing criminal charges of some sort, you can be sure.
But Mr. Lauck is not a Jew, and Mr. Schmidt was not a Jew. More than that, they both have said and written things that the Jews would like to make it illegal to say or write in America, and so the Clinton government has collaborated with a foreign government in the persecution of these men, while the politicians and the Jewish media have pretended not to notice. That’s worse than a lack of respect for the law. That is using the power of the law in a lawless way. That is tyranny. You know, the problem isn’t just that we’ve got more crime these days, both inside the government and among the citizenry. There always have been lawbreakers, and there always will be. And the crime rate has been going up for a long time. What’s different and dangerous today is that such a tolerant attitude toward crime is permeating our society. It used to be that a politician as crooked as Bill Clinton had to be very careful to keep his criminal activity secret. Today a substantial portion of the electorate don’t care whether their President is a criminal or not, so long as he keeps their favorite government programs going. And the government in turn feels that it no longer has to hide its contempt for the rights of its citizens. It can do the things Mr. Freeh’s FBI did at Waco, and it can conspire in the violation of Mr. Lauck’s constitutional rights, and it doesn’t have to worry about public opinion, because the public doesn’t really care. That is frightening.
This is not just an abstract problem. You may think, “All right, our society is becoming uncivilized because it has lost its respect for the rule of law. Ho hum. Too bad for our society, but that doesn’t affect me.” If that’s what you think, you’re wrong. What is happening will have very concrete and immediate and unpleasant consequences for many of us, not just Gerhard Lauck or the children the Clinton Justice Department incinerated at Waco in 1993. Every society has its quota of amoral, antisocial individuals, who prey on others if they can. In a civilized society, the law keeps these antisocial predators under control. In a savage society, where each man is a law unto himself, the predators are likely to be killed as soon as they make themselves known. But in a society such as we have in the United States today, where the legal establishment itself is becoming lawless, many of the predators are able to prey on society without fear of the law — in fact, under the protection of the law, with the cooperation of the legal establishment — yet the citizens are not free to protect themselves from these predators. The form of the law — the pretense of lawfulness — protects the predators, but not their victims. What we have developing in the United States today, in fact, is the worst of all possible situations, where a corrupt and lawless legal establishment has formed a partnership with the most predatory and destructive antisocial elements in our society: we have growing collaboration between an increasingly unpopular government, the Jewish mass media, and special interest groups which hope to win gains for themselves at the expense of the general public.
The basis for this unholy collaboration is the continuing dispossession of the White majority by the Clinton coalition: the homosexuals and the feminists and the non-Whites — and, of course, the Jews. Our basic body of law, the law which grew up with our civilization, is inconvenient for them. It is not favorable to the homosexuals and the other perverts. It does not make special provisions and quotas for non-Whites. And it does not give a preferred status and exemption from criticism to Jews. And so the members of the Clinton coalition have been working hard to change and corrupt our body of law and replace it with law more favorable to themselves. And when the process of change and corruption is not fast enough for them, they turn to other methods. That is why the FBI collaborates with the secret police in other countries to punish our citizens for the exercise of their legal rights. That is why the Clinton government and the controlled media collaborate with special-interest groups to harass and vilify law-abiding American citizens who continue to exercise rights that the members of the Clinton coalition find threatening.
The rights that are especially threatening to the Clinton coalition are those specified in the First and Second Amendments to the US Constitution: our rights of free speech and of self-defense. These are the rights they fear most. And these are the rights they will be using extra-legal means — and sometimes even illegal means — to combat during the second Clinton administration. It was their fear of the Second Amendment which led them to commit the massacre of the innocents at Waco. It was their fear of the First Amendment which led them to betray Gerhard Lauck to the German secret police. And it will be their fear of the First Amendment also which will lead them to use surrogates in their attacks against me and other critics in the future. And, you know, their fears really are justified. They don’t have much time left. The vigilantes haven’t started dealing with them yet, but with only 23 per cent. of the electorate behind them during the last election, they must be wondering how long it will be before the other 77 per cent. finally loses its patience with them. They still can strike at me and a few others, but eventually the time will come to strike back. And when there is no law left to protect them from retribution, they will have only themselves to blame for destroying that law.
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Source: National Alliance
By White people, law is seen as a practical implementation of justice and truth and morality. By non-Whites, and especially by that dangerous variety of non-Whites called Jews, law is viewed as a weapon to gain advantage and hurt others.