The State as End-In-Itself
by J. R. Nyquist
Weekly Column Published: 12.07.2007
Print“The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all – is called ‘life.’”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 11
Continuing from last week’s column: The state is a necessary evil. Society cannot maintain liberty without the state’s war-making powers. That being admitted, the state is dangerous. It can be used to destroy liberty. History tells of the many generals who became masters of the state, from Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte. Historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote, “Power is evil.” Modern man thinks of power as a good thing, but power frequently corrupts those who possess it. Ambitious politicians, like Adolf Hitler, or successful revolutionaries like Lenin, have seized power. Revolutionary personalities like these are typically corrupt from the outset. Given power, they are brazenly murderous. For the revolutionary socialist, the state is more than society’s organ of defense and civil order. In socialist hands the state dominates and tramples, transforms and liquidates. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who warned, long ago, that the state was becoming a substitute for God. “Everything will it give to you,” wrote Nietzsche, “if ye worship it, the new idol.” Without thinking, the masses look to government with the same hope of salvation they once found in religion. “Feed me,” they cry. “Give me work. Give me food stamps. Provide healthcare, childcare and retirement in my old age.”
The disciples of Marx and Lenin long ago saw themselves as mini-gods. It was their “historical mission” to destroy the capitalist system. They would eliminate religion. The lion would lie down with the lamb. The promise of peace on earth led them to justify murder on a grand scale. If people do not obey us, we cannot build communism. Therefore, all who are not with us are against us. The dialectical materialists (i.e., Communists) were not God-fearing. No laws, no morality, no rules constrained them. Instead, they believed in “forces of history.” In reality, they believed in themselves as the main moving force in history. They were the revolutionaries and “the revolution” was everything. As mini-gods, they wanted to create a more perfect world. But first, a mass bloodletting was decreed!
We should not be surprised to learn that the regime of execution, murder and torture did not bring paradise as promised. The madmen stepped back, retreated from their ideology, and tried another angle. The mass killers who founded the Chinese Communist state opened diplomatic talks with President Nixon and adopted state capitalism as a means to build an even greater killing machine. Between 1956 and 1991 the Russians gradually pealed back Stalinism and finally discarded the Stalinist husk in 1991. For several years there was a pretended democracy in Moscow, which fooled many people. The secret police, however, was still in charge behind the scenes. The one-time chief of the KGB/FSB, Vladimir Putin, has since emerged to openly dominate the country, becoming president through appointment, winning elections through fraud and intimidation. Because the KGB/FSB (secret police) can act against anyone in Russia, because there is no check on KGB power, the Russian state has become (has long been) a criminal enterprise – without law, morality or common sense. The Russian state is a den of thieves, as are many states in today’s world. Nietzsche said that the state, as idol, was a destroyer and its leaders were “madmen.”
Putin’s party won the recent parliamentary elections in Russia. Among those elected we find a newly minted Liberal Party deputy named Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB official accused of assassinating KGB/FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko (poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 last year). Why should a trained thug be sent into parliament? The British want to extradite Lugovoy for Litvinenko’s murder. As it happens, members of the Russian parliament are immune from prosecution. Conveniently, the powers-that-be in Russia have rewarded and protected their assassin at one stroke.
“Yea,” wrote Nietzsche, “a hellish artifice hath here been devised, a death-horse jingling with the trappings of divine honors.” Long before “the killing fields of Cambodia,” long before the advent of the Soviet gulag or the Chinese Lao Gai and the 100 million victims of Marxism-Leninism, Nietzsche knew that mass death was coming. The state had become the end-all and be-all. The absolute states of the East, like Russia and China, possesses weapons of mass destruction – thousands of hydrogen bombs, tons of anthrax, bubonic plague and smallpox.
In general, we refuse to grasp the conjunction of absolute state and ultimate weapon. Those who aspire to absolute power, regardless of the ideological justification, are madmen. They need not believe in Allah or in the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Such are only pretexts for seizing power and declaring war. They are driven by a pathological need, and twisted by a readiness to destroy all who stand in their way. Those who get absolute control of the state are always at war with humanity. They are at war and never at peace – which is logically entailed by their madness.
The same impulse that drives the budding dictator to grasp the throne also drives him to grasp for the weapon of mass destruction. That is why the dictators of the earth seek to build nuclear and biological weapons and do not worry about the consequences to themselves or their people. It is certain that weapons of mass destruction will be used in the future. And it is child’s arithmetic to determine which country they will be used against. America dropped the bomb on Japan to bring a quick end to a bloody war. The new crop of dictators want to use nuclear weapons to overturn the “hegemony” of the United States, and initiate an era dominated by their own state machine.
“Yea,” wrote Nietzsche, “a dying for many hath here been devised, which glorifieth itself as life: verily, a hearty service unto all preachers of death!” The totalitarian regime has always brought death, always signifies death; it has always been led by madmen. This is natural, since madmen are required to create and sustain it. “Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness – as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne, – and ofttimes also the throne on filth,” noted Nietzsche. “Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and toad eager. Badly smelleth their idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters.”
This is the state as end-in-itself.
Copyright © 2007 Jeffrey R. Nyquist
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