07/17/2024 Power & Market Murray N. Rothbard
This first appeared in The Libertarian Forum, Vol VI, No. 6-7, June-July,1972, following the attempted assassination of Presidential candidate George Wallace.
John F. Kennedy; Malcolm X; Martin Luther King; Robert F. Kennedy; and now George Corley Wallace: the litany of political assassinations and attempts in the last decade rolls on. (And we might add: General Edwin Walker, and George Lincoln Rockwell. In each of these atrocities, we are fed with a line of cant from the liberals and from the Establishment media. In the first place, every one of these assassinations is supposed to have been performed, must have been performed, by “one lone nut” – to which we can add the one lone nut who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in the prison basement. One loner, a twisted psycho, whose motives are therefore of course puzzling and obscure, and who never, never acted in concert with anyone. (The only exception is the murder of Malcolm, where the evident conspiracy was foisted upon a few lowly members of the Black Muslims.) Even in the case of James Earl Ray, who was mysteriously showered with money, false passports, and double identities, and who vainly tried to claim that he was part of a conspiracy before he was shouted down by the judge and his own lawyer – even there the lone nut theory is stubbornly upheld.
It is not enough that our intelligence is systematically insulted with me lone nut theory; we also have to be bombarded with the inevitable liberal hobby horses: a plea for gun control, Jeremiads about our “sick society” and our “climate of violence”, and, a new gimmick, blaming the war in Vietnam for this climate and therefore for the assault on George Wallace. Without going into the myriad details of Assassination Revisionism, doesn’t anyone see a pattern in our litany of murdered and wounded, a pattern that should leap out at anyone willing to believe his eyes? For all of the victims have had one thing in common: all were, to a greater or lesser extent, important anti-Establishment figures, and, what is more were men with the charismatic capacity to mobilize large sections of the populace against our rulers. All therefore constituted “populist” threats against the ruling elite, especially if we focus on the mainstream “right- center” wing of the ruling classes. Even as Establishmenty a figure as John F, Kennedy, the first of the victims, had the capacity to mobilize large segments of the public against the center-right Establishment.
And so they were disposed of? We can’t prove it, but the chances of this pattern being a mere coincidence are surely negligible. If the only problem is a “sick society”, a “climate of violence”, and the absence of gun laws, how come that not a single right-centrist, not a single Nixon, Johnson, or Humphrey, has been popped at?
From Mises.org, here.
