L. Neil Smith: Apocalyptic Doomsayer

Previously, I established that L. Neil Smith is extremely paranoid about the modern world. He claims that evil “collectivists” -- essentially commies -- are out to destroy freedom and enslave the human race, first in America, then throughout the world, unless people awaken from their sheep-like complacency and oppose them, which effectively means starting a second American revolution to overthrow the tyrant Obama before he seizes all our guns to render us helpless.

I’m not making this up or even exaggerating; read the articles I link to in the first post.

Today I would like to examine this apocalyptic fantasy more closely. He describes his vision in an article entitled “The Genocide Agenda”, in which he reveals the mastermind behind this nefarious plot. Is it Lex Luthor, Magneto, or Fu Manchu? Maybe the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, or the Skulls and Bones? Nope. It’s the United Nations, with help from the current administration. I kid you not.

Actually, this should not be unexpected. The UN has been the target of hate by reactionaries here in the United States since it was chartered in 1945, and whatever else he believes, Smith is a product of the rural American far-right reactionary culture, with its blind patriotism, worship of guns, and pathological hatred of the Left in any form, especially Socialists (again, commies). The only trait Smith doesn’t share is religion: he is an atheist, not a fundamentalist Christian, but as an anarchist he rejects all forms of authority, even divine ones.

Here are his own words:

The gravest threat to life, liberty, and property in today's world--especially to life--is the UN. It can do absolutely anything it wants to, to whomever it wants to, because it's "the cops of the world".

Its single all-important mission? To succeed where Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler had all failed: at the involuntary expense of individuals who actually worked for a living, try to take over the world.

Since the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union, the new world nerve center for socialism is the UN, which is no less an enemy of everything worthwhile in the western world than Hitler and Stalin were.

Every day, we strive for a future world in which everyone is armed who wants to be, and because of that, there can be no more genocide. At exactly the same time, the UN, in its fanatical totalitarian attempts to disarm everybody, is striving--whether the "useful idiots" who support it know it or not--to make the next genocide happen.

Except for certain nuances, any of this could have come straight from the website of The John Birch Society.

The emphasis on guns in that last quote is no accident. For Smith, gun ownership is the greatest of all rights, because it can be used to protect all the rest. Remember his mantra: “Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon--rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything--any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.” And if you think he just means Americans, consider these statements:

With plenty of American help, the UN has several operations underway aimed specifically at disarming people all over the world, rendering them even more helpless against predatory governments than they are right now.

It wants you and me and our neighbors to be as helpless as the Nazis wanted Jews to be. It screams for power to control our children and tax us directly. ... It wants its own army. It struggles ceaselessly to disarm whole populations, exactly the same way the Nazis did, and for exactly the same reasons, rendering them as vulnerable to genocide as the Jews in 1930s' Germany. It wishes to render every individual in the world defenseless against criminal butchers. Don't think for a minute that it means to exclude America. It doesn't, and it will tell you so, openly.

In fact it's a major objective of the UN to seize and destroy every privately owned weapon in the world.

What terrifies these unelected and unelectable gangsters most is the increasingly real prospect of six billion individuals standing tall, independent, and armed. What the UN needs, for as long as we allow it to continue to exist, is its own Second Amendment.

So, how will the UN accomplish this plot? According to Smith, this is what will happen:

Step 1 -- Seize all weapons, leaving everyone helpless. (See the above quotes.)

Step 2 (concurrent with Step 1) -- Destroy the economy. “Some observers believe the current administration, politicians in both parties, and socialist sugar-daddies like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and George Soros, are wrecking our economy on purpose, trying to provoke open rebellion so that UN military forces can be called in to ‘restore order’.”

Step 3 -- Evacuate the towns and cities, and force everyone to live in massive super high-rise apartment complexes. “[E]very last individual on this continent (and elsewhere, presumably) will be rounded up and forced to live at a vastly reduced standard of living, in 'arcologies', vast piles of thousands of apartments, stacked one upon another, as much as a mile high. These grim, gray structures, with their roving patrols and built-in weapons detectors, were colorfully romanticized in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall, but if you've ever seen a typical Japanese apartment--Ken Takakura's in the 1989 movie Black Rain, for example, or Bruce Willis's ‘palatial’ cubby hole in The Fifth Element--then you'll have a better idea what's being planned for us.”

Step 4 -- Clear the land of all human traces. “With humanity thus contained--quarantined--as if it were some kind of disease (an article of leftist dogma since the 1960s), rather than the pinnacle of evolution that it truly is, under the banner of ‘saving the Earth’, the land will be emptied, cleared of all human artifacts and other traces, ordinary people forbidden ever again to enter the open countryside, and, in keeping with the current environmental fascist insanity, permitted to return to its ‘natural state’.”

Step 5 – Eliminate 90% of the world’s population. “Population--reproduction--will be rigidly controlled until the number of people on Earth has been reduced by the 85 or 90 percent the UN and environmentalists have admitted repeatedly they want to see eliminated. Apparently, if you strive to do all of that to Mankind, instead of smaller groups like Jews or Armenians or Chechens--you're a statesman and a benefactor, rather than a mass-murdering monster. Remember that, next time you see a politician or a movie star speaking on behalf of the UN. What they are endorsing by their presence is genocide.”

In a later article, Smith depicts people being taken away to forced-labor camps, only to return later as stew meat. I’m not exaggerating; see “The Last Good Year”. Also, he assumes that people who refuse to leave the countryside or manage to escape being rounded up will be left to starve. “Refusniks, those who resist this change, will be relegated and confined to the bulldozed ruins of the old towns across America, to starve and die out, perhaps assisted by occasional military training exercises.”

Elsewhere he suggests neutron bombs would be used to wipe them all out. See “Three And A Half Funerals”. “It's rumored that Washington is preparing to use neutron bombs to finish the job of depopulating ‘flyover country’, the suburbs, and small towns, leaving all non-living assets intact.”

Of course, in Smith’s vision, the power elite don’t live like the peasants they’ve enslaved. “[T]he emptied countryside will become a playground for the new socialist elite, the nomenklatura as they were known in bad old Soviet Russia, who will vacation there, perhaps even dwell or retire there in their dachas, in aristocratic splendor that the peasants, locked down together in their dark, dirty, crumbling hundred-story warrens, their brains scientifically numbed by drugs and ennervating [sic] ‘entertainment’ programs, will never be allowed to see. With the exception, of course, of the many young, attractive, clean-limbed boys and girls the elite select to take with them in the name of ‘National Service’.”

But how can he know any of this? He claims that the UN publicly admits to it in a document on its website that anyone can download and read. “Barack Obama, today's leading frontman and mouthpiece for the UN, has done a great deal of talking about change, about hope, and about ‘remaking America’. The truth about what he really has in mind can be discovered in a UN document--enthusiastically supported by most American politicians--called ‘Agenda 21’. It is not obscure. It is not a secret. It is easily available for inspection all over the Internet.”

In fact, here is the link to the UN’s Agenda 21 webpage, which includes a button to download a PDF version. It’s a long document, but I encourage all of you to read it when you have time. The reason is because: it doesn’t say what Smith claims it says! (Big surprise. Smith often plays fast and loose with the facts.) Nowhere will you find anything about confiscating weapons. Nowhere does it say anything about destroying economies. Nowhere does it speak of evacuating the countryside, putting people into arcologies, or clearing the land to return it to a natural state. Nowhere does it talk about reducing the global population by 90%. And nowhere does it even hint at any of this. I doubt that Smith read this document, but then again he didn’t need to because he’s making it all up, and he counts on no one else reading it either, so no one will catch his falsehoods.

To be fair, it does talk about sustainability, and to Smith, sustainability is code for genocide: “[The UN’s] declared interest in ‘sustainability’--merely a code word for the nightmare it would create under Agenda 21--is enough to condemn it.” But this is just part of Smith’s paranoia. He merely assumes it’s the case, and he expects the rest of us to take his word for it.

Indeed, this subject tends to make him quite hypocritical. At one point he wrote: “Ironically, in nations foolish enough to sign onto the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is forbidden to criticize the document itself or the organization that generated it. Nor does it take a lot of imagination to foresee, in a post-9/11, USA Patriot Act era, how this means that any written, verbal, or electronic criticism of the United States government, the North American Union, or the UN will become an offense punishable by indefinite imprisonment, torture, and death.” Ignoring for the moment whether the justification for his final claim has any basis in fact, this begs the question of why he’s still here. Surely if he’s correct the Obama administration would have long ago killed him off in an “accident”, or kidnapped him and taken him to some secret prison to be tortured and killed and turned into hot dogs. Which in turn makes me wonder whether he really believes this stuff (in which case he is delusional) or just cynically takes advantage of the freedom to say whatever he wants to spout apocalyptic paranoid fantasies about the evil Obama and UN.

In another article (“The Shiny New Face of Genocide”) he said the following: “For the enemies of individual freedom, one of the most important keys to acquiring power is the claim that an uncontrolled population of individuals, in an unregulated economy, is rapidly rendering the whole planet uninhabitable. (Some people--they believe a small but annoying minority--will resist this, which is why everyone but the government must be disarmed.) For the good of everyone, including Blessed Mother Gaia, people must be deindividualized [sic] and controlled, while industry must be tightly constrained, or better yet, shut down altogether. Never mind that there is absolutely no proof to this claim, whatever. Never mind that each and every assertion made in its support has, sooner or later, been clearly shown to be a baldfaced [sic], pathological lie.”

And yet, he makes no attempt to verify or support this claim, which is itself based on numerous lies, or at best wishful thinking. And he has the gall to accuse the people he disagrees with of committing the same sins he commits so freely with no sense of shame. But as I pointed out at the start, he grew up in a culture dominated by a form of Christianity heavily influenced by apocalyptic visions. Though he now professes to be non-religious, he still sees the world in such terms; indeed, substitute Antichrist for collectivist and socialist, and you have a tirade that could have come from a fundamentalist right-wing Christian. So it’s perhaps no wonder that he can’t help basing his arguments on end-of-the-world scenarios that he hopes will scare people into reacting irrationally.