Censoring the “S” Word

Via SHNV

 

“It is a very significant fact that the adversaries of the trend toward more government control describe their opposition as a fight against Washington and against Berne, i.e., against centralization.  It is conceived as a contest of states’ rights versus the central power.”

• Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, p. 268

“I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy.”

• Letter from Lord Acton to General Robert E.Lee, Nov. 4, 1866

Do Silicon Valley entrepreneurs want to bring back slavery, perhaps using the newly enslaved to assemble computers and other electronics?  One Anand Giridharadas, writing in the October 28 New York Times, would have you think so.  His opening sentences are:  “First the slave South, now this.  Is Silicon trying to secede from America?

Giridharadas is apparently horrified that a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Balaji Srinivasan gave a speech at Stanford University recently in which he advocated “seceding from [American] society” and its looting and over-bloated welfare/warfare state.

As is typical of all statists, inside and outside of government, whenever the “S” word is mentioned Giridharadas, like all the rest, attempts to effectively censor all discussion of secession by insinuating that taking the idea seriously reveals that one must secretly condone slavery.  Or at least be an apologist for the Confederacy, an institution that has been demonized by the American state like no other for the past 160 years.  (The same American state that condoned and enforced slavery with Fugitive Slave Clauses and Acts from the end of the Revolutionary War (1783) until 1866).

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