Ten years ago, I started to write an article, but I never carried through with the concept. Instead, it remained among my notes until now.

I should explain that I might have postponed dealing with a piece of writing for any number of good reasons, from lack of opportunity, to relative priority, to quality standards. I also have the unfortunate tendency to procrastinate on projects when inspiration fails. I typically accumulate more unpublished notes than published work. This instance is notable for another reason, however.

The intended article was called To Skeptics of Taxation as Oppression in America. In an unoriginal move, I intended to begin with a famous quotation of Martin Niemöller:

“In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

From that theatrical epigraph, the draft went on like this:

Some who have examined Promethea carefully may still be wondering why I am so adamant. Perhaps you are one of those thinking, what is so terrible about the way things are? For instance, you may be thinking that your government actually bothers you very little. You pay taxes, they leave you alone, for the most part. They always have, why shouldn't they continue to let you do, in general, what you want to? Well, the truth is that it is possible you are right. For you, things may change very little. Perhaps you can get by pretending there is no problem. But reread the words I quoted above, and consider them carefully. Not only do I mean to suggest that, even considering exclusively your own direct interests, it is always sensible to concern yourself with how others are treated, if only to protect yourself by precedent. I am also suggesting there is a parallel between government oppression under the Nazis and oppression today. You may be thinking how ridiculous that comparison is - but consider this. The precedent exists - and you have accepted the precedent - that the government has power over your life. Once you have accepted that, anything can follow because it has your sanction. Right now, you may only be noticing the effects of government in a few (obvious) ways, most notably in the percentage of your money they take every year. No, that is not the same as oppressing minorities, imprisoning political critics, starting wars of conquest, or utterly ruining your life. But you have accepted the government's right to do all these things. And if you will only rise up against oppression when it becomes unbearable for you, you will almost certainly find that on that day it is too late. A history lesson for the skeptic: in the Weimar Republic very many ordinary Germans were happy enough to pay their taxes and accept the power of government - after all, what could their duly elected government ever do to really hurt them? And certainly, there was little cause for alarm when a new chancellor was elected in 1933. After all, what had politics to do with their lives. The choice is yours.

I look back over this with my perfectionist eye, and think that I was right not to publish it at the time, from a compositional point of view. Certainly, it would have needed work to meet my standards.

It is particularly tricky to reference the historical example of the German National Socialists, even though in many ways, essentials from the period when fascism was trendy still continue (aside from the mad eugenics). This suggests that the real significance of Godwin’s Law is that Hitler is still shutting down discussion, after sixty-five years in the ground.

What I really want to draw to your attention, however, is this part:

Right now, you may only be noticing the effects of government in a few (obvious) ways, most notably in the percentage of your money they take every year. No, that is not the same as oppressing minorities, imprisoning political critics, starting wars of conquest, or utterly ruining your life. But you have accepted the government's right to do all these things.

I wrote those words before September 11, 2001. Notice that in the meantime, three out of the four items in bold have become a reality to one degree or another, and for some individuals, the fourth has also.

Poisonous hate for Arabs and Muslims and drastic suggestions for “what to do about them” followed 9/11. So did federal profiling of those and other minorities as threats, such as Mexican immigrants, the excuse for much paranoid border fortification. Jailing political prisoners had already been nothing new in the experience of individuals like Leonard Peltier, but this became easier and more acceptable under the intoxication of war fever, now that antiwar critics and political opposition may be tarred as “terrorists” and bullied in various ways. Guantanamo and other sites lock away whomever the military seizes, including some officially cleared of accusations. The government gave itself the ability to redefine prisoners of war in the proclaimed "war on terror" as criminal detainees, and to suspend habeas corpus, which used to protect people accused of crimes. The politicians have given themselves other sweeping discretionary powers, not limited to Big Brother surveillance, including calling torture or assassination legal—as long as the executive branch claims to have good reason! They have renewed their arbitrary powers since. I suppose I need not state the decade’s examples of “wars of conquest” which continue to spread—like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, maybe Iran—conquests made for whom, to what end, and serving whose benefit in the end, being more particular questions one could raise. As with any good militarist regime, the US military just goes where they are told—hold the questions.

The other reason why I never completed the article should now be clear. My examples of dire threats expired, for they actually happened, in the meantime. Suffice it to summarize that America has blundered into accepting a more imperial and more fascist State, since I started the warning I intended to write out.

The change is considerable across several measures, from domestic civil liberties to foreign aggression, from economic corporatism to militarism. The most dangerous tenet of militarism in American politics, the American form of the “leader principle” (Führerprinzip), has gained many adherents who refuse to seriously question the President, particularly when he belongs to “their party,” but also during a crisis situation and its ensuing panic. The press largely seems to have believed its job in reporting the Iraq invasion was to help the administration and the military lie about it, and meanwhile to harbor no skepticism concerning expansions of executive power. The “ratchet effect” of Crisis and Leviathan has been amply demonstrated during the past decade.

You may observe this is all very troubling. But I do not recall what has occurred simply in the interests of fostering mutual depression.

It will not escape the reader’s understanding that this article implies an “I told you so,” not by mentioning the admonition above, since I didn’t publish it at the time, but similar ones I did publish, including some timely words I wrote during that September of 2001. I doubt that any of the libertarian, civil libertarian, anti-imperialist, anti-militarist, anti-corporatist and antiwar dissidents who have warned the country, only to be ignored, ridiculed, scoffed at, even accused of traitorous or terrorist sympathies, are above saying “I told you so.”

And despite its imperfect formulation, the specific argument I intended to make in the unfinished article remains valid, I think. The potential for extraordinary tyranny has always hidden behind mundane management and control which seems bearable. Powerful, self-styled elites, and ideologues, and their power-worshipping supporters bide their time, pandering to this or that special-interest demand, waiting for their chance to expand their powers radically. Their chances come during crises, usually problems manufactured indirectly by their own arrogant and aggressive policies (like anti-American terrorism, or the recent economic meltdown), threats which may be real but are exaggerated for effect (avian and swine flu), and occasionally bogeymen they have the audacity to fabricate out of whole cloth (Iraqi WMDs). All the while, though, they fund their highly dangerous, destabilizing political power system with direct and indirect taxes—confiscated and inflated fiat money. Domination and money secure the State. Relying on such an arrangement in any way is a volatile foundation for society.

“Fine,” a reader may admit, “we should have been less credulous. We should have heeded the warnings. We should have known that power was potentially dangerous, before it became so dangerous. We all should have done more to resist. But what good does this do now?”

Perhaps none. Maybe there is nothing more that you personally could have done, anyway. Perhaps, after all the necessary work to learn underground knowledge of the hidden ways of the world, awareness of what will happen is just Cassandra’s curse.

My own admission to make here is that apparent indifference to many of the messages I have tried to communicate over the years has sometimes eroded my confidence to put them on display, and that too has been a reason to publish less than I have written. It can feel all too much like talking into the wind; one wants to scream, and then realizes that, too, cannot be heard.

It might be too late now; it might have been too late when I was born. My talents and efforts might be too insignificant to stand up against what comes, and yours too. I have always considered alliance an intelligent strategy when in danger of being overwhelmed, but even so, all combined efforts might be in vain.

On the other hand, it is possible that trying to do more than float with the tide of history is an essential condition of individuality, and self-realization. If you wish to distinguish yourself as a man or woman in your own right, there are some things you must do, succeed or fail.

I keep making the basic point that one can never exempt oneself from the surrounding society. One can never ignore the challenges of diagnosing problems or at least listening to others who take on those challenges.

We wish for a rock to hold back the tide, when it turns against us. Or we watch our little pool, and we pretend for a while to see nothing else of the ocean. But time passes, and change comes in. We cannot secede into a private life, for the protection of private lives is an accomplishment of civilized society, and that is precisely what is under threat.

Civilization is not a product of technological, material comforts—the other way around, rather. Nor is it orchestration by managing hierarchies, but an innovation of organic society understood to be based on connected individuals. Civilization is an ideal achieved in human society to the extent that its people align their concepts and organization to distinguish individuality, protect and foster personal expression, and retain the achievements of individuals within cultural forms.

This subtle concatenation worked across the ages is a delicate masterpiece that can only weather so much, and a more profound loss could scarcely be imagined. Yet, its peril cannot easily be seen or felt. Rarely do the immediate and material alert us to its defense. So it is that most people believe all the civilization they take for granted—which allows them the leisure and luxury to ignore it—will go on forever, no matter what they do, no matter what violations they allow.

The truth is that some pillars supporting civilization have eroded so much they are in real danger of collapse. Yet few understand what must be repaired, or see the means to do so. When pillars like these fall, they only fall in retrospect, when it is too late to look and listen for the danger.

Other pillars have virtually gone, quietly: standards of teaching and learning, respect for serious engagement of ideas, and the cultivation of breadth represented by generalists, for renaissance men are needed to make a renaissance. Only afterward could we look back to see that once, things were different. Only now does it seem possible to trace so many of our current troubles back to leaving behind the once-solid work of the past.

The truth is that civilization crumbles unless we recreate it, again and again. Civilization must be treated as a living thing. Like any ideal alive in culture, it must be refreshed, remade, rediscovered again. When you build civilization anew, you reinforce it. Remaining civilization cannot be defended like turf.

The wisdom behind reverence for old bastions of civilization must speak to younger hearts who ask why, before the old words lose their meaning, before conservative defenders sound backward to everyone else, strangely attached to a past that means nothing and reflexively averse to change. Fine old principles are essential to grounding the new, but they must be given new life, reinterpreted and made real in new forms by living generations.

If, instead, the mantle of “progress” is lent to haphazard notions of the good—or worse, to the maneuvers of collectivizing and orthodoxical minds who seek to order organic society after their own image—then the incredible momentum behind change erodes civilization instead of upholding it, and does so in the name of progress.

Once summoned en masse, human inertia appears as inexorable as a force of nature. It seems quixotic to resist it then, yet there is no alternative; one is always in harm’s way.

So one must remember that change is not only an affliction upon individuals, it is also made by them. Persuasive hope and progress need not only lie, and lure the masses. Values can be made honest, as well as alluring, by daring to practice them. Such zeal that change commands should serve civilization, and be tempered to a fine point with care. Those who represent civilization might transform others as they were transformed. Ardent, passionate for ideals to light their way, revolutionaries (in the broadest sense) can burn with Promethean or incendiary fire. Those who serve civilization must cultivate the heroism of paladins, or witness the descent of savage hordes.

Think back once more on that barbaric tide that has rolled in over the past ten years. Ask yourself, what kind of change will come to us during the next ten?

With urgency, but with circumspection, make yourself a part of that change.