How I Became A Voluntaryist: A Farewell to Tax-Financed Murder

Voluntaryist, The, Second Quarter 2008 by Knaebel, Jeff

The event had taken place on my partner's watch. He reported to me his eyewitness account. This experience-together with the lies of Congress swirling all around me and delivered right into my faceresulted in complete disillusionment with the government that had sent me overseas to a foreign war against a people who posed no threat.

I had been so naive, so gullible. The 'patriotism' conditioning had penetrated deep within my psyche. I had come to identify myself as an American, yet I was facing a process of disillusionment with the United States government. America was supposed to be the "land of the free and the home of the brave," but I could begin to see that this was not true. It was a charade and an appearance, not the truth. I remember walking through the Capitol Rotunda and fighting back tears at the sight of sculptures of the Founding Fathers. Feelings of deep bitterness overwhelmed me. They, as well as I, were being betrayed by the politicians with whom I was negotiating. This goes to show my then naivete, for subsequent study has taught me that none of these men were pure either. See, for example, the Politically Incorrect Guide series of Regnery Publishing.

It amazes me how long men remember eloquent words while so quickly forgetting the bloody deeds they conceal. Who can doubt the absolute evil of power, no matter in whose hands?

Another deeply disturbing experience remains with me. In the mid-nineties, I made a visit with my children to the Los Alamos Museum-the shrine of the Mother of All Laboratories of the Science of Total Annihilation. I recall feelings of repugnance at the message of "national pride," the arrogance, the hubris expressed in write-ups accompanying the displays. Perhaps even more repelling were the momentos sold there and at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, such as pocket-size trinkets of the Hiroshima bombs, that we may remember with satisfaction how we delivered agonizing death to hundreds of thousands of human beings, and thus feel "national pride."

After the Los Alamos visit, I began thinking that surely the American feats of atom smashing and nuclear weaponry have carried us across a threshold of world-ending destructive power. When we split the atom, we rent asunder the basic building block of material life. Can there be any more powerful statement of utter contempt for life? Can there be any more clearly stated suicidal intention? Is it other than madness?

I thought of the hard words of Native American elders repeated to my face in about the same terms as Chiksika (1779), "The whites seek to conquer Nature, to bend it to their will and to use wastefully until it is all gone, and then simply move on, leaving behind the waste and looking for new places to take." This mentality of exploitation has now metastasized as the globally infectious disease of wantonly wasteful mass consumerism and endless war-for-profit.

Now to return to my story.

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement battle involved years of working as resource consultant-advocate on behalf of Alaska Native tribes (later formed into corporations mandated by law, and thus deliberately destroyed). I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Dee Brown) and Black Elk Speaks (Neihardt and Black Elk). I participated in tribal council meetings, funerals, potlatches, talking circles, community fish cleaning and Board meetings. We worked with "Power Lawyers," lobbied the Congress, negotiated with Cabinet secretaries and Governors and State Legislatures and the Military and environmental groups by the dozen.