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10A106
Victim Sanction
by Jim Davies, 12/19/2010
On Friday evening, I watched the MSNBC program Dateline as it related how Elizabeth Smart was rescued from her kidnappers in Utah in 2003, and reflected that it may help explain why so many people tolerate government. In case you missed them, the highlights of the story are that this 14-year-old girl was taken from her bed in June 2002 in her parents' upscale Salt Lake City home, and vanished. Nine months later, she was spotted on the street in Sandy, UT, with two older people and rescued - but only after resisting the rescue and telling the cops to leave her abductors alone. The lead kidnapper was a religious weirdo called Mitchell, who kept Elizabeth in a primitive shack in the hills outside SLC with the help of his wife, and who after making her his second "wife" raped her repeatedly and tethered her to a nearby tree with a steel cable until she submitted. Then he dressed her in a burka and the strange trio would appear in public. Elizabeth had several opportunities to escape but did not take them. It appears that after being ill-treated for many weeks she "flipped" and, encouraged by crumbs of favor, largely thought of herself as part of Mitchell's family. Although she testified to all this at his recent trial, she was understandably reluctant even now to speak of it on camera and NBC respected that. Fortunately, she was able to re-adjust to normal life back home. Elizabeth's behavior has been called an example of the "Stockholm Syndrome", so called because after some bank employees in that city were held by robbers in 1973 for several days, they too flipped and identified with their captors. It seems that constant, frightening deprivation interspersed with occasional favors can cause the victim to relate to and depend upon his tormentor. It didn't take long! Government has tormented Americans in almost uncountable ways, yet Americans keep voting for more. It repeatedly steals half the product of our labor, and such taxation is like rape. It pretends to exist to "protect" us, yet routinely exposes us to actual dangers. It pretends to care for us in old age, but actually impoverishes the elderly by stealing the means to buy pensions and then paying us about a third of what free-market insurers would pay. It claims to stabilize the economy but actually provokes instability like the present Greatest Recession. It pretends to provide "free" education for all regardless of means, but actually dumbs down all but a select few and obstructs those who try to reform obscenely expensive school districts. It has multiplied health-care costs by about seven times in real terms, while destroying 98.5% of the currency's value in less than a century. It is striving daily to abolish privacy, on the Internet and in the airports. It screams panic about an alleged "global warming" but distorts data suggesting there is none and fails utterly to establish that if it does exist, it is man-made. It wages war with an ally that is notably less than reliable, just for the sake of waging war. It pretends to operate on a "limited" basis while knowing full well that it never was limited and never could be. Some of our money it steals is given to foreign governments on the pretext of promoting "democracy" but it actually promotes dictatorship and poverty of the people, preventing a free market raising their living standards. And so on; the list is almost endless and if you need more, peruse the ZGBlog archive. Yet at every election, tens of millions turn out to beg for more of the same. Why do Americans keep identifying with our captors? - because most folk have been brainwashed, far worse than that young girl in Salt Lake City. The fix? - a course of de-programming from the Cult of the Omnipotent State.
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