From here in Central America ordering books from the U.S. is slow and expensive. It makes me selective about those I buy. I didn’t hesitate, however, when I heard that Dr. Ron Paul’s book, The Revolution, a Manifesto was available from Amazon.
It took almost three weeks to get here and cost twice the cover price. Now that I’ve seen the book, I count it time and money well-spent. Grazing at random through the small volume, I realized at once that Ron Paul is not presidential material. Using the last twenty years of presidential history as a guide, Dr. Paul is far too intelligent, articulate, well educated, and honorable to ever become president of the United States.
Which is not to say that American politicians have always been dissembling ego maniacs eager to don the purple of Empire. Dr. Paul quotes heavily from the earliest politicians of the Republic. He openly admires men like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, and Henry Clay, brilliant, educated men whose ideas on republican government and foreign policy align closely with his own.
They had no dreams of empire. Theirs was a policy of defending and supporting freedom by example, not spreading it by force. Dr. Paul believes Americans would favor such a policy today if they were given even a short break from jingoist, fear-mongering propaganda.
But there is more to Dr. Paul’s little book than foreign policy. Much more. The sweep of the congressman’s knowledge of economics, history, health care, the environment, tax policy, drug policy, the Federal Reserve, inflation, presidential powers, constitutional law, and the environment is breathtaking. His willingness to speak the truth about them is more astonishing still. As he put it so well, “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”
Proving him right, the media regularly uses slimy smears of “Anti-Americanism” and “appeasement” against him. At the same time honest discussion of the real goals and effects of our present disastrous public policy is simply forbidden.
America is soaked constantly in cascading sound bites and propaganda lies. The media have gone out of their way to brush aside Dr. Paul and marginalize his campaign and its enthusiastic supporters. Paul has become like Dorothy’s little terrier, Toto, pulling aside the Wizard’s curtain, while the media blusters at us to “Ignore the man behind the curtain!”
The difference between the three media anointed candidates consists almost entirely of how they look. All offer “change” but the only thing that will change when any of them becomes president will be the names of the occupants of the cushy corner offices.
In the preface of his book Dr. Paul writes: “…in the American political lexicon, “change” always means the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.” To hear their own promises that’s exactly what we will get from Barack McHillary.
You are not likely to have ever read anything written by an American politician that approaches the eloquent case for political freedom and constitutional government that Ron Paul offers in this book. It is a mind changing, and possibly world changing work that shows that Ron Paul’s campaign and his revolution are just beginning.
I can do no better than to urge you to read it and close with Dr. Paul’s own words.
“With national bankruptcy looming, politicians from both parties continue to make multitrillion-dollar promises of “free” goods from the government, and hardly a soul wonders if we can still afford to have troops in — this is not a misprint — 130 countries around the world. All of this is going to come to an end sooner or later, because financial reality is going to make itself felt in very uncomfortable ways. But instead of thinking about what this means for how we conduct our foreign and domestic affairs, our chattering classes seem incapable of speaking in anything but the emptiest platitudes, when they can be bothered to address serious issues at all. Fundamental questions like this, and countless others besides, are off the table in our mainstream media, which focuses our attention on trivialities and phony debates as we march toward oblivion.
This is the deadening consensus that crosses party lines, that dominates our major media and that is strangling the liberty and prosperity that were once the birthright of Americans. Dissenters who tell their fellow citizens what is really going on are subject to smear campaigns that, like clockwork, are aimed at the political heretic. Truth is treason in the empire of lies.
There is an alternative to national bankruptcy, a bigger police state, trillion-dollar wars, and government that draws ever more parasitically on the productive energies of the American people. It’s called freedom. But as we’ve learned through hard experience, we are not going to hear a word in its favor if our political and media establishments have anything to say about it.
If we want to live in a free society, we need to break free from these artificial limitations on free debate and start asking serious questions once again. I’m happy that my campaign for the presidency has finally raised some of them. But his is a long-term project that will persist far into the future. These ideas cannot be allowed to die, buried beneath the mind-numbing chorus of empty slogans and inanities that constitute official political discourse in America.
That is why I wrote this book.”
That is also why every American should read it.
