David McElroy

In 1975, Chao Ponhea Yat High School in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was converted into a prison. The communist Khmer Rouge had just overthrown the previous government, and the regime led by the murderous Pol Pot spent the next four years torturing and murdering people in this place. Although nobody knows for sure, it’s thought that somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000 men, women and children were brought here. Only seven of those are known to have lived.

We have roughly 35 years between today and the horrors of what happened at the place known at the time as Security Prison 21 (S-21). The complex is now known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. That’s one of the buildings of S-21 above just a few weeks ago, seen through the barbed wired that helped keep desperate people from getting out. What lessons can we draw from S-21?

The comfortable lesson is that there was something uniquely evil about communism or the Khmer Rouge regime that took over there. Maybe it’s something unique to Cambodians or to Asians in general. But those sorts of explanations don’t hold up. You can find similar torture and murder in many places around the globe. We certainly saw vicious inhumanity in Nazi Germany, not just from highly trained SS killers, but from ordinary people. When almost 2,300 Jews were killed in 1941, one of the killers was a police secretary back home in Vienna. Walter Mattner described the killings to his wife in a letter:

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A little more than a year ago, the West watched in excitement as Egyptians forced long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak out of power. Now the country has just selected its first freely elected president. Mohamed Morsi is the choice of the majority of Egyptian voters, so he’s what the democratic process produces. He also ran using a slogan of, “Islam is the solution.”

He’s a candidate who promised to stand for “democracy” — whatever that means to him, or us, for that matter — and for women’s rights, but he also supported banning women from the presidency. He’s been the head of the political faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group working to place Egypt under Islamic law. If this is what the majority of people in Egypt want, is that just fine with us?

I’ve said before that freedom and democracy aren’t the same things, even if a tendency toward more freedom has generally correlated with some form of democracy. There’s no reason that a democratically elected government can’t pass repressive laws and even change the political system to keep themselves in power — all legally, of course.

Since the democratic process in Egypt seems to be leading in the Islamist direction, isn’t it time for the U.S. government to question its policy of trying to force countries down the road toward democracy?

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Why don’t libertarians win elections? Simple. Most people don’t want the things that libertarians promise. They don’t believe in the things that libertarians believe in. So the question is why libertarians bother to run campaigns.

This has been a question I’ve heard debated ever since I became a libertarian 20 years ago. It always seemed like a contradiction to me. When I was active in the Libertarian Party, it felt as though we weren’t clear on what we were doing. Were we trying to win elections? Or were we just trying to educate people?

Every libertarian campaign suffers from the same confusion. Some people try to talk themselves into believing the candidate can win, but more realistic people understand it’s not going to happen. Those people tell themselves that the campaign is worth it anyway, because they’re educating people and “spreading the message of liberty.”

Both groups are lying to themselves, but they don’t realize it. If they read what I’m saying here, they will be certain that I’m wrong. But if I’m wrong, I’d like someone to show me the successful libertarian campaigns that are changing people’s minds and then winning elections. Here’s a hint. You won’t find any.

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