Forty-five years ago, I first raised my hand to my heart and pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stood, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. A year or two later, First Amendment be damned, God got edited into it, an event I should have seen as a dire warning; it wasn't long afterward that I began a lifetime of learning that everything the pledge represents is a sick, twisted lie. Think I exaggerate? Then explain Waco.

It would never occur to most Americans (or it won't until it's too late) that next month they'll be casting ballots in a referendum on the Holocaust. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler rounded up social and political undesirables -- homosexuals, Gypsies, Jews -- and imprisoned them in camps to be worked to death, cruelly experimented on by sadistic butchers pretending to be scientists, killed by diseases of overcrowding, fatigue, and malnutrition that people hadn't died in Europe from for centuries, gassed to death and the valuable gold removed from their mouths -- even the hair from their heads -- before their murdered, mutilated remains could be incinerated to anonymous ashes in ovens that will be infamous for 1000 years. That's what we'll be voting on, come November: whether we think the Holocaust was commendable or not. Because, historically and morally, there isn't a speck of difference between what happened then in Germany and what Bill Clinton ordered done in 1993 to another group of social and political undesirables, outside of Waco, Texas.

Then, as now, the people approve the current regime's acts of mass murder, pretend they didn't know what was going on, keep silent from a well-founded fear that the same could happen to them, or from an even more contempible fear of being embarrassed if they make a fuss. After all, anybody who'd speak up for that "Wacko from Waco" David Koresh must be a religious, right-wing, racist, neofascist gun-nut, right?

Then as now, the national media -- consisting largely of failed personalities who crave power but (due to severe emotional handicaps) are unable to do more than enjoy its exercise vicariously -- echo the government's lies while helping it bury incriminating evidence. Why, the Davidians believed differently than others do, and, even more horrifyingly, acted on those beliefs. Besides, they had almost as many weapons in their home, per capita, as the average Texas family! Almost.

Meanwhile the Clinton Administration, like all leftist regimes, floats serenely upon the ocean of blood it's spilled in order to take and keep power. Of course, compared with the 200,000 murders in East Timor that we now know Clinton shares culpability for, Waco may seem like small potatoes to a collectivist like he is, with no regard for the unique, irreplaceable value of a single individual. Yet this is more than merely a matter of right versus left, conservative versus liberal, Republican versus Democrat. This is a matter that transcends ordinary politics, a matter of right and wrong, and ultimately of crime and punishment.

For months, now -- forty-two of them, to be precise, plus 51 days -- I've wondered incessantly, to myself and others, why Bill Clinton isn't in jail, instead of running for reelection. Why aren't Webster Hubbell and Janet Reno -- who did Clinton's evil bidding during the Mount Carmel affair -- making the same lame, revealing, gratifyingly futile excuses that Adolf Eichmann made, from inside a glass box exactly like the one he spent his final public days in?

What I've been wondering most of all is why Bob Dole hasn't denounced his opponent for the mass murderer he is. Could it have something to do, by any chance, with the embarrassing fact that what happened to the Branch Davidians was conceived, approved, planned, and rehearsed during the Republican Bush Administration? Come on, Republicans, I know you read this publication, that's one reason I created it. Let's hear why your guy isn't saying the one thing that could get him elected and shut down forever the despicable party that refused to rescue German Jews when it was given a chance, and sent Japanese-Americans to concentration camps in the 1940s. Is it because, despite your prattle about respect for the law, you have as little genuine regard for the highest law of the land -- the Bill of Rights -- as Clinton does? Or is it simply that you want to retain the power to commit exactly the same kind of atrocity yourselves?

Regardless of who wins or loses this election, it's going to present me with a serious personal problem. I know what Clinton's guilty of. And so does everybody else. How can I go on offering friendship, doing business, even being civil with anyone I know voted for him? I'm not talking about the first time around in 1992. Anybody can make a mistake, I suppose. To my eternal chagrin, the first time I voted it was for Richard Nixon. But anybody who votes for Clinton now is approving what happened at Waco after the fact. They're rubberstamping it, ratifying it, becoming Clinton's accessory to mass murder. The deaths of 81 innocent people -- 22 of them children -- are on their conscience.

And any presidential campaign that doesn't scream its outrage over Waco from the housetops is much worse than an accessory, it's a bloody-handed co-conspirator.

On November 5th, as you step into that booth, do the human thing, the thing that separates us from animals: learn from the experience of others. Remember the hardest lesson history ever taught our species. Remember the millions Hitler slaughtered and the dozens Clinton's only gotten started with. Try to imagine what it must feel like to be confined, terrorized, gassed, and burned to death -- what it must feel like to be a German Jew or a Branch Davidian.

Remember that -- for the sake of this nation's future, as well as for the future of our own children -- there can be only one political issue of any importance.

L. Neil Smith is publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise. His award-winning first novel, The Probability Broach, long out of print, has just been republished in unexpurgated form by TOR Books. A list of his books and a collection of essays like this may be seen at http://www.webleyweb.com/lneil/. Permission to redistribute this article is granted by the author, provided it is reproduced unedited, in its entirety, and appropriate credit given.