Those who choose to mock anarchists by holding up Somalia as the sort of situation that comes about in the absence of the state are missing a lot of really important pieces of the story. A friend of mine (thanks, Donovan!) reminded me of one of the biggest the other day: that Western statism, in the form of foreign aid money violently expropriated from states’ subject populations and transferred to Third World state rulers, results in a violent struggle for control of Somalia. The warring factions each know that whoever comes out on top will stand to gain untold riches from the United States and other Western states. To make matters worse, the factions know that the U.S. sends even larger amounts of aid to regions plagued by al-Qaeda; so they have a serious incentive to invite al-Qaeda into their territory.
And, of course, states like the U.S. have a vested interest in ensuring that Somalia doesn’t become too peaceful prior to the establishment of a strong central state, because such a society would be highly threatening to the illusion that the state is necessary for peace and prosperity.
In response to my previous post, someone on a message board replied to the primary question (”What might have been?”) with, “We would be speaking Russian.” And another commenter also indicated he believed the Soviets would or could have developed nuclear weapons first and conquered the world in the absence of the Manhattan Project. In this particular example, the blame appears to fall back on the Manhattan Project itself, since Stalin didn’t have a nuke program until he heard about the one in the U.S.
But I think a more important point for the general case is that a free society, unencumbered by destructive taxation and regulation, would be extremely wealthy and highly versatile. Such a society would have people and firms that would have total mastery over information gathering and would know about a foreign power’s weapons plans in short order. The idea that a wealthy, free, and fiercely independent people would not spontaneously organize to prevent the development or use of such a weapon is absurd. Not to mention that a society that had eliminated the state or reduced it to the point that it was not engaging in military adventures (and the resultant weapons development) would not even represent a threat meriting the creation of a civilization-endangering weapon by a foreign state.
I recently discovered a facebook group called Soldiers Are Not Heroes. I ran across it a few days ago when a friend joined it, and, glancing at it briefly I figured I probably pretty much agreed with it. But I didn’t bother joining it until I saw people start joining a petition to demand that facebook remove the group. Upon closer inspection, it seems to have a bit of a pacifist bent to it (which I reject), but I stand 100% behind its mission “to question the perpetrated illusion that a man becomes a hero by wearing a uniform.”
Soldiers (by which they clearly mean not just soldiers but troops from all branches of the military) don’t get a free pass to hero-land just because they happen to think they’re doing something good and noble. Psychopaths and cult leaders often sincerely believe they’re doing something good by murdering or subjugating people, but we don’t call them heroes. Maybe not a perfect analogy, but you get the point.
There are several reasons to reject the blind honoring of military personnel:
1. Troops are paid out of funds taken by force from the people they claim to be protecting (same as the Mafia).
2. The military is a part of compulsory nation-state governments, which violently suppress competing defense agencies (same as the Mafia).
3. Unless troops are literally defending a country’s borders (or the territory inside those borders) from a current or impending attack, they are not engaging in legitimate defense but rather illegitimate aggression.
4. Troops engaging in aggression in other countries under the justification that they’re protecting our rights are terribly mistaken since military engagement is always one of the chief rationales for the expansion of government at home and infringement of rights.
5. Troops claiming that it’s necessary to fight overseas in order to keep us safe are again sorely mistaken since their actions are well known to actually increase anger against their country and create more extremists intent on killing the troops and the troops’ fellow countrymen.
To be clear, I sympathize with the troops and their families since I fully understand that most of them have the absolute best of intentions and have never really thought through the implications of what they’re doing, and they may indeed act heroically in specific instances and in other areas of their lives, but there is nothing heroic about giving yourself over to do the State’s bidding in military matters.
And the fact that there’s a huge movement on facebook to ban “Soldiers Are Not Heroes” betrays a sad epidemic of unthinking rally-round-the-flag nationalism (which these same people rightly ridicule when they see it happening in other countries). As Murray Rothbard says in For a New Liberty,
War is the great excuse for mobilizing all the energies and resources of the nation, in the name of patriotic rhetoric, under the aegis and dictation of the State apparatus. It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest. Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morals—as the libertarian Albert Jay Nock once phrased it—of an “army on the march.”
It is particularly ironic that war always enables the State to rally the energies of its citizens under the slogan of helping it to defend the country against some bestial outside menace. For the root myth that enables the State to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the State of its subjects. The facts, however, are precisely the reverse. For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only “die” by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes its subjects to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting to defend them.
I can kind of understand when I run across some goofball on the interwebs who accuses libertarians of being isolationist due to our opposition to meddling in other countries’ affairs, but it’s at least a little surprising and disheartening to see the Pew Research Center and someone whose title is “AP Diplomatic Writer” using the same bad definition: Poll: Isolationism Soars Among Americans
What he clearly meant by “isolationism” was “noninterventionism.” An isolationist is someone who literally wants to see his country isolated from the global community–he wants a ceasing or reduction of not only official intervention but also things such as trade and travel. A noninterventionist is someone who simply opposes his national government intervening in the affairs of other countries. Libertarians are noninterventionist because we oppose intervention but are NOT isolationist since we advocate maximum freedom of movement and trade. I would expect that very few people are truly isolationist except for maybe a handful of hardcore authoritarian populists.
Pew appears to have based its claim of increasing isolationism on the respondents’ answer to the statements, “The U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,”and, “We should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home.” At the same time, the poll shows a marked increase in support for free trade agreements, which are a pretty good proxy for gauging support for actual free trade since so many people perceive these agreements as free trade.
So what Pew’s own poll shows is a strong trend not toward isolationism but toward the libertarian principle of nonintervention.
Blogs and opinion columns across the country and across the political spectrum (that is, the artificial conservative-liberal political spectrum) are no doubt calling for Americans to “remember 9/11″ and similar robotic utterances. But what are we supposed to remember, exactly? Like most people, I was shocked at the 9/11 attacks and had the natural human urge to lash out at whoever committed those atrocities and anyone who might be vaguely related to them. Thus did I support the American invasion of Afghanistan, and thus did I proudly serve in the fourth troop rotation of Operation Enduring Freedom, stationed at Bagram Airfield with my National Guard unit.
But I’ve studied and learned a lot since that time and have since removed myself from the unhealthy nationalistic rage that previously clouded my faculties. The fact is that the United States attacked a country (yes, a country controlled by a primitive, violent, despicable regime…like many others around the world) that was not threatening American citizens. It’s common knowledge that humans have a tendency to sort themselves into tribal divisions. The state has taken full advantage of that unfortunate evolutionary holdover and convinced a great many people from both of the state-sponsored parties that anyone who opposes the U.S. government or its totalitarian and interventionist policies actually opposes the American people and our “freedom.” Yes, some of the Islamic fundamentalists probably oppose our freedom…but so do the Christian fundamentalists who live here among us! The main problem is our government, despite the wishes of most of the people it rules, has taken it upon itself to try to remake the world in its own image (which is especially contradictory and destructive since there are so many different ideas within the state apparatus of what the image actually is).
What it comes down to is:
1) The people who attacked us were murderous religious maniacs who happened to be using a particular country as a base of operations.
2) We had no right to invade either Afghanistan or (most certainly) Iraq (though the people who lost family members in the 9/11 attacks would, I think, be justified in hiring private security forces to seek out and capture or kill bin Laden and his co-conspirators).
3) Continuing the support of our presence in either country is not much different than supporting a mugger who has begun to beat and rob an innocent person based on the argument that this person, now confused and disoriented, is ripe for further mugging by others until we “stabilize” his situation.
In memory of the terrible events of 9/11/01, I suggest we call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American troops and other personnel and money from Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is rich. A bunch of suckers (i.e. Democrats and anti-war independents) elected Obama thinking he would somehow stop U.S. military aggression (even though he had a half-hearted, long, drawn-out proposal for extricating us from Iraq and talked openly about invading Pakistan!), and now they are starting to see that he has exactly as much respect for peace and prosperity as Bush did.
Stefan Molyneux, in describing the multiple ways that governments lead to war in Practical Anarchy, finishes with this:
If the above is understood, then the hostility of anarchists towards the State should now be at least a little clearer. In the anarchist view, the State is a fundamental moral evil not only because it uses violence to achieve its ends, but also because it is the only social agency capable of making war economically advantageous to those with the power to declare it and profit from it. In other words, it is only through the governmental power of taxation that war can be subsidized to the point where it becomes profitable to certain sections of society. Destruction can only ever be profitable because the costs and risks of violence are shifted to the taxpayers, while the benefits accrue to the few who directly control or influence the State.
This violent distortion of costs, incentives and rewards cannot be controlled or alleviated, since an artificial imbalance of economic incentives will always self-perpetuate and escalate (at least, until the inevitable bankruptcy of the public purse). Or, to put it another way, as long as the State exists, we shall always live with the terror of war. To oppose war is to oppose the State. They can neither be examined in isolation nor opposed separately, since – much more than metaphorically – the State and war are two sides of the same bloody coin.
As many people prepare to celebrate America’s Independence Day, marking the beginning of a revolution that was to transform America into a land of relative freedom to which people would flock in vast numbers, one of our most recent new additions was welcomed by a bullet to the stomach from a government agent.
The man’s crime? He was suspected of having crossed an imaginary line on the ground drawn by politicians (who themselves subsist criminally by violently appropriating other people’s money) without following the politicians’ rules and procedures for such movement. Yes, a truly heinous crime.
Kind of makes me wonder what we’re actually celebrating on Independence Day. We remember that intrepid generation of Americans who gained their independence from one ruler but forget that another ruler immediately took its place and has grown progressively more oppressive ever since, to the point where something as simple and beneficial as immigration can be deemed illegal by the rulers.
I heard a guest on a news program this morning discussing Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia and his hopes for a better Middle East. He said that Obama needs the help and support of many of the region’s autocratic leaders that oppress their own people and so will be unable to lecture them about changing their internal policies and institutions. He described this as the “conundrum” facing American foreign policy.
Now, the libertarian approach to the Middle East would be to follow George Washington’s advice and try to maintain friendly relationships with all the states in the region and ending any “entangling alliances” like the one with Israel. It’s not our place to be lecturing other countries about freedom and democracy, especially when our vaunted democratic process is currently doing so much to destroy our freedom. The best thing to do is to set a good example and try to keep trade and travel as open as possible so that the citizens of those other countries can see the benefits of a relatively freer and more open society first hand and be motivated to go back home to fight for their own freedom.
Isn’t it interesting how using the libertarian approach eliminates the supposed “conundrum” and would even allow us to get rid of probably hundreds of State Department employees currently being employed in the complex machinations of our interventionist foreign policy?
Several times today I’ve heard someone (mostly just radio DJs) say, “Happy Memorial Day.” That doesn’t make sense to me. What could possibly EVER be happy about calling to memory our fallen troops? In addition to the obvious point that we should ruminate on this more than one day per year, on this Memorial Day we should remember those who have died in all our conflicts, but we should not think back on them as having died gloriously fighting for our country but rather as having been taken from us prematurely by acts of government aggression. There is nothing glorious about war, regardless of the inclinations toward which some of our baser instincts may lead us (especially after a devastating attack like 9/11). As I’ve pointed out before, few American conflicts aside from the original Revolution could really be considered defensive conflicts.
The fact is that large-scale war between nation-states is an artifact unique to (surprise!) nation-states. It’s clearly sometimes unavoidable in the world we find ourselves in, but that doesn’t make it any better. Many of our conflicts have been fought by people drafted into service by force, an unconscionable state of affairs wholly opposed to the idea of a free society on which this country was founded. Even many of those who choose to join the military end up fighting and dying in wars that they know are wrong and in which they would not have chosen to fight if they’d had the option. It’s true that many people voluntarily join the armed forces and even approve of the conflicts in which they end up dying, but there’s no avoiding the fact that, in the absence of the state’s war-making, those individuals could have had much longer lives, engaging in valuable production, exchange, and personal fulfillment.
I was fortunate to not lose any of my fellow soldiers with whom I served overseas during the deployment of my National Guard unit, but we all still suffered by being there. Many endured a reduction in income, lost career opportunities, strained family lives, and some even missed the births of their children. Several even lost marriages over problems caused by the deployment. When the state makes war, it destroys not only the lives of enemies and innocent bystanders but also the lives of the very troops who do its bidding. We should memorialize the fallen not as glorious war heroes but as innocent victims of the state.
Randolph Bourne famously said, “war is the health of the state.” Very true. It could equally be said that peace is the health of a free and prosperous society. Don’t fall into the trap laid by the government, which wants us to continue the primitive tradition of glorifying military action (which in turn means glorifying government itself). It’s all very clever and takes advantage of our inborn desire to see ‘our side’ beat the crap out of the ‘other side.’ But it’s my view that, as a species, we’re advanced enough now to not be taken in by such tricks and to not have to rely on involuntary coercion (the government) to solve our problems, either internal or external. It’s high time we stopped allowing the government to manipulate us into continuing to support it through the mythos of the ‘glorious sacrifice’ in war.
Okay, I’ve slammed Obama plenty on his apparent desire to use the guns of government to take from Peter and give to Paul (while government itself keeps a hefty cut). His economic policies, if carried out, will likely prolong our recession and are, quite simply, morally repugnant.
But I also want to acknowledge the bright side of this situation: Obama’s foreign policy disposition.
But first, let me lay out a premise: there is a direct relationship between true national security and individual liberty. The safer we are, the less excuse the government has to crack down on personal freedom in the name of catching bad guys. Inversely, as we have seen over the past 8 years (and in other periods of war), increasing numbers of people threatening violence against us leads to increasing government infringements of our liberty.
Now, on to Obama and his foreign policy.
Generally, Obama seems much more willing to sit down and talk with our international interlocutors than McCain would have been. Thinking optimistically here, I can see a President Obama treating states like Iran, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela like adults (even when they don’t deserve it) and opening dialogue instead of opening fire (literally or figuratively). Some of the basic rules of conflict resolution are to make the other side feel like an equal, keep them from losing face and getting defensive, and move them from an adversarial position on the other side of the table to a co-problem-solver position on the same side of the table jointly attacking an impersonal problem. I have a feeling Obama has a relatively well-developed understanding of these principles. Hopefully, his talk during the campaign about unilaterally going into Pakistan was just a miscalculated attempt to prevent McCain from painting him as a sissy. Basically, foreign relations is like raising children. Children don’t respond well to screaming and beating, and neither do the child-like despots that control the countries we call our “enemies.” You praise the positive actions and use negative actions as opportunities to talk about why the action was wrong. Such an approach will drastically reduce international tensions and eliminate potential military conflicts, thus making us safer.
One other key point is that Obama is not in bed with Israel. He won’t likely be bending over backward to support a country that’s perfectly capable of defending itself. Since our foolishly unconditional support of Israel is one of the main rallying cries for recruitment of new anti-Western terrorists (I know, it doesn’t really make sense to us), cutting or reducing the U.S.-Israel military and financial umbilical cord would go a long way toward enhancing our overall security.
One negative aspect of Obama’s foreign policy that shouldn’t go unmentioned is his probable continuation and increase of all kinds of foreign aid. Not only is foreign aid another immoral instance of government using force to transfer wealth from one group to another, but it has the added disadvantage of giving ammo to various countries and groups calling for violence against Americans (as in the case with Israel).
So hopefully the foreign policy of the Obama administration will actually improve both our short term and long term security and do so by following the libertarian principles outlined above.
