| Urbane Guerrilla |
08-03-2005 03:38 AM |
Somebody crazed enough to defend tyrannies everywhere, which is what you're too messed up to see you are doing, Bruce, telling me I'm a little off?-- my, my, that feels like a medal.
Peace at any price seems to be the standard you march under. I'm here to tell you slavery and oppression are worse than war, which is pretty much a given with the more vertebrate thinkers -- and the more vertebrate sort of libertarian, as well.
Since the kind of nations I disapprove of are uniformly totalitarian ones -- you wouldn't want to live under those regimes either, I don't think, not unless you have remarkably strong masochistic traits (I don't) -- it simply cannot be wrong that I would attack them, nor would it ever be wrong to make war upon such. The Communists used to misuse the term "war of national liberation," but the record so far is that it's the democracies, particularly the United States, that actually liberate -- by war with totalitarian systems. We have replaced totalitarian systems in two sizeable nations by warfare already: Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have both been, in the end, improved. Even though each country got raked over pretty thoroughly, the improvement has stuck, even in a never-democratic place like Japan. Neither nation's political system precisely resembles the American, but I don't see they have to.
It seems you don't have much understanding of how umbrella a term "Libertarian" really is. That's just intellectually lazy: there are at least three major and separate streams of Libertarian philosophy: right-Libertarian, a very Jeffersonian lot; left-Libertarian, who seem to come at it from a free-love-and-legal-weed elderly-hippie platform; and the anarcho-Libertarian, who are perhaps the most radically anti-big-government of the lot, through being hostile to the very notion of any government at all -- though modified, I think, by experience. As you can tell, I'm no leftist, and I should mention that while the late Murray Rothbard was my first exposure to Libertarian thinking, I don't share his touchingly naive belief that anarchic social models are the answer to it all. That leaves the right-Libertarian, unless I can start a whole new, aggressive, brook-no-interference branch of the philosophy myself. Since I usually find myself agreeing with the kind of ideas, particularly in foreign policy, that the Republicans come up with, though unhappy with the Reps' enthusiasm for a great big state and debasing the currency by inflation, I figure I'm a right-Libertarian.
It's something like this: if libertarian ideas of proper governance are to spread beyond the borders of the United States, those holding these ideas are going to be subject to repression by the statist thugs of the very nations that need libertarianism the most: the autocracies, the oligarchies, the totalitarian regimes. They must be prepared to resist that oppression. Moral suasion isn't going to do it, as we all know, since such thugs aren't there to open a panel discussion about the issues, and the thugs employed by such states basically aren't going to have a place in the society the libertarians wish to make, certainly not as thugs. So we libertarians must be prepared to countenance violence, and revolution, and to be more efficient at it than the tyrannies can be. The slavemonger revolutionaries have managed successful accession to power by such revolution, and their strategies are well known. Why can't these strategies be turned to the aid of making open and free societies instead of closed national slave-pens?
Oh, and those Libertarians who alleged to you the Constitution forbids war save in the most narrowly defined understanding of "defensive?" They cannot point to any Constitutional clause that says that -- certainly not in Article I, Section 8, 11-16.
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