Headsplice, one thing you really should understand about socialists and fascists: they are not merely brothers under the skin, they are identical twins under the skin. Google "beefsteak Nazi" for some expatiation. Fascists and Socialists fought against each other in WW2 not because they were antitheses -- they were
competitors. See also Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's
Leftism Revisited. Believe me, you'll never look at the various brand names of antidemocracy the same way again. You'll probably have to hunt it up in university library stacks or online used book dealers; I believe it is unfortunately still out of print. I last read it about 1990.
Woo! -- maybe not!
Check this on Amazon.
I am really very pleased with the behavior of this Republican President: unlike any Democratic one since LBJ, he is trying to remove undemocracies (at which LBJ quite failed), and he is concentrating the Federal government on international matters and foreign policy, rather than in meddling with internal matters and trying to push the Bill of Rights aside, as Clinton so signally did. For seven years I've heard a great deal of yelling about how Bush is destroying our civil rights, yada yada yada he did this and he did that -- while the evidence on the ground clearly shows me that no he isn't. Look around the Cellar -- are we in any wise censored? Is
anyone? How many guns can't you buy, and is that number, if greater than zero, any different than it was under Clinton's misrule? It is somewhat greater than under Nixon's, if you like -- that ought to be fixed. When was the last time you were made to incriminate yourself in a court of law? When was the last time anybody was? And so on and so forth down through the Bill of Rights. It is little appreciated by the Dem Kool-Aid swillers that this Administration isn't interested in trammeling them. They're busy. Successful, too: no more planes in any more buildings. Reagan, and the younger Bush: they are both into limited government, and that is how they will go down in history. Some pundits remark that Bush less resembles Reagan than he does Truman -- a Democrat -- in that while he suffered heavily in popularity polling, he's set up and founded the policies and institutions that will pay off in the present conflict, enabling our victory. Truman did this for the Cold War, Bush for the War on Terror. The biggest detail difference I see in these protracted conflicts is the first revolved around nation-states and the second features transnational terrorists demonstrating that the power to destroy is increasingly available to aggrieved private persons, and that what used to need a nation's resources now can be attempted by a millionaire.
Radar, the antidemocratic antilibertarians have initiated the aggression -- neither you nor I need be worried about that, really ever. As antilibertarian antidemocrats, they should also be viewed as enemies of mankind. You don't seem to grasp this, and thus you are reluctant to actually replace antidemocratic antilibertarians with libertarian democrats by whatever means the savage fascists make needful. Countervailing violence is not made illegitimate by the numbers of people doing the countervailing nor whether they're in uniform, Radar. I read your opposition to removing the sources of mankind's political troubles as you making one rationalization after another to conceal a deeply xenophobic streak in your makeup. I am not crippled by xenophobia, have no need to veil it with an infinity of rationalizations for never removing a single fascist, and thus I think more clearly and more morally than you do -- or perhaps can. (I'm assuming while there's life in you, there is also a possibility of redemption.) My working assumption is that good, libertarian governance is good for any human society anywhere, and ought not to be denied anyone, anywhere, simply because they're furriners. As corollary, I consider human liberation and its consequent tendency to prosperity (viz.: America) of such importance that I cannot see a moral difference or delegitimization whether a native group performs the tyrant-excision, or an outside group like the US Army performs it. It's all being done by humans, making other humans free. Freer, if you're actually willing to accept Plan B. After all, that freedom makes prosperity is a libertarian tenet. (That prosperity demands and begets freedom is a T.P.M. Barnett one.) What kind of libertarian finds excuses, rationalizations, for not pushing freedom? Might it be a xenophobic, narcissistic one?
In fact, I don't know of any reason to deny a free society to them at all, and consider that any attempt to do so on anyone's part, regardless of how native they be, an act of at least moral violence and improper aggression, to be met with a
successful campaign to neutralize such oppressors and remove the threat they present. Don't stop short of hanging such miscreants to capital-city lampposts if you want their threat removed and the success achieved. No one weeps for fallen oppressors, and highly motivated sociopaths who make it to head of state -- all too frequent a phenomenon, right? -- only create sociopathic states.
Just the kind of outfits that make us libertarians feel needed.
Then too, I distrust radicalism, even as a leavening of the lump(-enproletariat, even): the more radicalized and extremist a society is, the less sustainable its stability or its radical condition; the pendulum always swings to center. The centerpoint itself slowly, evolutionarily, incrementally travels, apparently under impetus of a people desiring not to repeat history. Though there may be something to Marx's quip about history's repeats: first as tragedy, then as farce. It would lead one to expect two-fers. A democratic society, tending as it does to longterm stability, evolves less in great sweeping changes than by increments; day-to-day stuff that passes almost unnoticed. I'm patient enough to work with that. Societal tantrums are trouble. They also tend to destroy those who spark them.