The Effects of War on Liberty

by Anthony Gregory over at LewRockwell.com

Controversy on war and foreign policy still persists within some libertarian circles. The apparent difficulty seems to come with the assumption that the proper antiwar libertarian position is just too easy, just too simple – there has to be more to it than this. This assumption is implicit in such arguments for intervention as the ones seen in Randy Barnett’s widely criticized Wall Street Journal article from July.

Libertarians are accustomed, when arguing against domestic policies, to point to the practical as well as the moral issues involved. While many libertarians see themselves as primarily "consequentialist," on the one hand, or "moralist," on the other hand, all libertarians enjoy the benefit of a political philosophy with very strong arguments both practical and ethical. It is a beauty not just of libertarianism, but of human nature and the world around us, that what is moral is so very often what works. If slavery were actually economically efficient for society as a whole – which it isn’t – it would make for a sadder world and a harder time for libertarians. If property rights were efficient but ran counter to any consistently applicable ethical theory, it would also pose problems.

It is a wonder, then, that many who favor liberty, spontaneous order, voluntary human action, free trade and markets, and as little government as humanly and practically possible, do not see the full force of both the ethical and practical arguments against an interventionist foreign policy. In war, many friends of liberty have been tempted into siding with big government, with central planning, and with collectivist, rather than individualist, ethics. This exception to libertarian theory and ethics in the realm of foreign policy is a peculiar blind spot, and one that unfortunately has serious and negative implications for our work for liberty, since the warfare state has most likely been the biggest, most dangerous, most expansive and most disastrous government enterprise in modern American history.

Libertarian Ethics, War and Foreign Policy

Libertarians believe that individuals have a right to live their lives according to their own free will, so long as they do not initiate force on other individuals with the same right. From this moral first principle flows our entire social and legal theory – property rights; the right to self-defense; opposition to the modern leviathan state; and respect for civil liberties, due process and other checks on expansive government. Self-ownership and free self-determination form the ethical buttress of our case for free markets, free trade and personal liberty.

Because of our stern support for private property, libertarians view expropriation and trespass to be violations of human rights. Most people accept the basic premise that you should not steal from or trespass against your neighbor, but libertarians apply this ethic to the state. Taxation, being a coerced extraction of wealth, ultimately at the point of a gun, is a form of theft, and thus morally wrong from a libertarian standpoint.

Many government programs do not violate liberty in themselves – few people are forced, for example, to go to a public library or a government-funded university. However, even such relatively peaceful programs are funded coercively, through tax dollars. Libertarians oppose government spending on social programs, by virtue that it is government theft from individuals. We might even favor what a social program is attempting to achieve – a library is hardly objectionable to most people, in itself – but we must oppose the power of the state to forcibly seize the rightful property of some and give it to others. Even those of us who believe in a minimal government believe its taxing power should be shrunk as much as possible, with the ultimate ideal of eliminating it and replacing all taxation with voluntary financing.

War is typically an expensive government program. Estimates for how much the Iraq war alone will come to cost the American people range from about $400 billion to a trillion or more. According to economist Robert Higgs, the defense budget is even far larger than we might think, since so much of the warfare state’s costs are hidden as expenditures in other department budgets or "off-budget" items. Furthermore, Americans are still paying the debt for past warfare state spending. We are looking at more than a trillion dollars a year spent on the warfare state – almost 10% of the economy’s yearly output. At other times, the warfare state has cost much, much more as a percentage of the economy. During World War II, it was at about 40%.

By what moral principle can libertarians defend these enormous tax expenditures? More than $3,000 per American per year is being taken by force for the warfare state, no less than if that money were spent on libraries, food stamps or other public projects libertarians oppose. Every American taxpayer who opposes the war, for moral, religious, practical or whatever reasons, is being compelled to fund something against his conscience and judgment. This alone – the taxing side of the warfare state – presents huge problems for any libertarian who continues to attempt to reconcile his libertarian ethics and support for a large military establishment.

But when it comes to foreign policy, the moral issues go far, far beyond those of tax dollars. People – many innocents included – are killed in war. The government bombs neighborhoods knowing that it will kill hundreds or thousands of innocents. Infrastructure, private and public but in no case owned by the attacking government, is destroyed. Homes are invaded and blown to bits. Children are slaughtered. This isn’t all just what happens when particularly criminal soldiers commit atrocious individual crimes of rape, violence and torture – which also predictably happens to a grotesque degree during war. Most of the killing is just part of the policy. Bombing Baghdad or Belgrade has what legal theorists might call a "substantial certainty" of killing innocent people. Modern war is in fact in practically every case an example of mass murder. It must be opposed by the libertarian first and foremost for this reason. For not just Americans have individual rights to life, liberty and property; so too do all foreign non-aggressors, and so killing them, which is a predictable outcome of today’s typical military tactics, is gravely immoral according to libertarian ethics.

Some argue that when the fight is against a truly ghastly foreign regime, any innocents killed by the supposedly "good" government of the U.S. are "collateral damage." The true aggressor, according to this argument, is the enemy regime, not the U.S. government, which is acting in supposed defense of Americans.

One response is that historically, in most of its wars, the U.S. government has invaded or attacked a country that never attacked or credibly threatened to attack Americans on U.S. soil. Even by a collectivist analysis, whereby we look at nations, rather than individuals, when assigning guilt, the U.S. has more often than not been an aggressor.

However, to the libertarian, this is all of secondary importance. Libertarianism concerns individual rights and individual actions. States, nations, communities and so forth are abstractions and social constructs which do not act independently of the individuals they comprise. Only individuals act and only individuals have ethics or rights, and so it is a violation of an innocent person’s rights to bomb him, even if the government he lives under is aggressive and tyrannical. Certainly, the U.S. government was itself quite aggressive in the Middle East before 9/11, yet that in no way legitimized the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which killed innocent Americans for the crimes of their government. So, too, is it immoral to bomb a country with the substantial certainty that it will kill innocent foreigners, even if their government is aggressive.

Central Planning and War

Many will argue that these high moral principles are just impractical to the question of war, and that, furthermore, the U.S. government’s wars in particular have on balance protected more than violated the lives and liberty of a greater number of individuals, including foreigners "liberated" by U.S. wars. This is a collectivist ethical calculus and incompatible with libertarian ethics, but it also neglects the powerful practical libertarian arguments against government intervention and central planning. In fact, as experience and economic theory both show, the government is no more competent at centrally planning the protection of freedom and peace worldwide than it is at producing effective solutions to social problems in the domestic sphere.

Socialism fundamentally doesn’t work, as Ludwig von Mises revealed, because the state, as owner of the means of production, cannot make rational economic calculations. Without private ownership and exchange, there are no prices, and without prices there is no effective means to determine how and where to divert resources to their most urgent use. Mises also pointed out that one intervention in the economy often causes distortions that are later addressed by further interventions, causing yet more problems, and so forth.

The U.S. government’s attempts at collective security on the grand scale seen throughout the last century have amounted to a gigantic socialist experiment, and have revealed in foreign policy the failings of central planning that Mises identified as endemic in domestic intervention. The United States entered World War I and tilted the war toward the allies with great force, encouraging the harsh treatment of Germany after the war, leading to the backlash in Hitler’s rise to power and indeed the rise of fascism and communism – rather than a world safe for democracy – for the next decade. In World War II, the U.S. gave enormous support to its ally, the totalitarian Soviet Union, which ended up expanding and supposedly justifying the U.S. government’s horrifying actions in the Cold War. During the Cold War, the U.S. government supported anti-Communist strongmen regimes throughout the world, including dictators and future U.S. enemies, such as Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship, which became an enemy after the Cold War, and the Muhajadeen fighters in Afghanistan who became enemies after 9/11. The U.S. has found itself supporting Saddam against the Iranian theocrats, only later to oust Saddam to the benefit of the very same Iranian extremists. Now the U.S. is contemplating supporting Sunni thugs, once again, to counterbalance the Shiite threat. The madness goes on and on.

To believe that the U.S. government can bring about liberty and peace worldwide is to have a faith in government planning – in socialism – more impenetrable to individualist reasoning and historical experience than we can find even at the most leftwing college campuses in America. It is fitting, then, if still ironic, that conservatives and even some self-identified libertarians have defended the Iraq war on the basis of how many schools, hospitals and other civil infrastructure the U.S. government has helped construct in Iraq – after it destroyed what was there before, of course. People who oppose government intervention in the U.S. economy somehow believe in government intervention in the Iraqi economy, trusting that what the Iraqis need is more U.S. socialism. This adds up, insofar as buying into the warfare state leads one to inevitably have more faith in government planning per se.

Which raises another point. The advent of the warfare state means a reduction of economic liberty, an attack on free markets and a general move toward state power and away from freedom. With war come crushing taxes, business regulations, trade restrictions, new bureaucracies, myriad erosions of fundamental civil liberties, and even, at times, a nationalized, enslaved labor market in the form of the military draft.

The Effects of War on Liberty

The largest and most troubling expansions of government in America were mostly not the result of social programs. The Progressive Era and even the New Deal did not do as much as war to move America away from its relatively libertarian heritage of limited, checked and balanced government, free markets and individual liberty. The Civil War brought with it draconian censorship, a draft, inflation, the suspension of habeas corpus and a consolidated national government that signaled the end of true federalism. World War I introduced even wider censorship, conscription, deportations and spying. World War II gave us food rationing, conscription, citizen surveillance, censorship, and Japanese Internment. With the War on Terror, we have practically lost the Fourth Amendment and seen habeas corpus once again suspended. These are no light matters. The end of habeas corpus is itself a repudiation of a nearly millennium-long tradition in the Common Law. It was not terrorists who set the clock back to pre-Enlightenment times for American liberty – it was the warfare state.

In the economic world alone, war has been a terrible disaster for American liberty. The so-called "American System" of corporate subsidies and economic nationalism, championed by Hamiltonians in the early years of the republic, finally became implemented during the Civil War. World War I saw the advent of thousands of new federal bureaus and regulatory agencies, some important ones of which were resurrected for the domestic New Deal. The national public university system is largely an outgrowth of the post–World War II military industrial complex. Price controls, medical socialism, income tax, central banking and so many other economic evils made their debut during, or came around to stay largely due to war.

Aside from the violations of civil and economic liberties, war also brings about a moral debasement of the warring culture, which in turn weakens the people’s resistance to more government and more general incivility. As the moral standards become lowered as they usually do with war, utilitarianism takes hold and nearly anything is considered permissible so long as it is not as evil as the enemy, whose wickedness, for that matter, is often exaggerated.

Imperialism and war have done more than anything to propel the collectivist ideologies characteristic of the 20th century. Once a people come to tolerate torture and chemical warfare against a country that has never even attacked them, they will generally be less vigilant when it comes to other government and private evils.

In practice, U.S. war has been a plague on the lives, liberty and property of millions upon millions of Americans and foreigners. The inability of the state to centrally manage human affairs is no less prevalent in global crusades against evil or humanitarian nation-building adventures than it is in run-of-the-mill domestic matters. The failure of the Iraq war is not a consequence of bad management or unique incompetence in the Bush administration; it is representative of the expected failings of military socialism.

This all should make sense to the libertarian. The moral principles of individual liberty that are so obviously compromised by the vociferous taxing, regulating and mass killing of the warfare state are complemented by libertarian economic and practical arguments against war. Not only is war a violation of the rights of the individual – which we must always oppose on moral grounds – but on balance, it has failed to produce security, much less peace and liberty, for most people it has touched.

The libertarian bias, therefore, should always be against the next government war. History reveals a pattern of lies, deceit, abuse and tyranny surrounding virtually every U.S. war, yet many friends of liberty, who generally don’t trust politicians’ words or their power to do good in domestic affairs, for some reason trust them when it comes to war, the biggest and most corrupting of all government programs. Free-market theory explains why government projects usually fail to achieve their advertised goals, even when undertaken with good intentions. Libertarian morality tells us it is wrong to aggress against individuals, to trespass against their property rights or do them bodily harm if those individuals are not attacking us. The libertarian case against foreign intervention, the warfare state, and global governmental crusades for democracy or against evil is not, as some would have it, weaker than the libertarian argument against drug laws, the minimum wage or Social Security. Indeed, the libertarian case against war is clear, multifaceted and harmonious, internally consistent and reinforced by history. It is also the best case against war there is, which is why we must keep making it, in the name of peace and liberty.

The Synthetic and Imperial View of Freedom

Does the government "invent" and "give us" our rights (legal positivism), or as the declaration of independance implies, our rights are self-evident and pre-existing and at best all a government can do is recognize that pre-existing right and abstain from violating it (legal naturalism)? Either rights are special privilidges granted by the government that can be revoked at whim (at which point it ceases to be any right at all), or they are something that we inherently possess by virtue of being human beings with self-ownership and property.

Those are the two basic opposing views on rights. Either freedom is a naturally arising thing, or freedom is something that government invented synthetically. These are the two diametrically opposed views on the nature of government: does society create government, or does government create society? I hold that society and government are two separate entities, and society precedes a government. The classical liberals, including the founding fathers, leaned heavily towards the position I am taking. They largely rejected the positivist and synthetic view of freedom.

Since I am an individual human being that controls myself, and therefore presumably my liberty is my own, then my liberty derives from my own faculties as an individual. This implies, first and foremost, self-ownership. And if I am a self-owner, only I can therefore enforce this in practise, by applying my faculties to the best of my ability. The positivists and statists deny all of this, for the implication of their view is that I cannot exersize such faculties without having them being given to me by a government, as if government literally invented human rationality and capability itself. But the entire notion is contradictary. Someone's liberty cannot be both their own and synthetically created by someone else at the same time.

The synthetic view of freedom and society blurs the distinction between society and government. It acts as if a society is molded in the absolute by the government, rather then taking the view that the government is something created by society. To the legal positivist, society is therefore seen as a synthetic thing to socially engineer, to mold like clay. It is simply assumed that society does not contain any capacity within itself for order or cooperation, and therefore it must be controlled dictatorially as if it were a canvas for the central planner to paint on as they please. To the positivist, society can be "planned" in the absolute.

But this is a highly mistaken view of the nature of society and government. Society is simply a statistical aggregate, a concept, meant to describe a group of individuals. It is government that is the artifice. Society is a natural order that is the necessary result of the need for individuals to band together as to cooperate in order to ensure survival and overall well-being. As such, society arose out of a self-organizing principle. Government came into the picture long after society formed itself. Society created governments. Governments were not always there, as if they were grand inventors that magically created society. The positivists therefore have the nature of social evolution entirely backwards. First, there is the individual, then there is the family, then there is the tribe, then there is the city, and so on. It is not the reverse, where first there is government, and we work our way down to the individual.

Not only is society a self-organizing entity, but as it evolves it becomes harder and harder to centrally plan. This is precisely because of the spontaneous nature of societal order. It is impossible to manage society from the top-down. Positivists are fooling themselves if they think that they are actually capable of centrally managing a modern economy. It has become so complex that it is impossible for a single central entity to be able to keep track of all of the variables involved. An economy is something that naturally arises to begin with out of (1) homesteading of previously unused and unowned property and (2) consequential exchange between property titles that were brought into existance by homesteading and production from the fruits of the homesteading. It is absolutely fallicious to believe that an economy is the artificial creation of an institution such as a government.

It is not because of the existance of a government that people decide to cooperate with eachother. People cooperate with eachother because if they did not, if everyone were completely isolated from eachother, with no interaction at all, everyone would simply die. The human race would have simply never come into existance. Social cooperation is a necessary result of existance itself. If men and women did not band together to form families, then procreation would not have occured. If people did not engage in production and trade with eachother, then there would be no way for them to efficiently obtain food, clothing and shelter. In short, there is a natural incentive towards cooperation. The alternative is non-existance.

It should be clear on this basis that it is impossible to synthetically create social cooperation. It is impossible to synthetically create a family, an economy, a society. Someone cannot be artificially made into a free person, they already are a free person by virtue of their nature as a social animal. Someone cannot be given a right to property, they already have a right to property. Someone cannot be given a right to self-ownership, they already are a self-owner. This is what is meant by the terms "natural rights" and "natural law". It is expressly not synthetic. It is natural. It arises as a consequence of human nature itself.

The synthetic, positivist view of freedom is commonly manifested in the notion that someone wouldn't have the right to critisize the military if it weren't for the military fighting for their right to say it in the past. It is a blatantly statist premise that I'm not allowed to critize my government "because people fought and died so that you can say that"; this is a reoccuring disingenuous tagline that people use to shoot anyone down critical of their government, especially military policy. But it is wrong. No, my ability to freely speak derives entirely from my faculties as an individual, not from any external force or group.

The sentiment in question is a false conclusion driven from a false premise. The false premise is the idea that "the troops" are currently defending our rights, or have done so in past offensive wars. This is, of course, not the case at all. The false premise is the notion that one's ability to express freedom would not exist without some deliberate action of people in the past to grant me this ability, such as in some anchient battle. But obviously, my actual abilities of expression derive only from me. In many ways, this is a crude from of ancestor worshop at best. But the people being refered to are most likely not my ancestors at all, so it is even further removed from the nature of reality than this.

This conservative idea that liberty comes from the military is one of the grand obfuscations of government. My liberty derives from my nature as an individual human being. My liberty does not derive from the altruistic sacrifices of other people towards the goverment's wars, to causes that I myself may disagree with to boot. The military power is not synonomous with liberty. The military power, more than any other institution, has been than grand violator of liberty, for it possesses the ultimate means of force by which state power is obtained, retained and expanded.

Consider those who argue that America's current foreign policy is "defending our freedom". It takes quite a perversion of the meaning of freedom in order to buy into such a notion. To begin with, if it protects my freedom, then why can't I not pay for it? And here we get to the paradox of the militaristic arguement for freedom: they have to violate my freedom, in the name of protecting their own flawed conception of freedom. That is, I am not free to abstain from being forced to be allegedly "free". But if I am forced, then obviously I am not free. This continues endlessly in logical contradiction.

The idea of forcing people to be free is orwellian indeed. Many defenders of the Iraq war do not only assert that it defends my freedom (by allegedly keeping me safe from "the terrorists", a claim that is factually absurd when one looks at the empirical facts) but that it is in defense of the freedom of the victims themselves, of the Iraqi people. It shouldn't take much thinking to see what's wrong with this idea. The military invaded their territory, regaurdless of their consent or rather lack thereof. The very definition of being free, of having rights, is based on consent. Rights had to be violated in order for the invasion to take place. Empire and freedom are two diametrically opposed principles. The idea that through government we can make foreign people free is nothing but a large-scale consequence of the flawed belief that governments are where our own freedom comes from domestically.

The entire idea that we can use military occupation and nation building to "spread freedom" is an oxymoron. Freedom cannot be forced onto people, they have to choose it. They have to express it themselves. They have to assert their rights themselves, free of compulsion in either direction. People cannot be bombed into freedom. You cannot give someone else rights. They already have them, and only need to assert them. If you enact force on someone in the name of "helping them", one is in reality harming them by violating those rights that they already have. It's like punching someone in the face and then claiming that you're defending them.

The military complex is a violator of freedom by its very nature as an institution. It is founded in force. Coercion is its means. Everything that it does is at the barrel of a gun. It is the great big gun in the room, so to speak. It is the government's ultimate means of enforcement of coercion. Its aim is to destroy, not to create. It results in the mass destruction of human life and property, and human life and property are the very things that freedom derives from. If the individual, if human life, is our unit of value, then militarism and empire is the ultimate destructor of value. If the fundamental right is the right to life and property, then war is the ultimate violation of rights.

One of the biggest problems of politics is the perversion of language. The meaning of words is warped and even reversed into their polar opposite. Forcing systems of government on foreign people is asserted by politicians as being freedom. The meaning of rights is twisted as to imply coercive positive obligations with respect to other people. A right is improperly defined as something that is given to you, and therefore you owe allegiance to others, some power structure, for bestowing something upon you that you allegedly did not already possess the capacity for in yourself. Freedom, therefore, is defined in a manner identical to slavery.

This is the moral crises of the modern world. A lack of understanding as to the nature of freedom. Only when people properly understand what freedom is will they be able to gain it back from those who have taken it away from them. The choice between slavery and death is no choice at all. Freedom at the point of a gun is no freedom at all. But freedom is not just a pipe dream. It is something that can be brought into fruition in all of our lives, if only we properly identify it.

A Debate on "The West" vs. "Islam" and War

This is exerpted from a debate on a message board, in which the person being debated with is trying to justify the following premises (1) that all Muslims inherently present a threat to "the west", and this alleged threat on "the west" is meant to mean a threat on me as an individual and (2) that not only are "the west's" current wars in the middle east justified, but war against the entire Muslim world is justified. Their statements will be in quotes and italics, mine will be without quotes.

It is amazing that people who are supposed to be the greatest enemies of collectivism buy into forms of hobbesian collectivism by putting forth a conflict model of society ("the west", whatever that's supposed to mean, vs. the muslim heathen). This is all about breeding social conflict where it didn't exist before or need not exist. I'm interested in avoiding social conflict, not increasing it.

"You have hit on a fascinating subject when you said “the west” and expressed doubt as to whether such a thing really exists."

The point is that the invocation of "the west" is an obfuscation. Taking the word to describe a geographical territory, I am part of "the west" in that I am within that territory. I am not directly or overtly effected by Muslim people thousands of miles away, and I never will be. To say that there is a "war against the west" is to imply that there is a war against me; it implies uniformity.

But I walk around all day without any Muslim attacking me; indeed, without coming into contact with any at all. To imply that "the west" and me are the same thing is to engage in collective obfuscation. I am an individual. I am not "the west". And if I am considered to be a component part of "the west" this does not mean that an attack on another component part is an attack on me; as an individual I am still independant from those other component parts.

"The conflict does exist whether you choose to acknowledge it, or avoid it."

What conflict? An inherent conflict between "the west" and the "middle east"? That's just collectivist nonsense, because again it presumes uniformity on the part of both sides, which is not the case. Everyone who is a Muslim or everyone who is in the middle east is not waging war against everyone who is not a Muslim or everyone who is not in the middle east. If you take a look at objective reality, it would become obvious that it is particular "western" governments that have engaged in war against particular middle eastern territories by invading, occupying and bombing them.

On the other hand, empirical reality tells me that the chances of me being a victim of muslim terrorism are less than my chance of winning the lottery or spontaneously combusting; and the chances of "America" being taken over by middle easterners and transformed into a muslim theocracy is zero. The chances for a Muslim in the middle east to be "collateral damage" in "western" occupations and internal strife is much much higher than the chances for me to ever have to worry about anything close to what they deal with on a daily basis.

"As I have already stated before, there are people who mean us ill."

Intent in itself is not a crime. To enact an aggression against someone simply because you think that they might aggress against you in the future makes you the aggressor. It is not legitimate to enact force on people simply because they have ill desires towards others. You can only enact force in defense once they have actually overtly presented the threat. If I punch you in the nose because you, while on your own property to boot, insulted my character verbally or advocated verbally that the institutions I personally like should be done away with, then I am guilty of assault. Justifying initations of aggression by alluding to intent or "psychic damage" is the oldest trick in the book.

"There is a war."

Indeed, there is. It is was initiated by the U.S. government against multiple countries that did not attack "us".

"It was declared by them against us."

I'm sorry, but this is pure horsedung. No Muslims have literally militarily invaded any "western" territory. Many "western" governments, on the other hand, have been occupying their territory for decades on end. In either case, "Us vs. Them" is a collectivist obfuscation that assumes uniformity on the part of both sides, which simply is not the case, and creates what I refered to as a conflict model above. There is no "us"; we do not all agree. There is no "them"; neither are they uniform. The conflict model pits groups against eachother, as if there is inherent conflict between them that is impossible to resolve without warfare.

I object, because I myself as an individual am variant with the other members of the group that I'm allegedly part of, and I see the capacity in man to "live and let live" with people of different asthetic preferances. Man contains the capacity for cooperation despite inequality and disagreement. Conflict models are hobbesian and obfuscate the individual and variance. They invent social conflict where they need not exist or did not previously exist.

"We are not bad people for defending ourselves."

Once again, who is "we" to begin with? "We" presumues a uniformity that does not exist; I have not been aggressed against by any Muslim, therefore I have no legitimate defense claim. It would not be legitimate for me to go shoot some Muslim fellow; that would be murder. Furthermore, if "we" means the people of the united states, or any western "nation", you are simply making a false defense claim. There has been no offense to defend yourself against. What you are doing is engaing in the classic tactic of trying to justify iniations of aggression with false (and collective) defense claims.

Muslims can shout "down with the west! down with the west!" all they like. That would not present anyone with a justification for enacting aggression on them simply because they insulted your character. Furthermore, if we would stop identifying with collectives (such as "the west"), we would understand that we are decieving ourselves to interpret insults of "the west" as an insult of our personal characters as individuals. "The west" is just a concept to describe a territory. No particulular individual and their character can be described with the phrase. Otherwise, one is engaging in an absurd kind of anthropromorphicism.

This "us" and "the west" stuff is simply the old trick of getting people to identify with the state, which leads to the idea that the state is defending "us" in engaging in offensive warfare. I refuse to identify with something that I am not part of myself, and I further refuse to act as if any group I may be part of requires uniformity (I.E. absolute conformity to the other component parts) on my part. I refuse to be insulted personally by attacks on an abstract concept that does not actually describe me as an individual. And I refuse to allow the illusion of national territorialism to force me sacrifice myself to such an abstraction. I will only sacrifice myself for what I value as an individual (I.E. self-interest), not to collectives.

"There are dangers to you posed by Islam in the form of an establishment of a muslim theocracy."

In America? Absolute lunacy. There is virtually zero chance of me being subject to Muslim theocracy as imposed externally. On the other hand, there is indeed a huge chance of me being subject to totalitarianism as imposed internally. Furthermore the logical result of the aggressive state warfare that you suggest would lead to increases in government power at home, and that in itself is what constitutes the true, direct threat to me right in my backyard.

"Intent IS the crime!"

Intent in itself can be nothing more than a thought. Intent is not a crime. Intent in itself does not effect me as an individual. A criminal is a criminal because they act out their ugly intentions. On the other hand, someone who simply has ugly intentions, but lacks the courage or willpower to actually carry them out in physical action against others, does not constitute a criminal. A low-life perhaps, but not an aggressor.

"Intent is at the center of what it means to commit a crime."

Not quite. I can simply wish death upon you, and not act this out. Intent does not necessarily lead to physical action. I can intend things all day and not actually do anything about them. Most muslims, and religionists in general, I think can be viewed this way. They are cowardly in this sense. Sure, they may shout incoherancies and advocate ugly things against "the west", but the bulk of them do not carry it out in action against those whom they preach hate against (out of cowardice, at best they can externalize the costs onto others to act it out for them, through the mechanism of an institution such as a government). Are you seriously trying to get me to believe that an entire collective deserves aggression to be enacted on them because of either (1) their hateful opinions in themselves or (2) the aggressive actions of a small group of people within their ranks? This cultural collectivism of yours has to be addressed. It is illogical.

"Someone who advocates killing you because you are a kafur invites a just retaliation as long as you confine your killing to just him."

Really now? So if someone simply makes the statement that "all Americans should die", I am justified in aggressing against that person merely because of their verbal advocation that I should be dead (which, again, hinges on me identifying with the nation and state, which I regaurd as a pile of collectivist bulldung)? Verbal advocation is not a crime. You can write all the pamphlets and advocate stuff verbally all you like. It becomes a crime when you start to act on it. Most people do not act on their verbal advocations. Now, if the person makes the verbal advocation on my property, then we can start to have a legitimate defense claim of some sort, insofar as I can have that person leave my property if I desire, forcably if necessary.

"As I will show, we did not start this war."

As can be seen from objective reality, the united states government invaded a territory, which contains some people who never did anything to any American (actually practically none of them have; zilch, zero). That is an initation of aggression. To argue otherwise is to make a grand obfuscation of what an initation of aggression is. The country that actually militarily invades another territory is the starter of a war, the initator of the war.

This should be quite obvious. A war is started by the initial act of invasion. No Iraqi (or Iranian) has invaded America, there has been no military invasion of America, and nor would it be legitimate to enact aggression against an entire group because of what one person in that group did (that would constitute an initiation of aggression against innocent bystanders). You go after the actual individual aggressors, not entire "nations", not everyone within an entire territory irrespective of their own responsibility as individuals.

"I will leave it at that and continue assembling my sources and references so that you can read and judge for yourself whether there is a threat, who constitutes that threat, if we may consider all of Islam as a rotten egg as regards their intentions towards us etc etc."

Here's a clue: it's the governments that set up the initial crises. All of them to one degree or another. On the other hand, governments are to be distinguished from "society" or "the people". Governments are a particular small band of individuals who control a monopoly over a given territory. The "society" that they rule over is constituted by a separate group; those who are subjects to the given territorial monopolist (I.E. state). None of the people in that group have aggressed against me, and therefore as an individual I cannot have a defense claim against that which has not actually aggressed against me. I am not justified in aggressing against people who never aggressed against me. It's that simple. It's really that simple.

I think your position hinges on collective territorialism and group-identity-think. What you are asking me to do, in essence, is sacrifice myself to a collective ("the west") in the name of fighting a collective ("the muslims") that has done nothing to me as an individual. When I think about it, the demand you're making of people is incredibly altruistic. To spell things out even more clearly: what you are advocating is genocide in the name of "preserving the west".

Trendy, Modern, Emergent Evangelicals Want To Bomb Darfur

by Bill Barnwell

Count me as a loud dissenter to one of the latest trendy causes of many younger Evangelicals: Darfur. I have no desire to push our already overstretched military to intervene and bomb foreign warring factions into peace, love, and happiness. Interesting how many of the same people who complain about our continued military presence in Iraq (and I join in their criticisms) want the UN or the US to start dropping bombs in Darfur to kill even more people in the name of humanitarianism.

Darfur is certainly a troubled region. You can read about this very unstable area of Sudan and its long and complicated background here. However, according to some younger "emergent church"-type Evangelicals and a coalition of other voices on the left and right, the situation isn’t really all that complex. We have the power to easily solve the crisis. What’s needed is "social justice," they say. Apparently the socially just thing to do is bomb Sudan, invade yet another country, and involve ourselves in yet another messy civil war. Alas, the facts are always a little more complicated than the humanitarian enthusiasts would have you believe.

So, while many progressive Evangelicals are calling for our exit in Iraq, they are also simultaneously calling for our entrance into Sudan. Their problem is not so much that bombs are falling; they are just are in disagreement with where the bombs are falling. Progressive Evangelicals will take issue with that statement and say they merely support sanctions and UN peacekeepers to start with, and then maybe the tanks and bombs. But if history is any judge, once we insert ourselves into a "UN peacekeeping mission," we seemingly never leave. A timetable is set and pushed back year after year. "Peacekeeping" also tends to be a prelude to "war-making." And as Richard Land (the Southern Baptist Convention’s head of their Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) says, any peacekeeping mission will need the necessary "military teeth."

According to some of our anti-Iraq war, pro-peace Evangelicals, all we need to do is just give war a chance in Darfur. This turnaround is similar to the peacenik left-wingers who in '99 traded in their lava lamps, open-toed sandals and Grateful Dead CD’s for machines guns during their euphoria to bomb Serbia for "humanitarian" reasons. Of course, those laptop bombardiers weren't the ones actually going to war, just like the belligerent rightwing bloggers and radio personalities are not the ones serving in Iraq today.

Yet eight years later that region is still largely a mess and most the stated reasons for going into that war turned out to be exaggerations or untrue. We were told Milosevic was a "new Hitler" even though he was losing a province every couple of years and his country's economic and military strength was puny. Allegations of genocide were overstated and atrocities were revealed on both sides. There's certainly real atrocities going on in Darfur right now (and that are worse than existed in Kosovo), but I have no reason to believe that we are going to make the situation all better with tanks and bombs, and apparently neither do many of the aid workers actually on the ground over there.And what of all those millions of dollars raised by the "Save Darfur Coalition?" Well, according to this recent New York Times article, it's actually not getting to Darfur and not doing much if any relief. And what do relief workers think of this proposed UN military intervention being pushed for by various left-wing gunslingers and their hipster Evangelical buddies? They claim it will result in more carnage and more damage, not less.

Note that most people attracted to a particular cause think that war should be waged long before all other options are exhausted or facts on the table (See Iraq in the summer 2002–early 2003). Personally as a Christian, I really don't see the New Testament ethic pointing towards a promotion of military strife, certainly not before all the facts are in and all options exhausted.

For every Christian who plays some "gotcha" game with me by pointing to the various wars of ancient Israel, I ask them to actually look at what the New Testament has to say. Romans 13 grants the state the authority to punish its own transgressors, but I don't see this as giving blanket authority for waging undeclared do-gooder wars against other sovereign territories – wars that often cause more harm than good. And this is a disputed point, but some NT Greek scholars would contend that the "sword" being referenced in Romans 13 is a small defensive dagger. Whatever it is, its best application for today probably isn't Humvees and stealth bombers against foreigners and "collateral damage" (a.k.a. innocent civilians).

But I'm a realist, and I know war is not likely to go away anytime soon. As a practical matter, however, I don't see this one meeting a theological or constitutional smell test. Certainly not yet at least. If someone could actually make a convincing case that bombing the bad guys of Darfur would result in a net positive, even though it would probably inflict its own evils, I might entertain such utilitarian notions even though that kind of moral equivocating troubles me. But more likely you'd have a situation similar to what happened in Kosovo, an area most people today have long forgotten about which is still quite screwed up. Or you could have American ground soldiers get in the middle of a bloody and messy civil war. I think we're already in the middle of one too many of those as it is. There is also the unfortunate reality that even though America is big and strong, it is not able, nor should it try to correct all the wrongs in the world. And as we are now seeing, it doesn't always work to try and force people to resolve their differences and get along happily ever after, even when you try and force them with a government-paid-for gun. Also, whether we want to admit it or not, we are just too stretched economically and militarily to insert ourselves into a never-ending stream of global conflicts, even ones like Darfur that involve real human rights abuses.

Make no mistake, both the left and right love military force; they just love it for different reasons. Putting the humanitarian crusaders in charge would not necessarily reduce America’s involvement in foreign wars and entanglements. They too love to play the role of Globocop. Keep that in mind before you enlist in their brigades to hop aboard the Darfur bandwagon.

The internal contradictions of U.S. imperialism

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11152
by Justin Raimondo

When the history of the Iraq war is written, the question of who lost it and how it was lost will be paramount, yet the answer is clear enough even today. The seeds of defeat were sown long ago, and not just by the policymakers and authors of our present disastrous policy. The co-authors of defeat in Iraq are the politicians and the U.S. military, both of whom are constrained by the internal political dynamics of U.S. imperialism. The military deficiencies that some, like Sen. Harry Reid, have pointed to are not a matter of individual "incompetence" on the part of some generals: the inefficiencies are inherent in the system.

Via Matt Yglesias we hear the news that the U.S. is now ramping up the air strikes, a sure sign – according to William Lind – that we are losing and clueless:

"Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the 'surge' is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: it isn't."

Civilian casualties are way up – but who cares? Not the Americans, who are so fixated on the internal politics of the war – the "battles" raging in Washington, D.C. – that they don't have either the time or the inclination to pay attention to the "metrics" coming out of Iraq.

Besides which, as Yglesias reminds us, the Pentagon doesn't bother keeping track of Iraqi casualties. In a war for hearts and minds, however, the civilian casualty rate is a big indicator of American (or insurgent) success: the higher the rate, the lower are the chances that the U.S. can pull it off. After all, we are aiming – presumably – to give the Iraqis the security within which they can resolve their intractable political situation and begin to stand up (so we can stand down), but the bureaucratic and political imperatives of the imperial system that is evolving – in Iraq and everywhere else the American footprint is large – override the strategic requirements of fighting a successful war, as this story makes all too clear:

"The Air Force feels left out of the counterinsurgency debate. What's particularly galling to some officials is that the role of air power was relegated to a five-page annex at the back of the new Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. Setting out to rectify that perceived shortcoming, the Air Force is drafting its own manual for irregular warfare, due out this summer. And officials are speaking out about air power's contribution to labor-intensive irregular warfare, seen as the domain of the U.S. military's ground pounders."

The war on the ground in Iraq must take a back seat to the ongoing war within the U.S. military between the "air power" boys and the "ground pounders." Everybody wants a piece of the action – except, of course, when it comes time to take responsibility for defeat, which is even now looming large in the Pentagon's nightmares.

One of the chief weaknesses of imperialism is that empires have their own internal dynamics, which don't always conform to the requirements of external military and diplomatic policy. The only hearts and minds the American military seems to care about are those in Washington: winning over the Iraqi people is incidental, because the incentives work the other way. The Air Force has to show it is part of the solution in Iraq, whether or not it can actually play a significant positive role on the battlefield, because that is the road to increased pull on the Hill and in the White House, which means more funding. Within the Empire are all these little empires, competing for tax dollars, prestige, and political primacy, and it is this civil war – always being fought, albeit at various levels of intensity – that is the ultimate undoing of the imperial order.

It doesn't matter that air power exacerbates the problem in Iraq, rather than solving it. It doesn't matter that we're alienating ordinary Iraqis, who often are the victims of U.S. air raids; all that matters is that the Air Force's rivalry with the Army (and the Navy) requires air strikes. What determines our "strategy" is a shifting concatenation of competing agencies and political factions that meet on the battlefield of congressional committees and the higher councils of U.S. policymakers. The outcome of this war – the intra-bureaucratic turf war – determines the strategy and conduct of the external war. And that is the road to certain defeat.

Rent by internal contradictions, the American Empire contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, and these are sown and nurtured by the sheer scope of it. I am reminded of an anecdote Rose Wilder Lane tells in her 1936 polemic Give Me Liberty: she had gone to Russia a convinced Communist and supporter of the October Revolution and was astonished to find that the "liberated" workers and peasants didn't share her enthusiasm for the proletarian state. She got into a debate with a Russian peasant, who appeared impervious to the lure of Leninism:

"I drew for him a picture of Great Russia, to its remotest corner enjoying the equality, the peace, and the justly divided prosperity of his village. He shook his head sadly. 'It is too big,' he said. 'Too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man's head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.'"

The American Empire is being undone by its bigness – no one can centrally plan such an enormous undertaking. The physical holdings of the Pentagon alone are so vast that they constitute a nation unto themselves, a huge empire as complex and far-flung as Great Russia then or now. The regime-changers in Washington are no better at planning the reconstruction of the Iraqi state than the central planners in the Kremlin were at building a modern industrial state out of a peasant-based economy.

The American Empire will end just as certainly and ignominiously as the Soviet Empire did – and, perhaps, even more rapidly, on account of the economic factors involved. It's true that our enormous wealth – i.e., the boundless productive capacity of capitalism – masks the true economic cost of war, to some degree. Yet, in the end, we may wind up being destroyed by the very market forces we are so intent on globalizing.

Empires cost money, and this one, as Garet Garrett wryly observed half a century ago, is unique in that "everything goes out and nothing comes in." The Romans exacted tribute from subject nations, seizing gold, slaves, and anything not nailed down. The American Imperium, on the other hand, is the Bizarro Empire, where U.S. taxpayers pay tribute to America's local satraps, such as Egypt and Israel – the two biggest recipients of our "foreign aid" program. We defend Japan and South Korea, allowing them to shelter under our military umbrella while they export finished goods to the American market – and lend us the money to build an empire of bases around the world.

As Ron Paul tirelessly points out, the American welfare-warfare state is built on the shifting sands of an economic pump-priming perpetual motion machine, i.e., government debt. We are selling our children into slavery and bankrupting the nation: this is the price of empire, at least in purely economic terms. The price in blood– ours, the Iraqis, and perhaps the Iranians and others in the not-too-distant future – is higher still. Whether the American people are prepared to pay it is a question that is currently torturing our elites: this is the real heart of the Iraq war issue in American politics, and both parties seem committed to persuading us that the price of empire is worth it. The Democrats propose to do it on the cheap. They solemnly vow to fight future wars of conquest "smartly," while the Republicans are more extravagant and daring, with a devil-may-care attitude about the expenditure of troops and treasure in pursuit of "global hegemony," as the neocons like to put it.

The rise and fall of the Bizarro Empire is going to be an object lesson in how greatness, and liberty along with it, is lost. The story promises to be Spenglerian in its tragic denouement yet oddly inspiring in that the old republic survived as long as it did – up until at least the fatal year 1917, when we were dragged into the Great War and the seeds of the next were planted. The beginning of the end was when America embarked on its long overseas crusade to make the world safe for democracy against the villain of the day. Twice the villains were Germans, and since then the Russians, the Iraqis, and now the "Islamofascists" have all had their turn.

Tomorrow it may well be the Russians again, and then there's always the Red Chinese, whom the Fates have entrusted with much of our debt – a weapon more deadly than any H-bomb.

America, having exhausted itself militarily, economically, and spiritually, will one day be found washed up on some foreign shore, a hapless Gulliver overrun by hordes of angry Lilliputians and bound by a thousand threads to their feuds. When the history of the American Empire is written, any fair and objective author will have to concur that it didn't have to turn out that way: if we choose the prerogatives of Empire over the ascetic ideals of our republican tradition, we go willingly to our doom.

Romanticism and Progressivism

Political philosophies often involve views of history. There are two general tendencies in how political philosophies regaurd history: romanticism, which is to be understood as a longing for and idolization of the past, and progressivism, which is to be understood as a longing for and idolization of change and progress into the future. The romanticist gladly proclaims that they favor "turning back the clock". The progressive gladly proclaims that history is an endless march towards future progress.

Both of these tendencies are manifested in various ways, and pop up simultaneously within many political philosophies. The marxist view of history, in which communism is proclaimed without proof as being an inevitable future stage of history, is an example of progressivism. On the other hand, progressivism of a quite different sort was espoused by Herbert Spencer, in which social evolution necessitates adaptation to man's environment through increased individual freedom in accordance with the laws of nature.

An example of romanticism would be rigid religious or cultural traditionalism, in which changes that have occured in recent times, such as the move towards secularism and cultural tolerance, are radically opposed while systems of the past are held up as the ideal. And romanticism has also been represented in American nationalism, in which the figures such as George Washington are idolized as if they were gods. To varying degrees, this is also true of every other nation that has ever existed in recorded history.

When understood in their proper context, romanticism and progressivism have lead to both erroneous and correct conclusions. Romanticism always faces the danger of becoming primitivism and ludditism, in which more simple, agrarian and tribal living of the past is considered the ideal. And progressivism always faces the danger of becoming unenthusiastic and desensitized to the present, or of becoming overly utopian by basing the allegedly "inevitable" future on false notions about human nature.

When a change is proposed that would undo something that was previously done, the staunch progressive suddenly becomes conservative, and the use of the term conservative here is meant to mean a defense of the status quo (the present). On the other hand, when a change is proposed that would do something that was not previously done, the staunch romanticist becomes conservative. When these drawbacks of both groups are combined, it can amount to two-punch defense of the status quo.

But there have also been some good tendencies in some progressive and romantic views. The wise progressive possesses the insight that it is possible to improve conditions through both social evolution and revolution. They are aware that there are some things that have not been tried yet, at least fully. The progressive has reason for optimism toward the future. Where the progressives erred was in the question of how to go about changing things and what to change to, and in exessive optimism.

The romantic possesses the insight that there are certain basic principles or laws which are necessary for order to flourish. They are aware that there is much to be learned from the thinkers and writters of the past, and that there are some things that will never go away. Where the romantic erred was in the inability to aknowledge the changes and extensions that have been made upon the basic principles and laws of the past, and in their exessive pessemism toward the future.

Some progressive forces have been beneficial to the condition of mankind. In particular, the classical liberal revolution of the 18th and 19th century was incredibly progressive in that people adopted new ways of thinking about politics and economics, and for the first time in history the liberty of the individual was increased considerably in comparison to beforehand. This newfound freedom was first felt in England and later spread to America and some of the other European countries. It is important to keep in mind that this change required the rolling back of the previous systems of monarchy, fuedalism and mercentalism.

During this period, the romanticist and conservative parties were the monarchists, mercentalists and many of the people in the privileged classes. The advent of classical liberalism did not completely abolish the system of monarchy or mercantalism. It did, however, reduce their scope and considerably damage their reputation among the public. Without the classical liberal revolution, slavery and hereditary monarchy would have never been phased out and constitutional republicanism would have never been implemented. But for the time being, the conservative forces had lost out.

During the 19th century, classical liberalism itself was going through changes and new ideologies started forming. The ideas of socialism and communism were being formulated, as were the ideas of anarchism. Capitalist economics was also advancing simultaneously. However, it did not take very long for communism and socialism to become conservative, in that they became reactionary ideologies to the classical liberal progress that was going on. The socialists began to consider the increases in economic freedom and capital accumulation that had gone on as something to abolish.

In this sense, the original communists and socialists wanted to "turn back the clock". They bitterly resisted the progressivism of the industrial revolution. On the other hand, they became convinced that communism is an inevitable future stage of history, and that socialism was the inevitable process by which society will be transfered into communism. In its earlier stages, socialism was linked to the anarchist movement. However, it started to split with the anarchist movement because it began to support the use of government, of political means, to achieve socialist ends. To a serious and consistant anarchist, this is akin to blasphemy.

In many ways the anarchist movement, particularly the individualist anarchist movement, was an extension on the ideas of the classical liberals. Both the classical liberals and individualist anarchists shared many of the exact same premises, but they drew two different conclusions from those premises. The classical liberals concluded that we need a strictly limited constitutional government, while the anarchists concluded that we need no government at all. The two groups were allies to some extent, but some of the classical liberals also became conservative with respect to their relationship to the anarchists. The anarchists posed the threat of further change to the limited governmentalists.

Throughout the 2nd half of the 19th century, the classical liberal movement itself started to dissolve and fragment. In America, the advent of the civil war intensified already existing cultural divisions and hostilities. Certain aspects of mercantalism and militarism were returning. The conservative forces were gaining hold again. A new type of "progressivism" was emerging which was, in part, a conservative reaction to the liberal revolution. This progressivism replaced liberalism with a rising network of privileges, the military-industrial alliance and the war economy. The spirit of the old liberalism was dead. Some major contributing factors to its death was (1) the merging of socialism with conservative forces (2) the move towards a philosophy of expediency and (3) the rise of public demand for special privileges.

At the beginning of the 20th century, banking was officially monopolized, centralized democracy was spreading around the world and WWI ushered in the era of total war and national confrontation. In every country, nationalism manifested itself to varying degrees. The overall political landscape was no longer divided between revolutionary/libertarian forces and conservative/reactionary forces. Everyone started becoming a reactionary to everyone else, splintering into an endless array of special interest groups. What little remnants of classical liberalism remained was was slowly soaked up into the Republican party mostly, and it remained there as only a small fragment in the early 20th century, peaking as a resistance movement to the new deal.

The American "progressive" movement of the early 20th century defined progress in terms of increased government powers over the economy to allegedly achieve benevolent and egalitarian ends, including the use of military force to "spread democracy around the world". It took a reactionary and hostile view towards the industrial revolution and capitalism in general. On the other hand, it could not be said to be an all-out communist movement. In its economic content, it was closer to fascism than communism. Whereas in communism the government is supposed to take control of the means of production, economic fascism is a system in which the government merges and colludes with private industry through patronage and protection.

In Europe, communism and fascism was on the rise during this time. One way to look at the relationship between these two systems is that communism is radical progressivism that uses government power to attempt to achieve its ends, while fascism is radical romanticism that uses government power to attempt to achieve its ends. The German fascists, otherwise know as the national socialists or nazis, idolized and romantisized anchient norse culture in a blatantly religious way. Communism went for another route: it co-opted religion altogether and turned the state itself into a god that is can be the instrument of endless "progress". Both communism and fascism stem from an extreme rejection of the ideas of classical liberalism, capitalism and anarchism, and they both represent totalitarian forms of government. Both grew out of socialism.

In America, neither pure communism or pure fascism was the system of the day. Interventionism (centrist statism) took hold. Elements of both left-wing socialism and right-wing socialism were combined throughout the early 20th century. But the scale was always tipped a bit more towards right-wing socialism in America, and this trend has only increased over the years. In terms of the common person's views, most Americans settled for softer variants of socialism, or some kind of centrism. When the stock market crashed, many of the people became convinced that it was the fault of capitalism, but the capitalist era had long been over for decades. In this new era, the long-term fruits of the capitalist era, the capital that it had accumulated and planted seeds for further accumulation, was to be tapped into by the government. In either case, the welfare state, or at least part of it, became the bi-partisan status quo in America during this period.

By the time WWII ended, America was the true superpower of the world. This was mostly because Europe and other parts of the world were in utter ruin from all the war and economic hegemony, while America didn't really get effected on its own soil. Another contributing reason for the great comparative prosperity that America had during the 1950's was because to an extent, the Eisenerhower administration, during the first term, rolled back the regulation that the war economy had brought about. But this did not last for very long. The war machine got charged back up in no time throughout the 2nd half of the 20th century. It has been growing at an alarming rate.

For a brief period in the 1960's and part of the 1970's, the American left-wing had an upsurge of a progressive anti-authoritarian spirit. This was particularly manifested in the rise of an anti-war movement among their ranks. However, this movement quickly devolved into an absurd form of romanticism in which primitive living is looked upon favorably. It was also co-opted by the socialist and communist movements. In spite of the good qualities of the new left, the establishment left has always been rather conservative, and have historically persued interventionist and militaristic foreign policies.

The American right-wing became co-opted by militarists and former new deal era democrats. What remained of the libertarian spirit within America's right-wing was essentially purged. While the cold war was initiated by Democrats, it quickly became taken over by conservative Republicans. The seats of quasi-libertarian Republicans became replaced by social conservatives and former Democrats. America's contemporary right-wing embraces a centralized government in order to carry out an active and aggressive foreign policy, extension of domestic police powers and government collusion with buisiness. Furthermore, America's contemporary left-wing embraces much of this same program, only with a somewhat different set of interests involved.

None of the mainstream political interest groups represent a genuine progressive and revolutionary spirit. Neither do they posses much of an appriciation of the advances that were made in the past. Leftists tend to view the advances of private commerence that have gone on negatively, and view the advance of government power with respect to the economy as the epitomy of progress. Rightists tend to view the advances of personal interrelations that have gone on negatively and view the advance of government power with respect to foreign policy as the epitome of progress.

Leftists tend to view a move towards more economic freedom as "turning back the clock". Rightists tend to view a move towards a less active foreign policy and more personal freedom as "turning back the clock". For both of them combined, actual progress is seen as a retrogression, while a retrogression back into authoritarian control of personal and economy activity, and warfare, is seen as progress. In typical Washington politics, the authoritarian side of their agendas are generally accepted while anything smacking of something truly new is generally rejected. This has the effect of hampering true progress. But there has also been a hampering of the people's appriciation for the progress of the past, as they have been kept largely ignorant of such things.

The political parties have represented little more than a shell game. They take advantage of people's fears of the future to exploit the romantic spirit. They take advantage of people's fears of the past to exploit the progressive spirit. The modern so-called left and right are like the ghosts of something that doesn't exist anymore. The deck of public opinion appears stacked in favor of power. The political climate does not consist of people who desire to use power vs. people who do not so much as people who each have different ends they want to use power to achieve. The political spectrum has realigned itself so many times and split into so many fragments that the conventional views of politics today are absurd.

Polyarchy (Part II)

http://www.polyarchy.org/manifesto/english/past.present.html

18. The state takes over

Parallel to nationalism, two dishes were becoming more and more the staple food of the masses, cooked in various ways by the state now in association with degenerated (i.e. bureaucratic/monopolistic) capitalism and socialism. They were: - race hatred - class hatred The struggle for political power was conducted by groups competing for mass support and arousing irrational passions for ignoble motives. Hatred directed against the 'others', those with different religions, cultures, ways of life, political beliefs, became common currency in late 19th century Europe. The Jews became, generally, the scapegoats, a soft target to divert attention from any crisis or misdeed. From the "Dreyfus affair" in France to the nazi 'final solution' and, beyond that, throughout the 20th century, state sponsored race and class hatred have mixed in an intoxicating cocktail.

This cocktail, based on nationalism as its main ingredient, has produced two major results: - imperialism - militarism Let us focus on each of these phenomena (imperialism, militarism) since they lead straight to the (total) demise of both capitalism and socialism and to the full emergence of the virus (statism) that plagued communities and individuals since the end of the 19th century and for a large part of the 20th century. This period was marked by the dominance of the nation states and by the disasters and destructions of which they were the cause.

19. Imperialism

Imperialism is the starting stage of statism. In the past, merchants, pilgrims and adventurers have crossed the oceans, set foot on uncharted territory; people have migrated and occupied land, mixing with indigenous peoples or settling and cultivating new territories (colonization). When the mercantilist state entered the world arena, the aim became to find riches to appropriate, especially gold and silver, because these represented an increase in its wealth and power. This policy became known as colonialism.

During the period of development of capitalism (end of 18th century to the end of 19th century) colonialism came almost to a halt. The state, the main backer of colonialism, was no longer the centre of power, whilst the new dynamic powers represented by capitalist entrepreneurs and merchants were busy manufacturing/trading goods and inventing/perfecting new mechanical devices. The situation changed when a system of nation states was in place all over Europe and capitalism had built such productive machinery as to make possible the maintenance of an ever increasing parasitical stratum (bureaucracy and its social appendages).

At that moment, both colonialism and the capitalistic trading posts became things of the past and a new phenomenon appeared : imperialism. Imperialistic dominance was built, in many cases, on the basis of existing commercial outposts : that is why capitalism has become associated and confused with imperialism. But imperialism (political dominance) was not a necessary concomitant of capitalism (economic benefit) or even of pre-capitalistic economic exploitation. In fact, before the advent of capitalism, huge profits were made with the slave trade relying on small trading stations scattered along the African coast of Senegal, without the need for white slave merchants to occupy a country or, even, to penetrate deep inside it.

As regards capitalism, it was interested in producing and exchanging goods, not in holding and administering a territory. It needed a trading station, not a land, a capital or a bureaucracy. The thesis that behind any imperialistic venture there are economic gains, hoards of wealth, vast treasures, is so very plausible that it is (almost) universally accepted even when it is factually untrue. Clearly it has served the state well when it had to find a post-factum rationalization for its follies.

But, in reality, imperialism, on the whole, has been a very costly adventure and one that no sensible capitalist would have ever underwritten or even considered if their personal fortunes were at stake. Only state nationalism, clearly relying in an exploitative way on the productive achievements of capitalism, could produce imperialism. What is more important is that, beneath imperialism, advocating and supporting it, there was the growing mass of the state bureaucracy and the growing role of the state military.

20. Militarism

The consolidation of national states and their imperialistic adventures demanded not only servants wielding the pen (bureaucrats) but also servants wielding the sword (soldiers). Military expenditure rose considerably between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. In Germany it went from £10 millions in 1870 to £110 millions in 1914 (a tenfold increase); in Britain, over the same period, from £23 millions to £76 millions.

With the expenditures rose the arrogance of the military, spurred on and reinforced by the equivocal folly of patriotism, so respectable on the surface and yet rotten at the core. In France this can be clearly seen through the tragically farcical development of the "Dreyfus affair", the military caste out for blood, piling up outrageous lie after lie, in a bid to protect itself at any cost. In Germany, the militaristic Prussian attitude, held in high esteem all over Europe, was ready to involve and associate other continental states in the massacre that is war.

The First World War was not an accident but the almost inevitable outcome of an outgrowing and outpouring of militarism fuelled by each state's own nationalism and imperialism. The scramble for Africa was the muscling of the nation states, the preparation for total war. The pistolshot in Sarajevo would become the pretext for the end of the brief interlude of liberalism and provide the spark for the events that, shortly thereafter, would lead to the demise of both capitalism and socialism.

21. The demise of capitalism

The joint growth of nationalism and militarism contributed to driving capitalism down the road of bureaucratism and monopolism. Starting from Germany, protectionism, weakened but never totally removed under capitalism, had already reaffirmed itself towards the end of the 19th century. In fact, not all of capitalism was, by then, a dynamic system as portrayed by friends and foes alike. New economic masters had increased their power (trusts and corporations) trying to avoid both risk and responsibility (limited liability companies).

In some cases, monopolies and cartels, favoured by the resurgent protectionism, had already made a mockery of the freedom of the market (the so-called invisible hand); in other cases, weak and outdated industries were asking for trade protection by the state, in the old tradition of the mercantilist political economy. When the First World War broke out, the state, almost everywhere, seized control of the railways, shipping, gold reserves, and a few strategic materials.

After the war the German state controlled the use of more than 50% of the national income; in Italy, by 1934, Mussolini could boast that 3/4 of the economy was in the hands of the state. At that point, the state was ready to take over and dominate not just the economy but the whole of society. And, subservient to a logic of nationalism, protectionism and monopolism, capitalism was willing to accept a subordinate position, to become for the state, in the years to come, the useful idiot to be blamed for anything going wrong, the docile cow to be milked for all its worth. And this just to be kept alive even in a degenerate form.

The imposition by the state of a neo-mercantilist policy based on protectionism strangled world trade and was responsible for recurrent crises and a long depression, both attributed to the working of capitalism. For long periods in the first half of the 20th century production stagnated or grew very slowly even in presence of unsatisfied needs. It was only during the second half of the century, with the abolition of many tariffs (1948 Gatt, 1957 European Common Market) that people could enjoy a rising standard of living. The contribution of the state in post Second World War economic growth is nil, unless we count as merits the fact that it reduced its asphyxiating presence and its damaging control on 'foreign' trade (but not on 'domestic' matters). That, in the first half of the 20th century, capitalism was purged and liquidated by the state appears clearly and in an exemplary way in the treatment reserved for the Jews. If there was a group that truly represented the spirit of capitalism (internationalism, liberalism, economic calculation, etc.) it was the Jews.

And the 20th century, the century of statism, saw the discrimination, ghettoization and extermination of Jewish communities, by the state, in many countries of Europe. The demise of capitalism and its replacement by statism with its neo-mercantilist policies can be dated, in Europe, to the outbreak of the First World War. From then onwards, Europe would be dominated by a policy of protectionism and dirigism administered by the nation states.

22. The demise of socialism

The ascent of capitalism and the growth of factories had meant a vast increase in the number of factory workers. On the political front, the expansion of the right to vote signified the possibility, for the workers, of electing representatives to the national parliament. To enhance the living conditions of the masses of workers, socialist (labour) parties and trade unions were formed in countries all over Europe. Parties and parties' delegates, on the one hand introduced more discipline and continuity to the fight for workers' emancipation and betterment; on the other hand they became, more and more, external agents who took control and manipulated the masses to their own purpose (income, security, power).

A new bureaucracy arose. The dynamic was similar to the spreading of the state bureaucracy : production made it possible to feed parasitism, in this case new parasitic strata coming out of or taking sides with the workers. Party bureaucrats became the manufacturers and mediators of conflicts, replacing direct action and self-emancipation. The mighty German Social Democratic party became modelled on the Prussian army and a model for other socialist parties to follow. As in the case of capitalism, the demise of socialism was, first of all, an internal moral debacle that destroyed the soul (the socialist yearning) while keeping the body (the party bureaucracy).

There are plenty of tombstones to mark the death of socialism: - 1919 : Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht killed by para-military groups (the Freikorps) with the connivance of the minister of the interior, the socialdemocrat Noske; - 1921 : the repression by the Bolsheviks of the Kronstadt uprising; - 1936-1937 : the defamation of and crackdown on the anarchists by the communists during the Spanish Civil War. These were all marked by actual physical deaths. But none is so representative of death (inner death) as the almost unanimous vote of the representatives of the German Social Democratic Party in the Reichstag in favour of war credits (1914) After that date, the word 'socialist' (as in 'socialist party') was, already, no longer related, in actual fact, to freedom, emancipation, internationalism and pacifism, that is to the basic tenets of socialism.

23. The final demise

The peak of all this dynamic that finally brought to worldwide dominance a new power system based on the state, took place on a Tuesday in late October 1929. On the 29 October 1929, the USA stock exchange crash damaged forever the reputation of capitalism as a viable economic system, able to carry on without regulations from above. After that event, capitalism was totally irrevocably dead, theoretically and factually. The fabrication of that event and of the resulting anti-capitalist feeling was a master stroke of the Federal Government of the United States of America.

At that time, the word 'capital' applied more to pieces of paper, be they notes or shares, than to productive machinery, and this tells us a lot about the transformation of the word and of the world since Adam Smith. The actual fact was that this so called 'capitalism' had undergone such a radical transformation (from industry to finance, from free trade to protectionism, from laissez-faire to dirigism) that it would have been more appropriate (theoretically and practically) to declare that it had died rather than that it had evolved. But this frank declaration of death suited neither the state, the new hidden master, nor the public at large, still fantasizing about freedom of trade, free enterprise and the balanced budget, realities all long-since disappeared or which, in some countries, had never existed.

In the USA, since the war with Spain (1898) and the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the federal government (the central state) had started intervening and interfering in business large and small. In 1913 the Federal Reserve (state central bank) was instituted in order to put an end to the so-called 'anarchy' of capitalism and as a remedy for bank failures that had numbered 1,748 during the previous twenty years. Protectionism was on the rise. The United States government had been highly protectionist since the end of the civil war (1865) and then later (1890) with the ultraprotectionist McKinley tariff act. As a matter of fact, the decade that saw the big crash started with the protectionist tariffs of the Fordney bill (1922) and ended with a further increase sanctioned by the Hawley-Smoott tariff act (1930).

So the master stroke of the USA federal state was to destroy freedom in production and commerce with all sorts of state controls while at the same time reproaching capitalism, or what was left of it, for misusing a freedom (despairingly called anarchy) it no longer enjoyed. The crisis came because of the incompatibility between a mercantilist (i.e. protectionist) state and a capitalist (i.e. free-trade) economy on the wane. This contrast created frictions and imbalances that were attributed to the basic working of unregulated capitalism, and so justified further doses of state intervention (neo-mercantilism).

That state interventionism was not the solution, is made very clear by the fact that, during the next 20 years of Federal Reserve control, bank failures went up to 15,502 (almost a nine fold increase). And this led to wider powers for the Federal Reserve and to a larger role for the state under the "New Deal". The less the state medicine worked, the more it was prescribed ! We can mark the big stock exchange crash and the subsequent New Deal as the final demise of capitalism, and the worldwide ascent to dominance of statism.

24. From capitalism/socialism to statism

The First World War and the subsequent malaise and excesses, up to the big crash of 1929, were the visible phenomena of a gigantic crisis that threw what was left of capitalism and socialism into a state of terminal exhaustion from which they would come out all but dead, in Europe and elsewhere. Needless to say, as elements of feudalism survive amid the development of capitalism, so elements of capitalism and advocates of socialism (both of a degenerate or mutilated type) survive during the dominance of statism but in a wholly subordinate position.

The demise of capitalism/socialism is marked by three deaths: - the death of liberalism : people abdicate freedom in favour of patronage and protectionism, i.e. subordination, controls, restrictions; - the death of individualism : individuals give way to masses, parties, bureaucracies; - the death of economic rationalism : economic calculation is replaced by considerations of power, prestige and patronage.

Besides these regrettable disappearances, the only aspect that survived was the powerful industrial machine and disciplined workforce set in motion by capitalism and socialism and now at the service and disposal of the state for the extraction of revenues and for the production of instruments of war. Actually, something else survived: the labels 'capitalism' and 'socialism' were kept, to designate what were, by now, empty shells, to be filled or fought over for the use and convenience of the scoundrels of statism.

It must be made very clear that, as the word 'capitalism' used during the 20th century has nothing to do with the historical phenomenon of free enterprise that flourished mainly during the 19th century, so the word 'socialism' (or for that matter 'liberalism') employed in the 20th century has similarly undergone such a total change of meaning, with respect to the previous century, as to be not any longer useful in a scientific historical context. And so, finally, from the death of capitalism and socialism and the incestuous intercourse of degenerated remnants of so called capitalism and socialism, statism was born.

25. Statism (origin and typology)

The state is the power constituted for the preservation and perpetuation of parasitic strata and statism is the general label that applies to all ideologies and realities that aim at expanding and consolidating the power of the state. The origin of statism can be ascribed and dated to the First World War and the incredible enlargement in the role of the state that ensued. Wars, as Randolph Bourne stated, are the health of the state. They lead, almost inevitably, to a situation in which people are ready to give up freedom in exchange for security. And usually, the very forces which, in the first instance, deprived them of security (the state, especially the state military apparatus) are then supposed to reestablish it and grant it.

The usual deceitful pre-condition for doing so is that people remain silent and obedient (besides killing and being killed in war). As history has shown over and over again, from that single shot in Sarajevo at the beginning of the 20th century to the many shots in Sarajevo at the end of the same century, the silence and obedience demanded or imposed by the state have produced appalling tragedies in which neither security nor freedom have survived, let alone been granted. The binomial 'law and order' as a trademark of the state and the very justification for its existence, has actually become a misnomer for oppression and disruption.

In fact, the proliferation of laws by the state to keep everybody and everything under its control, has produced the phenomenon of 'disnomy', that is laws that provoke material and moral disorder. The term statism refers to a system of power characterized by the control and dominance (absolute or relative) of the state in any life situation and activity, with the crushing or subduing of all opposing or intermediate bodies. The only recognized sovereign body is the state.

Clearly, there is no such thing as "the state" but bureaucrats of all kind and in all sectors (political, administrative, judiciary, military, financial, etc.), working hand in glove for the feeding of parasitic strata of which they are the central core. The old vocabulary has remained on the surface (i.e. capitalistic society, fight for socialism) as a smoke screen, a useful device for the bureaucrats to employ when things go wrong.

Statism has presented itself under three main typological labels: - socialism/communism - fascism/nazism - dirigism/welfarism. As previously repeatedly pointed out, labels should not distract us. The 'socialism' here concerned has nothing to do with the ideas elaborated and fought for during the 19th century (especially the first half). The state 'socialism' referred to here shows many resemblances with fascism and nazism (that is, national socialism) and in fact people moved from one movement to the other as it suited their own ambitions for power (Mussolini, Laval and Quisling, amongst others). And even the word 'welfare' under statism does not refer to physical and mental well-being of individuals and communities.

26. Socialism/communism

The first clear example of statism took place in the most backward and most absolutist state in Europe : Russia. Russia at the beginning of the 20th century was a feudal society that had almost nothing to do with capitalism and certainly nothing at all to do with liberalism. In the same way that, in England, the existence of freedom provided the best conditions for the birth of the industrial revolution, so in Russia, the lack of freedom and the existence of a large bureaucracy under an absolutist ruler were the ideal conditions for the growth of statism.

To have qualified the October Revolution as a socialist revolution has been either a misunderstanding (self-deception) or a mystification (mass-deception) of reality. Nothing, theoretically or practically, supported this belief other than the use of a socialist phraseology. Not enough, to say the least. In reality, the October Revolution marked only the passage from feudalism to mercantilism under a new leadership.

Almost from the start, this revolution favoured and imposed the same mix of mercantilist principles that would be applied for years and years to come: - interventionism : the state activating and controlling industry and trade; - fiscalism : the state extracting the maximum of revenues through taxation, to the point of total expropriation and physical elimination (e.g. the kulaks); - suprematism : the state striving for expansionism and for the imposition of unequal terms of trade (e.g. in dealing with foreign nations or with the so called 'brother' nations, that is, satellites or subordinate countries).

It was this mercantilism that was hailed as socialism by infatuated or deceitful intellectuals and accepted by gullible or hopeful believers. Later on, the attempt by the Russian state to modernise the economy through plans for mechanization and electrification masterminded from the top, that is to develop a full blown form of statism, was presented as the transition to communism. Through propaganda, this became the example to follow for increasing numbers of workers and intellectuals, each camp attracted by the security and protection the state was offering to large masses, though in exchange for total submission. The Russian experience, while presenting further evidence of the death of socialism, would provide a lesson to many future leaders-dictators (especially in backward countries) on the path to statism.

27. Fascism/nazism

As the First World War led to so-called socialism in Russia, so it was the source of fascism and national socialism in Italy and Germany. Italy had an economy with a few capitalistic areas, mainly in the north, while, elsewhere, it was basically up-dated feudalism. Fascism found fertile soil in the resentment of those who, after the turmoil of the war, could not find any satisfactory position within the existing power bases (the state bureaucracy, the socialist bureaucracy). Everything had already been taken. There were no more posts available. Something had to be done through a new movement : fascism and the "fasci di combattimento".

To attain power and impose their dictatorship, the fascist leaders were ready to promise all things to all men as they did on various occasions, like in the San Sepolcro manifesto (1919) : suppression of the monarchy, universal suffrage, fight against imperialism, distribution of land to peasants, workers control and so on and so forth. Promises not worth the paper on which they were written. Once fascism was in power what remained beyond the empty words was the bureaucratisation, militarisation (the so called "fascistization") and, finally, disintegration of an entire society Germany had very advanced capitalistic enterprises; however, at the same time, state interference in the economy from the end of the 19th century onwards had given a strong impulse to cartels (monopolies and oligopolies) and state controlled banks.

It was then a very ambiguous and fragile social and economic balance, that collapsed when, in a period of crisis (the recession of the early '30s), the Germans consigned their freedom to the state and the state to the nazis in a quest for security and protection. Nazism was the movement that seemed best able to provide an answer to people's anxieties, culturally and materially. Fine tuned propaganda, impressive gatherings, grandiose shows of power, all contributed to the success of nazism.

Later on, once the nazi party was in power, the state embarked upon a series of public works (i.e. the motorways or "Autobahnen") and on other huge projects aimed at providing employment. This reflected a new economic thinking from which the intellectuals of the new deal took inspiration and on which Keynes based his state spending recipes. Nazism was the clearest, most advanced and so the most horrific expression of statism in every aspect of life : cultural, political and economic. As a social experiment it vied with Russian communism.

In fact, Hitler and Stalin can be considered like the bosses of two criminal gangs, similar in every respect, that initially agree on sharing the loot (Molotov - von Ribbentrop pact and the carving-up of Poland) but, finally, are destined to fight each other for the total and exclusive control of the territory. Fascism and nazism, both anti-capitalistic (in their phraseology 'anti-plutocratic') movements, were those that best represented the monocratism and imperialism intrinsic to statism in its extreme criminal form.

28. Dirigism/welfarism

While communism (Left) and nazism (Right) dominated hearts and minds in the first half of the 20th century, dirigism and welfarism (Centre) became the common ideological tenets of statism, in the developed countries, from the second half of the century. Needless to say, Left, Right, Centre are ideological concepts, that is weapons of political struggle, void of any cognitive (scientific) value insofar as they are labels masking not just similar but, in many cases, identical policies.

In the United States the big crash (brought about by the federal reserve with a policy of easy money followed by one of restriction of money) and the following depression (sustained by the federal government with a policy of high tariffs that strangled world trade) threw large masses into a desperate situation. The conditions were in place for the appearance on the political stage of a fatherly figure : Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His proposals (the "New Deal"), shortly preceded by the new national socialist government in Germany with similar measures of state control and intervention, would put the federal state in charge of many spheres of social life. What the New Deal did in psychologically helping people to regain confidence was considerable; but the practical results in the fight against unemployment were very poor.

In 1933, over 12 million people were out of work; in 1938, after 5 years of New Deal and huge federal expenditures, 10 million people were still unemployed. But, by then, the Second World War was about to erupt, unemployment could be absorbed through enrolment in the army and by the massive production of armaments and Roosevelt could emerge triumphant both on the domestic and on the foreign fronts. In the end, it was the war which finally gave millions of unemployed Americans what the New Deal had not been able to deliver, confirming, once again, what had already been acknowledged, that war is, truly, the health and salvation of the state.

In England the war had the same effect of greatly extending the power of the state to regulate the life of the citizens. At some point in the course of the war it was only natural that somebody started thinking about the state taking care of everybody and everything even after the war.

The welfare state was thus born from a series of good intentions by caring and decent people. The result is that dirigism and welfarism have led to the state taking control of society and dominating the life of the individual. More and more the state has occupied the role once played by the mediaeval church, perfecting it to become even more greedy (taxes), more intrusive (secret police, un-American activities committee, etc.) and more paternalistic (social security) than the old church and, in addition, with compulsory membership, from birth to death.

29. Statism as a world system (20th century)

During the 20th century statism has emerged and affirmed itself all over the world, even in backward countries, sometimes more as mercantilism than as full blown statism. All these experiences of statism have been characterized, at least initially, by: - the emergence of a father figure, a saviour - an anticapitalist stance that was, in actual fact, an attack against liberalism and individualism. Besides the most striking examples such as Mussolini (the corporative state), Hitler (the volk state), Stalin (the proletarian state), Roosevelt (the interventionist state) and Beveridge (the welfare state), many more figures and experiences of statism have appeared all over the world.

In France, where the state has generally played a primary role, Gaullism and the Fifth Republic reaffirmed and reinforced the dominance of the state in a period of troubled transition from decolonisation. In Spain and Portugal, Francoism and Salazarism represented a more pre-capitalistic phase of statism, still meshed with colonialism and feudalism. In Argentina, a very wealthy country after the Second World War, Peronism built and consolidated its statism by associating vast sectors of the population in the sharing and squandering of all the available assets.

In China, Maoism became the new imposed religion and Mao the high priest of a despotic imperialistic state. He was the main culprit for the economic disasters of the "big leap forward" (around 30 million deaths from famine) and for the destructive struggle for power, deceptively called the "Cultural Revolution." In Africa the state and its bureaucracy have been the poisonous legacy of the European powers, the true black man's burden.

In fact, it is not what has been taken away (i.e. natural resources, which are still plentiful in Africa) but what has been left behind (i.e. the beginning of statism) which constitutes the real shackles to any attempt at social emancipation and economic development. African statism has been, in some cases, the result of the combination of nationalism with marxism; this allowed the ruling élite to disguise, underneath the glossy varnish of a revolutionary phraseology, what was nothing else than the expropriation of freedom and the monopolization of resources by the state masters and their servants (the bureaucracy, the police, the army).

In all these cases the state can be considered neither as the "comité d'affaires" of the bourgeoisie nor the "patron saint" of the proletariat but a bureaucratic, often criminal, organization sucking wealth from productive groups and allocating it to parasitic strata (factions and sycophants). And statism is the historical period of wide and deep dominance of this entity called the state above any other social and economic organization.

30. Statism : foundations (warfare-welfare)

Statism, as it emerged after the Second World War, is based on two main pillars. - Warfare (militarism and authoritarianism) : the army and the police. State and state of war are two faces of the same coin. Without preparing incessantly for war and waging war, at regular intervals, the existence of the state cannot be justified, as regulatory tasks can be more suitably performed by other, wider and smaller, organizations. In the absence of full scale war, enemies have to be invented and anxieties have to be be artfully manufactured. The cold war, for instance, was a clever invention of statism on both sides.

This does not deny the fact that aggressive posturing and imperialistic behaviour were common practice in the post war period, but they were the result of statism and not the product of communism or capitalism, realities already dead and surviving only as emotionally charged labels. From the perspective of statism it is possible to view and account, in a more satisfactory way, for the Sino-Soviet clashes and the French-USA rivalry.

As a matter of fact, the propaganda about the communist or capitalist menace, while making people insecure and docile, allowed statism to carry out, everywhere, the biggest programme of army and weapons build up ever seen on the face of the earth. There were two main reasons for this display and deployment of military personnel and war equipment : - to increase and reinforce (willingly or unwillingly) allegiance to one's own side, internally and externally - to provide employment for masses of people. And this leads to the second pillar of statism. - Welfare (paternalism and parasitism) : the bureaucrats and the underclass.

The increase in productivity through the introduction of more effective means and modes of production has led to an increase in output. Over time, the state has become, on a grandiose scale, the controller and allocator of this massive production. And here resides the cunning of statism. With the introduction of welfare it has produced a revised and updated version of the old provision of "panem et circenses" to the Roman plebs. Its aims are identical : to manipulate the masses in order to win their favour. State welfare has become the path towards mass 'wares-fare', the ever increasing consumption of goods which, in time, dulls the senses and destroys the critical mind.

The proletariat has been replaced by the 'consumariat', a crowd of consumption addicted people ready to follow any fad and any craze, whose sole aim in life is to swallow anything, any time, anywhere. The original sentiment of compassion that was at the basis of the welfare provision has led to corruption via consumption. Welfare parasitism and ever escalating levels of consumerism have also acted as a barrier to the progressive shortening of the working hours. This because a growing mass of superfluous goods is expected from a shrinking number of workers, instead of useful and fruitful activities being shared by everybody.

The two associated/antagonistic groups (entrepreneurs and workers) that represented the dynamic of capitalism, have been largely replaced under statism by two mutually supporting groups that feed off each other: the distributor and the recipient of state benefits. An increase in the numbers of the second group (recipients) requires an increase in the first group (distributors). So it is a bonanza for both of them, as long as it lasts. Welfare has truly become the 'worstfare' of late statism, the programmed fabrication of a lost and wretched humanity. From cradle to grave or, rather, from pristine innocence to moral death: what a devious work of castration and corruption done in the name of care and compassion!

31. Statism : the cultural system

Statism has not been a trick played by a small minority of devious people against the large majority of decent folks. Not at all. Statism has been the (almost) inevitable, if temporary, result of a long historical process of tumultuous change ushered in by industrialization. In its wake, power libido and anxiety reduction, the longing for terrestrial gods and the quest for security, appeared and mingled, amongst other factors, to give birth to the Leviathan. The common person of the 20th century, like the one emerging from the dissolution of the Roman empire, was possessed by the terrible angst of being alone and defenceless.

In the past, the church had represented, during fearful times, the fatherly/motherly figure in whose embrace the soul could rest until a new period of splendour would come (e.g. the renaissance) and new, more resilient individuals would emerge (e.g. the merchants). In modern times, capitalism, on the one hand advocating freedom and individualism and, on the other, transforming human beings into machines, had the effect of plunging masses of people into a feeling of utter impotence.

That is why the factory workers felt such a strong need to get together into trade unions and parties. Even many capitalist entrepreneurs, feeling threatened not only by workers' movements but also by the continuous revolutionizing of means and modes of production, joined into associations and lobbied for the safeguard of their interests, financing factions and coalitions. All these collective bodies offered protection, assistance, identity under the guidance of strong leaders.

Almost inevitably, they modelled themselves on the organization in power (the state) and, under the control of ambitious personalities, they became more interested in grabbing a share of that same power than in abolishing its despotic nature. The long march of approaching power was finally completed in the 20th century when, even those organizations previously fiercely antagonistic to the state of the 'bourgeoisie' (e.g. the socialist parties), became themselves "the state."

This was made possible by the common person: - exchanging freedom for protection - abdicating responsibility through delegation - drowning individuality and loneliness in gregariousness and yearning to belong to a 'superior' entity, such as the state or the party. As for the state, its paternalistic and patronizing role during the 20th century was most evident in the economic sphere and was made possible by the powerful productive machine previously brought into being by capitalism.

32. Statism : the economic system

The economy of statism is based on three main pillars : - Employment. The survival of statism and its raison d'être consist in granting employment to the common person. While capitalism laid the accent on productive or profitable work, statism stresses employment, regardless of the usefulness or meaningfulness of what somebody is employed to do. Employment is paramount even if it consists in alternately digging and filling holes. This need to create jobs is hence at the root of the expansion of bureaucracy and of many intermediation and regulatory tasks (lawyers, accountants, consultants, etc.).

During the 20th century the rise of statism was unstopped and unstoppable mainly because more and more people were earning a living from the state (bureaucracy, army, police), by the state (lawyers, accountants), for the state (tax collectors). The state was feeding them and they were dependent on the state. Without the state, no job, no security, no future, nothing. At least, so many believed. Many of these jobs, and the high number of people filling them, were not a physiological requirement for the working of an advanced society but a necessity of state control (the stick) and state paternalism (the carrot of parasitic allocations). - Consumerism.

The availability of resources and manufactured goods on an unparalleled scale has made possible an orgy of consumption. While capitalism was the realm of production, so statism is the realm of consumption. For the state, consumerism is the way to kill two birds with one stone; on one the side it produces an obtuse numb happiness in the mass of consumers; on the other, through indirect taxation, it quietly extracts revenues to feed (e.g. through welfare payments) a further expanded cycle of generalized consumerism. - Tax and Debts.

To pay for parasitic employment (bureaucrats), parasitic unemployment (welfare recipients) and gargantuan consumption by parasitic strata, there is a need for huge amounts of revenue. To this end the state has resorted to - printing money : this has caused inflation and it is not by chance that the period of statism has been historically and intrinsically associated with constant inflationary pressures; - borrowing money : this has resulted in the accumulation of a huge debt (domestic or foreign) that is the most conspicuous economic legacy of statism to future generations; - extorting money : this has taken place through scorching taxation that has hampered if not discouraged investment and hindered social and economic development.

The state is not at all interested in craftsmanship (the ability to produce useful and durable goods) but in taxmanship (the ability to tax merchandise - the more useless and ephemeral the merchandise, the better for the coffers of state). Under statism two aspects become paramount: - the pricing of every transaction : the state is interested in the price of everything and in the value of nothing, for the simple reason that, for the purpose of taxation, price is everything and value is nothing; - the control of every transaction : the state attributes such a weight to the control of every transaction (e.g. hiring of workers, selling of goods) that any economic intercourse unsupervised by the state is criminalized and blacklisted (black labour, black market). The economy of statism, in fact, relies totally on this pricing and control of everything to drain resources from producers and channel them towards parasitic strata and parasitic occupations under the aegis of the state.

33. Statism : the political system

The political system of statism is based on a series of organised groups (parties, lobbies, electoral committees, mafia groups, etc.) whose aim is to acquire power or to put like-minded people into positions of power. The capitalist aim of profit through production has been replaced, under statism, by the push for power and prestige through patronage. Where universal suffrage exists, everybody, in principle, can be elected or help to elect somebody to the highest positions of power. This is the strong appeal of democratic statism.

In both democratic and autocratic statism, as in every system of delegated/usurped power, the overall objective, once the summit is reached, is to stay there for as long as possible by using, towards the masses, a mix of benevolence and brutality, charity and cruelty, tenderness and terror, as deemed applicable and appropriate. To hold on to power any trick is acceptable. The two basic ones are: - falsification-mystification of reality The main (inevitable) political mystification is to promote the identification of party interest with the general interest and to discredit political adversaries (if they are not physically liquidated or practically silenced) with all sorts of specious arguments or manufactured lies.

Plausible innuendoes take the place of factual truths. To put it briefly, what is part and parcel of political life would not be at all acceptable in any productive activity where mutual trust and cooperation are basic and essential pre-requisites. - corruption-captivation of people The mystification of party interests through their identification with the general interests is achieved mainly by corrupting large sections of the electorate through selected allocations of public resources extorted by the state. This buying of consent is done through - hiring an army of servants.

Modern statism has done away with the "ancien régime" restricted attribution of state positions. It has flung the doors wide open and created a large army of bureaucrats taken from all walks of life. - feeding a large number of dependent people (e.g. the welfare recipients), who rely more and more on the big brother state. This dissipation of public money also wins for the state the complicity of some productive sectors that find an artificially created mass market (the welfare recipients as eager consumers) for their goods. In short, the political hand of statism supports the economic hand and both, artfully using words such as 'compassion', 'employment' and 'redistribution', play the moral card wearing the mask of the benevolent provident parent.

34. Statism : positive aspects

The fact that statism has lasted for decades means that, in many situations and in several aspects, it has been a historically necessary response to the needs of the people. It must also be recognized that, in the early phases, when it was not yet a monopolistic power, the state (i.e. the Parliament) introduced highly progressive and worthy laws (the limitation of the working day, the protection of children, etc.). Furthermore, not all the money allocated by the state went towards parasitic endeavours; sometimes it contributed to improve a regional area (e.g. the Tennessee Valley Authority) or to create favourable conditions for economic revival (e.g. the case of Singapore).

In some other cases, the state, i.e. intelligent individuals within the state, have taken measures that have given some dignity to the downtrodden and lifted the common person to a better life. Even homogenisation, when it results in the introduction of higher standards or in the repeal of cruel local customs, has to be put on the positive side of the state's balance sheet. In many cases things would have taken place locally, in due course, through the process of imitation, but this should not discount the role of accelerator played, in various instances, by the state. At the same time, it must be recognized that, as the state accumulated power and became a monopolistic agent, the negative aspects grew exponentially; they have now reached the point where they provide the rationale for the extinction of the state if human beings and communities are to develop further.

35. Statism : negative aspects

While advocates could put forward other positive aspects of statism, no exhaustive register of them could match the catalogue of utter desolation and tragedy for which statism is responsible, superior in horror and depravity to any other organization or phenomenon in history. Only a pallid euphemism could describe them as the negative aspects of statism. They are here classified into three headings : - Dependency Statism has made people dependent on an impersonal power, on a collective super-imposed conscience to which the personal moral conscience has abdicated.

It has restricted people's freedom to move from place to place unless consented and regulated by the state (passport, visa, special permit, etc.). It has created an underclass of lifeless puppets, who wait at the door for a cheque to arrive in order to numb the futility of their lives buying useless objects that make them feel alive while already morally and mentally dead. Dependency has served statism very well, while crushing personal and social development. In actual fact, development and statism are incompatible terms insofar as development is an inner process of gaining strength and becoming independent, whereas statism is a top down situation of control and subjugation. - Despondency

Statism is responsible for many phenomena of hatred known as racism, antisemitism, chauvinism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, in which one group, becoming "the state", has gone on the rampage and has manufactured, for others, a condition of utter hopelessness and despondency. The deportation and destruction of ethnic communities (Native Americans, Armenians, Jews, Kurds, Tibetans, Tutsi, and on and on), has been one of the most revolting products of the domination of statism.

Besides that, the brainwashing of so-called dissidents, the crushing of individuals, of anyone not in agreement with or in obedience to the State power. The Cheka, the KGB, the SS, the OVRA, the Carabinieri, the Prefecture, the Committee for un-American activities, the police, the army, or even the petty bureaucrat, all have had the power, at one time or another and in various ways and at different levels, to make the life of free individuals and communities simply miserable or totally unbearable. - Death Statism has been obsessed with creating a machine for destruction that has reached its zenith with the atomic bomb.

Under statism, we all have been witnesses, many times, of systematic material destruction and physical and spiritual death. The atrocities committed by states during the 20th century are unparalleled in scale and can be compared in brutality (but not in duration) to those committed by the most deranged, disturbed and depraved of personalities. Even the Spanish Inquisition under Torquemada, the most despicable show of power of the catholic church that resulted in the killing of 2,000 people in the course of 20 years, cannot remotely compare with the 6 million Jews exterminated by Nazi statism, the more than 10 million liquidated by Stalinist statism, the 30 million starved to death by Maoist statism, and these are only a small sample of the death fury of the state.

In fact, during the historical period of statism, approximately from 1870 (French-Prussian war, destruction of the Porta Pia wall in Rome and invasion of the Papal kingdom by the Italian state) to 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of communist statism), the deaths caused by the state through the countless disasters, large and small, that it engendered (wars, deportations, famines, etc.), exceed 100 million people, on average 1 million individuals sacrificed every year to and by Leviathan.

Looking back at the 20th century, the horror of statism is still there for anyone who cares to open their eyes or remember: the gas chambers, the concentration camps, the ethnic cleansing, the mass murders, the abolition of freedom, the annihilation of dignity, communities torn apart, children denouncing parents, friends betraying friends. Under the yoke of statism too many people have lived in constant fear and danger of violent death, and still do, because, all too often, the state has made the lives of free human beings and communities poor, nasty, brutish, and short.