New York City’s Mayor-Turned-Nanny-Wannabee, Michael Bloomberg got a taste of his own medicine when he was denied a second slice of pizza at a local restaurant. Says the “report,” from The Daily Currant:

Bloomberg was having an informal working lunch with city comptroller John Liu at the time and was enraged by the embarrassing prohibition. The owners would not relent, however, and the pair were forced to decamp to another restaurant to finish their meal.

Sometimes one of these busybody control freaks gets his just deserts, even before he’s finished his meal!

…cross-posted at LRCBlog.

E.T.A.:…by the way, in case the quotation marks around “report” are too subtle, this is a satirical story, like those on The Onion, although this would make my day if it actually happened!))

Yesterday, Mark DeWeaver did an interview with U.S. News & World Reports regarding his recently published book on China: Animal Spirits with Chinese Characteristics.

Below is the interview:

Also viewable at Google Hangout.

I previously interviewed Mark for TLS and reviewed Animal Spirits for TLS.

Last month, I mentioned America’s first individualist anarchist, Anne Hutchinson. She’s a hero of mine, for obvious reasons, despite my not sharing her religious beliefs.

One of the several reasons I’m enjoying Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates is that I’m learning more about Hutchinson. For example, I love this detail:

The daughter of a persecuted Puritan minister who helped her cobble together the best education possible for female children (who were denied university attendance), Anne Hutchinson is one of the brainiest English-women of the seventeenth century. Yet she is no stranger to the goopy fluids of female biology. Besides birthing her own litter [of 15 children, by the way!], she works as a midwife, delivering babies and no doubt serving the brew imbibed before and after labor, the wonderfully named “groaning beer.”

Here’s my favorite detail within the detail:

By aiding Boston’s new mothers, Hutchinson quickly befriends a lot of women. She starts leading the women in a regular Bible study in her large, fine home.

These Bible-study group became the seedbed of antinomianism: a new religious individualism (and heresy) within New England Puritanism. It also became the basis of political and philosophical individualism more generally, thus Murray Rothbard’s description of Hutchinson in Conceived in Liberty as America’s first individualist anarchist.

She preached the necessity for an inner light to come to any individual chosen as one of God’s elect. Such talk marked her as far more of a religious individualist than the Massachusetts leaders. Salvation came only through a covenant of grace emerging from the inner light, and was not at all revealed in a covenant of works, the essence of which is good works on earth. This meant that the fanatically ascetic sanctification imposed by the Puritans was no evidence whatever that one was of the elect. Furthermore, Anne Hutchinson made it plain that she regarded many Puritan leaders as not of the elect.

The Massachusetts powers that be understood that Hutchinson’s Bible-study sessions were central to the dissemination of her religious and political heresies and so, as Sarah Vowell relates,

In September of 1637 … [t]hey resolve, writes Winthrop, “That though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another,” assemblies of “sixty or more” as were then taking place in Boston at the home of “one woman” who had had the gall to go about “resolving questions of doctrine and expounding scripture” are not allowed.

"The Bill of Rights," Vowell comments, "with its allowance for freedom of assembly, is a long way off."

Rothbard again:

Winthrop then called for a vote that Mrs. Hutchinson “is unfit for our society — and … that she shall be banished out of our liberties and imprisoned till she be sent away.…” Only two members voted against her banishment.

When Winthrop pronounced the sentence of banishment Anne Hutchinson courageously asked: “I desire to know wherefore I am banished.”

Winthrop refused to answer: “Say no more. The court knows wherefore, and is satisfied.” It was apparently enough for the court to be satisfied; no justification before the bar of reason, natural justice, or the public was deemed necessary.

As good as Rothbard’s account is, I find Vowell’s even better:

“What law have I broken?” she asks.

“Why the fifth commandment,” answers Winthrop. This is of course the favorite commandment of all ministers and magistrates, the one demanding a person should honor his father and mother, which for Winthrop includes all authority figures. Wheelwright’s sermon was an affront to the fathers of the church and the fathers of the commonwealth.…

When she presses him once again to point out the Scripture that contradicts the Scripture she has quoted calling for elders to mentor younger women, Winthrop, flustered, barks, “We are your judges, and not you ours.”

Winthrop really is no match for Hutchinson’s logic. Most of his answers to her challenges boil down to “Because I said so.”

In fact, before this trial started, the colony’s elders had agreed to raise four hundred pounds to build a college but hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about it. After Hutchinson’s trial, they got cracking immediately and founded Harvard so as to prevent random, home-schooled female maniacs from outwitting magistrates in open court and seducing colonists, even male ones, into strange opinions. Thanks in part to Hutchinson, the young men of Massachusetts will receive a proper, orthodox theological education grounded in the rigorous study of Hebrew and Greek.

The US attorney general recently announced that homeschooling is not a fundamental right, thereby denying asylum to a German family that had fled their home country, where the 1938 Nazi-introduced ban on home education is still enforced. The American homeschooling community is understandably outraged at the current presidential administration’s position on the question, but we shouldn’t be at all surprised. Why would any government willingly relinquish the authority to indoctrinate? The need to prevent random, homeschooled maniacs from outwitting political leaders and seducing citizens into strange opinions — such as individual freedom and responsibility — is essential to the health of the state. And if we question too vociferously the logic of their decision, they may well reply in essence that they are our judges and not we theirs.

I have a fondness for Enoch Powell that I never could manage for Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps that’s because I was indoctrinated to hate Thatcher and had never heard of Powell before last Saturday, when Wikipedia noted the 45th anniversary of the so-called Rivers of Blood speech for which he is infamous.

Both Thatcher and Powell were British politicians. Both were Conservatives. (Powell eventually left the Conservative party, claiming that while he was a life-long Tory, there were good Tories in the Labour Party. I guess I don’t really understand Toryism.) Both Thatcher and Powell are targets of left-wing hatred and smeared as proto-fascists. (See Lawrence Reed on the recent anti-Thatcher hatefest in the UK.) And I suspect the British Left would have a hard time distinguishing either of them politically from libertarians. We’re all ultra right wing, radically free market, and anti progress, aren’t we?

Powell rose to political stardom at the same time he fell from political power. On April 20, 1968, he gave a speech criticizing the British government’s existing immigration laws and its proposed anti-discrimination legislation. Everywhere I’ve looked for information on this speech and the speechmaker, these two issues have been conflated, and yet to a libertarian they could not be more different.

Two issues:

1. Immigration
2. Discrimination

On one of these, Powell seems to be in accord with us. On the other, not so much.

Immigration

Calls for the state to control or limit immigration are antithetical to the libertarian goal of limiting or eliminating the state itself.

(Unplanned plug: at Invisible Order we just completed our second ebook for Reason magazine, and it happens to be apropos: Pro-Growth and Humane: A Reason Guide to Immigration Reform.)

Discrimination

On the other hand, any law that prohibits individuals from discriminating on any basis they choose is a violation of the fundamental rights of free association and free thought. This line from Powell’s speech, which one detractor called an “explosion of bigotry,” could not be more in accord with libertarian thinking:

The third element of the Conservative Party’s policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr. Heath has put it, we will have no “first-class citizens” and “second-class citizens”. This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow citizen and another or that he should be subjected to inquisition as to his reasons and motives for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

What is not at all in accord with liberty is Powell’s suggestion that the British taxpayer provide “generous grants and assistance” to help immigrants leave the UK. (Paul McCartney apparently considered some Enoch-specific lyrics in the Beatles song “Get Back (to Where You Once Belonged)” but they didn’t make it into the final release.)

If Margaret Thatcher was the British Ronald Reagan (or vice versa), perhaps Enoch Powell was the British Pat Buchanan (or vice versa). Like Buchanan, Powell was an ultra-nationalist. Like Buchanan, he consistently took positions in opposition to the main party line of his country’s conservatives. Powell supported gay rights and opposed nuclear weapons, at least within Britain. He advocated the dismantling of the British Empire.

Unlike Buchanan, Powell often advocated for free-market positions, although he seems, like Buchanan, to have had a soft spot for economic nationalism (which consistently takes the form of protecting the nation’s producers at the expense of the nation’s consumers).

While writing this post, I thought I should double-check to see if Murray Rothbard had had anything to say about Enoch Powell back in the day. Here’s the Libertarian Forum on the British elections of 1974:

Decades of horrific British policies have created a rigid, stratified, and cartellized economy, a set of frozen power blocs integrated with Big Government: namely, Big Business and Big Labor. Even the most cautious and gradualist of English libertarians now admit that only a radical political change can save England. Enoch Powell is the only man on the horizon who could be the sparkplug for such a change. It is true, of course, that for libertarians Enoch Powell has many deficiencies. For one thing he is an admitted High Tory who believes in the divine right of kings; for another, his immigration policy is the reverse of libertarian. But on the critical issues in these parlous times: on checking the inflationary rise in the money supply, and on scuttling the disastrous price and wage controls, Powell is by far the soundest politician in Britain. A sweep of Enoch Powell into power would hardly be ideal, but it offers the best existing hope for British freedom and survival. (Libertarian Forum, March 1974)

And 8 months later:

Amidst this turmoil, the most heartening sign is the rapid growth of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists in a country that only a few years ago had virtually no one even as "extreme" as Milton Friedman. The major libertarian group is centered around Pauline Russell, and includes businessmen, journalists, economists, and others ranging from anarcho-capitalists to neo-Randians to the Selsdon Group, the free-market ginger group within the Conservative Party. Most of this group is friendly with the notable Enoch Powell, who of all the politicians in England is the only one with both the knowledge and the will to stop the monetary inflation and to put through a free market program and an end to wage and price controls. Powell, himself, despite his Tory devotion to the monarchy (which is seconded even by many of the English anarcho-capitalists), has grown increasingly libertarian. The Powell forces were working on a gusty strategy for the then forthcoming October elections: voting Labour in order to smash the statist leadership of Edward Heath. (Libertarian Forum, November 1974)

(Cross-posted at bkmarcus.com.)

One doesn’t have to be any sort of radical to be appalled that thousands of police, working with federal troops and agents, would “lockdown” an entire city—shutting down public transit, closing virtually all businesses, intimidating anyone from leaving their home, and going door to door with SWAT teams in pursuit of one suspect. The power of the police to “lockdown” a city is an authoritarian, borderline totalitarian power. A “lockdown” is prison terminology for forcing all prisoners into their cells. They did not do this to pursue the DC sniper, or to go after the Kennedy assassin, and I fear the precedent. It is eerie that this happened in an American city, and it should be eerie to you, no matter where you fall on the spectrum. You can tell me that most people in Boston were happy to go along with it, but that’s not really the point, either. If two criminals can bring an entire city to its knees like this with the help of the state, then terrorism truly is a winning strategy. (And we should also keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of the massive police response did not aid in capturing the suspect—it ultimately turned on that old fashioned breakthrough—a normal denizen calling the authorities with information.)

If America suffered a bombing like the Boston Marathon atrocity every week, America would feel like a very different place, although the homicide rate would only be about one percent higher. I acknowledge the maiming was on a mass scale, but this kind of attack has to be taken in perspective in terms of how much of a risk it poses to the average American, because we have to consider what response the people would tolerate in the event of more frequent or far worse attacks.

If the people of the United States will cheer seeing a whole city shut down, even for just a day, in the event of a horrific attack that nevertheless had 1/1000th the fatalities and about two percent of the casualties of 9/11, what would Americans support in light of another 9/11? What about a dirty bomb going off in a major city? The question has nothing to do with what government wants to do, or whether police statism is a goal or simply a consequence. What will the *people* want and expect the government to do if tens of thousands were chaotically killed and injured in a terrible terror attack, or if many small attacks hit the country? I fear they would welcome the abolition of liberty altogether, given their reaction to last night. That, of course, is altogether the wrong response. If we cannot look at the police reaction last night very critically, there is really no hope for even moderate protection of our civil liberties today.

I posted the paragraph below on my Facebook page and a long, sometimes contentious, debate broke out. We even had a resident of Boston and a policeman–two different people, by the way–chime in to attack my point of view. Given that it generated so much discussion in that venue, I figured I’d share it here as well.

Armored police vehicles. Tactical teams. Everyone under house arrest. Soldiers and/or other armed enforcers roaming the streets. House-to-house searches. We call it, “Terror in Boston!” In any one of the several places the U.S. has invaded and/or is currently deploying drones, they’d call it, “Tuesday.” Perspective. Stated differently, maybe the “terrorists” won a while back?

Even looking at it now, it strikes me as obvious and uncontroversial. Maybe I’ve spent too much time sniffing the glue of philosophical free thought?

…cross-posted at LRCBlog.

There is something about April. From Columbine to Virginia Tech, from Oklahoma City to Boston, mid-to-late April occasions some of the most infamous massacres on U.S. soil. At least, these are the ones we are told to focus on. The killers are called terrorists. Unless they wear uniforms, as they did on April 19, 1993, just outside Waco, Texas. That time, as we are urged to believe, the terrorists were the ones who died. In all these massacres, regardless of specifics, the government portrays itself as all that keeps chaos at bay.

The state claims to stand against terrorism, but killing people is its stock in trade. Slaughters come in various forms, almost all of which feed the health of the state. The state conducts much killing outright. The state officially poses against other killing, while nevertheless encouraging it through its own violence. Even the killing that the state has no hand in serves as a pretext for the state to grow.

In Boston this Monday, someone left bombs that murdered three people, including an eight-year-old boy, and injured 176 others. President Obama called the crime an “act of terrorism.” The establishment definition of “terrorism” was always flawed, in that it categorically absolved the government, but at least it specified the targeting of civilians for political goals. Yet these days, even before the motive is known, such as at Boston, or when the targets are not civilians, such as American soldiers abroad, the U.S. government calls any dramatic acts of violence of which it disapproves “terrorism.”

This February, they called ex-cop Chris Dorner a terrorist. Then the police surrounded him in a cabin to burn him alive, asking the media to cover its eyes like at Waco. Everyone who knew how the state operates had no reason to expect he would get due process. They were going to hunt him down and kill him no matter what. The media dropped the formality of calling him an “alleged” murderer. The LAPD tried and convicted and executed him all on the same day and no one batted an eye. Meanwhile, liberals say all talk of American tyranny is irresponsible and conservatives continue to worship law enforcement

Today, violent resistance to the state is called terrorism. Many of the “terrorists” rounded up and imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay were at most guilty of defending their country against an invading army. Some of these people continue to languish in that dungeon, seeing their desperate hunger strike in protest of declining conditions go unanswered, except by an administration willing to cut off their water.

From February 28 to April 19, 1993, the Branch Davidians resisted. On the morning of February 28, about one hundred ATF agents, concealed in livestock trailers, descended upon their property. The agents had planned and trained for eight months, having practiced their histrionic assault on model buildings. There was no reason for all this other than publicity. The agents could have easily arrested Koresh, whom they had befriended. The agents had conducted an investigation of weapons violations and found nothing. Koresh had cooperated with them. 60 Minutes had recently focused on an ATF sexual harassment scandal, and the agency was accused of racial discrimination during a House subcommittee meeting. The bureau wanted to improve its public image. Officials reached out to the press to make sure reporters could witness their heroics on the last February morning of 1993.

Unlike the vast majority of the hundreds of daily domestic militarized raids in America, the ATF’s surprise raid “Operation Showtime” faced resistance. When the agents ran out of ammo, the Davidians ceased fire. There were casualties on both sides, although one anonymous agent told the Dallas Morning News that he suspected some agents had fallen from friendly fire. Once the raid became a clear disaster, the ATF forced the press away.

Then came the standoff. The FBI took over and turned it into a full-blown military operation on American soil. Psychological warfare came down hard on Koresh’s followers. The FBI blared loud, obnoxious music, and sounds of animal slaughter, while shining blinding lights through the night. Agents gratuitously drove a vehicle to defile a Davidian grave. The government cut off this group’s access to family, media, and lawyers. It destroyed their water supply.

The media demonized the Davidians as a heavily armed cult that abused its children. Journalists tended to report government claims as fact. But they became increasingly critical of the ATF and FBI as well. After weeks of looking like fools in the mainstream press, particularly after a critical exposé in the New York Times on March 28 revealed the initial raid’s bad planning and recklessness, government officials became increasingly hostile to the media. On April 11, ATF intelligence chief David Troy stopped holding his regular press conferences altogether.

Attorney General Janet Reno, who took office in the middle of the standoff, finally decided to put an end to it. At about 6AM on April 19, the FBI began pumping flammable and poisonous CS gas, banned in international warfare, into the Davidian home. Officials knew that women and children were holed up in the section of the home exposed to this gas. The government continued to deploy gas for almost six hours.

Chemistry professor George F. Uhlig estimated in congressional hearings that there was a sixty percent chance that the gassing alone killed some children. “Turning loose excessive quantities of CS definitely was not in the best interests of the children,” Uhlig said. “Gas masks do not fit children very well, if at all.” He testified that the gassing could have transformed their surroundings “into an area similar to one of the gas chambers used by the Nazis at Auschwitz.”

The FBI brought out an Abrams tank, the Army’s heaviest armored vehicle, to replace its Bradley fighting vehicles. Agents drove the tank, which Attorney General Janet Reno later obscenely compared to “a good rent-a-car,” into the building. FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, who had shot and killed Vicki Weaver in August 1992 at Ruby Ridge as she held her infant in her arms, was at the scene. FBI agents launched incendiary tear gas canisters. Justice Department spokesman Myron Marlin later declared, “We know of no evidence to support that any incendiary device was fired into the compound on April 19, 1993.” The FBI finally admitted six years later it had indeed used such projectiles at Waco.

The Davidian home went up in flames in the early afternoon. More than seventy people died, all of them civilian targets, many of them Americans, others hailing from other countries, more than twenty of them children and close to half of them people of color, although somehow the Davidians are often smeared, along with the so-called militia movement, as white supremacists. As the fire raged, the FBI turned back the local fire department. Special agent Jeffrey Jamar claimed that he feared for firefighters’ safety—presumably, the Davidians might shoot at the very people trying to stop the fire that was burning them to death. When it was all over, the ATF hoisted its flag atop the conquered ruins.

The trial of the survivors was a sham. Confused jurors intended to convict survivors of weapons offenses but not murder charges. The judge sided with the prosecution and defied the jurors’ intentions. By 1999, polling indicated that a strong majority of Americans blamed the FBI for setting the fire. Special counsel John Danforth, a Republican, released a report the next year whitewashing the Clinton administration of all guilt in this atrocity.

After Sandy Hook, liberals regurgitated every tired gun control argument, but one of the most interesting is that an armed populace fails as a brake on tyranny because the government has the military hardware to win any confrontation. And indeed it’s true: most who resist government are swatted down like bugs. Some resist violently, like the Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee in December 1890, and are slaughtered. Others are shot for daring to resist even by throwing rocks at armed troops, like the four students murdered and the nine wounded at Kent State in May 1970. Others are targeted after a few years of relative calm, like the Philadelphia MOVE radicals in May 1985. Liberals are correct that the government has the means and the willingness to crush Americans who dare to resist. This fact never seems to convince liberals that the state is way too powerful and menacing to begin with, and maybe the last thing we should want is to give it more law enforcement powers, such as the monopolization of firearms through a war on guns.

About once a day police kill an American, but it’s often a criminal and no one cares, or at least a marginalized person like the homeless Kelly Thomas, beaten in July 2011 by five officers in Southern California, dying of complications five days later. Or they are veterans like Jose Guerena, at whom Tuscon police fired 71 rounds in the middle of the night in May 2011 – innocent of any crime, just in his own house at the wrong time. The state saves most of its killing for abroad, where killing is its very policy. And now, thanks to the war on terror, Obama calls America his battlefield and the world his jurisdiction. He has made it official doctrine that the president can order anyone’s death unilaterally.

Twenty years ago, Waco showed Americans the truth about law enforcement, the U.S. government, and the state itself. It revealed what reality was like for foreigners overseas. Yet most Americans seem totally indifferent to the mass murder the U.S. government has perpetrated and unleashed in the Middle East. On the day three were murdered in Boston, seventy-five died in Iraq. Violence in Iraq nine years ago was called terrorism, unless it was committed by U.S. troops. Today, violence in Iraq hardly makes the news. The state decides whose lives are worth caring about, and when.

Some critics of state violence dislike the very word “terrorism,” calling it meaningless, but I disagree. The state perverts most words it uses, but these words can still hold value. Terrorism refers to violence intentionally inflicted on the innocent to instill fear and advance political goals. American officials commit terrorism all the time. In the twenty years since Waco, state terrorism has escalated, from the anti-civilian sanctions on Iraq to the double-tap drone attacks on foreign first responders, all the way down to the constant domestic police raids. Even the more pedestrian police measures such as the systematic groping of New York City residents known as “stop and frisk” are there to “instill fear,” as police commissioner Raymond Kelly boasted was the intention, according to former NYPD captain Eric Adams’s testimony. From top to bottom, at home and abroad, the post-Waco American state seems intent on instilling fear in all of us.

Every April since 2003, I’ve written a piece about Waco. I think Americans should never forget what happened. LewRockwell.com published most of these articles. They each have a little bit of something different and discuss contemporary events. I also wrote my undergraduate thesis on Waco and the relationship between the media and the police state. Here are my archives for those interested:

• 20 Years Ago Today: Operation Showtime (Independent Institute, February 2013)
• We’re All Branch Davidians Now (LRC, April 2012)
• From Waco to Libya: Eighteen Years of Humanitarian Mass Murder (LRC, April 2011).
• Waco and the New Brown Scare (LRC, April 2010).
• The Waco Butchers Are Back (LRC, April 2009).
• Why Waco Still Matters (LRC, April 2008).
• Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, Virginia Tech (LRC, April 2007).
• Waco and the Bipartisan Police State (LRC, April 2006).
• Waco, Oklahoma City, and the Post-9/11 Left-Right Dynamic (LRC, April 2005).
• Eleven Years Since Waco and Very Little Has Changed (LRC, April 2004).
• An Anniversary We Must Never Forget (Independent Institute, April 2003).
• “God Help Us, We Want the Press”: The 1993 Waco Disaster and Media/Government Relations”  (UC Berkeley Undergraduate thesis, 2003).

I might take a break from revisiting Waco next April, not because I’ve forgotten the victims – I never will – but simply because I feel like I’ve done enough writing about this particular atrocity for a little while, given that the state has raged on in so many directions, making Branch Davidians out of so many foreigners and Americans caught on the wrong side of the U.S. government’s never-ending siege of the world. Many Davidians died and others suffered injustice at trial, but tragically these victims are not so unusual. There are also the many thousands slaughtered abroad in the last 20 years. There are the thousands shot by law enforcement since then. There is Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the sixteen-year-old from Denver whom Obama snuffed out with a drone, whose death was justified on the grounds that he had a bad father. Before the rapid rise of the surveillance state and the post-9/11 terror war, Waco was the best opportunity to turn things around. Instead, most Americans turned their backs and now our country is becoming one big playground for the police state.

We might call the situation David Koresh’s revenge.

This also appeared at LewRockwell.com 

The relationship between war and libertarianism has interested me since 9/11. In the aftermath of those terrorist attacks, I witnessed in grim fascination many libertarians make excuses for government in the realm of national security. The proper libertarian position on war has become a matter of controversy, although I believe it shouldn’t be. “War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne said, as well as being “mass murder,” in the words of Murray Rothbard.

The following essay presents some of the most relevant materials and readings on this controversy. It is unapologetically tilted toward the antiwar position, although it includes some references to pro-interventionist writings. It is idiosyncratic and not comprehensive, and its omissions are not always deliberate. I am always interested in reading suggestions. As for the citations, I include publishing information for books but generally leave it out for articles written for or available on the web, so as to avoid extraneous clutter. Please follow the links to learn more.

Among the founders of modern libertarianism, Rothbard most consistently urged an antiwar position. In “War, Peace and the State,” he identified opposition to all state wars as well as to nuclear weapons as the libertarian’s core commitments. For more on Rothbard’s views on these questions, I recommend “Murray N. Rothbard: Against War and the State” by Stephen W. Carson and “Murray N. Rothbard on States, War and Peace, Part I” and “Part II” by Joseph Stromberg.

In terms of comprehensiveness and clarity, the best modern treatment is “Why Libertarians Oppose War,” chapter nine in Jacob Huebert’s fantastic Libertarianism Today (Praeger: 2010), which is probably my favorite introduction to libertarianism. Huebert covers all the bases, touching on the relevant economics, U.S. history, and moral principles, and delivers radical conclusions. The chapter is perfectly balanced in terms of scope and emphasis. In November 2012 he eloquently summed up his thesis at a Students for Liberty conference in a talk titled “Why Libertarians Must Oppose War.”

Other decent libertarian introductions feature strong summary discussions of foreign policy. Chapter fourteen, “War and Foreign Policy,” in Rothbard’s For a New Liberty still stands the test of time, and provides a nice refresher on Cold War revisionism. Harry Browne’s two campaign books, Why Government Doesn’t Work and The Great Libertarian Offer, both gave the issue serious attention, and he published a moving excerpt from the first book as an article, “What Is War?”  Mary Ruwart’s Healing Our World in An Age of Aggression (Sunstar Press: 2003) has a solid discussion of foreign policy, an earlier version of which is available online. Gary Chartier gives the topic due attention in Conscience of an Anarchist: Why It’s Time to Say Good-Bye to the State and Build a Free Society (Cobden Press: 2011). On multiple occasions Chartier has spoken on the centrality of peace under the eminently quotable topic title, “There’s War, and There’s Everything Else.”

Marc Guttman’s edited compilation Why Peace? is a masterful 636-page collection featuring dozens of authors, mostly libertarians, explaining how they came upon their staunch antiwar and pro-civil liberties convictions. It belongs on the bookshelves of all libertarians who prioritize war and peace issues. One powerful contribution is Bretnige Shaffer’s “Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World.”

In an excellent and succinct discussion of the war controversy, Robert Higgs draws a line in the sand with “Are Questions of War and Peace Merely One Issue among Many for Libertarians?” Higgs’s highly regarded scholarly stature and his general ecumenical stance on other issues make this piece very special. “In sum,” Higgs concludes, “the issue of war and peace does serve as a litmus test for libertarians. Warmongering libertarians are ipso facto not libertarians.”

More than a few have argued not only that libertarians should oppose war, but that they must oppose war to properly be called libertarians.  Walter Block has a couple of pieces on why pro-war libertarianism is a contradiction in terms, “Bloodthirsty ‘Libertarians’” and “Libertarian Warmongers.”

Homing in on the non-aggression principle, Wendy McElroy explains why virtually every war fails the libertarian test in “Libertarian Just War Theory.” Roderick Long’s 2006 article “The Justice and Prudence of War: Toward a Libertarian Analysis” presents a strong and somewhat novel argument against strict pacifism while adhering to a very hardcore antiwar position. As for the broader meaning of pacifism as opposition to all wars, Bryan Caplan has written one of the most compelling libertarian arguments for pacifism in a series of blogs, starting with “The Common-Sense Case for Pacifism.”

I have personally contributed a number of writings on libertarianism and war, the most extended of which was based on my talk “Warmongering Is the Health of Statism,” given at a LewRockwell.com conference in November 2005. For one of my most theoretical pieces that relate, see “Collateral Damage as a Euphemism for Mass Murder.” My most recent piece along these lines, “Noninterventionism: Cornerstone of a Free Society,” focused on American history. More of my writings are mentioned further down.

Standing Athwart History, Demanding Peace

Political issues come and go but war has always been with us. Those of the classical liberal tradition have tended toward the pro-peace position, although there have always been heretics. The major wars throughout history faced libertarian opposition and today libertarians disparage them retrospectively.

Ralph Raico’s 2007 talk “Classical Liberalism on War and Peace” sums up the historical liberal abhorrence of war. In a sense, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was itself an antiwar tract, as Don Boudreaux notes in “Adam Smith on war.” In nineteenth-century Britain, the Manchester School, personified by Richard Cobden and John Bright, was firmly on the side of peace, as Jim Powell explains in “Richard Cobden’s Triumphant Crusade for Peace and Free Trade.” Herbert Spencer’s “Patriotism” from Facts and Comments (1902) remains one of the most radical discussions of moral responsibility falling on the soldier. Stromberg’s “John Stuart Mill and Liberal Imperialism” addresses one of the most prominent classical liberal hawks.

Arthur A. Ekirch’s book The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition (The Independent Institute: 2010) surveys the historical relationship between U.S. liberalism and opposition to war. Stromberg discusses the current of anti-imperialist American liberalism in “Imperialism, Noninterventionism, and Revolution: Opponents of the Modern American Empire.”

For a discussion of libertarian attitudes about foreign policy throughout U.S. history, see Christopher Preble’s lecture, “Libertarianism and War.” Preble himself favors a mostly but not radically non-interventionist foreign policy, and emphasizes his antiwar side here: “libertarians. . . see war as the largest and most far-reaching of all socialist enterprises.”

Unsurprisingly, the most celebrated wars in U.S. history have become the most contentious among libertarians. At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Fernando Teson has etched out his theory of defensible “libertarian wars” and elaborated on it in “More on Libertarians and War.” Gary Chartier’s “Violence, Wars, and States” at the same forum stakes out the antiwar position.

Even more radically antiwar libertarians like Rothbard have defended the colonists’ cause in the American Revolution. But there exist libertarian critiques of even the most seemingly defensible wars. Stephan Kinsella’s “Thumbs Down on the Fourth of July” compiles some of the most recent libertarian critiques of the American Revolution, including a contribution by me.

Multiple controversies surround the American Civil War. Radical abolitionist Lysander Spooner, a libertarian anarchist writing at the time, strongly opposed attacking the South. Since then, classical liberals from Lord Acton to H.L. Mencken have criticized Lincoln. Ludwig von Mises, on the other hand, favored the Union cause.

Today, some libertarians to varying degrees favor the Union, others the Confederacy, and still others oppose both sides. In April 2011, Reason Magazine commemorated the 150^th anniversary of hostilities by publishing a handful of perspectives ranging from anti-war but not pro-South all the way to pro-Union. Sheldon Richman, editor of  the Freeman, dedicated that month’s issue to libertarian revisionist perspectives, including by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, author of the definitive libertarian history of the Civil War—and one of the best history books on any war or by any libertarian—Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. Hummel also has an unpublished book manuscript elaborating at length on one of his key contributions: the thesis that the government, including the national government, subsidized slavery, making it profitable for slaveholders despite its macro inefficiency, with the implication that secession was a viable anti-slavery, peaceful alternative to war: “Deadweight Loss and the American Civil War: The Political Economy of Slavery, Secession, and Emancipation.”

For a series of pro-Union critical responses to the Freeman symposium, see Timothy Sandefur’s “Springtime for Jeff Davis and the Confederacy.” Over the years, lots of writing at LewRockwell.com, particularly by Thomas DiLorenzo, has critiqued the Civil War, and especially the Union’s conduct. Pushing back against a perceived pro-Confederacy bias, Charles Johnson has written multiple pieces criticizing the Southern warfare state.

The first major Progressive War, the Spanish-American War, united most classical liberals in opposition. They were key figures in the Anti-Imperialist League, headed by Mark Twain.

World War I was more divisive, as many precursors to the modern libertarian movement, from individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker to Old Right giant Garet Garrett, favored the war, which enjoys few defenders among libertarians today. Indeed, one of the most compelling critiques of the war, particularly emphasizing the effects on the United States, is Ralph Raico’s terrific “World-War I: The Turning Point,” included in the author’s recent and entirely relevant collection, Great Wars & Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal, which also includes fantastic revisionist essays on Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Trotsky, and other topics. A most stirring critique that explores some neglected wartime effects on domestic statism is Rothbard’s “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and Intellectuals.”  Jim Powell’s Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II makes the argument, not uncommon among libertarians, that U.S. entry paved the way to many of the centuries worst cataclysms. Libertarian historian Hunt Tooley’s The Western Front: Battleground and Home Front in the First World War is one of the best and most moving general accounts of the European War in all the literature.

World War II is a more controversial matter. Old Right giant John Flynn’s 1944 book As We Go Marching was a devastating liberal critique of World War II’s impact on American statism. The same year, Ludwig von Mises explained the National Socialist warfare state in Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total War and Total State. Rothbard’s article, “World War II: The Nadir of the Old Right,” explains the key significance of the world’s largest ever battle in shaping the principal precursor to the modern libertarian movement.

The Rothbardian tradition has opposed U.S. entry into World War II, demonstrated by a sample of critical writings from Higgs, who has focused on its domestic consequences in Depression, War, and Cold War, among many other academic and popular writings, including a nice revisionist piece, “World War II: An Unspeakable Horror Now Encrusted in Myths.” Jacob Hornberger has over the years run dozens of articles criticizing everything from U.S. diplomacy before Pearl Harbor and U.S. cooperation with Stalin to Roosevelt’s refusal of Jewish refugees and the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki—many of these articles wound up in the great FFF collection, The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars. Hornberger’s series on repatriation remains one of the few available popular writings on this episode. For his publications I have written reviews critical of World War II. Raimondo has written multiple pieces keeping the Old Right opposition to war alive, and his book Reclaiming the American Right puts the issue front and center.

Many libertarians today continue to defend U.S. entry into World War II, and some look upon the opponents incredulously. Eric Dondero had trouble believing Harry Browne, who on his radio show said he opposed U.S. entry. Cathy Young’s review of Tom Woods’s Politically Incorrect Guide to American History takes for granted that American entry into the war was a positive thing. On the other hand, many modern libertarians take it just as much for granted that Franklin Roosevelt’s warmongering was indefensible. As Antiwar.com’s Angela Keaton said in an interview with Motorhome Diaries: “I get this question from time to time, especially from new libertarians: ‘Aren’t some wars necessary—like World War II?’ No. No. There’s your answer to that.’”

The Cold War, from its hot conflicts to its domestic political culture, occasioned the birth of modern libertarianism, by distinguishing it unmistakably from the right. The reflective “Conscience on the Battlefield” by Foundation of Economics Education president Leonard Read in 1951 marked a definite break from the Korean War hawks, although FEE did not focus much on foreign policy generally. In 1963, Rothbard’s “War, Peace, and the State” took specific aim at conservatives as it fashioned a radical libertarian theory against war, and his “Confessions of a Rightwing Liberal” and other writings served to emphasize peace as a core element of libertarianism.

These libertarians ideas finally animated a political and social movement amidst escalation of the Vietnam War, police state crackdowns on antiwar protesters, and draft card burnings and marchings. Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008) conveys much of the history of this agitation, and is especially good on such event as the famous split at the Young Americans for Freedom and the 1950s and 1960s Cold War libertarian counterculture. Focus on war issues helped give rise to the New Left, which featured an affinity between anti-authoritarian leftism and libertarianism, especially in its scholarship. Rothbard’s journal Left and Right epitomized this fusion, as did his title essay, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty.”

Yet there were Cold Warrior libertarian fellow travelers. Even the early Libertarian Party was divided on immediate draft amnesty. In 1991, some libertarians defended the first Gulf War under George H.W. Bush. A smaller faction defended Clinton’s war with Serbia in 1999.

Jeff Riggenbach’s great introduction to historical revisionism, Why American History Is Not What They Say, explores libertarian, left-, and right-wing war historiography in some depth. Tom Woods’s book We Who Dared Say No to War, co-edited with Murray Polner, at least implicitly serves as a libertarian endorsement of antiwar perspectives throughout American history, with classic essays criticizing the War of 1812, the Mexican War, The Civil War (including from a Southern anti-Confederacy perspective), the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the War on Terror.

Jeff Hummel’s unfinished book manuscript,  “War is the Health of the State: The Impact of Military Defense on the History of the United States” has excellent chapters on America’s major wars from the Revolution through World War II, focusing on the relationship between conflict and government growth. Each chapter is followed by an outstanding bibliographical essay. Also worth mentioning are Bruce Porter’s War and the Rise of the State (Simon and Schuster, 2002); John Denson’s edited volume, The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, Rothbard’s Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, a powerful tract on American wars and the coporate state; Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan, the classic tome on war and the growth of the U.S. government, Joseph Stromberg’s bibliography on war, peace, and the state, David Gordon’s bibliography “On War,” and the Independent Institute’s bibliographies at OnPower.org.

From a war’s most primary policies—killing and conquest—all the way down to the taxation, intrusions into the economy, censorship, violations of civil liberties—libertarians should have more to hate about war than anyone else, as war fuels state power and collectivism in a thousand ways at once. Accordingly, libertarians have produced some of the most comprehensive critiques of war, especially its effect on wide range of government policies. Moreover, the libertarian critique often comes from all angles, so that libertarian economists, legal theorists, historians, and other social scientists will all have something bad to say about a war.

Nevertheless, in the libertarian community remains a faction that defends a wide range of state activities in the name of national security. This faction appeared to grow or become more vocal in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

War and Libertarianism after 9/11

The 9/11 attacks, the U.S. response, and particularly the Iraq war, have served to illustrate the deep divide in principle among self-described libertarians and questions of war and peace. Each event was a testing ground for principled libertarian opposition to the warfare state. Joseph Stromberg contributed a series of pieces, reflecting on the returning trend of pro-war libertarianism, which had declined a bit after the end of the Cold War. Coining the term “liberventionist,” Stromberg analyzed the unfortunate reemergence in “Liberventionism Rides Again,” critiqued general liberventionist intellectual error in “Liberventionism II: The Flight from Theory,” and discussed the liberventionist tendency to whitewash the history of U.S. intervention and even advocate total war on civilians in “Liberventionism III: The Flight from History.”

Many libertarians and some libertarian groups came out firmly on the side of peace after 9/11. Among the institutions were LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, The Libertarian Enterprise, Strike the Root, the Mises Institute, The Independent Institute, and the Future of Freedom Foundation. Many of these groups not only took a pro-peace position early, but have held peace as a high priority in their publications and programs consistently since 9/11.

Harry Browne, the recent Libertarian presidential candidate, published a bold antiwar article within a day of the terrorist attacks, “When Will We Learn?” stirring up controversy among LP members. The Libertarian Party establishment itself seemed to favor the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Lew Rockwell critiqued this ambiguous LP press release in his article “Does the LP Support THIS War?”

Reflecting on the sad divide in the libertarian movement over the war, the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Jacob Hornberger explained in “Libertarian Splits in the War on Terrorism” why freedom is impossible so long as there is perpetual war. David J. Theroux, president of the Independent Institute, and Karen DeCoster warned about the assaults on American liberty that would come with the burgeoning warfare state, and the impossibility of using aggression and central planning to bring about security, in “The New U.S. War on Liberty.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe explained why libertarian principles mean the rejection of aggressive war and why libertarian class theory should lead one to distrust the warfare state in an interview, “Hans-Hermann Hoppe on War, Terrorism and the World State.”

Standing against the criticism of libertarian dovishness early after 9/11, Justin Raimondo defended the antiwar libertarians in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Postrel?” and L. Neil Smith did so as well, while expounding on the non-aggression principle as it relates to war, in “War of the Weenies.”

Raimondo explained how there was more hope for libertarians than many might think in his article, “Long Live Libertarianism!“—an inspiration for anyone at the time who was worrying about the death of rationality and principle in this movement of ours. In his speech “War and Freedom,” Lew Rockwell reflected on the disappointing performance of mainstream libertarians, and the horrible bloodthirstiness of conservatives and the Bush administration.

When some libertarians went beyond supporting the Afghanistan War to advocating war on Iraq, it became clear that liberventionism was not going away and was not only an understandable, if disappointing, visceral reaction in the immediate wake of 9/11.

After Justin Raimondo challenged the Libertarian Party to take a firm antiwar position in his speech, “Libertarianism in the Age of Empire,” activist and writer Thomas Knapp chimed in with “The Party and War,” explaining why the Libertarian Party could not afford to be soft on the issue. Shortly after Gulf War II began, Robert Higgs addressed the demented mindset of liberventionism in “Are Pro-War Libertarians Right?” Harry Browne reflected on the many ways libertarians had to violate their own principles in “Libertarians and War.” Gene Healy from the Cato Institute took libertarian Iraq hawks to task in a September 2003 blogpost “Libertarians and the War.” Daniel McCarthy reiterated the major reasons why we must oppose warfare aggression in “Liberventionism for Fun and Profit.” Don Boudreaux found himself explaining his position in a 2005 piece called “An Open Letter to My Libertarian Friends Who Don’t Understand My Opposition to the War in Iraq.”

In 2005, R.J. Rummel, great scholar of governmental mass murder, coined the term “freedomist” to describe an interventionist libertarianism rooted largely in the logic of the democratic peace theory. I criticized this theory in “Making the World Safe for Imperialist Democracy.”

Other conspicuous liberventionists writing from 9/11 to the end of the Bush administration included Tim Starr, Timothy Sandefur, J. Neil Schulman, Max Borders, Glenn Reynolds, John Hospers, Ron Bailey, Tyler Cowen, Neal Boortz, Randy Barnett, and Larry Elder—although some of these people have changed their tune since. Underground “mainstream libertarian” Eric Dondero made a lot of noise criticizing antiwar libertarians and calling for their purge, characterizing antiwar libertarians as pro-Islamist or “leftwing libertarians.”
The most vociferously pro-war voices in the broader libertarian movement have belonged to Objectivists. The Ayn Rand Institute called for nuclear war after 9/11. Raimondo explained how Objectivism related to warmongering within the libertarian movement in his speech, “The Objectivist Death Cult.” To be fair, there have been efforts by Objectivists to expose the folly of Randian warmongering, including a wonderful article by Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Understanding the Global Crisis: Reclaiming Rand’s Radical Legacy,” as well as a thoughtful piece by Chip Gibbons, “Ayn Rand: The Roots of War.”

The Vindication of Libertarian Non-Interventionism

As the Iraq war became increasingly unpopular, Gary North expressed optimism that liberventionism was on its way out in “The Self-Castration of Libertarian Hawks.” In 2006, Milton Friedman passed away, and his publicized characterization of the Iraq war as “aggression” gave new mainstream credence to the antiwar libertarian view. The Volokh Conspiracy responded with a blog putting Friedman’s disagreement with his wife in the context of a longstanding controversy among libertarians.

In 2005, Matt Welch at Reason Magazine had an interesting pro-war libertarian quiz as he appeared to be working out these issues himself challenging interventionists to define the boundaries of their position. “An Open Letter to Libertarians Who Support the War on Terror” by Marc Joffe is diplomatic and conciliatory article standing firm on the side of peace. Justin Raimondo addressed the issue again in “Libertarianism and the War,” inspired by the release of Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism. Jacob Hornberger, in early 2007, addressed “The Critical Dilemma Facing Pro-War Libertarians,” concluding that we must stand with the warfare state or with liberty. In June 2007, John Walsh, a leftist at Counterpunch, credited the Future of Freedom Foundation for its three-day conference on peace and civil liberties: “Libertarian Conference on Peace and Liberty: Shaming the Official Antiwar Movement.” In late 2007 Bryan Caplan asked, “Why Did So Many Libertarians Support the War?”

Ron Paul spent most of his political career focusing on the evils of U.S. intervention abroad, as his collection of speeches and writings, A Foreign Policy of Freedom well demonstrates. Paul ran for president in 2008 and 2012, each time putting focus on the war issue. In response to his first presidential campaign, Randy Barnett wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal asserting that one could be a libertarian and support the war in Iraq. This incited an avalanche of responses, many of which are included in Stephan Kinsella’s “An Overview of Criticisms of Randy Barnett on Iraq and War.” In addition, Robert Higgs wrote a letter to the editor, part of which was published in the WSJ, which added his expertise to the issue. Walter Block penned a piece “Randy Barnett: Pro-War Libertarian,” as well as an excellent and more substantive critique in “A Libertarian War in Afghanistan?”. My own response to Barnett was a column, “The Effects of War on Liberty,” that focused mostly on the relationship between war and statism.

The Ron Paul Revolution of 2007–2012 hardened the association of libertarianism with non-interventionism. I celebrated this in my own article in late 2007, “Ron Paul and the Defeat of the Liberventionists.” Five years later, Less Antman credited Paul for emphasizing peace and declared at the 2012 Libertarian Party convention in his stirring nomination speech for R. Lee Wrights that “Anti-war Is the Health of the Anti-state Movement.”

After eleven straight years of war, antiwar and anti-interventionism have seemingly arisen as the dominant position among libertarians. But new issues—another terrorist attack, another alleged genocide abroad—could always bring the controversy back. In late 2012, the sticky bundle of issues surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict animated libertarian debate, much of it aired on Bleeding Heart Libertarians. Steve Horwitz took a nuanced position in “‘Anti-State’ or ‘Pro-Liberty’? Some Thoughts on Israel.” John Glaser of Antiwar.com responded with an antiwar critique of Israel in “Libertarianism, Israel, and Palestine – A Different View.” Peter Lewin largely took a pro-Israel position in “Let’s Talk Fundamentals: Israel is Not The Problem and Israel Does Not Have The Solution” Matt Zwoliski in “Libertarianism, Self-Defense, and Innocent Shields” and Chartier in “Some Principles,” attempted to bring the issue back to basic fundamentals to guide debate. My own article, “Gaza and America,” attempted to show that the Israeli state’s attacks on Palestinian are as unlibertarian as is Hamas’s terrorism, and why Americans in particular should care.

On the tenth year anniversary of the beginning of the Second Gulf War, Reason Magazine published a forum of reflections from various libertarian writers: “The Iraq War: 10 Years Later.” Ron Bailey admitted he was wrong about Iraq, most others reiterated their position of opposition, and Ilya Somin argued for a nuanced approach, ultimately concluding the war was good for both America and Iraq on balance.

Libertarians Against War

It would be impossible to list every valuable critique of war written by libertarians, but some that are particularly libertarian in their method and approach are worth including. David Henderson’s very good column Wartime Economist at Antiwar.com is worth noting. Laurie Calhoun’s “Just War, Moral Soldiers?” hones in on the individual ethic of fighting in a war. Sheldon Richman’s “War as a Government Program” demystifies warmaking and shows it is as political and problematic as any state activity. Lew Rockwell’s “War and Inflation” draws the connection between these two key state activities. Joe Salerno’s “Imperialism and the Logic of Warmaking” brings praxeological insights to bear. My own “War and the Common Good” sees war as the epitome of collectivism.

Other libertarian scholars and writers whose primary issue is war or foreign policy, and who thus stand as walking examples of libertarian war opposition, deserve mention for their wonderful contributions. The Independent Institute’s Charles Peña has written many critical pieces and Ivan Eland, author of The Empire Has No Clothes, has written thousands of articles. The Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow, Ted Galen Carpenter, and Malou Innocent are also worth following.  Eric Garris, founder of Antiwar.com with Justin Raimondo, has done as much to promote peace as any living libertarian. See his interview in the Daily Bell. Scott Horton the libertarian radio host has done over a thousand interviews with experts, most of them on foreign policy. Arthur Silber is a quasi Objectivists whose Once Upon a Time blog usually features very hard-hitting focus on the war issue.

I’ve written other assorted pieces relevant to the discussion of war and libertarianism. In “Only War Will Prevent War” I mock what I saw as a crude utilitarianism in pro-war libertarian reasoning and in “Would Pro-War ‘Libertarians’ Have Supported the New Deal” I pose the question of what degree of statism they would endorse. “A Compromise for the Libertarian Hawks” is mostly a polemic piece arguing that there is no such thing as pro-war libertarians; such people are merely a species of conservative. The pro-war anarchist faces scrutiny in “Anarcho-Statism.” I make a general plea that libertarians stand front and center on the issue in “Libertarians and the Warfare State” and I identify what I take to be a theoretical problem in “Liberventionists: The Nationalist Internationalists.” Parts of this essay are adapted from my 2005 article, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of World War.”

There is no issue more fundamental to liberty than peace. The essence of liberty is peace, and nothing expands the state and gives cover for rights violations better than war.  

* I will update this in the next week or so with more links I’ve been sent.

The brilliant Glenn Greenwald tweeted today:

Must-read from ProPublica: The Drone War Doctrine We Still Know Nothing About (via @robertgreenwald)

Must reading indeed. Here’s what I don’t get about the drone debate. Why the @#$% did it take so long to start? Admittedly, I’ve grown somewhat numb to the fact that so-called conservatives are attacking the current POTUS about issues that seemed somehow obscure to them when Shrub was manning the con. Still, one would hope that basic human decency would, maybe, cause some kind of reaction to senseless killing of men, women, and children even in the far-away Middle East. Yet, there has been an alarming lack of concern about the drone program before now. Given CIA director nominee John Brennan’s recent cageyness about plans to use drones domestically, everyone is up in arms. The British are coming! One drone if by land! Two drones if by sea!

ProPublica sums it up nicely:

Consider: while four American citizens are known to have been killed by drones in the past decade, the strikes have killed an estimated total of 2,600 to 4,700 people over the same period.

Four American citizens killed–over the past decade–added to the pending plan to deploy drones domestically, signals the apocalypse. Several thousand non-Americans, is, well, another day at the office. One suspects that there are more than a few Americans who think such action is warranted, particularly since we’re “at war” with Al Qaeda or some such.  Really? Well then, how to reconcile this little tidbit?

“What about the people who [are killed and] aren’t U.S. citizens and who aren’t on a [known terrorist] list?” asks Naureen Shah , a human rights and counterterrorism expert at Columbia Law School. Of the few thousand people killed, Shah notes, “it’s hard to believe all of these people are senior operational leaders of Al Qaeda.”

Indeed. Are there really several thousand Al Qaeda “senior operational leaders” in Yemen and/or Pakistan? No. Furthermore, the standard for deciding to deploy a deadly drone strike is, shall we say, remarkably, embarrassingly  disgustingly, low.  U.S. officials are using what is termed a “‘reasonable man’ standard.” Let us again return to ProPublica, because I cannot say it better.

Asked what the standard is for who could be hit, former Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter recently told an interviewer: “The definition is a male between the ages of 20 and 40. My feeling is one man’s combatant is another man’s – well, a chump who went to a meeting.”

So, there you have it. Certainly, this author won’t be confused with a military strategist any time soon, but one feels pretty safe in saying that is not a defensible standard for deciding who dies. We can certainly be excited that people like Rachel Maddow are asking hard questions about drone deployment given Brennan’s pending confirmation. However, just like the Tea Party’s tardy recognition of fascism under the previous statist Czar, it just strikes me as a little late, now that we’re all enjoying the audacity of hope.

Better late than never I guess!

…cross-posted at the LRCBlog.

Having witnessed more than a couple knock-down, drag-out scuffles between various factions of the ostensible “liberty movement” over the last few days and weeks and months, it’s not really surprising to me when people disagree. One of the best–and most entertaining–ones occurred on Facebook (Where else?) just a few weeks ago. One side suggested that “Amerika is a police state!” They provided examples and context. The other side responded with, “C’mon! No one was jailed for calling the POTUS an idiot this week, right?” That’s also a pretty solid point. And, as is true of most of these debates, debates that balance on a sliver of disagreement between two tiny factions of what is itself a very small faction in the U.S. political landscape, both sides are somewhat correct.

There is little doubt that the current U.S. populace is accepting of and subject to infringements of liberty that would have likely had the so-called Founding Fathers reaching for ammunition.

There is also little doubt that no one in the U.S. will have to escape to another country for calling their Congressmen an idiot. (That this is relatively commonplace in other countries was brought home to me when I caught a ride recently with an immigrant from The Congo.)

So a little perspective can go a long way.

All that said, when I see stories like this one, wherein “a coalition of upstate New York universities and defense contractors has submitted a bid to become a federally designated testing and research site for the integration of unmanned aircraft systems, or UAS, into domestic airspace” I get that tingly feeling along the hairs on the back of my neck. Didn’t I recently read that the President’s first drone strike killed innocent civilians? (According to one news source, “The first strike in Yemen ordered by the Obama administration, in December 2009, was by all accounts a disaster.”) And yet, the drone program is accelerating, not abating.

Just the other day, we got our answer on the question of domestic use of drones. Says the article, “John Brennan, the nominee to be head of the CIA, didn’t rule out the use of unmanned drones in the U.S. when quizzed about the matter, a response that alarmed rights groups and civil libertarians.” Of course he didn’t rule it out. What shocks me is that people seem to genuinely believe that a government which deploys unmanned, remote-controlled devices that kill innocent men, women, and children in Yemen or Pakistan will somehow think, “Nope! That’s immoral…” when faced with the same option in the U.S. Innocent men, women, and children are killed in drone strikes so routinely that one wonders who the actual targets really are, or what purpose the program really has. Seriously, if you kill the people you claim to be protecting with each attempt to protect them, wouldn’t your methodology or your motives come into question at some point?  How the psychotic megalomanics who control the U.S. war machine treat the brown people in the Middle East is exactly analogous to how they’ll (eventually) treat the folks here. It’s simply a matter of when, not if.  And frankly, if we continue to let these bastards kill whoever they want overseas, we probably deserve it.

Rather than draw any further conclusions at this point–or further illustrate the height of my blood pressure–I’ll just end with the text of one of my recent tweets, somewhat modified…

“The skies of Yemen, coming soon to the U.S!”

…cross-posted at the LRCBlog.