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TWO PALADIN-PRESS FIREARMS-TRAINING DVDS free to the most creative respondent. Gopherit.

IN HARDYVILLE (in case you missed it yesterday when I wasn't online) it is "Showtime" for the resistance fighters in their battle to drive the feds from Hardy County.

Anarchy and Distribution

On the LeftLibertarian2 Yahoo! group, we’ve been experiencing some disagreements about the likely consequences of an anarchist society. There are so many aspects of our current culture, economy, infrastructure, etc. that have been distorted by privilege. Civil society has become so confused with the institution of the State that it’s hard to extricate one from the other. That’s why distinguishing the competing visions of different anarchists usually comes down to predictions of what the likely ends of anarchy are, not the broad means.

A long running debate among the anarchists, especially between individualist and more communist type, centers around the justice of wealth disparities. Certainly the existence of the State serves to enrich particular interests at the expense of others, but in anarchy would the rich dominate society - just as they do with the State? Even if we could immediately switch off the institutions that forcibly manipulate society, there is danger that the legacy of privilege and accumulated wealth could persist for some time, distorting markets and continuing the frustrate the balance of power between individuals.

Individualist anarchists have had a variety of responses to the problems of historical property and wealth distribution. Even anarcho-capitalists who see large scale social coordination as the natural direction of society have different views, such as Hans Hermann Hoppe’s theory of a natural elite and Murray Rothbard’s support of syndicalist takeover of State-supported corporations. On the other side of the coin, left-leaning individualists also entertain a variety of approaches: from the agorist trust of entrepreneurship as a leveling force to mutualists such as Benjamin Tucker and Kevin Carson speculating about the possible need for short term State sponsored redistribution and reform.

The key question for anarchists is always and ever what will the the stateless society look like? Our constant search for the answer continually motivates and refines our strategies for getting there. But sometimes I think anarchists focus on details too much and get bogged down in achieving their vision of this society (I’ve written about this before). It’s easy to forget that anarchy is - anarchy becomes defined by - however humans naturally interact, not how we wish they would interact. In other words, this is an empirical matter, about which we waste time arguing over. At the risk of posing yet another prescription for anarchists, however, I’ll simply suggest that it is in human nature we find the kernel of proportionality and balance that could inform this matter.

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Revised and re-posted from last Memorial Day:

Since, as Paddy Chayefsky has his main character say in his movie The Americanization of Emily, " We...perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices" (see this and this), I've long thought that what is called Memorial Day would be better recast as Revisionist History Day. The state inculcates an unquestioning faith in its war-making by associating it with patriotism, heroism, and the defense of "our freedoms." This strategy builds in its own defense against any criticism of the government's policies. Anyone who questions the morality of a war is automatically suspected of being unpatriotic, unappreciative of the bravery that has kept us free, and disrespectful of "our troops," in a word, un-American.

To counter this we should do what we can to teach others that the government's version of its wars is always self-serving and threatening to life, liberty, and decency. A good way to spend part of the day would be to pick a war and read a high-quality revisionist account of it. Here are some books (in no particular order) you might use as a guide:

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, by Paul Fussell
Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, by William Appleman Williams
The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition, by Arthur Ekirch
The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic, 1890-1920, by Walter Karp
The Costs of War, edited by John Denson
Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, by Stephen Kinzer
All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, by Chalmers Johnson
War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin
The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, by David Hirst

A good place to start is this article by Robert Higgs: "How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan's Attack on Pearl Harbor" (The Freeman, May 2006).

Many other books and articles could be added to the list. The point is this: if we are to prevent wars in the future, we must self-educate and then, when opportune, teach others.

• Happy Memorial Day! Check out left libertarian perspectives on this holiday here and here.
• Many of you have responded to my pleas for topical feeds, which I really appreciate. I look forward to leftlibertarian.org becoming a more full fledged community in the future, and your help has only reinforced that hope.
• In cleaning up the syndication feeds, we’ve discovered some glitches where new feeds weren’t overwriting the old feeds. Please keep an eye on your blog posts and those published on leftlibertarian.org, and let me know if anything’s wrong.

Here�s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you�ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you�ve actually read, and not something that you�ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn�t entail endorsement of what�s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn�t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here�s the quote. This is from chapter 3 of William T. Vollman�s new book, Poor People. It�s a sometimes compelling and sometimes tiresome book; Vollman went around cities in the U.S. and all over the rest of the world, interviewing (urban) poor people in several different countries, bringing back their stories and their answers to questions like Why are you poor? and Why are some people poor and other people rich? The compelling part are the actual stories; the tiresome part, which appears only a little in this passage but a lot more elsewhere, is Vollman�s insistent, neurotic handwringing about his own position as a rich American and his own authorial presence in the tale. (There�s nothing wrong with being upfront about these things; but there�s also nothing interesting in spending 2, 5, or 8 pages musing about your trouble in writing about poor people�s stories, which you could have spent actually letting them talk about their own stories.) Anyway, this passage comes from Vollman�s visit to Russia in 2005, when he met an eighty year old woman in front of a church, who was begging to help support herself and a family of four � her daughter Nina, her son-in-law Nikolai, and two grown grandchildren, Marina and Elena.

Nina, who had been the family�s agent of verification twice in my case (first she telephoned the interpreter to inquire about our motives and resources, and then when I had invited myself into their home she had been the one who emerged from the doorway graffiti�d KISS MY ASS to inspect me), who calmed her husband whenever he got overly worked up against the government, and who seemed to be closest to the two daughters, had originally seemed to me, even taking into consideration Oksana, who in spite of being the breadwinner was after all eighty-one years old and who so frequently wept, the most capable physically, mentally, and emotionally. Nina was a handsome, careful woman who was aging well.

I had no idea that things would turn out this badly, she said. They promised us an apartment in Petersburg. We had no idea; we were actually lied to. We were told that my husband was sent there for construction, not to clean up. We heard about it on the radio, but they told him that he would be at a safe distance from the contamination. He was away for three months. He wrote letters. He was forbidden to let us know that anything was wrong. So I took him at face value; I thought that my husband would never deceive me. His health problems began immediately. He could no longer complete an eight-hour workday, so they proposed to fire him.

And what did you do?

I sat with the children a lot and also taught grade school.

�

When did you know that something was wrong? I asked.

I knew exactly when they measured me, the man replied. My exposure was nine point four.

And what did you know before they sent you to Chernobyl?

I didn�t know, he said. On my official military ticket they put down that I would only build houses, nothing else.

I had always thought that the USSR was fair to the workers, I said.

That is absolutely not true, he insisted, raising his voice. Fairness to workers is only what they scream about in the newspapers. I have written a letter to Putin. They reply told me to contact the regional authorities who have already ignored me.

The man had lost some of his hair. He was very lanky in his old blue suit, and sported a strangely pale and bony face.

He showed us his card which bore the date 1986, an incorrect year, which meant that he couldn�t prove that he had been at Chernobyl and therefore remained ineligible for compensation. (Here something must have been lost in translation or else Nikolai Sokolov was confused, for the date of explosion was in fact April 1986. Perhaps his part of the cleanup took place in 1987, for he later said: From �88 to �94 we lived in Volgograd trying to get housing.)

Have you stayed in touch with the other workers?

No, he said.

His wife thought the date to be merely an error. But he was sure that the government wanted all personnel in the cleanup crews to die.

I think that Moscow is responsible, he said. The whole point was to change the situation so that no one is responsible for what they have done to the people.

How are you today?

Unwell, he replied.

His wife said: When he was in the hospital, he got treatment. Then, when he had no more housing, that meant no more treatment�

I produced more radiation than the X-ray machine used to measure my lungs! he cried in proud horror. It was a four and I was a ten, so the X-ray was unsuccessful.

Was your presence dangerous to your family?

The lady who works the machine has to wear a lead apron against level four and I am a level ten, so absolutely. The situation was caused intentionally�

How was your life before Chernobyl?

He stood there folding his arms, thought, then said: My life was stable and very simple. I put in ten hours at the factory. Now I get the shakes and my joints ache. I am a house builder. I build from the bottom up. That is how I was trained, but I branched out into different types of work. Work is work everywhere. I started branching out into factory work and office work but then I started being discriminated against. I wasn�t making the same rate as others�

As I said, there were no more chairs in the Sokolovs� flat, so he stood. I, the guest, observer and rich man, sat. By now he�d begun to exert a weird effect upon me with his lank hair and bald forehead, his heavy greying eyebrows.

When you went to Chernobyl what did it look like?

Very regulated. We would get on a particular bus, travel to an intermediate area, put on our suits, then go to the main reactor compartment. We would carry armatures and concrete, and pour the concrete. Japan sent robots inside the reactor, but the radiation was so high that those new, shiny robots became useless. They just stood there.

What did it look like inside?

The reactor was already capped with concrete when we got there. But there was a machine tunnel next to it, the mechanical chamber. What had blown out of the reactor in the explosion landed there: walls, pencils, whatever. In the beginning we had to run, not walk, because the radiation was so high. We were in there with shovels wearing masks. We were only there for several seconds at a time. Five seconds per day was what we worked. We would run in, shovel one load into a trench, then run out. The trench was six to eight meters deep. Once the tunnel had been cleared out we were told that it was all right to walk. When the trench had been filled, we pumped concrete over it. Downstairs where we worked, we wore fabric suits. On the roof they wore lead suits. They were better protected.

How many workers did you see?

There were several busloads of people every day, just for our shift.

Why didn�t they just fly over it in an airplane and drop sheets of lead?

Elena, sitting in her chair, brushed her pale hands together and said something bitter in Russian. Meanwhile the man grew more and more loud, leaning forward ever closer. �I�ve asked myself that many times. The reason is that they were too cheap to spend the money and chose instead to expend people.

Elena echoed bitterly: Just people.

It�s war, but people basically end up dead. Our veins are clogged, so they just tell us to drink more vodka, which makes it worse.

How many people have died?

I don�t know. I don�t listen to the radio. I�m tired of listening to fables.

If you hadn�t gone to Chernobyl, what would your life be like today?

I would continue building houses, he shrugged. I would be able to have a decent job, and enough money.

�William T. Vollman, Poor People, pp. 70�73.

And the winner of our first presentation of this new award is … Dr. Clifford Thies, with this howler from a piece comparing Rudy Giuliani to George S. Patton over at Libertarian [sic] Republican.

I get the idea that Rudy sees the War in Iraq as part of the War on Terror, the way the Korean War or the Vietnam War were parts of the Cold War. If this is so, we will win because freedom is productive, and we can sustain an overwhelming military force out of a few percent of our GDP, whereas they’re incapable of sustainsing [sic] any kind of economy at all.

Apparently Dr. Thies was absent from history class on the day that it was explained that the US lost Vietnam, that the war in Korea has remained in “temporary ceasefire” and stalemate for more than 50 years now, that China and a number of other countries remain in communist slavery, and that the USSR collapsed in spite of, not because of, US maintenance of “an overwhelming military force” (and exactly in the way and for the reasons predicted by libertarians from the 1950s on, including but not limited to Murray N. Rothbard and L. Neil Smith).

Also of interest — but not part of the Stupid Statement award, since it came from Giuliani’s mouth and not Dr. Thies’s pen, since it’s just a lie and not a stupid statement, and since Giuliani’s propaganda machine is smooth enough that it’s not surprising that Dr. Thies wouldn’t know why Giuliani doesn’t spend much time in his old city any more:

[Giuliani] offered his condolecenses [sic] for the families of the students and alums of the Citadel who have fallen in the War on Terror, and said he knows their hurt having lost so many policemen and firemen on 9-11.

He didn’t “lose” those policemen and firemen — he sacrificed them to his own incompetence and corruption. Giuliani’s not fit to kiss the shoes of those who have lost their loved ones to the idiotic policies of people like himself, let alone compare himself to them.

Today is the day when Americans typically express gratitude for the sacrifices of soldiers. However, it’s just as valid to remember them as victims of State-sponsored violence. Millions of people have been killed by their fellow man, not because the two individuals disagreed, but because some other individual, pompous enough to play chess with others’ lives, ordered it. The State's wars have ended lives, ruined entire families, and obliterated whole communities - not just soldiers, but innocent civilian men, women, and children. We should be thankful for this - for the pettiness of state politics, for the gullibility of human beings, for the foreign soldiers our men killed? Here at Social Memory Complex we remember all victims of state violence, regardless of nationality or professed ideological flavor. None of them deserved to die this way. Until the State is finally overcome, we must keep their memory alive as that which was lost to preserve a power and privilege too monsterous to contemplate every day. Let the picture remind us that the wars we memorialize result in more than gravestones, American flags, and cookouts.

Tags: memorial day

The relatively unique burden of being both an anarchist and a former holder of elected political office (Second Ward Councilmember, City Council of North Kansas City, Missouri, 1996-1998 in my case) is that you have a duty of conscience to speak out even when you can “see both sides” because you’ve been there yourself.

While the national political arena offers a metaphorically target rich environment for the anti-statist critic, integrity demands not sparing the marginal cases when they come to your attention — including earnest libertarians who’ve managed to win local elections and are trying to do the right thing, if they could only figure out what that is. Certainly my own time in office was very far from perfect in its adherence to libertarian principles. I’m not the same man I was a decade ago, though. For roughly the past two years, I’ve denied that complete adherence to libertarian principle is even possible by politicians and that (as a result) it is not principle that must be thrown out the window by the libertarian movement, but electoral politics.

Libertarianism as a political philosophy tells us that immigration should be unrestricted. Here in Missouri, though, former Greene County Libertarian Party Chair and freshman Springfield City Councilmember Doug Burlison has proposed new legislation to harass migrants and their employers.

“The proposal would punish any local company found to have hired illegal aliens with a $500 fine on the first offense, a $1,000 fine on the second offense and loss of its city business license for a third offense.”

While the wording of the legislation is such that it directly only imposes fines on the employers of the innocent people termed “illegal aliens”, the effect of this would of course be pernicious interference in the ability of such innocent people to find work and provide for themselves and their families. If that doesn’t count as “harassment” in Councilmember Burlison’s view, he should contemplate the prospect of a hypothetical law imposing fines on employers who hire him.

Burlison responded to critics recently before I had gotten around to making this post. As a result, I’d like to go over it now.

“It is true that I have verbally pledged to propose an ordinance that addresses one small aspect of the current immigration problems we are experiencing in this country.”

Right off the bat, an error in thinking on the part of Burlison presents itself. I don’t know exactly who Burlison meant when he said “we“, but I doubt he has had a green card demanded of him lately or bled from blisters on his feet acquired in a deadly march across burning hot sands. From the perspective of justice and liberty, the only “problems” with immigration are the statist restrictions on it.

So why did Burlison do this (even though his fellow councilmember John Wylie called it a “moot point”)?

“This came about after being invited to speak to the local chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps about immigration issues. I spoke from the heart (and off the cuff) about my take on the screwed up situation we have found ourselves in. . .

Okay, so he’s going to talk to the Minutemen, even though he’s surely aware that they oppose open immigration. In and of itself, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly there are more than a few anti-liberty groups I’d like to have a word with myself. But, still, one has to wonder what he was thinking.

The bill of rights talks about the basic freedoms humans are born with, not just Americans, but all humans.

Okay, so he understands that all persons possess inalienable rights that are not granted by written constitutions, but hopefully recognized by them to some degree where such constitutions exist. This is a key point. Burlison knows better than to do this evil and tyrannical thing — but he’s going to do it anyway.

I would like to see our border with Mexico as normalized as our border with Canada sometime in my lifetime.

In fact, he’s even quite aware that open immigration is a desirable goal.

“Legal immigration needs to be streamlined and expedited.”

Sure. Simple. Abolish the restrictions the bureaucracy is there to administer. Of course, you can’t do that as a city councilmember, Doug. One would hope, though, that you would seek to avoid personally adding to the injustice that bureaucracy carries out, as a self-described “libertarian”.

“Welfare needs to be majorly reformed and reduced.”

Here’s where he’s getting really off track. The “illegal immigrants” Burlison seeks to persecute are not responsible for the statist welfare system of the United States government. That responsibility lies with the government policymakers and their allegedly “private” supporters. In fact, since “illegal immigrants” can’t vote, they are perhaps the people in America who are the least to blame for the statist welfare system. So why does Doug Burlison think welfare has anything to do with immigration?

“Social Security needs to be protected by a transformation to individually owned accounts, rather than collectively squandered political funds.”

Why on earth that would be an excuse to further harass people who already face legalized kidnapping by uniformed thugs and countless other difficulties and injustices is beyond me.

“The War on Drugs needs to end. The black market we’ve created finances thousands of passages through our southern border.”

Sure the War on Drugs needs to end. Doug Burlison has not claimed responsibility for the War on Drugs, though. If he ever does, I hope he renounces it as well as his contribution to the War on Innocent Brown People Who Talk Funny. That people evading one set of unjust laws are able to provide mutual aid through market mechanisms to people evading another set of unjust laws is, from a libertarian perspective, a Good Thing(tm), Mr. Burlison.

“Federal policies have made a mess of this issue, which are now having an obvious effect in our local community. Local law enforcement has at least an informal “catch and release” policy because of the confusion and lack of federal support in regards to undocumented, Spanish-speaking suspects. This has created the situation where domestic citizens are held to a higher standard of the law, while alleged illegal aliens get a pass.”

How positively egalitarian of you, Mr. Burlison, to seek to make us all equally oppressed rather than equally free. From a libertarian perspective, if an unjust law is unenforcable, that’s a Good Thing(tm). If a just law is unenforcable because of the inefficiencies of government, it is an indictment of governments monopoly of “law enforcement”. If Mr. Burlison genuinely believes that the detrimental effects of that monopoly are such a grave concern, he should (before attempting to infringe upon the liberty of others in the service of that monopoly, at the very least) resign his seat and agitate in favor of market anarchism .

“Market Anarchism is the doctrine that the legislative, adjudicative, and protective functions unjustly and inefficiently monopolised by the coercive State should be entirely turned over to the voluntary, consensual forces of market society.”

Ultimately, what Burlison is going through here is the basic tension that any “libertarian” political office holder goes through. The pressure is enormous, and I can say that from personal experience, to sacrifice liberty in the interests of trying to make government work. It’s a losing battle, Doug — government doesn’t work, as Harry Browne noted. The extent that you succumb to that pressure will be the extent that you lose your own sense of integrity or “soul”. Turn away from electoral politics and toward agorism.

There’s more to Burlison’s response, but I just can’t bring myself to wade through it all line by line correcting each of the many errors in thinking it contains. Read it yourself and critique it further if you wish. All I can say now is that this is the sort of thing that makes me glad I no longer support the Libertarian Party.

Note: Title of this post inspired by Samuel Edward Konkin III’s masterful “The Damnation of Bill Bradford“.