Do Good Guys Use Newspeak?
Apr 20, 04 | 7:12 am by John LopezThis is a good one:
ANTI - IRAQI FORCES FIRE ON MARINES FROM MOSQUECAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq - Anti-Iraq forces took up military positions in a mosque and a nearby building in Fallujah April 18.
Anti-Iraqi forces occupying a building adjacent to a mosque attacked the crew of an M1-A1 tank.
“Anti-Iraqi forces”? Here’s a clue about this thing: the side that deliberately distorts reality isn’t on the side of right. Now if that’s the side you want to take, then that says an awful damn lot about your priorities, and your ethics.
From the Antiwar.com blog.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 3:00 pm
Do Good Guys Use Newspeak?
.
.
.
.
.
Nope.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 3:16 pm
Just so long as one doesn’t start thinking that the other side is good, as is fashionable among quite a few at ASC. I don’t read antiwar.com much but I get the same sense about them.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 3:53 pm
I get the sense that those who want to discredit the antiwar people tend to build strawman arguments like “they think the other side is good” and completely ignore all the complex (libertarian) arguments about the failures of the justifications for the American invasion of Iraq and the slaughter of at least ten thousand Iraqis and some 700 Americans for reasons that have proven fraudulent. Not that I bought their “reasons” in the first place, but for those who did, their arguments have been totally decimated.
If the Marines are saying the “Anti-Iraqis” are attacking them, does that mean that the two “sides” are the US and the “Anti-Iraqis?” Which side are the Iraqis on, in this simple view? maybe there are three sides - the US, the Anti-Iraqis and the Collateral Damage side.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 4:20 pm
“Just so long as one doesn’t start thinking that the other side is good, as is fashionable among quite a few at ASC. I don’t read antiwar.com much but I get the same sense about them.”
-JTK
Oh, fuckin’ a.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 7:10 pm
“I get the sense that those who want to discredit the antiwar people tend to build strawman arguments like “they think the other side is good”…
Anti-war people are spread across a broad spectrum, hell, you can even put me in that spectrum because I oppose state war. And there are some enthusiastically cheering the other side on. Billy-Jay knows just what I’m talking about because he’s seen it too. It’s not a straw man, it’s a real phenomenon. I did not attribute it to everyone against the war, I was quite specific about one place I’d seen it.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 7:30 pm
And there are some enthusiastically cheering the other side on.
Even if we granted your characterization of “cheering the other side on” (and I think it is inaccurate as well as a smear, but for the sake of argument we’ll let it slide….) how exactly would that relate to your accusation that they think “that the other side is good?” As libertarians, I think that we all realize that is would be rare indeed to find one totally “good” side in any conflict . We can, however distinguish between the unjustly invaded side and the aggressors. In that situation, it is evil to cheer for the victory of the aggressors, regardless of your emotional attachment to them.
I did not attribute it to everyone against the war, I was quite specific about one place I’d seen it.
I think if you go back and read your original post to this thread you’ll see that you mentioned two places.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 7:58 pm
Here’s a quote from Jeremy Sapienza in his thread “Fallujah Fried Americans”:
“In fact, I think I’ll add this: The West, in particular the US and the UK, has commited more horrifically barbaric complete slaughters of non-Westerners (and hell, even other Westerners) BY FAR, by a factor of tens and maybe hundreds, than vice versa. THE WEST is the civilization populated with genocidal murderous madmen driven by insatiable bloodlust. The West has exterminated whole peoples, the West has dropped nuclear bombs and napalm and has wiped out ENTIRE CITIES FULL OF INNOCENT NONCOMBATANT CIVILIANS.
In light of this, Arabs might be the most civilized people on the fucking planet. 9/11 was NOTHING campared to the horrific things the US has done in just 2 years in Afghanistan. And lest we forget — warriors are not libertarians. They never have been. If you take all warriors at face value, from West and East, and compare them — the West comes out in the end as infinitely more barbaric.”
Jeremy’s association with antiwar.com contributes to my sense of your site, though I don’t read it much, as I initially admitted.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 8:16 pm
So, what’s your beef with what Jeremy said? Did he say one side was “good?” Did he get something factually wrong? Or do you just not like his tone?
Who do you think is more barbaric?
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 8:31 pm
Why don’t you go blog this over at antiwar: “THE WEST is the civilization populated with genocidal murderous madmen driven by insatiable bloodlust.”
I think Mao and Pol Pot stand up pretty well against western bad boys.
Do you think Bush is more barbaric than Saddam or that the U.S. is more barbaric than Saddam’s regime?
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 8:40 pm
Nice try at changing the subject, JTK. Are you cheering on the Bush side? Are they “good?” Why don’t you answer my questions?
And, as long as you’re trying to drag this discussion into who’s the worst, rather than who is “good” tell me if you count Hitler as a Westerner. How about Kitchener?
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 9:14 pm
I would add that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were working from concepts lifted from Marx and Rousseau, not the Koran.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 9:33 pm
Sapienza was way off base there - no doubt about it. The only reason Arabs haven’t piled up corpses by the hundred-thousands is that they haven’t yet had means and opportunity to do so. I mean, it isn’t like they’re a shining example of market anarchist collectives, or anything. Anyone seriously think that there aren’t myriad factions over there who’d gladly put every last Jew in Israel to the sword?
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 9:48 pm
The only reason Arabs haven’t piled up corpses by the hundred-thousands is that they haven’t yet had means and opportunity to do so.
You mean like the US did? Face it, states are evil, regardless of the race, nationality or religion behind the state. The fallacy JTK is trying to defend is that the people on ASC or AntiWar are “cheering” for one side because they’re so stupid and such crappy libertarians that they think one state is “good.” His problem is that he’s doing exactly what he’s tryng to accuse us of doing.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 10:10 pm
There is little doubt in my mind: the West, specifically Anglospheric culture, is much more civilized than the rest of the world. Anglospheric culture was responsible for the birth of classical liberal philosophy, the bedrock of libertarian thought today. The Enlightenment partially ended hundreds of centuries of famine, blight, poverty, disease, and fixed-sum economies. Yes, those things still happen today in the West, but they are rare and getting rarer. Some non-Western cultures still do not have the amenities of living present at the height of the Roman Republic two thousand years ago. They never embraced the superiority of free market allocation effiencies and productivity increases which lead to positive sum economies.
Reading The Gulag Archipelago, the thing that struck me most was how willing the general Soviet population was go along with the terror state. I was constantly thinking, “Why don’t you people fight back? What have you got to lose?” I realized that their entire worldview was completely foreign to what most Americans, whether consciously or subconsciously, take for granted. The very notion of individual sovereignty was lacking.
I saw the same thing when reading Night by Elie Weisel. The local Jewish leaders showed little skepticism towards the promises made to them by the Nazis. They showed too much trust in people with power, only to be betrayed with little effort.
There is a reason that the Anglospheric nations were victim to full scale slaughter by their own governments during the 20th century, unlike most of the rest of the world. The classical liberal worldview runs deep. It is the height of civilization. Almost all of the libertarian thinkers in history have come from Anglosphere nations - Locke, Spooner, Tucker, the Founders, Rothbard, Nozick, the Friedmans, Barnett, etc. Even the ones who came from other nations only became prominent in the Anglospheric nations - Rand, Mises, Hayek.
The rest of the world has had enough butchers to last another millenium - Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Tito, Amin, Hitler, Ortega, Jaruzelski, Mengitsu, Saddam, Mussolini, Franco, Hutus and Tutsis, Africa in general, … Killing fields, torture chambers, labor camps, medical experimentation, gulags, the Rape of Nanking, concentration camps, … That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
And no, the Anglospheric nations have not been perfect; their leaders, who are viewed with more skepticism by those they rule more than anywhere else in the world, have committed crimes too often for my tastes. That’s why I am a radical libertarian.
But to believe that the Anglospheric nations have carried out “by far” by factors of hundreds more slaughter than non-Western nations is the height of lunacy. To believe that Arabs are the most civilized people on the planet is purified and distilled absurdity.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 10:50 pm
“Nice try at changing the subject, JTK. Are you cheering on the Bush side? Are they “good?” Why don’t you answer my questions?
You asked me who I thought was more barbaric. I answered. If it wasn’t clear to you I think Sadaam is more barbaric than Bush and Saddam’s regime was more barbaric than the U.S. I think the East is more barbaric than the West.
When I turned the question back to you, you declined to respond.
I applauded when Saddam’s regime was overthrown and when his sons were killed and when he was captured, because those were good things in and of themselves. The continued occupation of Iraq is a total clusterfuck, which I am certainly not cheering. The Bush side is not good.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 10:51 pm
OK, Jonathan, which is the “good” side in the American invasion of Iraq? That was the subject before JTK cherry-picked a post out of a discussion from another site to change the subject. Whatever argument you might have with what Jeremy said, you still cannot accuse him of pretending one side is good.
As far as going along with a terror state, you might ask yourself why Americans were glued to their TV sets cheering at the spectacle of “Shock and Awe” as their State illegally and unjustly invaded another State under fraudulent pretenses. All you can do is argue that the Western states’ crimes were less by some standard like body counts or percentage of population killed. In the last couple of weeks over 1,000 innocent Iraqis have died at the hands of your “civilized” state.
Who’s the barbarian? An American general just called an entire town a “rat’s nest.” How civilized.
April 20th, 2004 at Apr 20, 04 | 11:02 pm
JTK:
These are the questions you didn’t answer:
So, what’s your beef with what Jeremy said? Did he say one side was “good?” Did he get something factually wrong? Or do you just not like his tone?
I think the East was more barbaric in the past but now it is a toss-up. If you had to point to the most barbarous regime in the past year or two, who would you point to? Jonathan has a point about the evolution of libertarian thought, but all civilizations deteriorate. That is what is happening with the west, and you can see it in the way no one wants to talk about how civilized we are now. We can point to the past and talk about how civilized we once were. I think Bush and Blair are a new low for western civilization.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 12:23 am
Tex,
“Even if we granted your characterization of “cheering the other side on” (and I think it is inaccurate as well as a smear, …”
…
“The fallacy JTK is trying to defend is that the people on ASC or AntiWar are “cheering” for one side because they’re so stupid and such crappy libertarians that they think one state is “good.” “
Sapienza has settled the question of whether he’s cheering or not:
“I will stand up proudly for it. I have cheered on men attacking US troops. I will continue to cheer any defeat US troops meet.”
(Read his linked post for full context, of course.)
That’s not a sentiment I expect to see featured prominently at antiwar.com, yet my sense is that he’s not alone there in this sentiment.
What do you think of it, Tex?
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 12:40 am
“I think Bush and Blair are a new low for western civilization.“
Bush a new low? How about FDR or LBJ? For that matter, what about Washington or Lincoln? Bush is a lightweight both in terms of historical import and temperment.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 12:42 am
Jeremy: “Also, I have purposely gone overboard, like when I post pics of Iraqis cheering as a US vehicle burns and caption it “glorious,” to get a rise out of ppl like you, JTK. Just like when Mikko uses sigs showing commies being executed and says it is heroic natural law (or something).“
What, did you think I wouldn’t check? You get someone jerking you around and you pretend that proves something? Anyway, I see why you snarked around about AntiWar. Why didn’t you just say that Jeremy makes fun of you and he’s part of AntiWar, so you wouldn’t admit you read it even if you did because you’re pissed at Jeremy?
Oh, BTW, your initial point is still wrong and you haven’t defended it.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 12:45 am
OK, Jonathan, which is the “good” side in the American invasion of Iraq? That was the subject before JTK cherry-picked a post out of a discussion from another site to change the subject. Whatever argument you might have with what Jeremy said, you still cannot accuse him of pretending one side is good.
Having Saddam in captivity and the socialist Ba’athist rule no longer in place is definitely a “good” thing, at least for now. Increasing violations of my civil liberties at home and angering more terrorist scumbags is a “bad” thing.
Now it is up to the Iraqis to build the institutions that will allow civil society to flourish. I don’t think they have they can do it, and this was one reason I did not support the Iraq War. It’s for lack of their civilized ways that lopping of the head of the terror state Saddam will not result in a free society.
As far as going along with a terror state, you might ask yourself why Americans were glued to their TV sets cheering at the spectacle of “Shock and Awe” as their State illegally and unjustly invaded another State under fraudulent pretenses.
So if states are fundamentally illegitimate, how can one state invading another state “illegal”? Among the very sound reasons for being against the War, the “national sovereignty” argument was the most ludicrous. So now it’s “unjust” for the US govt to depose of Saddam and the Ba’athist regime? Butchers deserve some sort of “sovereignty”?
All you can do is argue that the Western states’ crimes were less by some standard like body counts or percentage of population killed. In the last couple of weeks over 1,000 innocent Iraqis have died at the hands of your “civilized” state.
And as bad as this is, it is orders of magnitude less than Saddam’s crimes. It’s not even close.
Yes, Western states’ crimes have been less than those of non-Western states. That is my point. It takes a culture of liberty to keep governments from becoming tyrannical. Show me where the US and UK rank on this list. It’s not even close. I despise the US govt more than 99% of Americans but it is not even close to being the most evil govt in the world. And it is everyday Americans who have kept the US govt less evil than other govts.
When the entire world was at war in WWII, there was evil on all sides - communists in the USSR, fascists in Germany, and softcore communists in the US and UK. My “perfect” scenario would have been for the war to never have happened. But perfection is not an option because states have an inertia of their own. Yet, I am glad the softcore communists in the US and UK won. Suffering the New Deal was a hell of lot better than being placed in a Soviet gulag or Nazi concentration camp.
My perfect scenario would have medical professional licensure on the free market. Yet, any principled libertarian who sees a doctor who benefits from a state-enforced AMA monopoly knows that when perfection is not available, you support the least evil choice.
Similarly, it’s not inconsistent to hold one state in higher esteem than another state. Libertarians often lose sight of differences in degree and focus on lack of differences in category. This leads to myopia, and beyond that, a completely warped view of reality, which results in statements such as “THE WEST is the civilization populated with genocidal murderous madmen driven by insatiable bloodlust” and “Arabs might be the most civilized people on the fucking planet.”
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 12:53 am
Bush is a lightweight both in terms of historical import and temperment.
It’s a little soon to talk about historical import unless you want to talk about the possible implications of the Bush Doctrine (preventive invasions, what a concept, no?) and as far as temperament goes I think he may well go down as the first American president to become certifiably insane during his term in office.
As far as Blair goes, I tend to agree with my friend Randal: Blair is Saruman!
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 1:05 am
I’m not pissed at Jeremy and I simply don’t read antiwar much. I read Jeremy’s ASC all the time though. In general I’ve always thought Jeremy was well worth reading.
I’m confident he’s fully sincere in the words I quoted. I’m confident he’ll confirm that for you if you like. I’m confident you will never be able to quote him seriously saying he didn’t mean it. I’m reasonably confident such sentiments will not be featured prominently on antiwar.com.
I can’t read people’s minds. I infer from their reactions that some think those fighting against the U.S. forces are good. They are cheering on men attacking U.S. troops. They are cheering on any defeat U.S. troops meet.
Still want to call my observation that they are cheering a smear?
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 1:27 am
Taking pleasure in the death of human beings is disgusting, under any circumstances.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 1:41 am
The world is a better place without certain individuals and I can take pleasure in that. I do think it’s somewhat unhealthy when I hear people talk about taking pleasure in inflicting pain upon even evil people. I might grimly acknowledge some form of poetic justice there, but it has no appeal to me.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 3:03 am
So if states are fundamentally illegitimate, how can one state invading another state “illegal”?
Uh, because of international law? That those governments signed up for? Whether libertarians agree with them or not, there are international conventions that have been agreed upon and the American invasion flouted them. Why do you think no one is investing in the oil fields? It is because under international law, ownership and contracts cannot be considered legitimate because of the illegitimate position of the Americans in Iraq.
Among the very sound reasons for being against the War, the “national sovereignty” argument was the most ludicrous. So now it’s “unjust” for the US govt to depose of Saddam and the Ba’athist regime? Butchers deserve some sort of “sovereignty”?
Of course it is unjust and illegal. Imagine the Europeans “liberating” the Americans because they consider Bush to be a butcher. Besides, if you’re going to depose all the butchers in the world, you’re going to be at war forever, which points up the hypocrisy of picking the butcher who was sitting on some vast oil fields and was also conveniently hated by Israel. What a deal!
Oh, and why was it that of all the world’s butchers, the Americans picked Saddam Hussein? what about the poor suffering North Koreans? Don’t you care about them? Are they next?
And while we’re playing the “why Saddam” game, just how many Iraqis and Americans need to die for this project before leaving Saddam in place would entail LESS killing?
I knew someone would come up with the Rummel figures. I love it…morality measured by body bags and percentages. One thing the people who love Rummel’s figures never want to talk about is that the WWI and WWII figures add up to more than Mao and Stalin COMBINED. Those nasty barbarians.
Yes, Western states’ crimes have been less than those of non-Western states. That is my point. It takes a culture of liberty to keep governments from becoming tyrannical.
Which country has more people imprisoned? That would be a good guideline, wouldn’t it? Tyrannical countries tend to like to lock people up alot. Let’s see.
U.S. prison population largest in world
The land of the free, home of the swat team. Guantanamo? Abu Grahib? The Americans have 10,000 Iraqis locked up in Abu Grahib. In one year. That’s not counting the ones they’ve let go after being locked up for months for no reason and the ones who died in custody. Oh, and there are twenty less today after the prison got mortared.
Similarly, it’s not inconsistent to hold one state in higher esteem than another state. Libertarians often lose sight of differences in degree and focus on lack of differences in category.
True. Americans suffer from this affliction excessively. It’s odd, really. Patriotism really is a sort of a disease, causing people to be unable to be objective at all about their object of affection, even after their government liberates over 10,000 people from the burden of living. And that’s just this latest war. Why did we invade Iraq again? WMD? Drones of Death? I can’t remember what the latest reason is. Gosh, i hope no one decides we’re barbarians and liberates US.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible……..
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 3:11 am
JTK:
1. You’re defending the aggressor in Iraq.
2. Your argument is statist.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 3:14 am
How so?
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 3:37 am
“Of course it is unjust and illegal. Imagine the Europeans “liberating” the Americans because they consider Bush to be a butcher.“
Assuming something better would follow, what’d be wrong with that?
All this talk about “international law” is irrelevant at best: the base fact remains that the parties to this law are illegitimate entities, bands of robbers and murderers. So while you could argue that robbers and murderers ought to follow their own rules, it makes for a much better argument to argue against robbery and murder. I for one would welcome a liberation from the current band of robbers and murderers by market anarchist Europeans (assuming such existed), international law be damned.
Government law or even multi-government law doesn’t have anything except a coincidental relationship to “justice”. For example, it’d have been against international law to just kill Hussein and leave him for the vultures. Would that have been therefore “unjust”? Or let’s suppose that international law said that it was legal to beat the shit out of niggers. Would that make it right? Why or why not?
This is the same sort of myopia I’ve seen from the pro-war side, who argued that international law said that Iraq oughta get invaded to get rid of all those evil weapons it couldn’t prove it didn’t have. It’s an argument from convenience, a crutch for folks too lazy or too scared to discuss the real issues, and I don’t believe that anyone outside of the Worker’s World party takes it seriously.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 4:33 am
You know a libertarian is losing an argument when he appeals to international law (!).
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 4:48 am
> If you had to point to the most barbarous regime in the past year or two, who would you point to?
Red China, of course, for a lot longer than two years. Who could doubt this? Liberty’s enemies should recast their resumes. Her so-called friends are quite enemy enough.
(Jesus, John, I thought NT was a snakepit last week…)
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 5:00 am
Hiss. :-)
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 5:09 am
Welcome back my friend, to the show that never ends….
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 5:48 am
There is a reason that the Anglospheric nations were victim to full scale slaughter by their own governments during the 20th century, unlike most of the rest of the world. The classical liberal worldview runs deep. It is the height of civilization. Almost all of the libertarian thinkers in history have come from Anglosphere nations - Locke, Spooner, Tucker, the Founders, Rothbard, Nozick, the Friedmans, Barnett, etc. Even the ones who came from other nations only became prominent in the Anglospheric nations - Rand, Mises, Hayek.
Mostly I agree, but I’m not convinced that Anglophiles have cornered the market on Libertarian thought, nor do I think the relatively good fortune of being an Anglophile is prerequisite. The ones you listed are awarded an historical bias because they weren’t killed or imprisoned. After Solzhenitsyn how many like-minded Soviets had the courage to thumb their noses at the NKVD? There was also Vaclav Havel in Eastern Europe, tho I suppose neither he nor Solzhenitsyn was a libertarian as we would recognize one, but given the baseline each was working from their respective ideas were relatively threatening to the statists at the time, wouldn’t you say?
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 6:16 am
RKN,
Jonathan is not an Anglophile either, so I doubt very much that he considers it to be a prerequisite. However, the historical bias you cite is precisely Jonathan’s point: only Anglospheric nations have the cultural and political institutions necessary for tolerating and promoting classical liberal thought.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 6:19 am
Oops, I should have written that he was not born in the “Anglosphere,” as he is certainly a lover of all things Anglo.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 7:34 am
> Mostly I agree, but I’m not convinced that Anglophiles have cornered the market on Libertarian thought
My thoughts ran in the same direction, but I liked the spirit of the argument. Anglic culture is Germanic culture, and all of European culture is devolved Roman culture, itself in turn hugely influenced by Greek culture. There are socio-eco-bio influences, as well; for example, the colder North Atlantic winters made outsized emotional displays difficult to pull off, giving rise to highly formalized customs, manners, artworks and dispute-resolution procedures. But there is a fundamental difference between West and East, the difference that presenceofmind.net exists to celebrate: The West is fundamentally Individualist (with an imperfect consistency) and the East is fundamentally Collectivist (with near-perfect consitency). The hero of the West, from Luke Skywalker to Howard Roark to Wyatt Earp to Huck Finn to Jean Valjean to the Nazarene to Socrates to Odysseus to Jason to Gilgamesh, is the man who pursues his own truth instead of received or revealed or popular opinion. In a sense, that story is the West, and we never tire of telling it, nor of casting real-life events to fit that format. But the Libertarian idea has been of the West since there was a West. The East has never tired of trying to reabsorb this–to it–hideous deviation, and Marx and Hitler are particularly vicious examples of the attempt to reify the West into a renewed Orientialism (it’s Latin, knee-jerking in-lookers; look it up). Islamism is the same kind of movement, though it lacks the Germanic efficiencies of the Nazis and Communists. The difference is that Western Illibertarians are still Westerners. They’re always looking for the Odyssian quick-fix trick, the artifact of the mind that undermines their professed Eastern unmindedness–rendering them unable to do unto themselves as they would gleefully do unto others. The Islamists are the real deal, and what they lack in efficiency they make up for in zeal. All childish nattering by moral equivalizers shoved back into the toy box, this is a war the West must win–lest the only truly human civilization, whatever its faults and inconsistencies, be lost to the world forever.
(Damn, Rod, I just blew an essay on you. Lucky for me, I’ve already written it many different ways.)
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 5:40 pm
Uh, because of international law?
International law? So now I have to be told how to live my life, not just by the bastards in Washington, buy also by the bastards in Belgium, Amsterdam, Paris, the UN, and the rest of the world? Surely you see a danger in world government.
Imagine the Europeans “liberating” the Americans because they consider Bush to be a butcher. Besides, if you’re going to depose all the butchers in the world, you’re going to be at war forever, which points up the hypocrisy of picking the butcher who was sitting on some vast oil fields and was also conveniently hated by Israel. What a deal!
All butchers need to be killed - Saddam, Mugabe, Kim, Castro… That’s a simple truism. I didn’t trust the US govt to do the killing efficiently, nor did I trust that the Iraqis were civilized enough to create a free society once their butcher was dead.
Oh, and why was it that of all the world’s butchers, the Americans picked Saddam Hussein? what about the poor suffering North Koreans? Don’t you care about them? Are they next?
You seem to think that I supported the war. I assure you I did not. Yes, I do in fact care about the North Koreans. It’s due to the US Govt’s actions that the South Koreans are not in the hell that the North Koreans are in. This is a clear case of one set of states (the US govt and the South Korean govt) being much, much less evil than another set of states (China and the North Korean govt).
I knew someone would come up with the Rummel figures. I love it…morality measured by body bags and percentages. One thing the people who love Rummel’s figures never want to talk about is that the WWI and WWII figures add up to more than Mao and Stalin COMBINED. Those nasty barbarians.
Really? So the US and UK govts were the only bad guys in world wars I and II responsible for all the killing? Was England supposed to just give up and lay down arms when Hitler wanted to enslave them? And they were completely responsible for the deaths involved? And those deaths exceeded the estimated 100 million deaths that Stalin and Mao carried out?
U.S. prison population largest in world
I agree - the Drug War is one of the worst crimes the US govt is committing. But compared to other countries, the overall picture is that the US govt is much less intrusive than in most parts of the world. In England, people have been sent to jail for defending their own property. In France, an entire 1/3 of the population either directly works for the French govt or in close intimacy with it. Most political parties there are openly socialist. The EU puts anything the US govt bureaucrats do to shame. Africa is filled with tinpot dictators and socialist governments. The Arab world is largely filled with dictators and theocracies. China and India are only now opening up markets from under the boot of socialism.
True. Americans suffer from this affliction excessively. It’s odd, really. Patriotism really is a sort of a disease, causing people to be unable to be objective at all about their object of affection, even after their government liberates over 10,000 people from the burden of living.
So it’s an ‘afflication’ to take pride in the culture that make you freer than most of the world? Are all cultures the same? I didn’t think libertarians would fall prey to this sort of cultural relativism, but cavorting with commies has dangerous side-effects I guess. Perhaps it is libertarians who suffer from the affliction of Ostrichism, in which they lose the ability to contrast different sets of data, to tease apart differences, to rationally think about non-anarchist world that exists today, and to see degrees of evil.
April 21st, 2004 at Apr 21, 04 | 7:08 pm
Mostly I agree, but I’m not convinced that Anglophiles have cornered the market on Libertarian thought, nor do I think the relatively good fortune of being an Anglophile is prerequisite. The ones you listed are awarded an historical bias because they weren’t killed or imprisoned. After Solzhenitsyn how many like-minded Soviets had the courage to thumb their noses at the NKVD? There was also Vaclav Havel in Eastern Europe, tho I suppose neither he nor Solzhenitsyn was a libertarian as we would recognize one, but given the baseline each was working from their respective ideas were relatively threatening to the statists at the time, wouldn’t you say?
I don’t see Solzhenitsyn as a libertarian. He saw evil and chronicled it for history. But I don’t think he ever figured out philosophically the worldviews that cause that kind of society to arise. Micha made the point above, but I think that any liberty advocates that arise in non-Anglosphere societies are fighting an uphill battle because the cultures they live in are do not have the same tradition of individualism that Anlgospheric societies do. The Magna Carta was written nearly a thousand years ago, and those roots run deep. Most of the Arab world has nothing remotely resembling it even today. It’s good to see that liberal ideas are starting to flourish in places they traditionally have not - entrepreneurial India, Poland, Estonia, etc.
April 22nd, 2004 at Apr 22, 04 | 6:29 pm
I don’t see Solzhenitsyn as a libertarian. He saw evil and chronicled it for history. But I don’t think he ever figured out philosophically the worldviews that cause that kind of society to arise. Micha made the point above, but I think that any liberty advocates that arise in non-Anglosphere societies are fighting an uphill battle because the cultures they live in are do not have the same tradition of individualism that Anlgospheric societies do. The Magna Carta was written nearly a thousand years ago, and those roots run deep. Most of the Arab world has nothing remotely resembling it even today. It’s good to see that liberal ideas are starting to flourish in places they traditionally have not - entrepreneurial India, Poland, Estonia, etc.
I acknowledged that calling Solzhenitsyn a Libertarian would be a stretch, tho evidently his writing has moved even some anglo-libertarians to their present political beliefs. The co-founder of PayPal, for instance: http://www.theadvocates.org/celebrities/peter-thiel.html. And at least one of Solzhenitsyn’s books is among the top ten suggested Libertarian reads.
Half of any political movement is documenting the wrong of what you want to see replaced. The other half is activism. My point was that I don’t see anything particularly “anglophilic” with regard to the first half of Libertarianism — the desire for liberty/freedom is innate.
Sadly, I don’t see much of anything occuring in modern Anglospheric societies with regard to the second half either. Even there liberty advocates are fighting an “uphill battle.” And from my perch the hill becomes steeper and the summit more distant with every passing year.
May 12th, 2004 at May 12, 04 | 10:19 am
“There is little doubt in my mind: the West, specifically Anglospheric culture, is much more civilized than the rest of the world”
???
I think we need to define ‘civilized’ here. If you define it as granting relative freedom from oppression to your own people whilst pursuing murderous imperialist foreign policy, building a huge and ever more destructive arsenal, and enforicing incredibly damaging levels of protectionism then you are correct.
September 17th, 2004 at Sep 17, 04 | 3:33 pm
Jonathan Wilde’s understanding of history may be different from yours. For example, of the region of the world which brought us the Roman empire, the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the Inquisition, the nation-state, the divine right of kings, global colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, World War I, fascism, Stalinism, terrorism(*), and the Holocaust, Wilde says:
“Yes, Western states’ crimes have been less than those of non-Western states. That is my point. It takes a culture of liberty to keep governments from becoming tyrannical.”
Further, we are given to understand that the Soviet Union lost World War II:
“Yet, I am glad the softcore communists in the US and UK won. Suffering the New Deal was a hell of lot better than being placed in a Soviet gulag or Nazi concentration camp.”
(One wonders, of course, how all those millions across half of Europe felt about being placed in a Soviet gulag thanks to the diplomatic efforts of the architect of the New Deal.)
I fear, though, that I am simply failing to understand something important. In particular, I am not at all clear on what Wilde and other men of the west mean when they talk about it (”The West”, that is). At times it seems to mean Europe and those colonies where the remaining population is mostly of European descent; at times it seems to mainly be used to divide England and its sattelites from the wogs (although nuanced discussions of “Anglospheric” states such as apartheid South Africa, the British Raj, the Jim Crow South, or the U.S.-annexed Philippines seems strangely lacking); at times it apparently includes what is today Iraq (Gregg Swann cites the Mesopotamian “Gilgamesh” as a paradigm of “Western” heroism). Meanwhile, Stalin’s Russia is, at times, put side by side with Mao’s China–apparently as a case study in Oriental (?!) tyranny.
Maybe if the defenders of the West could make it more clear just where the hell they are talking about, and when, I could get somewhat clearer on the support for their world-historical thesis.