The Futility of Being Anti-War and Pro-State
by Angelo Mike
Exclusive to STR
February 7, 2007
"War is the continuation of politics by other means." ~ Karl Von
Clausewitz
What does that tell you about politics?
The great anti-state and anti-war libertarian Frederic Bastiat gave us a
greater such insight when he said, "In war, the stronger dominates the weaker.
In business, the stronger imparts strength to the weaker." We can modify this
to fully cover the difference between violence and peace. The reality is, "In
politics and war, the stronger dominates the weaker. In commerce, the stronger
and the weaker impart strength to each other."
It is for this reason that being anti-war, or more accurately, anti- a
particular war, is ultimately not going to prevent war if one supposed that the
state still is necessary. For states don't just carry out warfare
internationally. They carry out low intensity warfare domestically and
internationally through foreign policies such as the manipulation of
currencies, taxation, putting up obstacles to trade where the private sector
had worked to remove natural obstacles, putting up navies and armies to prevent
peaceful trade, putting domestic soldiers in military bases located in other
countries to maintain hegemony, state-imposed immigration restrictions, and
restrictions on the right of each individual to secession.
It is only within this framework of low intensity warfare that high
intensity warfare is conceived and cultivated.
The pattern usually goes as this: A gang of robbers and murderers first
dominates a society. This gang can sustain itself on the products of that
society. So, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out, any gang of robbers isn't
necessarily a state. For if such a gang robs and then goes on the run and does
not pretend to have a rightful claim to your money, it is not a state. It must
be able to sustain itself by constantly exercising such compulsion on innocent
people. If they weren't innocent, then they would be plainly viewed as hostages
or prisoners. They must be turned into prisoners without anyone knowing it.
So it's important that society not be viewed as a separate or productive
entity apart from this gang. For if they are really viewed as separate, then it
is clear that they are mere victims of aggression from these domestic invaders.
This is why any state which is to survive must create an intellectual middle
class which propagates support for it by taking children from a young age and
teaching them that they are the government. It must, as expediently as
possible, turn all pro-individual/pro-freedom influences from a young age into
a subversive influence.
Thus, as Mises wrote, it was perfectly logical of the Bolsheviks to
destroy families in Russia . We can extend this explanation to Stalin's purges
of military leaders and all older people who knew he wasn't the great military
hero he claimed to be. Stalin was, in fact, a man who had been in so many
accidents when he was young, such as being hit by horse drawn carriages, that
he walked with a hobble and was rejected by the military.
But one doesn't have to be a brilliant economist to recognize this. Our
own supporters of democracy recognize this. Kids grow up and quite naturally,
within families, are taught values such as kindness and generosity. In families
they learn how to love. It is certainly not natural for them to learn how to
submit to authority and actively uphold authority. They must be quickly
integrated into state life so as to recognize this occupier as an integral part
of their welfare. They must be compulsorily unified as an abettor to the state.
I can relate a personal story which I was kind of shocked to reflect upon
years after it occurred. In third grade, I was in a private school when my
teacher, Mrs. Bogdan, was teaching us about property taxes, a concept I had
never heard of before. She said that if you have a car or home, you are taxed
on it. Up to that point, I had only known of income taxes and only had some
vague idea that taxes were bad.
The concept seemed totally odd. Don't you enjoy exclusive use and
enjoyment of your property? As Lysander Spooner said of a child's understanding
of natural law, if a child finds a flower and picks it out of the ground, he
understands that it is his to own since he found it first, and no one has a
right to force you to give it up.
I innocently raised my hand and asked a question. "How can they tax
something if you own it?"
Mrs. Bogdan would have none of it. She snapped back, "Because we need to
pay for the police and firemen," as if I was some operative sent in to subvert
the order of the classroom by right-wing parents.
Her answer made no sense to me. I had a total disconnect between, on the
one hand, making you pay a tax for what seemed like the mere act of owning a
car or home, and on the other, paying for police and firemen. As I grew up, I
realized I was completely correct not to understand, and that Mrs. Bogdan was
merely a foul mannered liberal Democrat who hated intellectual honesty.
How does one go from believing that something must be paid for to
believing that it must be compulsorily paid for by a monopolist? No one
innately feels this idea (unless they want to be that monopolist). Rothbard
uses an example in The Ethics of Liberty to demonstrate this in which he
describes what would happen if a society started from scratch: There are
thousands of people, composed of many different families, who trade, work, and
divide up labor. They recognize a right of self-defense and some of them are
armed.
But along comes someone who says that all these people are totally
insecure in their rights and property. What they must do is give up all their
weapons to the Jones family, and let the Jones family alone arbitrate over
disputes and take their money to do so. Such a notion to this population would
seem preposterous. The Jones family would probably squirm at the thought of
having this kind of power.
Compulsory unification under a state, then, only seems natural because
it's perpetuated and taught to us in state schools, or private schools, which
are licensed, regulated, and often funded by the state. Thus, since they get
"public" money, the state may use this as a pretense to regulate the receivers
of this money and decide on what is the acceptable use of it in favor of the
state, as opposed to some private interest. This gives the illusion of a public
interest or some national character which is built up in the minds of the
youth. Everyone is eager to see children raised in state schools, public or
private, since these kids may one day be ruling the country. They have an
interest in not being ruled in a manner not of their liking. If they don't want
themselves and their children to be slaves, then they must become masters.
We may come back to the issue of this national character in state
societies and war. Every attack intended for a government, then, may serve as
the means for a government to externalize the cost of waging war against the
enemy government, or just plain enemy, as George Bush calls them. War now isn't
merely a contest between two gangs or states, but between two competing ways of
life. War must be systematically escalated so that no one may escape it, lest
the well being of the state be eroded.
Citizens of Kansas or Oregon who may otherwise have nothing to do with
Washington , D.C. other than be forced to pay taxes then get taxes confiscated
and industry regulated so as to systematically support escalating war. Any war,
whether under a monarchy or democracy, is accelerated into being a total war of
our way of life versus theirs, or freedom and democracy versus fascism. This
can mean only one thing: Perpetual war, since no victory can ever be declared
when winning means having to use force to mold another population into
submission not for concrete terms of surrender, but perpetually giving tribute
(taxes) to aid the victor's way of life.
For instance, on September 11, 2001 , 19 murderers killed about 3,000
people in Washington , D.C. , Pennsylvania , and New York . It would have made
little sense to attack these targets if there was no dominating sovereign to
make submit. For who were these men attacking? Innocent people. On a market,
had such an attack been made, the proper course of action would simply have
been to apprehend and possibly kill the surviving accomplices to this attack by
giving money to security agencies.
Under a state? The solution has been to kill or kidnap anyone possibly
affiliated with Al Qaeda, the organization which sent its 19 members to kill.
This meant invading an entire nation, Afghanistan ; killing innocent civilians;
and as of this date, ruling them for over five years, often under martial law,
with no end to the number of times we can be victorious in sight.
Many supposedly anti-war people support this war of aggression, yet
oppose the American war against Iraq for the simple reason that the Taliban
harbored Al Qaeda.
And yet, if you were to ask them if our 65,000 soldiers in Germany should
be attacked, or all of Germany attacked, because there are American soldiers
carrying out aggression and murder against Iraqis, what kind of response do you
think you would get? What of the over 150 countries with American soldiers
stationed? And who can be charged to responsibly carry out this task? Analysis
over war is much more sober when staged in such a light.
In Iraq , where the U.S. government has set up a central state, insurgent
operatives and Al Qaeda have infiltrated, since the government is the easiest
means to get hold of to use violence on others. Thousands of Iraqi police
officers have been fired or are under investigation for collaboration and
involvement with attacks on Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers. And really, who
else should we expect a state to attract? These insurgents are using hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi government tax dollars to fund their efforts. It is much
easier to confiscate this money with a state than to raise it voluntarily.
Should these insurgents not want the most prominent and expansive means of
carrying out violence on innocent people so readily within their grasp?
Since the Iraqi government is now harboring insurgents who are
threatening the American state's racket on crime there, should America , too,
now be invaded? Should we invade Iraq all over again? Kick in the door of every
Iraqi home and detain everyone under suspicion of being an enemy combatant?
Then there's Iran . Iran has been in the sights of our government for
years, to put it mildly. The "tough" rhetoric coming from Democrats and
Republicans on not taking any options off the table can't be viewed as anything
but a threat to all of Iran , since we've already aggressively invaded
Afghanistan and Iraq , deemed Iran one of the Axis of Evil countries, and now
are mobilizing for war with them. And they have the nerve to want defend
themselves! Don't they have the good sense that our government has to realize
that, if you're not a threat to the United States , we won't attack them? That
is, unless you're a politician like Hillary Clinton, who thinks that being an
accomplice to the agony and death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis was a mere
mistake to be overlooked, since she would vote differently had she the chance
today.
We know why politicians like her supported the war then and don't support
it now. It was popular then and unpopular now. Their opinion, like that of much
of the nation, is an oscillating pendulum, taking the easiest possible course.
And no one would refuse her the benefit of the doubt. Since without that,
states would be strangled into inaction, and peace might break out. No; we must
give sociopaths another chance to learn from mere mistakes.
Iranian agents are, seemingly by merely being present in Iraq ,
threatening Bush's racket on the use of overwhelming violence on innocent
people there. And since that force is being paid for with money and resources
confiscated from American taxpayers, and this is a "public," not "private" war,
if the American state is to retain its own well being, it must unify all of us
in war against all of Iran. For if Americans are possibly being thwarted in
their efforts to maintain hegemony over Iraq by Iranians when American tax
dollars are being put to use in such an effort, don't all the American
taxpayers have a right to see a stop to this? Isn't their money being thrown
down the drain, and must it not now be put to use more effectively?
Even if we did manage to prevent the Iraq War or the war on Afghanistan ,
we'll only have prevented aggression for a while. We know what states are and
what they do. They thrive on conflict, and war is their livelihood. Politicians
only maintain their well being at the expense of everyone else. In peace time
(such a phrase should seem absurd given what the very existence of states
entails), leaders are given relatively little attention and glory. Only the
wartime leaders are the truly great ones to be remembered and the "national
character" modeled after. They must seek war if they want to be truly great.
So perhaps we could have avoided these wars, or even World War I or World
War II and still had states. We know eventually that there would be further
wars initiated by states, possibly more deadly than ever, since there would be
a much more thriving and productive private sector from which to siphon off
resources to conduct them. All it would take is some small conflict,
assassination, trade or currency dispute, or a vainglorious politician to do
it. In order to maintain public support for these wars, states would have to
integrate themselves into society even more strongly and swiftly, akin to how
the more isolationist Americans of pre-WWII or WWI had to be drafted, industry
made cartels of, dissident thought suppressed and punished with imprisonment,
and media infiltrated.
As it is, much of this job is already done and just needs perpetuating so
that the mere word of a statesman can turn who was otherwise a friend and
business partner into an enemy to be destroyed.
Yet most of the world still believes in democracy, and that their country
is always the true democracy. In our minds, Russia and China are ruled by
despots, and we are democratic. In theirs, they are democratic, and we have a
despot. The truth is that each of us has democratic dictatorships. These men
rose to power on popular movements.
These populations also still hold that the absence of such monopolies of
overwhelming force, which alone determine law and may destroy anyone they want,
and may do so at little cost to themselves, must be maintained lest chaos and
anarchy ensue. Therefore, we have to keep giving these states the benefit of
the doubt. And states rely on these very people for even more expansive powers
and support to make suffer and destroy anyone they want.
This is what democracy does to people. It makes them stupid. Its very
existence presupposes that it serves some useful purpose. How else could such
entities exist for so long?
Even those typically anti-war countries such as France or Germany are
really limited not by their inflated sense of nationalism or their true
democracies, but by their size and resources. Imagine if France or Germany had
the size and resources of the U.S. We could never safely entrust to such a
seemingly peaceful people such a horrible power, and we know exactly what they
would do with it, sooner or later.
The supposedly anti-war members of society and politicians fall prey to
this idiocy. These people reason that, if we're at war with a country such as
Iraq , the nature of the national character means that we should be at total
war, and not a single American should be spared from sacrificing to escalate
the utterly futile campaign to murder, steal, and enslave. They're under this
delusion that the state is society, so what must be good for the state is good
for society, even when they have some notion that war, or a particular war
they've selected, is bad.
We can't even count on them to oppose the wars that they, well, oppose.
This is like Dr. Strangelove. "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the
war room!" Only instead of the instantaneous destruction of all life on earth,
we must be dragged along through years of misery, destruction, and stupidity
until we decided that the price of liberation through the state is too much to
bear. We'll have finally realized that we don't want to be liberated into a
pile of rubble.
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Angelo Mike is an economics and public policy major at Marymount
University in Arlington, Virginia.
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