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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Part I of III
Arguments over war in Iraq and its justification, recently fuelled by emotions running high over the first anniversary of the Sept 11th attacks, have been plaguing the libertarian camp. Samizdata decided to summarise its contributors’ positions on war in general and Iraq in particular and received some interesting responses. There are many strands of arguments for and against war on Iraq and it is impossible to even mention them all in one posting. There are several interesting points I wish to add to or stress in the debate.
One of the objections to Perry’s position on the destruction of tyranny and libertarian opposition to it comes from Julian Morrison (a comment on the above linked article):
There are many ways and means of destroying tyranny, but the only ones that are “libertarianly correct” are those which do not involve harm to innocents. Assassination is far preferable, for example, to war – and hand-to-hand war is preferable to blanket bombing. There exists no right to murder, regardless of how convenient it might be.
Here justification of war is reduced to the effects it may have on the civilian population or innocents. This makes opposition to tyranny impossible. For example, makes it impossible to fight anybody ruthless enough to use human hostages.
Ignoring for a moment the other important conditions of just war, which I will deal with in Part II, I want to look at Nazism and communism as examples of historical tyrannies that were accepted as evil to be justifiably eliminated. Opposing Nazism by force was justified as self-defence and the war against Hitler and Germany has been accepted as a just war. The WWII experience proves appeasement wrong on both grounds – moral (fails in self-defence) as well as strategic or practical (gives the enemy opportunity to accumulate weapons and pose a greater threat).
Although during WWII the distinction between a dictator and the nation he lead was blurred, the Cold War made abundantly clear that there is a difference between a dictator waging a war with the country behind him and a dictator with the civilian population being at his mercy and under the same threat as his opponents.
Perry mentions Czechoslovakia as a case in point and I will merely add to his voice. During 1968 Prague Spring civil resistance the Warsaw pact used military threat on the civilian population and in the early days of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 there was in our minds a real threat that the communist government would use the army on the demonstrators. How could an attack by the West make the situation any worse in a country where the state is ready to use ‘military force’ (not just law enforcement) on its citizens? Whether I die being run over by a T-55, shot by AK-47 or by a stray ‘Western’ bomb does not make much difference to me as an individual in such situation. In fact, young and idealistic as I was in those days, I’d probably prefer the latter, given that being killed during a ‘Western liberation’ would at least serve a purpose I agreed with, whereas being killed by communists wouldn’t.
We know Saddam has used military force and chemical weapons on Kurds and will not hesitate to use such force again… Those who oppose war on Iraq on ‘moral grounds’ will find it hard to wriggle out of agreeing that it was right for the West to fight Nazism and wrong to leave the nations of Eastern Europe under communism. The problem is that Nazism and communism are obviously wrong ex-post and the current debate is about determining the moral and strategic position ex-ante.
To be continued…
Doctrine of Just war and libertarians (Part II)
Strategic considerations for attack on Iraq (Part III)
Yesterday I wrote about how I simply do not believe that the true motivation of some who speak out against intervening militarily in Iraq, or elsewhere, is quite what it claims to be. Now that does not mean I question the honour of all who counsel against war, though in some cases that is indeed what I do.
But when some, like Jacob Hornberger, claim that their opposition to war comes in any way out of concern for the well being of the people who live under ghastly regimes like that of Saddam Hussain or Stalin, then I do start to question whether ‘whiteman speaks with forked tongue’. I do not know if Hornberger honestly believes that (he is after all a politician) but even if he does, I wonder how he would react to the discovery reported today in The Times of London (sorry no link) of yet another mass grave in Russia dating from Stalinist times, containing 30,000 people. That is the equivalent of 10 World Trade Centers worth of innocent victims murdered by the NKVD between 1936 and 1939.
So please, if the exclusive reason Ron Paul and Jacob Hornberger at al want to avoid military conflict with far off tyrants is that they do not want members of the volunteer US military to get killed whilst earning their pay, well fine, I don’t agree but I can respect that. Just spare me the crap about worrying about ‘innocent Iraqis/Russians/Czechs/Slovaks/Koreans/Tibetans etc.’ who are or were living under the rule of mass murdering tyrants because it is complete bullshit.
An interesting Q&A article between Congressman Ron Paul (R, Texas) and Jacob Hornberger, an Independent Candidate for the U.S. Senate from Virginia, brings forward several of the reasons that I both like, and regularly disagree with Ron Paul on many issues.
Rather than do a lengthy take down, I will confine my remarks to Hornberger’s remarks in question 17 in the Q&A:
From a moral standpoint, we should not only ask about American GI casualties but also Iraqi people casualties. After the Allied Powers delivered the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany to Stalin and the Soviet communists after World War II, those people suffered under communism for five decades, which most of us would oppose, but who’s to say that they would have been better off with liberation by U.S. bombs and embargoes, especially those who would have been killed by them? I believe that despite the horrible suffering of the Eastern Europeans and East Germans, Americans were right to refrain from liberating them with bombs and embargoes. It’s up to the Iraqi people to deal with the tyranny under which they suffer – it is not a legitimate function of the U.S. government to liberate them from their tyranny with an attack upon their nation.
For a start, the Iraqi ‘nation’ is not by any reasonable measure under the control/ownership/whatever of the Iraqi people, it is under the control of the Iraqi flavour of Baathist Socialists lead by Saddam Hussain and his family… so attacking Iraq is not attacking the Iraqi ‘nation’ and certainly not the Iraqi people, but rather the regime which controls it.
However Hornberger is quite right that as a result of that huge moral blot on Roosevelt and Churchill, the Yalta Agreement, the Western Allies did indeed “[deliver] the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany to Stalin and the Soviet communists after World War II”. Given that both Hornberger and Paul have chosen to frame their views firmly within the state centred meta-context of ‘national interests’, thereby at a stroke moving their position off the true moral high ground, I will follow them for now into the murky valley in which congressmen and would-be senators choose to dwell.
Well if the US and ‘Western Powers’ were indeed responsible for people in Czechoslovakia ending up under Soviet control, as it was indeed US troops which liberated much of the country from the Nazis, then how is it such a reach to see how ‘Americans’ did indeed bear a responsibility for undoing the state of affairs which condemned two generations of Czechs and Slovaks to communist tyranny?
Likewise, is Jacob Hornberger really going to suggest that Czechs and Slovaks are going to thank people like him for not actively trying to liberate them? It is not as if they were passively accepting communist rule and yet in 1968, the likes of Hornberger did nothing. If he thinks people in Czechoslovakia were happy they were not supported on the ‘moral’ grounds it would not be good for them I suspect he is in for a shock. Hornberger’s responses to Ron Paul wear moral clothing but frankly it is as phoney as three dollar bill. Hornberger is actually talking about utility, not morality. The only moral position is to oppose violence based tyranny with force. That was my view in the Cold War and it is my view regarding Saddam Hussain.
The destruction of tyranny whenever it is possible is never a bad thing for any libertarian to support, if liberty is to be more than just some abstract thing bandied about in debates.
What all neolibertarian hawks should be driving these days
![[photo of Sarah Lawrence]](http://www.sarahlawrence.org/Images/sarah2.jpg)
Sarah Lawrence: clearly up to no good
In May this year, I had the pleasure of meeting George Smith when we were both speaking at the Youth 4 Liberty Summer Camp in Orono, Ontario, Canada. I found him interesting, learned and charming, but my speech, which was an anarcho-capitalist argument for the war on terrorism, apparently made little impact on him, if a recent article of his is anything to go by. In The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Vol 1, No 31, he says darkly: If a crisis presents an opportunity, an endless crisis presents endless opportunities. With bin Laden off the radar, the administration is setting sights on Hussein. Is he now the linchpin of world terror or just the one we might get away with killing? Have we reviewed all tyrants and found him the most imminently threatening?
What is this conspiracy theory asking you to believe about yourself? Suppose you think that Saddam Hussein needs to be disarmed, deposed and replaced by a democratic government. George Smith is asking you to believe one of two things:
- You are a nefarious character (in league with the US government and other reprehensible scoundrels) who thinks that Saddam Hussein is not a bad chap who should be taken out to protect the people of the world from whatever dreadful wrongs he might do next, but merely someone “we might get away with killing” OR
- You are a gullible fool who has been taken in by the dastardly US government’s anti-Saddam rhetoric.
If you came to this conclusion long before the US/UK governments did (and let’s face it, only a matter of ten days ago, Tony Blair seemed unconvinced), (2) would imply that you were taken in by people who did not themselves hold that opinion. So it follows that George Smith is asking me to believe (1) – that I am an immoral person who wants Saddam taken out merely because he is someone “we might get away with killing.” George, George! Tell me you don’t really think this!
Following the remarkable reaction to the article The real England speaks, several people have e-mailed us to ask what ‘our’ views are regarding the ‘War on Terrorism’ or ‘Israel and the Middle east’ or just plain old ‘war’.
Firstly, Samizdata.net has no ‘editorial positions’ on issues per se. Our writers would all be described as libertarian, ranging from anarcho-capitalist to minarchist to neo-libertarian conservative. In other words we all hold fairly divergent views on quite a few issues, but broadly speaking we all tend to fall into the more hawkish end on issues of war and peace, taking the view that violence based tyranny is best dealt with by confronting force with force, though without losing sight of illiberal abridgements of civil liberties which may be wrapped in more genteel cloth closer to home.
Articles laying out what we feel is the rational position regarding these issues are…
The modern bestiary of comparative belligerency
Birds of a feather… sometimes don’t flock together
Brendan’s back and rallying…not
With friends like these…
Saddam moves in mysterious ways
Exquisite appeasement
None of the above
The Palestinian Götterdämmerung
The time for choice is long past
Why the US fights the way it does
As we have written enough articles on the topic of war and peace to fill ‘War and Peace’, this is by no means the totality of germane articles we have written… but if you read these you will have a pretty shrewd idea where the writers of samizdata.net are ‘coming from’.
Liberty… If You Dare
CYBERSPACE – September 13, 2002: LibertyForum (http://www.libertyforum.org), a web-based political discussion forum, has emerged from an intensive 1 year beta-testing phase and has opened its electronic doors to the general public. During its testing period, a group of approximately 400 dedicated users logged over 200,000 individual posts to test LibertyForumís PHP based forum software, which reviewers consider one of the best implementations of web-based discussion on the Internet.
LibertyForum is organized around the discussion of news-items and political topics, and places the libertarian principles of its creators firmly ahead of site popularity or narrowly ideology. Membership is not restricted to any particular political camp, a fact that has resulted in the wide spectrum of political opinion and ideas presented by forum members.
A key aspect of LibertyForum’s commitment to libertarian principles is its environment of open-debate. Rather than rely on moderators, post deletions, poster banishment, or other types of forum censorship, LibertyForum allows its members to decide for themselves what it is they want to read. Comments are rated by the forum’s membership through the use of a Post Rating System based on Slashdot.org’s (http://Slashdot.org) “Karma” moderation system. This fosters a system of meritocracy, where posts are rated according to their content, and where members are free to set their reading preferences at whatever threshold they prefer.
LibertyForum’s growing expertise in the delivery of web-discussion services has led it to seek and establish strategic partnerships with a variety other Liberty oriented organizations. These organizations are able to utilize LibertyForum’s infrastructure to provide discussion services for their members; this at no cost to the organization or its members. True to its focus on the individual, LibertyForum also actively promotes an international atmosphere that welcomes the participation of posters throughout the world.
With a current, and growing, user base of over 600 members, and daily posting activity that often exceeds 1,500 individual posts, LibertyForum is poised to become the premier Liberty oriented discussion forum on the web. To find out more about LibertyForum, or to become a member, please visit http://www.libertyforum.org.
Contact: John Deere
forums@libertyforum.org
http://www.libertyforum.org
You may be aware that there are blogs for every corner of the human mind. Well, almost every corner, since the thought of blogs for some of the corners of the human mind makes me shudder. It is also axiomatic that people who came up with the weblog technology will have their own corner (or basement) of the blogosphere where their blog about blogging, that is, meta-blog to their heart’s content.
Although I am not a techie by any stretch of imagination (thank you, you may stop now!), I am very interested in technology and so the following post of a techie blogger, Jon Udell of John Udell’s Radio Blog caught my eye:
Every web user engages daily in this process of information refinement. Many share their results – that is, URLs with annotations – in the form of FYI (“For Your Information”) emails. Some also share their results on personal “links” pages. And a few employ a new tactic called weblogging. A weblog is really just another kind of annotated links page, typically in the form of a daily Web diary that filters and reacts to Web information flow according to personal and/or professional interests.
The current weblog craze is, in all likelihood, a passing fad. If you visit Blogger, a portal site that aggregates over 1000 weblogs, you may conclude that this form of communication has already suffered the same fate that befell the Usenet. One “blogger” (short for “weblogger”) recently complained that although there was once a hope that the weblog could become a powerful tool for reaching out and connecting with the world, it has become a powerful tool for self-gratification and self-absorption.
Two years later, he makes a similar argument:
Despite massive uptake of blogging in certain circles, I don’t see evidence that it has made much of a dent in scientific communities. The same is true, I think, in many other professions. Blogging seems huge to those of us engaged in it, and in important ways it is. Culturally, it represents a style of communication that is genuinely new. Technically, it may be the most popular application of XML. But blogging is still a drop in the ocean of email. It’s far from ubiquitous, and at the ETech conference, both Sam Ruby and I were surprised to see how little-understood RSS feeds were even among experienced bloggers.
Whether Jon Udell is right about the overall impact of blogging is not central to my point here, which is simple – understanding the technical side of information generation and dissemination opens more opportunities to generate and disseminate them as well as maximises the use of existing channels.
Underlying the weblogging movement are two technological trends – RSS headline syndication>1 and pushbutton Web publishing. I have recently come across the squabble over RSS formats that from a fifty-thousand-foot perspective looks like a tempest in a teapot. Neither the simplicity of RSS .9x nor the extensibility of RSS 1.0 matters to someone who has yet to experience the ‘virtuous cycle’ that is only recently being discovered by so many – for example, Don Box:
While spending my evening with RSS, I had two epiphanies:
1. The connection between blogging and RSS is deep.
2. WS-IL>2 is the closest we have to RSS in the web service space.
With respect to the first observation, the cycle looks something like this:
while (true) {
ScanRSSFeeds();
RantAboutStuffYouSawFromRSSFeeds();
ExposeYourRantsViaRSS();
}
What an amazingly virtuous cycle!
Before you start thinking of how sad spending one’s evening with RSS is and of any stupid puns on epiphanies or of any of the usual responses that the non-techies fall upon to compensate for their lack of understanding of squiggles, a much more important perspective springs to mind.
The above is worth noting, as technology is making difference to those who find themselves opposing the mainstream or standing aside from it. Communication via the internet, email, weblogs and other channels to come has transformed and will continue to transform the private and public discourse. Many bloggers have discovered the joy of sharing with the world ideas whose expression had, until recently, been confined to conversations over a pint of beer or a cup of latte. Not that there is a cause for rejoicing every time such idea is liberated and this freedom has its price (for a more precise total scroll down the left hand bar here for Havens of Fluorescent Idiocy). I do believe that we have merely scratched the surface of what blogging could do in terms of generating information and, more importantly, in terms of its aggregation.
On a more immediate note, RSS has to do with information filtering and as such is relevant to the blogoshpere. Various blog digests have been set up and disappeared, trying to find an intelligent way of sorting out the data and passing on information that is of interest. Preferences akin to mail filters would allow the user to filter only the data in which they are interested onto the page, from the entire pool of data. For example, a user interested in articles about “Football” would be able to set up a personalised channel that simply consisted of a filter for Football, or even for a particular team or player. Or for all references to Slashdot.org, or whatever. This would give him the largest selection of content, with the greatest degree of personalization available. Tools would be made available to simplify the process of creating these files, and to validate them, and life would be good.
I have risked boring you to tears with techie acronyms in order to get my message across – I see technology as the main tool (and a weapon, if necessary) of education, development, protection and dismantling of the modern state. If we fancy ourselves as making any impact with our arguments, campaigns, thoughts and outpourings via blogging, let’s at least explore it’s potential to the full.
Disclaimer: Those who blog purely for personal gratification and self-absorption, please ignore my rallying call. No need to spend evenings with RSS and various assorted technologies. 
Note1: RSS – a dialect of XML, a vocabulary for representing annotated links. What exactly RSS stands for is itself a subject of controversy – Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, or John Udell’s favorite, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Note2: WS-IL – Web Services Inspection Language (WS-Inspection) 1.0
Last week I had dinner with Alex Singleton of Liberty Log so I took a look at what he’d been saying there, and found this:
One American reader of this site recently disagreed with something I wrote about American foreign policy. He wrote: “It’s interesting to have foreigners telling us Americans what WE ought to do. Why don’t you confine your efforts to mobilizing the British military to do your international crusading for you?” Well, the reason is that I don’t want to. In a free society, individuals are free to express their viewpoints as often as they want. Clearly, there are times when it is best not to voice an opinion (especially when in the company of people whose fists don’t value negative rights!), and individuals should also be free not to take any notice of opinions expressed, but there is nothing inherently immoral from a libertarian standpoint in telling others what to do.
Ah but there might very well be. It all depends what you tells them. Libertarianism says that Alex should be legally allowed to say what he wants, but not that anything he says is therefore morally right or even excusable.
This distinction constantly gets blurred. Phoners-in to the radio shows I’m sometimes on routinely glide from the claim that something is wicked to the claim that therefore it should be illegal, no further argument being regarded by them as necessary. Insisting on this distinction, as I always try to do, is central to libertarianism, not some merely incidental nitpick.
This distinction applies also to my somewhat frivolous potato crisps dilemma. Commenters reassured me that I don’t have to like, or even morally defend, everything that I nevertheless think capitalists should be legally free to do. Quite right.
My worry, however, is that Walkers Crisps are straying – I agree only a very small step – beyond mere tastelessness into the realms of compulsion. If the children that Walkers are aiming their crisp adverts at were totally free to ignore them, fine. The trouble is that Walkers are doing their business not just with the children directly, but with their school as a whole. The children are unfree. I agree, they’re not very unfree (not when it comes to ignoring adverts), and I don’t actually believe that Walkers and the schools in question should be forbidden to do this kind of deal, just jeered at. Nevertheless, somewhere between selling crisps to rather unfree children and selling poison gas to Adolf Hitler, a line gets crossed. To take more up-to-date examples, if someone is selling armaments to Mugabe or to Al-Qaeda, would “but I’m just a capitalist doing business” count as a complete defence in our eyes? Clearly not.
In the song Rule Britannia, it is said that ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’: Paul Marks wonders exactly when that was most true.
When was liberty in Britain at its height?
First of all I discount the talk of either Celtic liberty or Anglo Saxon liberty being the peak of liberty on this island. We have little information of how much lords took in tribute/taxes so it is not possible to know whether the ancients paid less of their incomes in tax than, say, people in the mid 19th century.
What we do know about the Celtic age is that it was time of war and plunder (as various lords struggled for power) – so even if we choose to ignore such things as human sacrifice the Celtic age does not seem very libertarian.
It is true that in some periods the Anglo Saxons managed to set up a fairly orderly society in those parts of this island known as England – however (to give just one example of un-libertarian practice) the Domesday Book records that about one in ten people in the newly conquered England was a slave.
So when was liberty at its height in this island? Well the ‘official’ reply to this (the reply I have given to children studying history) is “the early 1870’s”. The figures we have indicate that central taxes reached their low point (as a proportion of total income) in 1874 – also in 1875 we have a orgy of statism. Many functions which had been optional for local councils become compulsory by a Act of 1875, the trade unions are put above the law of contract by an Act of the same year and (finally) taxes begin to rise.
True, the Education Act of 1870 (the Forster Act) meant that in some parts of the country there were boards of education demanding education rates before 1875 and there was a decline in agriculture (putting pressure on the poor rates in some places) after 1873. However, if we are basically interested in government spending, taxes and regulations the peak of freedom seems to be 1874 – and then everything goes down hill.
However – is the above all that matters? In my ‘gut’ I would not say the early 1870’s were the ‘great age of liberty’ – I would say that this sounds more like the 1820s. → Continue reading: British Liberty
More on the environ-mental note… (David, do you put the hyphen in to emphasise the ‘mental’ in the word? Nothing gets past me!) 
The Gauteng provincial government set up a scheme, encouraging delegates to the Earth Summit (governments and environmental groups alike) to pay into a novel fund to compensate for the pollution caused by flying to South Africa, using electricity and driving around. A remarkably free-market approach – a delegate travelling from the United States, for example, would pay about $100 to offset the 10 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by flying to and staying in Johannesburg.
The fund will put the money raised into environmentally friendly schemes ranging from solar water heating to tree planting and improving energy efficiency in buildings. The contributions to the fund were voluntary and only 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide had been offset.
What the environ-mentalists forgot, perhaps, that such voluntary contributions will also act as a signal about how credible, popular or appropriately priced such fund is. For who should know better than the environ-mentalists themselves just how deranged and pointless is their way of approaching the environment and its problems.
Amazing image by www.scrofula.com (click image)
I passionately believe in freedom of speech and not just for my friends but also for my enemies. Not just for people who are right but also for people who are wrong and even for people who are vile and obnoxious.
One of the many reasons for my view is that freedom of speech enables us to identify the bad guys among us. Unfettered by laws or conventions they will, in the fullness of time, display their true colours. Freedom of speech is not just desirable, it is an essential tool of survival.
I am very glad the enviro-mentalists are able to speak their minds because that enables the sane among us to learn the extent of their psychosis. Let us ponder, for a moment, on this little gem:
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental. — Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!
Enviro-mentalism is not just a ‘different viewpoint’; it is a deranged, homicidal death cult and should be treated as such.
Since these people have expressed a clear (and gleeful) desire to exterminate us all, I believe it to be of the utmost importance to ensure that they never acquire the means to do so.
In the meantime, I nominate this question for debate: Is shooting an enviro-mentalist a legitimate act of self-defence?
Glenn Reynolds over on Instapundit already pointed out this post on Indepundit. It deserves to be widely read so I am reiterating it.
If anyone tells you Saddam isn’t really trying to acquire nuclear weapons and isn’t really a threat… tell them to read the above.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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