End the War on Freedom

Bill Walker at Laissez Faire Electronic Times - The Total Poindexter Constitution - a rewriting of the constitution to be more in line with reality. Funny, if you ignore the fact that it's so accurate.

Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com - Libertarianism in the Age of Empire - A speech Mr. Raimondo gave to the Libertarian Party of Illiois on March first. Freedom in Our Time! A short history of the Libertarian Party, which has been anti-war since Vietnam. He proposes that the party join the current antiwar movement in a big way. Bravo! [smith2004]

[New York University professor of philosophy James] Burnham -- not only a leading light of the National Review crowd, but a major influence on the conservative movement before the Reagan era -- was no defender of capitalism. His 1947 book, The Managerial Revolution, celebrated the end of laissez-faire capitalism and heralded the rise of a state-centered "managerial society" everywhere on earth. The "third world war," in his view, was merely a battle between different forms of managerialism, the Red variety and the Western version. The cold war was a civil war between two rival brands of statism, and Buckley echoed this line, in the early 1950s, when he wrote the following:

"We have to accept Big Government for the duration -- for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged ... except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." Conservatives, Buckley declared, must endorse "the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy," including the "large armies and air forces, atomic power, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington -- even with Truman at the reins of it all." [Commonweal, January 25, 1952]

Even with Truman at the reins of it all -- or Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Richard Nixon, it didn't matter. What mattered, to Buckley and the cold war conservatives, was the prosecution of their fanatical crusade against the Soviet Union by whatever means. Confiscatory taxation, the centralization and growth of federal power, conscription -- nothing was sacred, not the Constitution, not the Bill of Rights, not the free market, not the alleged conservative principles that Russell Kirk called "the permanent things." Everything was to be sacrificed on the altar of the war god.

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Let's make no mistake about the meaning of this war: we are entering the age of the American Caesars. When George W. Bush gives the order to attack, he will be crossing a Rubicon that the Founders of this country did everything to make impassable. They bound the President, and the would-be restorers of royalism in America, with the chains of the Constitution. They looked askance at a standing army, because they feared it would mean the rise of a professional officer corps inherently militaristic in outlook. They abhorred the European empires, and did all in their power to make an American version of King George III a political impossibility.

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But there is another element that gives this fuel a bit of high octane, another motivation that is driving our war-hawks, and that is their fealty to the state of Israel.

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We are fighting a war for Israel. When the body bags come home, and the dead are buried, let this be inscribed on their tombstones: They died for Ariel Sharon.

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There is no place in the libertarian movement for the War Party and its minions. The Libertarian Party must take decisive action against any "Libertarian" candidate or spokesperson who endorses this war. Equivocation on this question is equally impermissible. Nor do we want any kind of a "debate." What some people refuse to recognize is that some questions are already settled: libertarians do not "debate," year after year, the primacy or utility of economic and political liberty. We don't re-argue the case for and against capitalism, as opposed to, say, anarcho-communism. Every time a drug lord shoots someone down in the streets in broad daylight, we don't revisit the drug question. We don't reconsider the gun control question every time some nutso teenager kills half his classmates with a rifle. Why tear up the very roots of the libertarian ethic now that George W. Bush has decided to ignore Osama bin Laden and go after the tinpot dictator of a decimated country? It's an outrage, and I have just one message to any alleged libertarians, party members or not, who support this rotten war: stop calling yourself a libertarian. Get out of the movement, quit the party, and don't call us -- because we won't be calling you.

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The LP must make a strategic decision to intervene in the antiwar movement. Not tepidly, or tentatively: not half-heartedly -- but in a massive, nationally-coordinated manner.

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The libertarian movement has a niche all carved out in advance if it ever chooses to occupy it, for the antiwar movement has been red-baited in every major newspaper in the country: the presence of small but vocal left-wing groups has all but obscured the basically mainstream character of antiwar sentiment, at least in some media. While the hard left will probably not welcome us with open arms, the main body of the movement will find us not only interesting but also necessary -- as a way to deflect criticism of the movement as too left-wing. Well, you see, they'll say, when faced with the familiar red-baiting from the War Party, we have these libertarians, and they aren't exactly commies, now are they?

Thomas L. Knapp at Rational Review - The life of the Party: The Party and war - Mr. Knapp agrees with Mr. Raimondo in all but some details. [smith2004]

We can afford to have people in the LP who want drugs legal but regulated like alcohol, or who want to "phase in" legalization, possibly beginning with medical marijuana. They'll eventually come around, and progress can be made on those more focused goals while that happens. We can't afford to have a substantial faction advocate a continuation of the war on drugs and have that faction be seen as welcome in the LP. It just doesn't work. It's a "core" issue. It goes to the heart of what the Party is.

We can afford to have people in the LP who will accept "shall issue" permit systems instead of holding out for Vermonty carry for concealed weapons. They'll come around eventually; in the meantime we'll have made progress in the right direction. We can afford people who come out on the victim disarmament side of the ridiculous "should private citizens be 'allowed' to own nukes" debate, because it's not an issue that's really in front of us at the moment, and by the time it is, they'll have figured it out. We can't afford to have Sarah Brady as the keynote speaker at our national convention. We can't afford a substantial victim disarmament caucus in the LP. It's a "core issue." It goes to the heart of what the Party is.

There's no way the impending invasion of Iraq can be squared with the LP's platform or Statement of Principles. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. I've watched a number of people try, and I've so far seen only one mildly persuasive argument from a libertarian perspective on the issue -- J. Neil Schulman's. Schulman doesn't allude to the LP, but instead uses Rand's "ethics of emergencies" and talks about a lack of "non-deprivatory alternatives" -- a valiant, if unsuccessful, effort.

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War is, at this moment, and will likely be for at least the next decade, the defining issue in American politics. That makes it a core issue for the Libertarian Party. The Party can't afford to be neutral on this issue. The Party can't afford to be divided on this issue. And the Party can't afford to be wrong on this issue.

Nicki Fellenzer at Armed Females of America - A "Bad Gun Law" Grows in Brooklyn - whoa, baby! No mincing words here. Ms. Fellenzer gives Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes his just desserts. [smith2004 kaba]

Charlie Reese - The Last One - before our boys go in and Mr. Reese shuts up, he writes a final column about the horrors of war.

OK, this is my last anti-war column. The president's going to go, and I have a rule that when Americans go into combat, I don't criticize the war they're in. I'll raise hell trying to stop them from going to war, but once they're in it, I support them.

So I want you to do me, and yourself, a favor. Buy or rent two videos. One is "Black Hawk Down," the story of the Rangers' battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, and the other is "We Were Soldiers," the story of the battle in Drang Valley in Vietnam. Both are very good films, both are based on true stories, and both give as reasonably accurate a picture of war as you can get without making the audience throw up in their popcorn.

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Maybe you think that after Saddam Hussein is gone, everyone will live happily ever after, but I'm here to tell you that it will be the same. Nothing will change. No liberal democracy is going to bloom in the ancient desert of old Babylonia. No American will be able to say "I'm safer and freer now" because those young people died in Iraq. No Iraqi standing in the rubble is going to say, "Gee, I'm glad the Americans got rid of Saddam by destroying my home and my family." All this war is going to accomplish is to add to the world's store of misery -- more death, more wounded, more destruction, more debt, more poverty, more hatred, more profits for the merchants of death, more pollution and more terrorism.

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And I haven't even mentioned the suffering that will be inflicted on the Iraqis -- their young boys, their children, mothers, fathers and grandfathers. You saw how Americans ran terrified from the collapse of the towers in New York. Imagine what it's like to be in a city that is being bombarded with 2,000-pound bombs, cruise missiles, artillery and Gatling guns. Imagine trying to save your children in such a mad inferno. Imagine what it would be like to see your children torn into ragged, bloody chunks of meat by shrapnel, or burned into a twisted piece of charcoal, with wet, yellow intestines leaking out. It's pure hell to be the collateral damage. But sit back and enjoy your war. It's what you want.