Noninterventionism: Cornerstone of a Free Society


Recommended Posts

From: http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1112e.asp

Noninterventionism: Cornerstone of a Free Society

by Anthony Gregory, Posted March 30, 2012

A free society is impossible under an empire. Even the most just war you can imagine is a disaster for liberty and prosperity, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out. An unjust war amounts to murder, mayhem, and mass destruction. And a perpetual state of war guarantees that liberty will never be achieved. James Madison said it very well:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and ... degeneracy of manners and of morals.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Indeed, from a purely consequentialist point of view, America has lost most of its freedom during its wars. Even the American Revolution itself had negative effects — martial law, massive debt that ushered in Hamiltonian control of the new republic, and consolidation of power in the national capital.

The War of 1812 resulted in martial law in Louisiana, where people were jailed without habeas corpus simply for criticizing military law. A judge was jailed for issuing a habeas corpus writ.

During the Mexican War the executive branch unilaterally adopted taxing powers over U.S.-controlled ports in Mexico.

The Civil War brought with it mass conscription, corporate welfare, the death of real federalism, the suspension of habeas corpus, the jailing of thousands of dissenters, the censoring of hundreds of newspapers, the creation of a national leviathan with such new agencies as the Department of Agriculture, military commissions, and the use of the army against civilian draft rioters in New York.

With World War I, thousands of new agencies were created, millions were enslaved to fight in a royal European family feud, American citizens were jailed for saying things I say every day, income-tax rates skyrocketed into the 70s, and the federal government implemented economic controls that were later brought back in peacetime during the New Deal. In fact, the New Deal was basically the revitalization of the wartime economy from World War I.

World War II saw the conscription of 11 million Americans, the detention of hundreds of thousands of “enemy aliens” without due process, Japanese internment, martial law in Hawaii, a quasi-fascist command economy complete with comprehensive price controls, tax rates above 90 percent, censorship, and the prolonging of Herbert Hoover’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s Great Depression, which didn’t end until the U.S. government stopped consuming 40 percent of America’s income to wage the war.

The Cold War gave us drafts, especially during the hot wars with Korea and Vietnam, and surveillance and psy-ops directed against peaceful activists by U.S. intelligence agencies. With the war on terror we have lost the last remnants of the Fourth Amendment, habeas corpus has taken another beating, we are treated like prison inmates every time we fly, peaceful activists have been spied on, media have been manipulated by Washington, torture has become normalized, soldiers are not allowed to quit after completing their first or even third tour of duty, and Americans’ telecommunications have been exposed to surveillance by the military.

War gave us the welfare state — first for veterans then for the rest of us. It gave us Prohibition — it was during World War I that beer was targeted, both for its German origin and its popularity on military bases — and Prohibition led to gun control and the continued destruction of the Bill of Rights. War, under Lincoln and Wilson, gave us the corporate state, which is now a permanent feature of American life. War gave us federal meddling in education. It created virtually every precedent by which our liberty is robbed.

It is no exaggeration to say that had America not found itself in those wars, we would be much, much freer — even if a New Deal were passed every decade, even if the Progressive Era had never ended, even if the Great Society were three times as grandiose, even if Obama had been president for the last century. There are many threats to liberty, and all are worth taking seriously. But nothing has approached war when it comes to destroying American liberty. And abroad, war has created conditions that almost always lead to less freedom and security, not more, for most people involved.

The CIA talks about “blow-back” — the idea that U.S. intervention leads to unanticipated and unpredictable results that harm America and its interests. Few people take it far enough.

If it were not for the Mexican War, the question of the expansion of slavery into the new territories might never have exploded into the political conflicts that culminated in the Civil War. If it were not for the Civil War, the U.S. nation-state would have not had the manufacturing power and mercantilist interests of the North combined with the expansionist sentiments of the South, which became united, by force, in the national project of imperialism. If it were not for the Spanish-American War, the colonies seized by America at the time would not have been targets for a Japanese attack in World War II.

World War I and beyond

But World War I was the true starting point of all the trouble we’ve seen since. If not for U.S. intervention in World War I, the Germans would not have lost so decisively, the Allies would never had been able to impose such crushing conditions on Germany, and Hitler would have probably never come to power. Meanwhile, the United States also pressured the Russian democrats who had overthrown the tsars to stay in the conflict, leading to the conditions that allowed Lenin to take power. The Nazi and Soviet states — two of the most infamous totalitarian regimes of modern times — were born at least in good part because of U.S. meddling in World War I. At the same time, the Allies carved up the Middle East, messing up that region in ways that affect us to this day.

World War II was simply a consequence of World War I, although it too could probably have been avoided had Britain not declared war to save Poland — which it never did save. But given the line between World War I and World War II, many assume the latter, the “Good War,” was a clear victory for peace and democracy.

It’s hardly that simple. World War II resulted in the amassing of far more territory under Stalin, who was certainly not much of an improvement over Hitler. Indeed, Hitler’s greatest crime of all — the Final Solution — was a wartime measure. War was bad for the freedom of everyone ruled by Hitler, just as with any other government.

Moreover, in addition to Stalin’s territorial grabs, the defeat of imperialist Japan opened the door to communist domination of Asia. Aside from the socialist takeover of China, it was during World War II that the United States supported Ho Chi Minh, who would later take over the communist government of Vietnam. World War II simply paved the way to communist control of almost half the planet, as well as the Cold War.

During the Cold War, the United States supported any regime poised against communism. That included the Ba’athists in Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein; the shah in Iran, which led to the textbook blowback of the Islamic Revolution; and, in the late 70s and early 80s, the mujahideen in Afghanistan, whose successors still plague most of that poor country. Eventually, the United States would side with Saddam against Iran (while sending Iran weapons illegally) and then turn on its ally, waging war with Iraq under George H.W. Bush. All of this meddling, of course, led to 9/11 and the resulting war on terrorism.

World War I led to World War II, which led to the Cold War, which led to the war on terror. It is a vicious cycle, and it needs to end, or else we will always be in a state of war, all sides believing they didn’t start it, and peace and the freedom that depends on it will always be a dream.

The immorality of America’s wars

But there is an even more fundamental reason to oppose wars as a general principle. Wars are almost always unambiguously immoral. War is, after all, mass killing conducted by government.

The great 13th-century Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas and the Dutch Protestant Hugo Grotius of the 17th century etched out a Just War Theory to determine the moral status of a given war. For a war to be just, it has to be defensive. It has to eschew the targeting of innocents. It has to protect wartime prisoners. It has to be declared by a properly constituted authority. It has to be winnable — a state can’t just devote the population to a suicide mission with no chance of victory. It cannot result in more evils than it eliminates. Only those directly responsible for aggression can be punished. It has to have good intentions — revenge itself will not do. It has to spare civilians. It has to be publicly declared. It has to be a last resort. Both the cause in the war and the conduct in executing it have to be just.

America has waged virtually no just wars. Some wars might have been in retaliation for a direct act of aggression — such as World War II in the wake of Pearl Harbor, but even that did not justify the firebombing or nuclear destruction of Japan’s civilian centers, or the firebombing of Dresden and more than a hundred other German cities. Most American wars fail the Just War test on almost every count. And the morality of a nation that embraces immoral wars is more threatened than by all the social deviancies one could imagine combined.

It is for all those reasons that the classical liberal movement — the movement of liberty — has always had a particular abhorrence for war. The Levellers hated war. Jefferson and Madison wrote about it passionately. Lysander Spooner, although a radical abolitionist, opposed the Civil War. Most prominent pro–free market and pro-liberty Americans — from Mark Twain and Edward Atkinson to Grover Cleveland and Andrew Carnegie — opposed U.S. intervention against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines (where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed by U.S. forces), and later in World War I. The Old Right coalition in the era of Franklin Roosevelt was concerned with the New Deal, but despite their disagreements one thing united them more than anything else: opposition to foreign war. The modern libertarian movement grew, not only in opposition to regulation and socialism, but also in opposition to the conservatives’ embrace of the draft and the Vietnam War. And of course, if one issue unified and energized the Ron Paul revolution starting in 2007 it was opposition to George W. Bush’s criminal foreign policy and war on terrorism.

Many issues are very important and cut right to the nub of what it means to be free. Such issues as censorship, gun control, drug prohibition, income taxation, fiat money and central economic planning are all crucial, and we should never flinch in opposing such depredations on liberty. But if there’s any one issue on which all of liberty hinges, any one policy whose moral implications warrant the greatest urgency at all times, any one political question that determines whether you live in a semi-free country or a nation that is categorically preempted from becoming free, it is, as James Madison and many others before and after him have said, war. A noninterventionist foreign policy is the cornerstone of a free society. It is certainly not sufficient to allow for freedom, but without it, freedom is but a dream.

Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent Institute, a policy adviser for the Future of Freedom Foundation, and a columnist at LewRockwell.com. Anthony's website is AnthonyGregory.com. Send him email.

This article originally appeared in the December 2011 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There are no "just wars" There are lost wars and won wars.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The fate of the state is war. War does not cause the state, it just buffs it up. It's like climbing a ladder. The first step is the rung of the state. The next is war. Then the state again. Up and up we go with the general situation being re-enforced by economic growth which feeds the state through taxes and population growth which feeds the state its soldiers. Then there is jingoism and moralism and a miasma of mass nationalist hypnosis and a surfeit of desire to be bitches to bastards all doing the same damn dance.

--Brant

Link to comment
Share on other sites

New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll

03CIVI-articleLarge.jpg

For 110 years, the numbers stood as gospel: 618,222 men died in the Civil War, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South — by far the greatest toll of any war in American history.

This week: The gender gap in computer science; recounting the Civil War dead; and it turns out you are what you wear.

In this series, writers use contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.

But new research shows that the numbers were far too low.

By combing through newly digitized census data from the 19th century, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has recalculated the death toll and increased it by more than 20 percent — to 750,000.

http://www.nytimes.c...ner=rss&emc=rss

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The fate of the state is war. War does not cause the state, it just buffs it up. It's like climbing a ladder. The first step is the rung of the state. The next is war. Then the state again. Up and up we go with the general situation being re-enforced by economic growth which feeds the state through taxes and population growth which feeds the state its soldiers. Then there is jingoism and moralism and a miasma of mass nationalist hypnosis and a surfeit of desire to be bitches to bastards all doing the same damn dance.

--Brant

If the nation is attacked by an outside force, what do you recommend we should do?

My inclination is to kill the bastards and everyone of their relatives. What would you recommend?

If I had been in charge of WW2 there would have been no Germans and Japanese left in Europe and Asia respectively. Not a single one. But I wa just a kid at the time, so it does not matter.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Link to comment
Share on other sites

New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll

03CIVI-articleLarge.jpg

For 110 years, the numbers stood as gospel: 618,222 men died in the Civil War, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South — by far the greatest toll of any war in American history.

This week: The gender gap in computer science; recounting the Civil War dead; and it turns out you are what you wear.

In this series, writers use contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.

But new research shows that the numbers were far too low.

By combing through newly digitized census data from the 19th century, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has recalculated the death toll and increased it by more than 20 percent — to 750,000.

http://www.nytimes.c...ner=rss&emc=rss

I was just about to post what you have posted. 750,000 - 850,000 dead. In a country with a population of only 32 million. That would be like the U.S. have 7.5 million to 8.5 million war dead. And imagine the number of alive but maimed survivors. In the Civil War it was estimated that 1.5 million were maimed. That is to say lost one or more limbs. That would come to 15 million cripples in terms of our current population.

For those who wish to read the research paper on which this new figures are based please see:

http://www2.binghamton.edu/history/docs/Hacker_CW_dead.pdf

Ba'al Chatzaf

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The fate of the state is war. War does not cause the state, it just buffs it up. It's like climbing a ladder. The first step is the rung of the state. The next is war. Then the state again. Up and up we go with the general situation being re-enforced by economic growth which feeds the state through taxes and population growth which feeds the state its soldiers. Then there is jingoism and moralism and a miasma of mass nationalist hypnosis and a surfeit of desire to be bitches to bastards all doing the same damn dance.

--Brant

If the nation is attacked by an outside force, what do you recommend we should do?

My inclination is to kill the bastards and everyone of their relatives. What would you recommend?

If I had been in charge of WW2 there would have been no Germans and Japanese left in Europe and Asia respectively. Not a single one. But I wa just a kid at the time, so it does not matter.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I don't know why you keep defaulting to this garbage. Japan attacking the United States begs the question of why it did. It was more than stupid hubris and historical ignorance of what the U.S. was capable of.

--Brant

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't know why you keep defaulting to this garbage. Japan attacking the United States begs the question of why it did. It was more than stupid hubris and historical ignorance of what the U.S. was capable of.

--Brant

Nonsense! If thine enemy smite thee on thy cheek tear his arm out at the shoulder and beat him to death with it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't know why you keep defaulting to this garbage. Japan attacking the United States begs the question of why it did. It was more than stupid hubris and historical ignorance of what the U.S. was capable of.

--Brant

Nonsense! If thine enemy smite thee on thy cheek tear his arm out at the shoulder and beat him to death with it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Isn't that a philosophy? You disdain philosophy. If you were the only philosopher, I'd disdain it too.

--Brant

Bob has his own evil twin carried around in his back pocket--when his mind fails him his twin goes into action

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've always been disturbed by Bob's near-sexual level of bloodlust and praise for war.

I accept the justice of defensive wars, and also the war against Hitler and Japan (although I may not accept the reasonableness of all means used in these wars, depending on context). But Bob seems to revel and glory in war itself. It makes him beat his chest with KILL OUR ENEMIES-ness, damn any subtleties.

I think perhaps war makes Bob feel phallically empowered or something.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've always been disturbed by Bob's near-sexual level of bloodlust and praise for war.

I accept the justice of defensive wars, and also the war against Hitler and Japan (although I may not accept the reasonableness of all means used in these wars, depending on context). But Bob seems to revel and glory in war itself. It makes him beat his chest with KILL OUR ENEMIES-ness, damn any subtleties.

I think perhaps war makes Bob feel phallically empowered or something.

Pop Psyche in action. No. It is very simple. If we don't kill our enemies they will kill us. Try to find a sexual motive there.

I have a simple rule:

Cherish and protect your family and friends.

Be polite to neutrals, they might become your customers or friends some day.

And utterly destroy your enemies. People who attempt to harm you deserve no pity or mercy. They need to be destroyed as a matter of self defense and as an example to a would be enemy who will be deterred. And if not deterred then destroyed. And it is not just enemy individuals, but enemy cultures that need to be eliminated.

Loving one's enemy is just the kind of crazy sh*t some of the Christians preach! Feh! Strictly for the Goyim.

If you succeed you will live a long time and die comfortably in your bed. If you don't you may well die by violent means.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Pop Psyche in action. No. It is very simple. If we don't kill our enemies they will kill us.

Whilst "if we don't kill our enemies they will kill us" is completely correct, this glosses over a HUGE amount of complicated and subtle discussion regarding many convoluted issues in foreign policy. There's also a subtle element of methodological collectivism; seeing the government as "us."

Try to find a sexual motive there.

The point I was making is that your rhetoric about war has, for a very very long time, seemed abnormally joyful about war. If it were merely a matter of destroying enemies, it would be an unfortunate necessity. You seem to relish it too much.

I have a simple rule:

Cherish and protect your family and friends.

Be polite to neutrals, they might become your customers or friends some day.

And utterly destroy your enemies. People who attempt to harm you deserve no pity or mercy. They need to be destroyed as a matter of self defense and as an example to a would be enemy who will be deterred. And if not deterred then destroyed. And it is not just enemy individuals, but enemy cultures that need to be eliminated.

Enemy cultures? This is utterly blatant methodological collectivism, which treats individuals as mere instances of their cultural platonic form.

Loving one's enemy is just the kind of crazy sh*t some of the Christians preach!

I'm not talking about loving one's enemy. I'm suggesting we take proper due dilligence in identifying our actual enemies. I am not advocating loving our enemies. I'm advocating we retain a cool head and be rational about identifying whether or not someone is our enemy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd have gone to war after Pearl Harbor if I'd been around then. Blasting those sailors on Sunday morning who didn't even know they were at war in a sneak attack would have engaged my alligator brain even if I had known the Japanese had been grossly provoked by a President who wanted to go to war with Nazi Germany. I even could have participated in the bombings of Japanese cities, not out of revenge but out of getting the damn war over with as quickly as possible. My uncle was a navigator on B-17s in the Pacific. He was at Pearl Harbor, Midway and Guadalcanal. He never graduated to B-29s until Korea because he was shot up when Japanese Zeros attacked his plane which barely made it back. He couldn't move so he passed ammo to the nose gunner who subsequently died from his wounds and earned the DSC, the second highest award for bravery. My uncle still has shrapnel from exploding 20mm cannon shells. He spent a year in the hospital. This is the true face of war, not the righteous, brainless crap Bob puts out. I knew soldiers in SF for whom killing was a joy, who wallowed in it. Fortunately, they were greatly outnumbered or failed the training. Unfortunately, one was an officer. He was, many years later, convicted of murdering his Cambodian wife in North Carolina, apparently so he could marry his cousin and run for the presidency of the Czech republic. It took three trials, but he only got one of 36 jurors to vote not guilty. He once killed 18 men with a continuous burst of .30 cal machine gun fire when his airboat slammed across a rice paddy dike in Cambodia in 1966*, an operation I was on. Aside from airboats we used giant navy patrol air-cushioned vehicles (PACVs) and helicopters that brought in Vietnamese troops. That evening I talked to him about taking prisoners--I couldn't so I didn't--"No! No prisoners!"

--Brant

*we weren't supposed to be in Cambodia, but didn't find out we were where we shouldn't be until we had killed 56 from the unit that had kicked our asses six days before in Vietnam, killing the SFC next to me with a bullet almost between his eyes--then #2 American soldier in Vietnam, General Abrams, arrived the next day for a debriefing and Prince Sihanouk complained, but his info was so bad it was obvious that his Vietnam border was in the complete control of the Vietnamese communists

http://en.wikipedia....Cushion_Vehicle

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hope it was clear -- and if it was not clear, I will make it clear now -- that I don't necessarily agree with every aspect of every article, not written by me, that I post. I like everything except the last part of Gregory's article, "The Immorality of America's Wars," which states: "Wars are almost always unambiguously immoral. War is, after all, mass killing conducted by government."

This is too simplfied for my tastes, as I indicated in "Thinking About War." . This article begins with some criticisms of the Rothbardian position on war.

The main value of Gregory's article lies in his discussion of how war accelerates the growth of statism. This is virtually inevitable, so I think libertarians and O'its should give this consequence serious consideration when assessing the desirability of a given war. As I point out in my article, even if a war is technically just, it doesn't follow that we should support it on prudential grounds.

WWII presents some difficult problems. Rand had a reasonable point when she suggested that the best course of action for the U.S. would have been to let Germany and the U.S.S.R. slug it out and exhaust one another, and then pick off the victor. The Russians, who probably would have succumbed to the German invasion without U.S. aid, benefitted more than any other nation from the outcome of WWII. It enabled them to place Eastern Europe under the yoke of communism.

The problem is that Germany declared war on the U.S., not vice versa.

Ghs

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The problem is that Germany declared war on the U.S., not vice versa.

Ghs

The second stupiest thing Hitler as a warlord ever did. The first was attacking Russia. Then he sacrificed his armies one after another.

--Brant

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Enemy cultures? This is utterly blatant methodological collectivism, which treats individuals as mere instances of their cultural platonic form.

Culture is the conveyor belt of values, ideas and ideals. No human ever cooked up a view of the world completely by his own efforts. Much of the bias and madness gets transmitted with language and religion. In particular, Islam is unequaled at turning perfectly biologically normal human beings into trolls and orcs.

If you want to stop the production of something blow up the machinery that produces it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Culture is the conveyor belt of values, ideas and ideals. No human ever cooked up a view of the world completely by his own efforts. Much of the bias and madness gets transmitted with language and religion. In particular, Islam is unequaled at turning perfectly biologically normal human beings into trolls and orcs.

If you want to stop the production of something blow up the machinery that produces it.

This is cultural determinism and a cultural version of Original Sin.

"Culture" is just ideas and ideas rest in the human mind. The "machinery" that produces culture is groups of people. What you are advocating comes very, VERY close to an open call for genocide.

Yes, there are heaps of crazy, dangerous, evil muslims. There are also those that aren't crazy, dangerous or evil. It should also be remembered that "Islam" is not a monolith; it has a long and complex theological tradition with various different factions, and plenty of internal debates. Just like you can't treat all kinds of Christianity as identical, you can't do the same to Islam.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now