The Antiwar.com Money Trail?


Mike Renzulli

Recommended Posts

[...] the antiwar.com crowd should do some fundamental thinking and original theoretical work on war, rather than assuming that Rothbard did all this for them. For all the disdain they may have for true-believing Randians, true-believing Rothbardians are no better.

Who at that site assumes "that Rothbard did all this for them"? I see much use of Rothbard's and other libertarians' emphases, especially by Justin Raimondo, the site's editorial director and featured columnist. That's not the same as making an assumption that Rothbard "did" their thinking for them, as they see it.

That is, unless you're identifying "the antiwar.com crowd" with, specifically, Raimondo. He wrote a biography of Rothbard (An Enemy of the State) that was far from academically distanced, certainly admiring, but by no means fawning or subservient to his viewpoints.

I doubt Raimondo would have undertaken that effort if he hadn't been impressed, for rational reasons, by Rothbard's achievements, theoretical and personal. (Few are like Robert Caro, who spent decades on a still-unfinished multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, while personally despising the man.)

What you're expecting more generally, though, is somewhat unreasonable: that this site should indeed engage in extensive, deliberate "fundamental thinking and original theoretical work." That's not its place nor its intended role.

It brings together news links, bloggers, analyses, essays, and commentaries, while encouraging activism and personal networking among those broadly opposing war. It's not a site for a university-level symposium. It doesn't exist even to do minimal investigative reporting, let alone original research or philosophizing.

I still believe that your seeing "Randolph Bourne Institute" as its parent organization's name made you assume, to some extent, that it was someplace dedicated to the ideas of Randolph Bourne. It isn't, nor is it thus focused on Murray Rothbard and his particular distinctions, beyond Raimondo's column (and only occasionally then).

And one look at the roster of columnist contributors — it's right there on their main page, every day — should tell anybody who's even mildly aware of just how diverse the voices are in this supposed "crowd." You can try to put the likes of Pat Buchanan, Tom Engelhardt, Ron Paul, and Nat Hentoff into the same jack-in-the-box container, George, but they'll just spill out under pressure of their many differences ... ideological, tactical, and stylistic. They are only brought together on matters of war and related idiocies, not on other topics.

Your talking of a "crowd" suggests an ideological conformity that fits the fever-swamps in the brain of this thread's starter, not any reality.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 63
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

[...] the antiwar.com crowd should do some fundamental thinking and original theoretical work on war, rather than assuming that Rothbard did all this for them. For all the disdain they may have for true-believing Randians, true-believing Rothbardians are no better.

Who at that site assumes "that Rothbard did all this for them"? I see much use of Rothbard's and other libertarians' emphases, especially by Justin Raimondo, the site's editorial director and featured columnist. That's not the same as making an assumption that Rothbard "did" their thinking for them, as they see it.

That is, unless you're identifying "the antiwar.com crowd" with, specifically, Raimondo. He wrote a biography of Rothbard (An Enemy of the State) that was far from academically distanced, certainly admiring, but by no means fawning or subservient to his viewpoints.

I doubt Raimondo would have undertaken that effort if he hadn't been impressed, for rational reasons, by Rothbard's achievements, theoretical and personal. (Few are like Robert Caro, who spent decades on a still-unfinished multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, while personally despising the man.)

What you're expecting more generally, though, is somewhat unreasonable: that this site should indeed engage in extensive, deliberate "fundamental thinking and original theoretical work." That's not its place nor its intended role.

It brings together news links, bloggers, analyses, essays, and commentaries, while encouraging activism and personal networking among those broadly opposing war. It's not a site for a university-level symposium. It doesn't exist even to do minimal investigative reporting, let alone original research or philosophizing.

I still believe that your seeing "Randolph Bourne Institute" as its parent organization's name made you assume, to some extent, that it was someplace dedicated to the ideas of Randolph Bourne. It isn't, nor is it thus focused on Murray Rothbard and his particular distinctions, beyond Raimondo's column (and only occasionally then).

And one look at the roster of columnist contributors — it's right there on their main page, every day — should tell anybody who's even mildly aware of just how diverse the voices are in this supposed "crowd." You can try to put the likes of Pat Buchanan, Tom Engelhardt, Ron Paul, and Nat Hentoff into the same jack-in-the-box container, George, but they'll just spill out under pressure of their many differences ... ideological, tactical, and stylistic. They are only brought together on matters of war and related idiocies, not on other topics.

Your talking of a "crowd" suggests an ideological conformity that fits the fever-swamps in the brain of this thread's starter, not any reality.

First, you are making far too much of my casual use of the word "crowd." I simply used it to mean "those people," i.e. those libertarians at antiwar.com who have accepted Rothbard's views on war basically "as is." Raimondo is not the only one, and my criticisms also apply to Rothbardians who have nothing to do with that site. The antiwar.com factor is incidental to my points.

Second, I never assumed that antiwar.com is dedicated in some manner to the ideas of Randolph Bourne. My posts didn't discuss the overall structure or purpose of this site at all. My only interest was, and is, in the Rothbardian theory of war and its acceptance by some of his followers. Rothbard admired Bourne's writings, and some of the key components of Rothbard's theory, such as the claim that only states can engage in wars, are the same as Bourne's.

Third, libertarians have discussed Bourne's ideas about war for decades -- , ever since I have been in the movement, at least -- and his writings are still considered essential reading for Rothbardians. Despite all this attention, however, I have never seen a critical analysis of Bourne's ideas, of the sort I wrote, from a libertarian perspective. I simply wanted to place Bourne's comments about war and the State in a broader context. Although my comments were prompted by the "mission statement" on antiwar.com, my comments had nothing inherently to do with that site. Antiwar.com was the occasion but not the subject of my remarks. Antiwar.com had no more to do with the vast majority of my observations than OL does with the comments I am writing now.

Lastly -- and I want to spend much more time on this point -- I never said or suggested that Raimondo and other Rothbardians have let Rothbard do their thinking for them. I'm not even sure what this is supposed to mean. Much of my post dealt with the assumption that Rothbard and Rand built tightly integrated theoretical systems with foundations so solid that no reconstruction from the ground up will ever be required.

This is seen as a boon, and rightfully so, for a watertight foundation means that Rothbardians and Randians can focus their attention on the subsidiary but nonetheless crucial tasks of spreading the good news, filling in some theoretical cracks here and there, extending the range of the foundational principles to new areas, enriching the theoretical fabric by constructing mid-level principles (or what Francis Bacon called "middle axioms"), applying their respective theories to concrete problems, and so forth.

Although none of this demands that Rothbard's admirers defer to him uncritically, there is a natural tendency for familiarity to breed complacency. The longer we adhere to a theory and work with it, the more self-evident it appears, and the less likely we are to take a close look at possible cracks in the foundation.

So does this mean that Rothbardians and Randians should forever be searching for such cracks and never permit themselves the confidence that comes with philosophical and moral certainty? No, of course not. I am not proposing the kind of pervasive and pathological doubt that can paralyze the mind and make us despair of ever finding solid ground to build on.

I think there are serious problems with the Rothbardian approach to war, and as a person who is ideologically predisposed to agree with Rothbard in such matters, having been greatly influenced by him, I do not say this lightly. Perhaps I am wrong, and perhaps a plumb line Rothbardian will one day convince me that I am wrong. I welcome that day, should it ever occur, but it will never occur so long as Rothbardians do not take this problem seriously and develop a more sophisticated approach to resolve it. It will no longer do to repeat the standard Rothbardian line that war is mass murder, and that by conceding the possibility of just wars I am in fact, if not in theory, advocating mass murder. Nor will it do to repeat simplistic maxims like "War is the Health of the State."

Few libertarians are more skeptical of war than I am, but this skepticism was not born out of my disdain for the state. Rather, it emerged from my general skepticism about the efficacy of violence in general, whether inflicted by individuals or by institutions (which are essentially social habits, or patterns, sometimes backed by moral or political sanctions, that generate reasonable expectations about how other people will act in the future.)

After the appearance of The Voluntaryist in the early 1980s, a concerted campaign against us was organized by Rothbard and his hounds, including Raimondo. I was repeatedly accused of being a pacifist, owing to my interest in the tactic of nonviolent resistance. My basic views have not changed since then. Nonetheless, having been indicted 30 years ago on the charge of pacifism, I am now suspected of being a war monger and potential advocate of mass murder.

In truth, I never advocated nonviolent resistance as a moral imperative or as a moral ideal. I never even demanded that libertarians embrace it as a strategy. Since the tactic of nonviolent resistance originated with libertarian thinkers, most notably Thoreau and Gandhi, and since it has proved successful in some situations, I merely encouraged libertarians to give this tactic serious consideration, along with other nonpolitical tactics.

Rothbard had no problems with the Voluntaryists at first. On the contrary, he wrote a glowing testimonial that we used in our early advertising. In addition, Rothbard had written an introduction years earlier for an English translation of Etienne de La Boetie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude in which he praised the strategic potential of nonviolent resistance.

Rothbard endorsed us early on because he never imagined that we would actually be successful. But we were aiming for quality, not quantity, and as we persuaded more and more prominent members of the LP to resign, including at least one state chairperson, Rothbard turned on us with a vengeance, organizing a campaign to "crush" our subversive Gang of Three (Smith, McElroy, and Watner). To this end he enlisted the aid of Raimondo and other members of the LP Radical Caucus. Highly inaccurate articles were published in Libertarian Forum and in that contemptible rag, Libertarian Vanguard, which was the official voice of the Radical Caucus.

Thus, having been the target of a campaign in which Raimondo was closely involved, and having observed first-hand the appalling disregard for facts that characterized that campaign, I have become extremely wary of accepting anything that Raimondo writes at face value, especially when ideological issues are involved. On those occasions when I do read his articles, I always attempt to check his sources.

Before this rift, I spent quite a bit of time with Rothbard, Raimondo, and other members of the Radical Caucus. They were a fascinating bunch to observe, because they always seemed to be plotting something or other, and their rhetoric was peppered with the strategic lingo of Leninism, straight from the pages of "What is to be done?"

An uninformed observer might suppose that a major revolution was in the works during these gatherings , given how serious and secretive everything seemed. But all this was motivated by nothing more than the desire to keep the LP running on the Leninist tracks that Rothbard had laid down to defeat the "left sectarians" and "right deviationists" within the LP. The purpose of the Rothbardian vanguard (i.e., the Radical Caucus)-- another Leninist term and, not coincidentally, the title of the RC tabloid -- was to serve as the intellectual elite within the LP. Their chief role was to educate LP members and delegates so they would vote per the wishes of Rothbard.

I mention these details because I saw first hand how Raimondo conceived of his role as an activist, and nothing had changed when I talked to Raimondo numerous times in SF during the late 1990s. He didn't seem interested in theory at all; his job was to concretize, apply, and disseminate the ideas of Murray Rothbard. Raimondo's role was chiefly that of a propagandist (I use this term in a neutral sense.) A superb writer, he proved extremely good at this, if ethics don't count. Anything is possible, but I would be surprised to learn that Raimondo has immersed himself in the vast literature of just war theory because he is no longer able to accept Rothbard's foundational principles on this topic.

After all, Rotbard's (and Bourne's) approach enables Raimondo to claim that he opposes all wars, without falling off the philosophical cliff into pacifism.

Ghs

For more info on the Rothbard affair, see:

http://www.voluntaryist.com/toc.html

Scroll down and click on Issue 5.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Everything circles back to interpersonal vendettas, then, and yet again. That's what this comes down to. You're not truly judging Raimondo and associates and what they're actually doing at Antiwar.com. You're judging past set-tos you've had with them. (Which weren't all conducted in the tones you use to describe them. I was a member of the LP Radical Caucus, and your portrayal of it is highly distorted.)

That focus has a direct and major consequence: When you stop looking at what an intellectual in the arena is currently doing, which may indeed be more productive than they'd been in the past, you make an indictment from a now-dead past going forward.

When it's a matter of judging moral character, that might be relevant. (Though hardly sufficient, when it ends up ignoring current actions.) I'm seeing you, though, George, as with others more O-Orthodox, making the past override the present. Moral judgment may not be appropriate at this juncture. Gauging effectiveness at rhetoric, expression, topicality, or analysis might well be.

Ahab had his whale, pursued beyond all reasonable context. Most of the Orthodox Randroids still, forty years on, have their Branden and Branden. And you, as you finally admit here, have your Raimondo — as you do your McElroy. Assuming that your past nemeses are still your nemeses, and ought to be everyone's nemeses, without looking at more current evidence of their productivity, wastes time and life. Our time, and your life energy.

I'm not in the mood to abet vendettas, which is a stupid waste. It's also too damned hot to do so. So proceed with your Argument from Ignorance about what Justin Raimondo, whom you apparently don't care to sample as to current work and milieu, is up to. I've had enough as to engaging it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If the FBI really finds it meaningful to stalk petty student groups, then what might they entertain doing regarding the much larger libertarian-type organizations?

Shayne

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Shayne:

The 60's were as close to open revolution as this country has seen in the last seventy-five (75) years. In Queens County, NY City alone, the FBI types opened between a 100,000 and 200,000 pieces of personal mail. Copied anything of interest, resealed the mail and sent it on it's merry way. Then the copies were referred to the appropriate "authorities."

Robert Kennedy's Justice Department illegally wiretapped thousands. Openly kidnapped folks and dumped them in foreign countries.

Tapes of Martin L. King's plans for a big sex party in Washington the night before his I have a dream speech were played for Jackie "O."

The 60's make today's surveillance, with much better technology look tame by comparison.

Adam

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Steve, I'm really getting tired of your personal vendetta against George. Why are you cyberstalking him?

Well, when did you stop beating your wife? {rueful over-assumption-meme smile} ... I am doing no such thing. I get tired of principled, substantive discussions devolving into vendettas on his part. GHS is actually worth some replies, much of the time. Most people who post here are not.

When it comes out that, in the current instance, his discourse on Bourne is a sideshow to condemning Raimondo and associates sight unseen — he is not the same man or the same writer he was thirty years ago, he's far more accomplished — I see it as a waste of GHS's intellect and of our time. He's anchoring himself in conflicts with the now-long-dead, either topically or as persons, usually both. I don't have to like it, and I don't like it.

Your obsession with him seems to have ramped up with the Wendy McElroy stuff. Do you have a crush on her or something?

I'm enjoying the analytical and discursive pleasure of McElroy actually being out in the cut-and-thrust arena of applying libertarian and individualist principles to current events, and to broader topics of State abuses. (Such as an excellent overview of the historical and current perniciousness of passports.)

She has Freeman Online, Mises.org, and FFF pieces published every week. I get flagged to these on Facebook, a social medium George has disdained.

George isn't out there in the arena. I tend to have more of a "crush" on those who are. Certainly as far as putting them on my daily reading agenda.

Edited by Greybird
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Steve, I'm really getting tired of your personal vendetta against George. Why are you cyberstalking him?

Well, when did you stop beating your wife? {rueful over-assumption-meme smile} ... I am doing no such thing. I get tired of principled, substantive discussions devolving into vendettas on his part. GHS is actually worth some replies, much of the time. Most people who post here are not.

When it comes out that, in the current instance, his discourse on Bourne is a sideshow to condemning Raimondo and associates sight unseen — he is not the same man or the same writer he was thirty years ago, he's far more accomplished — I see it as a waste of GHS's intellect and of our time. He's anchoring himself in conflicts with the now-long-dead, either topically or as persons, usually both. I don't have to like it, and I don't like it.

Your obsession with him seems to have ramped up with the Wendy McElroy stuff. Do you have a crush on her or something?

I'm enjoying the analytical and discursive pleasure of McElroy actually being out in the cut-and-thrust arena of applying libertarian and individualist principles to current events, and to broader topics of State abuses. (Such as an excellent overview of the historical and current perniciousness of passports.)

She has Freeman Online, Mises.org, and FFF pieces published every week. I get flagged to these on Facebook, a social medium George has disdained.

George isn't out there in the arena. I tend to have more of a "crush" on those who are. Certainly as far as putting them on my daily reading agenda.

The deeper George gets into ideas, the deeper you try to get into George. It's an ad hominem default. And that was a very good article on passports by McElroy, whether she wrote it or not.

--Brant

I'm so anti-war I don't have to read antiwar.com--and don't

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The 60's make today's surveillance, with much better technology look tame by comparison.

Adam

Adam,

What do you suppose is marks the limit of their involvement? Do you think they'd remain content to just listen, or maybe would they get involved? Maybe ARI is an inside job?

Shayne

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Everything circles back to interpersonal vendettas, then, and yet again. That's what this comes down to. You're not truly judging Raimondo and associates and what they're actually doing at Antiwar.com. You're judging past set-tos you've had with them. (Which weren't all conducted in the tones you use to describe them. I was a member of the LP Radical Caucus, and your portrayal of it is highly distorted.)

That focus has a direct and major consequence: When you stop looking at what an intellectual in the arena is currently doing, which may indeed be more productive than they'd been in the past, you make an indictment from a now-dead past going forward.

When it's a matter of judging moral character, that might be relevant. (Though hardly sufficient, when it ends up ignoring current actions.) I'm seeing you, though, George, as with others more O-Orthodox, making the past override the present. Moral judgment may not be appropriate at this juncture. Gauging effectiveness at rhetoric, expression, topicality, or analysis might well be.

Ahab had his whale, pursued beyond all reasonable context. Most of the Orthodox Randroids still, forty years on, have their Branden and Branden. And you, as you finally admit here, have your Raimondo — as you do your McElroy. Assuming that your past nemeses are still your nemeses, and ought to be everyone's nemeses, without looking at more current evidence of their productivity, wastes time and life. Our time, and your life energy.

I'm not in the mood to abet vendettas, which is a stupid waste. It's also too damned hot to do so. So proceed with your Argument from Ignorance about what Justin Raimondo, whom you apparently don't care to sample as to current work and milieu, is up to. I've had enough as to engaging it.

I don't have a clue what you're talking about. I have nothing against antiwar.com; on the contrary, I agree with many of the articles posted there. Nor do I have some kind of vendetta against Raimondo. I saw him numerous times during the nearly five years I lived in SF. beginning in 1995, and we got along fine. All I said was that I am very cautious about his use of sources. He writes very quickly, and I think he gets careless at times. (We discussed this once in SF.) My concern stems from a lot more than things that happened in the early 1980s. For example, when I read his book Reclaiming the American Right years ago, I found a number of very questionable claims. Raimondo tends to write history with a heavy ideological slant, and that can cause serious problems in terms of accuracy.

Murray Rothbard, though an excellent historian in most respects, had the same problem at times. Generally speaking, his early works are superior, in terms of accuracy, to his later works.

As for Wendy McElroy, I have always spoken highly of her work outside the framework of her plagiarism. So get a grip and try to stay focused on what I have actually said.

Ghs

Link to comment
Share on other sites

She has Freeman Online, Mises.org, and FFF pieces published every week. I get flagged to these on Facebook, a social medium George has disdained.

George isn't out there in the arena. I tend to have more of a "crush" on those who are. Certainly as far as putting them on my daily reading agenda.

Where on earth did you get this idea? I don't "disdain" Facebook. I just don't have time for it.

As for being "out there in the arena," that's what I thought OL was. I would wager that a lot more people visit OL on a regular basis than Wendy's Facebook page. As far as I can tell, Wendy avoids posting on freewheeling public forums like OL where she cannot control what happens.

Ghs

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, when did you stop beating your wife? {rueful over-assumption-meme smile} ... I am doing no such thing. I get tired of principled, substantive discussions devolving into vendettas on his part.

I don't see George as being driven by vendettas. I see you as having a vendetta against him because he's critical of people whom you have a political crush on.

You remind me of all of the people back in the early 2000s who had a crush on Lindsay Pigero. They were so gaga over him that they were willing to overlook his behavior because they saw him as publicly standing up for some of the ideas that they believed in. It's amazing how easily you can be lulled into ignoring or downplaying ethical lapses. It makes Rand appear to have been right about certain libertarians' moral flexibility.

When it comes out that, in the current instance, his discourse on Bourne is a sideshow to condemning Raimondo and associates sight unseen — he is not the same man or the same writer he was thirty years ago, he's far more accomplished — I see it as a waste of GHS's intellect and of our time. He's anchoring himself in conflicts with the now-long-dead, either topically or as persons, usually both. I don't have to like it, and I don't like it.

I'm not interested in hearing the rationalizations that you've come up with to keep your vendetta against George going. Boring!

I'm enjoying the analytical and discursive pleasure of McElroy actually being out in the cut-and-thrust arena of applying libertarian and individualist principles to current events, and to broader topics of State abuses. (Such as an excellent overview of the historical and current perniciousness of passports.)

Heh. You think she's "out in the cut-and-thrust arena"? Hilarious. I think George nailed it when he said that she "avoids posting on freewheeling public forums like OL where she cannot control what happens." It's an attitude that seems to be quite common among Objectivist and libertarian pundits. They appear to fear the cut-and-thrust arena, and limit themselves to venues which they can control, or in which they are protected by others who do the controlling.

She has Freeman Online, Mises.org, and FFF pieces published every week. I get flagged to these on Facebook, a social medium George has disdained.

Freeman, Mises, FFF and Facebook are cut-and-thrust arenas to you? Hahahahaha!!!!

George isn't out there in the arena. I tend to have more of a "crush" on those who are. Certainly as far as putting them on my daily reading agenda.

So, is there any behavior that you're not willing to overlook if a person is "out there" in the "cut-and-thrust arena" of highly obscure, low-volume libertarian websites which promote your ideals? Would you overlook, say, embezzlement, armed robbery, rape, arson, kidnapping or murder, for instance? If George were to provide an abundance of evidence to support his claim that one of your little libertarian idols was a murderer, would you refuse to look at it and scold George for having a personal vendetta against the killer?

J

Edited by Jonathan
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