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Posted June 17, 2002
Athens
In reading Alan Bock's column ["The Empire Strikes First"], I think there is an historical parallel with the kind of empire America wields today. One of our country's few acknowledged progenitors of democracy, Athens, sustained an alliance of other Greek island-states called the Athenian League. It was maintained to balance the power of Sparta in a 34-year war named after the chain of islands where many of the sea battles were fought, the Peloponnesian War.
Athens may have been an example of democracy within itself, for a limited time and a limited group of folks, but internationally they were tyrants that bullied the world. Members of the Athenian League were "encouraged" to join up by means of threats, physical violence, and killing people if they resisted. Tribute was exacted from "members" in order to finance the war.
In the end, Athens and Sparta were so exhausted from their war that some real hicks from up north in Macedonia -- who just happened to have a good army -- came in and took over everything.
It pays to spend one's power wisely.
~ John M., East Glacier, Montana
FAPOI
...I am glad someone finally put the smack down on WND. I've tried to come up with new acronyms for WND, such as WrongNewsDaily or WeNukeDetractors or WorstNewsDiscussions -- none of them truly fit (as the acronym should probably read: FAPOI, Fundie And Proud Of It). Oh well. Again, thank you, Justin, for yet another great read.
Unhappy Freeper
FreeRepublic ... used to be a fun place to visit, but it has been overrun by Israel-firsters who will not allow open discussion on anything related to the Middle East mess. I am not happy that Jim Robinson has deleted the link to your site. I emailed them about this but received no response. You should start your own news-discussion group I think you would attract a lot of unhappy Freepers.
The Backtalk editor replies:
There is a Friends of Antiwar.com "online community" at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/antiwarcom/.
Illegitimate Government
[Regarding Justin Raimondo's column of June 10, "Living in a Soviet America":]
In your recent piece on the 'Sovietization' of America , you wrote, "Where will this end? I'll tell you where: with the overthrow of our old Republic."
You speak of this as if it is in the future. But, the Republic has already been overthrown. And later in the same piece you write, "...will have usurped the old constitutional order."
It has already been usurped. We already live in a tyranny of the majority who have abandoned republican principles and adopted a legislative democracy. This is not the constitutional republic of the United States.
The federal government is wildly out of control having manifestly exceeded its delegated authority in Article 1 Section 8.
This 'government' is wholly and completely illegitimate having delegitimized itself by its myriad of constitutional violations. More important, it can not be reformed peaceably no matter how much one would like to accomplish that. It is no more reformable than was Parliament in the early to mid 1770s.
Sam Adams was not a pacifist. He was a man of principle. And he acted on them.
We agreed to be loyal to this government and to be obedient to the majority in all things as long as the government did not exceed its authority. Once it exceeded it, the government itself became seditious and a domestic enemy of the constitution. We owe no loyalty whatsoever to this majority....
In fact, we have the right and duty to rebel in legitimate self-defense.
Our Republic has already been overthrown.
I am not in the least bit a violent man. And neither was Sam Adams. But, enough is enough. No tyranny in the history of man has ever relinquished consolidated central authority peacefully once usurped.
The only way that we are going to get it back is to take it back. Please make no mistake about what I am saying. Legitimate self-defense is not disturbing the public tranquility. The majority already exists in a state of war with us right now. They had an obligation and duty to obey the highest law of the land and they have refused, whether by ignorance or by intention. They have corrupted the government and now the force of government is wielded against us, our rights and our liberties.
Enough is enough.
It is way past high time to literally rebel.
Closing the Loop
While I do have your Antiwar.com site bookmarked, I was directed to ... [Justin Raimondo's] "Turn Toward The Left" column via a link [from] Strike The Root.
After reading that wonderfully affirming essay, I also had to read its Wednesday predecessor. Both are excellent, and their links have been forwarded to many of my friends.
Regarding those friends, your articles come at an opportune time as they reinforce a pleading case I made to a few of them this past weekend about "closing the loop" between conservative fiscal responsibility (a falsehood anymore) with liberal social conscience (same empty rhetoric) through adopting basic libertarian principles. While some expressed some doubt about success or the fatalist "you can't change the system," your articles should help open their eyes just a little bit more.
Flower of Liberty
I was happy to see Justin Raimondo's remarks on a libertarian-left alliance. But he still seemed to identify socialism with state socialism. And Alice M's letter likewise accepted the false identification of the free market with conservatism or capitalism. But the world can't be pigeonholed into a dichotomy between state socialism and market capitalism (the latter is an oxymoron, by the way). This fact is underscored by Wednesday's letter from Larry Gambone. The Voluntary Cooperation Movement, with which Larry's Red Lion Press is affiliated, includes a number of predominantly mutualist organizations (mutualism being a non-statist, Proudhonian variant of socialism).
The simple dichotomy between "market capitalism" and state socialism is given the lie by the mutualist Benjamin Tucker, often mistakenly claimed as an ancestor by many right-libertarians. In fact, Tucker considered himself a libertarian socialist. He argued that capitalism was a system of privilege that depended entirely on state subsidy and intervention in order to exploit labor. In a truly free market, without artificial restrictions on working class access to land and capital, the extraction of surplus value would be impossible. Profit, rent and interest would decline to zero under market pressure, and labor would get its full product.
Socialism didn't become state socialism until the turn of the twentieth century, when it was taken over by New Class social engineers and "professionals" who wanted to manage the working class for its own good. The working class movement was originally mutualist, organized around cooperatives, labor-notes, and syndicalist unions; the very term "socialist" first appeared in the London Cooperative Magazine in 1827. (There's a good article by Tim Evans on this subject at the Libertarian Alliance site.)
There is plenty of room for cooperation between intellectually honest right-libertarians and libertarian socialists. People like Karl Hess and Murray Rothbard, and your own Joseph Stromberg, have relied heavily on New Left analyses of state capitalism -- and contributed valuable free market analysis of their own. At one point, I believe, Hess favored treating any corporation that got most of its profits from the state as "unowned" property, to be "homesteaded" by workers' syndicates. There's quite a bit of common ground between libertarians like him and socialists like Colin Ward and Paul Goodman.
This overlapping territory includes a broad spectrum of movements in the American populist tradition, going back to Painite radicalism and Ricardian socialism. Georgists, geolibertarians and distributists should be making common cause with Wobblies. Those of us on the left who believe in workers' control, neighborhood self-government, and community technology, are naturally the allies of homeschoolers and gun-owners. We shouldn't let artificial left-right distinctions divide us. Anyone who believes ordinary people should control our own lives is an ally. As Karl Hess said, the flower of liberty should be welcomed whether its petals are red white and blue, or red and black. And as David DeLeon suggested, a truly American populist movement may be more at home under the Gadsden Flag than either of them.
I fully agree that much of the left is economically illiterate. But the "corporate liberal" analysis of Weinstein and Kolko is an excellent starting point for educating them on real free market economics. It's also a good area of common ground between the libertarian left and the Rothbardian right. When I first saw Joseph Stromberg's Austrian take on overproduction and imperialism as results of state capitalism, I tore into it like a starving dog. The mainstream left needs to see that the corporate globalization that they rightly oppose is the result, not of the "market," but of mercantilist state intervention. The left shouldn't leave the term "market" to its enemies.
I urge anyone interested in seeking common ground to contact Larry Gambone, as he suggested. You can also contact me at kevin_carson@hotmail.com.
Rothbardian
I have just finished reading "Turn Toward The Left" and enjoyed it immensely.
I remain a Rothbardian at heart.