Month: September 2014

The state is the archenemy of the individual, as has been demonstrated by libertarian state analysts from Herbert Spencer (Man Vs. State) to Albert Jay Nock (Our Enemy, the State) to Murray Rothbard (Anatomy of the State). However, it is not only our chief enemy, it is also our chief maker of enemies. The parasitic state is not only perpetually at odds with us, but it is constantly setting us at odds with others. It is not only a millstone around our necks, but a target.

States make enemies on behalf of its subjects, primarily because threats make it easier to marshall support from the frightened and indignant public for expansions of its power, both home and abroad. This is agreed upon both by opponents and practitioners of this policy. Rothbard wrote that:

…the State has for centuries used the “foreign threat” to aggrandize its power over its deluded subjects.

and that…

“…war and a phony “external threat” have long been the chief means by which the state wins back the loyalty of its subjects.”

And the leading Nazi Hermann Göring stated at the Nuremburg Trials that:

“…it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.(…) …voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked…”

This aspect of the state has been especially important in recent news. The bourgeoning Islamic State, or ISIS, seems straight out of super villain central casting. And when the political class isn’t panicking over ISIS, it is scaremongering over the “imperial designs” of Vladimir Putin.

Continue reading “Our Enemy-Maker, the State”

The footage of President Obama strolling through the ancient ruins at Stonehenge was an apt bookend to the meeting of NATO, a Cold War relic that should have been abolished after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. But while hundreds of protesters marched through the streets calling for NATO to be dissolved – "From Iraq to Ukraine, NATO only causes pain," they chanted – NATO leaders saw the crisis in Ukraine as an opportunity to breathe new life into the moribund military alliance.

The recent NATO meeting in Wales was supposed to be about how to wind down NATO’s 12-year military adventure in Afghanistan – without admitting the monumental failure of leaving behind a fractured, impoverished nation that can’t even figure out who won the last election. Afghanistan, however, was barely mentioned. Nor was the disastrous NATO intervention in Libya that has resulted in a failed state rife with violence. And while there was some handwringing about how to deal with ISIS, it was clear most NATO countries did not want to join Obama in a new military quagmire. The meeting’s main focus was the conflict in Ukraine, a conflict that NATO played a key role in creating.

A creature of the Cold War created in 1949 to defend Europe from Soviet expansion, NATO did not dissolve when the Soviet Union collapsed peacefully. But it did assure Russia that it would not expand eastwards beyond the reunified Germany, and it would not station significant numbers of troops in Eastern Europe.

NATO broke the pledge. In 1999, it admitted three former Warsaw Pact countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In 2004, it admitted the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Today the NATO security alliance covers 28 member states. It does not include Ukraine, but Ukraine is pushing for NATO membership.

Continue reading “Ukraine Conflict: Red Meat for Anemic NATO Alliance”

"Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin" is the splendid title of John Mearsheimer’s article in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs. Like Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, the title alone, along with the prestige of the author in the firmament of the elite, make the book a potent weapon in the struggle to curb the U.S. Empire – before it permanently curbs us. Mearsheimer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and co-author with Stephen Walt, Professor and former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, of the widely cited The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. If you wish to convince someone of the foul role played by NATO in Ukraine, this article is a superb primer.

The first two paragraphs give an apt summary of the article’s core thesis; they read in part:

"According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe…

"But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president – which he rightly labeled a "coup" – was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West."

Continue reading “Mearsheimer Pins Blame for Ukraine Crisis on US, But…”

This is a speech given at the Direct Democracy Festival at Thessaloniki on September 4, 2014 about the trend of decentralization creating a global commons on the Internet and the disruptive potential of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Thank you for inviting me to this event. I feel honored to be here in Greece, the birthplace of democracy.

I was born and grew up in Japan. I moved to the States as a young adult. I live beyond borders and don’t belong to one particular nation. In a sense, I find the Internet to be my home. Indeed if there wasn’t the Internet, I wouldn’t be here right now.

Often I find this online borderless world more real than the world outside. In this place called "real life", we are separated and controlled by the interlocking power of nation-states and corporations. Every aspect of our lives is financialized and imaginations are captured by institutionalized hierarchies. Yet in the interconnected world of cyberspace, I find that imagination is not just surviving but thriving.

I here ask a question. Can the imagination of this virtual world help free the world that has been commodified? Tonight I am going to talk about the resistance against enclosures happening on the Internet and how the trend of decentralization in recent years is facilitating a reopening of the commons.

BitTorrent, Pirate Bay, Creative Commons, Linux and WikiPedia. Here we see the emergence of waves of uprising that challenge this culture of ownership and are weaving a new network based on sharing.

Continue reading “Resistance Against Enclosure; Internet as Global Commons”

ISIS is facing growing criticism for its use of cluster monitions in its ongoing war in Iraq and Syria. The complaints, interestingly enough, began with allegations that Syria’s government was the one using the “banned” munitions, and was treated in a similar negative light.

Both ISIS and the Assad government are “bad guys” and so predictably their use of the munitions was going to be treated as beyond the pale. Yet the problem of cluster munition use is much older and wider-spread than just Syria/ISIS, and rarely gets treated as an important situation, or even a problem.

The US military heavily used cluster bombs during both the Iraq and Afghan wars, causing massive civilian casualties. The Israeli military littered southern Lebanon with munitions during their most recent war there, with unexploded ordinance continuing to kill Lebanese civilians to this day.

The US has similarly ignored the “ban” on cluster munitions use with a massive export of such bombs to Saudi Arabia only last year.

Cluster munitions have proven a huge humanitarian problem, killing civilians years after the war they were used in is over. Yet the ISIS use of such weapons is hardly out of keeping with international norms, and the problem of cluster bombs spans the globe. It is a mistake to treat ISIS as unusually bad for using such weapons when the US does so casually and with impunity, and has a stockpile of such weapons that far, far exceeds anything ISIS could ever dream of looting from what warehouses it has.