121 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
121 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
Keeping Freedom Alive: a response to Vodkapundit
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<p>In a trenchant essay he posted on the 30th of January, Vodkapundit<br />
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<a href='http://www.vodkapundit.com/archives/005115.php#005115'>fulminates</a><br />
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against people he calls “doctrinaire libertarians”. While I sympathize in some<br />
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respects — I too have been attacked for my pro-war position — I<br />
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think there is some serious danger that Steve’s arguments are throwing out the<br />
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baby along with the bathwater.</p>
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<p>I’m an individualist anarchist. In most peoples’ books that would<br />
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qualify me as a “doctrinaire libertarian”. I got reminded why<br />
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recently by watching a Babylon 5 episode, the 4th-season one in which<br />
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Sheridan is interrogated by an EarthGov psychologist who uses torture,<br />
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isolation, and drugs, to try and break him. But more frightening than<br />
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the torture is the ideology that comes out of the interrogator’s<br />
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mouth; the command that truth is fluid and must bend to power; the<br />
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disingenuous disclaimers of any responsibility for the hell Sheridan<br />
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is being put through; and beneath it all like a constant drumbeat, the<br />
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seductive invitation that if Sheridan will just surrender his will to<br />
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the State, his pain will end.</p>
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<p>The interrogator is never named. Like his prototypes in Nazi<br />
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Germany and Soviet Russia, he is a case study in the banality of evil<br />
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— the true face, the night face, the real face of the State.<br />
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And what is truly terrifying is that the interrogator is not a mere<br />
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thug but a man with a subtle and flexible mind. There is an angle on<br />
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the world from which all his lies and acts of coercion issue from a<br />
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coherent moral position — but it is one that promises everyone<br />
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but his masters hell on Earth, forever and ever, amen.</p>
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<p>In this episode J. Michael Straczynski gives us a fictional<br />
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depiction of a type that is all too real. Anyone who has read Arthur<br />
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Koestler’s <cite>Darkness at Noon</cite> or Aleksandr Solszhenitzyn’s<br />
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<cite>The Gulag Archipelago</cite> knows that if anything, JMS (who<br />
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clearly did his homework on the real-world techniques of brainwashing)<br />
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<em>understates</em> the soul-destroying depths to which the ideology<br />
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of statism can sink, trapping the interrogator and his victim in a<br />
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machinery of coercion that will ultimately consume them both.</p>
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<p>The moral climax of that episode comes after Sheridan says “You<br />
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know, it’s funny I was thinking about what you said. ‘The pre-eminent<br />
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truth of our age is that you cannot fight the system.’ But if, as you<br />
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say, truth is fluid, that the truth is subjective, then maybe you can<br />
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fight the system — as long as one person refuses to be broken,<br />
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refuses to bow down.”</p>
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<p>“But can you win?” the interrogator asks, almost gently. Sheridan,<br />
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knowing it is likely to mean he will shortly die under torture, rasps<br />
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out the bedrock libertarian reply “Every…time I…say…<em>no</em>!”</p>
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<p>If I were the praying kind, I would be on my knees every day<br />
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praying that if there ever comes a moment when I must confront the<br />
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night face of the State, I too will meet it with that kind of courage.<br />
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And that day may come. Because the hell that spawns creatures like<br />
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that nameless interrogator is what waits for all of us down the road<br />
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to serfdom that is paved with good intentions like “welfare” and<br />
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“protecting the children” and “saving the environment” and, yes,<br />
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“necessary war”.</p>
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<p>This is why I think we all ought to be grateful for “doctrinaire<br />
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libertarians”, even the ones more doctrinaire than me. It’s their job<br />
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to keep reminding all of us where that road leads. And it frightens<br />
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we when anyone replies to “War is the health of the state” by saying<br />
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fearfully “Let’s be blunt here, kids. When foreigners are rearranging<br />
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the Manhattan skyline because, in part, our women drive cars, then<br />
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goddamnit its <em>time</em> for a healthier state.” Because it’s in<br />
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the shadow cast by that kind of fear that creatures like the<br />
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interrogator and his masters grow and flourish.</p>
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<p>Necessity, as wiser men than me have observed, is the credo of<br />
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tyrants and the excuse of slaves. It disturbs me to hear anyone<br />
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talking like a slave.</p>
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<p>I agree with you in conceding that the state is at this time the<br />
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only way we have to answer the terrorist threat. The world in which<br />
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Osama bin Laden would be killed by troops hired by a consortium of<br />
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crime- and disaster-insurance companies rather than a government does<br />
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not yet exist.</p>
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<p>But having conceded the present necessity of state action makes it<br />
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<em>more</em> necessary, not less, that we listen to the most<br />
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contrary, ornery, anti-statist libertarians we have, and to hold<br />
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harder than ever to our intentions for a libertarian future. Otherwise<br />
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we risk becoming too comfortable with that concession, and letting the<br />
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statists seduce us further down that road to serfdom.</p>
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<p>Does this mean we can’t slam the LP for its attribution of the 9/11<br />
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attacks to American foreign policy? No, you’re right; that position<br />
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is not just wrong, it bespeaks a lack of moral seriousness and a kind<br />
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of blinkered parochialism that cannot actually see anything outside<br />
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of U.S. politics as having causal force.</p>
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<p>But there is a big difference between observing that the LP is<br />
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contingently wrong about the liberation of Iraq (true) and suggesting<br />
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that our only course is to abandon our longer-term commitment to the<br />
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abolition of drastic shrinking of the state (false). Beware of<br />
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throwing out that baby with the bathwater. John Ashcroft is not yet a<br />
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greater threat to liberty than Osama bin Laden — but that day<br />
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may come yet. Only libertarian thoughts, libertarian words,<br />
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libertarian deeds, and a principled libertarian opposition to the<br />
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arrogance and seductions of power will prevent it.</p>
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<p>UPDATE: Gary Farber <a href="http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_amygdalagf_archive.html#107567816290438373">thinks</a> I’m making the same error I slammed John Perry<br />
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Barlow for recently. But there is a large difference. Barlow<br />
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was being specifically paranoid about a short-term threat which he ties to<br />
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specific people he thinks are evil and has (at the very least) grossly<br />
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overestimated. I have a longer-term concern about structural tendencies<br />
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that are built into the nature of government, and which don’t require<br />
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specific evil people running things to take us to some very nasty places.</p>
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<p>Or, to put it another way, Barlow has what is essentially a devil theory;<br />
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Bush, or Cheney, or Ashcroft or someone like them is evil and wants to put us<br />
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in camps next year. This is silly. I, on the other hand, don’t think it<br />
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much matters for the long term whether “good” or “evil” people are running<br />
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the government; the <em>premises</em> and the <em>process</em> of government,<br />
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and the collectivist ethos that underlies them, have a momentum of their own<br />
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that grinds away at our liberty regardless. The founders of the U.S.<br />
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understood this tendency and erected the Bill Of Rights as a firewall against<br />
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it. The fact that in many jurisdictions U.S. law now suppresses “hate speech” and<br />
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bans the possession of firearms demonstrates their failure.</p>
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<p>The erosion of liberty which I fear is a far more gradual process than<br />
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the sudden collapse into totalitarianism that Barlow envisions. But it<br />
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is also more difficult to resist and counter. Because the end stages,<br />
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where <em>only</em> evil people can adapt themselves to politics, are<br />
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probably many decades away, few people can summon the concern and the<br />
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will to say “Stop now, before it’s too late!”. There is always some<br />
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short-term reason that seems good to accept the state’s poisonous candy<br />
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— the new entitlement program, the next round of farm- or steel-mill<br />
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subsidies, the airport metal detectors to make us “safe”.</p>
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<p>Many (though not all) of the people who can summon that will are<br />
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libertarians. Which is yet another good reason to listen to them carefully,<br />
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even when they’re more doctrinaire than me.</p>
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<p>(Exercise for the reader: Let’s stipulate that littering laws may not lead to 1984,<br />
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but can you defend the proposition that laws banning speeech and weapons don’t? Discuss<br />
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historical examples such as Nazi Germany and Tokugawa-period Japan. Be specific.)</p>
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