Samizdata

An interesting Q&A article between Congressman Ron Paul (R, Texas) and Jacob Hornberger, an Independent Candidate for the U.S. Senate from Virginia, brings forward several of the reasons that I both like, and regularly disagree with Ron Paul on many issues.

Rather than do a lengthy take down, I will confine my remarks to Hornberger’s remarks in question 17 in the Q&A:

From a moral standpoint, we should not only ask about American GI casualties but also Iraqi people casualties. After the Allied Powers delivered the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany to Stalin and the Soviet communists after World War II, those people suffered under communism for five decades, which most of us would oppose, but who’s to say that they would have been better off with liberation by U.S. bombs and embargoes, especially those who would have been killed by them? I believe that despite the horrible suffering of the Eastern Europeans and East Germans, Americans were right to refrain from liberating them with bombs and embargoes. It’s up to the Iraqi people to deal with the tyranny under which they suffer – it is not a legitimate function of the U.S. government to liberate them from their tyranny with an attack upon their nation.

For a start, the Iraqi ‘nation’ is not by any reasonable measure under the control/ownership/whatever of the Iraqi people, it is under the control of the Iraqi flavour of Baathist Socialists lead by Saddam Hussain and his family… so attacking Iraq is not attacking the Iraqi ‘nation’ and certainly not the Iraqi people, but rather the regime which controls it.

However Hornberger is quite right that as a result of that huge moral blot on Roosevelt and Churchill, the Yalta Agreement, the Western Allies did indeed “[deliver] the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany to Stalin and the Soviet communists after World War II”. Given that both Hornberger and Paul have chosen to frame their views firmly within the state centred meta-context of ‘national interests’, thereby at a stroke moving their position off the true moral high ground, I will follow them for now into the murky valley in which congressmen and would-be senators choose to dwell.

Well if the US and ‘Western Powers’ were indeed responsible for people in Czechoslovakia ending up under Soviet control, as it was indeed US troops which liberated much of the country from the Nazis, then how is it such a reach to see how ‘Americans’ did indeed bear a responsibility for undoing the state of affairs which condemned two generations of Czechs and Slovaks to communist tyranny?

Likewise, is Jacob Hornberger really going to suggest that Czechs and Slovaks are going to thank people like him for not actively trying to liberate them? It is not as if they were passively accepting communist rule and yet in 1968, the likes of Hornberger did nothing. If he thinks people in Czechoslovakia were happy they were not supported on the ‘moral’ grounds it would not be good for them I suspect he is in for a shock. Hornberger’s responses to Ron Paul wear moral clothing but frankly it is as phoney as three dollar bill. Hornberger is actually talking about utility, not morality. The only moral position is to oppose violence based tyranny with force. That was my view in the Cold War and it is my view regarding Saddam Hussain.

The destruction of tyranny whenever it is possible is never a bad thing for any libertarian to support, if liberty is to be more than just some abstract thing bandied about in debates.

What all neolibertarian hawks should be driving these days

Sarah Lawrence: clearly up to no good

In May this year, I had the pleasure of meeting George Smith when we were both speaking at the Youth 4 Liberty Summer Camp in Orono, Ontario, Canada. I found him interesting, learned and charming, but my speech, which was an anarcho-capitalist argument for the war on terrorism, apparently made little impact on him, if a recent article of his is anything to go by. In The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Vol 1, No 31, he says darkly:

If a crisis presents an opportunity, an endless crisis presents endless opportunities. With bin Laden off the radar, the administration is setting sights on Hussein. Is he now the linchpin of world terror or just the one we might get away with killing? Have we reviewed all tyrants and found him the most imminently threatening?

What is this conspiracy theory asking you to believe about yourself?

Suppose you think that Saddam Hussein needs to be disarmed, deposed and replaced by a democratic government. George Smith is asking you to believe one of two things:

1. You are a nefarious character (in league with the US government and other reprehensible scoundrels) who thinks that Saddam Hussein is not a bad chap who should be taken out to protect the people of the world from whatever dreadful wrongs he might do next, but merely someone “we might get away with killing” OR


2. You are a gullible fool who has been taken in by the dastardly US government’s anti-Saddam rhetoric.

If you came to this conclusion long before the US/UK governments did (and let’s face it, only a matter of ten days ago, Tony Blair seemed unconvinced), (2) would imply that you were taken in by people who did not themselves hold that opinion. So it follows that George Smith is asking me to believe (1) – that I am an immoral person who wants Saddam taken out merely because he is someone “we might get away with killing.”

George, George! Tell me you don’t really think this!