Life, Love, and Liberty

Aster of Wellington says what I was thinking:

I would also point out the continuity of this sort of child prison brutality with the generally accepted patterns of childraising in general. While reading through this chronicle of abuses I couldn’t help but think that it sounded like a compilation of all the things I’ve seen or heard parents do or threaten to do to ‘their own’ children.

Conservatives often say that ‘criminals are just children who never grew up’- i.e., that ‘civilisation’ is the project of breaking the stubborn will of the stubborn natural barbarism of children. In this view, which is obviously linked to Christian notions of original sin (or equivalent ideas in other authoritarian religions and moralities), ‘making people behave’ is precisely ABOUT beating them down into submission- ‘productive citizens’ being those beaten down enough, and ‘respectable’ people being those who have accepted repression and control as the norm. According to this view, there is a natural link between the proper treatment of children and criminals- the first have noy yet, and the second have failed to, internalise discipline adequately.

Of course under such a system there can never really be too much discipline, or any real objection to brutality. This is the same mentality which justifies torture- and insofar as the ideology of racism is linked very strongly with the perception of nonwhites as ‘half-devil and half-child’ (i.e., less naturally self-disciplined than white people), it’s very strongly linked to racism. And of course this psychology is the natural corollary of oppressive systems as such, which of course function primarily by pressing people to do things they just plain hate to do.

But none of it is comprehensible aside from a certain view of human beings- as bad things which need to be made ‘moral’ by constant orders and harangueing… and a certain institutional treatment of children. I personally don’t see this torture camp as something distinct from ‘normal’ childraising- it is merely a more extreme form of the way children are usually treated by conservatives. I think this kind of atrocity is implicit whenever one’s natural approach to evil is to yell and moralise and shame.

- Comment on Charles Johnson’s blog

Well, I wasn’t thinking of it exactly in those terms, but I wholeheartedly support her message! I am a staunch unschooler who supports the right of children to decide how they want to learn.

For liberty!

For happiness!

For children too!

I will be writing more on these issues in the future. I strongly believe that the libertarian and anarchist movements must understand that context matters. In this case, the context that children grow up in will have an effect on the type of society we live in. If you believe that the “good” comes from discipline with children, then you will be more likely to believe that the “good” comes from discipline meted out to adults by other authority figures.

“A strong shield against the vulgarity of jealousy is that man and wife are not of one body and one spirit. They are two human beings, of different temperament, feelings, and emotions. Each is a small cosmos in himself, engrossed in his own thoughts and ideas. It is glorious and poetic if these two worlds meet in freedom and equality. Even if this lasts but a short time it is already worthwhile. But, the moment the two worlds are forced together all the beauty and fragrance ceases and nothing but dead leaves remain. Whoever grasps this truism will consider jealousy beneath him and will not permit it to hang as a sword of Damocles over him.

All lovers do well to leave the doors of their love wide open. When love can go and come without fear of meeting a watch-dog, jealousy will rarely take root because it will soon learn that where there are no locks and keys there is no place for suspicion and distrust, two elements upon which jealousy thrives and prospers.”

~ Emma Goldman

“Re: Vietnam war (was Re: [LeftLibertarian2] Re: Justin Raimondo)

tony_hollick wrote:

> I do want you to understand that I _do_ understand the point
> you’re making.

I’m not at all sure that you do, since if you did, it would be much
harder to make sense of responding with this:

> I do not believe that the pilot who dropped the napalm that
> burned the little girl worke up that morning and thought: “Let’s go
> out today and deliberately napalm some children.” I believe he flew a
> mission, and was directed erroneously by the Forward Air Controllers
> to drop his bombs on what were believed to be military targets.

Well, hey, at least his heart was in the right place.

If you are claiming that someone is acting as “the defense” in a
particular conflict, then it ought to make some difference to you
whether the violence that they use actually succeeds in defending anyone
against anything, whether or not the means that they select are
appropriate to the task of proportional defense, whether or not the
people–the *actual individual people*, not The People in the mythical
political sense–that they claim to be defending ever actually asked for
their protection, or asked to be protected in the way that their
“defenders” set about protecting them, whether or not the putative
defenders actually tend to succeed, or had any realistic hope of
succeeding, in protecting those individual people as claimed, etc. Their
private thoughts and hopes have a lot less to do with any of this than
their outward actions and the context of those actions, particularly the
context of how those actions affect those they are putatively
protecting, and whether those they are putatively protecting ever wanted
that kind of “defense.”

My question is what the (ARVN, under a U.S. chain of command) pilot who,
as per the requirements of his mission, dropped napalm on the village of
Trang Bang, and then wheeled around and — oops! my bad! — burned the
fleeing refugees alive, mistaking a crowd of screaming children (among
them Phan Thi Kim Phuc) and ARVN soldiers for a military target, was
actually defending, and what he was defending it against. If you think
that incendiary bombardment of villages — knowingly and deliberately
burning people’s homes, and running a substantial and perfectly
predictable risk of burning the people themselves alive — villages
where few or none of the people, and especially not the people ruined,
maimed, or killed by the bombardment, ever asked for your “defense” –
is a good way of defending individual people’s lives or livelihoods,
then I think it obvious that you are trying to get to a predetermined
conclusion rather than reasoning in good faith.

Judging from the means, mission, and context, I think it is perfectly
clear what the ARVN and the U.S. military were trying to defend at the
burning of Trang Bang. It wasn’t Phan Thi Kim Phuc, or much of anyone in
Trang Bang. It was the U.S. occupation and the south Vietnamese State,
both of which were separate from, parasitic upon, and generally hostile
to, ordinary people like Phan Thi Kim Phuc. But if you think that I give
a good god damn about the “defense” of either of those, particularly
when the human cost of that defense is what’s happening in that photo
and in millions of unrecorded “missions” of fire, maiming, and death,
forgotten now by everyone but the surviving victims, the kind of
missions that immediately turned “It became necessary to destroy the
village in order to save it” into cliché, then you’ve got another think
coming.

> The little girl recovered from her awful injuries, and has
> visited the West, giving interviews.

Yes, I know that she has. She wouldn’t have except that someone who had
nothing to do with the military assault — Nick Út, the Vietnamese AP
photographer who took the photograph — took her and the other surviving
children to a hospital in Saigon, where surgeons exhibited actual
heroism and defense by defying all odds (it was initially believed she
could not have survived such severe burns) by saving her life.

Many of the children who were burned alive at Trang Bang were not as
fortunate as Phan Thi Kim Phuc. Many of them, including two of Kim
Phuc’s cousins, died in the bombardment.

> Lt. Calley’s misconduct was brought to trial after the bravery
> of a helicopter pilot there, and has recently been released from
> prison.

Yes, again, I know. Thompson’s decision to put himself in the line of
fire in order to defend villagers from rampaging U.S. “defense”, and his
decision to report what happened, is a good example of genuine heroism
and a genuine effort to defend realm people from aggression. The U.S.
military command’s well-known reaction to the report — a year and a
half of white-washing, stonewalling, downplaying, and conscious deceit,
until Seymour Hersh’s investigative report finally forced their hand –
is not.

> Ten million Germans were killed during WWII. Between half a
> million and a million German prisoners-of-war were murdered in US and
> British prison camps _after_ WWII had ended, and after they had
> surrendered in response to air-dropped Safe Conduct passes (James
> Bacque, “Other Losses”). Every female in Berlin between the ages of
> 14 and 55 was raped, usually many times, by Red Army “liberators.”
> Between nine million and fourteen million Germans died _after_ the war
> from the deliberate withholding of fertilizer and farming tools.
>
> Was smashing the Nazi State worth the price? You tell us.

The price to whom? Worth it for whom?

It may well be that the price to 40,000 people in Dresden was worth it
for you. But I’m not sure that you’re the one that should be asked.

Since I didn’t pay the price, I wouldn’t presume to say what would be
worth it or wouldn’t be worth it. But, as a logical matter, I certainly
wouldn’t recognize the savage conquest of half of Europe for Stalin’s
Red Empire, or the aerial terror-war that the RAF and US Army waged
against German cities, or the deliberately brutal occupation of Germany
by the corporativist-Stalinist Alliance, as examples of what you might
call “the defense.” And I think it’s interesting that you would treat it
as just obvious that an anarchist, of all people, would somehow just
have to concede the moral legitimacy of the conduct of the governments
involved in the single most destructive war in the entire history of the
world, no matter what the human cost inflicted upon innocent bystanders.

-C”

~ Charles Johnson

“Even today, America is certainly among the best places to live inside, despite its many troubles. For one thing, we still have many freedoms, at least tacitly, that most other countries do not. For another, living in America, we have much less a chance of being bombed by the U.S. government than do foreigners.”

~ Anthony Gregory

That last point gave me a real laugh. I am not sure if Anthony intended it to be funny or not though. It’s actually quite true!

The quote of the day feature is back!

“It’s no secret that after 9/11, the administration authorized the use of waterboarding, and that the technique was used on a number of detainees in 2002 and reportedly stopped in 2003. But the administration has never explicitly admitted that.

In fact, when Dick Cheney, seduced into loose talk by a friendly interviewer, confirmed that “a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives,” the White House furiously backpedaled, and Tony Snow did his best to proclaim that “a dunk in water” had not been a reference to waterboarding, but just “a dunk in the water.”"

~ Paul Kiel

Thanks, Tony. I feel much more reassured now.

“No one who supports putting a drug user in jail has any right to shed crocodile tears over the death of someone whose life they have proved willing to throw away. The middle class moralist prides emself for saving their victims from the shadows’ imagined atrocoties. Yet it is such a moralist who supports the real, unimagined atrocity of destroying other peoples’ lives because the moralist feels threatened by their existence as a creeping social plague. It would not matter if the prohibition laws could not be shown to have caused this young woman’s death. Every arrogant bourgeois who supported a law to jail her for her regulation alread pronounced their intention to regard her life, choices, and dreams as worthless.

I wish I had any hope of overcoming this dualised, fear-ridden and bigoted consciousness. But I think most Americans (and people throughout the world) are wedded to this kind of life, psychically and socially, which demands the forcible suppression of alternatives for its persistence. And I fear that this kind of life, while horrid, is ineradicable and dominant for socially functional reasons.

But that aside- I have no patience for those who talk of the ‘good intentions’ of those ‘concerned’ about drug use. Anyone who doubts that should remember that the same people who mourn that ‘drugs’ killed this woman would, if a miracle had granted her resuscitation, greeted her return to the world with courts, manacles, and jail.

For words constitute the distinct chime of the leper’s bell of social conservatism:

“FOR YOUR OWN GOOD”.

~ Lady Aster

“When you strip away all the verbiage, all the intellectual tap dancing, and all the efforts to “understand” and be “tolerant,” that is the inescapable, the terrible bottom line: many of you think we are Freaks. Speaking for myself with regard to these issues, I don’t want you to “understand” me or to be “tolerant” of me. I don’t want you to “study” me, and try to graph all the various points of similarity and difference between us: I want you to recognize that I am completely and entirely a human being, just as you are. And I want you to understand fully what that means, and to genuinely mean it.

It is one thing to be openly hated and despised, as gays and lesbians are by many on the right. We’re used to that, and we got used to it a long time ago. As was required, we manufactured intellectual and emotional armor to protect ourselves. In the current climate, we have to put it on every single damned day. It weighs a great deal, and it exacts an awful price. But without it, we would suffer injuries too grievous to be borne.

But how much worse it is to be cajoled into taking off that armor — to hear you tell us that you understand we’re “just like you” in all the ways that matter, and that we’re really “just the same” — and then to read or hear about “how easy” you think it is to “make fun” of us, especially when our status as Freaks is too obvious. How much worse it is when we believe you, when you tell us you think we’re all equal — except that you can get married, while almost every leading Democrat will say, well, no, we can’t get married. But we can have “civil unions.” Because, you see, Freaks don’t get married.”

~ Arthur Silber

“Love offers the model of perfect communication: the orgasm, the total fusion of two separate beings. It is a glimpse of a transformed universe. Its intensity, its here-and-now-ness, its physical exaltation, its emotional fluidity, its grateful acceptance of the value of change - everything indicates that love will prove the key factor in recreating the world. Our emotionally-dead survival cries out for multidimensional passions. Lovemaking sums up and distils both the desire for, and the reality of, such a way of life. The universe lovers build of dreams and one another’s bodies is a transparent universe: lovers want to be at home everywhere.”

~ Raoul Vaneigem

If Lysander Spooner were alive today, he’d be the ripe old age of 200. He’d probably also be shocked at the current state of America.

In honor of his memory, I present three choice quotes:

“The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that — however bloody — can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.”

~ Lysander Spooner

“Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

In vices, the very essence of crime — that is, the design to injure the person or property of another — is wanting.”

~ Lysander Spooner

“A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.”

~ Lysander Spooner

Update: I corrected the age. I give a hearty thanks to Roderick T. Long for pointing out my error in the comments section. I had put 121, instead of 200.

“One last thought needs to be considered. As mentioned, the apparatus necessary for a full-scale genocide has already been created. The Nazis managed to exterminate millions of Jews and other groups. The only active armed resistance occurred in the Warsaw ghetto. Originally containing three hundred thousand Jews, the gradual Nazi deportation program eventually reduced the population to forty thousand. It was at this point that an armed resistance movement, armed with homemade weapons and led by courageous youth in their twenties, began. They succeeded in warding off the Gestapo for a month before finally being crushed. So far the only public official courageous enough to advocate genuine resistance to what is being done to America today has been former New Hampshire state representative Tom Alciere. Let’s not make the same mistake as the Europeans of sixty years ago.”

~ Keith Preston

“The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound book when considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very naively in its myth of original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty-Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”

~ Mikhail Bakunin

Update: I’ve been told by a friend that Satan is actually not the serpent in the Genesis story. However, Bakunin’s point that God is forbidding man from the pursuit of knowledge still stands.

“I feel John Mackey is advising we listen to everything *wrong* with the left- the Puritanical moralism characteristic of the original Progressives, while simultaneously slamming the door in the face of the liberatory impulses that represent the left at its best. While I do think libertarians should learn more empathy and compassion, that is a far cry from absorbing the notion that moral idealism equates with transcending selfishness. In my opinion versions of idealism which tell people to subordinate their interest to a greater good are the problem- ultimately because I think they destroy and torment the best passions in individuals. It is worth noting that Mackey makes no arguments for unselfishness but merely appeals to popularity and ‘common sense’.”

~ Lady Aster

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

~ Ayn Rand