The Futility of Being Anti-War and Pro-State

by Angelo Mike 

Exclusive to STR

February 7, 2007

“War is the continuation of politics by other means.” ~ Karl Von Clausewitz  

What does that tell you about politics?  

The great anti-state and anti-war libertarian Frederic Bastiat gave us a greater such insight when he said, “In war, the stronger dominates the weaker. In business, the stronger imparts strength to the weaker.” We can modify this to fully cover the difference between violence and peace. The reality is, “In politics and war, the stronger dominates the weaker. In commerce, the stronger and the weaker impart strength to each other.”  

It is for this reason that being anti-war, or more accurately, anti- a particular war, is ultimately not going to prevent war if one supposed that the state still is necessary. For states don’t just carry out warfare internationally. They carry out low intensity warfare domestically and internationally through foreign policies such as the manipulation of currencies, taxation, putting up obstacles to trade where the private sector had worked to remove natural obstacles, putting up navies and armies to prevent peaceful trade, putting domestic soldiers in military bases located in other countries to maintain hegemony, state-imposed immigration restrictions, and restrictions on the right of each individual to secession.  

It is only within this framework of low intensity warfare that high intensity warfare is conceived and cultivated.  

The pattern usually goes as this: A gang of robbers and murderers first dominates a society. This gang can sustain itself on the products of that society. So, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out, any gang of robbers isn’t necessarily a state. For if such a gang robs and then goes on the run and does not pretend to have a rightful claim to your money, it is not a state. It must be able to sustain itself by constantly exercising such compulsion on innocent people. If they weren’t innocent, then they would be plainly viewed as hostages or prisoners. They must be turned into prisoners without anyone knowing it.  

So it’s important that society not be viewed as a separate or productive entity apart from this gang. For if they are really viewed as separate, then it is clear that they are mere victims of aggression from these domestic invaders. This is why any state which is to survive must create an intellectual middle class which propagates support for it by taking children from a young age and teaching them that they are the government. It must, as expediently as possible, turn all pro-individual/pro-freedom influences from a young age into a subversive influence.  

Thus, as Mises wrote, it was perfectly logical of the Bolsheviks to destroy families in Russia . We can extend this explanation to Stalin’s purges of military leaders and all older people who knew he wasn’t the great military hero he claimed to be. Stalin was, in fact, a man who had been in so many accidents when he was young, such as being hit by horse drawn carriages, that he walked with a hobble and was rejected by the military.  

But one doesn’t have to be a brilliant economist to recognize this. Our own supporters of democracy recognize this. Kids grow up and quite naturally, within families, are taught values such as kindness and generosity. In families they learn how to love. It is certainly not natural for them to learn how to submit to authority and actively uphold authority. They must be quickly integrated into state life so as to recognize this occupier as an integral part of their welfare. They must be compulsorily unified as an abettor to the state.  

I can relate a personal story which I was kind of shocked to reflect upon years after it occurred. In third grade, I was in a private school when my teacher, Mrs. Bogdan, was teaching us about property taxes, a concept I had never heard of before. She said that if you have a car or home, you are taxed on it. Up to that point, I had only known of income taxes and only had some vague idea that taxes were bad.  

The concept seemed totally odd. Don’t you enjoy exclusive use and enjoyment of your property? As Lysander Spooner said of a child’s understanding of natural law, if a child finds a flower and picks it out of the ground, he understands that it is his to own since he found it first, and no one has a right to force you to give it up.  

I innocently raised my hand and asked a question. “How can they tax something if you own it?”  

Mrs. Bogdan would have none of it. She snapped back, “Because we need to pay for the police and firemen,” as if I was some operative sent in to subvert the order of the classroom by right-wing parents.  

Her answer made no sense to me. I had a total disconnect between, on the one hand, making you pay a tax for what seemed like the mere act of owning a car or home, and on the other, paying for police and firemen. As I grew up, I realized I was completely correct not to understand, and that Mrs. Bogdan was merely a foul mannered liberal Democrat who hated intellectual honesty.  

How does one go from believing that something must be paid for to believing that it must be compulsorily paid for by a monopolist? No one innately feels this idea (unless they want to be that monopolist). Rothbard uses an example in The Ethics of Liberty to demonstrate this in which he describes what would happen if a society started from scratch: There are thousands of people, composed of many different families, who trade, work, and divide up labor. They recognize a right of self-defense and some of them are armed.  

But along comes someone who says that all these people are totally insecure in their rights and property. What they must do is give up all their weapons to the Jones family, and let the Jones family alone arbitrate over disputes and take their money to do so. Such a notion to this population would seem preposterous. The Jones family would probably squirm at the thought of having this kind of power.  

Compulsory unification under a state, then, only seems natural because it’s perpetuated and taught to us in state schools, or private schools, which are licensed, regulated, and often funded by the state. Thus, since they get “public” money, the state may use this as a pretense to regulate the receivers of this money and decide on what is the acceptable use of it in favor of the state, as opposed to some private interest. This gives the illusion of a public interest or some national character which is built up in the minds of the youth. Everyone is eager to see children raised in state schools, public or private, since these kids may one day be ruling the country. They have an interest in not being ruled in a manner not of their liking. If they don’t want themselves and their children to be slaves, then they must become masters.  

We may come back to the issue of this national character in state societies and war. Every attack intended for a government, then, may serve as the means for a government to externalize the cost of waging war against the enemy government, or just plain enemy, as George Bush calls them. War now isn’t merely a contest between two gangs or states, but between two competing ways of life. War must be systematically escalated so that no one may escape it, lest the well being of the state be eroded.  

Citizens of Kansas or Oregon who may otherwise have nothing to do with Washington , D.C. other than be forced to pay taxes then get taxes confiscated and industry regulated so as to systematically support escalating war. Any war, whether under a monarchy or democracy, is accelerated into being a total war of our way of life versus theirs, or freedom and democracy versus fascism. This can mean only one thing: Perpetual war, since no victory can ever be declared when winning means having to use force to mold another population into submission not for concrete terms of surrender, but perpetually giving tribute (taxes) to aid the victor’s way of life.  

For instance, on September 11, 2001 , 19 murderers killed about 3,000 people in Washington , D.C. , Pennsylvania , and New York . It would have made little sense to attack these targets if there was no dominating sovereign to make submit. For who were these men attacking? Innocent people. On a market, had such an attack been made, the proper course of action would simply have been to apprehend and possibly kill the surviving accomplices to this attack by giving money to security agencies.  

Under a state? The solution has been to kill or kidnap anyone possibly affiliated with Al Qaeda, the organization which sent its 19 members to kill. This meant invading an entire nation, Afghanistan ; killing innocent civilians; and as of this date, ruling them for over five years, often under martial law, with no end to the number of times we can be victorious in sight.  

Many supposedly anti-war people support this war of aggression, yet oppose the American war against Iraq for the simple reason that the Taliban harbored Al Qaeda.  

And yet, if you were to ask them if our 65,000 soldiers in Germany should be attacked, or all of Germany attacked, because there are American soldiers carrying out aggression and murder against Iraqis, what kind of response do you think you would get? What of the over 150 countries with American soldiers stationed? And who can be charged to responsibly carry out this task? Analysis over war is much more sober when staged in such a light.  

In Iraq , where the U.S. government has set up a central state, insurgent operatives and Al Qaeda have infiltrated, since the government is the easiest means to get hold of to use violence on others. Thousands of Iraqi police officers have been fired or are under investigation for collaboration and involvement with attacks on Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers. And really, who else should we expect a state to attract? These insurgents are using hundreds of thousands of Iraqi government tax dollars to fund their efforts. It is much easier to confiscate this money with a state than to raise it voluntarily. Should these insurgents not want the most prominent and expansive means of carrying out violence on innocent people so readily within their grasp?  

Since the Iraqi government is now harboring insurgents who are threatening the American state’s racket on crime there, should America , too, now be invaded? Should we invade Iraq all over again? Kick in the door of every Iraqi home and detain everyone under suspicion of being an enemy combatant?  

Then there’s Iran . Iran has been in the sights of our government for years, to put it mildly. The “tough” rhetoric coming from Democrats and Republicans on not taking any options off the table can’t be viewed as anything but a threat to all of Iran , since we’ve already aggressively invaded Afghanistan and Iraq , deemed Iran one of the Axis of Evil countries, and now are mobilizing for war with them. And they have the nerve to want defend themselves! Don’t they have the good sense that our government has to realize that, if you’re not a threat to the United States , we won’t attack them? That is, unless you’re a politician like Hillary Clinton, who thinks that being an accomplice to the agony and death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis was a mere mistake to be overlooked, since she would vote differently had she the chance today.  

We know why politicians like her supported the war then and don’t support it now. It was popular then and unpopular now. Their opinion, like that of much of the nation, is an oscillating pendulum, taking the easiest possible course. And no one would refuse her the benefit of the doubt. Since without that, states would be strangled into inaction, and peace might break out. No; we must give sociopaths another chance to learn from mere mistakes.  

Iranian agents are, seemingly by merely being present in Iraq , threatening Bush’s racket on the use of overwhelming violence on innocent people there. And since that force is being paid for with money and resources confiscated from American taxpayers, and this is a “public,” not “private” war, if the American state is to retain its own well being, it must unify all of us in war against all of Iran. For if Americans are possibly being thwarted in their efforts to maintain hegemony over Iraq by Iranians when American tax dollars are being put to use in such an effort, don’t all the American taxpayers have a right to see a stop to this? Isn’t their money being thrown down the drain, and must it not now be put to use more effectively?  

Even if we did manage to prevent the Iraq War or the war on Afghanistan , we’ll only have prevented aggression for a while. We know what states are and what they do. They thrive on conflict, and war is their livelihood. Politicians only maintain their well being at the expense of everyone else. In peace time (such a phrase should seem absurd given what the very existence of states entails), leaders are given relatively little attention and glory. Only the wartime leaders are the truly great ones to be remembered and the “national character” modeled after. They must seek war if they want to be truly great.  

So perhaps we could have avoided these wars, or even World War I or World War II and still had states. We know eventually that there would be further wars initiated by states, possibly more deadly than ever, since there would be a much more thriving and productive private sector from which to siphon off resources to conduct them. All it would take is some small conflict, assassination, trade or currency dispute, or a vainglorious politician to do it. In order to maintain public support for these wars, states would have to integrate themselves into society even more strongly and swiftly, akin to how the more isolationist Americans of pre-WWII or WWI had to be drafted, industry made cartels of, dissident thought suppressed and punished with imprisonment, and media infiltrated.  

As it is, much of this job is already done and just needs perpetuating so that the mere word of a statesman can turn who was otherwise a friend and business partner into an enemy to be destroyed.  

Yet most of the world still believes in democracy, and that their country is always the true democracy. In our minds, Russia and China are ruled by despots, and we are democratic. In theirs, they are democratic, and we have a despot. The truth is that each of us has democratic dictatorships. These men rose to power on popular movements.  

These populations also still hold that the absence of such monopolies of overwhelming force, which alone determine law and may destroy anyone they want, and may do so at little cost to themselves, must be maintained lest chaos and anarchy ensue. Therefore, we have to keep giving these states the benefit of the doubt. And states rely on these very people for even more expansive powers and support to make suffer and destroy anyone they want.  

This is what democracy does to people. It makes them stupid. Its very existence presupposes that it serves some useful purpose. How else could such entities exist for so long?  

Even those typically anti-war countries such as France or Germany are really limited not by their inflated sense of nationalism or their true democracies, but by their size and resources. Imagine if France or Germany had the size and resources of the U.S. We could never safely entrust to such a seemingly peaceful people such a horrible power, and we know exactly what they would do with it, sooner or later.  

The supposedly anti-war members of society and politicians fall prey to this idiocy. These people reason that, if we’re at war with a country such as Iraq , the nature of the national character means that we should be at total war, and not a single American should be spared from sacrificing to escalate the utterly futile campaign to murder, steal, and enslave. They’re under this delusion that the state is society, so what must be good for the state is good for society, even when they have some notion that war, or a particular war they’ve selected, is bad.  

We can’t even count on them to oppose the wars that they, well, oppose. This is like Dr. Strangelove. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the war room!” Only instead of the instantaneous destruction of all life on earth, we must be dragged along through years of misery, destruction, and stupidity until we decided that the price of liberation through the state is too much to bear. We’ll have finally realized that we don’t want to be liberated into a pile of rubble.