Monthly Archives: April 2010

The price others pay for our “freedoms”

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If you believe we all sleep a little better at night knowing our military is overseas defending our freedoms against evil terrorists, I hope this video upsets your slumber a bit:

There may be some debate over what weapons this group of people were carrying, but there is no debate over what happened after U. S. helicopters opened up on them with 30mm cannon fire.  They then proceeded to shoot unarmed civilians, including children, trying to evacuate the wounded.  At least 12 people were killed and the two children wounded.

Perhaps most sickening were the comments on the radio after the engagement, urging one of the wounded, Reuters driver Sameed Chmagh, to pick up a weapon (if indeed that’s what he was doing) so he could be shot again, or that it was these people’s fault for “bringing their children into battle”, never mind that they weren’t looking for battle; the Army helicopters shot them without warning as they tried to assist the wounded.

Perhaps someone can explain how we’re any more free now, because I’m having difficulty seeing it.  In fact there’s no rational explanation for how these wars, or any wars, have ever helped us maintain our freedoms.  We seem to be less free now than at any point in the past 200 years, and it’s not because radical Muslims hate our wealth and decadent culture.  It’s because our rulers must continually find “enemies” to threaten us, from within and without, to maintain their authority.

These wars were started by the last regime, and this atrocity occurred on George W. Bush’s watch; yet Barack Obama has made no real effort to reduce American troop presence in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the latter case has even escalated military operations.  Yet Obama campaigned on promises to get troops out of Iraq and harshly criticized Bush’s handling of both wars.  The president has changed, the party has changed, but the regime has not.  Nor has the rhetoric to justify the continued prosecution of overseas conquest.

Republican wars, Democrat wars — it hardly matters anymore who is to blame for them.  They are now just imperial campaigns, with all the horrors and enormous cost in blood and treasure they entail.  But empires inevitably fall.

[Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard]

Out of the rubble and into a cage

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When can you trust the state?  Never.  It’s a hard lesson to learn, made even more terrible by circumstances beyond anyone’s control.  Nearly five years after Hurricane Katrina, I still remember how cops manhandling an elderly woman and confiscating her gun — her only means of self-defense in a city gone mad.  And then there was the murder of two unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge, which the New Orleans police later tried to cover up.

You can’t trust the state, even when it appears no one else can save you.   And now survivors of the terrible earthquake in Haiti are learning the same, painful lesson:

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.

These are not criminals — just people overwhelmed by the quake and subsequent aftershocks, looking for food, water and shelter.  When the Marines evacuated them, they were under the impression that they could join relatives already in the U. S., but instead they were immediately arrested and held for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — despite a current suspension of deportations to Haiti.  All of this, because they didn’t already have a piece of paper from the U. S. government granting them permission to come here.  And yet more immigrants have all but disappeared into ICE’s detention center network, with family unable to find them.  Some that were lucky enough to be freed were granted tourist visas, allowing them to stay for a short while, but not to work.

But even when their loved ones are put in cages for no reason by the government, people can’t seem to let go of their implicit trust of the state:

The government’s actions have been especially bewildering for the survivors’ relatives, like Virgile Ulysse, 69, an American citizen who keeps an Obama poster on his kitchen wall in Norwalk, Conn.  Mr. Ulysse said he could not explain to his nephews, Jackson, 20, and Reagan, 25, why they were brought to the United States on a military plane only to be jailed at the Broward center when they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19.

The cognitive dissonance of that paragraph is almost dazzling: an Obama supporter who doesn’t understand why the Obama-led government jailed his nephews.  Even with the boot on their neck, people still look to the state to save them.  Will they ever learn?

Never trust the state.

[Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard]

Towards a new era of property, liberty, and justice.

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So as the previous post hinted at, I am now part of a new collaborative project called The Libertarian Standard.  For now it consists of a blog, but we plan eventually to expand our offerings to include in-depth articles and perhaps videos and podcasts.  This exciting project brings together many libertarians of diverse backgrounds, but rooted in a Rothbardian, Austrian-economics perspective.  We are anti-war, anti-corporatism, and anti-state.  We feel a kinship to paleo-libertarian sites such as LewRockwell.com and the Mises Institute but we aim for a hipper, more technology-oriented approach that will appeal to a new generation of soon-to-be-radicalized libertarians.  The revolution will be blogged!

I’m pleased to be part of this venture and plan to be active in contributing to it.  I also hope it will stimulate my muse so that I post more on this blog, which has lain dormant for far too long.  So please subscribe to both!  And look up The Libertarian Standard on Facebook and become a fan.