Posted June 4, 2003

Regarding "The Folly That Is Europe" by Nebojsa Malic:

Nebojsa Malic makes some interesting, and correct, comments on the corrupt practices of the various self described "democratic" regimes in the former Yugoslavia.

I believe however in some respects he rushed to judgment. For instance he writes, "After the Nazi occupation, in 1946, the Communist 'liberators' proceeded to 'liberate' the people of Yugoslavia of their private property. Land, housing, factories, mines... everything was 'nationalized,' with a few exceptions such as shops and small farms."

He goes on, "Serbian regime is equally reluctant to restore plundered property to its rightful owners. Doing so would 'cost the government money,' as it would need to compensate owners whose properties have been modified and cannot be returned outright, and definitely lose the potential to profit from selling the property. (Notice the assumption that the government has a 'right' to profit from plunder!)."

Malic would surely be aware of the fact that, as in my own home village, most property was owned by a few rich families forcing most of Serbia's peasants to live in servitude and poverty, i.e. as "Serfs". Given that such a land distribution was no doubt unnatural we can expect that these families acquired these lands through "plunder". After the war many of these "Serfs" acquired land and a home of their own, land which previously "belonged" to the village oligarchs. Many Serbs today have only the land that was bequeathed to them in the past. Malic would have them lose that as well, returning to the glories of the past when most Serbs lived in serfdom.

One gets the impression that Malic would have the royal family, the church and the arrogant, venal traditional oligarchs (despised by most Serbs) be granted back "their property" forcing many poverty stricken families into homelessness. Now Malic may consider this to be "libertarianism" but any objective reader will readily appreciate that it is anything but. As far as "compensation" goes I for one would oppose it; why should they be compensated for losing something which never rightfully belonged to them in the first place?

The property of Serbia belongs to the people of Serbia, not to the state, the party, the church, the royal family, nor the oligarchy. A consistent libertarian could not possibly disagree. In this respect the land distribution policy of the communists was just and ought not be reversed. This is good instance of one of the key differences between left wing Anarchism and right wing Anarchism and a good demonstration of the former's superiority over the latter.

~ Marko B.

Nebojsa Malic replies:

I am aware that property claims in Serbia are somewhat confusing, but one thing is abundantly clear: that property DOES NOT belong to the government; any government, regardless of how much 'of the people, for the people and by the people' it claims to be (and the more it claims, the less it is, usually). Therefore I must disagree with your claim that 'property of Serbia belongs to the people of Serbia,' as it is meaningless. The past five decades have shown the disastrous impact of collective or state property on any sort of economic progress. The only real property of Serbia is its territory – and even that is in danger of being stripped away. How can the Serbian government be expected to protect anyone's property rights (a basic function of the state, if one wishes to accept it) when 1. it doesn't recognize them to begin with, and 2. it cannot or will not even protect its own (Kosovo)?

Mike Ewens Replies

I love the website soo much, I am 14 years old and one of maybe 10 antiwar people in my grade, I just love reading your articles. I learn a lot while I see what's going on in the world. I print a lot of your columns out and put them on my "peace wall." I would just like to thank you for making this. So many people call me too opinionated, and I'm glad someone else is too!

~ Brooke L.

Student Coordinator Mike Ewens replies:

Thanks for the email! We always love to hear that people find our work worthwhile. I hope that we keep producing material for you peace wall (great idea!).

Don't let people tell you that you are too opinionated...so long as you are not dogmatic and keep an open mind, having principled positions on important issues is a good thing. Hey, tell me what size T-shirt you wear and your mailing address, and we will send you a free Antiwar.com T-shirt from our online store [coming soon]!

I don't know much about international law, and I'm not quite sure if you do or not, but I thought I'd ask this question: can George W. Bush and the U.S. government be taken to court, by an individual or an organization, for their illegal war against Iraq? or are they above the law?

~ Andrew S.

Mike Ewens replies:

Thanks for the question. Although I am not a lawyer, nor an expert in international law, I do know a little history.

The answer to your question depends on what you mean by "illegality." Did the US violate international law? Well, that depends on what part of it you refer to. The US government is selective when it comes to a recognition of international law. They utilize it when it helps, for instance the reduction of WMDs and arresting Milosevic, and ignore it when they don't like what it means for policy...UN Security Council approval for war or landmine elimination. Thus, I think it would be very difficult for the US government to recognize an international law it violates; it will merely say that the law doesn't apply to America (read: they will proclaim they are sovereign).

Now, an American will have just as much luck suing the government. The struggle arises because you have to use government courts to sue the government (they have a monopoly on lawmaking and judging). Despite the disregard for the Constitution (no where does it say the federal government has a role in disarming nations or "liberating" them), the final say regarding the legality of government actions resides in the Supreme Court...again an arm of the government.

Overall, there is little hope in suing the government. I honestly don't think that it is the best place to focus one's energy. Instead, concentrate on a grassroots effort: show people the facts and convince them why this war was wrong. Once a movement of educated and energized individuals forms, the chances of such a war as the one on Iraq happening again is greatly reduced.

I don’t understand why people suddenly start to question about the Iraq’s WMDs, long after the war ended.

Since Saddam did not use his alleged WMDs during the war, only two interpretations remain valid:

1) The WMDs did not exist.
2) They did exist, but Saddam did not use them.

In the first case, the coalition forces won war only to prove that they were wrong. In the second case, Saddam was awfully misunderstood. He was too humanitarian to use any WMDs even to his fatal enemies. He deserves a Nobel Peace prize.

~ Y. Hoffman

Mike Ewens replies:

I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that he should get the Nobel.

The non-use of these supposed weapons does demonstrate perhaps a third point…he feared the wrath of American might in response to their use. More likely though, many of the chemical weapons he may have had were degraded beyond use and his “missile system” could shoot but two weak scuds into the Kuwaiti desert. I suspect that Saddam was the weakling many of us antiwar pundits said he was all along; a man who preferred to save his neck before attempting to fight off the Goliath called “The Coalition” (thus not a threat to America).

Regarding "Libertarianism in the Age of Empire" by Justin Raimondo:

Thank you for an outstanding essay, and website.

Right after 9/11, I was stunned to discover that the Objectivist Center – which promotes and refines "Randian" ideas – was in favor of the war on Afghanistan, and the Bush "War on Terrorism". Moreover, the Center's stable of Randian writers unanimously chose to ignore any connection between radical Muslim hostility toward the United States, and our government's 20th century history of brutal military adventuring. Each of the Center's editorialists chose to engage in a surrealistic and enormous exercise of historical context-dropping.

It has since occurred to me that a big reason for the pro-war stance of Ayn Rand objectivists is this: they have swallowed uncritically the dogmatized, sanitized history of World War II that was written by the American left, and that upholds American involvement as a sort of holy war.

But this full-hearted embrace by Randians of the virtue of World War II reveals a glaring and fundamental inconsistency in their political outlook. What I admire so much about Rand and the objectivist movement is its emphasis on the primacy of reason; its bedrock, reality-bound explanation of the nature and source of moral principles; and its uncompromising and passionate defense of individual liberty. No other philosophical movement explains epistemology, ethics, and politics with such coherence and intellectual force. No other philosophical movement can provide a rock solid justification for the existence of individual rights.

Tragically, however, objectivists – and possibly Rand herself if she were alive today – do not apply or uphold Rand's ideas consistently. For with all the brilliant pathbreaking Randians have achieved in the realm of ethics and natural rights; and with all the appropriate emphasis given to logically proving the existence of rights as objective ethical principles, Randians are schizophrenic when the topic is foreign policy. Suddenly, rights become hazy, and of secondary importance.

Clearly, it is simply impossible to reconcile objectivist ideas of individualism, minimal or "voluntary" taxation, freedom from conscription, and a severely-restricted "night-watchman state", with the historical reality of World War II. Most Randians seem not to be aware of this giant disconnect, because they consider American involvement in that war as the triumph of the forces of liberty, swooping down like an avenging angel on dictators and collectivist thugs. Once they have embraced FDR as an American foreign-policy hero, cheering on the military adventures of Bush I and II is but a quarter step away.

Thanks for your great work on behalf of individual liberty!

~ Mark Humphrey

Regarding "We Were Right" by Justin Raimondo:

Justin Raimondo makes a comment in this article:

"...Americans are new at this game of Empire, but they are about to be baptized in blood and fire."

I've read comments similar to the above quote by Mr. Raimondo before by people like Pat Buchanan and other libertarian or so-called paleo-conservatives but what's "new" about American imperialism? What about the Philippines, Hawaii, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, China and Mexico, etc? All of these countries had to endure invasions, occupations, interventions, annexations and "colonial" rule by the US starting at the beginning of the last century. As retired Marine General Smedley Butler put it in 1931:

"...I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." ...

Mr. Raimondo is also always going on about the ex-Trotskyists among the Neo-cons as if the left is somehow responsible for not only their own transgressions but all of the Rights as well. This is silly. For one thing a number of very important figures on the right were never left wingers, i.e. William Buckley and Pat Buchanan. Pat Buchanan, now of the anti-imperialist Right (good for him), for most of his life was propagandist/ soldier in the Neo-cons' war against third world independence.

It's also justified to point out that the Neo-cons that were Trotskyists are "EX" Trotskyists. Most of the people who are still Left whether Trot or not were organizing the demonstrations against the recent war that libertarians attended because there were no Libertarian or Paleo-conservative organized demos (that I am aware of). Most of the right was on the pro-war side or didn't give a damn.

I like Antiwar.com and read your site regularly. Mr. Raimondo's articles are very good also but you should examine your own ideological blind spots and hypocrisies as well as the left's and the Neo-cons'.

~ Bob Ransdell, Soquel, California

Justin Raimondo is right when he writes that the antiwar movement was right, but I am puzzled at his maintaining that "Americans are new at this game of Empire". America does not have the biggest military-industrial complex for nothing – and, by the way, the American military-industrial complex is not a Mr Bush creation. In a way, the developments of Bush the Second administration are welcome if only because it has shown in the open what for decades was done under cover.

~ Ana Williams, UK

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~ Buddhadev Chakraborty

Regarding "Despite Thin Intelligence Reports, US Plans To Overthrow Iranian Regime" Jason Leopold:

While I live in an area far removed from the Middle East, I am no stranger to violence, having lived through the Terror unleashed by Sendero Luminoso. The key element in finally defeating this scourge, and in destroying the MRTA guerrillas, was clear intelligence and planning. Probably because we are still a developing country, these things matter to us, as we expect to get the results we aimed for. The preservation of our own way of life, not the suffering of the imposition of foreign-bred ideologies.

Unfortunately, it does seem that hegemonic states have a tendency to run half baked into muddles which eventually become tar babies. The idea that the American state is well-loved and perceived as a liberator seems to be a well-cherished illusion of the American establishment; but it is, alas, a pernicious illusion. One of your most respected Senators (whose name unfortunately escapes my memory) wrote a book called The Arrogance of Power, referring to one of the many American interventions in the Dominican Republic (1963, I believe, when they installed general Wessin y Wessin). There he outlined the blind ignorance which motivated such an intervention and the repression which followed. All in the name of Democracy, of course.

Reality bears little resemblance to this.

In general, outside a self-seeking or befuddled minority, the (so-called) Silent Minority perceives the American establishment as the dagger tip of multinational corporations out to sack our countries. You may have seen on TV that this Silent Minority is now assailing the most unpopular president ever to disgrace the Presidential Office here in Peru. The perception is that he is being backed not only by the multinational who funded his campaign but also by the American ambassador, who recently hailed him as a 'democrat'.

If this is the general perception the American establishment has of 'promoting democratic values', then this viewpoint can only be classified (if not stigmatized) as a most provincial Wilsonianism, out to remake the World according to principles which seem to be breaking down even in the United States itself.

Returning to the Iran situation, a good reading of history would show that Iran has always been more 'clerically oriented' than most other states. And this comes all the way since (at least) 500 BC (yes, BC) when the official, national religion was Zoroastrism. So there is nothing new in this so-called radical and authoritarian stance from the Iranian people. ...

If truth were openly told, the real reason behind all this democratization of the world is removing national characteristics and denationalizing people so that a homogeneous culture can be established; one in which resistance to foreign economic penetration (it was called 'Yankee imperialism' before) can proceed apace. History is full of such examples; such as it is full of examples paralleling the infamous 'Old Europe"speech. I fear that the particular personage who so ignorantly insulted the nation which aided the fledging USA in the hour of need will live to rue the day.

Let us just hope that the American people do not have to listen to words similar to those uttered by a defeated Dacian chief (from what is modern Rumania) as he was led chained in one of many triumph processions in Rome: "the Romans make a desert and then call it Peace". Nor do they have to live in fear, as we did for 10 long years while we fought against the Khmer Rouge clone, Sendero Luminoso.

~ Leonard Ernest Hussey, Lima, Peru

Regarding "Lies Reporters Tell" by Nebojsa Malic:

As you properly illustrate New York Times reporter Jason Blair simply embellished his news reports with added imaginative detail.. There is no evidence that anyone was maligned or harmed. Meanwhile countless reporters have reported on what happened in Bosnia or Kosovo, without personal knowledge, but relying on what some other person said or wrote. In consequence the story of 200,000 dead in Bosnia, supposed to be mainly unarmed Muslims slaughtered by Serbs is established as fact, while the true figure seems to be between 40 and 60 thousand, of all three groups Serbs, Croats and Muslims mainly in the course of battle. It is the Serbs that are accused of "ethnic cleansing" in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo while the UN Committee on refugees has illustrated that there are over 900,000 Serb refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in Serbia where they are in poor condition with foreign help only from the International Red Cross.

Milosevic is accused of seeking to drive the Albanians out of Kosovo (he stated that no "Citizen of Yugoslavia" would be deported, but only those that had entered illegally from Albania). It is however open knowledge that the Kosovo Albanians have always wanted to drive out all the Serbs and have been successful in driving out most of them.

How many reporters have used this false information without checking its veracity?

How much damage has this caused to the Serbs.?

~ Geoffrey Wasteneys, Canada

Cause of Terrorism

Just finished reading, "Lie and Conquer" by Herr Baroud. There is one small section in his article that I would like to expand on.

"Many knew in advance that overthrowing the Taliban would change nothing in the equation, because it is injustice and oppression that breed terrorism, not a tiny regime that was engaged in endless tribal civil wars."

No doubt injustice and oppression breed terrorism. However, as a nation do we want to go around the world sticking our nose into other people business in a perpetual war on terror?

Of course not, and really, does it matter if there is terror in Sri Lanka, the West Bank, Gaza, Chechnya, et al? No. How has terror in this area affected US citizens?

It hasn't really. And why haven't Basques, Tamils, IRA, and other assorted riff raff, err freedom fighters, or whatever, not attacked us? Simply, we haven't stuck our nose into their business. Why did Hezbollah attack us in Lebanon when we sent in Marines? Why are our forces subject to 'terror' attacks in Iraq? Why did Al Qaeda strike after we came to Saudi, but forgot to leave? I leave the answer as an exercise to the reader.

~ Jim Vinsel, Oregon

Regarding "Mini-Nukes" by Mike Ewens:

The normal preference of the nuclear weapons and related arms lobbies is for their operations to be secret. When publicity is given to what they do, it is serving some other agenda.

The most recent manifestation of nuclear weapons scaremongering was over the alleged Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. That particular scaremongering made no significant use of ideologically motivated anti-nuclear activists, but that was merely because of its implausibility. Whenever there can be mobilisations of sincere antinuclear activists – people who will work without pay for ideological reasons – such mobilisations are encouraged.

I first perceived this logic at work in the celebrations of the INF Treaty in 1987, where antinuclear activists celebrated the destruction of "an entire category of nuclear weapons". The INF Treaty was billed as the first step in a process to culminate in universal nuclear disarmament, but what antinuclear activists were really celebrating was the demise of the World Peace Council, the old-style-Communist peace movement that insisted on having a single rule for both Soviet and American nuclear weapons.

In 1991, immediately following the failure of the Communist coup against Gorbachev, there was another outbreak of nuclear weapons danger-mongering. Suddenly huge amounts of publicity were being given to NATO plans to introduce a new air-to-surface nuclear missile called TASM. The TASM campaign against new NATO nuclear weapons effectively served the purpose of distracting attention from what the antinuclear movements should have been concentrating on at that time: Russian nuclear weapons.

Yeltsin had come to power, with the support – let us not forget – of the most radical sections of the Western extra-parliamentary Left, with hopes of pursuing radical nuclear disarmament, not just of the other Soviet nuclear weapons republics: Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine, but also of Russia.

Yeltsin's radical antinuclear intentions became clear at a conference in Moscow with Western political leaders not long after the defeat of the Communist coup. This was the time when the Western nonaligned antinuclear movements that had celebrated their defeat of the World Peace Council in 1987 should have been putting all their support behind Yeltsin to achieve as radical a reduction of the Russian nuclear arsenal as possible, even its complete dismantlement, which Yeltsin indicated in a speech to the Duma on 3rd September 1991, that he would like to see. But the nuclear weapons theme that was dominating the international media in those weeks was NATO's TASM.

Most of Yeltsin's antinuclear weapons proposals of that time were successfully ignored, and indeed after 1991 it was only in reaction to extreme provocation that Yeltsin was ever again to try to mount the antinuclear bandwagon. For example in the mid-1990s of the German Christian Democrats attempted to win a federal election by scaremongering over alleged smuggling of nuclear weapons materials from Russia (the German secret police had been carrying out a number of "sting operations" to lure impoverished Russian scientists into selling nuclear materials on the black market). Yeltsin responded to this by launching a short-lived revival in the United Nations of some of Gorbachev's anti-nuclear-weapons rhetoric, which once against died through lack of Western response.

What is the hidden agenda behind the new scaremongering over mini-nukes?

Firstly, to give the United Nations a new antinuclear role to help people to forget the UN's humiliation over Iraq, where what was formerly characterized by half the Security Council as an illegal invasion based on an illegal doctrine of preemptive war, has now been retrospectively legitimated. Secondly to reinforce the warnings that "US unilateralism" encourages nuclear proliferation by leading non-nuclear weapons states to believe that nuclear weapons possession is the only way of protecting a state from a US attack.

...Even Noam Chomsky has joined the chorus of this sometimes disingenuous, always purportedly "antinuclear", stoking of nuclear weapons proliferation, based on assertions that fly in the face of all experience, from the experience of the nuclear-weapons possessing former Soviet Union (vast areas of which are now occupied by United States military forces) to the experience of Iraq (the attack on which was justified by its allegedly attempting to do what is now billed as a way to avoid being attacked).

Let us leave the issue of mini-nukes for American antinuclear activists to deal with. They at least, as Americans, should not be accused of that lack of respect for American national sovereignty that is inevitably attributed (in electioneering rhetoric to the America's "patriotic" political constituency) to anyone else who in any way disparages the American national totem: its nuclear arsenal. Which is not, of course, to say that they will not be.

The international antinuclear movement does not need to lend its weight to disingenuous danger-mongering whose real intention is to try to restore the tattered credibility of the United Nations. By all means support Greenpeace, Antiwar.com and others in their campaign against mini-nukes, but remind them again and again that danger-mongering should be left to those who think they have something to gain from reducing the population to a state of terror. That does not include antinuclear activists.

~ Wayne Hall, Athens, Greece

Regarding Ken Smith's letter posted May 27:

Ken Smith's letter was imaginative and interesting, but leaves quite a few question marks.

For one thing, the "72 year cycle" theory of American history (with its various elaborations) may not continue to operate in the future.

Assuming for the sake of argument that it will, however, it is highly questionable whether the Bush regime is really much of a change from standard 20th Century US foreign or domestic policy, except perhaps in magnitude. Remember that the other "72 year milestones" were the adoption of the Constitution after the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. The Bush regime and the "911"/ terrorism/ imperialist frenzy are hardly in the same league of revolutionary historical crises. Beware the current heat-of-the-moment "everything has changed" GOP/ warmonger myopia/ spin. Bush looks more like the last gasp of the 1933 cycle, than the 21st-century-shaping "Next Big Change" 2005 is still a couple years away, and the next 72-year node may come a few years late, rather than a few years early due to Gore's "surprise" defeat as Smith contends – how's that for tweaking a theory to "predict" desired outcomes?

Smith's view of the next 72-year cycle, though rosy from a "business as usual" Republican Imperialist point of view, is economically doubtful. Consider: escalating US government debt, long-term US economic decline (individual after-tax/ inflation incomes have dropped steadily since the early 1970s), increasing percentage of GDP consumed/ controlled by government (federal/ state/ local spending an unfunded mandates now total 52% of GDP, not counting Dubya's increases, and rising fast, up from 2% at the Founding, 10% under FDR, 25% under LBJ, and 45% under Reagan), rampaging economic regulation/ cartelization, Social Security insolvency, a fiat money system based on bad loans to deadbeat foreign States, the exploding waste of national wealth on futile/ blowback-generating military adventures, and many other steadily-worsening, long-term, endemic problems.

All these things, and more, indicate a US Welfare/ Warfare/ Police State that is headed for disastrous bankruptcy and political/economic collapse, a la debt-ridden France right before the French Revolution. Exactly the sort of statist Gotterdammerung/ Apocalypse that would fit the questionable-at-best "72 year cycle" theory. And hardly the stuff of a stable 21st century global Pax Americana or some hard-ass GOP wet dream (or, alternately, some self-defeating, economically/ historically
illiterate dystopian/ pessimist/ masochist fantasy, a la the conservatives' Eternal Communist Threat or Orwell's "boot stomping on a human face forever", etc.– sorry guys, all tyrannies and empires eventually self-destruct, they just don't work economically).

When this political/ economic eschaton "immanentizes" itself (any R.A. Wilson fans out there?), my bet is a radicalized "return" to America's libertarian cultural/ ideological roots (which were at best quasi-libertarian in political-economic practice). Not for any idealistic reasons or out of wishful thinking, but simply because freaked-out political activists, shell-shocked by vast political/ economic disasters, tend to dump the existing/ failed paradigm (which today is an unstable mix of welfarism, imperialism, police-statism, corporatism, socialism, and enviro-statism – all headed for the dumpster) and latch onto either the latest untried ideology (note 1917 Russia) or the ways of an idealized past (note 1930s Germany). And in America, free-market libertarianism, which has only developed into an untested ideological program since the 1960s despite deeper historical roots, could be interpreted or marketed either way (or both ways, to different audiences).

Well, 2005, the next test of the "72-year cycle" theory, is only a couple years away, so we'll see what happens. ...

~ Peter Brow, Webmaster, Nation Of Liberty