Peace activists
How far should anyone be willing to go to right an injustice? In his "debate" with Bill O'Reilly, Michael Moore suggests that brutal dictatorships and other tyrannies are overthrown by spontaneous uprisings.
Moore isn't the only one making such wishful claims, nor is he the first. Other politicians spoke up before, but to little effect. About this, one prominent Democrat was quoted, while still in the minority, thus:
I am a proponent of local rather than national government. The original constitution of the country, embodied within the document of the same name, was of a union of states joined for national defense, but holding sovereignty within the states themselves. It is the reason the Senate exists (each state is represented equally there, regardless of population), and the reason the Electoral College was created (to give weight to states at least as much as people).
The Democratic politician cited above was Clement Vallandingham, a leader of the Copperhead movement. Copperheads were generally sympathetic to the South, but their motives are as unclear as those of some of the current anti-war Democrats. It seems that they were in favor of both states rights (good) and slavery (bad) when they may have been in fact simply in favor of peace (very good). On the topic of the Civil War, libertarians usually favor the pro-peace, pro-states' rights side, offering various arguments to blunt the criticism that this makes them pro-slaveholder. Having been through this experience, I understand the experience of the modern equivalent of the Copperhead, whose anti-was stance makes them (if you accept the terms of their opponents) pro-Saddam.
The arguments offered to blunt the pro-slavery accusation may approach the issue from the doomed structure of that kind of society (the oppressed outnumber the oppressors and would have eventually risen up as they did earlier in Haiti), from the economic unsustainability (it would have eventually become obvious that paying them would be less expensive than feeding, clothing, and housing them, and their motivation and productivity would be higher), or from the angle that it would have been cheaper for abolitionists to simply purchase the slaves (freeing some and raising the value of the remainder to the point that it would no longer be in the interest of holders to abuse them). While interesting, I find these uncompelling. A more ignorant accusation is that capitalism itself supported slavery, when in fact the capitalist North opposed it and that only the state -- more specifically, the pro-agrarian Southern variety -- made slavery possible. Without the state there was no law, no sheriff, no posse, no possibility of keeping hordes of healthy workers under your thumb.
In the final analysis, I have found Tibor Machan's argument to be wholly consistent with libertarian (though not anarchist) values. Machan, taking up the question of whether Lincoln's attacks on free speech, property rights, and habeas corpus and whether his ambiguity on questions of slavery and race makes him a racist, a bad American, and bad president, decides to the contrary:
And when you talk about the American Civil War being "on", Catton leaves little doubt as to how bad it could be. Over 600,000 total dead, 400,000 wounded, totalling about 3% of the population (1 in 30, or 1 in 15 men). The power of these books is not their detailed statistics (that might even be a shortcoming - the preceding figures come from Wikipedia); it is instead in the details of the men who had to fight on the front lines. The major officer figures -- little Mac McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, Meade, Grant, Upton -- are profiled as needed, and the fringe politicians -- Vallandingham and others -- receive similar treatment when the narrative requires context, but the overwhelming narrative is from the point of view of the soldier himself. The war technology of that era gave advantage to defense, but the officers were taught and the political climate required offense. The result was wholesale slaughter, as officers sent or led thousands into the enemy's maw. Where are the reparations for the men who died or their families?
How fair is it that I compare the Copperheads of that era to those who prefer peace today? My only point was that war can be much more complicated than most people want to admit. If you accept the principles on which the Union was founded, then the Civil War seems to have been a tarnished but successful struggle for which it would be difficult to make a utilitarian argument (which I mention because I continue to struggle against utilitarianism). What are the similarities and differences between the Copperheads and today's peaceniks?
Though most would admit that war was bad, they admitted then that slavery was worse. Coming back to the utilitarian calculus, how many dead or wounded men were worth one freed slave? The mortally wounded suffers but a few moments, while the slave suffers a lifetime. However, the slave may endure a lifetime of hope, while the dead man is deprived of future happiness. It's an impossible calculus, but one which most people would agree was ultimately worthwhile.
Or was it? If the war had not been fought, and instead the secession had been allowed, the United States might today be broken up into two or possibly even more smaller nations, some of which might have combined with Canadian territories or Mexico. Slavery probably would have endured in the South for a few more years until it was ended by insurrection or enlightenment or both. We might all today live in something a great deal more like Swiss cantons or the original United States rather than the modern, monolithic, ambitious, leviathan called America. Or, having abandoned slavery, the South might have rejoined the Union.
Should the same path be taken today with Iraq? Saddam was reportedly killing 10,000 people a year, and occasionally stirring up wars with his neighbors; assuming this might have gone on for a generation or more, and that the situation in Iraq will soon improve, the war will result in an improvement compared to what might have been. On the other hand, since the fall of the Ba'athists, researchers have calculated a horrific butcher's bill of 100,000 additional deaths -- are those worth the additional freedom that could come to the Iraqis (but at this time has still eluded them)? On the other hand, Saddam's reign would have ended eventually anyhow, so perhaps the factional violence would have come after another 20 years of 10,000 per year.
Even if we could sort out all of those hypotheticals, we still have the problem that fighting our fellow countrymen to free slaves is quite different than going around the world to free Shias and Kurds from Saddam. On the other hand, why shouldn't we? If there is a moral imperative to free people from tyrants, it would seem that this is the right thing to and ignoring the other instances is the wrong thing. On the other hand, if we were to build a system that could actually be capable of going about and freeing people from the world's tyrants, it seems likely that we would become just such a society ourselves since it would require a massive state apparatus built around a military and run by a man or group with no sense of compunction about sending men to their deaths (and probably a lot of things less serious).
It has to be recognized, after all, that Lincoln went through several commanders before he finally settled on Grant. Winfield Scott was too old, McClellan was too reluctant, Burnside was incompetent, and Hooker was perhaps the victim of fate or of the superiority of Lee's tactical skills. In Grant, Lincoln finally found a general who would fight, and moreover who understood "total war", remorselessly sending thousands to die, holding Lee by the collar while Sherman marched on Atlanta, destroying Lee's foraging ground by destroying the Mennonite and Amish farms in the Shenandoah Valley, and grinding away on Lee until the attrition finally took its toll. Though that toll fell hardest on the men who fought at the front, it continues to fall on every generation since as governors then turned more of their sovereignty over to Washington, and Washington was transformed from a sleepy little artificial martial parade ground into the center of American power. The current conflict continues to reinforce that trend.
O'REILLY: Look, if you were running [Saddam] would still be sitting there.The problem with this is that we can't tell if Moore is just being disingenuous or is really that naive. These dictatorships may go on for generations, but his point of view is that we should let them, no matter (apparently) how bad they are, because war is wrong, full stop. It isn't clear why war is wrong but uprisings are okay despite the massively violent French Revolution and South African uprisings and the fairly violent American Revolution. He maintains that democracy can't be introduced from the barrel of a gun despite the examples of both WWI and WWII. Unfortunately for him, the world does not yield to clever slogans, which is all Mr. Moore seems to master (his other great contribution to this debate has been the "Would you sacrifice your own child" canard, which I disposed of here).
MOORE: How do you know that?
O'REILLY: If you were running the country, he'd still be sitting there.
MOORE: How do you know that?
O'REILLY: You wouldn't have removed him.
MOORE: Look, let me tell you something in the 1990s look at all the brutal dictators that were removed. Things were done; you take any of a number of countries whether its Eastern Europe, the people rose up. South Africa the whole world boycotted ...
O'REILLY: When Reagan was building up the arms, you were against that.
MOORE: And the dictators were gone. Building up the arms did not cause the fall of Eastern Europe.
O'REILLY: Of course it did, it bankrupted the Soviet Union and then it collapsed.
MOORE: The people rose up.
O'REILLY: Why? Because they went bankrupt.
MOORE: the same way we did in our country, the way we had our revolution. People rose up ...
O'REILLY: All right, all right.
MOORE: ... that's how you, let me ask you this question.
O'REILLY: One more.
MOORE: How do you deliver democracy to a country? You don't do it down the barrel of a gun. That's not how you deliver it.
O'REILLY: You give the people some kind of self-determination, which they never would have had under Saddam ...
MOORE: Why didn't they rise up?
O'REILLY: Because they couldn't, it was a Gestapo-led place where they got their heads cut off ...
MOORE: Well that's true in many countries throughout the world ...
O'REILLY: It is, it's a shame ...
MOORE: ... and you know what people have done, they've risen up. You can do it in a number of ways. You can do it our way through a violent revolution, which we won, the French did it that way. You can do it by boycotting South Africa, they overthrew the dictator there. There's many ways ...
Moore isn't the only one making such wishful claims, nor is he the first. Other politicians spoke up before, but to little effect. About this, one prominent Democrat was quoted, while still in the minority, thus:
He talk[s] sarcastically of "King [Bush]," specifically denounce[s] [The Patriot Act], and repeat[s] all of his familiar arguments seeing the war as a step toward despotism and demanding an immediate peace. [In] a wild, fire-eating speech, coming tolerably close to an outright declaration of sympathy for the [Ba'athists] .... "The war [...] is, in your hands, a most bloody and costly failure .... War for the [original cause] was abandoned; war for the [victims of tyranny] openly begun, and with stronger battalions than before. With what success? Let the dead [...] answer." He want[s] peace, and peace at once, and he cried: "Ought this war to continue? I answer no -- not a day, not an hour. What then? Shall we [cut and run]? Again I answer no, no, no!" His program was simple, based upon faith: "Stop fighting. Make an armistice. Accept at once friendly [international] mediation."... [He] had denounced the war as "wicked, cruel, and unnecessary" and had had said in so many words that it was not being waged to [save the country from terrorists] but "for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism."The basic problem, of course, is that it is difficult to sort the problems of opposing war and opposing the party in power.
Among the possible victims of circumstance in this [period] were the Democrats who made up a majority of the [..] legislature. Without realizing it these men were struggling against the fact that the American political system, wide enough for many things, had not by the founding fathers been made wide enough to contain [wartime dissent]. They were Democrats taking normal advantage of the fact that they had won an election, and what they were running into was the fact that there was no way, in this moment of all-out war, by which they could do no less than oppose the war itself. There could be no delicate shadings of action or belief. The administration was fighting for complete victory; to stand against the administration in the ordinary way, using the grips, feints, and arm locks of normal political struggling, meant in actual practice to stand for something less than victory -- something a good deal less, perhaps, if the wrestling got a really strenuous, so that the struggle might finally appear to be a struggle against the war itself rather than simply against the people who were conducting the war.In addition to the problem of the struggle between the parties over the war, and over those conducting the war, and how far to go in this struggle, there is also the question of what weapons to use.
Among the assembling Democrats there were stout [patriots] who opposed the [war to free the people] and the [increases in executive powers]; among them, also, were others who wanted only to have the war end -- with a [...] victory if possible, without it if necessary. And there were also men who saw the war consuming precious freedoms and creating tyranny, who blended extreme political partisanship with blind fury against the war party and who at least believed they were ready to strike back without caring much which weapon they used.I admit that the setup above and the book quotes above are intended to mislead. They are in fact from Bruce Catton's three volume series, The Army of the Potomac. The politics of the war were only slightly less complex than those of the current war in which we find ourselves. Although he doesn't go deeply into it, Catton does touch on the ways the Civil War changed the national character, and not necessarily all for the better.
I am a proponent of local rather than national government. The original constitution of the country, embodied within the document of the same name, was of a union of states joined for national defense, but holding sovereignty within the states themselves. It is the reason the Senate exists (each state is represented equally there, regardless of population), and the reason the Electoral College was created (to give weight to states at least as much as people).
The Democratic politician cited above was Clement Vallandingham, a leader of the Copperhead movement. Copperheads were generally sympathetic to the South, but their motives are as unclear as those of some of the current anti-war Democrats. It seems that they were in favor of both states rights (good) and slavery (bad) when they may have been in fact simply in favor of peace (very good). On the topic of the Civil War, libertarians usually favor the pro-peace, pro-states' rights side, offering various arguments to blunt the criticism that this makes them pro-slaveholder. Having been through this experience, I understand the experience of the modern equivalent of the Copperhead, whose anti-was stance makes them (if you accept the terms of their opponents) pro-Saddam.
The arguments offered to blunt the pro-slavery accusation may approach the issue from the doomed structure of that kind of society (the oppressed outnumber the oppressors and would have eventually risen up as they did earlier in Haiti), from the economic unsustainability (it would have eventually become obvious that paying them would be less expensive than feeding, clothing, and housing them, and their motivation and productivity would be higher), or from the angle that it would have been cheaper for abolitionists to simply purchase the slaves (freeing some and raising the value of the remainder to the point that it would no longer be in the interest of holders to abuse them). While interesting, I find these uncompelling. A more ignorant accusation is that capitalism itself supported slavery, when in fact the capitalist North opposed it and that only the state -- more specifically, the pro-agrarian Southern variety -- made slavery possible. Without the state there was no law, no sheriff, no posse, no possibility of keeping hordes of healthy workers under your thumb.
In the final analysis, I have found Tibor Machan's argument to be wholly consistent with libertarian (though not anarchist) values. Machan, taking up the question of whether Lincoln's attacks on free speech, property rights, and habeas corpus and whether his ambiguity on questions of slavery and race makes him a racist, a bad American, and bad president, decides to the contrary:
Still, when it comes to endorsing southern secession it is not enough to point out Lincoln's failures in his position on slavery. More important is whether one group may leave a larger group that it had been part of -- and in the process take along unwilling third parties. The seceding group definitely does not have that right. Putting it in straightforward terms, yes, a divorce (or, more broadly, the right of peaceful exit from a partnership) may not be denied to anyone unless -- and this is a very big "unless" -- those wanting to leave intend to take along hostages.Once you grant that, as they say, it's on.
Seceding from the American union could perhaps be morally unobjectionable. It isn't that significant whether it is legally objectionable because, after all, slavery itself was legally unobjectionable, yet something had to be done about it. And to ask the slaves to wait until the rest of the people slowly undertook to change the Constitution seems obscene.
And when you talk about the American Civil War being "on", Catton leaves little doubt as to how bad it could be. Over 600,000 total dead, 400,000 wounded, totalling about 3% of the population (1 in 30, or 1 in 15 men). The power of these books is not their detailed statistics (that might even be a shortcoming - the preceding figures come from Wikipedia); it is instead in the details of the men who had to fight on the front lines. The major officer figures -- little Mac McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, Meade, Grant, Upton -- are profiled as needed, and the fringe politicians -- Vallandingham and others -- receive similar treatment when the narrative requires context, but the overwhelming narrative is from the point of view of the soldier himself. The war technology of that era gave advantage to defense, but the officers were taught and the political climate required offense. The result was wholesale slaughter, as officers sent or led thousands into the enemy's maw. Where are the reparations for the men who died or their families?
How fair is it that I compare the Copperheads of that era to those who prefer peace today? My only point was that war can be much more complicated than most people want to admit. If you accept the principles on which the Union was founded, then the Civil War seems to have been a tarnished but successful struggle for which it would be difficult to make a utilitarian argument (which I mention because I continue to struggle against utilitarianism). What are the similarities and differences between the Copperheads and today's peaceniks?
Though most would admit that war was bad, they admitted then that slavery was worse. Coming back to the utilitarian calculus, how many dead or wounded men were worth one freed slave? The mortally wounded suffers but a few moments, while the slave suffers a lifetime. However, the slave may endure a lifetime of hope, while the dead man is deprived of future happiness. It's an impossible calculus, but one which most people would agree was ultimately worthwhile.
Or was it? If the war had not been fought, and instead the secession had been allowed, the United States might today be broken up into two or possibly even more smaller nations, some of which might have combined with Canadian territories or Mexico. Slavery probably would have endured in the South for a few more years until it was ended by insurrection or enlightenment or both. We might all today live in something a great deal more like Swiss cantons or the original United States rather than the modern, monolithic, ambitious, leviathan called America. Or, having abandoned slavery, the South might have rejoined the Union.
Should the same path be taken today with Iraq? Saddam was reportedly killing 10,000 people a year, and occasionally stirring up wars with his neighbors; assuming this might have gone on for a generation or more, and that the situation in Iraq will soon improve, the war will result in an improvement compared to what might have been. On the other hand, since the fall of the Ba'athists, researchers have calculated a horrific butcher's bill of 100,000 additional deaths -- are those worth the additional freedom that could come to the Iraqis (but at this time has still eluded them)? On the other hand, Saddam's reign would have ended eventually anyhow, so perhaps the factional violence would have come after another 20 years of 10,000 per year.
Even if we could sort out all of those hypotheticals, we still have the problem that fighting our fellow countrymen to free slaves is quite different than going around the world to free Shias and Kurds from Saddam. On the other hand, why shouldn't we? If there is a moral imperative to free people from tyrants, it would seem that this is the right thing to and ignoring the other instances is the wrong thing. On the other hand, if we were to build a system that could actually be capable of going about and freeing people from the world's tyrants, it seems likely that we would become just such a society ourselves since it would require a massive state apparatus built around a military and run by a man or group with no sense of compunction about sending men to their deaths (and probably a lot of things less serious).
It has to be recognized, after all, that Lincoln went through several commanders before he finally settled on Grant. Winfield Scott was too old, McClellan was too reluctant, Burnside was incompetent, and Hooker was perhaps the victim of fate or of the superiority of Lee's tactical skills. In Grant, Lincoln finally found a general who would fight, and moreover who understood "total war", remorselessly sending thousands to die, holding Lee by the collar while Sherman marched on Atlanta, destroying Lee's foraging ground by destroying the Mennonite and Amish farms in the Shenandoah Valley, and grinding away on Lee until the attrition finally took its toll. Though that toll fell hardest on the men who fought at the front, it continues to fall on every generation since as governors then turned more of their sovereignty over to Washington, and Washington was transformed from a sleepy little artificial martial parade ground into the center of American power. The current conflict continues to reinforce that trend.
Labels: book, police-state
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