Murray’s reasoning for including, at least, the war of the Confederacy is dubious. To quote his take on what constitutes a just war:

My own view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.

This viewpoint of Rothbard is not the best take on just war. Rothbard uses the collectivist concept of a people rather than the autonomous individual. This can easily lead to a nationalistic defense of state sovereignty as opposed to a radical defense of individual rights. This is not to deny that human beings exist in a social context. It simply acknowledges that consent is ultimately necessary on an individual level.

Even if one agrees with this viewpoint, it doesn’t legitimize the South’s war. The South was trying to preserve coercive domination over black people. And the Confederacy hypocritically denied slaves the same right of secession that the Confederate government was claiming in relation to the Union. The negative libertarian rights and freedoms of the slaves were not acknowledged by the Confederate state.

There is simply no way of reconciling radical libertarian principle with a defense of the so called Southern War of Independence. This doesn’t mean the Union was perfect or perfectly embodied libertarian ideals either. To quote Roderick Long:

When libertarians on one side point out that the Union centralised power, violated civil liberties, committed vicious war crimes, was hypocritical on secession, ignored avenues for peaceful emancipation, and cared more about tariffs and nationalism than about ending slavery, I agree and applaud; but they lose me when they start calling the Civil War the “Second War of American Independence” and portray the Confederates as freedom fighters.

Equivalently, when libertarians on the other side point out that the preservation and extension of slavery was central to the South’s motivations for secession (as seems clear from what secessionists said at the time of secession, as opposed to what they said in their memoirs years later), and that the Confederacy was just as bloated and oppressive a centralized state as the Union, equally hypocritical on secession and equally invasive of civil liberties, once more I agree and applaud. (As I like to say, the Confederacy was just another failed government program.) But they too lose me, when they start calling Lincoln a great libertarian and the consolidation of federal power a victory for liberty.

The proper position to take is one of opposition to both states alike and support for anarchistic abolitionism of the Lysander Spooner variety.

A number of ideas have been put forward to mediate the amount of innocent victims. Technology philosopher Christine Boshuijzen cites technologically impaired military officials as a reason for civilian deaths. Doctoral student Dieuwertje Kuijpers calls for more democratic accountability for the CIA. Artificial intelligence professor Gustzi Eiben wants to improve drones’ face recognition and tracking software. Computer scientist Arnoud Visser claims the remedy is to fully automate the whole killing process by programming drones with algorithms governing the acceptable margins of error. These changes might very well reduce innocent deaths. Drone warfare would be far more efficient. But is efficiency really the goal?

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The site is something I visit everyday to enjoy the above features. It keeps me abreast of the latest machinations of the warfare state. This has led to a few blog posts on war related current events. If you’d like to see those posts continue; one way to help is to donate to the fundraising drive.

Another reason to contribute is that the financial deck is stacked against the forces of anti-militarism and anti-imperialism. The war party has the whole U.S. treasury at their disposal. Both of the two major party establishments are committed to a policy of statist interventionism. A way of countering this imbalance is to make contributions to sites like Antiwar.com.

In addition to the reason above; Antiwar.com is also worth making a contribution to because of the timely importance of the issues it addresses. In light of further U.S. military intervention in Iraq and continuation of drone strikes; its message is more relevant than ever. We can’t afford to lose a valuable source of information on the warfare state’s policies at a time like this.

As the destructive impact of said policies spreads; we need to keep abreast of developments more than ever. Knowledge is part of challenging oppressive militaristic power structures and the fruits they bear. Antiwar.com does a real service in furthering this aim. An aim that can save countless lives around the globe.

The immense loss of life from U.S. military policy in particular justifies special attention and focus. We can’t afford to lose sight of the importance of battling the evils of U.S. military interventionism. Antiwar.com is an invaluable resource for furthering this agenda. It deserves our support and attention.

The war party responsible for the above doesn’t sleep and neither does Antiwar.com. News is updated daily and new op-eds from around the net appear on a daily basis as well. If you have any extra cash to spare; do consider helping Antiwar.com continue to do this. You will be rewarded many times over by the information and opinion it gives you access to. If you can; please donate today. Don’t put if off. Antiwar.com needs your support today.

La necessità di espandere la guerra con i droni potrebbe dar luogo a quelle innovazioni che gli specialisti invocano. Secondo loro, l’obiettivo sarebbe la riduzione delle vittime civili. Questo attenuerebbe la voglia di vendetta e rappresaglia.

L’obiettivo è nobile. La parola “nobile”, infatti, non potrebbe descrivere meglio la situazione. Nel 1139, papa Innocenzo II emise una bolla che vietava l’uso della balestra al fine di proteggere la nobiltà europea. A quei tempi, la funzione principale della nobiltà europea era di mettere una forza militare costosa e ben addestrata al servizio dei monarchi. La balestra era un’arma economica, facile da usare e molto potente. Con una settimana di addestramento, un semplice contadino poteva uccidere un cavaliere protetto da una pesante armatura. L’idea che un esercito di contadini potesse decimare forze ben più addestrate fu giudicata anti-cavalleresca. Il bando della balestra fu dunque, nel vero senso della parola, “nobile”.

Similmente, quando si trova davanti forze che adottano strategie e tattiche nuove e diverse dal solito, il potere è pronto a bollare il nemico come incivile. I gruppi di militanti, contadini nel vero senso della parola, non rispettano le teorie della guerra legittima, ritualizzata della Nato. La guerra con i droni è considerata una risposta civile che dà legittimità all’intervento americano banalizzando la natura orribile della guerra stessa. Il fatto, però, è che si continua a terrorizzare le popolazioni locali con attacchi indiscriminati. E il rimedio proposto non è la cessazione della guerra, cosa giudicata impensabile e sconveniente, ma il miglioramento della sua esecuzione.

Sono state fatte tante proposte per limitare le vittime innocenti. Christine Boshuijzen, filosofo che studia la tecnologia, cita le scarse conoscenze tecniche degli ufficiali come causa dei morti civili. Dieuwertje Kuijpers, studente di dottorato, chiede una maggiore responsabilità democratica per la Cia. Gustzi Eiben, che insegna intelligenza artificiale, vorrebbe migliorare i software di riconoscimento facciale e tracciatura dei droni. Arnoud Visser, informatico, pensa che il rimedio sarebbe l’automazione totale di tutto il processo di uccisione, ottenibile programmando i droni con algoritmi in grado di ridurre il margine di errore a livelli accettabili. Molto probabilmente, questi cambiamenti porterebbero ad una riduzione delle morti innocenti. La guerra con i droni sarebbe molto più efficiente. Ma è l’efficienza il vero obiettivo?

Pensate a quanto potrebbe crescere l’arroganza dei militari se avessero il drone perfetto. Con la possibilità di regolare minutamente le relazioni di potere regionali con attacchi di precisione, chiunque anche vagamente sospettato di intenzioni terroristiche potrebbe essere assassinato immediatamente con il tocco sterilizzante e civilizzante di un bottone. Uno sguardo vendicativo in direzione della bandiera a stelle e strisce e la possibile recluta terroristica verrebbe subito individuata e trattata come si deve. Gli algoritmi potrebbero anche decidere quali giovani sono maturi per il reclutamento tra i terroristi e ordinare la decimazione immediata di questi dati numerici.

In questa guerra dei droni, se si vuole andare nella direzione giusta, il prossimo passo è l’abolizione immediata. L’aristocrazia, le élite, combattono queste guerre a distanza contro piccoli gruppi di individui che collaborano tra loro formando reti che cambiano continuamente alleanze. Il campo d’azione di questi individui è la vendetta spicciola, la diatriba tribale, l’estremismo religioso e l’instabilità politica. La soluzione è ovviamente la fine dell’interventismo militare e l’abolizione dello stato bellico.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Their goal is noble. In fact “noble” couldn’t be a more apt descriptor. In 1139 Pope Innocent II issued a bull forbidding the use of crossbows in order to protect the position of nobility in European society. The prime function of European nobility at that time was to supply royalty with expensive and well-trained soldiers. The crossbow was a cheap, easy to use, and powerful weapon. With a week’s training a mere peasant could kill a heavily armored knight. The idea of peasant armies decimating skilled forces was deemed void of chivalry. The crossbow’s ban was, literally, “noble.”

When faced with opponents adopting new and different strategies and tactics, the powers that be are quick to declare their opponents uncivilized. Militant groups, peasants in every sense of the word, don’t comply with NATO’s chivalrous, ritualized just-war theory. Drone warfare is seen as a civilized response which legitimatizes the US’s involvement by downplaying the horrible nature of war. Yet the terrorizing of local populations through indiscriminate drone strikes continues. The proposed remedy for this horror is not to cease war — that would be unthinkable and unprofitable — but merely to improve upon its execution.

A number of ideas have been put forward to mediate the amount of innocent victims. Technology philosopher Christine Boshuijzen cites technologically impaired military officials as a reason for civilian deaths. Doctoral student Dieuwertje Kuijpers calls for more democratic accountability for the CIA. Artificial intelligence professor Gustzi Eiben wants to improve drones’ face recognition and tracking software. Computer scientist Arnoud Visser claims the remedy is to fully automate the whole killing process by programming drones with algorithms governing the acceptable margins of error. These changes might very well reduce innocent deaths. Drone warfare would be far more efficient. But is efficiency really the goal?

One can only begin to imagine how a perfect drone feeds the military’s hubris. With the imagined ability to micromanage regional power relations through precision strikes anyone even slightly suspected of terrorist aspirations could be assassinated quickly at the sterile and civilized push of a button. A vengeful glance in the direction of the star-spangled banner and subsequent terrorist recruitment would be easily spotted and dealt with too. Algorithms might even decide which youths are ripe for terrorist recruitment and allow for immediate decimation of these datapoints.

The correct next development in drone warfare is its immediate end. The aristocracy, the elites, are fighting long distance wars against small groups of individuals cooperating in networks of ever changing allegiances, petty vengeance, tribal grudges, religious extremism, and political instability. The clear solution is non-interventionism and abolition of the warfare state.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Guerra “Civilizzata” Significa Guerra Permanente.

Herbert Spencer, the great English libertarian philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th century, eloquently expressed radical liberalism’s antipathy to war and militarism. His writings are full of warnings about the dangers of war and conquest. Young Spencer saw and cheered the rise of the industrial type of society, which was displacing what he called the militant type. The industrial type was founded on equal freedom, consent, and contract, the militant on hierarchy, command, and force. Yet he lived long enough to see a reversal, and his later writings lamented the ascendancy of the old militant traits. We have a good deal to learn from the much-maligned Spencer, who is inexplicably condemned as favoring the “law of the jungle.” This is so laughably opposite of the truth that one couldn’t be blamed for concluding that the calumny is the product of bad faith. As Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long writes,

The textbook summary is absurd, of course. Far from being a proponent of “might makes right,” Spencer wrote that the “desire to command is essentially a barbarous desire” because it “implies an appeal to force,” which is “inconsistent with the first law of morality” and “radically wrong.” While Spencer opposed tax-funded welfare programs, he strongly supported voluntary charity, and indeed devoted ten chapters of his Principles of Ethics to a discussion of the duty of “positive beneficence.”

Spencer jumped on the issues of war and peace right out of the gate. His first book, Social Statics (1851), contains a chapter, “Government Colonization,” that examines the effects of imperialism on both the home and subjugated populations. While formal colonization has gone out of style, many of its key characteristics have been preserved in a new form; thus Spencer’s observations are entirely pertinent.

He starts by pointing out that the “parent” country’s government must violate the rights of its own citizens when it engages in colonial conquest and rule. Spencer advocated just enough government to protect the freedom of the citizens who live under it (although the first edition of his book included the chapter “The Right to Ignore the State,” which he removed from later editions), and he claims that the money spent on colonies necessarily is money not needed to protect that freedom. He writes,

That a government cannot undertake to administer the affairs of a colony, and to support for it a judicial staff, a constabulary, a garrison, and so forth, without trespassing against the parent society, scarcely needs pointing out. Any expenditure for these purposes, be it like our own some three and a half millions sterling a year, or but a few thousands, involves a breach of state-duty. The taking from men property beyond what is needful for the better securing of their rights, we have seen to be an infringement of their rights. Colonial expenditure cannot be met without property being so taken. Colonial expenditure is therefore unjustifiable.

Spencer proceeds to demolish the argument that foreign acquisitions increase the wealth of the parent society, as though such acquisitions are analogous to voluntary trade relations. He writes,

Experience is fast teaching us that distant dependencies are burdens, and not acquisitions. And thus this earliest motive for state-colonization — the craving for wider possessions — will very soon be destroyed by the conviction that territorial aggression is as impolitic as it is unjust.

Any true economic benefits from dealing with foreign populations can be obtained through free trade, he says. He invokes the law of comparative advantage to argue that the parent society loses, not gains, when the government coercively creates artificial foreign markets for products the society can’t produce as efficiently as others can.

As for those on the receiving end of colonial policy, Spencer was blunt: “We … meet nothing but evil results. It is a prettily sounding expression that of mother-country protection, but a very delusive one. If we are to believe those who have known the thing rather than the name, there is but little of the maternal about it.” While the worst practices, he adds, were less common in his time, “kindred iniquities are continued.”

We have but to glance over the newspapers published in our foreign possessions, to see that the arbitrary rule of the Colonial Office is no blessing. Chronic irritation, varying in intensity from that of which petitions are symptomatic, to that exhibited in open rebellions, is habitually present in these forty-six scattered dependencies which statesmen have encumbered us with.

He condemns “the pitiless taxation, that wrings from the poor ryots nearly half the produce of the soil” and “the cunning despotism which uses native soldiers to maintain and extend native subjection — a despotism under which, not many years since, a regiment of sepoys was deliberately massacred, for refusing to march without proper clothing.”

Down to our own day the police authorities league with wealthy scamps, and allow the machinery of the law to be used for purposes of extortion. Down to our own day, so-called gentlemen will ride their elephants through the crops of impoverished peasants; and will supply themselves with provisions from the native villages without paying for them. And down to our own day, it is common with the people in the interior to run into the woods at sight of a European!

Spencer wonders,

Is it not, then, sufficiently clear that this state-colonization is as indefensible on the score of colonial welfare, as on that of home interests? May we not reasonably doubt the propriety of people on one side of the earth being governed by officials on the other? Would not these transplanted societies probably manage their affairs better than we can do it for them?

No one can fail to see that these cruelties, these treacheries, these deeds of blood and rapine, for which European nations in general have to blush, are mainly due to the carrying on of colonization under state-management, and with the help of state-funds and state-force.

Spencer was keenly aware that such criticism of the government was regarded as unpatriotic. In 1902, near the end of his life, he turned his attention to that charge.

In an essay titled “Patriotism,” included in his collection Facts and Comments, he begins, “Were anyone to call me dishonest or untruthful he would touch me to the quick. Were he to say that I am unpatriotic, he would leave me unmoved.”

England may have done things in the past to advance freedom, Spencer says, but “there are traits, unhappily of late more frequently displayed, which do the reverse.”

Contemplation of the acts by which England has acquired over eighty possessions — settlements, colonies, protectorates, &c. — does not arouse feelings of satisfaction. The transitions from missionaries to resident agents, then to officials having armed forces, then to punishments of those who resist their rule, ending in so-called “pacification” — these processes of annexation, now gradual and now sudden, as that of the new Indian province and that of Barotziland, which was declared a British colony with no more regard for the wills of the inhabiting people than for those of the inhabiting beasts – do not excite sympathy with their perpetrators.… If because my love of country does not survive these and many other adverse experiences I am called unpatriotic — well, I am content to be so called.

“To me the cry — ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ seems detestable,” he continues.

Spencer gave no ground on this matter, which he made obvious with a story he relates toward the end of his essay.

Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling — anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called — in a somewhat startling way. It was at the time of the second Afghan war, when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan. News had come that some of our troops were in danger. At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man — then a captain but now a general — drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety. I astounded him by replying — “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.” [Emphasis added.]

Spencer was second to none in his antimilitarism and anti-imperialism, that is, his love of universal individual liberty and all forms of voluntary social cooperation. With heads held high, libertarians can claim him as one of their own.

Another strength of Antiwar.com is the quality of the in-house columnists. Whether you’re reading Justin Raimondo or Lucy Steigerwald; it’s sure to be interesting. These in-house writers make fine additions to the non-in house writers sourced from around the web. Lucy Steigerwald’s work is especially enjoyable and well written.

In addition to the above; Antiwar.com is run by anti-militarist libertarians. Those who appreciate our left-libertarian writing on here are encouraged to help further our anti-militarist stance via donating to Antiwar.com. Antiwar.com is not a left-libertarian site per se, but, it does valuable work that benefits left-libertarianism.

This valuable work includes sourcing news from a wide variety of sites. The kind of news you may not find in the mainstream media. It cuts through corporatist propaganda that serves the interests of the warfare state and political class. Such propagandistic shilling for war is in definite need of being countered. Antiwar.com is your go to resource for that.

Where the war party propagandists mentioned above consistently push war; Antiwar.com consistently pushes peace. The number of lives that could be saved by this unwavering advocacy of peace is high. Antiwar.com is doing its part to save lives from militarism and imperialism every day. This is especially crucial work in the age of extrajudicial drone assassinations and saber rattling at China.

Antiwar.com knows that the above mentioned imperialism and militarism is as much a part of Democratic Party practice as the practice of the GOP. It provides a critique of the war party across party lines. This is especially needed in a time when Obama has renewed the Iraq War started by a Republican president. Warmongering knows no party boundaries and neither should we critics of war know any such boundaries in our criticism.

Anti-militarist work that spares no one guilty of pushing warfare is worth donating to. If you have money to spare; please consider donating to Antiwar.com. You’ll be helping out countless victims of the American empire by bringing their plight to the attention of the public. A very worthy cause.

But the mattress sales and the barbeques are not why I hate Memorial Day. When my father called me the day Walter died, he wept with me. When the President solemnly intones his “gratitude” at Arlington National Cemetery, he does so while sending more Nicks and Marisols to their deaths. He does so while turning them from the kids they were into the heroes he needs them to be so that he can dupe another generation of kids the way we were duped.

But they were not heroes. Telling the truth does the dead no dishonor, and lying does them no honor. Like most soldiers in every war from every country, my dead were just kids who believed the things a sick culture told them about duty, honor, and country. They, like me, maybe even like you, were raised saying the Pledge and standing for the Star-Spangled Banner, playing with GI Joes and being taught to be grateful to the military for their “freedom.”

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Of course, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine do not have the option of staying uninvolved. The wolf is at their door, it seems. While we of course wish them well, a sober analysis of the military situation does not hold out a great deal of hope for the Ukrainian government. However, not all is lost for the Ukrainian people; indeed, as recent events in Iraq have shown (paying attention, Comrade Teson?), a popular insurgency can achieve results a traditional military cannot. A complete after-action review on the successful insurgency in Iraq would run to hundreds of pages, but the bottom line is simple, classic guerilla warfare. Ukrainians today would do better to trust their liberty to themselves, rather than to a brittle, easily destroyed institution like the government in Kiev – or the one in Washington, D.C.