C4SS Senior Fellow and The Karl Hess Scholar in Social Theory, Kevin Carson, join The Annoying Peasants Radio Show.
On this episode, The Annoying Peasants discuss mutualism, individualist anarchism and Carson’s books – Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.
Charles Johnson, aka Rad Geek (left) and I (right) are running an ALL Distro table at the Students for Liberty regional conference today. If you’re in the area, drop by (Smathers Library 1A, University of Florida)!
Welcome!
This is my first weekly review. In the tradition of the individualist anarchist, Benjamin Tucker, it will be edited to fit the editor. The political-cultural-economic angle will be anti-state, anti-authoritarian, left-wing market anarchist, anti-imperialist, libertarian, and pro-sex feminist.
Let us begin with a rundown of some fantastic foreign policy related pieces:
1. Sean Scallon discusses the rise of a nationalist militarist “left”.
3. Diana Johnstone discusses the use of the bombing of Serbia to justify the potential war in Syria.
4. Kate Epstein discusses Chelsea Manning.
5. Freddie deBoer talks about the tendency of liberal hawks to try to find a good war.
6. Ramah Kudami has a list of do’s and don’ts for Progressives on Syria.
7. Norman Pollack on Obama’s march to war in Syria.
8. Norman Pollack speaks on militarism again!
9. Jacob Hornberger discusses U.S. hypocrisy towards the Syrian government.
12. Sheldon Richman discusses lies surrounding the Afghan War.
13. Jordan Michael Smith writes a review of George Kennan’s American Diplomacy.
A storm erupted over Michael Lind’s critique of libertarians for not having a single country to point to. Several good responses were penned. Roderick Long and Kevin Carson wrote my favorite ones. I include them below along with general pieces on libertarianism.
1. Thomas E. Woods Jr. discusses the silliness of a recent Salon piece on libertarianism.
2. Rachel Burger explains why “Libertarian” arguments against gay marriage fail.
3. Anthony Gregory discusses what’s wrong with both the governmentalist left and right.
4. Ronald Bailey responds to a Salon.com critique of Libertarianism.
5. Left-libertarian market anarchist, Roderick Long, responds to Michael Lind and E.J. Dionne.
6. Sheldon Richman responds to Michael Lind’s contention that libertarians love dictatorship.
7. Kevin Carson rips Michael Lind a new one too!
8. Kevin Carson answers Michael Lind’s query about the lack of a libertarian country too.
Next up are a series of articles on civil liberties violations. Keep Big Brother away!
1. Justin Raimondo discusses the recent NSA spying revelations.
2. Norman Solomon writes an open letter to Dianne Feinstein.
3. A Guardian editorial discusses the recent NSA revelations.
And two articles on the evil of the War on Drugs!
1. Darryl W Perry talks about how drug policy made him an anarchist.
2. Carmen Yarrusso discusses the legalization of marijuana.
A few chess pieces from the site Chesscafe.com:
1. Book review of a Mikhail Tal text.
2. Steve Goldberg reviews Pawn Structure Chess.
3. Chess problem solving portrayed as an art below. It’s taken from T.B. Rowland and F.F. Rowland’s, The Problem Art.
4. Review of ebook on the Ruy Lopez by Chris Wainscott.
C4SS Senior Fellow and The Karl Hess Scholar in Social Theory, Kevin Carson, will join The Annoying Peasants Radio Show tomorrow, Tuesday, October 8th at 9:30 pm eastern time.
On this episode the Annoying Peasants will be discussing mutualism, individualist anarchism and Carson’s books – Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.
In my summary of the C4SS vs IP episode, I made it clear that,
We would even be happy to encourage and facilitate a conversation with members of the Muslim community for him, if he so desires. It would be a good learning experience for all of us.
To take steps toward honoring this declaration I have reached out to Davi Barker of The Muslim Agorist and Muslims for Liberty. Barker is an a writer, an artist and an activist of significant skill and purchase in libertarian and agorist circles. I even had the privilege of meeting and talking with Barker at the 2013 New Hampshire Liberty Forum.
Before our site was taken down I emailed Barker some of the cruel comments coming out of the S4SS UGent group to get his perspective and experience dealing with this kind of hyperbole and bigotry. I also tapped the Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS) contributors and coordinators group for questions that they think individuals might want to ask regarding Islam and its intersection, if any, with anarchism or libertarianism. I want to thank Barker for his time and participating in this discussion.
When we initially approached the S4SS UGent group’s point of contact to explain what was going on and why a number of their discussions had begun to take on an Islamophobic focus complete with racist epithets.
They responded simply with, “Discussion on the NAP [Non-aggression principle] and how to deal with people ‘from certain cultures’ … the general conclusion was: seek and destroy.”
Barker would like to inform them that,
The answer [to how to deal with people] is, exactly the way you deal with people from your culture who engage in aggressive, rights violating behavior. The culture of origin has no bearing on the NAP, in fact the NAP precludes conceptualizing people as their culture. People are individuals. To regard cultures for their crimes instead of individuals for their crimes is collectivist thinking, what Ben Stone calls right-wing socialism. If an individual commits aggression his culture of origin is irrelevant, and his guilt in no way transfers to others in his culture who have not committed such an act.
Our interlocutor, “No culture wholly cohesive enough [to warrant categorical violence?] Have you ever heard of Afghanistan and Saudi-Arabia?”
Barker, from experience, explains, “
Yes, in fact, I have traveled there. I just recently returned from a month long trip to Saudi-Arabia, and I did not find a cohesive culture. I found the proliferation of western modes of dress and music common among the young, and displeased elders who preferred traditional modes. I found those who defended the prevailing order, and others who felt the monarchy was a tool of western powers they’d rather see cast off. I found some proselytizing the extremist Wahhabi doctrine, passing out free books about their movement’s founder, and I found others completely rejecting this doctrine and blaming it for most of the woes of their country. I found a whole host of cultural customs, some pleasant and others shocking, and also many frustrated and embarrassed by those customs. Anyone, especially an anarchist, who believes that there is a cohesive culture within the arbitrary boundaries defined by a state, has obviously never traveled there.
And, finally, charming as always, “When it comes to nazis, communists, and islamofascists, it is us or them, there is no margin of negotiation.”
Barker concludes,
As much as I hate to go to bat for nazis and communists, this is still not true, even for them. I have had neo-nazi and communist friends in my life, and even they were individuals, capable of reason, capable of moral agency, and capable of negotiation. They were in short, individuals first, and ideological labels second. And regardless of what your state subsidized text books told you about history, the same was true for every citizen and soldier in Nazi Germany. They were individually accountable for their crimes, not collectively.
The S4SS contributors were very interested to talk to Barker. I pulled together some of their questions for him:
1. How does your religion and your politics relate, if at all?”
Before I converted to Islam I was a socialist. A Marxist by osmosis, being from California. When I converted I mistakenly believed that Islam was a monolithic religion. One of the aspects of it that appealed to me was that the scripture, the Quran, has been preserved in it’s original language, and there are not sectarian divides over different translations. I quickly learned that having all Muslims agree on one book did not mean all Muslims agreed on one interpretation, and being new to the religion it became important to me to consider all available interpretations and to have a method of discerning between them. This process of investigation, searching for the interpretation which seemed most consistent to me, forced me to also question my political beliefs. To discern a political philosophy which was not only consistent with my new creed, but also internally consistent. This criterion lead me to reject socialism, and embrace property rights, and ultimately reject statism, and embrace voluntaryism. The Quranic verse, “There shall be no coercion in this way of life” is one that many Muslims try to mitigate through various interpretations, but I take it as a radical and inviolable axiom by which all interpretations must be measured.
2. Since 9/11, anti-Muslim bigotry has fueled both state violence and individual violence. How can libertarians ally with Muslims against this violence and hatred?
Many Muslim organizations focus on social outreach, sensitivity workshops, and interfaith work in an effort to combat anti-Muslim bigotry by demystifying Islam for non-Muslims. In the mainstream culture this has proven highly effective, and studies have shown that the majority of Americans have never actually met a Muslim, and having met just one Muslim face to face correlates dramatically with a rejection of stereotypes, propaganda and bigotry against Muslims. However, in my experience libertarians reject these things whether they’ve ever met a Muslim or not, because libertarianism, as an individualist philosophy, automatically rejects collectivist claims made about anyone. Libertarians, at least those who have fully internalized individualist thinking, are already inoculated against bigotry. So, partnering with Muslims to organize social events is an effective method, but even just spreading the message the liberty itself is an effective strategy against violence and hatred.
3. What are some common misconceptions about the Muslim religion that libertarians should know?
One of the biggest misconceptions we face in America is that Islam is somehow foreign to American society. In reality, Islam has been in America since its inception, mostly through the slave trade. Some historical sources suggest that Andalusian Muslims arrived in North America long before Columbus, and that many who traveled to the new world hired Muslim navigators from Spain. Most African slaves were brought to North America from West Africa, which is mostly Muslim. The statistics are impossible to guess, but there is evidence that many slaves were running clandestine schools to teach their children Arabic and preserve some of their Islamic heritage. The first recorded conversion to Islam in America was in 1888 by Alexander Russell Webb while he was operating as a Consul to the Muslim world.
4. Do you use your faith to explain the morality of anarchism or libertarianism? If so, how?
Yes. There are a number of ways to do this. First, it’s important to point out that Muhammad was born in a tribal anarchy, and never established a State as we would define it. It’s perhaps easier to make this argument as a Christian because Jesus was in direct conflict with Rome, and never came to power. Muhammad had conflicts with the Byzantine and Persian empires, but Arabia was a polycentric clan structure, so his primary conflict was with the dominant clan. Once he came to power Muhammad served as an arbiter, but he never claimed the authority to legislate those who did not explicitly consent to his leadership. Those who did not convert, and that sense did not consent, formed their own legal systems. And even when he was asked to serve as arbiter in disputes between non-Muslims he judged according to their laws, not Islamic law. So, he never established a monopoly on violence, but lived among competing judiciaries. Second, there are a number of good quotes from him, as in “The greatest jihad is to speak the truth in the face of a tyrant.” And finally, it’s pretty easy to call upon various periods of Islamic history where the State was weak or non existent and science and philosophy thrived in the Muslim world. Early libertarian writer Rose Wilder Lane has a book titled “Islam and the Discover of Freedom” which catalogs much of this history and describes how many of the philosophical underpinnings of libertarianism, such as the separation of faith and reason, the primacy of freedom of conscience, and many aspects of natural law theory came to Europe through interaction is Muslims in Turkey and Spain.
If you are interested in finding out more about Davi Barker’s work and faith, please check out his articles, interviews and art on his site – The Muslim Agorist.
Today on MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” co-host Krystal Ball showcased a rather embarrassing misunderstanding of libertarianism, citing Somalia as a “libertarian paradise” and suggesting that society would descend into dirty, violent chaos in the absence of government.
Ball apparently believes (with the superstition of the devout) that, for instance, healthcare services can only be furnished by and through the coercive mechanisms of the state. Such confused ideas emanate from the mistake of seeing the state as a socially progressive quasi-charity, as the result of some social contract by the terms of which we give up certain freedoms as participants in civil society, and in return receive services like police protection, roads, clean water and even health insurance. If Ball took a more careful, historical look, however, she would see that the state is not such an institution, not the result of a legitimate agreement, not genuinely interested in the plight of the poor or those workers she’s so worried about.
American radicals like Benjamin Tucker, Ezra Heywood and Joshua King Ingalls probed more deeply and understood the state in its historical and theoretical context; they worried about many of the same concerns as Ball. Their lives were intimately bound up in the defense of labor against capital, in social and economic justice and advancing the causes of society’s marginalized groups. It is interesting, then, to observe someone like Ball — obviously unfamiliar with radical history and movements — so sweepingly identify all of libertarianism as right-wing. One tradition of libertarian thought, anarchism, has always regarded the economic and political ruling classes as fundamentally inseparable, and has accordingly looked for the connections between coercive political authority and wealth inequality and exploitation. The state is the consortium of a rich, predatory elite; it guards their interests and creates the structural preconditions for widespread poverty and misery. Ball might ruminate on the words of Joshua King Ingalls, discussing the true origins of the state:
As the boundaries of tribes extended they came into contact with other tribes, upon whom they made war or who made war upon them. Mutual destruction and the possession of the domain and goods was doubtless the purpose of these conflicts. The more warlike destroyed the weaker or less warlike, and appropriated their wealth, as formerly our farmers destroyed the bees to obtain their accumulated honey; but, like them, the warlike tribes soon learned a better way. We have seen, now, what we may class as the primitive form, both of “production and division by usurpation.” Under this most discouraging state of affairs, however, production still went on, evincing the aptitude of mankind even in a savage or semi-savage, for productive industry, notwithstanding the word of our teachers of economics and apologists for existing usurpations; that unless the capitalist and landlord be assured of the lion’s share in the distribution they would not co-operate, and industry must cease.
This form was superseded by another form, in which the lives of the conquered were saved, upon the condition that they would become the bond-slaves of the victors—they, and their children, and their children’s children. This form may be termed chattelism. Under it production and division were quite simplistic problems. Its effect upon the increase of wealth was, no doubt, considerable in comparison with the barbarity which it superseded, and which killed the worker to obtain possession of his product. It was in some respects more considerate to the vanquished, and much more convenient for the predatory class; but it was less favorable to production than might have been expected, for the worker before had the normal incentive to industry, the prospective possession of its fruit, and till the last the hope that he might escape the threatened doom. But as a productive worker, the slave soon sank to the lowest level known to industrial activity—so low that the lash became the resort to stimulate his flagging purpose. To this enslavement and usurpation there was this justification, and this only. The victor could plead that he had saved the life of the vanquished, which was forfeited by the laws of barbaric war, and in consideration of which the victim gave his long-life service and also that of his posterity.
http://youtu.be/eZ0CsXmcjzE
C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, discusses the prospects of achieving social justice through liberty with Jason Lee Byas and Grayson English of Liberty Minded.
As if the C4SS vs IP story wasn’t weird enough, it has taken a bizarre and unexpected turn in the past twenty four hours. The story so far:
On September 13th, 2013, C4SS’s student activist network, Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS), published a letter dissociating from the S4SS UGent chapter for violating and activating the third S4SS design principle by using racist language, affirming racist conspiracy theories and even advocating violence as a justified or viable response to said theories in a S4SS identified and organizing forum. The third S4SS design principle states:
3. S4SS spaces are safe and valued spaces. We are dedicated to not only identifying agents of aggression, but dissolving institutions of oppression. [emphasis added]
Around 10 days later, the C4SS and S4SS websites were taken down by “not your typical DMCA letter.” In response, we chose to defend our site — not by a legal fight, but by doubling down on our free speech. Rather than being isolated or intimidated into silence by the legal censorship, we spoke out on social media and our websites. We spoke out about the legal threat against us and we re-published copies of the censored exposé on our other websites (here, here, here, here, here and here). We reached out to anarchist, anti-fascist, and information-freedom activists on the web and called on them to swarm against this censorious abuse of copy-power. And, to our immense gratitude, we got a lot of help from the web, including, but not limited to: Jad Davis at the jVerse, and wonderful stories in online media by Jesse Walker at Reason and Mike Masnick at techdirt. The social response to legal intimidation made it clear that bigotry could not count on copy-fascism to protect and hide it. We owe all of you a great debt of gratitude for what came next.
On September 26th, C4SS, regained access and redirected its domain back to its main site. That afternoon we received an anonymous 100 Bitcoin donation to our “Support the Center in this Fight” wallet: 129pipr12a5UUZ447bLYjx1paRnCXqG5vi. (Needless to say, “Some of us laughed, some cried, some screamed, but we were all in shock, until…”)
Later that evening we received an email from Olivier Janssens, the individual that had retained the lawyer, J.D. Obenberger, to draft and submit the DMCA takedown of the S4SS dissociation letter. In this email he identifies himself as the anonymous Bitcoin donor:
First of all, thanks for accepting my defeat. Lesson learned, for sure.
Even if it doesn’t matter to you, I’ve also learned a whole deal about getting ‘aroused’ by a group of guys and joining in bashing Islam. I have a whole other story to tell about that, but I guess thats for another time.
This escalated so far out of control, not just Streisand-wise, but for everything I stand for (intellectual property being evil is one of them). The choice was to pursue this further in court and fight for pro-censorship copyright, which I couldn’t even begin to imagine doing cause it would kill my principles. I am glad you guys were reasonable enough to accept my apologies. I can’t say this enough. I am grateful for the mature response on your blog.
In regards to the lawyer, I’ve been trying to get him to issue a takedown request all day. It seems this might be a first so I think he’s thinking on how to do it. He says that if I don’t counterfile, the site should go up again within 10 days ‘automatically’. I am still trying to push for him to send a letter asking for an earlier restoration, and will try to get you guys in CC or notify you as soon as it goes out.
As another token of good faith, and to make up for what happened, and to protect you from this in the future, I am going to send you 100 BTC.
That’s the story so far, but before you go C4SS would like to respond to a number points in this email and offer our reactions to it — so that our Supporters understand where we stand and everything else is crystal clear.
1. We did not accept anyone’s defeat. So long as IP and bigotry still exist as the damage holding back the vibrant social cooperation without aggression, oppression, or centralized authority that we desire, this fight is still very much on.
Does this mean we are pursuing state sanctioned legal action against Janssens, his Copyfascist lawyer or the cowardly Bluehost that thought it safer to pull a longtime customer’s site rather than look twice at a DMCA takedown notice that Mike Masnick said, “On my first read, I wondered if it was fake, because not only is it completely over the top, in it, Obenberger more or less admits that the takedown has little to do with copyright…,” no it does not. We are anarchists. We have other means of solving, resolving and dissolving situations.
Does acting like anarchists and not pursuing state sanctioned legal action count as “accepting defeat?” Again, no it does not.
2. Do we believe that he has “learned a whole deal” about this “group of guys and joining in bashing Islam”? We have no idea, but we like to think the best of people.
Philip K. Dick once apologized for “preaching” that “The devil has a metal face,” when what he finally realized was that “[it] was in fact not a face; it was a mask over a face. … You do not place fierce, cold metal over fierce, cold metal. You place it over soft flesh…”
We do not know if behind Janssens’s “fierce, cold metal” mask of IP and bigotry is another “fierce, cold metal” mask covering some other drive for control or intolerance. We do know that under all masks there is, finally, a human face.
We also know that S4SS UGent is still active, they have not reached out to the rest of the network, nor have they taken steps toward following the S4SS design principles. They have not changed their name signaling their change in status or orientation. They have switched their Facebook group, now, to “private,” they have set up a “like” page, and they are planning events and scheduling speakers, still, titled as a S4SS chapter.
In order to protect the S4SS network and prospective members the dissociation letter, “S4SS’ UGent Not Anarchists (or Comrades),” will remain up as a warning until they decide to render it irrelevant through their actions.
3. Are we reasonable enough to accept his apology? We can only accept an apology for actions done to us – the use of the state to take down our site for almost three full days. We cannot and will not accept an apology from him on behalf of any other group or individual harmed by him, specifically the Muslim community. We have neither the right nor inclination. That is for him to do and for that community to consider. This is his moment of reflection and reconciliation.
We would even be happy to encourage and facilitate a conversation with members of the Muslim community for him, if he so desires. It would be a good learning experience for all of us.
4. Good faith, making up and further protection. We are in the process of making sure our writers get paid for their work and moving our site to a secure and civil liberty conscious host. After all of that is taken care of we will be actively donating, supporting and promoting, anarchist, anti-racist and solidarity economy projects around the world. So it is true that with this donation we will be “making up” for the damage done and protecting ourselves better for the next fight, but good faith is something that is earned everyday with everyone individually.
We wish him all the best and we will try to help him along his way the best we can. But never mistake our best wishes and noblest intentions for passivity or leniency. We want that world of vibrant social cooperation and we are – teeth bared – ready to fight for it.
“Evil is real like cement. … I thought I hated those guys [Nazis] before I did the research [for The Man in the High Castle]. After I did the research, then I had created for myself an enemy that I would hate the rest of my life. Fascism – wherever it appears, whether it is Germany, United States, Soviet Union or anywhere – fascism, wherever it appears, is the enemy.” —Philip K. Dick
NSA analyst Edward Snowden shook the intelligence community as well as the public when he released a trove of secret NSA files to the world. In the aftermath of his action, the United States government reared its aggressive head as it worked very hard to capture and imprison him. In the process a global drama ensued as well as an invigorated public discourse on the nature of privacy and what the government is doing to peer into our private lives.
As the investigation into how Snowden’s acts of rebellion were carried out, the NSA has reportedly uncovered that he accessed the documents via an internal website of the agency itself. The documents were posted to the internal website, and Snowden was able to access them easily with his security clearance. Under the radar of his supervisor he easily made digital copies of what he found.
Since the NSA data was leaked by Snowden the agency has apparently taken steps to limit employee options for storing data in an effort to avoid future leaks. The question, of course, is whether or not such efforts will truly have an effect. If they do stop leakers, will they serve to inhibit the overall communication process between what is already a mess of bureaucratic agencies? In other words, are their systems permanently disrupted no matter what they do?
Perhaps it goes even deeper, into something that has become pervasive. Kevin Carson’s Two, Three, Many Snowdens! has us look at an ever growing class of workers that are rebellious, anti-authoritarian hackers, and who happen to be getting jobs in government security.
C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, participates in a discussion of the terminology of “capitalism,” the desirability and practicability of a free society and the centrality of peace with the crew of The Annoying Peasants Radio Show.
The purpose of ReadLiberty.org is to transcribe, preserve and spread all 403 issues of Liberty, Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order, an individualist anarchist periodical originally edited and published by Benjamin Tucker from 1881 to 1908.
As part of our activities we have decided to publish the whole Volume I of Liberty in the form of an eBook in ePub, Mobi and PDF formats. In the phase one an eBook containing issues 1-13 of the original Volume I will be made available. Once they are all transcribed, the eBook will be updated to contain all 26 issues of the original Volume I. And you can be a part of the book!
C4SS is very excited by this project. Benjamin Tucker’s periodical, Liberty, is not only a major influence on market anarchist thought, but it is greatly responsible for setting the style of market anarchist discourse. As Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson detail in their introduction to Markets Not Capitalism:
The history of the individualist and mutualist tradition is largely a history of ephemeral publications, short-lived presses, self-published pamphlets, and small radical papers. The most famous is certainly Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty (1881-1908) … The independent, dialogue-based small press has provided a natural habitat for market anarchist writing to flourish – whereas liberal and Marxist writing found their most distinctive habitats in declarations, manifestos, and intricate, comprehensive treatises. …
Market anarchism aims to draw out social truths not by dogmatizing or laying down the law, but rather by allowing as far as possible for the free interplay of ideas and social forces, by looking for the unintended consequences of accepted ideas, by engagement in an open-ended process of experimentation and discovery that permits the constant testing of both ideas and institutions against competitors and bottom-line reality.
In other words, Tucker’s Liberty is not only an invaluable anarchist resource, but a glimpse into what a possible market anarchist culture would look like in all of its iterative glory, weirdness and experimentation.
Another reason we are excited by this project is that ReadLiberty is devoted to making Tucker’s Liberty available to anyone. As they clarify on their page’s Q&A:
Q: What license will be the book subject to?
A: As we don’t believe in the concept of IP it’ll be a subject to the CC0 “license”. Although you don’t have to we’ll be thankful if you choose to mark us as the authors of the transcription and let others to use the work in the same way. Happy reading, sharing, editing and selling!
Every little bit helps. Please donate $5 today and help bring Tucker’s Liberty to more and more people. (Link to their indiegogo page)
On September 4th, my op-ed Chelsea Manning and the State’s Abusive Transphobia was published as a letter to the editor in Urban Tulsa Weekly. The paper treated it as a “really convoluted counterpoint” to an asinine letter by Oklahoma State Senator Frank Simpson, who argued that Chelsea Manning was not a hero. State Senator Simpson consistently misgendered Chelsea Manning in his letter and echoed baseless state propaganda about the alleged “harm” caused by her disclosures of government criminality. My op-ed, published as a “counterpoint” to State Senator Simpson’s letter, primarily addressed different issues than his letter. As such, I posted a direct response to State Senator Simpson, and I am happy to say it was published as a letter on September 11th in Urban Tulsa Weekly.
To be clear, my letter was dealing largely with separate issues from State Senator Simpson’s. As such, I feel I should respond directly to his specific claims and questions.
Simpson asks: “did Bradley Manning demonstrate any attribute we would normally associate with heroism?”
Chelsea Manning demonstrated multiple attributes we would normally associate with heroism. First, she demonstrated courage and willingness to face great personal risk. In blowing the whistle on the U.S. government’s crimes, she risked death (as seen in the government charging her with a capital offense), decades of imprisonment, torture (which she did receive), and abuse from a prison system famously hostile to transgender individuals like her.
Second, she demonstrated moral principle. She expressed a commitment to truth and desire for reform as her motivations for leaking these documents. As she wrote in her chats with Adrian Lamo:
“If you had free reign over classified networks… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?”
“God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms… I want people to see the truth… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”
Her courageous and principled whistleblowing, for which she has been tortured and caged, did lead to substantial discussions, debates, and reforms. Her leaks provided evidence of corruption in the Tunisian government that helped spark the Arab Spring. Manning’s disclosures also shed light on what McClatchy Newspapers called “evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence.” The outrage caused by exposure of this brutal war crime helped end the U.S. occupation of Iraq. http://www.salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_iraq_war/
Simpson claims “Manning didn’t save anyone’s life.” This is simply false. By playing a pivotal role in ending the US military’s occupation of Iraq, Chelsea Manning prevented the deaths of both Iraqis and American troops that would inevitably have come from continued occupation.
Simpson also asserts that Manning’s disclosures “jeopardize the lives of thousands of our military personnel.” But prosecutors were unable to demonstrate that even a single person was harmed as a result of Manning’s disclosures. What does State Senator Simpson know that they do not? http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/08/01/the-government-cant-prove-bradley-manning-hurt-anyone-but-joe-klein-knows/
It appears that State Senator Simpson is unable to recognize courage, principle, and personal risk when they are staring him in the face. It also appears that he is interested in commenting on Manning’s actions without devoting any serious study to the matter. Perhaps voters should keep this in mind when considering whether he is informed enough to hold political power over them.
Sincerely,
Nathan Goodman
Bigotry and racism are oppressive ideas that run afoul of individualist ideals. Anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim bigotry are two forms of bigotry that have for at least the past decade been used to justify a litany of criminal acts of tyranny and state violence. The New York Police Department has “designated entire mosques ‘terrorism enterprises’ in order to justify the use of invasive methods to spy on congregants and imams.”
The United States government held Muslim blogger Tarek Mehanna in solitary confinement for years before convicting him and sentencing him to years in prison, merely for expressing opinions online. The U.S. government and their allies regularly use bombs to murder innocents in primarily Muslim countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. The Holy Land Five are incarcerated by the U.S. government merely for making charitable donations and offering humanitarian aid to suffering Palestinians. The French government bans veils worn by Muslim women. Belgium enforces a similar discriminatory ban.
Anarchists, libertarians, and radicals should stand against these oppressive state policies and the bigotry that fuels them. But under the name “Students for a Stateless Society UGent,” some racists have chosen to enlist anarchism’s name to the cause of racism and violent oppression. Last week the Students for a Stateless Society network made it clear that we will not stand for this kind of bigotry. S4SS UGent are not our comrades, nor are they anarchists. Here is our statement of disassociation from these bigots.
More development may be on the way for many of England’s national parks, with Tory Planning Minister Nick Boles claiming that villages are in danger of becoming extinct due to encroaching wilderness; he has said national parks should be more than just wilderness. The idea is that development would be permissible on green spaces that nobody would miss, and that these areas should be used for more than just wilderness. This move towards wilderness development signals an ongoing theme of developing protected areas in national parks around England.
Of course, this action has been met with ire from environmentalists who believe that there is not more happiness to be derived from housing than there is from protected wilderness. There is also concern that developing protected areas would justify more development under the guise of sustainable construction. England has over 5,000 square miles of national parks whose protection is funded, of course, by taxpayers, but managed by State functionaries who can dish the land out to the biggest, fattest, most well connected of the political class. If this is truly for the people, then it would seem that the people should decide, not the political class.
Many libertarians might argue that Boles is exactly right, though, and that homes for people are more important than green space in national parks. Another consideration, however, is the issue of property as manifested in the context of State control. In other words, much of the problem above has nothing to do with housing, per se, but rather with monopoly land ownership and the predictable distortions that ripple out from such “ownership.”
Libertarians can sometimes be a bit soft on ecological concerns, but this does not have to be the case. Grant Mincy’s Libertarianism: An Ecological Consideration lays out ways in which libertarians can, and should, engage with sound ecology.
C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, gave the talk “Achieving Social Justice Through Liberty” at the University of Oklahoma.
http://youtu.be/yYGYH3eC5yI
Q&A:
http://youtu.be/81uWXAiTC0k
The civil war in Syria and the implications for the United States government’s involvement is hot on the lips of most political analysts these days. The recent chemical attacks on civilians in Syria have ignited military interventionist rhetoric on the part of the Obama administration, but with an overwhelming number of people polled opposing such action, President Obama has decided to let congress vote on allowing limited, targeted military strikes against the Assad regime. These things, though, have a way of sending out ripple effects that often carry unforeseen consequences that last for generations.
For example, George Bush Sr.’s decision to invade Kuwait spawned what would eventually become an extended and global battle with al-Qaida, and from a foreign policy point of view, a limited attack against Syria would largely be symbolic of endorsing Obama’s “red line.” This can cause one or both of the following: Entrenchment in yet another foreign conflict or the ongoing assertion of United States supremacy.
A left-libertarian approach to the above comes in the form of Grant Mincy’s piece “TOL Response: 5 Foreign Policy Problems Libertarians Need to Address.” Since so much of what mainstream media pundits talk about, when it comes to foreign policy, is about what the best reaction to aggression or war ought to be, it is arguably more critical to get to the root of the issue. We need to start thinking less about reaction, and more about long term solutions to making civil war and Empire obsolete.
C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Miriam Daniell’s “Songs of Struggle and Sorrow” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Miriam Daniell’s “Songs of Struggle and Sorrow“.
$1.50 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.
“A voice rebellious, which should never cease…”
This chapbook is a new selection of poetry by Miriam Daniell, edited by the ALL Distro. The 34 poems in this collection were gathered from two main sources: her prolific contributions to Benjamin Tucker’s individualist paper Liberty during 1892; and a series of several more poems prepared for posthumous publication by her friends, which appeared in the Chicago anarchist paper Free Society during 1902.
The Anarchist press of the late 19th and early 20th centuries published much more than ideological tracts, polemics and political analysis. In their newspapers, pamphlets, union halls, radical community schools and gatherings, Anarchists and labor radicals alike worked to build a broad, vibrant and lovingly crafted culture of creative solidarity and resistance. Theoreticians, workers, storytellers and dreamers made cartoons, posters, poems, stories and labor songs. One of the most restless and, for a few years, one of the most prolific of these authors was Miriam Daniell (1860–1894), a strike leader in England and a prolific poet, writer and critic in the u.s. radical press.
Daniell was an English-American labor activist, writer, and individualist anarchist. Born in England, she helped to organize a wave of textile workers’ and dock-workers’ strikes in Bristol in 1889–90, one of the most significant labor uprisings in Bristol’s history. In 1890, she left a stifling marriage, and England, together with her close friend and fellow organizer Helena Born (the subject of the intimate “To H. B.,” included here). When she arrived in Boston, she became involved with both the free love movement and American individualist anarchism. For a few years she became a prolific contributor to the radical press, with work from her hand appearing in almost every issue of Tucker’s Liberty for several months running, until her hand was stilled by a tragic death at the age of 34. She left us these poems. The 34 collected here offer a sample not only of her feminist and radical labor poetry, but also her personal and confessional moments, her humor, her vivid sense of the eerie and grotesque, and her meditations on sorrow, struggle and loss.
The Center for a Stateless Society has named Nathan Goodman its first Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies.
Goodman, a C4SS Senior Fellow, is a writer and activist living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has been involved in LGBT, feminist, anti-war, and prisoner solidarity organizing. Goodman has only been with C4SS for little over a year and in that time has become one of our most versatile and challenging writers. Goodman has published 18 commentary op-eds with C4SS, many of which have been republished with mainstream periodicals and sites like Counterpunch, South Carolina Chronicle and Legal Pro News. Goodman has also written two features, one review and participated in multiple media appearances. He is currently working on a number of scholarly studies for C4SS and has been translated into three languages.
This position honors the versatile, relentless and rebellious abolitionist Lysander Spooner whose life and work exemplifies total commitment to not just slavery’s containment and retreat from social life, but its pursuit and annihilation. A commitment that we feel is shared by Goodman through his tireless work for prison abolition and LGBT liberation.
We look forward to seeing where Goodman’s research and writing take Abolitionist Studies.
C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Nathan Goodman‘s “The Knowledge Problem of Privilege” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Nathan Goodman‘s “The Knowledge Problem of Privilege“.
$1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for every additional copy.
In this essay, Nathan Goodman (Center for a Stateless Society) discusses how the Knowledge Problems facing elites, “experts” or “representatives” recur not only in economics, but also in cultural conflicts over gender, disability, and other systems of structural social privilege. The danger of trying to make decisions for others, when cut off from the dispersed, tacit or local knowledge that they have, show how Hayekian limits on what we can know also apply to the the struggles and the challenges of other oppressed and marginalized people.
“IN HIS CLASSIC ESSAY, “THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOCIETY,” F. A. Hayek explains the concept of distributed knowledge. Every individual has unique knowledge shaped by their experiences and preferences, knowledge that may not be accessible to others, no matter how well educated they may be. But Hayek’s point about distributed knowledge applies to more than just economic issues. It also applies to social issues. . . .
“JUST AS WITH ECONOMICS, THESE SOCIAL PROBLEMS of epistemological hubris become bigger when government gets involved. By definition, politicians do not have the knowledge of everyone their policies will impact. But often, when marginalized groups are impacted, politicians become extra prone to ignore those from an affected population. . . .
“ULTIMATELY CALLS FOR PEOPLE TO CHECK THEIR PRIVILEGE are not an attempt to silence. Rather, they are an attempt to get people to recognize the limits of their knowledge. Libertarians should have the humility to check our privilege, to listen to oppressed people who discuss their experiences, and to respect oppressed peoples’ rights to direct their own struggles for liberation. . . .”
Nathan Goodman is a writer and activist living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has been involved in LGBT, feminist, anti-war, and prisoner solidarity organizing. He writes frequent commentaries for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and keeps a blog, Dissenting Leftist (dissentingleftist.blogspot.com).
“The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.
Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.
Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps — to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.
As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.
If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.”
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