Di Darian Worden. Originale pubblicato il 23 agosto 2018 con il titolo Remembering the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Tutti i regimi autoritari sono infidi e violenti. Il patto firmato da Molotov e von Ribbentrop, accordo tra Unione Sovietica e Germania nazista in vigore dal 1939 al 1941, mostra il pericolo che i programmi…

Authoritarian regimes are brutal and untrustworthy. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in effect from 1939 to 1941, shows how dangerous the schemes of authoritarians can be to people who live within their reach. The Pact helped Hitler launch the racial war he sought, helped Stalin launch his own…

The dearth of anarchist theory in print is sometimes pretty embarrassing. Our discourse is rich, but it can also be maddeningly ephemeral and inaccessible, lost to zines and interpersonal conversations. While illegibility can be a defensive weapon against outside authorities, it also frequently reinforces power relations by increasing barriers to access. It’s painful to have to…

Understanding history as best we can is important for obvious reasons. It’s particularly important for libertarians who want to persuade people to the freedom philosophy. In making their case for individual freedom, mutual aid, social cooperation, foreign nonintervention, and peace, libertarians commonly place great weight on historical examples most often drawn from the early United…

The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker (Harper 2013), 448 pages. What is the substance of American paranoia? From where does it emanate, and why is its study important? These are some of the questions that, without preaching or bludgeoning us with elitist pretensions, Jesse Walker, books editor at Reason magazine,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Wish You’d Stop Bein’ So Good To Me, Cap’n” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford. Some people might see an internal contradiction between Hoppe’s repeated use of the term “dominated” to describe the role of certain privileged segments of society, and the idea that “libertarian” ideas were formulated by…

Another year is over. The New Year holiday is a natural time of reflection. When the ball drops and fireworks pop in the early January sky 2014 will be gone. A whole new year of human history will begin. A whole new year to continue our beautiful struggle. If there is one fact our collective history…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roy A. Childs, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The purpose of this particular essay is simply to apply some of the principles of libertarianism to an interpretation of events in a very special and important…

You may be familiar with Murray Rothbard’s article “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, beloved eminence grise at LewRockwell.com, takes things a step further and makes belief in human inequality the defining characteristic of right-libertarianism (“A Realistic Libertarianism,” Sept. 30). This isn’t just a hill he’s willing to die on, but a hill…

Mandatory minimum sentences have been receiving a fair bit of scrutiny lately, largely due to the efforts of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). And rightly so. Mandatory minimums remove discretion and context from sentencing, resulting in grossly unjust and wildly disproportionate sentences for minor offenses. Moreover, they’ve caused some troubling shifts in who has discretionary…

About the only thing A. Barton Hinkle gets right about the Industrial Workers of the World in “Meet the Left-Wing Extremist Running for U.S. Senate” is not calling them the “International Workers of the World”. Although at least Reason likening the “Wobblies”, whose founding antedates the Russian Revolution by over a decade, to “warmed-over Lenin” is not the…

There can be no prescription old enough to supercede the Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free, and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so, if they please.–James Otis, Jr. James Otis, Jr. (2/5/1725-5/23/1783) of West Barnstable, Cape…

What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements. It is not necessary to say to a man, ‘this land is yours,’ in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only necessary to say to him, ‘whatever your labor, or capital produces…

Part 1: Kolko at Home An earlier generation of libertarians was interested in Gabriel Kolko, a historian of the Left. Who was he? Born in 1932 in Paterson, NJ, historian Gabriel Kolko studied at Kent State, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University (PhD: 1962). From 1970 until his retirement he taught history at York…

Charles T. Sprading was a libertarian activist and prolific writer in a number of causes, ranging from freedom and freethought advocacy, cooperativism, Irish Independence, publisher of libertarian books and periodicals, opponent of anti-blue laws, and, in his last years before his health failed him (d. approx 1960), supporter of the Bricker Amendment and strident opponent…

Il 25 marzo la Commissione Nazionale per la Verità (Comissão Nacional da Verdade) ha sentito un colonnello in pensione per cercare di capire come “venivano torturati i prigionieri politici” e identificare “chi era vivo al momento dell’arrivo, chi morì, chi scomparve, e chi furono i torturatori” della Casa da Morte (Casa della Morte), un punto…

A retired colonel was heard on March 25th by Brazil’s National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade) to clarify how “political prisoners were tortured” and identify “who was alive when they arrived, who died and who is still missing, as well as the torturers” from Casa da Morte (“Death House”), an underground center for repression located…

In 1975, two leftists, one of whom had been a top GOP insider and a founder of the American libertarian movement, collaborated on a book published by a leading Washington, D.C. left-wing think tank and the Unitarian Universalist Association advocating devolution of political power from the federal, state and city levels to self-sufficient local neighborhoods,…

Transfer of Power Arguably the most powerful person in the United States (even rivaling the POTUS), Ben S. Bernanke, has left the Federal Reserve. Since 2006 he has sought to make the economy his marionette. Fed policies, under his direction, worked to manage a collapsed housing market, busted mortgage industry and the 2008 global financial crisis –…

“Need I comment that these capitalists, both in Islam and in Christendom, were friends of the prince and helpers or exploiters of the state? […]” “Thus, the modern state, which did not create capitalism but only inherited it, sometimes acts in its favor and at other times acts against it; it sometimes allows capitalism to…