Monthly Archives: September 2011

Rothbard on Power to the Neighborhoods 8

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Secession, Strategy

Another Rothbard classic.

My long term goal is to have ATS and ATS-allied groups operating in cities, towns, counties, and regions all over the USA, and working in tandem to advance ideas like this in their own local areas. The rest of my work is simply about developing an intellectual counter-elite and theoretical foundation for these ideas, developing a workable strategy, cultivating constituents for such a project and developing viable activist endeavors towards such an end.

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This article first appeared in the May 15, 1969, issue of The Libertarian Forum.

Norman Mailer’s surprise entry into the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City, to be held on June 17, provides the most refreshing libertarian political campaign in decades. Mailer has taken everyone by surprise by his platform as well as his sudden entry into the political ranks. The Mailer platform stems from one brilliantly penetrating overriding plank: the absolute decentralization of the swollen New York City bureaucracy into dozens of constituent neighborhood villages. This is the logic of the recent proposals for “decentralization” and “community control” brought to its consistent and ultimate conclusion: the turmoil and plight of our overblown and shattered urban government structures, most especially New York, are to be solved by smashing the urban governmental apparatus, and fragmenting it into a myriad of constituent fragments. Each neighborhood will then be running its own affairs, on all matters, taxation, education, police, welfare, etc. Do conservative whites object to compulsory bussing of black kids into their neighborhood schools? Well, says Mailer, with each neighborhood in absolute control of its own schools this problem could not arise. Do the blacks object to white dictation over the education of black children? This problem too would be solved if Harlem were wholly independent, running its own affairs. In the Mailer plan, black and white could at long last live peacefully side-by-side, with each group and each self-constituted neighborhood running its own affairs.

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Rick Perry’s Vulnerabilities with the Right Reply

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From the National Journal.

 

“The US ruling class has continually drifted leftward over the last century to the point where the “Old Left”, the Marxist/Trotskyist/New Deal intellectual Left of the 1930s, are now the ostensible conservative Republicans while the Marcusean cultural Marxists of the 1960s “New Left” are now the liberal Democrats. If this historical pattern continues, then an on-going leftward drift will mean that within a couple of decades the ostensible “conservatives” or “right-wing” will be the present day reactionary liberalism of Dianne Feinstein, Charles Schumer, Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Albert Gore, John Kerry, Michael Moore and Morris Dees. We can easily envision an ideologically and intellectually decrepit lot such as these presiding over the final days of the crumbling US empire.”

-Keith Preston

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By Alex Roarty
National Journal

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has taken the Republican presidential field by storm since declaring his candidacy on Saturday, winning widespread praise for his outspoken conservative positions. But Perry has served 26 years since first winning election, as a Democrat, to the Texas state House in 1984. That means he carries a record — a long record — containing a few conservative blemishes that his leading rivals in the GOP field can seize upon.

Indeed, in an interview with a Des Moines radio station on Monday, Perry was deluged with questions from informed Republican voters about potential conservative heresies on his record — from his enthusiastic backing of an unsuccessful superhighway proposal that critics claimed was a land grab, to his support for Al Gore in the 1988 Democratic presidential primary.

Wondering about the playbook of attacks his Republican rivals may be digging from in the coming months? Here’s an overview:

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The Regionalist: Stormin’ Norman, Decentralist Reply

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Article by Bill Kauffman.

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In 1969, Norman Mailer, the dukes-up bard of Brooklyn and a self-proclaimed “left conservative,” undertook a campaign for mayor of the city that had, seven decades earlier, swallowed his borough of homes and churches. Competing in the Democratic primary against a quartet of machine hacks and standard-brand liberals, the novelist-pugilist got clobbered. What do you expect of an electorate that has filled Gracie Mansion with the likes of Abe Beame, Ed Koch, and Rudy Giuliani? But Mailer ran a race that carved out a path that we would do well to follow today. I don’t believe that any municipal campaign of the last century has been packed with such radical spirit and reactionary sense.

Mailer averred that he was to the left of the liberals and to the right of the conservatives: wisdom’s place! He diagnosed the modern malady: “The style of New York life has shifted since the Second World War (along with the rest of American cities) from a scene of local neighborhoods and personalities to a large dull impersonal style of life which deadens us with its architecture, its highways, its abstract welfare, and its bureaucratic reflex to look for government solutions which come into the city from without (and do not work). . . . Our authority has been handed over to the federal power. We expect our economic solutions, our habitats, yes, even our entertainments, to derive from that remote abstract power, remote as the other end of a television tube. We are like wards in an orphan asylum. The shaping of the style of our lives is removed from us—we pay for huge military adventures and social experiments so separated from our direct control that we do not even know where to begin to look to criticize the lack of our power to criticize. . . . [O]ur condition is spiritless. We wait for abstract impersonal powers to save us, we despise the abstractness of those powers, we loathe ourselves for our own apathy.” Has any candidate in postwar America been as eloquent? (Mailer’s essay, “An Instrument for the City,” reprinted in Existential Errands, is a brilliant and shamefully neglected decentralist manifesto. If only NYC had listened to Mailer, Paul Goodman, and Dorothy Day instead of John Lindsay, Robert Moses, and the New York Times.)

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Anarchism 3

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Article by Bill Kauffman.

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Perhaps no political term is quite so misunderstood as “anarchy.” In the popular press, it is a synonym for disorder and chaos, not to mention looting and pillage: countries like Haiti are always being “plunged into anarchy.” The anarchist, meanwhile, is frozen into a late-nineteenth-century caricature: he is furtive, hirsute, beady-eyed, given to gesticulation, gibberish, and, most of all, pointless acts of violence. Yet anarchy, according to most of its proponents through the years, is peaceable, wholly voluntary, and perhaps a bit utopian. The word means “without a ruler”; anarchy is defined as the absence of a state and its attendant coercive powers. It implies nothing about social arrangements, family and sexual life, or religion; and in fact the most persuasive anarchists, from Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy to Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, have been Christians.

Under anarchy, wrote its advocate Prince Peter Kropotkin in the Encyclopedia Britannica(1910), “the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions.” From alms to arms, “an anarchist is a voluntarist,” explained Karl Hess, the speechwriter for Barry Goldwater who chucked it all to live as a husband, neighbor, and welder in rural West Virginia. Anarchists would separate state from church, state from education, state from welfare, even state from justice. (Murray N. Rothbard and David Friedman, among others, have explored how courts and policing might work in a stateless society.)

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Contentment Without Religion Reply

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Article by Russell Longcore.

I don’t generally post articles about religion here, as I like to keep religion and politics separate. I also consider the militant atheism of some strands of classical anarchism (and today’s “New Atheists”) as archaic and largely irrelevant to modern societies. I also don’t want religion to be a divisive force in the movement I am trying to develop.

But this piece by a former fundamentalist turned deist is an excellent introduction to the anti-clerical outlook that is a big part of the anarchist tradition. “Unbelievers” are the fastest growing religious perspective in the U.S. today, and religious dissent often correlates with political dissent. Criticizing Christian orthodoxy and embracing alternative religious perspectives like deism and entirely skeptical positions like atheism were an essential and primary part of the cultivation of the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. It is out of this intellectual milieu that political philosophies of the kind we discuss here emerged: classical liberalism, classical anarchism, libertarian socialism, and modern libertarianism.

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An undercurrent of comments began after I ran Laurence Vance’s article Are Evangelical Christians Warmongers? One reader calling himself “Anubis” (the jackal-headed Egyptian god) started it by commenting “Another reason I’ve become an atheist. If there was a God he would…”

I took the bait and replied “Being an atheist is unintelligent and flies in the face of reason. Being a-religious makes sense. You can acknowledge God’s existence and have a relationship with Him without embracing any particular religion.”

“Nathan McMurray” added this: “Careful Russ, you don’t know the specifics of why this reader chose atheism over theism. If it was based on “unintelligent” presuppositions then yes, his choice would be unintelligent and, therefore, fly in the face of reason. But there are many of us atheists that have examined the facts of the various Holy Scriptures and found that none of them point to anything that would resemble an all-knowing creator entity; much less an entity that has taken a keen interest in a certain species of upright walking apes and with whom they copulate. At best, all anyone can say with certainty is they are a hopeful agnostic.”

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Are We At War With Pakistan? Reply

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Article by Justin Raimondo.

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In the days before the Empire, generals – particularly Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs – kept their mouths shut. The Founders’ justified fears of military intrusion into the political realm were still present in the American consciousness, and the idea that an American general might try to influence policy directly, by making public statements on controversial political topics, was considered outside the norm. Today, however, no one is shocked by Admiral Mullen’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that we are, for all intents and purposes, already at war with Pakistan:

“Extremist organizations serving as proxies of the government of Pakistan are attacking Afghan troops and civilians as well as U.S. soldiers. For example, we believe the Haqqani Network – which has long enjoyed the support and protection of the Pakistani government and is, in many ways, a strategic arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency – is responsible for the September 13th attacks against the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

“There is ample evidence confirming that the Haqqanis were behind the June 28th attack against the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul and the September 10th truck bomb attack that killed five Afghans and injured another 96 individuals, 77 of whom were U.S. soldiers. History teaches us that it is difficult to defeat an insurgency when fighters enjoy a sanctuary outside national boundaries, and we are seeing this again today. The Quetta Shura and the Haqqani Network are hampering efforts to improve security in Afghanistan, spoiling possibilities for broader reconciliation, and frustrating U.S.-Pakistan relations. The actions by the Pakistani government to support them – actively and passively – represent a growing problem that is undermining U.S. interests and may violate international norms, potentially warranting sanction. In supporting these groups, the government of Pakistan, particularly the Pakistani Army, continues to jeopardize Pakistan’s opportunity to be a respected and prosperous nation with genuine regional and international influence.”

If the evidence is so “ample,” why didn’t Mullen reveal any of it during the course of his testimony? It’s “classified,” which means we ordinary mortals aren’t entitled to see it: we just have to take their word for it. In this context, however, their word isn’t worth a hill of beans.

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One Cheer for the DADT Repeal Reply

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Article by Kevin Carson.

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With the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the U.S. armed forces ceased at least a major part of their official discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.  Since the Congressional deal last Fall — one of Obama’s promises he actually followed through on — the gay and lesbian community has been counting down the months, days and hours until the repeal took effect.  MSNBC resounded with cries of “Nunc dimittis!”  So I’ll add my own congratulations for the gay service members — I guess.

At first glance, this story would seem like a big win for anyone who hates seeing large, powerful institutions walk all over people’s human dignity and treat them like dirt.  But at second glance, what do you think the state’s armed forces are all about, anyway?

Thanks to this recent blessed occasion, we’ll have the pleasure of knowing the torture at Gitmo — the closing of which is a promise Obama didn’t follow through on — is being conducted by a military that’s integrated not only by race but by sexual orientation.  And the “extraordinary renditions,” the “harsh interrogation techniques” at Baghram AFB, and God knows what at the network of black sites around the world — stuff Obama never even promised to stop — will all be carried out by gays and straights alike.  O happy day!

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Thugs of the Organized Criminal Class Reply

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Article by David D’Amato.

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The fact that “we live in a post-9/11 world” has become a convenient refrain for law enforcement over the past decade — and one that can apparently be called upon to justify limitless growth of the American police state.

This week, reporting on the protests still underway on Wall Street, the New York Times’ Joseph Goldstein noted that the “police’s actions suggested the flip side of a force trained to fight terrorism.” That’s because the NYPD have dealt with demonstrators with all of the characteristic brutality that we’ve come to expect from our cities’ militarized patrols.

A quick search in YouTube is enough to reveal the kinds of excessive, violent tactics that the police have employed, arresting many protestors without cause under the thin pretense of “disorderly conduct.” The story reminds us that today police departments are more often a greater threat to peaceful society than the criminals they ostensibly protect us from.

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