The moon landing was faked by the U.S. government for propaganda purposes to win the Cold War. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 was actually an inside job as a pretext to go to war. Space aliens landed in Roswell, NM but the government has been covering it up. The Sandy Hook massacre was faked to increase support for new gun control laws; the “victims” were actually actors who are all alive and well today. The Illuminati is the secret entity which actually governs the whole world…
The natural response to these statements is to say “these people are mad barking moonbats” and to keep ourselves as distant as possible from the people making them. Those of us in the liberty movement who want to be taken seriously are very quick to renounce anyone who is within six degrees of Alex Jones or anyone else who states any of the above. It’s difficult enough to be taken seriously about legalizing drugs, the non-aggression principle, free markets, and freedom of association; the last thing we need is to be lumped in with “those people.”
While it is very important to defend the “brand” of the liberty movement, it’s also important to recognize the reasons why people believe some rather nutty things.
[W]hen I say virtually everyone is capable of paranoid thinking, I really do mean virtually everyone, including you, me, and the founding fathers. As the sixties scare about the radical Right demonstrates, it is even possible to be paranoid about paranoids. – Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, (p. 24) (Read my book review here)
Once one learns about some of the activities governments been proven to have been involved in, some conspiracy theories no longer seem as outlandish. I used to refer to conspiracy theories and wacky beliefs as “black helicopter” stories and I’m fairly certain that others used the same terminology. Once I learned that black unmarked helicopters were used in the assault by the FBI on the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX,(Napolitano, p.110) I stopped calling such ideas “black helicopter.”
In the year 2015 there are many good reasons to protest: police brutality, injustice, the war on (some) drugs, the war on (some) terror, etc. One thing from Martian Luther King Jr.’s legacy that seems to be lost and something we should rediscover is the art of the peaceful protest and civil disobedience.
King understood that for positive change to occur, he had to truly win the hearts and minds of his fellow Americans. Being a positive example by showing the world that he and his followers would take a stand against injustice without resorting to violence was even more important than the words he spoke to that end. Certainly, not everyone believed in using the non-violent approach. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers believed that violence was necessary to achieve their shared goals.*
Who was right?
Personally, I find the pictures and the videos from the non-violent protests and the acts of civil disobedience to be far more compelling. There’s just something about seeing people refusing to act in a violent fashion against the state which inherently IS violence. This has a way of changing hearts and minds.
Contrast this with today’s protests in Ferguson, New York, and elsewhere concerning the police. For the most part, the protesters are peaceful and are using tactics which King would likely be proud. Unfortunately, however; it’s the nasty protesters that are violent, incite riots, or cheer at the news of cops being ambushed which receives far too much of the publicity. Even holding up signs like “The only good cop is a dead cop” or “fuck the police,” though certainly permissible as recognized by the First Amendment, turns people off who might otherwise be sympathetic to one’s cause.
Sadly, it’s not just a few misfit protesters who think that aggression is sometimes warranted to get one’s way. No less than the pope himself last week in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks said: “(If someone) says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”
The leader of the same Catholic Church which normally advocates finding non-violent solutions to conflict (such as the Just War Doctrine) says that because someone says something offensive about one’s parents or faith it is permissible to use violence against that person! People’s feeling are more important than the concept of free expression.
I’m not interested in living in a world where I cannot insult the pope or his religion nor do I want to live in a world where the pope cannot insult me or my atheism. The world I am interested in living in is one where we can have passionate, even hurtful disagreements without fearing physical harm to my family, my friends, or myself.
Let us all rediscover the art of peaceful protest and civil disobedience on this Martian Luther King Jr. Day.
On Wednesday morning at about 11:30am local time, militants stating they were from Al-Qaeda in Yemen attacked the Paris offices of satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing twelve and injuring eleven:
Two gunmen in balaclavas and bullet-proof vests, armed with a pump-action shotgun and an automatic rifle, stormed into the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo at about 11.30am as about 15 journalists had gathered for the weekly editorial conference. They called for the editor by name and then murdered him before spraying the room with gunfire, killing nine more and wounding others. Laurent Léger, a Charlie Hebdo writer, managed to sound the alarm, calling a friend and telling him: “Call the police. It’s carnage, a bloodbath. Everyone is dead.”
As they made their getaway, the gunmen shot dead two policemen, including one who they shot in the head at close range as he lay injured on the pavement.
Charlie Hebdo has courted controversy regarding depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in the past, starting in 2006 when they responded to the Jyllands-Posten controversy with images of the Prophet Muhammad of their own. Their offices were firebombed in 2011 in response to a cover changing the name of the paper to “Charia” (for Sharia) Hebdo with a “guest editorial” by the Prophet.
There is some question as to how Islam regards depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. The Qu’ran does not ban depictions of the Prophet. However, some variations of the hadeth – a collection of Muhammad’s teachings that I could best compare to Proverbs – outlaw the practice.
Reaction has been swift, with French President François Hollande denoting Thursday as a day of mourning. The United Nations and United States were also quick to condemn. Muslims not affiliated with the Islamic State were quick to denounce the killings. Jon Stewart took some time on The Daily Show to talk about it. While some outlets are censoring the covers that Charlie Hebdo has put out, others have reacted with spiteful malice towards this attitude. Of course, the usual suspects in America have ratcheted up the Islamophobia.1
It should also be noted that French Muslims have dealt with considerable discrimination despite their heavy presence in France’s population when compared to the rest of Europe; in 2010, a French government panel recommended banning the Hijab in public buildings. The response by some on the French right has been openly hostile to Islam, and many Muslims are bracing for retaliation.
It is my personal belief – one that I will concede risks politicizing this topic at a sensitive time – that one thing bears mentioning: I don’t know of too many children who have the ability to write who put down “I want to kill people when I grow up!” on paper. That’s because just about any form of extremism is born from desperation. The Islamic State isn’t an uprising of well-to-do people; it, along with Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups, is an uprising of people who feel that they have nothing else to live for, being taken advantage of by people who are teaching a perverted form of Islam to those that don’t have the means to know any better. When you live every day in abject poverty, in fear of drone strikes, a bunch of virgins start to sound enticing.
Times like this bear a link to what Afghanistan used to look like. Miniskirts, uncovered heads, a useful economy… it’s hard to place those images with what has replaced them in my lifetime. But a populist revolt overthrew the King in 1973, and starting in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded as part of their larger proxy war against the United States, leading to a civil war that lasted ten years and only ended thanks to American intervention. The country never recovered.
I bring up Afghanistan in this context because that’s basically been the entirety of the Arab middle east: a pawn for the two big superpowers to play with, damn the consequences. Those countries’ destruction opened the way for many extremist groups to come about; The Islamic State is little more than a Pokemon evolution of all of the movements before it. Those groups, for many in this area, are the only way to get out of their sorry way of life. Those groups teach the bastardized form of Islam that educated Muslims denounce on a daily basis. Every time a drone strikes a wedding party in one of these countries, we make those groups a little stronger.
Free speech and free thought are the antithesis of what extremist Muslims – or really, extremists of any religion – want or believe in. If we want to create less extremists, we must allow the way of life in these countries to improve. Until that point, what happened to Charlie Hebdo, the girls kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram, the beheading of the Western journalists and aid workers, and other cases of extreme terrorism will continue, the head-shaking will continue, the hatred will continue, and the cycle will get stronger and stronger, not unlike the circling of water around a toilet drain.
UPDATE @11:46AM ON 1/8: Charlie Hebdo’s Patrick Pelloux has defiantly announced that, instead of printing the standard run of 60,000 magazines, their next issue will print 1m copies.
Charlie Hebdo will publish next Wednesday to defiantly show that “stupidity will not win,” columnist Patrick Pelloux told Agence France-Presse, adding that the remaining staff will soon meet.
“It’s very hard. We are all suffering, with grief, with fear, but we will do it anyway because stupidity will not win,” he said.
1 – I will not link to or mention any of these people or their hashtag. I refuse to give them oxygen.
Christopher Bowen covered the video games industry for eight years before moving onto politics and general interest. He is the Editor in Chief of Gaming Bus, and has worked for Diehard GameFan, Daily Games News, TalkingAboutGames.com and has freelanced elsewhere. He is a “liberaltarian” – a liberal libertarian. A network engineer by trade, he lives in Derby CT.
Today, the White House announced that they were looking to thaw relations with Cuba for the first time since President John F. Kennedy severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January of 1961, which preceded the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that following April. In their statement, the White House noted that fifty years of sanctions and other actions against Cuba have failed to achieve their stated means. This seems to be inarguable; ever since those severed ties, the relationship between the United States and Cuba has been highly antagonistic, with America using its financial and political clout to install strict financial sanctions against them, largely punishing them for adopting a communist government and aligning with the Soviet Union until the latter’s dissolution.
Under the terms laid out simultaneously by the White House and Cuban President Raul Castro, US residents could travel to Cuba for tourism, and Cuba would be allowed to accept United States credit cards. President Obama has also requested Secretary of State John Kerry to begin a review of Cuba’s standing on the list State Sponsor(s) of Terrorism, and some prisoners – most notably American Alan Gross – have been exchanged.
Of course, everything is not as cut and dried as Obama simply waiving his hands and saying “make it so”. For one, most Cuban sanctions are codified in American law, per Doug Mataconis. The number one opponent is going to be Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), whose views echo those of many Cuban exiles and their family members who refuse to deal with Cuba so long as the Castro brothers are in power. Combined with Congress’s total inability to get anything done of note, there is going to be resistance before relations can be formally normalized.1 Naturally, when diplomacy is on the table, there is also a contingent of Americans – the hawks – that are not satisfied unless we’re blowing someone up.
Frankly, it’s well past time for us to normalize relations with Cuba. We had better relations with Russia – the number one antagonist in the Cold War – for a time than we did with Cuba, and all because of… what? The Cuban Missile Crisis, which we instigated with the Bay of Pigs invasion? Punishment for dealing with the Soviet Union back in the early 60s? Some assassination attempts against Presidents, by a country that we invaded? That stupid picture of noted murderer and tyrant Che Guevara being printed on T-shirts and postcards? Actually, that might be a really good reason after all…
Don’t mistake this for altruism. The intention here is definitely to line the pockets of private industry as the mandate’s stated goals of increasing internet penetration and American tourism start to take seed. There’s also the view that ending the embargo will hurt Raul and Fidel Castro as people start to realize the magic of capitalism, a view that seems to be shared by Hillary Clinton. Lastly, our request for Cuba to improve their human rights record is prettyfunny, contextually speaking. But even if it’s bad for Cuba’s leaders, opening up relations with Cuba is not only the best thing for Cuba’s people, it’s the best thing for America, as well. We not only get a fertile ground for business dealings – a problem only for hard-core communists and socialists – but we look much better to the United Nations, now that it’s not just us and Israel holding out.
Ultimately, the end of the embargo, and the surety of the overall improvement to both the Cuban economy and the quality of life of its people, will prove one key point: America, and capitalism, won the Cold War, and it was a rout. The Soviet Union’s been dead for over twenty years, replaced by a plutocracy. Cuba will fundamentally change after holding out for decades purely out of spite. And other countries such as China are communist in name only. If the Cold War was a fight between American capitalism and communism, it’s over, and it was a slaughter.
1 – I would not be surprised if a Republican controlled Congress put the brakes on this for at least two years so as not to give Obama credit.
Christopher Bowen covered the video games industry for eight years before moving onto politics and general interest. He is the Editor in Chief of Gaming Bus, and has worked for Diehard GameFan, Daily Games News, TalkingAboutGames.com and has freelanced elsewhere. He is a “liberaltarian” – a liberal libertarian. A network engineer by trade, he lives in Derby CT.
With the election of the new Republican Congress in last week’s midterms, there are some questions about what policy directions the new Congress will try to take. Much of this is because the GOP didn’t really run on anything except “Obama sucks.”
The Republican Party has been debating foreign policy with less interventionist Republicans like Rand Paul clashing with more hawkish Republicans like John McCain.
This week, I asked the contributors whether or not the GOP will return to its Bush-era hawkish days or not?
Christopher Bowen:
In the big battle between the old-school Republicans and the new-style Tea Party types, the arguement in most circles has centred around economics; really, it’s centred around the Affordable Care Act. There have been other battles, but ground zero has been spending. It’s that focus on those larger battles that have enabled the latter group to enable sweeping social conservative legislation despite the fact that much of that legislation goes against their “liberty” strain of political thought.
It’s with that small sample size of history that I prognosticate what the future holds: if you are a liberty minded person who does not want perpetual war, the next two years are bad news.
It should be noted that of all the things most Republicans hated about Obama, the one thing many agreed with was when he decided to take actions against Libya and the Islamic State. Likewise, many of the conservative lawmakers who have made token rejections of the cavalier way Obama has gone about implementing these wars said nothing about George W. Bush when he did largely the same thing, with some even cheering him on.
To put it simply, war is a divisive subject in both parties, with the far-left liberals also clashing with establishment Democrats.
In the end, war will be something that conservatives latch onto because it will create jobs – a huge selling point to a new, conservative Congress as they prepare for the 2016 election against the Democrat’s biggest hawk, Hillary Clinton – and increase patriotism, which is always a go-getter for the GOP. The dissenters will either be silenced or made irrelevant by feckless Democrats too scared of their own shadows to reject the war drums, and everything that brought us to Iraq the second time will continue to keep us there the third. Those who don’t want to go to war will be labeled anti-American, wanting to help the enemy by forfeiting American jobs. Meanwhile, existing fears about Muslims – largely based off of a few cartoon-like caricatures that would make Boris Badenov blush – will be stoked, as the scary man with the gun in the turban will continue to supplant the scary man with the gun in the ushanka, which long ago supplanted the scary man with the gun and the Tojo glasses as our Common Enemy Who Must Be Destroyed. We have always been at war with Islam, comrade.
“Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship(…) the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” – Hermann Goering, Nuremberg Diaries
Chris Byrne:
Simple answer? No… except rhetorically… just as they have been for years.
What exact role does congress have in the use of the military other than funding it (or not), disapproving of it (or not), and bloviating about it? Or in foreign policy as a whole? It seems that their approval or disapproval are largely irrelevant at this point anyway… and have been for some time.
Ask me again in two years when the president is a Republican.
Doug Mataconis:
I would submit that the premise of the Roundtable is somewhat flawed, because there is no real evidence that the Republican Party in general, or Republicans at the House and Senate level specifically, have ever really retreated from the “Bush-era foreign policy.” Yes, there are some examples one can point to in both chambers of Congress who have spoken out against an interventionist foreign policy over the the past five years of the Obama Administration. Senator Rand Paul, and Members of Congress such as Justin Amash and Walter Jones come to mind most immediately in that regard, and of course Congressman Ron Paul continued to adhere to his non-interventionist rhetoric until he retired at the end of the 112th Congress. For the most part, though, the GOP Caucuses in both bodies as a whole, have taken the same positions on foreign policy issues that they have in the past.
What we have seen over these past five years isn’t so much evidence of the GOP reconsidering the interventionist foreign policy that defined it during the Bush years as opportunistic criticism of the Obama Administration for pursuing policies that were actually logical extensions of politics previously advocated by Republicans. In some cases, such as the 2011 intervention in Libya, that criticism took the form of opposition to the in retrospect limited U.S. involvement in the aid provided to rebels in Libya’s civil war. In others, such as the Obama Administration’s policies in Syria, Republicans have been downright schizophrenic. After spending two years criticizing the President for not doing enough to aid the anti-Assad rebels in Syria, Republicans on Capitol Hill went with the winds of public opinion, which was decidedly anti-war, and opposed President Obama when he was threatening to take action over the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Now, in connection with actions against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Republicans seems to speaking out of both sides of their mouth; criticizing the Administration for acting at all while at the same time saying that he isn’t doing enough and, in the end, inviting a terrorist attack on the United States. Above it all, though, is the fact that the majority voice in the Republican Party remains one that supports interventionism, continues to think that the 2003 Iraq War as a good idea, considers the only acceptable foreign policy in the Middle East one that blindly supports Israel, and denounces any attempt to cut the defense budget as “retreat.”
There are, as I’ve said, some exceptions to this general rule, such as Rand Paul. Paul, however, remains a minority voice in his party on foreign policy and there are already indications that if he runs for President in 2016 he will be targeted by many forces inside the GOP based on his foreign policy views. We’ve already seen such attacks from the likes of John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Congressman Peter King, and conservative pundits such as Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post and pretty much everyone who writes at Commentary. One can hope that a Paul candidacy would lead to a real debate on these issues but it’s just as likely that Senator Paul’s efforts to raise these issues will end up being drown in a sea of denunciations of him as a “isolationist.”
So, no, the GOP won’t return to its interventionist ways. But that’s because it never really left that path.
Sarah Baker:
For three reasons, I am optimistic that we will not see a renewed focus on hawkish foreign interventions in the near future.
First, even among people who originally supported the Iraq war, many now believe it was a mistake. Whether they say so publicly or not, deep down in their hawkish hearts, they understand that invasion led inevitably to being forced to choose between two unpalatable options: maintaining a heightened presence for years to come or allowing the place to descend into chaos.
The lessons for Syria could not be more obvious.
Second, we are broke. This country is trillions of dollars in debt. A significant portion of that debt reflects spending during the Bush years. This includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a combined price tag, by some estimates, as high as $6 trillion. Even the most hawkish of the hawks must see that we cannot continue to allow this sort of debt to burden our descendants for generations to come.
Third, the world has been fundamentally changed by the globalization of Internet news and the advent of social media. When people die in drone strikes, for example, we can watch interviews with their grieving survivors within days—or even hours—of the strike. For the first time in history, ordinary Americans can exchange messages in real time with ISIS fighters.
We cannot know all of the ways in which these interactions will change the world. But surely they will not make it easier for us to kill one another.
Matthew Souders:
I believe that a GOP-controlled legislature will take some actions internationally, particularly against ISIS, and that libertarians will scream bloody murder about it, but I believe it will be wrong to be so aggrieved. This notion that non-intervention is the savior of US foreign policy that lurks at the heart of the libertarian party is the reason that many Republicans have not become libertarian and the primary reason libertarians still do not field competitive candidates for office.
In the real world, the US is the only superpower with enough influence to have a positive impact on world security. In the real world, the relative success of the EU would be impossible without the US playing an active role internationally. In the real world, ISIS demands a response, lest it embolden every radical or crazy person to join the fight at home or abroad. But in the eyes of many in libertarian ranks, the US would be secure if only we didn’t get involved.
We just passed the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy cannot possibly be described as anything other than a roaring success on the merits – this, the most interventionist president we’ve ever had. Obviously, the same sort of aggression cannot work against a non-centralized power like Islamic Extremism the way it worked against the USSR. It requires a different set of answers and a different general posture. But to ask Congress – who have heard the American People demand action against ISIS – to take no action on the assumption that any action we take must only make matters worse is folly. And the price we will pay if we go down that road will be worse than the price we paid for ignoring Islamic Extremism in the 90s.
None of which is to say that I expect or desire a full-scale war in ISIS-held territory. I believe in the oldest of international doctrines – that we should speak softly, but carry a big stick. That our use of force should be commensurate to the need. That we should not be fooled into believing that it is possible to construct a freedom-loving nation out of people who have never known or expected freedom. But when the cries of people brutalized by a savage group of radicals bent on restoring the Islamic Caliphate go up, and America does not respond – then the world as we know it is surely in the gravest danger.
Stephen Littau:
I have to admit that when I cast my vote for Cory Gardner in order to fire Mark Udall (in hopes of making Harry Reid the Sen. Minority Leader), the notion that the GOP would be so stupid as to return to the Bush era foreign policy never really entered my mind. Sure, I know there are still a few hawks in the GOP who have never met a war (or are we calling them “kinetic actions” now?) they didn’t want to start but I thought that by now the majority had learned the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
I’m holding out hope that the Senate, under new leadership, will have other priorities which passed through the House but never saw the light of day thanks to Reid. Priorities such as auditing the FED, passing a damned budget, passing the Record Expungement Designed to Enhance Employment Act (REDEEM Act), and the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR Act) should at the very least have an up or down vote. There’s now simply no acceptable excuse for not getting this done.
This is why I decided, perhaps against my better judgement, to vote in favor of a GOP Senate Majority. I certainly didn’t vote in favor of the idea of more boots on the ground in the Middle East. Whose vision will the GOP lead congress follow, that of Rand Paul or that of John McCain? If its the latter, control of the legislative branch will be very short lived and deservedly so.
Kevin Boyd:
Put me down in the “don’t know” category. Sure more hawkish politicians in the GOP won big such as Tom Cotton and Jodi Ernst, but there has been a growing anti-war right as the bills from Iraq and Afghanistan have come due. Conservatives are asking was it worth it to pay so much to achieve so little.
I think we’ll see where the party is going on foreign policy, if a Republican is elected president. However, it appears that every presidential race will be settled in the Democratic primary from 2016 on as Democrats can already count on having 270 or close to 270 electoral votes before the first vote is cast.
I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.
