And an admirable role model for the Simian's memory: An avenging rebel terrorist shot Abe, not Grant, who suicided himself with whiskey and self-pity, after lollygagging in the animal-beshat White House, lost that, took up liquor, became a helpless drunk, friends caretook his inept pickled carcass for a few years then he wrote a vain, distorted book about his carnaging of the rebels, and worst comedownance, got entombed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so it is said, but who knows what military-industrial effigy lies in that grafitti-and-dogshit-smeared pile overlooking beshitten liberal-elitist, nest of rebellious vermin Columbia University, Riverside Church, the National Council of Churches, and best, squalid, infested, periodically ractist white-massacreing Harlem. Still, when you visit Grant's Tomb you see mostly well-dressed African Americans studying the memoria displayed welling tears at the piles of war dead, the freed slaves, the army grunts and officers gauntly posed in muddy filth. A tourist bus roars in, pinky blobs waddle into the high-domed gloom, see no cafe, no gift shop, come out to circle the monument looking for something to buy or eat or video. Nothing there like the rest of the homeland shopfested US. What the fuck they mouth, fart, scratch, heave their globs fore and aft, struggle to re-mount the bus, stare out the dark glass at me in my Swift Boat get-up, jesus-bearded, gut abusting, carrying a Viet Vet begging sign that says Apocalypse Now or Else.

-- R.A. Hettinga wrote:

Seriously, any future crypto-anarchy / anarcho-capitalist society is probably not going to succeed unless it can project *more* force than we can project currently with force monopoly -- not less. That *doesn't* mean centralized, but it certainly means *more*.

It is often argued that since war, violence, etc, are public goods, only a state can efficiently defend against states. Yet in most wars since 1980, non state entities have done most of the heavy lifting -loose coalitions containing many independent groups, for example the contras, the holy warriors that overthrew the Taliban. Looking at the events of World War II, it looks to me that it does indeed require a state to conquer and occupy a hostile government, as the US conquered and occupied Germany, but the Japanese army was broken by a thousand small groups. Defeating a large scale evildoer is a public good - but large scale evil consists of many acts of small scale evil, and defeating each particular small scale evil act is a private good. When it came to the part of the war that was purely a public good, conquering the German and Japanese homelands, America did indeed bear almost the whole burden, but when it came to defending Australia against the Japanese, the Australians bore the major burden, and similarly for most other battlefields outside of the aggressors' homelands. Most German troops died fighting Russians in Russia, not Americans in Germany. The particular victims of particular Japanese or German acts of aggression counter attacked those particular Japanese or Germans attacking them. National defense, or at least some forms of national defense, such as destroying Hitler's Germany, is a public good, and genuinely anarchist societies are apt to under provide public goods. On the other hand governments tend to provide the wrong kind of public goods, providing what serves their purposes rather than the supposed purpose of the public good, Further, when a government gets in the business of providing a some supposed public good, it creates a lobby, which results in the public good being over provided, thus for example ever lengthening copyright, ever more expansive patents for ever more trivial "inventions", and, of course, the infamous military/industrial complex, such as Haliburton. War, for example destroying Hitler's Germany, is the most plausibly essential public good, the strongest justification for the state. But when we look at the defeat of the Soviet Union, or the defeat of the Taliban, this argument looks considerably weaker. The heavy lifting in those wars was done by loose alliances of small groups, for example the holy warriors and the contras, which did not rely on a single large centralized authority to support the public good of defeat of an oppressive regime. In the second world war, public good theory would lead us to expect that the most powerful state, America would bear almost the whole burden of defeating the threat, and smaller states would hang back and cheer the winner. The holy warriors were probably effective against the Soviets because each holy warrior was defending his home, and each small group of holy warriors were defending their village. Among the contras, it appears that the Indian contras defended the Indians against forced collectivization, breaking up collectives with extreme violence and killing the collectives functionaries and administrators, often in disturbingly unpleasant ways, but failed to participate in other contra struggles. Thus anarchic forms of society appear to be capable of waging war defensively with considerably effectiveness, but are considerably less capable of taking the war to places far away. This is not such a severe limitation as it might appear, since the Soviet Union was overthrown by essentially defensive wars, leading to the dominoes falling all the way to Moscow. It is the nature of Islam to impose dhimmitude on nonbelievers, without much regard for official state boundaries. "Dhimmitude" being a dangerously inferior status where one's property is insecure, and women are apt to be raped. Existing Muslim states often fail to prosecute crimes against infidels, and when crimes are prosecuted, penalties are slight. The West has tried to confine Dhimmitude inside a system of states - the Muslims can oppress their minorities inside Muslim state boundaries all they like, but cannot oppress outside Muslim state boundaries. This artificial boundary bends under pressure, creating the conflict we now see. The anarchic equivalent of the current policy of imperial state building, would be to enter mutual defense arrangements with dhimmi, without regard to state boundaries. The Taliban had imposed Dhimmi status on Muslims they did not agree with in Afghanistan. An anarchic America would not be able to occupy Iraq, nor would it be capable of "building democracy" in Afghanistan, but it would be able to do the equivalent of sending special forces to assist the Northern Alliance. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Jyneib4EqTRVeeBY0/BjpjdEidDWCmp8YSQkckag 47p0ym1TCnknVRDL2q1wHz9ykyIr4wMdZjZBin9s/

At 11:11 AM -0800 11/3/04, James A. Donald wrote:

It is often argued that since war, violence, etc, are public goods

This is my favorite retort to that: "Externalities are the last refuge of the derigistes." -- Friedrich Hayek An otherwise excellent rant elided... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Externalities are the last refuge of the derigistes." -- Friedrich Hayek

ocorrain@yahoo.com (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Tiarn=E1n_=D3_Corr=E1in?=) writes:

The Russians (for example) conquered Hitler's capital, Berlin. And I believe the Russian zone in Germany was larger than any of the others, reflecting the fact that Stalin bore most of entire burden of defeating Germany, uncomfortable as it may be.

The figure that's usually quoted is that 80% of German's military force was directed against Russia. Of the remaining 20%, a lot had already been engaged by France, the UK (via the BEF, the RAF, North Africa), Greece, etc etc before the US got involved in Europe. So the Russians should get most of the credit. Peter.

"R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> writes:

At 3:32 AM +1300 11/3/04, Peter Gutmann wrote:

...

Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> writes:

...

On Tue, Nov 02, 2004 at 08:16:41AM -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

...

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB109936293065461940,00.html> No cypherpunks content. Just local politics.

And it's not even original, they've mostly just translated it into English, updated it a bit (e.g. League of Nations -> UN), and changed the Russian names and references to Middle Eastern ones.

Yup. That's Davis' point, actually. Fuck with the West, we kick your ass.

Well it wasn't the point I was trying to make, which was comparing it to predictions made by (the propaganda division of) another super-power in the mid 1940s about winning an unwinnable war because God/righteousness/whatever was on their side, and all they had to do was hold out a bit longer. Compare the general tone of the WSJ article to the one in e.g. the first half of http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/documents/htest.... Peter.

"R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> writes:

Germany 1944 does not equal USA 2004, no matter how hard you twist the kaleidoscope.

Fighting an unwinnable war always seems to produce the same type of rhetoric, whether it's the war on some drugs, the war on anyone Bush doesn't like, or the war on anything non-German. The only thing that changes over time are the identities of the bogeymen that are used to justify it. (Do you seriously think the war on bogey^H^H^Hterrorism can ever be won? Leaving aside the obvious debate that you can't even tell who you're at war with, how do you know when you've won?. We have always been at war with Terroristia) Peter.

-- Peter Gutmann wrote:

Fighting an unwinnable war always seems to produce the same type of rhetoric,

It is a little premature to call this war unwinnable. The kill ratio so far is comparable with Britain's zulu war. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 9YCccdHmWgBxj3a1UFFKM7Xyl1qKvkQYJoNuuZEw 4pOgjIzTXDiWQ1xXvdwBxCk93EgSXiZfQ29ag+5sW

"James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> writes:

But it is hardly a matter of "holding out". So far the Pentagon has shattered the enemy while suffering casualties of about a thousand,

We're talking about different things, the War on Bogeymen vs. the War for Oil. In its war on bogeymen, the most notable thing the USG has achieved to date is to create vastly more of them. Its strategy is about as effective as the paras were on Bloody Sunday, i.e. its actions serve mostly as a recruitment drive for the opposition: I swear by Almighty God [...] to fight until we die in the field of red gore of the infidel tyrants and murderers. Of our glorious faith, if spared to fight until not a single trace is left to tell that the Holy soil of our country was trodden by these infidels. Also these robbers and brutes, these unbelievers of our faith, will be driven into the sea, by fire, the knife or by poison cup until we of the true faith clear these infidels from our lands. (Whoever wrote the original was definitely no English lit major). Peter.

At 9:00 PM +0000 11/10/04, ken wrote:

Be fair. They had a trained and disciplined army. Most of whom would obey orders to the death. That's worth a hell of a lot in battle.

Yeah, but the zulus had the wrong end of, well, the stick. Take a look at, again, Hanson's "Carnage and Culture" for a nice discussion of the Zulus in particular, and exactly why 18 brits in a hastily constructed breastwork could hold off several thousand, killing most. Cheers, RAH ------ -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'