War ain't beanbag. Irony is conserved.

[R. A. Hettinga]

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At 6:11 AM +0000 6/13/04, Carmi Turchick wrote:
>Here is more about the connection between the death squads and the
>policy of genocide and our own American facility, the School of the
>Americas...

Yawn. War, to paraphrase a famous American income-redistributionist,
ain't beanbag.

Yes. We taught soldiers, hell, thugs, even, to kill commies. It was a
war. Remember?

The commies were killing people too, remember? More to the point,
they wanted to kill lots more. Deliberately, or worse, through their
own ignorant mismanagement of the lives they would eventually have
total control of.


All those "innocent" people were either totalitarians or dupes.
Lenin's "useful idiots". Even the nuns. Even the bishops. Even the
nice Anglo church ladies from El Norte who thought that in a war
between Ghandi and, say, Stalin, Ghandi would win. Bambi vs. Godzilla
is more like it. Of course, like Lenin himself, ultimately, those
"idiots" were like Ghandi joining the war on Stalin's side.

[Okay, so, in actuality, Ghandi *was* on Stalin's side, economically
and ideologically, at least, the world's most beatified useful idiot
in that regard. Certainly Nehru was on Stalin's team, explicitly so,
creating the world's second largest command economy after China's,
dooming tens of millions of his countrymen to famine, and most of the
rest to destitution -- for *decades* -- in the process, because food
prices were *calculated* by a committee somewhere instead of
discovered in a market like they're supposed to be, and because
cheaper, superior, foreign goods and services were legislated out of
Indian markets entirely. Except for the elite, of course...]


"Liberation" theology, remember that? ["Liberation" being yet another
communard verbal expropriation, like what they did to the word
"liberal". War is peace. Or, in the case of "liberation", and
"liberal", freedom is literally tyranny.]

Remember Aristide's little ditty in praise of the "necklace"?

Remember Ortega and the people whose property he expropriated, who he
jailed, and those small-businessman "counter-revolutionaries" he
eventually killed? He would have killed more if we'd let him. If
Reagan had let him.

Don't think the "innocent" Allende would have been any different,
he'd already started the process of expropriation and confiscation of
people's livelihoods, and eventually, their lives, when, yes,
Pinochet took him out. Life is hard. War sucks. People die.

And of course, there's the Sendero Luminoso, the "Shining" Path. Real
humanitarians.

Oh. That's right. Butchers like the Sendero's Guzman, like Ortega,
or, these days, Chavez and Castro, are *heroes* to people like you.
"Freedom fighters," or some such emetic nonsense. I'm a functional
atheist (okay, a Unitarian; there's some pyroclastic irony for
you...), but one of the best things the Pope did -- after helping
first Thatcher and then Reagan *free* three-quarters of Eurasia, if
you now count India, and start what is an irreversible process in
China -- was to kill "liberation" theology in its metaphoric crib,
before it literally killed tens of millions of people, much more than
centuries of ignorance and cryptofeudal tyranny hadn't done already
in South America. (See, speaking of Guzman and Sendero, the works of
Hernando de Soto for more on that...)


A nation-state, if you remember your first political "science" class,
is about force and geographic monopolies thereof. Politics is about
who controls and spends the economic rents that a force-monopoly
violently expropriates from its citizenry, and about buying
non-violent acquiescence in that expropriation through "social"
programs and other forms of fraud, thus lowering the transaction cost
of what would have been a more violent act of theft.

As Mancur Olsen said in "Power and Prosperity", a prince is a bandit
who doesn't move.

Absent any *physical* brakes on his power -- be they economic or
violent -- whoever is in charge of a nation state, and whatever elite
he needs to keep himself in power, can do whatever they damn well
please. It is only an armed (first) and educated (second), and thus
*free* population that prevents them from turning into tyrants.
Stalin, the subject of "Power and Prosperity" -- and ultimate model
for erst-and-proto-tinpots from Santiago to Managua to Havana to
Caracas, from New Delhi to Baghdad, from Phnom Penh to Pyongyang --
being the canonical example.

Your heroes, from the "liberation" theology Church Ladies to Castro,
were about selling oppression to the masses.

My heroes, certainly the people who ran, and, yes, those who
graduated from, the School of the Americas, thugs and all, were,
ultimately, on the side of good and right. And ultimately, by the
count of democracy versus tyranny in this half of the world -- more
important, by the count of free versus confiscatory
crypto-and-neo-feudal markets -- it looks like they won, so they were
on the right side of history as well.

War ain't beanbag. Until we solve the problem of force-monopoly with
free markets someday, war, and monopolistic violence, is,
paradoxically, how we protect free markets, and, through them,
freedom itself.

Irony, apparently, is abundant in the universe, and, like matter and
energy, force and fraud, it is conserved as well.


Cheers,
RAH


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-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'