There was a time when children like my daughter were routinely sent away to live in institutions. To say that they were “cared for” is a gross distortion. They were warehoused until they died, often abused: physically, psychologically and even sexually, and subjected to some barbaric forms of “treatment” for their conditions. I would like to think that I would have been one of the few parents who refused to subject their children to such a fate, and I think I know myself well enough to say that I would have been, but I will never be certain of that.

There is a lot that is wrong with the world now, and it is easy for me to focus on that as I watch my country slide into a brutal, authoritarian police state and government-induced economic collapse. However there are also beautiful things happening in the world, and there are some really positive trends in our evolution as human beings. This is one of them: That it is no longer routine to send developmentally disabled children to live as zoo animals to be tormented and ignored; That there are entire industries around caring for those with autism and other developmental disabilities; And that more and more parents are beginning to appreciate the unique beauty of their own children. This photo essay is one example of that trend:

Fashion photographer focuses on those with genetic conditions to reframe beauty

Note: Corrina (pictured above) is a friend of ours, and has the same genetic condition that our daughter has – IDIC(15).

The Best of Bretigne Shaffer

In 1988, I fled college without having graduated, saved a little bit of money and got on an airplane for Taiwan. Martial law had just been lifted and back then, to enter on a tourist visa, you had to show a return-trip ticket. So that’s what I bought, even though I had no intention of returning to the US after my three-month-one-time-renewable stint was up. My plan was to sell my ticket to someone else and use the money to buy a ticket to wherever I was going next. So I put an ad in a local English-language paper and a young American guy responded to it. He paid me half the money up front, with a promise to pay the balance after I went to the airport with him and checked in – since the ticket was of course still in my name.

On the day of his flight, the American guy and I took the bus out to Chiang Kai Shek International Airport. I took the ticket up to the airline counter, checked myself in, and then handed him the ticket and he handed me the rest of the money. We were both familiar with airport procedures back then: Once you had checked in, you would not ever have to show identification again. There were no long security lines, no invasive pat-downs, no full-body scanners. You walked through a metal detector and then on to your gate. He took the ticket, we said goodbye and I never heard from him again, so assume that he made it all the way to Los Angeles.

Imagine trying to do this in today’s world. Imagine what would happen to the hapless souls who even attempted to pull off this kind of mutually beneficial exchange that harmed no-one else. Very likely, they would both find themselves accused of plotting a massive terrorist attack and be thrown into a military prison, detained indefinitely, perhaps never to be released.

By today’s reasoning, the airports should have been on full alert back then. 1988 had been one of the worst years in terms of international terrorist attacks since 1972. With 456 incidents, the year had the highest number of terrorist attacks since 1985, and was within a cluster of the worst five years to date at that time.

(Source: SystemicPeace.org, drawing on data provided by the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents (RDWTI))

In fact, the number of international terrorism incidents began to decline soon after that period – all without the aid of “heightened security” or the official harassment of airline passengers. It began to rise again beginning in 2001, and there is no reason to think that all of these heightened security measures have had any impact at all in preventing acts of terrorism since then. What they have done however, beyond the obvious violations of our right to privacy, to travel, and not to be molested by strangers wearing badges, is to help change our culture for the worse.

I remember when flying used to be fun. I remember the feeling of excitement as I headed to the airport, boarded my plane and lifted off for new adventures in unknown lands – or even known ones. For the past few years, I’ve just avoided flying entirely, but I recently took to the skies again, and can attest to the complete lack of fun and excitement there is to be found in being herded about like cattle and being barked at by TSA agents – many of whom, the signs in the security line proudly inform me, have previously served in the military.

None of this surprised me. What did surprise me though, was something that happened on the plane on one of these trips. I was traveling with my family – my husband and son a few rows back, my daughter and I sitting together. Across from us were two empty seats and after the seatbelt sign was turned off, a well-dressed gentleman from the row in front of us moved from his seat into one of the unoccupied ones. He was not an American, but I wasn’t sure what part of the world he was from. He had earbuds in his ears and was listening to music. After a short while, he began singing along to the music. Loudly. In a foreign language. The lady in front of me looked over at him with a concerned frown. Fifteen years ago, I would have just dug into my purse for my earplugs and written him off as an irritating fellow passenger. But on this trip I kept my eye on him to make sure he wasn’t going to set his shoes on fire. I uncapped my pen in case I needed to kill him with it.

After a while, and after seeing him engage in friendly banter with the flight attendants, I decided I wasn’t going to have to kill him with my pen and I put the lid back on. Of course he was just an irritating fellow passenger. But for a moment there, I had been caught up in the frenzied fear that has come to define American culture. I was just as wary of the “crazy foreigner” sitting nearby as anyone else would be. But I shouldn’t have been. I know better.

I know, for example, that I am more likely to be killed by my furniture than by a terrorist. Yet I don’t sit at home eyeing my dressers and appliances warily, waiting for them to make their move. I understand that my chances of being killed by a terrorist are approximately one in 20 million, while my chances of being struck by lightning are one in 5,500,000. Yet I don’t clamor for a War on Lightning to combat this deadly threat. And I am eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. I know all of this. So why was I swept up in the fear of terrorism on that flight?

I can think of lots of reasons: I am a mom and I had my little girl next to me and wasn’t going to take any chances; I hadn’t flown in a while, don’t get out much, and had forgotten how just plain weird people could be; acts of terrorism actually do happen, and I wouldn’t want to be unprepared in case this was that one in 20 million event. But here’s what I think it really is: I live in a culture in which fear is both an important commodity and a critical tool of manipulation. Various interests – government and the media mostly – combine forces to peddle fear, to magnify it, and to tell us what to fear. Whether we agree with it or not, we hear that message and it remains implanted in our psyches.

We are told that a man has tried to blow up a plane by setting his shoe on fire, it’s all over the news for weeks, everyone talks about it. Even those of us who don’t watch television can’t help hearing about it. And the next time we get on an airplane and see a person acting a little odd, we can’t help thinking about that guy setting his shoes on fire. Even those of us who should know better can’t help thinking about him. To some extent, most of us can’t help buying into the fear.

What we can do though is to not let that fear do our thinking for us. We can decide not to buy into the conclusions the purveyors of fear would like us to accept, and not forget that they remain – as a simple statistical fact – the greater threat to our security than are any terrorists.

When I was waiting to board my United Airlines flight a few weeks ago, a staff member announced over the loudspeaker that “those requiring special assistance, those traveling with small children and those currently serving in our military” would be allowed to pre-board. I hope I wasn’t the only one there to notice the irony in our having just passed through a massive, invasive and inept security apparatus ostensibly for the purpose of protecting us from terrorism – and then having the airline honor the very institution that has brought terrorism to our shores by its own acts of aggression overseas.

I don’t like to think that I can be manipulated by the fear mongers. But the truth is, when someone plants an idea or an image in one’s psyche, it is hard not to let that idea or image impact one’s thinking or even how one sees the world. Fear is a tremendously powerful tool for controlling people. Those who would control other people have known this for centuries. But it is only powerful to the extent that it gets us to abdicate our own powers of reason. We can remain viscerally fearful of terrorism – even irrationally so – and yet not accept the reasoning put forth by the fear mongers, nor the “solutions” that are their true aim.

We can remind ourselves of the statistics. We can remind ourselves that those in power want us afraid so that they can strengthen their control over us. And we can also remember that this pervasive fear is not a natural way of being, that it is not how all cultures are, that it hasn’t always been this way. We can remember that flying was once fun, that making it less fun has not made it any safer and that one day it can be fun again.

Previously by Bretigne Shaffer: The Revolution Is Over — Long Live theRevolution!

In 1988, I fled college without having graduated, saved a little bit of money and got on an airplane for Taiwan. Martial law had just been lifted and back then, to enter on a tourist visa, you had to show a return-trip ticket. So that’s what I bought, even though I had no intention of returning to the US after my three-month-one-time-renewable stint was up. My plan was to sell my ticket to someone else and use the money to buy a ticket to wherever I was going next. So I put an ad in a local English-language paper and a young American guy responded to it. He paid me half the money up front, with a promise to pay the balance after I went to the airport with him and checked in — since the ticket was of course still in my name. 

On the day of his flight, the American guy and I took the bus out to Chiang Kai Shek International Airport. I took the ticket up to the airline counter, checked myself in, and then handed him the ticket and he handed me the rest of the money. We were both familiar with airport procedures back then: Once you had checked in, you would not ever have to show identification again. There were no long security lines, no invasive pat-downs, no full-body scanners. You walked through a metal detector and then on to your gate. He took the ticket, we said goodbye and I never heard from him again, so assume that he made it all the way to Los Angeles.

Imagine trying to do this in today's world. Imagine what would happen to the hapless souls who even attempted to pull off this kind of mutually beneficial exchange that harmed no-one else. Very likely, they would both find themselves accused of plotting a massive terrorist attack and be thrown into a military prison, detained indefinitely, perhaps never to be released.

By today's reasoning, the airports should have been on full alert back then. 1988 had been one of the worst years in terms of international terrorist attacks since 1972. With 456 incidents, the year had the highest number of terrorist attacks since 1985, and was within a cluster of the worst five years to date at that time.

(Source: SystemicPeace.org, drawing on data provided by the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents (RDWTI))

In fact, the number of international terrorism incidents began to decline soon after that period — all without the aid of "heightened security" or the official harassment of airline passengers. It began to rise again beginning in 2001, and there is no reason to think that all of these heightened security measures have had any impact at all in preventing acts of terrorism since then. What they have done however, beyond the obvious violations of our right to privacy, to travel, and not to be molested by strangers wearing badges, is to help change our culture for the worse.

I remember when flying used to be fun. I remember the feeling of excitement as I headed to the airport, boarded my plane and lifted off for new adventures in unknown lands — or even known ones. For the past few years, I've just avoided flying entirely, but I recently took to the skies again, and can attest to the complete lack of fun and excitement there is to be found in being herded about like cattle and being barked at by TSA agents — many of whom, the signs in the security line proudly inform me, have previously served in the military.

None of this surprised me. What did surprise me though, was something that happened on the plane on one of these trips. I was traveling with my family — my husband and son a few rows back, my daughter and I sitting together. Across from us were two empty seats and after the seatbelt sign was turned off, a well-dressed gentleman from the row in front of us moved from his seat into one of the unoccupied ones. He was not an American, but I wasn't sure what part of the world he was from. He had earbuds in his ears and was listening to music. After a short while, he began singing along to the music. Loudly. In a foreign language. The lady in front of me looked over at him with a concerned frown. Fifteen years ago, I would have just dug into my purse for my earplugs and written him off as an irritating fellow passenger. But on this trip I kept my eye on him to make sure he wasn't going to set his shoes on fire. I uncapped my pen in case I needed to kill him with it.

After a while, and after seeing him engage in friendly banter with the flight attendants, I decided I wasn't going to have to kill him with my pen and I put the lid back on. Of course he was just an irritating fellow passenger. But for a moment there, I had been caught up in the frenzied fear that has come to define American culture. I was just as wary of the "crazy foreigner" sitting nearby as anyone else would be. But I shouldn't have been. I know better.

I know, for example, that I am more likely to be killed by my furniture than by a terrorist. Yet I don't sit at home eyeing my dressers and appliances warily, waiting for them to make their move. I understand that my chances of being killed by a terrorist are approximately one in 20 million, while my chances of being struck by lightning are one in 5,500,000. Yet I don't clamor for a War on Lightning to combat this deadly threat. And I am eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. I know all of this. So why was I swept up in the fear of terrorism on that flight?

I can think of lots of reasons: I am a mom and I had my little girl next to me and wasn't going to take any chances; I hadn't flown in a while, don't get out much, and had forgotten how just plain weird people could be; acts of terrorism actually do happen, and I wouldn't want to be unprepared in case this was that one in 20 million event. But here's what I think it really is: I live in a culture in which fear is both an important commodity and a critical tool of manipulation. Various interests — government and the media mostly — combine forces to peddle fear, to magnify it, and to tell us what to fear. Whether we agree with it or not, we hear that message and it remains implanted in our psyches.

We are told that a man has tried to blow up a plane by setting his shoe on fire, it's all over the news for weeks, everyone talks about it. Even those of us who don't watch television can't help hearing about it. And the next time we get on an airplane and see a person acting a little odd, we can't help thinking about that guy setting his shoes on fire. Even those of us who should know better can't help thinking about him. To some extent, most of us can't help buying into the fear.

What we can do though is to not let that fear do our thinking for us. We can decide not to buy into the conclusions the purveyors of fear would like us to accept, and not forget that they remain — as a simple statistical fact — the greater threat to our security than are any terrorists.

When I was waiting to board my United Airlines flight a few weeks ago, a staff member announced over the loudspeaker that "those requiring special assistance, those traveling with small children and those currently serving in our military" would be allowed to pre-board. I hope I wasn't the only one there to notice the irony in our having just passed through a massive, invasive and inept security apparatus ostensibly for the purpose of protecting us from terrorism — and then having the airline honor the very institution that has brought terrorism to our shores by its own acts of aggression overseas.

I don't like to think that I can be manipulated by the fear mongers. But the truth is, when someone plants an idea or an image in one's psyche, it is hard not to let that idea or image impact one's thinking or even how one sees the world. Fear is a tremendously powerful tool for controlling people. Those who would control other people have known this for centuries. But it is only powerful to the extent that it gets us to abdicate our own powers of reason. We can remain viscerally fearful of terrorism — even irrationally so — and yet not accept the reasoning put forth by the fear mongers, nor the "solutions" that are their true aim.

We can remind ourselves of the statistics. We can remind ourselves that those in power want us afraid so that they can strengthen their control over us. And we can also remember that this pervasive fear is not a natural way of being, that it is not how all cultures are, that it hasn't always been this way. We can remember that flying was once fun, that making it less fun has not made it any safer and that one day it can be fun again.

Bretigne Shaffer [send her mail] was a journalist in Asia for many years. She is the author of Urban Yogini (A Superhero Who Can't Use Violence) and Why Mommy Loves the State. She blogs at www.bretigne.com.

The Best of Bretigne Shaffer

I’ve seen many posts like this one today, from Antonia Litsinger:

“Well, I’m not going to get into the classic insanity mode – doing things over and over and expecting different results. I’m done with this whole political shit. It was fun for a while and I met a whole bunch of great people in the liberty movement. Let the crooks and the deviants have it. I’ve withdrawn my consent and am turning my back to them all.”

This is good. This is someone waking up. This is someone – and there are many of them – who has put a real effort into changing things for the better through the political system. Many have been doing it since 2007, some even longer. And while some will continue the fight, continue working to get “good people” into bad offices, others are starting to look a little deeper, are starting to recognize that it is the system itself that is broken, not the particular individuals who happen to be heading it up at the moment.

I shouldn’t be, but I am still surprised when I hear people urging me to support Romney because Obama will be so much worse, or Obama because Romney will be so much worse. I hear this from smart people, people I respect, and I have to do a double take because I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I can’t believe they can’t see that both of these people – or more accurately, the interests that support both of these people – are phenomenally evil and that to support either one is to support driving our country further toward a police state, aggressive military adventurism, economic cronyism and ultimately bankruptcy.

Yet people are so tribal, and so ruled by fear. I don’t know where the tribalism comes from. Some of it is learned, but I fear some of it is innate, and it still astounds me to see how powerful it is, to watch otherwise intelligent and caring people throw their support behind what can only be described as a fascist dictator, all because he’s “one of them”. “He’s a Democrat and I’m a Democrat and Democrats are good!” Or “yes, he’s awful, but the other guy is so much worse!” It is such a powerless position to be in, and is precisely how the power elite maintain their control over our lives – through fear. Fear of the terrorists their own policies incited; fear of “rich” people; fear of “illegal” immigrants; fear of the other guy who might win if you don’t throw your support behind our equally awful candidate.

What struck me, in reading the Tweets of those watching the proceedings, was this: Those who today were cheering because now “Ron Paul will finally retire and we’ll be done with him”, or berating him for not falling in line and supporting Romney like a good Party Member, really don’t get it. It’s not that they don’t “get” Ron Paul, it’s not that they don’t agree with his message or don’t understand why so many people are so passionate about him. It’s not even that they don’t “get” that Romney and Obama are essentially the same. What they don’t get is that the point of the liberty movement is not simply to win elections, and it is certainly not to win elections just for the sake of winning them. The point of the liberty movement is to bring about liberty. And after witnessing the corruption and dishonesty of the 2008 election proceedings and now the 2012 elections so far, it just may be dawning on more than a few in this movement that participating in the establishment’s rigged game is not an effective way of bringing about a free society.

If there is anything good that comes out of the Republican National Convention of 2012, it will be this: That the Republican Party leadership’s blatant disregard for its own procedures, its willingness to change the rules at the last minute to prevent an outcome it does not want, will be instructive to those who still believe in “working within the system to change the system.” It will push more liberty activists to start thinking of more creative ways, more productive ways of bringing about a free society. And it’s about time.

Many of us were cynical about building a free society by using the machinery of the state all along. But we supported Ron Paul because we had to say we tried. For myself, I felt that if his presidency was even a possibility (even though I don’t even believe in the office of the presidency) I had to do what I could to make it happen, for the sake of the lives that would be saved by reining in an aggressive foreign policy if nothing else. And I did, and I don’t regret it. But now it’s time to get serious about building a free society. The illusion that we can do it through the voting booth should by now be thoroughly discredited. Our focus should now be on building the society we believe in – one that is based on peaceful, voluntary interactions, where violence is only acceptable as a response to violence. The coercive system is failing, and it will only get worse. It’s time for us to get to work.

Bretigne Shaffer [send her mail] was a journalist in Asia for many years. She is the author of Memoirs of a Gaijin and Why Mommy Loves the State. She blogs at www.bretigne.com.

The Best of Bretigne Shaffer

Three years ago, I wrote an article in which I made some very specific predictions about the incoming Obama administration. I wrote the piece in the form of a letter to my pro-Obama friends and said that by the end of his term, Obama's administration would not look very different from that of George W. Bush. I told them that if I was wrong about my predictions, I would re-think all of my beliefs about our political system and about politics generally, and if I turned out to be right, I asked them to do the same.

I don't know if any of my friends took me up on my challenge — I'm guessing they didn't, since I never heard from any of them about it. But I do know that many of them are disappointed in what Obama has done so far, and that many are feeling hopeless about the upcoming election, resigned to their belief that there is "no better alternative." Incredibly, some of them plan to vote for Obama again.

It is for this reason that I would like to revisit those predictions I made three years ago. I still have nearly a year to go, but I think it is clear to anyone paying attention that Obama is not the pro-peace, pro-civil liberties candidate many of his supporters believed him to be. Nor is he going to "fix" the economy anytime soon. What may not be so clear though is that there is a better alternative. It also may not be clear that there is a way to support that alternative without sacrificing the option to vote for Obama in the general election.

So let's look at those predictions. If we're already on the same page about Obama's presidency, then just skip this part and go to the last section of this article to read about the better alternative.

I confined my predictions to the areas where I believed my pro-Obama friends and I shared common ground: A desire to end our country's wars of aggression around the world; A desire to see our basic civil liberties protected; and a desire to have a healthy economy. Here is what I wrote, and here's what has happened:

Foreign Policy:

At the end of Obama’s first four-year term:

1. The US will still have an active military presence in Iraq.

Obama ended the war in Iraq, right? Not exactly. While the administration may have officially declared the war to be over (an interesting feat in itself as it was never declared to have begun in the first place), the US does indeed maintain an active military presence there. Several hundred military personnel will remain under the Office of Security Cooperation, the US has built an embassy the size of the Vatican, with 17,000 employees, and there are an estimated 3,500-5,000 private contractors who will be working with Iraqi security forces.

2. The US will have attacked at least one more country that poses no direct threat to us.  (I’m not even going to count his early air strikes on Pakistan.)

Libya. Yemen. Somalia.

3. Military spending will have increased.

At the end of Bush's term — a year that featured the "surge", which made military expenditures unusually high, the US defense budget was $667 billion. At the end of 2011, the (estimated) defense budget was $708 billion. Even adjusted for inflation, this is an easy one.

Even more significant though, is that under Obama, war funding has also increased. While this figure did peak at $189.94 billion in Bush's last year, dropping to $159.21 billion for 2009, total war expenditures under Bush were $625.41 billion, while in his first three years Obama has already spent $497.6 billion. He would have to bring war expenditures down below $127.81 billion for 2012 (from $169.7 billion in 2011) in order to come in a penny under the George Bush years.

  4. US citizens will be no safer from terrorist attacks. I say this because I believe the (sadly all-too-accurate) perception of the US as an imperialist warmongering nation will persist.  I realize this one is open to interpretation.  I would just ask you to honestly ask yourselves at the end of these four years whether this is the case.

I say I got this one right too. But as I said, it's open to interpretation.

It is perhaps in this area that it is easiest to see how perfectly seamless Obama's administration has been with that of his predecessor. There are differences to be sure, but differences that are of importance only to policy wonks, not to the people who are suffering from and paying for the US's interventionist foreign policies.

As a dramatic illustration of this cohesion, listen to this video of US General Wesley Clark (ret). Clark tells of a memo from the Secretary of Defense's office in October of 2001, outlining a plan to attack and remove the governments of seven different countries in five years. The countries listed were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Lybia, Somalia, Sudan and finally Iran. Listen to General Clark and then try to tell yourself that President Obama is not simply continuing where the Bush administration left off.

Civil Liberties

1. More than 1% of US adults will still be in prison.  This number will very likely be even higher than it is today, and the black and Hispanic portion of that population will not have decreased by any significant amount.

As of August, 2011, the US prison population was an astonishing 2.4 million, or roughly 1.16% of the adult population, and the number of black and Hispanic prisoners remains wildly disproportionate to population ratios.

2. We will still suffer from the kind of police abuse that is becoming more and more common: military-style raids on unarmed civilians in their homes; the shooting and tasering of unarmed citizens; and police and judicial corruption leading to the jailing of many more innocent people than can be acceptable under any system…

I think it's hard to argue that these trends have in any way abated. If anything, law-enforcement has become more militarized, more turned against the people it is supposed to protect. If this is news to you, you might want to spend some time here or here catching up.

3. “No-Fly” lists will still be in place, and there may even be more restrictions on travel.

What do I even need to say here? Full-body scanners? Officially sanctioned sexual molestation forced upon those who do not wish to submit themselves to the potential health risks and privacy violations of said scanners? Forcing a terminally ill cancer patient to remove her adult diaper in order to board her plane? Spilling a bladder cancer survivor's urine all over him? Forcing a disabled six-year-old to take off his braces in order to walk through the metal detector? I would ask "how much worse can it get?" but I'm afraid I might find out.

4. There will be more restrictions on gun ownership and the right to self-defense.

This one hasn't yet come to pass. Second-Amendment activists insist that it will, but we'll have to see.

5. The police tactics and suppression of dissent at the 2012 RNC and DNC conventions will be just as brutal as they were in 2008.

We'll see. But given the treatment of "Occupy" protesters around the country, and that Congress has just passed a law that would outlaw any protests near certain government officials — whether or not the protesters are even aware that the officials are there — I'm fairly confident this prediction will turn out to be accurate.

6. Government surveillance of US citizens will continue…

Not only is the Obama administration intent on spying on US citizens, it has asked for legislation requiring all communications devices to allow "back-door" government access to private communications. It has also "…asked Congress that new and expanded power be given the FBI in accessing Internet customers' records without first obtaining a court order if the agency views the information involves terrorism or intelligence issues."

Writes Glenn Greenwald:

"What makes this trend all the more pernicious is that at exactly the same time that the Government is demanding greater and greater access to what you do and say, it is hiding its own conduct behind an always-higher and more impenetrable wall of secrecy.  Everything you do and say must be accessible to them; you can have no secrets from them.  But everything they do — including even criminal acts such as torture, assassinations and warrantless surveillance — is completely off-limits to you, deemed "state secrets" that not even courts can review in order to determine their legality."

When I wrote my predictions for the Obama administration, I bent over backwards to give him every benefit of the doubt in the arena of civil liberties. I wrote:

"I have to admit that this is the one area where Obama’s presidency is already looking different from that of his predecessor.  In his first few days in office, President Obama signed executive orders to 1) close Guantanamo within a year; 2) officially ban the use of torture in the military; 3) close the CIA-run secret prisons around the world; and 4) review detention policies and procedures and review individual detention cases.  He has also suspended the military trials at Guantanamo for 120 days, and has acted to combat government secrecy.  These are all good things and Obama is receiving well-deserved praise for them."

I now feel like a fool for having written those words. Not only is Guantanamo still open, not only does torture and indefinite detention continue, not only is Government secrecy as bad or worse as under Bush but Obama has signed into law one of the most heinous pieces of legislation imaginable, the National Defense Authorization Act, granting the government the right to detain, indefinitely and without trial or charges, any American citizen. He has also claimed for himself the right to assassinate an American citizen, and has in fact carried out at least one such assassination — again without a trial or any charges being made.

I should really just stop here. The NDAA by itself makes the case that the Obama administration is at least as bad as the Bush administration. There's nothing more I need to say. However since I did include a couple of predictions about the economy, let's go there:

The Economy:

1. The US will have massive inflation.  The dollar will lose at least 50% of its value against most goods and services, and certainly against the goods and services most people use every day.  This is a very conservative estimate.  It will probably be much worse.

OK, this clearly hasn't happened yet. And if it hasn't happened before the end of Obama's first term, I will admit I was wrong about this. However I still maintain that it will happen — and fairly soon.

This isn't just some random prediction. Since the housing and stock market collapses of 2008, the government and the Federal Reserve have been pursuing even more inflationary policies than those that caused the problem in the first place. The graph below helps to illustrate the magnitude of just how much new money has been put into the economy through government stimulus and bailouts. This shows the level of excess reserves — reserves held above the required ratio to deposits. This excess is currently just sitting there — it has not yet been lent out. But when the banks start lending it out (and it looks like they are starting to), it will create massive inflation. (For a more scholarly understanding of how creating more money is inflationary, see this Scrooge McDuck cartoon.)

2. Unemployment in the US will be worse than it is now.  It will be at least in the double digits.

I should have been more specific with this one. The official unemployment rate in January of 2009 was 7.8%. It is now 8.3%. So I got the first part of this right. I'll concede the second part, but not because unemployment isn't in the double digits — it actually is. Official unemployment measurements do not include either short-term or long-term "discouraged workers", nor do they include those who work part-time because they cannot find full-time work. Once you include these groups, the current rate of unemployment is around 22%, putting it in the double digits. But real unemployment was already in the double digits back when I made this prediction, at around 16.5%. So I say that I got the first part of this right but not the second.

As a relevant aside: In promoting its 2009 stimulus plan, the Obama administration made the claim that without the stimulus, unemployment would rise. It presented a graph to illustrate its projections for just how bad unemployment would get unless government spent hundreds of billions of dollars stimulating the economy. Well, government DID spend hundreds of billions of dollars stimulating the economy and guess what? The unemployment rate rose even higher than the government's worst-case scenario projections (see graph).

So what? There's no better alternative to Obama.

When Obama passed the NDAA bill, it gave me chills. Not because of the terrifying implications of the bill itself, but because I really believed he might veto it — not on the grounds he had stated when he threatened to, but in order to placate those of his supporters who are rightly concerned about the erosion of civil liberties. When he did not, I realized — more clearly than I ever had before — that he feels no need to placate anyone.

This fact was driven home to me when I spoke with some of my friends who had supported Obama in '08 and were disappointed with what they've seen so far. One said to me that despite her disappointment, she was probably going to vote for him again because she feared it would be "worse" with whoever the Republican nominee was. I have come to realize that, for those who are immersed in the two-party system and who truly believe there is a difference between Republican and Democrat, there is literally nothing their candidate can do that will cause them to withdraw their support. Like a battered spouse who simply can't imagine anything better than what they've got, they cling to their man because they believe that the other side can always produce something worse.

The truth is that we live in a one-party state. And until more people come to realize this and to reject the Party's rule over their lives, its grip will just continue to tighten. So it probably seems odd that I'm going to recommend that you vote, and even odder that I ask you to vote for a Republican candidate. But I am.

Ron Paul has a thirty-plus year history of opposing aggressive wars, violations of personal freedom and the government spending and monetary policy that are now bankrupting our country. He also has a thirty-plus year record of keeping his word and voting his conscience, which is more than I can say for any other politician.

Maybe you don't want to vote for Ron Paul because you object to some of his policy views. I think writer Anna O. Morgenstern addressed this concern quite well when she said:

"…if you’re going to slag off on Ron Paul for his (admittedly flawed) domestic policy views, then you’re sort of missing the point. His main appeal is that he’s the only anti-war candidate, and the war(s) are one of the few things that are directly under a president’s control. So if you vote for someone else, you’re basically saying “I’m willing to sacrifice innocent foreigners to have a better domestic policy”.

And keep in mind that under Obama, or for any of the establishment candidates, "a better domestic policy" includes a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to big financial corporations, arresting and jailing people indefinitely without charging them, and maintaining the highest prison population in the world.

The best part about what I'm suggesting though is that you don't have to give up your option to vote for Obama in the presidential election in order to support Ron Paul. You can vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primaries (which are going on right now) help him to win the Republican nomination, and in no way be bound to vote for him in the general election. Should he not win the nomination, or should you just decide in November that you still prefer Obama, you can still vote for Obama. But think about it: A presidential race between Barack Obama and Ron Paul. Would you really choose Obama? If yes, I'd really like to know why.

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. There are ten primaries and caucuses, eight of which are open or "semi-open", meaning that you don't have to register Republican in order to vote. (To find out whether your state has open or closed primaries, go here.) If you live in one of the Super Tuesday states, please think about going out and voting for Ron Paul. And please ask everyone you know to do the same.

When I made my predictions three years ago, I wrote:

"For years, I have said that real progress towards peace, freedom and respect for individual rights cannot come from working within the very system that sustains itself through war and the expansion of state power over people’s lives.  If in fact the Obama administration does herald great and significant change in these areas that we agree upon, then I promise to rethink these beliefs… If I am wrong about this, then I promise to re-think everything.  But if I am not, then I hope you will do the same.  Let’s talk again in four years."

If anything, my beliefs about political systems have only been reinforced by what I've seen these past three years: That political systems and politicians serve only their own interests, that they cause the problems they purport to cure, and that there is no significant difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties, both of which serve to expand the state at our expense.

We should of course be wary of placing our hopes for "change" in a politician who will rule over us. Any politician. Even Ron Paul. If we want to live in peace, then we must reject the coercive violence upon which a political system is built. We cannot continue to grant individuals the right to rule over others, the monopoly to both make and enforce laws, the monopoly on "justice" and on defense — and then act surprised when those individuals use their powers to their own benefit and to our detriment.

Ron Paul is the "anti-politician". He is the anomaly, the exception that proves the rule that politicians cannot be trusted. I don't support him because I believe he is the answer to all of our problems — we're going to have to dig a lot deeper for that. I support him because I believe that if elected, he stands a good chance of putting a halt to the bloodshed that is US foreign policy and to putting a big dent into the massive injustice that is our justice system. I believe that he would do everything in his power to restore habeas corpus, and to put the brakes on the government spending, corporate bailouts and inflationary policies that are running the economy into the ground.

If any of these are things that you care about, then go and vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primaries. Register Republican if you have to, just do it! If you don't, fine. That's your choice and I guess you've got your reasons. But don't come running to me when your man disappoints you once again.

Bretigne Shaffer [send her mail] was a journalist in Asia for many years. She is the author of Memoirs of a Gaijin and Why Mommy Loves the State. She blogs at www.bretigne.com.

The Best of Bretigne Shaffer

This essay originally appeared in the book, Why Peace, compiled by Marc Guttman.

As I write this, my son is running around the house naked, even though I’ve asked him twice to put his clothes on. I can hear the bathroom sink swooshing on and off as he makes a swimming pool for his zoo animals. I weigh getting up and possibly waking his baby sister, who is sleeping on my chest, against the lesser likelihood that he will catch a cold from running around the house naked and wet. I decide to stay put. The swooshing continues.

I wonder how a man named Scott Oglesby would deal with my son’s exuberance, his lack of “respect for authority,” his occasional noisiness. Last December, Oglesby, a police officer, was at Stevenson Elementary School in Bloomington, Illinois, when he heard a seven-year-old special-needs boy having a seizure. Oglesby ran into the room where the boy was being restrained by a school psychologist, shouted “you’re giving me a headache!” and grabbed the boy by the throat, holding him up in the air until he turned red, before throwing him down in a chair. Oglesby is now on “restricted duty,” but no criminal charges will be filed against him.

I’d like to think that cases like Oglesby’s are rare exceptions. But every week there seems to be another story about someone being shot with a taser over a traffic violation, or for not responding the way the officer wanted them to. There was the paralyzed man thrown from his wheelchair by an officer in a Florida jail; the New York City cop who stopped a woman from driving her dying daughter to the hospital; the mentally handicapped teenager who was tasered to death after waving a stick around; and, in May of 2010, in another increasingly common militarized raid on a family’s home, the shooting death of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones as she lay sleeping next to her grandmother. (There is little doubt as to what happened because the 20 officers who burst into the girl’s home had brought with them a camera crew for a reality-TV show.)

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”

When I first read Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” years ago, I saw in the first stanza a lament about the loss of a central authority, of political authority. Now I think he meant something else.

I have to believe that there was a time when people would have responded to the likes of Officer Oglesby by unceremoniously dipping him in tar, tossing a bucket of feathers over his head and casting him out from civilized society. Today he and his ilk are given “administrative leave” at best, and are soon back on the streets to endanger the rest of us. At the same time, more than half a million Americans sit in prison for the crime of using or selling substances the government disapproves of. Our nation has the highest per-capita prison population in the world by a very wide margin. Yet people like Officer Oglesby and the officers who killed Aiyana Jones do not count among the incarcerated. We are told that it is a punishable crime to ingest certain prohibited substances, a bigger crime to sell them. But, it is not a crime to shoot a seven-year-old girl in the head while she lies sleeping next to her grandmother. We have become deeply confused as to who the criminals are.

The question “why peace?” seems a silly one. Doesn’t everyone want peace? Isn’t that one thing we can all agree on? Everyone says they want peace, but very few are truly opposed to war or other forms of aggression. When she was US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright famously told the world that whatever was gained from the economic embargo of Iraq was “worth” the deaths of half a million children. But I bet she says she wants peace. The assertion – almost always conditional – has become meaningless.

As the United States government prepared to invade Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003, I did everything I knew to do to prevent it from happening. I engaged in debate, I signed petitions, I handed out pamphlets in sub-zero temperatures, and on February 15th, 2003, I marched in New York City, along with hundreds of thousands of others who were opposed to the war. On my way to the demonstration, I wondered how many would show up. I had the sense that I was in a minority, that most people didn’t care that much, or were too busy living their lives to do something like march for peace.

When I stepped out of the subway station, I was taken aback. Pouring into the street from every direction were people of all ages carrying signs and waving banners. As far as I could see, the streets were filled with people who shared my desire to prevent this war. I started to believe that maybe the sheer force of our humanity, our collective “no!” to more bloodshed, could prevent it. Barely a month later, the U.S. government began its invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I learned from that experience that demonstrations do not prevent wars. I was heartened by the outpouring of public opposition to war, but realized that we would need to come up with something much better than an appeal to those who are committed to waging war if we were to change anything. I also realized that most who said they were “anti-war” were really “anti-some-wars” – and not only out of political partisanship, but out of a desire to be taken seriously.

Nobody wants to come out and say that ALL war is wrong, that it is never justified. That would be unreasonable. Everyone knows that war is sometimes necessary. Everyone knows that sometimes there are just evil governments that invade other countries or commit atrocities against the people living under them. It is awful, it may even be unthinkable, but even if war is never good, there are times when it is necessary, and the practical and right thing to do is not to shy away from this reality but to be an adult and make the tough decision. Everyone knows that.

The problem with what everyone knows, though, is that it is quite often laced with omission and untruth.

Most children in American schools are taught very carefully about war, and why it is sometimes necessary. This lesson has to be very carefully planned and executed, because much earlier, those same children have been taught that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Adults might rightly fear that such children would not find it easy to reconcile the two positions. So we are taught about the American Revolution. We are taught about the Civil War. And then, at some point (for me it was in seventh grade) we are taught about World War II, the Holocaust, and the horrors of the concentration camps. I had nightmares about stormtroopers and gas chambers after those lessons, and I’m sure other children did too. I don’t remember precisely what those seventh-grade history books told me, but I came out of that class believing that the U.S. government went to war to save the Jewish people from the gas chambers, that it was right and just and that every once in a while, government does the right thing and this was one of those times. I’m sure other children did too.

Only later did I learn that saving the Jews was not the reason for the U.S. entering the war; that the government that supposedly cared so much for Jewish victims of the Nazi regime would not allow those same people to land in America – an act that might have saved many hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives without any military action at all; that the justification for US entry into the war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was not an unprovoked act, as we had been taught; that the nuclear bombs were not dropped on that country in order to end the war; that the Japanese government had been trying to surrender but balked at doing so unconditionally, a demand the US later easily revoked after the real purpose of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a show of force to the USSR – had been achieved.

It was only much, much later that I even thought to ask the question, relevant only to the version of history that had been presented to me: Why does saving innocent people in Germany justify killing innocent people in Japan? I still have yet to hear a satisfying answer to my question.

Far from proving the need for military intervention to deal with murderous madmen, the example of WWII shows precisely how the institution of war and the special rules that sustain it protect such sociopathic killers – as long as they are on the winning side. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has admitted as much, saying that the firebombing of Japanese cities and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been considered war crimes had the U.S. lost the war. They still should be. “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” asked McNamara, who by all accounts spent his later years haunted by his roles both in World War II and in the Vietnam War. Of course there is no answer to this question that makes any sense. So why are the rest of us not haunted? Why do so many of us refuse to apply consistent standards of morality to those who make war?

My son is now making a jam sandwich in the kitchen. Every once in a while he comes back to show me what he’s done, blueberry jam smeared across his face and hands, and I tell him to go wash his hands so he doesn’t get it all over everything. He ignores my request and runs back into the kitchen, squealing with delight. He is “defying authority,” and I am relieved. Too many of the problems I see in the world are the direct result of obedience and respect for authority.

We have lost our center. The little boy who was choked by Officer Oglesby understood that what that man was doing to him was wrong. “Mommy, didn’t that police officer’s mommy say he shouldn’t do that to people?” he asked later. That little boy has more clarity than the adults whose comments defending such abuse litter the blogosphere. He still knows the difference between right and wrong. It has yet to be wrenched from him by the system meant to “educate” him.

When I was in high school, someone once pointed to a bunch of kids who were teasing a mentally handicapped boy. “See? That’s what happens in anarchy!” He announced proudly, apparently demolishing my arguments against the state. Incredibly, it didn’t occur to me to point out that this wasn’t happening in “anarchy” but in the very controlled and authoritarian setting of a government school. It didn’t occur to me to tell him about my experiences in a Montessori school, where such behavior was unheard of.

Maria Montessori believed that children have a natural instinct for learning and a natural instinct for civilized co-existence. When teachers do not interfere, children learn; when children are treated with respect, they naturally become respectful; when they are encouraged to resolve their conflicts peacefully, they do so. I went to school with a little boy who had Down’s Syndrome, and I never saw any child treat him with anything other than compassion and decency. In the years I spent there, I witnessed some conflicts, and even a few rare instances of someone being hit. But the stereotype of abusive, bullying playground behavior was an alien thing that I never even heard of until I entered public school.

There, the lessons were just the opposite: That children are savages and must have learning and respect forced upon them. Oddly, this is to be accomplished not by showing them respect, but by treating them as lesser beings, while demanding that they respect those more powerful than them. Is it any wonder they soon start bullying those smaller than themselves? The lesson here – the lesson that goes on to inform adult decisions, institutions and problem solving out in the world – is that might makes right. Children are told to respect authority simply because it is authority. Simply because grown-ups are bigger and can punish them if they don’t obey. Nothing more.

An old Cherokee tale tells us that there are two “wolves” fighting inside each of us, two opposing sides of human nature: Good vs. evil; peace vs. aggression; compassion vs. hatred. The battle between the two sides rages in each one of us, and the side that wins is the side that we feed. Most of what we call “education” feeds the bad wolves. It works against our better nature and feeds what is worst in us, allowing it to grow at the expense of what is best. It may be true that violence, hatred, and even cruelty each come from a place within our nature. But a healthy society does not exalt them. It does not try to magnify and expand the very worst of our nature, making it dominant. A healthy society discourages these attributes of human nature. We are not a healthy society and what we have become is unnatural.

It is hard to explain to people who have only known the culture of this kind of schooling that there is another way, not only of educating children, but of living in the world. It is hard to get them to see that things don’t have to be the way they think they are, that it is within the nature of each of us to live peacefully. That the “law of the playground” is a lie and Lord of the Flies is a work of fiction. That there is always another way.

It was a long time before I really questioned the underlying premises of war: Primarily, that killing innocent people can ever be a legitimate form of self-defense or retaliation against a violent aggressor. At some point, I was presented with the absurd hypothetical thought experiments to which the apologists for war must always resort when asked to defend its morality. I was asked to believe that a bizarre set of circumstances, combined with a certainty of outcomes possible only in a purely academic construction, offer a passable analogy to the real-world situation faced by the war-makers. I was asked to accept the premise that killing is always the only possible solution and I was further asked to accept the assumption that the war-makers are concerned with preserving innocent life. Confronted with the question, I realized that yes, I would be willing to kill an innocent person in order to save myself or someone I loved. But I also realized that the act would still be a crime, though perhaps one mitigated by my necessity. In war, such crimes – all but the very few exceptions that prove the rule – are dismissed. In war, an act that ought only even be contemplated under a set of bizarre, highly unlikely, and strictly controlled circumstances is institutionalized and made routine.

Wars of aggression must always masquerade as defensive wars. From the Spanish-American war to Vietnam and now Iraq, we have all become familiar with the lies and propaganda used to justify what many call the “illegitimate” wars. That time after time these claims turn out to be false is no accident of history. This is the nature of the institution of war itself, which grants nearly unlimited powers to do violence to a single entity within a geographic sphere. To expect that the war machine thus spawned will act on behalf of anyone’s interests other than those at its helm; to expect it to use its powers to promote freedom or to protect the lives of the innocent is to believe in fairy tales. Even support for the best of all possible “good wars” must necessarily have these fairy tales at its foundation.

To believe that war can ever be “good” is to believe not only that the academic hypotheticals are accurate representations of the real-world conflict and that violence is always the only solution, we must also believe in lies that are deeply ingrained in most of our psyches. One of the most pernicious of these, one that persists in the face of centuries of evidence to the contrary, is that governments act in the interests of the people they govern.

Americans seem particularly susceptible to this line of reasoning. We vote for the people who rule our lives, the logic goes, and therefore we control them and are responsible for what they do. Most of us cling to this line of thinking and no amount of crony bailouts, “Constitution-Free Zones,” indefinite detentions without charge, SWAT-style raids on unarmed Americans in their homes, sexual molestation as a condition for air travel, or executive orders allowing for the murder of any American citizen at the whim of the president will convince us otherwise.

It’s funny to me that so many in the anti-war movement fail to recognize this, insisting instead that the problem is one of undue corporate influence on government. Many of these people distrust corporate monopoly, yet have no problem with the monopoly powers granted to the far more deadly state. They seem to believe that, in the absence of corporate pressure, the state would suddenly begin to act in the interests of those it governs. Until anti-war activists begin to comprehend the danger inherent in granting a monopoly to a single entity to “protect” and “defend” – until they learn not to expect anything other than abuse of such a position – they will remain impotent in the face of the war machine.

This first big lie spawns another one: The lie of collective identification with the nations we live in and the governments that rule us. Believing in this allows us to absolve our own government of its crimes against innocent civilians who live under evil or repressive governments. For if we are responsible for the actions of our government, those civilians must likewise be responsible for the actions of theirs, and “we” are therefore justified in using violence against them. This bloodthirsty collectivist thinking prevents us from recognizing the enemy we have in common with those civilians: Not “their” government and not “our” government, but the very institution of the war-making state itself, and the privileged position it occupies in our societies.

Even Christian just-war theory carves out a unique moral code for the war-makers, laying out conditions under which it is acceptable to kill innocent people. Why? There are no such conditions allowed for the rest of us. No matter how threatened we may believe ourselves to be, we are never permitted by the laws of society to kill an innocent human being without serious consequences. This is the biggest lie of all. It is the lie that says in some situations murder is no longer a crime; it is the lie that tells us the lives of some people are worth less than the objectives of others. Made concrete, it is the lie that in the most real and final way possible allows some people to pass judgment on the value of the lives of others.

You wouldn’t necessarily know it to see him tear around the house yelling at the top of his lungs, but my son is actually very civilized. He is reasonable and can be reasoned with. But he asks lots of questions and he wants to be treated with respect. I worry about how he will fare in a world that demands obsequious obedience to arbitrary authority. My daughter suffers from seizures. They are under control now, but what happens if she has a seizure when she is older and encounters an Officer Oglesby? Or is simply surrounded by people who are increasingly conditioned to see anything unusual as a threat? And whose first impulse is often violence?

Earlier this week, there was a story about some young American soldiers in Afghanistan who decided it would be “fun” to kill some civilians. After shooting a 15-year-old boy, they posed for pictures with his body. After the boy’s grief-stricken father had identified his body, the platoon’s leader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, “started u2018messing around with the kid,’” wrote Rolling Stone Magazine, “moving his arms and mouth and u2018acting like the kid was talking.’ Then, using a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears, he reportedly sliced off the dead boy’s pinky finger and gave it to (pfc Andrew) Holmes, as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.”

I find myself looking at people differently than I used to. I see young children in military fatigues and camouflage and I wonder what their parents can possibly be thinking. I wonder about the young men I see around me. How many of them are war veterans? The guy in front of me in line at the grocery store has a crew cut. Has he ever cut the finger off the corpse of someone’s child that he killed? Does he still have it somewhere? What does he do now? Is he in law enforcement? Would he fire on unarmed Americans if ordered to? Or if he just felt like it? Grab my son by the throat and hold him up in the air if he annoyed him? I don’t know who the people around me are anymore.

My own answer to the question “why peace?” is an easy one: Because I unconditionally oppose the killing of children, and because I do not believe the lie that it is “sometimes necessary,” or that it can ever be “justified.” I suppose I could add to this “…or innocent adults,” since there is certainly nothing more moral or just about killing them. But for me it is the systematized and sanctioned killing of children that makes war intolerable.

“Serious people” aren’t supposed to bring this up when talking of war. In the days and weeks leading up to a war, we don’t hear the talking heads pontificating about the deaths of children. Instead, they ask how much the war will cost, how long it will last, what the goals are and whether “we” will accomplish them.

Nobody ever asks, “how many children will we kill? How many will we maim? Mutilate? And how will we kill them? Will we blow them into little pieces with u2018smart bombs’? Will we poison them with toxic sprays? Will our soldiers shoot them in the head? How many will they rape first? And how many children will die simply because they no longer have access to clean drinking water, or because the hospitals have been destroyed?”

To ask these kinds of questions is to reveal oneself as a “kook,” “naïve,” a “bleeding heart” and “unrealistic,” and to lose any hope of being taken seriously in the debate. Yet what could possibly be more serious?

Among the footage from the US war on Iraq, there is a scene in an Iraqi hospital. In it, a man carries the body of a baby that is either dying or already dead. Not because the baby has been shot or because his or her home was bombed, but because as a result of the UN-imposed economic embargo, there is no medicine available to treat the baby’s condition. The look on the man’s face as he carries the bundled up child helplessly should haunt anyone who so much as missed one opportunity to speak out against that murderous policy.

The scene is one of hundreds of thousands of such personal tragedies from that one act of war alone, some of which have been captured on camera, most of which have not. Each time I see one, I am jolted into an awareness that the images could well be of myself or my child. Thankfully it is not me, not my family, and it is purely by accident of where I was born that it is not. Knowing this, I feel some kind of responsibility to those who, purely by accident of where they were born, have these horrors inflicted upon them.

I am not a pacifist. I do believe that violence is sometimes justified. But war is not simply “violence,” and one need not be a pacifist to oppose war. One need not renounce all violence in order to oppose the establishment of a class of people who are above the law; a special situation under which it is acceptable to kill innocents. If the moral codes upon which our societies are built are to mean anything at all, then we must oppose war. If we believe that people have a right to their own lives, a right not to be killed or assaulted by others; and if we believe that that each person has as much right to be here as anyone else, that no-one is above the law, whether by virtue of political, social, economic or any other status, then we cannot believe in war.

Of all the lies that support war, one runs deeper than the others. It is a lie that was given to most of us at a very young age. It is a lie about who we are, what we are capable of and what is the true source of the violence in our world. It tries to make us believe that the way we live now – with our Officer Oglesbys and fire-bombings and economic embargoes and the cutting off of fingers of other people’s children – represents the natural order of things. That because we are such flawed beings, we can expect no better.

“As long as humans have a proclivity for violence,” this lie tells us, “there will always be war.” This is utter nonsense. War does not persist because human beings are flawed or unenlightened, or even because we are violent or hate each other. Even if all of this is true about us, it does not explain war. War is not just another form of violence. It is the institutionalization of unrestrained violence with no meaningful accountability for those who inflict it.

Our problems are not caused by our flawed nature, but by flawed institutions. There will always be Officer Oglesbys in our world. There will always be some people who don’t mind using violence to get what they want. There will always be criminals. The question is whether we have systems that protect the rest of us from the criminals, or systems that enable and even encourage the real criminals, while criminalizing those who are peaceful.

We would do well to disabuse ourselves of the notion that institutionalized violence creates order. It does not. It creates a safe place for people like Officer Oglesby, the men who killed Aiyana Jones, the Robert McNamaras and Curtis LeMays and the countless thousands of others who murder with impunity under cover of the state. It creates anarchy – the anarchy of Yeats’ poem, spinning us out of control and taking us further and further away from anything that can legitimately be called order.

But these institutions also eat away at our center. They eat away at who we are, conditioning us to accept force, violation and disrespect as part of our daily lives; to accept the doctrine that might makes right, and to believe that nothing else is possible. They tear us from our own centers, our own moral centers, our knowledge of who we are.

“Why peace?” The reasons to abhor war are numerous, from an unyielding belief in the sanctity of human life, to fears for our own children’s future. But the simplest answer, the most obvious answer, is the one that seems to elude most of us, either because we have forgotten it or had it “educated” out of us: Because it’s what we’re made for.

Bretigne Shaffer [send her mail] was a journalist in Asia for many years. She is the author of Memoirs of a Gaijin and Why Mommy Loves the State. She blogs at www.bretigne.com.

The Best of Bretigne Shaffer

I knew it was only a matter of time before someone wrote in response to my recent article "Remembering Mr. Miyamoto," to educate me as to why it is sometimes right and just to slaughter innocent civilians. I was fortunate in that the first person to do so was both articulate and raised what I think is the strongest defense possible for such acts. His letter, and my response, follow:

I read your recent piece on the Hiroshima bombing and must say, that while your peaceful sentiments are laudable, you have the luxury of looking at it from the perspective of someone whose existence is not threatened by war. A more rounded view might be gained by more research on the actual fighting and nature of the war, and of the Japanese culture at the time. Every day that fighting continued, 10-12,000 people per day were being slaughtered by the Japanese in China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines. The credo of the Japanese Army at the time was "Loot all, burn all, kill all." Japan today is not the same country, nor has it the same cultural values that it did at the before the war ended.

A few books that might give a more rounded view of the war are Goodbye Darkness, A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester, The Flyboys, A True Story of Courage by James Bradley, My Helmet for a Pillow by Robert Lecke. I'm sure you have read Hiroshima by John Hersey.

The point of this is, it is easy to judge history retrospectively, with the certainty of the outcome, but it is an entirely different proposition to be facing your imminent demise or ask others to do so when you have the means to bring a horrific bloodbath to a quick conclusion. To judge the use of atomic weapons while ignoring the historical circumstances and prevailing cultural attitudes in Japan AND the US at the time is historically myopic. It would be more helpful to understand what drove the decision to unleash these weapons if one were to account for the unbridled barbarism unprovoked, unleashed by the Japanese throughout the Pacific, on all of its neighbors. I'm sure that if you were a woman living in Nanking during the Japanese occupation your view of the Japanese would be different from yours today. If you were lucky to survive, which would be less than certain.

Despite assertions to the contrary, Japan was not close to military collapse at the end of summer of '45. Our experience during the Pacific campaign was that the Japanese became more determined to sacrifice for their emperor as the war came closer to their homeland.

My perspective is from someone who was stationed in Okinawa, love the Japanese people, and am profoundly grateful that I was not born 40 years earlier.

My response:

Thank you for writing. I am well aware of the brutality of the Japanese military at that time. I am also aware of the culture that — much like that in the US today — largely supported the military's aggression against the people of other nations. However I fail to see how any of this justifies the murder of innocent civilians.

Moreover, you presume that the mass slaughter of innocent people was the only way to have ended this conflict. Yet there is ample evidence that this was not the case. We can argue about the state of the Japanese military at the time, but it is a matter of historical record that the Japanese government was ready to surrender. All the US side had to do was drop its insistence on unconditional surrender and allow the emperor to keep his position (a point it later gave in on anyway) and the barbarism you rightly condemn very likely would have ended.

There was at least one other possible solution as well: The US government could have opted to test a nuclear device in an unpopulated area to demonstrate its power, and then threaten to use it against Japan. Have you ever asked yourself why this was never done?

Of course all of the above begs the question as to why, after already having laid waste to much of Japan, the US government was prepared to mount a full-scale invasion of an entire nation over nothing more than its insistence on unconditional surrender — an insistence that helped to prolong the war, and that was later revoked anyway.

Here is the point that I think you are missing: When those who act on behalf of the state choose to commit a crime like this, they do so with the knowledge that as long as they are successful — that is, as long as their side is victorious and they don't end up on the wrong end of a war-crimes tribunal — they will face no consequences for their actions.

Former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara has admitted as much, saying that the firebombing of Japanese cities and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been considered war crimes had the US lost the war. He has asked "(w)hat makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

There is never only one way to resolve a conflict. Ask yourself, if Truman had declared that the only way to end the war was to nuke Toledo, would you have accepted his reasoning so readily? Those who make these decisions don't look for other options, because they don't have to. They do not face the same consequences the rest of us do for our actions. As long as the state has a monopoly on justice, and on determining who gets to use violence and under what circumstances, it cannot be held accountable in any real sense. And it therefore cannot be effectively prevented from inflicting horrors like the rape of Nanjing and the bombing of Hiroshima on the rest of us.

You write: "I'm sure that if you were a woman living in Nanking during the Japanese occupation your view of the Japanese would be different from yours today."

My objection to the mass murder of Japanese civilians is not for racial reasons as you imply. Like you, I have lived in Japan, and I have nothing but admiration and fondness for the Japanese people. But I do not abhor the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the victims were Japanese. I abhor them because the victims were innocent human beings. As I said, I am well aware of the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in China and elsewhere. I do not defend their acts, nor would I oppose a violent response to them. But you are not advocating violence in response to violence. What you are advocating is the use of brutal violence against people who had nothing to do with the violence you deplore. Quite simply: I think you are confused.

I understand. Lots of people are confused about this. It's a big part of why we keep having wars. The idea that people can be equated with their governments is one of the most pernicious beliefs afflicting humanity. It tells us that those who live under an evil or aggressive state are somehow responsible for the acts of that state and that it is therefore acceptable to kill them.

The point I was trying to make in my article was that the real conflict in our world is not between different nations or different peoples or cultures, but between the institution of the state itself and the rest of humanity.

To justify the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the grounds that it stopped a belligerent state from committing more atrocities is to justify every act of terrorism that has ever been committed against the citizens of a violent state. You cannot simultaneously argue that killing Japanese civilians was justified because it got the Japanese government to end its belligerence, and also argue that terrorist acts against American citizens — committed by those who wish to end US aggression against their countries — is wrong. If the devastation wreaked upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as a multitude of other Japanese cities) are not war crimes, then there is no such thing as a war crime.

Bretigne Shaffer [send her mail] is a writer and filmmaker, and the author of Why Mommy Loves the State. Visit her website.

The Best of Bretigne Shaffer

"People don't want to confront… that their government could have done something like this unless it was absolutely necessary. …it's almost like people find some sort of relief in the idea that sometimes you have to just mass murder tens, hundreds of thousands of innocent people… that it's unrealistic to think the world could work differently."

~ Anthony Gregory

In the summer of 1963, Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe was asked to go to Hiroshima to write about the Ninth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. Oe covered the conference and also met with some of the bomb's surviving victims and the doctors who worked to treat them. The result of this and subsequent trips over the next couple of years, became the essays that make up Hiroshima Notes published in 1965.

It was a pivotal time in Oe's own life: His first son had just been born with a large growth on his head that would have to be removed if he were to survive. The doctors warned that the surgery would most likely leave the boy severely disabled and barely able to function. They encouraged the couple to let the boy die. As he embarked for Hiroshima, Oe and his wife had not yet decided what they would do.

It was eighteen years after the bombs had been dropped, but only twelve since the lifting of an officially enforced silence about their effects. Following the Japanese defeat, the Allied Occupation government had issued a press code that prohibited public discussion or publication of any information related to damages from the A-bomb — including information about medical treatment. This press code remained in place until 1951.

Today, we take for granted knowledge about the deadly effects of nuclear weapons. In fact, this knowledge was hard-won, and not with the aid of government grants and oversight but quite the opposite. Doctors and researchers had to fight the official keepers of public opinion in order to first discover and then reveal the truth about the effects of these weapons.

In the fall of 1945, the U.S. Army Surgeons Investigation Team declared that all people who were expected to die from radiation effects of the bomb had already died and that no new cases would be acknowledged. Hospitals put out optimistic reports, downplaying the concerns of survivors, and telling pregnant women not to worry about any ill effects on their unborn babies. Doctors like Dr. Fumio Shigeto, the director of the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital, surrounded by a society that seemed hell-bent on denying the effects of the bombs, worked to document the controversial connection between bomb exposure and leukemia. Even after the ban on discussing such things had been lifted, these doctors came under harsh criticism from the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission for making their concerns public.

The story of those who cared for the bomb's victims is emphatically a story of people, not institutions: "The leading role in A-bomb medical care," writes Oe, "was not taken by the national government; quite the opposite, it was started with virtually no initial resources through the energy and efforts of the unbowing, persevering local people who had to contend with reluctant national authorities every step of the way." The A-Bomb Hospital which Dr. Shigeto also ran, says Oe, ..".was not built by, nor is it maintained by, the national government. It was built with proceeds from the New Year's postal lottery."

Dr. Shigeto — a man with "neither too little nor too much hope" — had arrived in Hiroshima only a week before the bombing. Following the blast, he worked tirelessly to understand its effects on his patients:

"What little time could be snatched from his hospital duties he devoted to investigations, visiting the bombed area by bicycle to collect burnt stones and tiles. …It so happens that Dr. Shigeto had been interested in radiology in his younger years… He discovered, for instance, that hermetically sealed X-ray films stored in the hospital cellar were exposed to the atomic bomb. He was one of the first Japanese to recognize on his own the nature of the atomic bomb on the bombing day."

A good portion of "Hiroshima Notes" is devoted to each year's meeting of the World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs — meetings that seem despairingly similar each year. And every year, people come from all over the world to walk in the annual Peace March on August 6th. Oe recounts the Peace March in 1963. When the marchers stop in front of the A-Bomb Hospital in Hiroshima's blazing sun, three patients step out to greet them:

."..a small middle-aged man begins to make a speech in a mosquito-like voice, holding his head high and erect like an Awa doll. He ignores the hot pavement and speaks fervently, but is interrupted by a loudspeaker announcing the departure of the marchers. I can barely hear his last words: u2018I believe the Ninth World Conference will be a success.'

"Holding the bouquet of flowers and dropping his shoulders in resignation (the heat, after all, is too much for an A-bomb patient), he withdraws with obvious satisfaction and dignity."

Meanwhile, the Ninth World Conference itself is beset with infighting, deception and ineffectiveness. The words "any country" is the stumbling block this time around, with participants unable to come to agreement on the declaration "We oppose nuclear testing done by any country." "The patients, however," says Oe, "are waving innocently and with great expectations, as though the marchers were their only hope."

It is at times almost painful to read of the efforts of those in the peace movement to influence world leaders; the seemingly impotent World Conference beset with divisiveness; the Peace Marchers marching perhaps for nobody but themselves. To their great credit though, many of these activists insist on holding their own government — in addition to the government of the United States — responsible for the devastation wreaked upon their country, calling for relief to bomb victims in the form of war damages.

"The distinction is crucial," says Oe, "for by pressing their case in such terms, the A-bomb victims raise the question of the responsibility of the United States government for dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the Japanese government for starting the Pacific War."

The distinction is crucial for another reason: It points to the real conflict that lies at the heart of all war: Not that between one nation and another, but between nation states themselves and the civilians they are free to murder.

Understanding this means recognizing the common thread that joins Hiroshima and Nagasaki with Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Soviet gulags, the state-induced famines, and the countless millions of civilian victims of war. It means identifying and recognizing the real enemies of humanity: Not nuclear weapons themselves, but the social institutions that allow for governments to use them — and other weapons — without fear of the repercussions ordinary individuals would face for committing such acts.

Oe himself experienced what he calls a kind of "conversion" during his 1963 visit to Hiroshima when he learned about the lives of those who had survived the blast: The "A-bomb maidens" — disfigured women deemed "unmarriable" who spend their days shut away in their homes with little human contact; The "orphaned elderly" who had lost all family members; The young pregnant mothers, fearful of bearing deformed children yet rejecting abortion; and even those who did not care to commemorate the bombing, or to use their misfortune to promote any agenda, but simply wished (as one survivor wrote) ."..to remain silent until they face death. They want to have their own life and death."

"I regain courage," says Oe, "when I encounter the thoroughly and fundamentally human sense of morality in the Hiroshima people u2018who do not kill themselves in spite of their misery'."

And yet of course, some did kill themselves. There is the young woman who, having become engaged to a man knowing that he would die of leukemia, took her own life soon after his death. There is the widow of a well-known Hiroshima poet who killed herself a few weeks after the monument displaying her husband's poem had been desecrated. And the man who had penned nine letters protesting nuclear testing and sent them to the US and Soviet embassies, only to have them ignored. This man attempted to commit ritual suicide in front of the Memorial Cenotaph and failed, living on only to be tormented by his own shame.

When he returned from Hiroshima in 1963, Oe and his wife decided that their son would have the life-saving operation. The operation was successful and, as doctors had predicted, the boy became severely disabled: As an adult, he is mentally handicapped, has limited speech and vision and suffers from seizures. He is also an award-winning composer whose first CD sold over a million copies. He lives at home with his family and has a job at a local welfare workshop.

When Oe again visited Hiroshima, in 1964, he learned that among those who had died since his last visit was Mr. Miyamoto, the frail, dignified man who had stood outside of the A-Bomb Hospital and greeted the Peace Marchers. He passed away, says Oe, ."..cherishing a pathetic wish." In his last written statement before he died, Mr. Miyamoto wrote:

"I appeal from Hiroshima, where mankind experienced the atomic bomb for the first time, for even today many people are suffering from leukemia, anemia, and liver disorders; and they are struggling toward a miserable death… I plead that all of you will cooperate to bring about a bright, warless world."

According to most high-school history texts, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible but necessary tragedies. They "ended the war," and while they resulted in the deaths of as many as 250,000, they saved many thousands more. Of course a close examination of the facts reveals that none of this is true: Even the estimate for a full-scale invasion of Japan put the American death toll at only 46,000 (all combatant deaths, not civilians). Moreover, the Japanese government had been trying to surrender — balking only at the unconditionality the US side demanded, as they did not want to see their emperor dethroned and executed. Following the Japanese surrender however, the US government happily allowed the emperor to continue serving as a figurehead.

Even the United States Strategic Bombing Survey declared that,”… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”  Indeed, the devastation the US forces had wreaked upon Japan through conventional warfare (the infamous firebombing campaigns left as many as half a million dead) had already helped seal Japan's defeat. The most generous interpretation possible of the motives for dropping the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they served as a demonstration to the Soviet Union of US military might. The assertion that the bombs were dropped in order to "save lives" is at the same time one of the most widely accepted and most easily refuted lies used in the defense of mass murder by the state.

If we are to honor the memory of Mr. Miyamoto and those others whose lives were shattered or ended by the bombing, then we should acknowledge this argument for the lie that it is. Likewise, if we are even to imagine .".. a bright, warless world," then it is not enough to build memorials, march for peace or repeat the mantra "never again!" It is not enough to appeal to those who start and live by wars to make them stop. We must identify the real source of all war: Not a particular nation or even a particular kind of weapon, but the institution of the state itself, with no real mechanism to hold it accountable, that enables some people to rain death and unimaginable misery upon others with impunity.

Bretigne Shaffer [send her mail] is a writer and filmmaker, and the author of Why Mommy Loves the State. Visit her website.

The Best of Bretigne Shaffer

In war, it
is widely understood that dehumanizing the enemy makes it much easier
to kill, brutalize and torture them. What happens when a government
begins to dehumanize the citizens that live under it? What should
those citizens expect in the future from such a government?

We are currently
confronted with a government that is deliberately dehumanizing us,
for whatever purposes its agents have in mind, and a population
that largely goes along with this, believing its master’s claims
that it is “for our own good.” That passengers are finally
beginning to resist this is good news. That some TSA employees are
beginning to feel shamed by comments from these passengers is also
good. They should be ashamed of what they are doing.

But just as
the capacity for evil is present in every one of us, so is the capacity
for good, and I have to believe that among the ranks of those “mindless
jackbooted thugs” are at least a few decent people who just
needed a job and took what they could get; who weren’t raised
to question authority but who might if pressed; and who in some
part of their minds want to think of themselves as the kind of people
who would do the right thing.

As activists
for liberty, we would do well to remember this. For the problems
that we face run very deep – deeper than the institution of government
itself. If we were to eliminate the state entirely, or indeed as
many predict, if the state collapses of its own dead weight, we
will be no better off as long as the vast majority of the people
around us still believe in the ethic of might making right; of coercive
violence as a legitimate tool for accomplishing one’s will
and for organizing society.

Government
schools, and even many non-government schools, have done a wonderful
job of inculcating these values in most of the people who make up
our society. To believe that violence is never justified except
in response to violence is widely perceived as wacky and “impractical.”
This is what we are up against. Not a monolithic state, but a monolithic
belief system that will remain in place even beneath the rubble
that once was the state, ready to rebuild.

I
personally will not take my children on another flight in this country
until things have changed drastically. This is partly out of fear
for their safety – and it’s not the terrorists I’m
worried about here – but even more because I do not want them
to grow up thinking that this kind of behavior, this way of interacting
with other human beings, is “normal” or in any way acceptable.
I want my children to grow up to have the skills and the sensibilities
that will allow them to live in a civilized society, to treat others
with respect and to expect to be treated with respect.

In this spirit,
I am glad that this week's Opt-Out Day was uneventful. In a rare
show of anticipatory analysis it seems the TSA toned down its security
theater in an effort to avoid confrontation and render the protest
a non-event. (Would that the TSA should employ its heretofore latent
strategizing skills towards its actual mandate of securing the safety
of air travelers.) There were numerous reports from around the country
of the full-body scanners simply having been shut off on one of
the busiest travel days of the year – a de facto admission that
these machines are not in fact a necessary or even important part
of preventing terrorist attacks.

It is important
that any future demonstrations against the abuses of the TSA and
other arms of the government remain peaceful. If it has not been
clear in the past that those of us who oppose government intrusiveness
and abuse held the moral high ground, it is abundantly so now. It
would be a shame to lose even a little of that ground and it is
crucial that — in stark contrast to the system we oppose — we remain
civil and civilized. Yes, the TSA agents are responsible for their
own actions and should be held accountable for them. Yes, most of
them seem willing to follow orders even when those orders involve
the systematic humiliation of people who have harmed no-one. But
it is critical that we not make the same mistake they make in dehumanizing
the u201Cenemy.u201D The real enemies are the people who have put this system
in place, and the bad ideas that give it popular support, not the
foot soldiers. I believe that fighting for freedom and fighting
for civilization — for civilized relationships between individuals
— are very nearly the same thing. With that in mind, those of us
who care about civilization must not become what we seek to oppose.
We must not dismiss their humanity as they have been dismissing
ours.

November
26, 2010

Bretigne Shaffer [send
her mail] is a writer and filmmaker, and the author of Why
Mommy Loves the State. Visit
her website.

So now the
cheerleaders for war would have us believe that they are more concerned
for the welfare of Afghan civilians than are those who wish to end
the US occupation.

First we have
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs sanctimoniously imploring
the editors of Wikileaks not to post more information that the administration
believes might endanger the lives of local Afghan informants:

"You
have Taliban spokesmen in the region today saying they’re combing
through those documents to find people that are cooperating with
American and international forces,” said
Gibbs. “They’re looking through those for names, they said
they know how to punish those people.”

Next, there
is Time magazine, a recent
cover of which was adorned with the badly mutilated face of
a young woman and the headline "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan."
(A statement, not a question.) As if the implicit pitch for more
war as a solution to violence against women did not provide enough
cognitive dissonance, the woman pictured was actually disfigured
by family members at the order of a Taliban official last year
– eight years after US forces entered Afghanistan.

In fact, the
Time piece fits very neatly with something found in one of
the leaked documents that has the White House so concerned. Titled
“CIA
Red Cell Special Memorandum: Afghanistan: Sustaining West European
Support for the NATO-led Mission-Why Counting on Apathy Might Not
Be Enough," the document ."..outlines possible PR strategies
to shore up public support in Germany and France for a continued
war in Afghanistan."

The Memorandum
continues:

"The
proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been
identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy
of the public for Afghan refugees and women… Outreach initiatives
that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their
stories with French, German, and other European women could help
to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe
toward the ISAF mission… Media events that feature testimonials
by Afghan women would probably be most effective if broadcast
on programs that have large and disproportionately female audiences."
(Emphasis mine.)

Says
Lucinda Marshall at CommonDreams.org
."..I rather suspect that lurking out there in the fog of war
are more memos and reports that will document the use of women’s
lives as an official strategy to call for war. Clearly, it gives
additional and very troubling context to the Time piece.
Since the get go with this war, journalists have been u2018embedded’
by the military. It would appear that that they still are and not
just in war zones."

Perhaps most
bizarrely though, The Wall Street Journal's Bret
Stephens likens a US troop withdrawal to an invitation for a
Khmer-Rouge style reign of terror and genocide:

"All
in all," says Stephens, "America’s withdrawal from Southeast
Asia resulted in the killing of an estimated 165,000 South Vietnamese
in so-called re-education camps; the mass exodus of one million
boat people, a quarter of whom died at sea; the mass murder, estimated
at 100,000, of Laos’s Hmong people; and the killing of somewhere
between one million and two million Cambodians.

"It
is a peculiar fact of modern liberalism that its best principles
have most often been betrayed by self-described liberals. As with
Cambodia, they may come to know it only when – for Afghans, at least – it
is too late."

Stephens is
correct in thinking that there is a parallel to be made between
Afghanistan in 2010 and Cambodia in the 1970s. It's just not the
one he's thinking of.

Just as US
military occupation in the Middle East has been a boon for recruitment
among Islamic extremist groups, the US bombing of neutral Cambodia
during the Vietnam War inspired many in that country to support
the radical communist Khmer Rouge, giving it the support necessary
to take control of that country and ultimately inflict the horrors
Stephens condemns.

Between October
4, 1965 and August 15, 1973, the US military dropped some 2,756,941
tons of ordnance on over 100,000 sites in Cambodia. To put this
in perspective, according
to historian Taylor Owen, ."..the Allies dropped just over
2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the
bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons,
respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country
in history."

In a 2006
article
written with historian Ben Kiernan, Owen makes a convincing case
for what has long been asserted by many observers: Without the indiscriminate
carpet bombing of what was first a nominally neutral country and
later a US ally, the Khmer Rouge would likely have remained a radical
fringe organization with little chance of coming into power. It
was the US military assault on villages and countryside that killed
as many as 600,000 and drove surviving Cambodians into the arms
of the radical communist group, allowing them to seize power in
1975.

As journalist
John Pilger puts
it: "Unclassified CIA files leave little doubt that the
bombing was the catalyst for Pol Pot’s fanatics, who, before the
inferno, had only minority support. Now, a stricken people rallied
to them."

Having ignored
the role of US military interventionism in helping to bring about
the very atrocity he warns of, Stephens writes:

."..somebody
might want to think hard about the human consequences of American
withdrawal. What happens to the Afghan women who removed their
burqas in the late fall of 2001, or the girls who enrolled in
government schools?"

Sadly, it is
very likely that they will continue to face abuse, disfiguring attacks
and even death for their acts of simple courage – just as they do
today under US occupation. Indeed, there is good reason to believe
that these kinds of attacks and the overall quality of life for
Afghan women have only grown worse with the US presence.

The Afghan
Independent Human Rights Commission reported
in March of 2008 that violence against women had nearly doubled
from the previous year, and a 2009
Human Rights Watch report concludes that "(w)hereas the
trend had clearly been positive for women's rights from 2001–2005,
the trend is now negative in many areas." Other
reports (including one
from Amnesty International in May of 2005) call the first part of
that statement into question:

Says
Ann Jones, journalist and author of Kabul
in Winter, "For most Afghan women, life has stayed
the same. And for a great number, life has gotten much worse."

Sonali Kolhatkar,
co-director of the Afghan
Women's Mission, says
"the attacks against women both external and within the family
have gone up. Domestic violence has increased. (The current) judiciary
is imprisoning more women than ever before in Afghanistan. And they
are imprisoning them for running away from their homes, for refusing
to marry the man that their family picked for them, for even being
a victim of rape."

Anand Gopal,
Afghanistan correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, says
"The situation for women in the Pashtun area is actually worse
than it was during the Taliban time. …(U)nder the Taliban, women
were kept in burqas and in their homes, away from education. Today,
the same situation persists. They're kept in burqas, in homes, away
from education, but on top of that they are also living in a war
zone."

"Five
years after the fall of the Taliban, and the liberation of women
hailed by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, thanks to the US and British
invasion," wrote
The Independent's Kim Sengupta in November of 2006, "such
has been the alarming rise in suicide that a conference was held
on the problem in the Afghan capital just a few days ago."

The US military
has made life worse for women in Afghanistan, not better. Is it
possible that a US exit will result in their lives becoming even
worse than they are now, as Bret Stephens and Time magazine
fear? Of course it is possible. But what is certain is that the
occupation has had a harmful effect on the lives of the vast majority
of Afghan civilians – not a positive one as the promoters of war
as a vehicle for social change assert. Also indisputable is that
the Taliban has grown
in strength since the occupation began, and it only continues
to do so. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has looked
closely at the motives
for terrorism. Even US intelligence agencies have acknowledged
that the US occupation of Iraq has strengthened Islamic fundamentalism
and ."..made the overall terrorism problem worse."

To call for
even more certain death and destruction as a defense against imagined,
possible worse bloodshed reveals a curious kind of moral reasoning.
For let's not forget what it is that Time magazine (despite
its protestations
to the contrary)
and Stephens are defending: The indiscriminate killing of innocent
men, women and children, in the pursuit of what they believe to
be some greater good.

When Stephens
decries the "killing of an estimated 165,000 South Vietnamese
in so-called re-education camps; the mass exodus of one million
boat people, a quarter of whom died at sea…" he conveniently
ignores the numbers of those who died because of US military
intervention in Southeast Asia. This would include a good portion
of the over 2 million Vietnamese (over a million of whom were civilians);
the tens of thousands of Laotians and as many as 600,000 Cambodians
– as well as the thousands killed by land mines and Agent
Orange, both of which continue to kill and harm even 35 years
after the US's departure. Yet presumably, by Stephens's accounting,
these deaths and many many more would have been justified had the
US military stayed in Southeast Asia and managed to save the 415,000
Vietnamese, 100,000 Laotians and 1–2 million Cambodians. One
is compelled to ask: At what point does this kind of moral calculus
cease to make sense? Is there any point at which the number of those
who might be saved no longer justifies the number of innocents slaughtered?

Forget for
the moment that the US government did not enter Cambodia for the
purpose of saving its citizens from the ravages of the Khmer Rouge;
Forget that its actions in fact facilitated that murderous regime's
rise to power; Forget even that, after its exit from Vietnam, the
US government allied itself with Pol Pot, with Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger famously saying
to the Thai foreign minister in November of 1975 "You should
also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They
are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We
are prepared to improve relations with them.”

Forget also
the suspension of disbelief that is required in order to accept
the proposition that governments engage in wars for the purpose
of protecting civilian populations. Especially foreign civilian
populations.

Forget all
of that because really, it is beside the point. The point here is
not the hypocrisy, dishonesty or even navet of those who would
support war as a means of "protecting innocents." It is
the moral decrepitude of presuming to calculate the worth of one
person's life against another's, or even to declare that a certain
number of deaths (always, someone else's death) are "acceptable"
by virtue of preventing more deaths.

The reality
is that this kind of exercise can never be anything more than an
intellectual parlor game. As a practical matter, there is never
any certainty about how many will or will not die if a given course
of action is taken. Of course no-one could have known with any certainty
how many people would die after the US pullout from Vietnam –
any more than anyone could have known with certainty that the US
bombing campaign in Cambodia would eventually lead to the deaths
of 1–2 million Cambodians at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
No matter how good the information is, one is ultimately dealing
in the realm of speculation.

But more to
the point, if one murder can be justified in this way, then so can
a thousand. And then a million. It soon becomes a silly, bloody
game of accounting where after a point the numbers become meaningless
and there is just one group of savages pitted against another, with
nothing to distinguish them but perhaps a marginally lower body
count, or slightly less stomach-churning methods of torture.

Earlier this
year, a man named Mohammad Qayoumi published a photo
essay in Foreign
Policy magazine. The photos were taken from an old book
published by Afghanistan's planning ministry in the 1950s and 60s,
and were accompanied by Qayoumi's commentary recalling the Afghanistan
he had known as a young man. The images depict men and women in
western dress going about their daily lives in what appears to be
a fairly well-developed, functioning society. Qayoumi recounts:

"A half-century
ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled
casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories
in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was
a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking
large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower
stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people
had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities
for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that
has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real."

The
images are in stark contrast to pretty much any photos from Afghanistan
today, and are a poignant reminder of how much that country has
lost. They also give the lie to views such as that of former Blackwater
CEO Erik Prince who recently
said:

“You know,
people ask me that all the time, ‘Aren’t you concerned that you
folks aren’t covered under the Geneva Convention in [operating]
in the likes of Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan? And I say, ‘Absolutely
not,’ because these people, they crawled out of the sewer and
they have a 1200 AD mentality. They’re barbarians. They don’t
know where Geneva is, let alone that there was a convention there.”

As Qayoumi's
photo essay demonstrates so clearly, Afghanistan is not a devastated
nation because its people "have a 1200 AD mentality."
It is devastated because it has been invaded and occupied by hostile
foreign powers for years. Anyone who truly cares about the welfare
of the Afghan people would do well to remember this fact before
proposing more of what has caused that country's problems as their
solution.

August
10, 2010

Bretigne Shaffer [send
her mail] is a writer and filmmaker, and the author of Why
Mommy Loves the State. Visit
her website.

When Helen
Thomas was vilified and presumably forced into retirement following
her remarks that Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine"
and return to "Poland, Germany, America… anywhere else,"
many commentators cheered, but a few expressed outrage:

"In
another example of how one-sided the American media is in framing
the issue of Israel," wrote
Andrew Steele, "veteran journalist and opinion columnist
Helen Thomas has been chased into retirement because of some remarks
she gave when questioned on the street by a blogger."

"(T)he
central issue," said
Glenn Greenwald, "is not the perception that she’s guilty
of bigotry, but the wrong kind of bigotry.  Anyone who doubts
that should compare the cheap, easy and self-righteous outrage
orgy against the powerless, 89-year-old columnist to the total
non-reaction in the face of the incessant
and ongoing
anti-Arab bigotry of The New Republic’s Marty Peretz, or
to the demands
of then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey that the Palestinians
leave the West Bank and go back to where they came from, and similar
statements from Mike Huckabee…"

While it may
well be that the attacks on Helen Thomas do reflect the media's
pro-Israel bias, they are more fundamentally a product of a much
deeper hypocrisy, one in which the vast majority of us are complicit.
Thomas is not the
first to have suffered for having committed
the offense
of offending.
Whatever the specifics of the offending speech, or the specifics
of which group was offended, each of these incidents has one thing
in common: They each make perfect sense within the framework of
our culture's beliefs, and are in fact a necessary part of sustaining
those beliefs.

To understand
why this is so, compare the fate of Helen Thomas to that of Madeleine
Albright. In 1996, when Albright was US Ambassador to the UN, she
famously asserted
that whatever benefits the US government derived from imposing an
economic embargo on Iraq were "worth" the deaths of perhaps
half a million Iraqi children. Far from being drummed out of the
public sphere for her offensive remarks, Albright went on to become
US Secretary of State and was awarded honorary degrees from five
universities. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of
the Council on Foreign Relations and reportedly
brings in between $60,000 and $75,000 for speaking engagements.

Or take the
current secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, who more recently threatened
Iran with a pre-emptive strike — an act that once
upon a time was considered to be a war crime. Or, for that matter,
all of those government officials who did in fact participate in
a war of aggression against Iraq. Indeed, there is nothing out of
the ordinary about politicians calling for mass murder, torture,
preemptive war and other acts of barbarism, while their careers
remain intact. Meanwhile, a comment that can be construed as racist,
or offensive to certain groups, can ruin a mere plebeian. We have
elevated name-calling to a higher offense than advocating (state-sanctioned)
mass murder and wars of aggression. That the hypocrisy of this is
not evident to everyone is an indication of our collective blindness
to acts of evil when they are committed by those in authority.

This blindness
is not solely an American phenomenon. Most people across the globe
accept that there is a different standard of morality for governments,
particularly in times of war. Even Christian Just War theory acknowledges
the special privilege of those in "authority" to make
war, and allows for civilians to be killed under the right circumstances.
"War is different" is the unanimous mantra, asserting
that even if we try to put limits on war (which will inevitably
be enforced after the fact and by the victors, if at all) they will
never be the same limits on violence that are imposed upon ordinary
people in ordinary times. It doesn't take much to extend this principle
to all acts of government, creating an entire class of people and
agencies for whom the normal standards of morality simply do not
apply.

Like abused
children, prohibited from engaging in the same violence their parents
routinely inflict upon them, most people have come to internalize
the twisted logic of their abusive relationships with their governments.
Why is this? Through some combination of cultural conditioning,
tribal instincts, our innate fear of our own independence, and outright
propaganda masquerading as education, the great majority of the
world's population — and in particular, those who reside in democratic
societies — have come to identify themselves with the governments
that rule over them.

A nation's
government is the creation of its people, the thinking goes. It
represents them, and its interests are aligned with the interests
of "its" people. The notion that those in government have
their own agendas that have nothing to do with the well-being or
expressed interests of "the people," and that they pursue
these agendas to the detriment of "the people," is heresy
in this worldview. It is a worldview that persists despite an endless
parade of corruption and broken campaign promises to demonstrate
its fallacy.

Of course,
accepting this belief also makes it easier for people to accept
the murder of innocent civilians in countries thousands of miles
away. After all, if a government is the creation of its people,
then those people are also responsible for the evil acts of their
governments. It is this kind of thinking that allows many Americans
to rationalize the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians
because they had failed to topple Saddam Hussein, or the indiscriminate
bombing of Japanese and German cities in World War II because civilians
in those cities had not prevented "their" governments
from committing evil.

Following from
this belief is another myth: That governments engage in wars for
the good of their people, to protect them from the people and governments
of other nations who wish them harm. We are taught that wars are
fought as a last act of desperation, as sole recourse to protect
the people of one nation from those of another. We are told that
our leaders hate war, but that it is sometimes necessary – always,
to protect a nation's people.

Of course,
a close look at the vast majority of wars fought throughout history
reveals the bankruptcy of this kind of thinking. Rarely if ever
are wars fought by governments with the interests of those they
rule in mind. And rarely if ever is there any justice or morality
to them. It is testimony to the power of our cultural blindness
that despite governments' unparalleled record of nearly 170
million murders in the 20th century alone — a figure that does
not include those who died in combat, or non-targeted civilian
deaths — most of us continue to believe that government is a force
for good, or at worst a necessary evil, and that it is needed to
ensure "peace and stability."

The real enemies
of humanity are not those who hurl offensive slurs. The real enemies
of humanity are those who perpetrate real crimes against real people.
More to the point, they are the institutions that allow these crimes
to be perpetrated on a grand scale and with impunity. Foremost among
such institutions is the monopoly on force itself.

Those who would
maintain these institutions need enemies like Helen Thomas. They
need to have established boundaries defining what is and is not
acceptable behavior, and they need for acts of government to be
included within the "acceptable" part. But something
needs to be unacceptable. There need to be some forms of behavior
at which we can all shake our fists and declare "shame!"
Everyone wants to feel righteous, to feel that they stand on the
side of the good and against evil, and when someone like Helen Thomas
makes a remark that offends an entire group of people — particularly
a group of people who have been persecuted in unthinkable ways —
she provides an outlet for that need. Those in government pile on
too, not so much to deflect attention from their own acts of actual
violence, but to reinforce the idea that while state violence is
legitimate, name-calling and insult are not.

As Paul Jay
of The Real News Network
remarked:

“Look who’s
attacking (Helen Thomas): the former Bush Press Secretary, who
was an apologist for the killing of perhaps a million Iraqis,
the former Clinton Press Secretary, who was hired recently by…
the equivalent of the Honduran Chamber of Commerce to defend an
illegal coup and a government that is now killing journalists
and political activists.  These are the people who are being
quoted in the press all over the country, that helped lead to
Helen Thomas’ — I assume — forced retirement.  But it’s OK
to defend an illegal coup, it’s OK to defend an illegal war, and…
her comment, that’s what everyone is going to get all excited
about?”

Helen
Thomas' fate serves as a reminder of what we all know, and what
the vast majority of us accept without question: That there are
different rules for those in power than there are for the rest of
us. Those who rule us are free to torture, murder, annihilate. But
lowly peons must adhere to the rules of polite society — or risk
being cast out of that society.

As long as
we continue to accept this, there will continue to be wars, mass
murders, genocide and democide.
If we are to have any hope of ending these institutionalized horrors,
we must first address the collective blindness that afflicts so
much of our society, and the entrenched beliefs that allow for that
blindness. One place to start is the notion that saying nasty things
about people is more offensive than doing nasty things to them.

June
16, 2010

Bretigne Shaffer [send
her mail] is a writer and filmmaker, and the author of Why
Mommy Loves the State. Visit
her website.

DIGG THIS

"This
motion picture is set over the Mediterranean Sea in an age when
seaplanes ruled the waves. It tells the story of a valiant pig,
who fought against flying pirates, for his pride, for his lover,
and for his fortune. The name of the hero of our story is Crimson
Pig."

Like more and
more families these days, ours does not have TV. We do watch movies,
and even TV shows that we get from Netflix, but these are mostly
for my husband and myself. We don't want our 22-month-old son to
spend his childhood in passive receptivity of all that mainstream
media has to offer (and to his credit, he's usually more interested
in dismantling the remote anyway). He knows nothing of Barney or
Dora the Explorer, and it is my fervent hope that he never learns
about Sesame Street.

I do make a
few exceptions though, and one of them is for Hayao Miyazaki. For
anyone who is not familiar with this man, he is quite simply the
greatest living director of animated film. He is also one of the
greatest filmmakers, and I would even argue one of the greatest
artists, of our time. The creator of such works as "My Neighbor
Totoro," "Kiki's Delivery Service" and his masterpiece
"Spirited Away" puts American children’s filmmakers to
shame with works of breathtaking beauty, imagination and stories
and characters that respect the intelligence of children.

In Miyazaki's
films, there is no attempt to "mold" my child's character;
no trying to "teach him a lesson," make him a better person
or help him grow up to make the world a better place. There are
values if you look for them, but essentially these films are just
plain fun. One of my favorites is Porco
Rosso. The story's hero is a freelance bounty hunter who
flies his bright red airplane around the Mediterranean hunting down
air pirates for cash. And yes, he is a pig. The film is great fun,
there are scenes that will literally take your breath away, and
the drama is as sophisticated as that of many adult films. But there's
something else. Around my third or fourth viewing, it dawned on
me that Porco Rosso is an anarcho-capitalist!

Mid-way into
the film, we learn that Porco is wanted by the Italian government.
There are warrants out on him for "treason, illegal entry,
decadence, pornography and being a lazy pig." His former fighting
buddy begs him to come back to the air force where he had once been
a hero. "I could still get you in," he tells Porco.

Porco responds
"better a pig than a fascist."

"Freelance
daredevils are finished," says his buddy. "To fly now
you need a government or an airline to pay you."

"I only
fly on what I earn myself" Porco replies.

As his friend
gives up on bringing Porco back into the fold, he warns him: "be
careful. They won't bother with a court of law." And indeed,
Porco spends the rest of the film hotly pursued by the fascist secret
police.

Of course the
exchange begs the question: If the government wants to throw Porco
in jail, and if he only flies on what he earns himself, then who
is it who is paying him to be a bounty hunter? Clearly it must be
the shipping companies themselves. This suspicion is given further
support when we see one of the luxury liners with its own fleet
of fighter planes trying to fight off a band of pirates.

It seems clear
that Porco is operating in a world where private agents — even those
who are themselves on the run from the law — are free to contract
their protection services out to other private agents. Maybe there
is a message to this film after all.

What a far
cry from our own world, where Somali pirate attacks have become
nearly daily news items. While some
private firms are beginning to offer
their services as guns
for hire on the high seas, many nations prohibit
the carrying of arms aboard ships that carry their flags, effectively
disarming shippers and creating floating buffets for the pirates.
Porco would sneer at this.

But then Porco
Rosso is the quintessential rugged individual; a lone, solitary
pig. When he makes a large cash withdrawal from the bank, the teller
asks him if he wants to make a contribution "to the people"
with a Patriot Bond.

"I'm not
a person," is Porco's terse reply.

Later, when
his arms merchant warns him that the government may pass laws against
what he does, he replies "laws don't apply to pigs." (After
Porco leaves, the merchant's son asks "how's war different
from bounty hunting?" His father replies "war profiteers
are villains. Bounty hunters are just stupid.")

He even smokes
(yes, in a children's film!), drinks, and has sexist attitudes —
although that doesn't stop him from hiring the plucky young heroine
Fio to rebuild his airplane. But he is also a good friend, true
to his word and devoted to his childhood sweetheart. In the end,
we are charmed by him, a little envious of his freedom to fly around
the Mediterranean as he pleases, and a little sad for him in his
solitude — all things you'd hope for in a good adult movie with
real live actors (instead of drawings of a pig).

"Porco
Rosso" is not unique among Miyazaki's work in this regard.
Adults will find his films as engaging and enjoyable as (and in
some cases more than) children will. And while some may be turned
off by the environmentalist themes of "Princess Mononoke"
and "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" (personally,
I've never been one to equate concern for the environment with support
for statist intervention, but that's just me) they should not let
this stop them from enjoying such films as "My Neighbor Totoro,"
"Kiki's Delivery Service," "Howl's Moving Castle,"
and of course "Spirited Away." Each of these films is
wonderfully crafted and unique. And if there is a message to any
of them, it is a message about self-reliance, loyalty, believing
in oneself and the value of hard work. Entrepreneurs frequently
feature as heroes, for instance in "Kiki's Delivery Service"
where a young witch seeks her fortune in a new city by starting
a broomstick-powered delivery service. In "Spirited Away,"
the heroine Chihiro is transformed through hard work and taking
on responsibility.

As
much as it is a relief to watch children's films that portray doing
business, being independent and earning money in a positive light,
it is even more of a relief to find an entire selection of children's
films that are not aimed at manipulating children. For as well-intentioned
as all those films about making the world a better place may be,
they miss out on a fundamental truth both about filmmaking and about
childhood: both are good in and of themselves. They do not need
some external purpose to make them worthwhile, or some outside agenda
to make them more meaningful. And perhaps the secret to Hayao Miyazaki's
success is that he understands this simple truth. Because he has
given us films about flying pigs, enchanted bath houses and magical
woodland creatures, the world is already a better place.

December
9, 2008

Bretigne Shaffer [send
her mail] directs the
Free World Media Center and hosts “On the Banks,” a weekly
“TV” show Break the Matrix.
The views she expresses here are her own.

DIGG THIS

A couple of
weeks ago, Joshua Snyder had an article on LRC entitled
“Ron Paul’s Long Tail." In it, he argued that “Ron Paul
is the one candidate able to unite the diverse elements in the Long
Tail. His supporters range from strippers to evangelicals, from
gun-toters to peaceniks, and yet his message is as mainstream as
the Constitution." Snyder argued that “Ron Paul’s Long Tail
will propel him to victory."

“Wishful thinking,”
writes Ryan Holiday several days later, in a piece entitled
“Why I don’t Care About Ron Paul and Why He Has Nothing to Do with
the Long Tail," “but completely incorrect. The idealism
here is admirable and yet the epitome of what causes most movements
to fail. It’s too ‘inspired’ to talk about strategy, or to look
at facts, or to win with the help of reality – they’d rather
die in spite of it. And it’s just total misinterpretation of the
Long Tail.
Because of this, not matter (sic) how much money he wins, Ron Paul
is doomed to fail.”

To his credit,
Holiday points out that the Electoral College is no Amazon.com.
“The internet has empowered your voices," he argues, “but the
system still disenfranchises your votes.” And he is right. But
the reasoning by which he travels from this important distinction
to arrive at the conclusion that a Ron Paul presidency is “impossible”
is seriously flawed.

Holiday is
absolutely right in claiming that the electoral system is not the
kind of “market” that serves the long tail, as he explains:

“Because of
the district basis of the system, it is impossible for minor candidates
to collect their small stakes in many communities into a significant
voting block. Candidates win based on how many individual districts
they can tally together, not how much overarching support they can
garner. Third Parties exist as aggregates of minor factions spread
throughout multiple constituencies but the electoral system doesn’t
care about percentage of the whole, only percentage of the local.
It is innately compartmentalized, tied to the part to the point
where the whole doesn’t matter. Sound familiar? This is exactly
what prevents a long tail economy from thriving in Borders or at
a Tower Records."

Holiday then
goes on to assert that because the electoral system is not an example
of the Long Tail business model, Ron Paul cannot possibly win. I
suppose this might be true if we accept that Ron Paul truly is a
“Long Tail candidate” – that is, if the market for what he is offering
is very small in each geographic locale but very large nationwide – however this is quite a substantial assumption to be making. Even
Joshua Snyder was arguing that Ron Paul could unite diverse
elements within the Long Tail – not that he represented an isolated
commodity within the Long Tail. But regardless of what Joshua Snyder
believes, I personally am not pinning my hopes of a Ron Paul victory
on the idea that he is a “long-tail candidate." And the fact
that the US presidential elections are not a “Long-Tail” serving
market is simply not enough to prove that Ron Paul cannot win in
those elections. Holiday bases his assertion that it is on the false
premise that Ron Paul can only be a “Long-Tail candidate” which
is the first problem with his argument.

The second
flaw is one I run into frequently with those whose focus is on “strategy”
rather than principles. It is a failure to understand the importance
of principles. Not of the principles themselves, but of the notion
of having them.

Mr. Holiday
writes: “Ron Paul supporters should be leveraging the media coverage
and ability to efficiently raise money not to buy votes, but to
force change from the candidates who can win.”

(This is already
happening, by the way – at least in lip-service terms –
by virtue of Ron Paul’s supporters propelling him towards the Republican
nomination. I’m not sure it could happen any other way.)

Ryan misses
out on one important point: This is precisely what many libertarians
have been trying to do for years: convince politicians that they
should support liberty and smaller government. Maybe he hasn’t noticed
that it has not worked very well.

The reason
it hasn’t worked very well is that systems don’t generally reward
those who aim to diminish the system. Our political system thrives
by pitting groups against each other, robbing from some to give
to others; restricting the freedoms of some for the benefit of others.
With rare exception, those who succeed in the system are those who
restrict freedom and increase spending. They may spout rhetoric
about free markets and limited government, but they almost never
follow through.

The real flaw
in Mr. Holiday’s suggestion is that he doesn’t seem to recognize
what a rare exception Dr. Paul is. The idea that we can simply “force”
the other candidates to become defenders of liberty by dangling
our votes in front of them misunderstands the nature of the game
and of the players. Ron Paul has spent 30 years demonstrating that
he is committed to liberty. When he says that he will do everything
in his power to diminish the role of government in our lives, he
means it, and those who support him trust him to do exactly that.
The same cannot be said about any of the other candidates
who are running. The very fact that Mr. Holiday believes their positions
can be dictated by pressure from voters is proof that he already
knows this.

Finally, Mr.
Holiday says “Take the only victory that is possible … that means
guiding the dynamic and opinion towards Libertarian policy as much
as possible within the system. And then, maybe, you have a shot
at changing the system; that is maybe, you can get rid of the Electoral
College. Until then, it doesn’t matter. Your victory is literally
impossible.”

Mr. Holiday’s
hubris-laden claim that Ron Paul “cannot win” is based on the false
premise that Ron Paul is necessarily a “long-tail candidate” and
that victory requires the presidential elections to be a “long-tail
market." He isn’t, and it doesn’t. Further, the idea that we
can somehow guide the system towards libertarian policy with the
assistance of policymakers who don’t believe in liberty is deeply
misguided.

Personally,
I’ll be voting for Ron Paul not because I think the odds favor him
but because I believe he is the only person who has any intention
of stripping back government. If he doesn’t win, are there other
victories that can be had by the movement? Sure there are. But they
aren’t likely to be at the voting booth.

December
3, 2007

Bretigne Shaffer [send
her mail] is a writer and filmmaker living in the Bay Area.
She also directs the Free
World Media Center, the media production center of the non-profit
Liberty and Privacy Network. The views she expresses here are her
own and do not reflect the views of the Free World Media Center
or the LPN.

DIGG THIS

As long
as it's just George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft
who are evil — a “bad batch” — then you don't have to kick the
habit entirely. Just make sure you get a good batch next time
— elect "good" politicians — and you'll never have to
question the political system to which you have become attached.

~ Me, three years ago: "Kick
the Habit: Politics Is Not the Answer"

I can't believe
the things that have been coming out of my mouth these past few
months. If anyone had told me a year ago that today I'd be sending
an e-mail to my friends urging them to vote — and to vote Republican
— I would have said that person was either nuts or just didn't know
me.

And yet here
I am, writing the e-mails, getting involved in the movement, and
trying to explain to my friends — long used to hearing me tell them
why voting is worse than a waste of time, how it helps perpetuate
a system that is destructive and wrong — why this time it's different,
this time it not only makes sense to vote, but they must
vote …and get all of their friends to do it too.

And all the
while, a little voice gnaws away at me, asking if I'm not just falling
into the same trap I warned against when I wrote about the 2004
elections "Kick
the Habit: Politics is Not the Answer"; If I'm not just
putting my faith in a politician to solve problems that have no
political solution; If I'm not just trying to solve problems with
the very mechanism that created them; if I'm not granting legitimacy
to the state by participating in its elections. And the truth is,
I don't have a clean answer to any of those questions. I can't just
dismiss them or pretend I'm not in fact falling victim to the same
attachment to political solutions — the same addiction — that I
saw so clearly as being part of the problem four years ago, and
that I still believe is part of the problem.

But neither
can I answer the other voice that asks questions just as troubling.
Questions like: "so why haven't you, and the anti-war movement,
been able to end the war in Iraq?" and "what exactly is
it you're going to do to stop them from nuking Iran?" I don't
have answers to these questions either, and I am quite frankly tired
of feeling helpless in the face of this kind of evil. And I know:
that's how they suck you in. That's what politicians and drug pushers
alike look for in their potential customers: a sense of helplessness,
neediness… an emptiness needing to be filled. I know all that.

But I also
know that this time something is different. Ron Paul's entire political
career calls into question my beliefs about how political systems
work and how politicians survive within them. My understanding of
democratic politics may explain everyone else in Washington, but
it certainly doesn't explain Dr. Paul's success in being elected
and returned to office for ten terms. Or maybe he is the exception
that proves my rules. Whatever he is, he is not the same animal
as the others in Washington, he's not selling the same stuff. And
his candidacy for president forces me — and, I believe, anyone who
has taken a principled stand against voting — to re-examine my reasons
for not participating in the system.

The truth is,
I never was a "principled" non-voter. I've always said
— jokingly of course — that if a candidate came along who promised
to drastically reduce the scope of government, and I trusted them
to do so, and that person actually had a shot at winning, I would
have to consider voting for that person. Not surprisingly, I have
never been faced with this particular dilemma. I suspect that I
am not alone among lifetime non-voters who have never really had
to examine their stance. As long as there is clearly no point in
voting, we are never really forced to dig deeply into the reasons
why we don't vote. And, certainly in my lifetime, there has never
been any point in voting in a presidential election. Until now.

I first encountered
Ron Paul the last time he was running for president. He was running
as the Libertarian candidate, and nobody even pretended he had a
chance of winning. As an opportunity to spread ideas about liberty
and free markets though, my friends and I thought his candidacy
was a good thing. One of my friends wrote to him and asked him to
come speak at our school, the University of California at Santa
Cruz (think Cuba to UC Berkeley's Kremlin).

This was 1987,
when the "Internet" was little more than a handful of
geeks in computer labs engaging in vibrant discussions on a Unix
platform and sometimes making little pictures with X's and O's across
the screen. My friends and I spent one Saturday plastering the UC
campus with "Who is Ron Paul?" flyers and did whatever
else we could think of to spread the word in advance of his appearance.
When the evening came, maybe six or seven people showed up. (One
of my co-organizers says it may have been a dozen, but I think she's
being generous.)

The word "gracious"
does not describe Dr. Paul's response to the meager turnout. "Gracious"
would have been skillfully concealing his annoyance and soldiering
on through the evening. Dr. Paul was not gracious. He was genuine
and engaged and seemed to care only about presenting and defending
the ideas he cares about so deeply. He was, I imagine, the same
person he continues to be as he pursues the Republican nomination
today; a person committed to liberty, doing whatever he can to bring
it about in our society.

The contrast
between our pathetic gathering twenty years ago and the rock-star
receptions Dr. Paul receives wherever he goes today is heart-warming
and gratifying. It makes me happy that Dr. Paul's years of tirelessly
speaking the same words in defense of freedom are paying off, and
it makes me feel that there may yet be hope for this country.

Like many of
his supporters, I don't agree with Dr. Paul on all of his positions.
We part ways on abortion and immigration. But the issues where we
do agree are so important and there is so much at stake that our
differences are not an impediment to my support. More importantly
— and I believe this is one of the greatest keys to his success
— I know that his stance on each issue is the product of his genuinely
held beliefs. He does not choose his words based on opinion polls
or on the fundraising successes they have earned other candidates,
but on his own understanding of what is right and what is wrong.
Because of this I have unending respect for the man.

I don't think
I am alone in this. People are beyond fed up with empty political
promises. They are tired of meaningless "choices" at the
ballot box. They are rightly cynical about the entire process. Ron
Paul has spent over 30 years of his life demonstrating that his
promises are not empty and that he is utterly devoted to the pursuit
of liberty in this country. Even people who have just been introduced
to him see that he means what he says.

And this changes
things. People are accustomed to voting for the lesser of two evils.
What happens when someone who is not evil shows up? Integrity is
not generally an ingredient found in presidential elections and
its presence here now changes the entire nature of the game. Ron
Paul is not playing by the same rules as everyone else, and by playing
by his own rules — by committing the political cardinal sin of meaning
what he says — he changes the rules for everyone else. Candidates
are now no longer measured against other politicians whose words
mean nothing, but against a man of integrity, and in order to succeed
they must rise to his level. But they can't. A reputation earned
in over thirty years of dealing with people is not something that
can be bought. Nor can it be "spun" out of thin air. Quite
simply: Ron Paul has something none of the other candidates have
or can get in time for the elections. This fact alone could very
possibly win him the Republican nomination and even the presidency.

And that's
when my own words come back to haunt me. There's that voice, reminding
me that I don't even believe in the process. That I don't want anyone
to be my president, that decisions over how much freedom I have
shouldn't be up to the majority. That by participating in the system,
I'm agreeing that they should, that the majority has the right to
rule over my life. So, for the record: I don't want a president.
And I don't grant the majority the right to make decisions over
my life.

But what is
at stake is so great now that it is just no longer acceptable to
not try whatever means I can find to fight what is going on. It
is not acceptable to sit by and watch as "my" government
lays waste to entire nations of human beings who have never done
me any harm. It is not acceptable to sit by as the same government
lays waste to the (however imperfect) institutions that evolved
to protect citizens' rights and freedom from tyranny. Not if there's
anything I can do to stop it. So, if there's even a chance that
Dr. Paul can have an impact in these areas, I feel an obligation
to help him do that.

It's not like
I haven't tried other things. I've stood out in front of the New
York Public Library in sub-zero weather handing out anti-war pamphlets.
I've written articles. I've marched in anti-war demonstrations alongside
tens if not hundreds of thousands of other people — demonstrations
that, if you get your information from the mainstream media, never
happened. I've tried what I knew to try, and none of it has worked.
The evils committed by the state — in my name and with my money
— have only gotten worse and more widespread, and will continue
to do so.

The truth is:
I just don't know what else to do.

So, come February,
or whenever it is they hold the primaries in my state (I'm told
I can only do this in one state, which is disappointing), I'll be
marching myself down to the voting booths and I'll be pulling a
lever… or filling in a form… or tapping on a screen. Actually, I
don't exactly know how I'll be doing it, but I'll be doing what
I've never done before and what I never thought I'd ever do: Voting
in an election for a presidential candidate who I believe can make
things better.

I've long believed
that politicians cannot get ahead by delivering more freedom and
less government; that the game of politics can be won only by delivering
more favors and more of other people's money to one's constituents;
that the only real winner, ultimately, is the state, and that those
who play the game end up serving its expansion. I've always qualified
my condemnation of politics and politicians with the words "except
for Ron Paul." I'd then usually say something like "but
of course he doesn't actually accomplish anything." Well I
was wrong about that. Really really wrong. For all these years,
Dr. Paul has been building something no other politician has — something
that when just one person has it, suddenly becomes an incredibly
valuable asset: credibility.

The question
with regard to Ron Paul is not whether or not he will keep his campaign
promises — he will. The only question is whether he will be able
to accomplish what he has set out to. Will he be elected? And if
he is, how far will he be able to get on his wish list of dismantling
the leviathan state to which we have become so accustomed?

I don't have
answers to either of these questions. And anyone who says they do
doesn't understand what is happening here: The very nature of the
game is changing and all because one man has insisted all along
on playing it his way.

So
maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is possible to effect positive change
toward a more free society through the political process. Ron Paul
has proven me wrong once already and he may just do it again.

I hope he does.

November
15, 2007

Bretigne Shaffer [send
her mail] is a writer and filmmaker living in the Bay Area.
She also directs the Free
World Media Center, the media production center of the non-profit
Liberty and Privacy Network. The views she expresses here are her
own and do not reflect the views of the Free World Media Center
or the LPN.

~
Will Durant
The Story of Civilizationi

On
the day I sat down to write this, a video was released showing one
man slowly cutting off the head of another, allegedly in retaliation
for abuses perpetrated against prisoners in the first man's part
of the world. On that same day last May, rioting Muslims in Nigeria
killed 11 Christians and burned two churches, following the murder
of hundreds of Muslims the previous week. In the Gaza Strip, a dozen
Israelis and Palestinians were killed in an ambush, and in the Northern
Iraqi city of Kirkuk, four people were killed and another 25 injured
when a bomb exploded in a crowded market.

It
can be discouraging to try to think about "purpose" in
a world that seems to get bloodier and more vicious with each day,
where the vast majority of the population is doing well to just
survive, and where the fate of so many rests in the hands of people
who have no "purpose" beyond their own acquisition of
power. But of course, this is precisely why it is so important to
examine our own sense of purpose.

As
a culture, we humans seem to believe that conflict is more interesting
than peace.

Throughout
the media, power and violence are glorified as exciting, intriguing,
even desirable. Local news stations compete with each other to bring
viewers the most sensational crime and car chase footage, while
blood and gore continue to do well at the box office. Across the
board, we tend to agree that violence is "interesting"
and worthy of our time and attention.

In
the entertainment marketplace, stories offering violent solutions
to problems sell — and they're easier to write. Developing dramatically
compelling conflict and resolving it without violence is extremely
difficult. It requires a great deal of thought and imagination.
In the movies as in the real world, action and violence involve
much less effort than does creativity.

There
is also something seductive about violence. "(W)ar is a drug,"
writes journalist Chris Hedges, "…peddled by mythmakers — historians,
war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state…"
He writes: "The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with
its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life.
It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living."ii

In
other words, one doesn't have to do the difficult, time-consuming,
and often boring work of figuring out what a worthwhile purpose
might be, and then figuring out how to live that purpose in one's
own life, every day. War is a ready-made game, with ready-made rules
and values — even ready-made equipment and a ready-made enemy.

Hedges
goes on to speak of those who become "addicted" to combat,
and high-risk situations. Writing about his own experiences covering
wars, he says "There is a part of me — maybe it is a part of
many of us — that decided at certain moments that I would rather
die like this than go back to the routine of life. The chance to
exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain
oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war…"iii

As
human beings, we do hunger for extreme experience, and to be passionate
about something. Admittedly, risking death is at the top of the
list of "extreme experiences," but there are other experiences
that do not rely on violence, that provide powerful inspiration
— and yes, sheer terror — for their participants. As anyone who
has ever performed for a live audience knows, the terror before
going on stage can only be compared to that of going into battle.
And the thrill of having completed one's best performance is a high
that defies comparison.

Life
presents us with a myriad of creative acts: entrepreneurship, athletic
accomplishment, creating a new product or work of art, making a
scientific discovery, having a baby. Each provides horrors, thrills
and joys of its own. Of course, these activities don't always come
with ready-made rules and values. Rarely do they offer four-week
boot camp and equipment issue.

Are
violence and the pursuit of power perhaps just the easiest ways
of finding meaning and intensity in life; the paths requiring the
least effort and imagination? Is it possible that evil is just the
end result of moral and imaginative laziness — of the lack of a
positive purpose in life?

If
so, then there is a very real danger to remaining lazy.

What
is perhaps most chilling about the images of Iraqi prisoners being
tortured and humiliated by U.S. soldiers is in the faces of the
perpetrators. They look happy. They look like they are having a
good time, like they are not in the least disturbed by what they
are doing. They look normal. And they are.

The
now famous "Stanford Prison Experiment," in which normal,
healthy young men were randomly assigned to be prisoners and guards
in a simulated prison, demonstrated how easy it can be for "normal"
people to commit acts of senseless cruelty. The experiment had to
be ended early because of the abuses committed upon the "prisoners"
by those playing the roles of "guards."

The
true horror in viewing the Abu Ghraib photographs is not that it
could have been you or me lying on the floor with a dog collar around
one of our necks, but that it could have been one of us holding
the leash. This is the danger inherent in not having a clear sense
of one's purpose. If we are not clear about why we are here, and
what our values are, then we run the risk of being used to perpetrate
evil.

If
we come to believe that evil is something outside of ourselves,
as those U.S. soldiers certainly must have, then we don't develop
the inner muscles we need to keep ourselves from committing
evil acts. We may even lose the ability to discern evil from benevolence.
And if we can no longer fight evil within us, how on earth can we
be expected to fight it anywhere else?

Developing
one's own sense of purpose requires a lot more effort than does
simply accepting someone else's purpose, or throwing oneself into
life-threatening situations again and again where finding one's
"purpose" requires no questioning or reflection.

Neal
Stephenson, in his novel Cryptonomicon,
asks the question "what is the highest and best purpose to
which we could dedicate our lives?" The answer given in the
novel is "to prevent future holocausts."iv

It
is difficult to argue with Stephenson's assertion. Yet there is
something empty about it. Something hollow. After all, if one's
purpose is dependent upon having an enemy to defeat, or catastrophic
events to prevent, then what happens when all the enemies are defeated,
and the catastrophes averted? Do our lives then become meaningless?
If fighting evil is what gives our lives meaning, then don't we
run the danger of actually becoming dependent on evil? One can't
help feeling there has to be something more.

What
is important is what endures. Long after the fall of the Roman Empire,
much of what made Rome great is still with us. Our civilization
today is built to a great extent on technological foundations developed
by the Romans in engineering, architecture, and most importantly
in their system of law. However flawed and perhaps short-lived our
own constitutional framework may be, it has been one of the best
attempts yet at preserving individual freedom and limiting the power
of government.

The
Roman conquests and military expansion of the Empire may have had
an impact on our present-day borders, what languages are spoken
where, or the particulars of trade routes, but none of this is what
is critical to civilization. Those things that endured the fall
of the Roman Empire were what made Rome great; not the military
conquests, nor the internal struggles for power.

The
question for us as individuals is, do we want to put our energy
into those things that will endure, and be of value in the centuries
to come, or do we want to focus on the power struggles and political
and military actions that are simply the backdrop — and often impediments
— to real civilization? Are we to be creators or destroyers?

It
is not an easy question, partly because the lines between the two
are not always clear, and because the two are not always mutually
exclusive. It could be argued that Roman law was a positive contribution
to civilization precisely because it put in place mechanisms to
keep evil at bay. And yes, civilization — the stuff that happens
on the banks — does include creating institutions, cultural traditions,
and technologies that serve to help keep us free — and that help
prevent future holocausts.

But
this cannot be our only purpose in being here, nor our highest one.
Fighting evil and preserving freedom may be necessary conditions
for human happiness and fulfillment, but they are not themselves
the source of that happiness and fulfillment. Furthermore, while
the two may sometimes overlap, they are not the same. And it is
just possible that we will never be free from tyranny, war and evil
until we know what we would do with ourselves in their absence.

How
then, to find our own sense of purpose?

In
the early 18th century, a thinker and writer by the name
of Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury asserted that
"…to have the natural, kindly or generous affections (by which
he meant those u2018which led to the Good of the Publick')… is to have
the chief means and power of self-enjoyment."v
Lord Shaftesbury argued that it is actually in our own self-interest
to care about the good of others and of society. Contrary to the
prevailing wisdom of his time, he believed that society is not at
odds with human nature, but that it is actually part of our nature
to be able to live in harmony with others.

His
ideas were not entirely new. The world's most enduring spiritual
traditions have in common the theme that true happiness is not to
be found by pursuing only one's own well-being. Jesus Christ told
his followers "…but whoever would be first among you must be
your slave; even as the Son of man came not to be served but to
serve…"vi  (Matt.
20:27, 28.) Likewise, the ancient yogic scriptures tell us that
the quickest way to enlightenment is through the practice of bhakti,
or devotion to God. Bhakti is practiced by cultivating love for
all earthly beings, and practicing service to those around us. Buddhist
tradition teaches karuna (compassion) and metta (loving
kindness) towards all as a way of life.

Each
of these traditions teaches us that it is a part of our nature as
humans to pursue some purpose outside of our own well being. They
tell us that we will find salvation or spiritual enlightenment through
working towards the good of those around us. If they are right,
then seeking the happiness of others might — crazy as it may sound
— bring us closer to our own true happiness than pursuing it directly.

The
idea is often received with cynicism. Bernard Mandeville wrote,
in response to what he saw as Shaftesbury's naïve faith in
human goodness: "…it is evident, that the first Rudiments of
Morality, broach'd by skilful Politicians, to render Men useful
to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that
the Ambitious might reap the more Benefit from, and govern vast
Numbers of them with the greater Ease and Security."vii

It
cannot be denied that politicians and others have used ideas of
virtue, self-sacrifice and concern for the good of others to manipulate
the public into doing their will. But this fact does not negate
the genuine hunger that we humans feel for our lives to be meaningful,
or the satisfaction that is found in contributing to others.

Mandeville's
view was that human greatness could be measured in terms of wealth
and prosperity. Yet most of us realize that wealth does not lead
to happiness. The personal rewards from serving others are not benefits
that can be demonstrated through logic or evidence to someone who
has not experienced them firsthand. Those who have, though — and
my guess is that they constitute the vast majority of us — know
that both the hunger and the satisfaction are real.

The
same week that the video of the brutal slaying of Nick Berg was
released, another news item went almost unnoticed, buried beneath
the carnage of that week's headlines. On May 13, "SpaceShip
One" became the first privately funded space craft to climb
to the edge of outer space. Designed by Burt Rutan and manned by
Mike Melville, the craft shot to a height of 211,400 ft. before
landing safely in the Mojave Desert. SpaceShip One has now gone
on to reach 337,500 feet and then nearly 368,000 feet within a period
of two weeks, winning Rutan and his team the coveted $10 million
Ansari X Prize.

Photo by Powell
Gammill of the Western Libertarian Alliance

This
story is not as titillating as the more gruesome events that usually
make it to the front pages. And admittedly, thousands of lives are
not at stake right now in the quest for private space travel. Yet
the prospect of private space exploration could conceivably have
as much of an impact on the world's population as the current conflicts
in the Middle East and elsewhere.

It
has been argued that a free society requires an ever-expanding frontier;
that democracies eventually devolve into dictatorships or worse,
and that the world's most successful examples of free societies
have begun as frontier societies. Whether or not this is true, the
prospect of a new frontier is an exciting one, and a frontier that
is open to private enterprise even more so — particularly as NASA
struggles with financial mismanagement, inefficiency, and a troubled
safety record.

A
century from now, what will be remembered about that week last May
will not be the brutal beheading of an innocent American, nor the
abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but that it marked a critical
episode in the early days of private space exploration.

Whether
you believe that private space flight will be the salvation of free
societies, or is merely the harebrained vision of techno-crackpots
is beside the point. What matters is that there are activities going
on right now — creative endeavors, some of which will fail and some
of which will succeed — that have the potential to alter the course
of history in powerful, positive ways.

These
stories are not usually on the front pages and they do not inspire
the media feeding frenzy of the more bloody and salacious events.
They are the results of people's peaceful and creative purposes.
These stories sometimes require seeking out, but for those who care,
are worth the effort. Each of us must decide which kind of story
will receive our valuable time and attention, and as we choose,
we decide to which part of the larger human story we are contributing.

Fighting
evil is sometimes necessary, and where one can do it without becoming
evil oneself, it is a worthy goal. But it is not our purpose in
being here. Likewise, it may sometimes be necessary to destroy,
and there are certainly enemies worth fighting. But to make destruction
the focus of one's life or to build a life around one's enemies
is not only unnecessary; it is contrary to our purpose as human
beings. Our purpose is not power. It is not what the headlines tell
us it is, nor what politicians would have us believe it to be. It
is something much more valuable, and much more enduring.

And
perhaps the best way to fight evil is to expose its banality, its
cheapness. To reveal that it's really not that "interesting"
after all. And then to put forward the radical notion that, as human
beings, we are happiest when we contribute to the happiness and
well being of others and to humankind, and perhaps that is our only
purpose in being here. When we can replace the cheap thrills of
violence with the genuine excitement of creativity, maybe then things
will start to get really interesting.

Notes:

1. Durant,
   Will. Life Magazine (New York, Oct. 18, 1963).
2. Hedges,
   Chris. War
   Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs,
   2002), 3.
3. Ibid.,
   5.
4. Stephenson,
   Neal. Cryptonomicon.
   (New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 1999), 401.
5. Shaftesbury,
   Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of. Characteristicks
   of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, (Indianapolis: Liberty
   Fund, Inc., 2001), 50, 57.
6. New
   Testament, Revised Standard Version, (New
   York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1952), 25 (Matt. 20:27, 28).
7. Mandeville,
   Bernard. Origin of Moral Virtue (Indianapolis, Liberty
   Fund, Inc., 1988), 47.

October
5, 2004

Bretigne
Shaffer [send her mail]
is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. See her website.

Then I met Nicole. "Do you want to help get rid of Bush?"
She called out to me as I was walking to my yoga class. "No,"
I sighed, "I don't," and continued walking. "I respect
that," she smiled, "have a nice day!" I wasn't quite
prepared for that. I stopped and turned back. "You know,"
I said, "if I thought it would make any difference, I would."
I told her that I saw Kerry and Bush as near-identical agents of
state aggrandizement, and that either one would only perpetuate
the interventionist foreign policy that had led to the war and our
occupation of Iraq. I readied myself for the practiced defense of
John Kerry, seeker-of-global-approval-for-unjust-foreign-wars. But
it didn't come. Instead, she stood there listening.

We talked for a while about the war and the political process.
She asked me if I knew anyone in Iraq. I said I didn't. "I've
got a lot of my peers over there," she told me. That's when
it hit me: I wasn't talking to a political hack. She was young and
black, and of course a lot of her peers were over there. She wasn't
standing out on the street all day because she wanted to get John
Kerry elected. She wasn't even really interested in beating Bush.
All she wanted was for her friends to come home safely.

Nicole asked me who I thought would be better than Kerry. I said
I thought the Libertarian candidate would be better — he had at
least promised to bring the troops home immediately. But I then
qualified that by saying that a) he couldn't possibly get elected;
and b) our problems ran a lot deeper than a matter of who was sitting
in the White House. We had become a nation of empire-building, and
in the game we called the political process, scaling back that empire
wasn't going to win. We would have to think of something else.

And she got it. She nodded. She didn't say anything about "throwing
away my vote." She was genuinely listening. She wanted to end
this thing as much as I did, and she was open to hearing suggestions
about how to achieve that. And I knew that my responses were inadequate.
I didn't know what else to tell her. I walked away feeling like
I owed her a better explanation of my position: After all, if I
was going to tell someone whose friends' lives hung in the balance
that voting was pointless, I'd better be able to tell her what she
could do instead.

The question gnawed at me for days. I thought back to a conversation
I had had at a dinner party one night with an exuberant, wide-eyed
young man who, like me, was very much against the war in Iraq. The
only difference between us (aside from the fact that he undoubtedly
watched more "West Wing" than I did) was that he blamed
the war on a few individuals — George W. Bush and his administration
— while I saw it as just another chapter in the continuing saga
of an increasingly interventionist US foreign policy.

At one point, I made the observation that it was the nature of
the state to seek power, and that what we were witnessing was the
result of our failure to restrain government. He practically blanched.
"Don't you think government can be used to do a lot of good?"
He rattled off a list of social programs and regulation of business
that surely required a strong government, and asked me if I didn't
support those. (I didn't, but that was beside the point.) He explained
to me that what we needed was to get people into office who would
wield the weapon of a strong government wisely — who would
impose the draconian regulations and finance the expansive social
programs that he thought were a good idea, but not wage the imperialistic
invasions he didn't like so much.

I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. "You
think you can do a deal with the devil," I said instead. "You
think you can use the power of the state to get what you
want, but that it's never going to turn around and use its power
against you, or in a way you don't approve of!" Whether he
heard me or not, I learned something important that night. For some
time now, I had been concerned for the sanity of some of my liberal
anti-war friends, who would go on and on about the evils of the
Bush administration — as if our imperialistic escapades had begun
in the last four years. Now I was starting to understand.

Like addicts who tell themselves that the addictive substance is
not to blame for the problems in their lives, those who are hooked
on the state are reluctant to identify it as the source of the social
ills they deplore. As long as it's just George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney and John Ashcroft who are evil — a "bad batch"
— then you don't have to kick the habit entirely. Just make sure
you get a good batch next time — elect "good" politicians
— and you'll never have to question the political system to which
you have become attached. You can blame the "bad politicians"
for any outcomes you don't approve of, and go on using government
force to spend other people's money and regulate other people's
lives.

And that's what it all comes down to: Force. Many of my friends
who abhor the US invasion of Iraq have no problem using government
force to achieve their own goals. And they don't seem to see the
connection between the two. Not only do they not question the morality
of using force to get what they want, they don't even recognize
the practical implication of doing so: That the more power you give
the state to do your bidding, the more power it has to act against
you.

So what would I tell Nicole now, if I ran into her again — or anyone
else who genuinely wants to bring US troops home from Iraq? First
of all, I would say that if your goal is to end war, you aren't
going to accomplish it by voting. You certainly aren't going to
accomplish it by voting for John Kerry, who has only promised to
boost the number of active-duty soldiers, increase the US presence
in Afghanistan, to step up US involvement in the war on drugs in
that part of the world and to put the National Guard in charge of
Homeland Security. But more importantly, if we want to end war,
then we need to stop pouring our support and energy into the entity
that thrives and expands by perpetuating war.

We are not likely anytime soon to diminish the state's motives
to wage war. What we can do is limit its ability to do so. The only
way to do that is to withdraw our support — and for many of us,
that's not going to be easy. As with any harmful addiction, we keep
doing it because we're getting something out of it. Giving it up
means giving up something we like, and are attached to — and many
of us are very much attached to the goodies we get from the state,
or to the benefits that we have come to believe can only be provided
by government.

But
the more we ask from the state, the more power we grant it over
our lives. And when we rely on force to get what we want, we can
be certain that that force will one day be used against us, or in
ways we find deplorable. If we truly want to end war, then we need
to end our addiction to force, and that means ending our addictive
relationship with the state.

July
29, 2004

Bretigne
Shaffer [send her mail]
is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. See her website.