The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for stopping working to use its “strategic intelligence” in dealing with the significant problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often vulnerable to “pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage man” (as Buckley has contemptuously composed), while disregarding and failing to apply libertarian theory to the most important issue of our time: war and peace. There is a sense in which libertarians have been utopian rather than strategic in their thinking, with a propensity to divorce the ideal system which we envisage from the truths of the world in which we live.
Simply put, a lot of people have divorced theory from practice, and have actually then been content to hold the pure libertarian society as an abstract perfect for some from another location future time, while in the concrete world of today we follow unthinkingly the orthodox “conservative” line. To live liberty, to start the difficult however essential tactical struggle of changing the unacceptable world of today in the direction of our perfects, we should recognize and show to the world that libertarian theory can be brought greatly to bear upon all of the world’s vital problems. By concerning grips with these issues, we can show that libertarianism is not simply a beautiful ideal somewhere on cloud 9, however a tough-minded body of truths that allows us to take our stand and to manage the entire host of problems of our day.
Let us then, by all ways, utilize our tactical intelligence– although, when he sees the result, Mr. Buckley might well want that we had stayed in the realm of trash collection. Let us build a libertarian theory of war and peace.
The basic axiom of libertarian theory is that no one might threaten or commit violence (“aggress”) versus another male’s individual or residential or commercial property. Violence might be used just against the guy who commits such violence; that is, just defensively versus the aggressive violence of another. Simply put, no violence might be utilized versus a nonaggressor. Here is the essential rule from which can be deduced the whole corpus of libertarian theory.
Let us reserve the more complicated problem of the State for a while and consider merely relations in between “private” individuals. Jones finds that he or his home is being attacked, aggressed against, by Smith. It is genuine for Jones, as we have actually seen, to repel this intrusion by protective violence of his own. Now we come to a more knotty concern: Is it within the right of Jones to commit violence against innocent third parties as a corollary to his legitimate defense versus Smith? To the libertarian, the response needs to be plainly no.
Remember that the guideline prohibiting violence versus the individuals or property of innocent males is absolute: it holds despite the subjective motives for the aggression. It is incorrect and criminal to breach the home or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or starving, or is doing it to conserve one’s family members, or is protecting oneself versus a 3rd guy’s attack. We may comprehend and have compassion with the motives in much of these cases and extreme scenarios. We might later alleviate the guilt if the criminal comes to trial for penalty, however we can not evade the judgment that this hostility is still a criminal act, and one which the victim has every right to push back, by violence if needed.
Simply put, A aggresses against B because C is threatening, or aggressing versus, A. We may comprehend C’s “higher” culpability in this whole procedure, however we must still label this aggression as a criminal act which B can push back by violence.
To be more concrete, if Jones discovers that his residential or commercial property is being stolen by Smith, he has the right to repel him and try to catch him; however he has no right to repel him by bombing a structure and killing innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine-gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more of) a criminal assailant as Smith is.
The application to problems of war and peace is currently ending up being obvious. For while war in the narrower sense is a conflict in between States, in the broader sense we might define it as the break out of open violence between individuals or groups of people. If Smith and a group of his henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his undertaking; and we, and others in society thinking about fending off aggression, might contribute financially or personally to Jones’s cause.
But Jones has no right, anymore than does Smith, to aggress versus anyone else in the course of his “simply war”: to take others’ home in order to fund his pursuit, to conscript others into his posse by utilize of violence, or to eliminate others in the course of his struggle to record the Smith forces. If Jones must do any of these things, he ends up being a criminal as totally as Smith, and he too ends up being based on whatever sanctions are portioned versus criminality.
In fact, if Smith’s criminal offense was theft, and Jones needs to use conscription to capture him or needs to eliminate others in the pursuit, Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such criminal offenses against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far even worse than theft. (For while theft injures the extension of another’s character, enslavement injures, and murder eliminates, that character itself.)
Expect that Jones, in the course of his “simply war” against the devastations of Smith, need to kill a couple of innocent individuals, and suppose that he must declaim, in defense of this murder, that he was simply acting upon the motto, “Offer me liberty or offer me death.” The absurdity of this “defense” ought to be evident at once, for the problem is not whether Jones was willing to risk death personally in his defensive struggle against Smith; the problem is whether he was willing to kill other people in pursuit of his legitimate end. For Jones was in reality acting upon the completely indefensible motto: “Give me liberty or provide death”– certainly a far less noble fight cry.
The libertarian’s standard attitude toward war need to then be: It is genuine to utilize violence against bad guys in defense of one’s rights of person and home; it is totally impermissible to breach the rights of other innocent people. War, then, is only appropriate when the exercise of violence is carefully limited to the individual criminals. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have fulfilled this requirement.
It has actually typically been preserved, and especially by conservatives, that the advancement of the horrendous contemporary weapons of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, bacterium warfare, and so on) is a difference just of degree rather than kind from the easier weapons of an earlier period. Of course, one response to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one. However another answer that the libertarian is particularly geared up to provide is that, while the weapon and even the rifle can be identified, if the will be there, against actual crooks, contemporary nuclear weapons can not. Here is a vital difference in kind.
Obviously, the bow and arrow might be used for aggressive functions, however it could likewise be pinpointed to use just against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even “conventional” aerial bombs, can not be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The just exception would be the incredibly unusual case where a mass of people who were all criminals lived in a huge geographical location.) We must, therefore, conclude that using nuclear or similar weapons, or the danger thereof, is a sin and a criminal offense against mankind for which there can be no validation.
This is why the old cliché no longer holds that it is not the arms however the will to utilize them that is considerable in judging matters of war and peace. For it is exactly the characteristic of modern weapons that they can not be utilized selectively, can not be utilized in a libertarian way. For that reason, their very presence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake.
And if we will undoubtedly utilize our strategic intelligence, we will see that such disarmament is not only a great, but the greatest political excellent that we can pursue in the modern world. For just as murder is a more heinous criminal offense versus another male than larceny, so mass murder– undoubtedly, murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itself– is the worst criminal activity that any male might perhaps commit. Which criminal offense is now impending. And the forestalling of huge annihilation is even more crucial, in reality, than the demunicipalization of waste disposal unit, as beneficial as that may be. Or are libertarians going to wax properly indignant about cost control or the earnings tax, and yet shrug their shoulders at, and even favorably supporter, the ultimate criminal offense of mass murder?
This article is excerpted from “War, Peace, and the State,” originally released in the Standard (April 1963). The complete essay is included in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays and The Misconception of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production (2003 ), modified by Hans-Hermann Hoppe– now offered as an EPUB.