Month: December 2011

The Burden of the Soldier

Earlier this month, a little-discussed headline read “Muted Ceremony Marks End Of Iraq War.”[1] Of course, neither the war in Iraq nor the occupation are really ending. Thousands of private security contractors remain in the country (as do the fifteen thousand employees of the Baghdad embassy).[2] The end of conventional military operations reflects the changing usefulness of the soldier to the state.

Generally speaking, the soldier’s role as provider of security is secondary to his role in propaganda. Regardless of an individual soldier’s motivation in joining the military, his primary function is to serve as a rallying cry for the fellow subjects of his state.

The nefarious motives behind wars, the endless political treacheries, and the massive fortunes accumulated by military industries must all hide behind the image of the soldier. He is portrayed as the best reflection of a grateful society, and elevated to the shining status of a religious icon, in the hope of blinding everyone to the cesspool of narcissism, corruption, and corporatism behind every war.

. . . the fact that parades, monuments, political speeches invoking their suffering, and streams of fawning news coverage are not only nonexistent for mercenaries, but scarcely imaginable, says much about the role and primary purpose of the soldier.

The soldier’s role, however, also burdens the state. Once an ongoing condition of war is cemented as the new normal, the soldier becomes, in many ways, a nuisance to the state. Soldiers invoke their own image and become outspoken critics, either of incompetence within their endeavor or of the endeavor itself. Soldiers write blogs, record embarrassing pictures and videos, and share them readily through social media, eroding the myths upon which the state relies.

Also, to justify the suffering of soldiers, the state is increasingly pressured to explain its endeavor and demonstrate progress. Neither mercenaries, mindful of their employment status, nor clandestine forces, carefully screened and highly disciplined, present such a burden. . . .

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* The End of the Mega States? * with Roman Skaskiw and Andy Duncan

“In our latest edition of Radio Free Market World Report, I talk to Roman Skaskiw about the global secession movement and particularly how this applies to the United States and the European Union. We examine why the world’s wealthiest countries, on a per capita basis, tend to be the smallest states, and why the major exception to this general rule, the United States, managed to avoid the trend.

We discuss whether the United States itself should be saved from secession, why European countries tend to be both socialist and independent, and whether the world will move towards a global government or a global constellation of micro-states.”

(More from Radio Free Market World Report)


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Note: This was just posted on mises.org.

Is the United States Too Big to Succeed?

Although European libertarians continue to produce great works of theory and activism, the United States has been, and seems to remain, the epicenter of the libertarian movement. There are no prominent protests in Europe calling for less governmental help as there are in the United States. Murray Rothbard’s essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty” refers to the United States as “the great home of radical liberalism.” In 1996, Dr. Yuri Maltsev presented a lecture at a Ludwig von Mises Institute summit entitled “Why America Must Be Saved,” making the case for the United States as the greatest hope in the struggle for freedom. Writing favorably of the tea-party movement, Peruvian writer and recent Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa distinguished the American individualist tradition as stronger than the European one:

In the United States, individualism has never had the bad press it had in Europe. In the purest American tradition, it is not the state but the citizen who is first responsible for failure or success.

Despite the more muted prevalence of libertarians in Europe, they enjoy a dynamic absent in America: strong regional identity reinforced by language and cultural barriers far greater than the relatively homogenized United States. As Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe might say, Europe has more “international anarchy,” . . .

However, what remains of European regionalism may very well do more to promote the cause of liberty than the more vigorous, better organized libertarian movement in the United States. . . .

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The Violence and Justice Monopoly

This essay was heavily influenced by one of my (now-former, 2023) intellectual heroes, Hans Hermann Hoppe:

Almost all of us hold two beliefs which contradict a third near-universal belief. The first is that a state, however else defined, is a geographic monopoly of security and justice. One cannot appeal a ruling beyond the state, and whatever private providers of security and justice may exist, they do so in pronounced subservience to and supervision by the state.

The second is that monopolies invariably cause high prices and low quality. Is it so absurd to unite these two self-evident ideas and suggest that states are poor providers of security and justice?

This, of course, rattles to its very foundation a belief most people consider unassailable: that states must invariably provide us, the gray, primitive, violent, purposeless masses, with security and justice — or else civilization itself would plunge into darkness and despair.

(Read more from Daily Anarchist)