[The following post written by TDV Senior Editor, Ed Bugos]
According to Justin Raimondo, the antiwar opposition from the left side of the left/right paradigm has collapsed, leaving the only opposition to the war machine solely in the hands of those who consider themselves to be libertarians… Today, if you want to oppose war, you have to adopt the libertarian/anarchist philosophy!
The so-called left has a problem with opposing war, according to Raimondo.
But he's right: there is nothing they can do about it. Their man is in power!
As you know, there is nothing antiwar about Obama and Kerry's agitations.
Their favorite time to use the war machine, legitimately, is when any group of people dares to want to secede from any other group, or when a large group of people does not want to have democratic government.
They already wage an eco war against the poor everywhere just with the threat of force, and if they had their way they'd use large armies to prevent certain cultures from ever advancing out of the stone age. But nothing, I repeat nothing, draws their ire like the nerve of some group claiming to have "self determination."
Hence the collapse of the left's resistance to the military industrial complex has left the only one consistent philosophical defense of individual freedoms against tyrannical power – whether by an individual dictator or a larcenous majority – which is basically the "thin" libertarian and anarcho-capitalist philosophies… our side.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, based on the growth of the occupy movements and rise of Obama's popularity, I feared that the death of the right (at least the neocon element) would revive the left, even though its ideas were long bankrupt. But instead, as Raimondo points out in the interview with Mises Institute's president Jeff Deist, the philosophy of the left now just lays bare and exposed as the hypocritical empire building dogma that the libertarians have always penned it as.
Certainly there is no relent in the winds of interventionism…..yet.
But there is hope.
We know from Ludwig von Mises that human action is driven by ideas… that history forms the empirical content of this drive, but that it all starts with ideas. It has been a very pleasant and unexpected surprise that the libertarian and anarcho-capitalist movements have become the fastest growing socio-political movements of the day, while the popularity of the left has waned with Obama's ratings far sooner than I would have imagined.
What ramifications does this have for the Federal Reserve or any other government policy?
None, in the intermediate term.
The establishmentarians will have to yield and dissipate, and the new ideas will have to make their way into the mainstream before regulations, laws, and crony acts are repealed (i.e. before the new ideas turn into action or make a dent in terms of actual government policies). All this takes time, and events could either accelerate it or divert it. The trends are pointing in the right direction though. It's a good foundation.
Time has proven once again that only the classical libertarian or the more consistent anarchist philosophies hold a constant stance against the abuse of power. Let it no longer be obscured that the Hitlers, the Lenins, the Stalins, the Maos, the Husseins, and so on, and on, and on, as it is, all work in the service of their ideas… the left's. All these tyrants have supporters who believe that their unadulterated use of power and coercion is legitimate relative to what they believe.
Whether one wants to spread democracy or freedom there is no consistent check against the abuses of this objective except in an anarchist/libertarian world.
Here is an interview Jeff Berwick did with Angela Keaton of Antiwar.com discussing anarchy and how libertarians are the only political philosophy left that stands up to the sick and evil war machine (a.k.a. the military industrial complex).
If you were to ask your average American what they think of anarchy they would likely tell you it is about chaos and disorder as that is what they have been programmed to believe. Well, nothing is more chaotic and disorderly than war and the only group that staunchly stands up against it are the libertarians and anarchists.
