How not to BBQ Pigs
Cross-posted to Vulgar Libertarians
In recent news, one guy lures random canadian cops to kill them, before eventually surrendering to superior forces. Some couple randomly attacks US cops, then kill a bystander who tried to stop them, before committing suicide. Apparently, in both cases, libertarian anarchist rhetoric was invoked as justification for the actions. What does that make the perpetrators? Heroes? No, only deranged murderers with a death wish. And this, even if we assume that they were correctly viewing cops as the occupation force they are: a violent gang of costumed thugs, serving as the largely unaccountable enforcers for an oppressive regime, whose main role is to disarm the population against petty robbers with or without a bureaucratic title, when they are not directly victimizing innocent people. Indeed, even against such an enemy, random killing is counter-productive, and far from minimizing conflict and destruction only adds to it - not to mention that causing an innocent bystander to die is at least manslaughter even assuming the killing itself was self-defense in the heat of action.
To put things in perspective, let’s for a few moments grant these people the premise that they were indeed fighting an occupier, and consider. Even against an undoubtly evil force occupation force, say Czechoslovakia occupied by nazi Germany, what would you think of a previous unsuspected person or couple who some day killed a couple of random soldiers before getting caught, even ignoring the issue of the bystander? Would they be called heroic resisters? No, even as resisters, they’d be call them losers! What, they were unsuspected, and all they did was kill two random soldiers? Not even officers? Just two lowly random soldiers, out of a million? And for that lame result, they sacrificed 100% of their hitherto undiscovered resistance cell? Even by their own terms, their acts were no glorious heroism, but losing loserhood.
But of course, that’s granting too much. Even if we consider nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, not all soldiers are criminal. A whole lot of soldiers never killed anyone - though most were no doubt complicit, willing or unwilling. Indeed, many of them saved lives. My father tells how, when he was five or so (in France), he once threw a rock at a german soldier; the soldier turned around and pointed his gun at the kid - but he didn’t shoot, even though he would probably have faced no adverse consequences had he done so; he truly saved the life of that kid (though maybe he did it because his officer ordered him to be nice to the locals under some explicit or implicit threat, in which case that officer is who saved that life). So, targeting random soldiers, moreover based on the criterion that you find them peacefully in the streets watching the public, rather than conducting criminal assaults, is criminal: you’re likely to kill specifically some of the least offensive soldiers, and to certainly not kill the worst. Now you could do even worse: you could target not merely random soldiers, but those selected specifically because they didn’t dare shoot at innocent-looking kids that you use as a lure or a shield; then you’d be selecting for enemy soldiers who don’t hesitate to shoot at kids, which is a particularly foul move, and would make you as wretched as a palestinian arab.
Obviously, as far as occupation armies go, the various US costumed villains are by and large not quite as bad as the nazis used to be. On the other hand, being a mercenary army that volunteers to do evil rather than a slave army conscripted to inflict it, they don’t have any valid personal excuse for their many initiations of violence against innocents - but at the same time, the halloween-habilimented hoodlums admittedly don’t kill at the same vast scale (at this time) - most of their crimes consist in robbing, assaulting, kidnapping, caging, or otherwise threatening innocent people. Does the average monochrome mobster deserve death? Possibly not even the average german nazi serviceman did then, and certainly not the average USG policy enforcement officer now. They deserve to be collectively fired and individually made to pay damages to all the innocent people they robbed, or helped rob, put in jail, forced to obey orders and submit to oppressive statutes, or otherwise victimized. But dishing out death to random blue bullies is no justice, it is crime.
Things would be quite different if the garmented goons had been individually identified and targeted for having personally partaken in criminal actions, or at the very least for being part of a unit egregious for its criminal behavior (say, an SS division). Of course, if a Vehmic court had gathered (maybe even reduced to the single shooter-to-be), and after carefully examining the evidence, had found that said bureau-rat was guilty and deserved death. Then the killing would be an execution, and could be quite justified. But to condemn on the flimsiest of evidence without contradictory debate is a travesty of justice far worse than even the courts of said bureau-rats usually indulge in. Criminal justice rightly requires a standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”, not “preponderance of evidence”, to justify punishment of dangerous felons. These killings were no act of justice, they were injustice, they were murder.
Now, even with a Vehmic court, resources are finite, and only the most pressing case under the court’s jurisdiction should be heard. Is the case of two random small fry the most pressing case of oppression against which these militants are fighting? There again, refusing to judge cases in order of relevance and to quickly dismiss less important cases for lack of resources is in itself a denial of justice. A wise man keeps his enemy list sorted, and the day he grabs his gun, takes them out in decreasing order of importance - the opposite of what America does in its suspenseful Hollywood entertainment with the Big Boss going down at the end! (Although, in The Patriot, at least the protagonist does explain the correct principle to his sons before their first battle: take out the enemy soldiers in decreasing order of military rank.) In the words of G. K. Chesteron: “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” If, barring necessities based on self-defense and ability, you target your enemies in the wrong order, even if each of your targets indeed does deserve death, you’re doing it completely wrong, and are only making things worse: you’re effectively sparing the big criminals and punishing the small ones for not being criminal enough. You’re hacking away the weak branches of the tree of evil, selecting for stronger ones to quickly re-grow, meanwhile leaving the roots of the tree entirely untouched.
Context matters. If the robed racketeers had come at these people and initiated the violence, then killing would have been justified as self-defense, even in absence of deadly judgement; it would still be a losing loser’s move, but at least it would be justified. Instead, the “militants” we’re discussing (to reuse the term en vogue in the mass media when they refrain from calling terrorists terrorists) are the ones who triggered the violent events with the intent to kill, and their action is not justified on these grounds - they are crimes. If these “militants” were somehow undertaking a violent but legitimate mission against some important enemy commander, and then found they had to kill the cops in the course of their action, it might also qualify as self-defense - and similarly the bystander who was killed might conceivably have counted as self-defense. But again that’s not what happened; they had no superior mission except to kill and get killed; and in the end their initiative caused an innocent man to die who otherwise wouldn’t. This is terrorism, not fight for freedom. Whether in France or in Iraq, in Canada or in the US, the killing of random soldiers, even of an evil illegitimate occupation force, is still unjustified terrorism.
Now, if victory were at hand or at least possible; if a liberating army were coming, or at least an allied army fighting and promising to come eventually; if the action was a skirmish part of an overall war that wasn’t already lost, then killing random soldiers might conceivably be part of a larger effort to vanquish the enemy army and achieve victory, out of which more just a peace might be established. In this light, actions of “resistance” against occupying forces can sometimes be justified. Though if you lose, and/or as long as you are the outsider and they are victoriously occupying, you’ll be called terrorists - and rightly so, if you lose: for your action, far from bringing that more just peace, only intensified the violence of the oppression. Those Polish men who resisted Stalin’s armies, staying in the woods for many years past the end of WWII, hoping that the anglo-american allies would come liberate them, were deluded as to the nature of the anglo-americans, unaware of how evil these “allies” were. Within their erroneous assumptions, they were heroic resisters; but for those who understand how the traitorous anglo-americans had betrayed them, they were mistaken militants indeed, and may even have been terrorists if they only killed lowly soldiers without a legitimate higher goal (such as taking out the worst bureau-rats, or escaping to another country, or just evading those soldiers sent at their hot pursuit). Admittedly, once they had literally taken to the woods and were proscripts, it was too late to come back or surrender to a mass murderer; thus, after the initial decision of undertaking armed resistance, it might have been justified to keep fighting until after Stalin’s death and the relative softening of the regime - but the initial decision would still have been a mistake, if not a crime, unless it was triggered by the communists coming after them first (which was actually the case - Stalin’s henchmen murdered or sent to slow death camps all Polish partisans who were not communists). I have a lot of respect for those men who kept fighting against all odds, and survived for decades - yet they may have wasted their (and other people’s) lives, by uselessly fighting rather than e.g. fleeing the country. But once again, this is not at all what happened in these two recent cases: these recent killers were just terrorists, murderers, and losers, who were not part of a bigger revolution. Consequences matter. Are given killings efficient military actions, part of a strategy that will bring victory? Are they the start of a revolution? Or are they utter failures, in addition to being criminal, that in addition to getting the deluded killers dead or in jail, only single out their intended friends for negative propaganda, or even reprisals?
The deluded claim by some of the killers that they were starting a revolution is relevant. And relevantly deluded. That people are not taking arms en masse against their oppressors is indeed a coordination failure. If a large enough number of people understood the nature of the State, and understood how to not replace it by something worse, and understood that others understood it, too, then they would quickly coordinate with each other and wage an efficient war against this oppressor. But the State is good at one thing, and it’s at perpetuating this coordination failure, with its cradle to grave propaganda, its omnipresent surveillance apparatus, its massive economic and legal interventions to favor its friends and oppress its enemies, and its violent enforcement agencies. And until this coordination problem is fixed, it’s not the revolution yet. After it’s fixed, the revolution will be short, and violence will be mostly unnecessary as the cowardly bureau-rats will quickly cower in fear. Acting as if this Big Problem had been fixed, when it hasn’t, is lunacy - and criminal lunacy if it leads to murder. If you want to help the cause of freedom, you must help fix that coordination problem: teach people so they understand, and for that, show them the way - by reducing conflict and violence, or at least showing how it could be reduced - not by increasing it. In a country where people believe in the State, killing an official will only get him replaced by another one while the establishment will have found justification for more violence; the killing can only be justified in self-defense, if the target is a murderer, or if the official is so much worse than his potential replacement that even despite the backlash they will have a hard time finding as bad a replacement (think: attempting to assassinate Hitler or Heydrich - though even in the case of Heydrich it’s not obvious that the assassination turned out so well in the end).
Criminal and counter-productive, these mentally deranged murderers are the shame of the liberty movement they claim to be part of. But shame is a legitimate feeling that is not to be denied. Muslims often deny the many terrorists in their midst as anti-islamic, oblivious of how violent interpretations of Islam are not just widespread, but historically prevalent. Republicans and democrats especially blank out on the political affiliation of the many mentally deranged mass-killers among them who target unarmed innocents - not to speak of the terrorists in uniform who kill and oppress “legally” in their name. Libertarian writers can do better than stoop to the level of those hypocrites. Yes, there are violent people and criminals who identify as libertarian, and will use the ideology to justify their crimes; and there are even authors who will try to find them justifications. As our ideas become more successful, they will attract not just honest people, but also the occasional criminal lunatic; and even the finest thinkers are not immune to seeking approval, tribal affiliation and worldview confirmation from followers who may include criminal minds. The question is whether our ideas make people generally more peaceful, or breed criminal lunacy. I insist that it is the former, whereas opposite ideologies that reject individual liberty and individual responsibility foster the latter. Which is the case? That’s the heart of the debate - and so let’s debate. Let’s break out the statistics of wrongful death by rabid (or non-rabid!) statists (often with or sometimes without a magic official rubber stamp) and wrongful death by rabid (or non-rabid!) libertarians (with or presumably without a magic official rubber stamp). Let’s count how many people were made more violent than they used to be or less violent, by libertarian philosophy, or its rival statist philosophies. Note for instance how the couple in the second case was also harboring nazi flags and claiming nazi affiliation - quite the opposite of libertarian anarchist ideology, which only shows how confused and deranged they were, and inspired not merely by libertarian ideas, but also by some opposite statist ideas; but don’t expect commentators to make a difference: on the contrary they revel in amplifying the confusion! Truth is to be embraced, which is made of the shame of criminal failure as well as of the pride of life-saving success. I’m not afraid of truth. Are you?