It’s maddening to reflect that literally every single president of my lifetime has been involved in a war in Iraq.^[1] For more than 20 years of my life, U.S. presidents have been continuously at war against Iraq in some way or another. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama, every one of them, started a new assault on Iraq at some point in their presidency, whether in the form of cruise missile strikes and aerial bombing, or lethal sanctions, or for the third time now a ground invasion. The only president of my lifetime who did not start a new war against Iraq was Ronald Reagan; and that’s only because he was too busy helping the Iraqi government get chemical weapons so they could fight a bloody proxy war for him against Iran.

The U.S. government’s two decades of continuous war and blockades in Iraq has killed over a million people, most of them civilians and children, in the name of national policy. The details of the policies always shift, every enemy turns out to be unique in their brutality, but the means of enacting them always remain the same: more missiles, more bombs, more soldiers, and more dead children in Iraq. And now the president speaks of humanitarian missions.

Yesterday night, President Obama gave a speech announcing that he would escalate the U.S.’s third war against Iraq, and that he would widen the war into Syria as well. I can’t say that the speech is extraordinarily belligerent; but only because what is outrageous in the speech is so ordinary, after all these years so deeply familiar with year after year of war in Iraq. The language is as shopworn as it is mendacious. In his speech, the President said:

. . . Our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy. First, we will conduct a systematic campaign of airstrikes against these terrorists. Working with the Iraqi government, we will expand our efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions, so that we're hitting ISIL targets as Iraqi forces go on offense. Moreover, I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven. . . . And our own safety — our own security — depends upon our willingness to do what it takes to defend this nation, and uphold the values that we stand for — timeless ideals that will endure long after those who offer only hate and destruction have been vanquished from the Earth. May God bless our troops, and may God bless the United States of America.

— Barack Obama, remarks on ISIL/ISIS and war on Syria and Iraq, 10 September 2014

These words — these exact words, without any change, could have been uttered by George W. Bush. They sound like him, full of hunting down terrorists and If you threaten America…. They could have been spoken, just as they are, by William Jefferson Clinton. They read exactly like every war speech that George H. W. Bush ever gave.

The dates and the names change, but the war rhetoric is always the same. Every President is a war President, and in war, every President talks in the same voice, from the same mouth, with the same lies, for the same ultimate purpose: to legitimize politically-organized mass murder. If you elect a liberal President who marched against the Vietnam War, what you’ll get in the end is a President. If you elect a humble foreign policy conservative, then he will govern as a President anyway. If you elect a Progressive President, then the fact that he is President will always turn out to be far more relevant than the fact that he is a Progressive. Electing presidents or changing political parties will never end war: No matter who you voted for, the winner always becomes the Government.

For war is essentially the health of the State.

See also.

• GT 2013-03-19: The Same Government
• GT 2009-01-25: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
• GT 2008-05-13: Gosh that’s tough
• GT 2008-03-17: March 17, 2003, 8:01pm EST
• GT 2007-05-13: Cry havoc! and let slip the pronouns of war…
• GT 2006-12-21: In ten words or fewer (personal pronouns edition): George W. Bush on the next year of the Iraq War

1. ^[1]I was born in 1981.↩

This week in coding: the ethos of Intellectual Property forces smart people to waste an incredible amount of time and effort dealing with trivial, unproductive bullshit.

Shared Article from The Huffington Post

Obama Delays Immigration Action Until After Election

WASHINGTON (AP) — Abandoning his pledge to act by the end of summer, President Barack Obama has decided to delay any executive action on immigr…

huffingtonpost.com

Of course, this is a shameful move from Barack Obama. Immigrants’ lives and families are being sacrificed, yet again, over and over and again, to opportunism and to crass political calculation. The careers of Democratic politicians are not more important than people’s lives and livelihoods. What makes it worse is that this move is as completely predictable as it is morally grotesque.

Progressive electoral politics is like building a vast, extraordinarily expensive, Rouge River-scale machine plant to build cars. Then, after the ribbon is cut, the plant opens to great fanfare, billions of dollars are spent, and a couple of go-karts are rolled off the line as a test, the manager up and tells you that there won’t be any more cars for the time being — because all the wear and tear on the machines would destroy their ability to make more cars, some day in the future. So until then you’ll have to wait. All the while the machine whirs along, drawing more power and costing more money all the time, but no more cars ever come off the line, because every time there might have been some output, it was sacrificed to make sure that the machine itself would keep idling smoothly. But it is so perfectly polished.

VRG Reader: Markets Not Capitalism

• Charles Johnson and Gary Chartier (eds.), Markets Not Capitalism, 1st ed. (Minor Compositions: 2011) will be the source for most of the readings in our VRG. You can obtain a copy directly from the publishers, or from the usual online bookstores. You can also read it online if you don’t mind giant PDF blobs.

In addition to the readings from Markets Not Capitalism, there will be a number of additional primary and supplementary readings that we will discuss to give more in-depth treatments to particular topics and offer additional context. Readings that aren’t in Markets Not Capitalism will be made available online. Here are links to the additional readings throughout the VRG.

Session 3: A Question of Ownership.

• Murray N. Rothbard (1969), Massacre at People’s Park, in The Libertarian Forum I.VI (June 15, 1969). 1. (PDF at Mises.org)

Session 4: A Question of Knowledge.

• F.A. Hayek (1945), The Use of Knowledge in Society in American Economic Review XXXV.4 (Sep. 1945). 519-30. (HTML at EconLib).

• Nathan Goodman (2013), The Knowledge Problem of Privilege, at Liberty Minded (July 29, 2013)

Session 5: A Question of Scale.

• Read Coase^[1] (1937), The Nature of the Firm, from Economica N.S. 4.16 (Nov. 1937). 386-405.

Session 6: A Question of Identity.

• Dyer D. Lum (1890), Introduction and Fundamental Principles from The Economics of Anarchy: A Study of the Industrial Type (HTML at praxeology.net)

• Benj. R. Tucker (various/1897), selections from Instead of a Book, By A Man Too Busy To Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism (HTML at fair-use.org):

  • Relation of the State to the Individual (1890). 21-29.
  • Our Purpose (1881). 30-31.
  • Who Is The Somebody? (1881). 177-178.
  • The Sin of Herbert Spencer (1884). 370-371
  • Rights and Duties Under Anarchy (1887) 58-60.
  • Should Labor Be Paid or Not? (1888). 403-404
  • Armies that Overlap (1890). 363-365.

Session 7: A Question of Activism.

• Sharon Presley & Lynn Kinsky (1976), Government is Women’s Enemy, Association of Libertarian Feminists Discussion Paper (HTML at alf.org)

• Lucinda Cisler (1970), Abortion Law Repeal (Sort Of): A Warning to Women, in Notes from the Second Year. (eBook at Duke University Libraries. Alternative HTML version at fair-use.org)

• Charles Johnson (2011). Women and the Invisible Fist: How Violence Against Women Enforces the Unwritten Law of Patriarchy. There are several drafts of this paper, prepared for different audiences. I recommend reading the December 2010/March 2011 Molinari Society version (2010.1217-2), which is about 20pp in length and was prepared for audiences already somewhat familiar with libertarian writing.

• Ellen Willis (1970). Women and the Myth of Consumerism, in Ramparts (June 1970). 13-16. (PDF at unz.org. Alternative HTML version at fair-use.org.)

• Betsy Brown (2000). A Radical Dyke Experiment for the Next Century: 5 Things to work for Instead of Same-Sex Marriage, from off our backs 30.1 (January 2000). 24.

Session 8: A Question of Ethos

• Karl Hess (1969). The Death of Politics, from Playboy (March 1969). (HTML at fare.tunes.org)

• Jason Lee Byas (2014). Toward an Anarchy of Production (Part I) from The New Leveller 1.1 and Toward an Anarchy of Production (Part II) from The New Leveller 1.2. (HTML at s4ss.org)

• Emma Goldman (1910). Minorities versus Majorities, in Anarchism and Other Essays (1910/1917). (HTML at Berkeley Digital Library: The Emma Goldman Papers)

1. ^[1]lol↩

If you’re in Auburn, and you’ve been watching the police-state horror-show unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri, you may be interested to know about this. TOMORROW (Friday, August 15) at 12pm, on Samford Lawn, Auburn University campus.

Announcement forwarded from AU Black Student Union follows

Attention auburn friends and family:

“Hands Up!” event tomorrow organized by BSU at 12pm on samford lawn to honor Michael Brown + raise awareness about police brutality directed at people of color

LET’S SHOW UP ! ! !

more info below from email sent by BSU’s president

Due to the recent events emerging in Ferguson, Missouri, in relation to the death of Michael Brown, Black Student Union would like to show its support in the fight for equality by joining in the “Hands Up!” Movement. This movement has been spreading rapidly around the country and we should all raise our voices in the fight for justice. We should raise our voices for those who cannot any longer, for Sean Bell, for Oscar Grant, for Amadou Diallo, for Michael Brown and for countless others. Meet us on Samford Lawn tomorrow, Friday, August 15th at noon to take a picture and let’s show the people of Ferguson, Missouri, that they have our support.

Hope to see you tomorrow at noon on Samford with your hands up.

War Eagle!
Jasmine S. Pettaway
Your BSU President