Enough

Well, there's been another shooting, not exactly an uncommon occurrence in the America of the 21st Century. This time, however, the victims were cops and the murderers were right-wing ideologues, an unusual combination. Most recent mass-murders have involved innocent citizens, and most of the perpetrators have been vaguely if not explicitly left-wing.

The liberal media--always anxious to capitalize on the blood of innocents to push their gun control agenda--is delighted that they've scored a double jackpot this time. At last!! The whackjobs aren't radical environmentalists or socialist workers party lackeys, they're genuine right-wing nutballs, Alex Jones Tea Party wingdings, so now they can play the ideology card they've been holding onto for so long.

Of course, that's just politics. Partisans in the true American Civil War always try to score cheap points at the expense of the opposition. That doesn't concern me so much as the usual attempts by the state and it's power brokers to make the political ideology a point of contention.

This is standard operating procedure for the government. Certainly, it's understandable that--when you're part of the government, you're going to be concerned about anything that's deemed "anti-government". During the Bush years, it was the anti-war movement--Code Pink terrorists!--now it's the Tea Party and right. The flavor of the victims change, but it's always the same tactic: demonize citizen movements as enemies of the people. The petty authoritarians who do this usually forget that these "movements" ARE the people, and they are merely (theoretically) servants. Of course, they don't really "forget"...it's the age-old game of divide and conquer.

The ideological hand-wringing is nauseating.

In their zeal to demonize their political opposition, both sides are missing the point. It IS about ideology, it's ALL about ideology. Not left wing or right wing ideology, not liberal or conservative or democrat or republican or green or libertarian or socialist or any other "ism" that currently comprises the alphabet soup of political operatives vying for the reins of power in Washington DC.

It's about the Ideology of Violence.

Violence is the principle ideology of the State--it's its sine qua non, its reason for being--and whenever anyone resorts to using that ideology in practice--whenever anyone violates the non-aggression principle--one essentially becomes that which they presume to oppose. Once you give in to violence, once you cross the line from self-defense to active initiation of force, you essentially BECOME a statist.

It doesn't matter whether the mass murderer of the day spouts rightwing or leftwing dogma, that has nothing to do with their insanity. Millions of Americans spout the same ideologies, subscribe to the same beliefs, and yet manage to abstain from strapping bombs to their bodies or stockpiling AK-47s with the intent of committing horrific acts of violence.

But, somewhere in the dark recesses of their minds, these two killers decided that other human lives weren't of value, and they appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner.  This isn't a specifically left-wing or right-wing ideology, it's the shared mythos of the state, the philosophical underpinings of the power elite.

The recent shootings and bombings monopolizing the recent media coverage are a diminutive sliver of the whole. As usual, the media is missing the real story. Americans today are subjected to a constant barrage of violence, it's the common denominator in almost every segment and aspect of public life, a virtual reign of terror. And the perpetrator is the state.

Make no mistake about it: this is blowback. Just as sure and certain as was the attacks of 911. As the state has become more lethal and powerful, ramping up domestic surveillance and initiating more domestic terrorism via police brutality and rampant militarism, so has the populace become surly and restless, and civil unrest is becoming the norm. No-knock warrants, deaths-by-taser, dog killings, assaults and beatings by the police have become commonplace. The State initiates and then perpetuates this cycle of violence: abuse begets resistance, which begets authority, which begets violence, which begets a clampdown. The endgame is apparent, and frightening.

These schmucks who conducted the CiCi's Pizza killings are perpetrators of the most heinous sort, just as the terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center were. But anyone who understands how the cycle of violence works knows that most, if not all, perpetrators of heinous crimes were once victims themselves. Most child abusers were abused children, most sex offenders were molested. This is data, not ideology. In a very real sense, the cycle of violence continues because we are all victims.

There is only one way to break the cycle of violence. It isn't by stockpiling assault rifles and planning civil unrest. That's not "self defense", that's self-destruction.

The only way to break the cycle of violence is to stop enabling it. To stop partaking in it. To say ENOUGH.

Enough of ideologies that promote the destruction of human lives--ANY human life. Enough of militarism and police brutality and foreign interventionism and prohibitionism. You can't shoot your way to freedom, you can't bomb your way to peace. The establishment doesn't use violence to achieve either of these goals, they use it to acquire and hold power. Dictatorship is the suppression of unrest, the prohibition of autonomy. Violence is their currency; citizen-violence is therefore counterfeit, and must be suppressed.

ENOUGH.

The only way to resist violence is to abstain from violence. The only way to resist tyranny is to abstain from tyranny. The two are corollaries. Resisting violence is resisting tyranny.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. They resisted violence AND they resisted the state, and--without ever succumbing to the allure of violence--they prevailed.

They were both assassinated too. But the petty, insignificant humans who killed them achieved nothing for their efforts, except making martyrs of their victims and promoting their causes over their own.

The world today desperately needs another Gandhi, another King. How much more of this insanity must we bear before someone steps up and says enough? If we don't break this cycle of violence, we will drown in an ocean of blood. This evil is not sustainable.

The freedom movement, especially, needs to embrace non-violence--or more specifically, anti-violence--and recognize that opposition to force is the surest and purest promotion of liberty.

Consider, for a moment, the achievements of the American civil rights movement, and you witness the triumph of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance. No liberties were secured at Watts, no human rights were advanced by violent Black Panther uprisings. But when Rosa Parks refused to acquiesce to the Montgomery Bus Company, and when four young North Carolina A&T freshmen staged a "sit-in" at a whites-only Woolworth lunch counter, the earth moved and the walls of institutionalized tyranny started to crumble.

One thing is certain: advocating for violent uprising is NOT promoting liberty. It's a sign of a society in the throes of death.

There is a certain irony at work in the movement's current preoccupation with defining itself, the pedantic and sometimes contentious debates over "thick" vs "thin", left vs right, and "brutalist" vs "humanitarian" flavors of libertarianism. But the one thing which has heretofore remained constant, the one thing which all different stripes of freedom advocate can agree, is adherence to the Non-Aggression Principle. Now, whether the NAP alone is enough to make one a libertarian is arguable, but one thing which ISN'T is that the NAP must be the foundation, the base, the spine that every other muscle and vein of libertarianism is built around. Without the NAP, you're simply not a libertarian, no matter what you claim.

It takes a particularly tortuous type of pretzel logic to reconcile the NAP with preemptive murder of cops, as has been trumpeted of late by Larken Rose and Christopher Cantwell (and now, apparently, Adam Kokesh as well). Preemptive killing is not "self-defense", and it's certainly not libertarianism. It's George-W-Bush-invading-Iraq-ism, and if that's the kind of intellectual company you want to keep you can have it. I'll take Thoreau and Mises, thank you very much.

I want to clarify, lest anyone accuses me of attempting to "define someone out of the movement". First, I could give a ratzass about "the movement". I'm my own agent and so is everyone else. Second, I wouldn't even if I could (nobody can, it's a conceit). Why? Because only the free flow of ideas can keep a society free and vibrant. Yes, even appalling, counterproductive "ideas" like rationalizing murder. There is no "final arbiter", no judge sitting at the top of the steps deciding who is and who isn't a libertarian. We are all our own final arbiters. Ideas have consequences, and every single person is responsible for choosing which ideas to accept, which ideas to reject, and which ideas to act on.

I reject the idea of preemptive violence. I abhor it as the intellectual engine of terrorism, the jet fuel of the state, the ideology of Cantwell, Che, and Pol Pot. I choose to be a resister, a voluntarist, a true advocate for freedom.

I can't speak for anyone else but myself. But I urge everyone who cares about the future of civilization to take a good hard look deep inside your soul before you entertain the idea that preemptive violence is congruent with libertarianism, that cop killing is a valid way to advance human freedom. If you do, you are of course free to apply any label which you so choose. You can call yourself an anarcho-capitalist or a Constitutionalist, a thick or a thin, a brutalist or a humanitarian. Just don't forget that you're also an enabler of dictatorship, a petty tyrant, and a shitty human being.