Big Head Press


L. Neil Smith's
THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 635, September 4, 2011

"The people who benefit from the
system see reform efforts as attacks"


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Some Thoughts on "Reforming" The State
by Michael Bradshaw
speaker at usrepeals dot org

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Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Some recent pieces in TLE have moved me to comment.

I would like to disagree with Ann Morgan's article in response to Mr. Montgomery, but, with the exceptions of an understatement about the government's uncaring attitude about sexual abuse (government people actually encourage sexual abuse in almost all cases as an expression of their sadism), a few punctuation errors and referring to an individual in the plural (shudder!), I find that I am unable to do so. Perhaps next time we may find something upon which to disagree.

The pieces by Gerald Montgomery [ADDRESS REMOVED—PRIVACY, YA KNOW] (He would want me to mention his nom de plume) and Russell D. Longcore are, however, horses of another color. Both implicitly approve of the state as an institution and call for its continuation in a slightly different form from that which is in power today, in North America between Mexico and Canukistan.

Mr. Longcore was rather straightforward in his enthusiasm for the state, advocating that middle North America be broken up into several states with all the powers to carry out the four basic functions of government: robbery, rape, slavery and genocide.

If I may quote Mel Gibson in his movie The Patriot, "Why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away?" As an Ethnic American (the culture derived from the Franco-Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, with roots in the Spanish Scholastics, to glimmerings in Classical Greece) and anarcho-capitalist I do not want anyone robbing, raping, enslaving or murdering me; especially slowly and in horrid agony. Really! It would be most unpleasant and I hereby register strenuous objections to the whole plan!

Mr. Longcore has not, to my knowledge, offered any method for limiting the power of his proposed continuation of the separated Union States other than new constitutions based on the old. Since that method has been found to fail in all cases to date and with the same result, metastasis of the state; his repetition of it with the expectation of different results meets one of the classic definitions of insanity. He wants to repeat the experiment with the same protocols that have produced uniform results over many repetitions in the past, and expects opposite results. How he expects to control those protocols of constitutional conventions (playgrounds for gangsters) is not stated. How will he bell the cat?

His advocacy of a political system that is designed to commit massive and wholesale violations of the ZAP, up to and including genocide, in perpetuity and against all people who are not members of the ruling nobility, places him outside the libertarian community.

Mr. Montgomery's papers in this publication beg the question of where to begin. One wonders if our editor runs them for the same reasons that he ran Master Steinsvold's piece, of long and infamous memory, which I responded to in issue number 362. As my government school "education" did not take very well, I shall not start in the middle to confuse the gentle reader, but rather at the beginning, as the sages teach. That is a hint to M. Montgomery.

M. Montgomery claims (if memory serves) to be in or retired from U. S. military special forces as an on-the-ground operative. It seems evident to me that he has not been to any of the war colleges or officer candidate schools, as he shows little knowledge of the triad of military method; goal, strategy and tactics.

The three must be worked in order, without exception and with appropriate emphasis given to each, or failure will result. One must start with the goal to be achieved, or there is no reason to consider the other two, as they will have no purpose. The strategy is a general outline of the types of actions to be taken and the order in which to do them (including those that are done at the same time or overlap) in order to achieve the goal. The tactics are the specific actions that are taken to carryout the strategy to achieve the goal. Tactics will change as the situation on the ground changes, but they must always be chosen to advance the strategy.

The only goal that I can remember M. Montgomery stating is the word "liberty" or liberty for all people. This is not adequate because it is too vague. He gives no context in which his liberty is to be enjoyed. Does he envision a state that respects or guarantees liberty, or a condition without a state? If he wants a state (and it is evident from his writings that he does), what is its form? Is it a monarchy, as Professor Hoppe has suggested? Does M. Montgomery aspire to the throne as King or Emperor; and if so, how does he expect to achieve that exalted position over an empire of about 300,000,000 subjects? Is it a constitutional republic, perhaps another iteration of the United States constitutional republic (with a similar dismal history)? Perhaps it is a Swiss-style cantonal democracy? Without a clearly stated goal, including at least a modicum of contextual details, he has nowhere to go with his revolution other than to set up another feudal state, ruled by a random set of "noble" thugs, in which the lords temporal and spiritual, and their vile servants, have no respect for the commoners and treat them as cattle; such as the ones that we see in Europe and America for the last millennium or so.

M. Montgomery's strategy is stated as forth-generation warfare, or guerilla war, apparently devolving back to a national army fighting with third or even second-generation methods to defeat the United States military in conventional bottom-up combat, as he has been instructed by the Unites States military and school system. That system has been proven to defeat that enemy by Vietnam, and leads to the formation of another state, invariably socialist or mercantilist, such as we suffer under now in North America.

M. Montgomery has put almost all of his effort here into his tactics, apparently to copy or paraphrase his military manuals on third and forth-generation war between national armies and nationalist-socialist rebels. Said rebels being bent on replacing the old aristocracy with a new one that maintains the old governmental forms. With themselves at the top, of course.

M. Montgomery states that his third and forth-generation by-the-military-manual (with some changes, of course) rebellion is the only way that "liberty" may be achieved. No other method has any chance of success. I hope that he can spell h-u-b-r-i-s.

M. Montgomery seems to be ignorant of or unable to understand that any goal (such as the peace, prosperity and progress of anarchy, or freedom from politics) other than replacing one state with another state that is just as bad, may be better. He seems blithely unaware that his states always include robbery, rape, slavery and genocide; that freedom from politics (anarchy) is better for the common man than being the property of political lords; and that there other ways than his that actually work to achieve freedom.

I would suggest to M. Montgomery that he reconsider his nebulous and downright mystic goal of just plain "liberty" without context. He may profit from an examination of other methods to improve the lot of the Americans (if he wishes to do so) than setting up a national army to replace one state with another.

I would offer to M. Montgomery my own goal (permanent anarchy, or freedom from politics), strategy (Fifth-Generation War, or 5GW as presented here at TLE over the past seven years) and tactics of the top-down, distributed order of battle, in two stages, to achieve a state of stable and progressive anarchy.

It is no longer necessary (if it ever was) for national grunts to kill other grunts, until one side runs out of grunts, and the other declares victory; with the Lords of both sides remaining in good health and wealth, of course. That is, in essence, what M. Montgomery's traditional bottom-up, hierarchical order of battle really is; and that is what national militaries and schools teach as the only way to fight and win major conflicts. And that is probably why M. Montgomery is convinced that the bottom-up, hierarchical order of battle is the only way to fight and win a war.

There is no need to turn whole continents into the wastelands of the previous generational battlefields. National governments (example, the United States of America) can, and probably will, be destroyed by fighting forces of 1,000 volunteers or less, using 5GW or similar strategy and tactics; leaving the country (the civilian populace and their property) intact and prosperous; and hardly noticing the war "raging" around them.

The continued peace cannot be kept by national governments fighting endless wars and internal genocides; but it can be maintained for the long term (centuries or more) by the Jim Bell Memorial Foundation and similar organizations, working with voluntary public subscriptions instead of stolen taxes.

Politics is a cancer in the body of human civilization. It is not necessary to kill the patient in order to cure him, any more that it is necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. The cancer can be removed by surgical strikes at the tumors (politicians and their high-level servants) and the patient (the human race) can go on living a long, healthy and happy life.


Michael Bradshaw is the Speaker (also the Lord-High Janitor) of the United States House of Repeals, www.usrepeals.org. Copyright © 2011, Michael T. Bradshaw

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