When the planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 I think just about everyone in the western world suffered shock. I know I did. I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t handle the overwhelming feelings, and I wanted to spring into action. Since I felt helpless to do anything I thought the only choice was to support my government. What I didn’t do, with just about everyone else, was to ask why someone would kill so many innocent people. My emotions were trying to guide me to ask these questions, but at the time the rising truth was so intense that I pushed it aside.
After the initial shock wore off people began to discuss why we were attacked. It took a few years for it to sink in, but I started to realize that support of this mafia that we call the government is why we were attacked. The attack was the result of the initiation of force. It was the result of a contradiction that most people hold: that the initiation of force is wrong unless it is the government that initiates it. Now that I see that contradiction clearly, I will not support anything that uses a gun to achieve its ends.
When people find out that I am against Obama’s plan for nationalized healthcare, they look at me as if I am some sort of monster that doesn’t care about the sick and poor. The truth is the opposite. I care deeply about people, especially those who have been less fortunate than I have been. That is why I support a stateless society. That is the biggest reason why I have come to the conclusion that anarchy is the best way for people to live, including the sick and the poor. The results I have seen at the hands of the government are the opposite of compassion. The results are MASS death. The results are more poor, more sick, more disadvantaged.
I will not support the use of force, no matter what end it supposedly achieves. When you support force for ANYTHING, including “helping” the less fortunate, you are standing in blood. If you do not support the use of force in your own life, but support the government in any way, you are standing in blood.
Nothing I have come across says this better than this video. Please watch it. It changed my entire perspective and I hope it changes yours.
Transcribed from the video “Standing in Blood” by Stefan Molyneux
I know that people get confused by my approach to the question of a stateless society. “Why would you work so hard, why would you quit your career, why would you expose yourself like this, for the sake of something like a stateless society, a voluntaryist society?”
“Is it because you hate the welfare state?”
“Is it because you would like the roads to be privatized so you can bypass traffic jams?”
“Is it because you would like children to get better education?”
All of those are not unimportant; I would like the currency to be more stable. I would like economic growth to be the rising tide that lifts all boats and helps people out of poverty. I would like the people currently incarcerated in prisons to be free of their torture and rape.
Of course.
But I must tell you, it has a lot to do with these poor…fucking…Iraqis. 1.2 million murdered as a result of this war. America has ten times the population. Imagine 12 million Americans being murdered and one million Americans fleeing America every month.
Just imagine. Just imagine. Just imagine: your entire society, your entire life, detonated, decimated. Your children dying, helpless, starving, wracked with disease and malnutrition in your arms.
Imagine fearing every airplane, every possible disease you have in your body as a sign of cancer of leukemia in your children – death of some horrible, slow, wasting kind.
Imagine watching your country — and the best in your country, those who you desperately need to help you survive (the engineers, the doctors) fleeing the country to live in tents with no future and barely enough food. Imagine being stuck in the limbo, in the null zone between countries for years — for decades.
Imagine what your life would be like if you were them: helpless, bullied, tortured and murdered by Saddam Hussein, installed and maintained by the United States for a decade with the US-Anglo blockade. Half a million children died in hospitals in their parents’ arms for lack of food, lack of medicine, lack of inoculations.
5 million American children would have to die as an equivalent. Remember how angry you were when 3,000 Americans died on 9/11. 5 million children, 12 million Americans, 1 million Americans fleeing the country every year because the country is being turned into a desert. As they said of Rome, “They made it a desert and called it peace.” They have made Iraq a desert, and it is not even peaceful.”
And this is the cost of our patriotism. This is the cost of believing in these sick fantasies of states and governments and the virtue of violence in any form! For the roads, for the poor, for the sick, for the old — that is the bait on the hook that breeds war!
You can’t get state control of education without this type of genocide. You can’t get collective services like roads and sewers and garbage collection without this slaughter!
Because violence breeds violence. If we say we can point guns at people to help the poor (in the form of “income redistribution”); if we say we can point guns at people to help the old, then the guns will be pointed at you to fund the slaughter.
When you salute the flag, you stand in blood.
When you praise the military, you stand in blood.
When you praise a politician, when you join a political party, you stand in blood. You wade in blood.
When you say the government should do this, the government should do that, you stand in rising blood, and it is almost covering our mouths by now.
If you’re interested in these ideas, go to Freedomain Radio, the world’s most popular philosophy podcast.
Tags: force, NAP, PhilosophyRSS
