m Upon the decease my wife, it is my Will & desire th all the Slaves which I hold in own right, shall receive their free. To emancipate them during life, would, tho' earnestly wish me, be attended with such insuble difficulties on account of theiixture by Marriages with the er Negroes, as to excite the most paful sensations, if not disagreeablonsequences from the latter, while descriptions are in the occupancy the same Proprietor; it not being my power, under the tenure by which e Dower Negroes are held, to mant them. And whereas among e who will recieve freedom acding to this devise, there may bme, who from old age or bodily infiities, and others who on account of ir infancy, that will be unable to pport themselves; it is msire that all who & second descriptably cloathed & they live; and that such of the latter description as have no parents living, or if living are unable, or unwilling to provide for them, shall be bound by the Court until they shall arrive at the ag of twenty five years; and in cases where no record can be produced, whereby their ages can be ascertained, the judgment of the Court, upon its own view of the subject, shall be adequate and final. The Negros thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read & write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan and other poor Children. and I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. And I do moreover most pointedly, and most solemnly enjoin it upon my Executors hereafter named, or the Survivors of them, to see that thuse respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the Epoch at which it is directed to take place; without evasion, neglect or delay, after the Crops which may then be on the ground are harvested, particularly as it respects the aged and infirm; seeing that a regular and permanent fund be established for their support so long as there are subjects requiring it; not trusting to the < u>ncertain provision to be made by individuals. And to my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom; or if he should prefer it (on account of the accidents which hae befallen him, and which have rendered him incapable of walking or of any active employment) to remain in the situation he now is, it shall be optional in him to do so: In either case however, I allow him an annuity of thirty dollars during his natural life, whic shall be independent of the victuals and cloaths he has been accustomed to receive, if he chuses the last alternative; but in full, with his freedom, if he prefers the first; & this I give him as a testony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.

At about the same time that he was drawing up his will, Washington made a list of the adult and child slaves on each of the Mount Vernon farms, usually giving ages, occupations, and other pertinent information. His list of 317 slaves, includes the names of 124 who belonged to him outright and were to be freed when Martha Washington died, 153 who were Martha Washington's dower slaves and at her death would go to the Custis heir-at-law, her grandson George Washington Parke Custis, and forty others leased by GW from his neighbor Penelope Manley French. Of the 277 slaves belonging to Washington in his own right or by marriage, 179 were 12 years old or older, eighteen of whom were"Passed labor." The remaining ninety-eight were children under the age of 12. Of those twelve years old and over, ninety-five were females and eighty-four were males. Shortly after Washington's death, Bushrod Washington recommended to Martha Washington that she get" clear of her negroes" at Mount Vernon. According to Eugene Prussing, she"was made unhappy by the talk in the [slave] quarters of the good time coming to the ones to be freed as soon as she died." He reported that"many did not wait for the event" but took off at once. In any case, all the slaves that Washington owned outright were freed after Martha's death, and the accounts of the executors of Washington's will show an expenditure by 1833 of more than $10,000 to the pensioned former slaves who remained at Mount Vernon or lived nearby (Bushrod Washington to Martha Washington, 27 Dec. 1799, in Fields, Papers of Martha Washington, 328-31; Prussing, Estate of George Washington, 158-60).

In the construction of which it will readily be perceived that no professional character has been consulted, or has had any Agency in the draught--and that, although it has occupied many of my leisure hours to digest, & to through it into its present form, it may, notwithstanding, appear crude and incorrect. But having endeavoured to be plain, and explicit in all Devises--even at the expence of prolixity, perhaps of tautology, I hope, and trust, that no disputes will arise concerning them; but if, contrary to expectation, the case should be otherwise from the want of legal expression, or the usual technical terms, or because too much or too little has been said on any of the Devises to be consonant with law, My Will and direction expressly is, that all disputes (if unhappily any should arise) shall be decided by three impartial and intelligent men, known for their probity and good understanding; two to be chosen by the disputants--each having the choice of one--and the third by those two. Which three men thus chosen, shall, unfettered by Law, or legal constructions, declare their sense of the Testators intention; and such decision is, to all intents and purposes to be as binding on the Parties as if it had been given in the Supreme Court of the United States.

We do not go to our doctors' offices and expect to see partisan propaganda posted on the doors, or go to hospital operating rooms and expect to hear political lectures from our surgeons. The same should be true of our classrooms and professors, yet it is not. When I visited the political-science department at the University of Colorado at Denver this year, the office doors and bulletin boards were plastered with cartoons and statements ridiculing Republicans, and only Republicans. When I asked President Hoffman about that, she assured me that she would request that such partisan materials be removed and an appropriate educational environment restored. To the best of my knowledge, that has yet to happen.

• As best I recall, I first encountered Robert Bidinotto at ISIL’s Rome conference in 1997. His main contribution at that time was a very nice speech urging mutual understanding and cooperation between Objectivists and (other) libertarians; my friend Bobby Emory in his FNF report called this extension of the olive branch on Mr. Bidinotto’s part “an important turning point for the movement.”
  
  In more recent years, unfortunately, Mr. Bidinotto’s tone in dealing with libertarian adversaries has grown increasingly hostile, but I was still able to have a fairly civilised debate with him on the anarchist question two years ago (see here, here, and here).
  
  But then came last month, when he sent me a link to a blog post in which he bade adieu to any canons of civility by denouncing anyone unwilling to support U.S. troops in Iraq as “scumbags.” Apparently the notion that the U.S. military policy of mass civilian homicide might be unjust, and that criticism of it might extend to criticism of those who carry it out, falls by his lights into a class of inherently dishonest ideas, sufficient to damn anyone who holds them as a “scumbag” without further discussion. (I can only infer that if Mr. Bidinotto ever read David Kelley’s Truth and Toleration, his memory of it has comfortably faded away.)
  
  Mr. Bidinotto also misleadingly equated not supporting the troops with despising the troops, which amounts to a smear of his opponents. (If a basically decent person has been unfairly manipulated into carrying out an unjust policy, despising that person is hardly an appropriate response. But neither is support.)
  
  Not being overfond of seeing myself and my allies smeared or called “scumbags,” I responded with some asperity, prompting Mr. Bidinotto to add the “lunatic” label on top of the “scumbag” label.
  
  What earned me this last was my supposedly amazing characterisation of his position as “malevolent tribalism.” But if this jingoistic don’t-you-dare-criticise-the-troops brand of patriotism doesn’t count as tribalism, what does? Tribalism also seems a fair description of Bidinotto’s dismissal of all criticism of America as criticism of America’s founding ideals of individualism and freedom; by thus identifying these ideals with a particular nation, Mr. Bidinotto evidently blinds himself to the possibility that the nation might not be living up to those ideals – and the result is that allegiance to the ideals get shifted instead to allegiance to the nation, even when this means discarding the ideals and attacking those who are actually defending them. (As for “malevolent,” the tone in which he talks about collateral damage speaks for itself.)
  
  Well now, turns out the latest person to be consigned to outer darkness is my comrade-in-arms Charles Johnson, who just got banned from commenting on Mr. Bidinotto’s blog for having the temerity to point out the logical inconsistencies in Mr. Bidinotto’s arguments. Check out Charles’ latest post for the details.
  
  As you’ll see, throughout his exchange with Charles Mr. Bidinotto is persistently unwilling to acknowledge basic principles of logic. I know from experience how frustrating he can be on this point: some time after our anarchy debate, I was having an exchange with Mr. Bidinotto on a discussion board (archived here and here) when he suddenly announced that he did not accept one of the basic principles of logic; specifically, he denied that there can be deductively valid arguments with false premises. (I note in passing that this would make reductio arguments impossible; since reductio is Randians’ favourite argument form, that seems a tad awkward.) Anyway, I withdrew from the discussion on the grounds that I didn’t see how it was “possible to continue a fruitful philosophical discussion once the basic principles of logic have been rejected.” (Much Randian abuse followed in response to this, but I declined to step back into the mire.)



• Enough on that subject. In related news: In my November 24th post A View to a Kill I suggested there was an inconsistency among these three quotations from Rand on the permissibility of killing the innocent:
  
  
  A. Ayn Rand says: hell yes, kill the innocent

  If we go to war with Russia, I hope the ‘innocent’ are destroyed with the guilty. ... Nobody has to put up with aggression, and surrender his right of self-defense, for fear of hurting somebody else, guilty or innocent. When someone comes at you with a gun, if you have an ounce of self-esteem, you answer with force, never mind who he is or who’s standing behind him. (p. 95)

  B. Ayn Rand says: hell no, don’t kill the innocent

  Whatever rights the Palestinians may have had – I don’t know the history of the Middle East well enough to know what started the trouble – they have lost all rights to anything: not only to land, but to human intercourse. If they lost land, and in response resorted to terrorism – to the slaughter of innocent citizens – they deserve whatever any commandos anywhere can do to them, and I hope the commandos succeed. (p. 97)

  C. Ayn Rand says: gee, there’s no right answer

  Even as a writer, I can barely project a situation in which a man must kill an innocent person to defend his own life. ... But suppose someone lives in a dictatorship, and needs a disguise to escape. ... So he must kill an innocent bystander to get a coat. In such a case, morality cannot say what to do. ... Personally, I would say the man is immoral if he takes an innocent life. But formally, as a moral philosopher, I’d say that in such emergency situations, no one could prescribe what action is appropriate. ... Whatever a man chooses in such cases is right – subjectively. (p. 114)

  Diana Hsieh responds in Ayn Rand on Total War (conical hat tip to Chris Sciabarra). Here are her main points, interspersed with my responses:
  
  

  In the first [quotation], Ayn Rand is speaking of war of self-defense with Russia. The “innocent” in question were the passive supporters of the Soviet Union, i.e. the vast majority of Russians who accepted the horrors of the communist government without significant protest. Those people were morally responsible for their decision not to fight the communists, for their willingness to live as slaves to the Bolsheviks. Without them, the Bolsheviks never could have retained their iron grip on power. Such people were not innocent, but guilty – albeit perhaps less so than active supporters of the communists. Given their choice to live without any rights whatsoever under the Soviets, they have no grounds on which to protest their death by an American bomb rather than a KGB interrogator. The genuine innocents in Soviet Russia were the opponents of the regime – and those people would have welcomed an invasion from the US, despite the risk of being caught in the crossfire.

  So according to Ms. Hsieh (or Rand, or both), anyone who lived under the Soviet regime “without significant protest” was effectively a supporter of the regime, and so not innocent, and so fair game for killing. As Chris Sciabarra has pointed out, this claim bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Ward Churchuill’s suggestion that the office workers in the World Trade Center were “little Eichmanns” who had it coming because of their participation in neofascist corporatism.
  
  In any case, the claim that refusing to rise up against a tyrant counts as de facto consent to the tyranny embodies a collectivist fallacy: confusing the individual with the group. It’s quite true, as La Boétie and Hume famously pointed out, that tyrannical governments cannot survive without the acquiescence of their subject populace. But to suppose this means that the individual members of this acquiescing populace have consented in some straightforward and unproblematic fashion ignores the collective action problem (see here and here) involved. If we all resist the tyrant, the tyranny will fail; but if I resist the tyrant first, without sufficient support, I’ll just be martyring myself for nothing. Coordinating simultaneous and effective resistance is, notoriously, no easy task.
  
  In an article in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (or The Return of the Primitive, as her heirs have chosen to rename it), expressing empathy for some dissidents on trial in the Soviet Union, Rand wrote: “I do not mean that I would have been one of the accused in that Soviet courtroom: I knew enough, in my college days, to know that it was useless to attempt political protests in Soviet Russia.” Doesn’t that make Rand herself one of those Soviet citizens who made no “significant protest” against the regime and so are allegedly morally culpable? A reductio ad absurdum, surely.
  
  Anyway, the notion that one should be happy to be blown to bits by an invading army so long as one’s country is liberated is a rather odd notion – frankly, a Soviet-sounding notion – for an egoist to uphold. And even if we grant it, the fact that someone should consent to being killed does not make it okay to kill her if she has not actually consented. As Rothbard points out, “anyone who wishes is entitled to make the personal decision of ‘better dead than Red’ or ‘give me liberty or give me death,” but “he is not entitled to ... make these decisions for others, as the prowar policy of conservatism would do. What conservatives are really saying is: ‘Better them dead than Red,’ and ‘give me liberty or give them death’ – which are the battle cries not of noble heroes but of mass murderers.”
  
  Ms. Hsieh continues:
  
  

  In contrast, the second quote concerns actual innocents, namely the ordinary Israelis conducting their daily, peaceful business within a fundamentally lawful, civilized society who are suddenly blown to bits by Palestinian terrorists. If the Palestinians had legitimate complaints against the Israelis, they ought to have settled them in a peaceful manner consistent with some measure of respect for law. They were not fighting a dictatorship – and so had no grounds upon which to inflict such senseless death and destruction.

  I certainly agree that Palestinians ought not to be killing innocent people; but I have a hard time seeing how this case differs from the first one. Can anyone claim with a straight face that Israel has really been a “fundamentally lawful, civilized society” for its Palestinian citizens (the fact that it’s not so bad for non-Palestinian Israelis hardly seems relevant), or that the Israeli legal system has been even remotely hospitable to Palestinian grievances (until so compelled by the intifada)?
  
  And how was the average Soviet citizen more complicit in Soviet tyranny than the average Israeli citizen is in the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinians? (If anything you’d expect Soviet citizens’ complicity to be less, since Israeli citizens are freer than Soviet citizens to protest injustices committed by their respective governments.) As far as I can see, both Soviet citizens and Palestinians are oppressed, both have a right to resist the governments oppressing them, and neither has a right to blow up innocent people as part of that resistance.
  
  Ms. Hsieh continues:
  
  

  The context of the third quote is substantially different from that of the first two, in that it concerns an ordinary person attempting to escape dictatorship, not a political conflict of any kind. It might be psychologically difficult for an ordinary person to kill under those circumstances, but that has nothing to do with the propriety of killing innocents (whether genuine or supposed) in war.

  This strikes me as another irrelevant distinction. What’s the deep moral difference between a so-called “ordinary person” trying to escape from a tyranny, and a so-called “political” agent trying to overthrow a tyranny? Don’t they both count as self-defense? If so, how can killing innocents be clearly permissible in one case but not clearly permissible in the other?
  
  The distinction between “political” and “ordinary” activities seems anyway oddly un-Randian. After all, isn’t the whole point of Rand’s political theory to subordinate political activity to the same moral rules that apply to “ordinary persons”? In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, for example, she contrasted the traditional view that “morality was a code applicable to the individual, but not to society” – society thus being “placed outside the moral law” – with her own advocacy of individual rights as “means of subordinating society to moral law.”
  
  In short, there may be some interesting moral differences among these three cases that could justify Rand’s differing treatments if them, but if there is, Ms. Hsieh hasn’t shown it.
  
  In conclusion, I want to address a couple of further points that Ms. Hsieh makes:
  
  

  The same assessment applies to the rationalistic libertarians claiming that the non-initiation of force principle prohibits self-defensive action against anyone other than a voluntary agent of a force-initiating regime. On that view, if Hitler ever invaded the US, US soldiers would be forbidden from defending the borders, since at least some of the enemy soldiers were unwillingly drafted.

  Here Ms. Hsieh has simply misunderstood the position she is criticising. That “rationalistic” (i.e., principled) position states that force is justified against aggressors. A soldier invading the US is an aggressor, whether or not she has been drafted, and so force is certainly a legitimate means of repelling the invader. The objection to killing innocent civilians is that they are (ordinarily) not aggressors. (To be precise, I think killing nonaggressors can be justified, but only under certain fairly rare circumstances; for elaboration, see here and here.) So the analogy with an invasion by Hitler doesn’t hold.
  
  

  Similarly, the US military couldn’t bomb Hitler’s concentration camps – and thus save millions of genuinely innocent lives by destroying the machinery of the Holocaust – because we might kill or maim some of those innocents.

  This is a trickier case than the first one, but it’s still not analogous to the cases Ms. Hsieh is using it to defend, because the people in the concentration camps are presumably going to be killed anyway, so saving some of them by killing the others seems less clearly indefensible. I’m not saying that it is the right thing to do – that’s a famously difficult moral question – but it doesn’t involve the objectionable feature of sacrificing some noninvasive lives – lives that would otherwise not have been lost – in order to save someone else. It’s the latter case that seems most blatantly to violate Rand’s prohibition on treating human beings as sacrificial animals.
  
  

  The pacifist libertarians fail to appreciate the philosophical context of the non-initiation of force principle, particularly the fact that its purpose is to protect human life by making peaceful co-existence in society possible.

  As an Aristotelean, I must of course reject the utilitarian idea that the sole “purpose” of the ban on initiatory force is “to protect human life by making peaceful co-existence in society possible.” Justice is part of the good life, not just a strategy for promoting it. (For the unresolved tension in Rand’s own thought between utilitarian and Aristotelean conceptions of virtue, see Neera Badhwar’s Is Virtue Only A Means To Happiness? and my own Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand. For the superiority of the Aristotelean approach, see both of the above plus my discussions here, here, here, and here.)
  
  The reference to “pacifist” libertarians is a red herring, by the way; while there have of course been some pacifist libertarians (e.g. Robert Lefevre), the libertarians that Ms. Hsieh is mainly arguing against are people who firmly believe in the legitimacy of using violence in self-defense against aggressors.
  
  I should add that Ms. Hsieh has not called me a scumbag or a lunatic, so I don’t means to be lumping her with Mr. Bidinotto. I discuss both in the same post only because they’re both Randians defending a position on military policy that I regard as incompatible with an individualist, libertarian ethic.

Like many young Europeans of his time, he was enthralled with the Revolutionary activity in the New World. Shortly after arriving in Philadelphia in 1776, Kosciuszko read the Declaration of Independence and he recognized everything in which he truly believed. When he discovered Thomas Jefferson was responsible for drafting the Declaration, he had to meet him. A few months later, while moving south with the Continental Army, Kosciuszko stopped in Virginia to meet with Jefferson. The two men spent the day comparing philosophies and became the best of friends.

The colonists were desperate for engineers, even those who had only just arrived from abroad with no knowledge of America, and on October 18th 1776 Kosciuszko became Colonel of Engineers, Washington's chief engineer and strategist. The thirty-year-old began planning forts along the Delaware. His first duty was to help fortify Philadelphia from naval attack. Kosciuszko centered the defenses on a new fort, Mercer, while setting up aquatic blockades designed to force British ships closer to both the shore and bombardment. Kosciuszko moved on to help with the defense of Fort Ticonderoga. Partly due to disregard of Kosciuszko's advice, Ticonderoga was toppled. Kosciuszko's forces felled pine trees and flooded fields to slow the pursuit of the British. This gave the rebels time to prepare for their first major victory of the war: Saratoga. At Saratoga, Kosciuszko fortified Bemis Heights overlooking the Hudson. His ingenious design contributed to the surrender of 6,000 troops under General John Burgoyne.

Kosciuszko then undertook the defense of the Hudson at West Point in 1778. So thorough were his fortifications, that the British never mounted an assault. One of the more imaginative links in the colonel's defensive plan was a 60 ton chain stretched across the Hudson to block British ships. Kosciuszko went on to lead troops and, by 1783, he had been promoted to Brigadier General. Of the foreign subjects who came to the revolution's aid, Kosciuszko's contribution was perhaps only second to Lafayette (with Charles Lee and von Steuben far behind). Kosciuszko learned how to win battles with a militia of untrained and poorly equipped men, as well as how to apply his years of study, often quite brilliantly, in the field, abilities he would use in his later career.

Kosciuszko developed a strong dislike for slavery and serfdom based on his belief in individual rights and Republican government. These applied not just to the newly independent colonies, but to his homeland.

Following the Revolutionary War, Kosciuszko returned to Poland to fight for independence from the occupying Russians. In 1789, he became Major General of the Polish forces. The reforms of the May Constitution of Poland, the first modern constitution in Europe and second in the world after the American, were seen by the surrounding powers as a threat to their influence over Poland. In, 1792 a Russian army of 100,000 crossed the Polish border and headed for Warsaw, now that Russia and her imperial allies were no longer battling the Ottoman Empire; thus began the War in Defence of the Constitution. the Polish Army was well-trained and prepared for the war. After the betrayal of Prussian allies, the Army of Lithuania could not stop the advancing Russians. The Polish Army was too weak to oppose the enemy advancing in the Ukraine and withdrew, regrouped, counter-attacked, and was victorious. In the ensuing battles, Kosciuszko repelled the numerically superior enemy and became the most brilliant Polish military commander of his time. In 1792, King Stanislaw joined the Targowica confederation and surrendered to the Russians and, in 1793, Prussia and Russia signed the Second Partition of Poland. Such an outcome was a blow for the Targowica Confederation who saw their actions as defence of centuries-old privileges of the upper classes, now regarded by the majority of Polish population as traitors. After the partition, the Targowica confederation evaporated.

Kosciuszko prepared a plan of an uprising and led the Polish-Lithuanian uprising of 1794 (known as the Kosciuszko Rebellion), winning key conflicts before being defeated by the vastly superior forces of Prussia, Russia and Austria.

Kosciuszko at Raclawice by Jan Matejko. Krakow National Museum. Events of April 4, 1794. Kosciuszko, on horseback, reviews his formations. He is greeted enthusiastically by peasants, armed with pikes made from reshaped scythes, who contributed significantly by their valor to a stunning victory in a battle against superior Russian forces during the initial phases of the Kosciuszko Uprising.

He says,"America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. [Only 11 percent comes from the Persian Gulf.] The best way to break this addiction is through technology." I don't like to see the word"addiction" applied even to drugs because it implies passivity. So it is inappropriate for the American use of oil. The fact is that by a combination of oil's nature and U.S. government intervention, Americans use oil because it appears economically sensible to do so. It's hardly an addiction. Let's fully deregulate the economy, adopt a noninterventionist foreign policy, and internalize all costs -- and we'll see what happens. In fact, we don't know what a truly free energy and transportation industry would look like. So Bush shouldn't be trying to imagine it and bringing his vision to fruition through subsidies and whatnot. That will be a disaster, although it will make big bucks for the well-connected companies that get the contracts.

He's only partly right when he says technology is the best way to end the use of oil (assuming that's really a good idea). But he left out the most important part: free, unsubsidized competition. Give someone enough taxpayer money and he will come up with a technological alternative to oil. Big deal. The real trick is to come up with an alternative that makes economic sense. The only way to know which technologies make economic sense and which do not is to let the market process play out without state regulation or benefit. In other words, no privileges for anyone. All costs internalized. Laissez faire, laissez passer.

Obviously George II has something else in mind. Did you see all the subsidies in his speech? Take a look. Okay, I'll save you the trouble.

So tonight I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22 percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy.

We must also change how we power our automobiles.

We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen.

We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switch grass.

Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years.

The government contractors are licking their chops. Corporatist central planning is alive and well.
I know all presidents do this, but I -- I! -- was surprised by how aggressively nationalist, tribal, and collectivist George II was in the speech. Some samples:

We will choose to build our prosperity by leading the world economy. . . .

The only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership. So the United States of America will continue to lead.

Here at home, America also has a great opportunity: We will build the prosperity of our country by strengthening our economic leadership in the world.

In a dynamic world economy, we are seeing new competitors like China and India. [Emphasis added; what does he mean by"we"? If a Chinese or Indian firm wants to sell me things I value, it is not my competitor.]

Tonight I will set out a better path: an agenda for a nation that competes with confidence . . . . [Emphasis added; the nation is not an economic entity.]

Americans should not fear our economic future, because we intend to shape it. [This sounds ominous. What if others don't wished to be shaped?]

Keeping America competitive requires us to open more markets for all that Americans make and grow. [The history of the U.S. government's opening of foreign markets is not pretty.]

With open markets and a level playing field, no one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker. [Unpacking that ominous sentence would take a dissertation. Does he really believe no non-American can out-produce any American?]

Well, you get the idea. And I didn't even cover the national-security part of the speech.

Cross-posted at Free Association.

It is no longer news that Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., passed away this week. She was 78.

An advocate and practitioner of nonviolent resistance, Martin Luther King Jr. once uttered a classic statement:"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."

While a lot of discussion has ensued over the nature of the"love thine enemy" philosophy that seems to underlie King's statement, I think there is a truth therein, which was made even more apparent by King's wife. Coretta Scott King often repeated her husband's maxim:"Hate is too great a burden to bear." But she added:"It injures the hater more than it injures the hated."

I've talked about the effects of hating in other posts dealing with everything from Yoda to my articulation of"The Rose Petal Assumption," so I won't repeat my reasoning here. Suffice it to say, there is an internal relationship between hatred, fear, anger, and suffering, and, often, the transcendence of one brings forth the transcendence of all.

I think what the Kings focused on was not"loving one's enemy" per se, but the practice of a positive alternative in one's opposition to evil. Nonviolent resistance is not equivalent to pacifism. It is not the renunciation of the retaliatory use of force; it entails, instead, the practice of a wide variety of strategies—from boycotts to strikes, which remove all sanctions of one's own victimization. One refuses to be a part of a cycle that replaces one"boss" with another. One repudiates real-world monsters, while not becoming one in the process. For as Nietzsche once said:"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

Nonviolence is not a social panacea, and sometimes it is absolutely necessary to use violence in one's response to aggression. But much can be learned about how to topple tyranny from the lessons provided by the theoreticians and practitioners of nonviolent resistance.

It's fitting that today I've marked Ayn Rand's birthday, for Atlas Shrugged is one of the grandest dramatizations in fiction of the effectiveness of fighting tyranny through nonviolent resistance. It is no coincidence that, while writing her magnum opus, Rand's working title for Atlas was"The Strike." Of course, Rand was no theorist of nonviolence, but her novel is instructive.

For further reading on the subject of nonviolence, let me suggest first and foremost the books of Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution. See especially Sharp's books, The Politics of Nonviolent Action and Social Power and Political Freedom.

Cross-posted to Notablog.