“Wasn’t the Declaration of Independence itself an act of lawbreaking?”

Well, if you take the Declaration at its own word (as I think you should), it wasn’t so much an act of breaking the law as an act of recognizing that the so-called “law” was no law at all, because it was without legitimate authority. Rather than breaking the law, it refused, and therefore dissolved, any obligation to respect the claims of legal authority over the American states at all; but folks with no legal authority can’t make law, so there was no law to break.

But, since the United States government hasn’t got any more legitimate authority over peaceful immigrants on private property than the King of England had over Americans minding their own business, the status of illegal immigrants is really much the same as that of those who signed the declaration, anyway.

Of course, for Ron Paul to recognize that, he would have to give up his job as a professional usurper, and start looking for an honest line of work. So I’m not holding my breath.

Kennedy:

Mexican immigrants tend to have more in common than ethnicity. If a comparable number of demographically comparable Scots were entering the country I have little doubt the reaction would be similar.

Well, at least the reactions from nativist bullies were pretty similar when comparable numbers of demographically comparable Irish immigrants were entering the country.

So I’m sure it’s true that part of what motivates nativists is based on socioeconomic status at least as much as it’s based on race. Still, I’m not sure why this would make the argument based on something other than bigotry. Isn’t there class bigotry as well as racial bigotry?

The arguments of people like Du Toit are largely sincere, I think, and must be addresses on their merits in any case.

Right, but pointing out that an argument rests on bigoted premises isn’t necessarily an evasion of the merits of the argument. Bigotry is a form of collectivism, and if you have a general case against using violence on the basis of collectivist premises than afortiori you have a case against using violence on the basis of bigoted premises. So pointing out that someone is trying to use bigotry to defend aggression seems to me just as good an argument as pointing out that someone is trying to use other forms of collectivism (e.g. constitutionalism or democratic mysticism) to justify aggression. If the latter doesn’t work, the former doesn’t either.

Anarchist:

I enjoyed it too. Too bad it’s written from the position that coercive government is just fine and dandy until it picks on gays.

It’s not. Have you read the book?

V is explicitly an anarchist and rejects coercive government as such. He cites the crimes of Norsefire (which involve an awful lot more than sending gay people to concentration camps, although I should say that sending gay people to concentration camps really is quite a good reason to resist a government) only as the most brutal end-result of statism.

Macker:

“It was you. You who appointed these people. You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you.”

I assumed the crime here was voting, and/or giving political support.

Not quite. The sin that V is talking about is submission: specifically, deference to claims of political authority over your life and the lives of your neighbors. Voting or concrete political support may be an expression of deference to claims of authority, or they may not, depending on the breaks.

Macker, I’m not suggesting that Boyington was stupid. (How would I know? I never met him and I haven’t read his books.) I’m aware that there are plenty of smart people in the military; and also that there are plenty of rock-stupid people in the military. It’s a big and diverse outfit.

What I’m suggesting is that however smart or however stupid Boyington was, there is a difference between a life spent using knowledge, where you use it, in the interest of some instrumental good, and a life spent pursuing knowledge for its own sake. And there is a further difference between different kinds of instrumental goods: between using knowledge in order to create useful things, and using knowledge in order to destroy and to gain power. Sometimes it may be necessary, even admirable, to put yourself on the line in order to destroy and to gain power. Sometimes it may be necessary, even admirable, to use knowledge to kill lots of people. (And in those cases it serves nobody to get all squeamish and pretend that your “service” or “heroism” involves something other than justified death-dealing.) But that’s a different kind of life from the kind of life that the University has historically been concerned with hosting, fostering, promoting, and celebrating, which is not about using knowledge at all, but rather gaining, contemplating, manifesting, and sharing it, for its own sake. If you don’t understand the difference, or its importance, then you don’t yet understand the historical purpose of the University.

For comparison, I currently live near Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan. On one side of campus, EMU has this big statue of Martin Luther King Jr. Why? I don’t know; the suggestion seems just that he’s an important guy so he deserves a statue. But King’s achievements (though I think they are indeed admirable) have nothing in particular to do with EMU or with academic life in general (in fact, he seems to have been a rather bad academic). Nor did the campaigns he was involved in have very much to do with expanding or improving the University (although there were other Freedom Movement leaders who did do that). So what’s the statue doing there? I don’t know; if it’s just supposed to honor him qua admirable human being, then I don’t think it should be there.

A lot of people in the past century have thought that a University’s job was, in the first place, to serve as sort of a factory for manufacturing admirable, or perhaps useful, Citizens on behalf of Society or Our Future. That’s part of the “salivating statism” of educational ideas in the last century that I mentioned above. And a lot of people have held as a consequence of that view that its primary operations should be to act as a sort of job training center, to make people smart and knowledgeable enough to (say) fly fighter jets, or design aircraft, or manufacture widgets. I reject the whole idea root and branch, and I am long since tired of Universities being pushed around with the expectation that it’s their job to celebrate any admired citizen who managed to pass through their gates, to reward purported achievements even when the achievement has nothing to do with their purposes, and generally to act like a large, well-endowed booster club for their alumni and the polity at large.

Macker: They already have a marble memorial dedicated to General Lafayette, and a building named after General George Washington. There’s a monument called Memorial Gateway with the names of 58 University of Washington students killed in WWII. So this isn’t exactly something new or foreign to this educational institution.

And so what? I think those are stupid too and if students had acted to block them from being erected I’d cheer them on. (The Memorial Gateway comes the closest to being a reasonable structure, since it aims to remember students lost rather than to celebrate an unrelated military triumph.) UW isn’t a military academy and there’s no reason for it to act like one. And there’s no time like the present to stop.

Macker: Besides, since when is the history involved in the exploits of Boyington not educational? There’s a lot to be learned from his experiences and his connection with the university.

This is frankly silly. Nobody is proposing that books on Boyington or the air war during World War II be thrown out of the library. If your aim is to educate people about the history of World War II, or Boyington’s exploits in particular, then there are lots of better ways to do it than a vacuously celebratory public monument.

Macker: Are you saying that Boyington is the equivalent of a General Custer? After all your statement applies to both equally.

(1) They are “equivalent” in both being remembered chiefly or solely as warriors. (2) They are not “equivalent” in that the moral status of Boyington’s military career is more complicated than Custer’s.

What I explicitly stated above, however, is that it does not matter, for the point I’m making, whether Boyington was involved in just or unjust wars. It’s not the job of a University to offer parting rah-rahs for deceased government-hired fighters, whether they are admirable people or not. There are lots of cultural outlets other than the University dedicated to blowing the trumpets for martial prowess, and I don’t see how it is any part of the goals or purpose of a University to celebrate it. (The University does have a purpose, and that purpose is to host, foster, celebrate, and promote a certain kind of life — the life of the mind, or what some would call the Arts and Sciences. There are other kinds of life that are indeed valuable or admirable, but it’s not the University’s job to promote them. The idea that a University owes a twenty-one gun salute to anyone who passes through and goes on to be cheered by others as a Good Citizen, whether or not the things they are being cheered for have anything in particular to do with the University or the kind of life it promotes, has something directly to do with the salivating statism of educational ideas in the last century.)

If you’re going to ignore my repeated explicit statements to this effect then you haven’t got any place complaining that my statements on the matter are disingenuous.

However, if Hoppe is right, then …

Quite apart from the merits or demerits of your substantive points, this is never an auspicious way to begin an argument.

Sunny: As for these comments, they are a lot of Nazi twaddle.

… because the Nazis were, of course, well known for their relentless criticism of public celebrations of military prowess.

Sabotta: As for the notion that Boyington was just paid by the “federal government” to “kill people” — while this is true in one sense, it is idiotically reductionist in another.

Please instruct me in the subtleties, then. What’s the purpose of “shooting down enemy planes,” if not to destroy the plane and kill the person? What was Boyington’s job in the south Pacific, if not to take commands from the federal government as to where and when to do just that? War, whatever you think of the cause that the war is supposed to serve, does involve killing people at another’s command. Sometimes killing is just and sometimes it’s unjust, but it is deliberate blood-letting from beginning to end.

I really have no patience with this kind of thing – I suppose I could suggest (in connection, for example, with his service with the Flying Tigers) looking up “the rape of Nanking” – but since all that happened to non-Caucausian people, I suppose it doesn’t matter.

This is disingenuous. Boyington’s military career didn’t end with the Flying Tigers and he went on to play an active and important role at the command of the United States federal government in their air war in the Pacific, after his tenure in the Flying Tigers — quite a different cause, with quite different ends and quite different means, which also happened to adversely affect the lives of a few “non-Caucasian” people along the way.

That said, it’s also rather beside the point, at least as I see it. Even if Boyington had only fought in unambiguously just wars, it’s not a University’s job to drum up military parades or put together memorials for successful killers. Why would it be?

As for Spencer, his comments on High Church revivalism in the CoE are steadfastly silly (and a reflection of his growing statism in old age), but the bulk of his remarks are quite right. The regimentation of every aspect of society, from recreation to politics to charity, into forms that unconsciously or consciously ape military subordination, at the direct expense of individualistic and industrial patterns of life, is a sign of decadence. The prominent celebration of martial and physical prowess, at the expense of art, intellect, industry, etc., is a sign of growing barbarism. Belligerent squadrons of ruddy-faced order-takers on the march may swell the Movement for or against whatever, but they don’t augur well for a free and humane society. In the very best of circumstances they may even be necessary evils to save or to make it possible to later achieve better things, but the incessant celebration of this kind of life from the commanding heights of a society is as sure a sign as any of long-standing rot.

And, to come back to the point, when did it become the job of Universities to give dead government warriors a parting rah-rah?

Stefan, well, there are lots of possible motivations that they might have had — I’m not sure what “America-bashing” is supposed to mean here, but leftist rhetoric, specifically antiwar sentiment, opposition to government war as such, squeamishness about death and violence in general, or any number of other things could have been behind different student gov members’ decisions. My point is just that it’s not obvious that universities should concern themselves with celebrating people whose chief claim to fame is killing a bunch of people at the command of the government. Certainly not in an unjust war — that’s plainly immoral — and not even in a just war, really. (I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide which the air war in the Pacific was.) Trumpeting martial glory just isn’t the function of a University in the first place, and isn’t something that we need more of from the command-posts of our re-barbarizing society. So I find it hard to work up much outrage at the students whether their motives were clearly praiseworthy or muddled and sentimental. If it’s the latter, they should think harder about what their concerns are, but they do at least have some slippery hold on the good, and they haven’t done anything wrong, let alone anything contemptible or “despicable,” in rejecting a commemorative memorial for Boyington.

1. Women in prostitution are just doing a non-aggressive job for willing customers in order to keep food on the table, often in rather desparate circumstances. They, as a profession, haven’t done anything to you to justify your use of them for a sexualized slur against college-aged women that you disagree with.

2. What’s wrong with University of Washington students having second thoughts about striking up a rousing march for the memory of an old warrior whose chief accomplishment in life was killing a bunch of people at the command of the federal government? Maybe there are other things in life that deserve more notice than martial glory, particularly at this stage of civilization, such as it is.

The argument over arbitration and hypothetical land claims by individual Palestinians has already spiralled pretty far out of the orbit of the comments section of a post about historical gaffes at LewRockwell.com; so I’ve continued it elsewhere, and I imagine the comments section there may be a better forum than the comments section here to continue it in-depth. The short of it is that I think Starr’s defense of third-party arbiters misses the point (because what third party arbiters are good for determining isn’t actually the determination that I was talking about) and that his attempt to suggest that the unjustifiable aggression of some “Arab/Palestinians” (whatever that’s intended to mean) against some Israelis somehow cancels out the obligations owed by different, unrelated Israelis to different, unrelated Palestinians doesn’t exactly undermine my charge that he’s engaging in tribal collectivism. The long of it is at GT 2006-02-09: Collectivism and Compensation.