I didn’t say that so-called “volunteer” soldiers aren’t responsible for their actions while in the military, or that the government’s coercion against them excuses immoral actions. I said that they aren’t actually willing volunteers. Willing volunteers are free to withdraw their decision to volunteer if they repent, or get scared, or have second thoughts. Soldiers aren’t.

These are willing volunteers who have pledged their lives to the nation state. They are nothing less than his partners in crime.

To the extent that soldiers willingly engage in deliberate violence against innocent people, they are certainly complicit in the crime and should be held accountable.

On the other hand, I don’t think it’s quite true that all soldiers in the American military are “willing volunteers.” Normally when someone willingly signs on for a job, they can always quit later if they have second thoughts about either the job in general, or about specific requirements imposed on them by their employers. Everywhere else in the world besides the military, this is called “quitting.” In the military it’s called “desertion” and it can be treated as a hanging crime if the government so chooses.

Soldiers, even so-called “volunteers,” who want to leave the military, but are coerced into staying by the threat of imprisonment or death, should not be considered willing participants, any more than victims of the draft should.

I seem to remember something in the U.S. Constitution (that long discarded document) called Amendment III. It states: . . .

If Congress and the several states repealed Amendment III, and authorized the Marines to force innocent people to quarter soldiers in their home, without their consent, would that make it okay to do so?

If it would, how in the world would it do that? If it wouldn’t, then who cares whether the Constitution says anything on the matter or not?

If the Constitution did have an article or amendment authorizing Congress to force people to pay for disaster relief, would that make it O.K.?

If so, how does a scrap of paper make violations of natural rights O.K.? If not, then remind me again why I should care whether the program is constitutional or unconstitutional in the first place?

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but whether Mort Walker is a libertarian or not, he’s still not funny.

Political correctness won’t save the what is surely one of the worst comic strips on the planet.

“This thread over at No Treason has been giving me a few chuckles. Apparently, this site is dedicated to showing that anarchists and libertarians are foul-mouthed tribalists incapable of using logical argument.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, Patrick, but a logical argument was made, at length in Lopez’s original post at http://www.no-treason.com/archives/2005/01/25/is-george-bush-a-traitor/ and more briefly in the first half of the first paragraph of Sabotta’s follow-up, on the subject of “treason trials” for wicked politicians and why the notion is absurd from an individualist standpoint. That is the subject from which this post takes it title, and yet nowhere here or in the comments of either article have I seen any argument in response to the case against the notion of treason. Instead there seems to be a lot of kvetching over whether or not John Sabotta was right to point out that Johnson seems to have a problem with Da Jooz and whether or not he was a bit rude in using the phrase “contemptible shit.”

So who seems to be playing the part of the tribalist incapable of logical argument so far?

Roger Young: “In the process, we have lost freedom of association but gained the chains of race quotas, egalitarianism, and ethnic cleansing of Southern culture.”

You did leave out that minor part about the decline of lynch law and the obliteration of State-enforced racial segregation.

As for the rest, race quotas are illegal under current antidiscrimination laws. But you are aware, aren’t you, that in a free society employers and schools should have every right to impose strict race quota schemes if they should deem it useful?

As a side note, “ethnic cleansing” is a word with a real meaning that you are systematically pissing on in order to melodramatically engage in bullshit Dixie identity politics. Real ethnic cleansing involves, among other things, forced physical removal and mass killing; the word was coined by reference to the Nazi policies of “cleansing” areas of Jews, Slavs, and other undesirables during the Holocaust. What you are complaining about is people hurting some white Southerners’ fee-fees by complaining about well-known symbols of slavery and Jim Crow. To hell with that.

Roger: “To top if off, we now have our money stolen from us to pay lazy bureaucrats to take off work and march in goofy parades in his honor!”

Be serious. Would you rather have your money stolen to pay government bureaucrats to punctiliously work in their government offices? I’d rather just not have my money stolen at all, but if it is going to be stolen, I desperately wish it could go towards keeping every government agent in the country doing nothing but making goofy parades.

Roger: “The only thing to ‘celebrate’ on MLK Day is that he’s dead.”

No matter how sleazy you may think that Martin Luther King Jr. was, it could not possibly have been the sort of thing that would make him deserve to be murdered. Which is what you propose celebrating. Is that really the sort of schadenfreude that you want to indulge in?

Mike Tennant: “The results of his crusade, furthermore, were increased centralization of power in Washington and decreased freedom for states and individuals.”

Decreased freedom relative to what? It’s certainly true that antidiscrimination law has infringed on individual freedoms over the past 40 years. That’s why it should be opposed, on libertarian grounds. But talking about “decreased freedom” involves a comparison between the conditions before and the conditions after the civil rights struggle. And the only way that anyone could possibly claim that the civil rights movement decreased individual freedom from State violations of rights would be to completely ignore the massive and inhuman daily rights-violations committed in order to enforce the government-sponsored Jim Crow caste system. The daily assaults on individual freedom perpetrated against any and all Black individuals in, say, Alabama, or Mississippi, or Georgia, in the dark years from the 1870s to the 1970s are now mostly gone, and it is in no small part thanks to the long years of dangerous and painful organizing work by people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, and others that it was accomplished. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’ve accomplished a hell of a lot more for the defense of individual rights in the real world than everyone in the contemporaneous libertarian movement put together.

As for the “freedom” of state governments? God, who gives a damn? States don’t have rights to infringe. Individual people do.

Holy mother of God.

“You have to say, ‘Here are the rules,’ and you are firm and fair. That radiates stability,” said Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon ….

… Yes, and let’s see who wrote the rulebook:

Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times.

… Starting off, apparently, with apartheid South Africa and its passbooks for the colored (now with high tech biometrics added to make it even creepier).

“… One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.”

… And this proposal comes straight from Leon Trotsky and his plan to implement industrial conscription under the regimentation of the Red Army. When he published the idea in 1919, he even managed to horrify his fellow Bolsheviks–no small feat, that.

Thank God our boys are over there to stop the enemies of freedom and democracy in Iraq.