D-Day and the Non-Aggression Principle

 

A foundational idea within libertarian thought is the non-aggression principle (NAP). I should not use physical violence against people who have not physically attacked me and have shown no evidence of plotting to do so. People who do not follow my religion or ideology and even commit blasphemy against it are not engaging in violence. As such, as hurtful as I may find their words, I must tolerate these people and cannot attempt to injure them. Libertarians go further with this doctrine and reject the legality of any law that lacks a clear victim of physical violence. For example, you have the right to shoot heroin and sleep with hookers. Such actions may be bad for your physical health as well as your family and the larger society. That being said, since these actions do not initiate physical violence, they should be legal. By contrast, all government action is, by definition, violent as it carries the implied mafia-style threat of either obeying or men with guns will do you extreme bodily harm. As such, any attempt by the government to go after people who have not initiated acts of violence themselves (people other than the likes of thieves, murderers, and invading foreign armies) is inherently illegitimate.

Perhaps the clearest explanation of this concept is Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable which is premised on the notion that it is better to be a prostitute or a drug dealer than a politician or a policeman. The fact that people are willing to break the law and risk prison in order to use your services demonstrates that people honestly want what you are selling. By contrast, as a public school teacher, I have no reason to assume that my students actually want to be in school. By agreeing to teach, I am, arguably, implicated in a conspiracy to deprive children of their liberty for hours every day in order to justify robbing the public to pay me a salary as I waste my student’s time. At best, I should allow students to play on their phones all day in order to better demonstrate that public schools are useless and should be abolished in order that kids should be allowed to make better use of their time by selling drugs and sex on a street corner.     

I would like to consider a limitation to the NAP. The NAP is premised on a world of individuals. What happens when we have to consider people as groups with narratives of initiated violence and victimhood? Imagine a German soldier sitting in a bunker, minding his own business, on the coast of Normandy, D-Day morning. Our German soldier has personally never initiated violence against anyone. Through no fault of his own, the only job he can find consists of putting on a uniform, carrying a gun, and sitting in this bunker. As this does not violate the NAP, our soldier agreed to do it.

Now our soldier finds that people he has never met are firing shells in his general direction, heedless of the fact that he might get hurt. Our soldier charges the Allied soldiers storming the beach waving a philosophy book and shouting: your actions violate the NAP and are, therefore, unethical. You are initiating violence against someone, mainly me, who has never harmed you. I was not part of the 1940 invasion of France, so it is not my fault that France is under German occupation. Furthermore, you are damaging beachfront property that does not belong to you. As none of you own property on this beachfront, you have no standing to argue that I have less of a right to be walking on this beach than you do. You need to sail back across the English Channel and leave me in peace to do my government job as inefficiently as possible. This will hasten the collapse of Nazi Germany, allowing me to finally do something useful like drug dealing or prostitution.    

Clearly, the German soldier’s position is absurd though I am increasingly frightened to suspect that many members of the Mises Caucus would be willing to agree that it is immoral for Allied soldiers to shoot him. Even though he has personally never harmed anyone, he is part of the larger system of Nazi Germany that has initiated violence against millions of people even as the vast majority of people in the system have not personally harmed anyone. Are we going to claim that the concentration camp guard who never shot anyone is innocent? What about Nazi propagandists like Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher?

Once we admit that our German soldier is guilty by virtue of our narrative that he is part of this larger system called Nazi Germany, it is hardly obvious where to draw the line. Imagine if a group of Englishmen were to charge the beaches of Normandy and open fire on the local French residents to retaliate against the Norman invasion of England in 1066, an injustice that the modern residents of Normandy have presumably benefited from in some way. Do students have the right to plant bombs in their teachers' cars in order to defend themselves against "educational violence?” On a serious note, critical race theory activists believe that you can be guilty of "structural violence" by virtue of being white and not actively working to overthrow the American political and economic systems, institutions tainted by racism.

Clearly, narratives are necessary in order to make sense of the world. That being said, once we allow for narrative thinking, we have to recognize how easy it is for anyone to game the system and argue that they are the victim of some historical injustice and that they have the moral right to do bad things to someone by virtue of the fact that the person can be connected as a beneficiary to that injustice. 

LGBTQ+ History Month

 

A local elementary school here in Pasadena placed the following banners in honor of LGBTQ+ month outside its front office. Let us leave aside the question of why it is more important for the school to ensure that elementary school kids are more aware of LGBTQ+ History Month than Filipino-American or Italian-American History Month. What struck my attention was the timeline's claim for 2003: "LGBTQ+ legalized nationwide in the U.S." 

I can only assume that this is supposed to be a reference to the Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas decision that struck down anti-sodomy laws. Obviously, this was a critical event in the history of gay rights that set up the Obergefell decision with its right to same-sex marriage. That being said, it is not as if LGBTQ+ people were illegal before 2003. While gay sex has certainly been illegal in many parts of the country, being a gay person was never, in of itself, illegal. As someone who studies Jewish History, the distinction is an important one. The Spanish Inquisition went after people who carried out Jewish actions such as eating cholent on Shabbos. The Nazis, by contrast, killed people for having a Jewish grandparent. 

The timeline's statement only makes sense if we assume that being gay is fundamentally about what kind of sex you engage in to the extent that preventing people from engaging in gay sex stops people, in some sense, from being gay as opposed to "merely" violating the right to privacy of consenting adults. If being gay is really about sex then it has no business being discussed with elementary school kids. Those in the gay rights camp need to get their story straight. 

The really strange thing about this mess of a statement is that Lawrence v. Texas had nothing directly to do with much of the LGBTQ+ alphabet. The decision affected trans people about as much as heterosexuals. Whoever made the timeline was so wielded to the notion that LGBTQ+ represents a coherent group of people that they kept to it even to the point of writing utter nonsense. Here is my proposal to the LGBTQ+ advocates running our schools. If you are planning to groom my kids, pump them with puberty blockers, and castrate them, is it too much to ask that you at least teach them to write about history in coherent sentences?           

Non-Intuitive War Crimes

 

An essential component of Protestant theology is sola scriptura that only the Bible has authority. For this to work, it is necessary to not only accept a Protestant reading of the Bible but also that only the Protestant reading of the Bible makes sense. In essence, a Protestant needs to be perfectly confident that he can drop a suitably translated Bible next to a native Pacific islander and they would be able to reconstruct Protestant theology for themselves. The moment we no longer assume that this is likely, sola scriptura collapses and we are left having to choose which pair of exegetical glasses we are going to use to read the text with. Protestantism may be one possible framework along with a Catholic or a Jewish reading but that will no longer be sola scriptura. 

I see a similar problem with the notion of international war crimes trials. There is a basic problem with charging someone from another country with a war crime mainly that it violates one of the most basic principles of law, ex post facto. For something to be a crime, there has to be a clear law with set penalties that were being violated at the time the crime was committed. Without this, governments can arrest anyone for what they did last week even if it was perfectly legal then.  

The Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were some of the evilest people in all of history and they certainly deserved death. That being said, the Nuremberg trial itself was illegal. The actions of the Nuremberg defendants, including mass murder, were all perfectly legal under German law. By contrast, the crimes, the tribunal, and the very process of the trial were all made up on the fly for the sole purpose of prosecuting the defendants. Considering this, an essential justification of the Nuremberg trial was that the crimes committed were so egregious as to make it obvious to the defendants that what they were doing was a crime. 

Considering this, a war crime cannot just be something that is a war crime. In order to be a war crime, it needs to be obvious that the action is a war crime. The moment we fail to meet that high standard then we lose the moral high ground and are stuck in the morally dubious position of trying to punish people for failing to live up to our morality. 

A war crime can never be obvious because the very act of fighting in a war already violates the most basic of moral taboos, murder. One thinks of the scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where Paul stabs a French soldier that was in a shell crater with him. Paul, stuck in the crater, is forced to listen to the man die. The power of the scene relies on Paul, stuck in the muddy crater and cut off from the fighting around him, coming to the awareness that, because of his actions, a human being is dying next to him and that he will never be able to wash this guilt from himself. Sending people to war means telling young men to murder other young men who simply happen to be wearing the wrong-colored uniform. If they agree to commit cold-blooded murder, they will be hailed as heroes but if they refuse they will be imprisoned or executed for dereliction of duty.   

If this was our standard for a war crime, war crimes would be obvious and just about every soldier and politician throughout human history would be guilty of committing them. Imagine if Amnesty International were to be contacted for help by a soldier in prison for refusing to fire on uniformed enemy soldiers who refused to surrender. The moment Amnesty took such a case would be the end of war crimes theory as no country could ever accept that their soldiers have a moral right to refuse to fight.  

For a war crime charge not to collapse into reductio ad absurdum, we need to assume that there really is such a thing as legitimate war, where you murder perfectly decent people who have not harmed anybody, and that this can be distinguished from illegitimate warfare which is a crime. I do not want this to sink into moral relativism. Clearly, there can be distinctions made between legitimate and illegitimate warfare. Part of being a citizen is agreeing to murder people in legitimate wars and the government has the right to punish people who wish to renege on this agreement. The problem is whether we can assume that these distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate will be obvious to all reasonable people.

Imagine that I was drafted into a war. I agree to murder someone in an enemy uniform who was not in the act of trying to murder anyone from my side. Perhaps, they were on the toilet and I took them out with a sniper rifle. My commanding officer next tells me to start shelling a kindergarten classroom that enemy soldiers are using for cover. Have I just been ordered to commit a war crime and should I risk going to jail rather than do such a deed? What if the kindergartners are singing a song about how they pledge to kill people in my country? Why is it worse to kill those kids than the soldier who was not threatening my side?

I like to think of myself as an educated person. That being said, I am not any kind of lawyer or war crimes expert. Presumably, my officers will have manuals written by legal professionals employed by my government explaining how the orders they are giving me are not war crimes and, as such, I will face prosecution for failing to carry them out. What grounds would I have to argue against that? At least I know enough history and political theory to give some decent speeches before my military tribunal when I am tried for dereliction of duty. What is an eighteen-year-old fresh out of high school supposed to do besides listen to his government’s lawyers and hope that his side does not lose the war?

There are many areas of law that are allowed to be complicated. For example, I cannot assume that I have correctly filed my taxes simply by relying on my moral intuitions. On the contrary, I need to rely on professionals. Similarly, the precise parameters of the right to kill in self-defense are not intuitive. As a rule of thumb, if you have time to worry that the law might not recognize your right to self-defense in a particular situation that is a sign that you should not kill your attacker. By contrast, for war crimes to be a meaningful charge, it needs to be intuitively obvious. Soldiers cannot be expected to go to war advised by foreign legal experts whether something is really a war crime. The moment a war crime becomes something that you even need an expert for and cannot simply rely on what your "parents might say” then the entire legal edifice of war crimes collapses into the personal morality of foreign lawyers to be used against you if your side loses the war.