I have been reading black block "libertarians" and anarchist writing in defense of violence.

Dear Black Block,

You guys, are nuts.


What is the purpose of a protest? Can you think of a purpose other than to use the media to spread your message and to show those that you oppose that they are opposed?

The WTO and any other bad guys can have their meetings in places you can't go. Shutting down a meeting is a good publicity stunt. Trashing the property of middle class people is not a good publicity stunt.

You say that the police attack nonviolent protesters as violently as they attack violent protesters. So what? The fact that peacefull protesters are as likely to get a baton to the head as violent protesters are does not mean that protesters should be violent. It just means that dislike of batons to the head is not a valid reason for a protester to restrain from violence.

Some of you claim to be in some way protecting the nonviolent protesters by fighting the police. Your not. The guys with cameras are the only people who can protect the nonviolent protesters and your violence destroys that protection by giving the mainstream media images that it can use to justify the violence to nonviolent protesters.

You could say, "without violence there will be no mainstream media coverage". When the media covers the violence they don't cover the issues. Either way, violence or no violence, the media will barely cover the issues, but by using violence those who believe in the issues will be dismissed as crazy.
You would get more coverage by protesting naked than you get by using violence.

The bad guys understand that the real battle is for public opinion and is not for control of the streets. The bad guys don't care if police and protesters kill each other. By wearing masks you create a perfect hiding place for undercover agents of the bad guys who will destroy the property of middle class people in your name, even if you refuse to do it.

The police are not your daddy's with whom you are angry. Nothing is gained by hurting or scaring police and making them hate you. You say if the police hurt you then you should have the right to hurt them. I agree but did you go to the protest to accomplish something or did you go because you want a fight? If you want to accomplish something then choose not to hurt the police even if the police because of their behavior deserve to be hurt. If you want to fight please find your own events.

Police are people with feelings. Treat them as you would like to be treated. They may not be the brightest people in the world, and some of them love violence as much as some black block do, and they may be too willing to be used for bad ends, but they have jobs to do and they sincerely believe that they are working for the people.

I doubt you can, influence the people who shape policy through violence but if you insist on trying then your violence should be targeted at people who shape policy. Burning down a Mcdonalds is not useful. Why do all governments outlaw assassination but not war? Could the 9-11 terrorists (assuming they were not steered by Neocons via quadruple agent Khaled Sheikh Mohammed) have influenced policy makers more by targeted killings of 10 relevant people than by killing a random 3000 people? Maybe. As it was, all the 9-11 terrorist bad guys did was give the Neocon bad guys an excuse to do what they always wanted to do.

The 9-11 terrorists believe that the neocon heavy hand unleashed would send them the recruits they will need for final victory. Even if the 9-11 bad guys are right, the price paid by average Arabs would be so high by that winning is loosing. This ignores the fact that Al Qaeda rule would be worse than the current klptocrat rule. If any Black Block is thinking to provoke the governments into loosing a long war with anarchists by overreacting to anarchist then you are more delusional than the 9-11 terrorists are. Our western government don't treat us nearly as bad as the Arab kleptocrats treat their people. Any time the majority of public opinion wants a western government overthrown the majority can overthrow that government through the democratic process without destroying their nation in a bloody war. Anarchists can not accomplish an overthrow through violence of any government without winning over majority's public opinion first. If we learn anything from Mao and Lenin it is that any government or non government anarchy resulting from a victory in a long war by lead by violent anarchist is almost surely going to be much worse than the present western governments that we have now.

Black Block and the 9-11 terrorists have dealt an extremely severe blow to the pro-freedom, anti-corporate rule, anti-globalization movement.

You mock Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King but they won victories.

Take off your stupid masks and stop your stupid violence. The masks and violence tactics can only work after majority public opinion is on your side. If you don't like the media, create your own media. We have Democracy, cameras and truth; if we are able to spread the the truth until the majority are with us, and they respond to the threat by by ending the democracy then maybe their might be a use for your masks and violence. Until then take off your stupid masks and stop your stupid violence!

You say that the police attack nonviolent protesters as violently as they attack violent protesters. So what?
So what? Non-violent protesters deserve to have a baton taken to their heads? Yet you go on to rant about violent protesters :rolleyes:

So what? Non-violent protesters deserve to have a baton taken to their heads?

That's not at all what (s)he said.
What does putting words in some else's mouth add to a discussion?
How is that productive in any way?

Besides, how can you even jump to that conclusion if you actually read the whole letter (or even the first few paragraphs)?

That's not at all what (s)he said.
What does putting words in some else's mouth add to a discussion?
How is that productive in any way?

Besides, how can you even jump to that conclusion if you actually read the whole letter (or even the first few paragraphs)?
I'll claim nirakar's poor grammar there for taking it a little out of context (it still comes across that way to me) :p
Instead of so what nirakar could have said something along the lines of it doesn't excuse violence or the instigation of violence...

I'll claim nirakar's poor grammar there for taking it a little out of context (it still comes across that way to me) :p
Instead of so what nirakar could have said something along the lines of it doesn't excuse violence or the instigation of violence...
:D
Fair enough.

Thanks khazakhan, I fixed it some.

Thanks khazakhan, I fixed it some.
No worries and I'll apologize for putting my mouth into gear before my brain so to speak :o

I have been reading black block "libertarians" and anarchist writing in defense of violence.I have never heard the term "black block libertarian" before, so forgive me if I'm misunderstanding all of this.

But as a "regular" libertarian--a registered, voting member of the Libertarian Party and a faithful reader of Reason and Liberty magazines--I assure you that libertarians do not ever condone the initiation of violence.

There are some crazy debates out there in cyberspace over what Libertarian means.

Put "black block" libertarian in a google search.

It seems that in Europe Libertarian means Anarchist.
I was reading about Black Block mostly in context of the events in Genoa during 2001.

Check the following website: http://www.politicalinformation.net/encyclopedia/Libertarian.htm on the history of the word "Libertarian". When the French banned anarchism in 1871 Anarchists became Libertarians.

The American National Libertarian Party is just a new baby on the seen founded in 1971, younger than me.

The American Libertarianism also seems to have evolved out of anarchism and then slid towards individualism when the anarchists mellowed after T and F Roosevelts negotiated a cease fire between the would be corporate looters and the would be working class looters. Then small business needed their own ceasefires with the would be worker, corporate and goverment looters but their was nobody looking out for small business.

A number of the anarchist groups are calling themselves Libertarians. It kind of makes sense. Libertarianism in it's extreme form would be anarchism.

The Cato institute also calls itself Libertarian which I think is a stretch in another direction because they sometimes support corporate welfare.

Some of the racist militia groups also considerred themself libertarian which I think is a stretch.

They are all kind of right because they have aspects of libertarianism.

The word "Libertarian" predates the Libertarian party. The word Libertarian is a global rather than an American word.

The word libertarian and predates Fredrich Hayek. I don't think Hayek, the Austrian School brand of economics, Friedman / University of Chicago thought, or Grover Norquist typify or represent Libertarianism or the Libertarian Party but some people would disagree with me. I don't think Lazefare Kleptocapitalism is Libertarian economics.

To me the freer and more competitive the markets are the more libertarian they are. But to have the freeist most competitive markets requires government to enforce anti-trust laws and contract laws and anti-fraud and theft laws. So both more anarchist and more pro corporate libertarians would say that my version of libertariansm has too much government involvement for me to call myself a libertarian. I think I am as much of a libertarian as Milton Friedman is. He calls himself a libertarian. Neither he nor I are part of the Party. Friedman is a Republican.

I want to suppress outsourcing until the third world wages catch up to America's wages so I was part of the Reform party and am now independant rather than part of the Libertarian party.

In America the term "libertarian" has been appropriated by the movement that more or less espouses the "classical liberalism" of people like Thomas Jefferson. The term "liberal" has been appropriated by the political left to mean a big-government movement that would make traditional liberals puke. Today there is hardly a hair's difference between American "liberals" and American "conservatives." They both envision a future in which the government has complete control over everything and everybody, they merely disagree on the most effective way to achieve that future.

The American libertarian movement names Ayn Rand and F. A. Hayek as its progenitors. It did not "evolve" out of anarchism. Most American capital-L Libertarians are former Republicans who wonder what happened to the ideals of small government and low taxes. American small-l libertarians got to where we are via diverse paths but most of us emerged from the 1960s agreeing that whatever any of us was striving for, a bigger, slower, more expensive, less responsive, more self-serving government was not the way to get it.

"Libertarian" is a clumsy word that illustrates the lack of formal planning that went into the movement's launch. It indeed has other meanings in other English-speaking countries. Our movement is not allied with theirs.

To say, "libertarianism in its extreme form would be anarchism," is like saying, "capitalism in its extreme form would be feudalism." The devil is in the details. We believe in a small government with very important powers, primarily a justice system to prevent us from sliding into anarchy and a defensively oriented military force to prevent authoritarianism from being imposed by someone else.

You misunderand the alignment of certain groups with the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party which are our crosses to bear.

Militias come into our tent because we are extreme in our support the right to bear arms. Citizens need to have enough firepower to keep the government from thinking how easy it would be to take over everything. That doesn't mean that citizens should be allowed to possess nuclear bombs but they need fully automatic weapons to hold off a Nazi-like power grab by soldiers and police who already have them.

Religious nuts come because we are extreme in our support of freedom of religion. The measure of a people's freedom is not how well they protect what they love, but how well they protect what they hate. As long as religionists abide by the Constitution, they must be allowed to think, say, and do anything they want among themselves, no matter how stupid or ugly it may be. If we don't give that freedom to them, then who's to say we can't squelch a comedian whose jokes we don't like or enthusiasts of a sport we find distasteful? "First they came for the communists..." is our credo.

Recreational drug users come to us because we are extreme in our interpretation of the Constitution. The government has no legitimate right to tell people what they can do with their own bodies. It knows that. Ninety years ago it knew that it had to succeed in amending the Constitution before it could legally stop us from consuming alcohol. It still knows that, it's just that we've forgotten. So we let it arrest people for using drugs that are less harmful than alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine, without bothering to amend the Constitution. Next thing you know it will be telling us that because Big Nanny Knows Best it's cancelling our right to eat red meat, live a sedentary life, have sex without a condom, or ride a motorcycle without a helmet. Whoops, that one has already gotten past us.

Racists come to us because we believe that Affirmative Action is Affirmative Discrimination. "The color of a man's skin is no more important than the color of his eyes," as Bob Marley said. Giving a man a job because he is black or a place in a university because his parents speak Spanish is no more just than doing it because he is white and his parents speak English.

All the wackos come to us because we are the only ones who defend them. That doesn't mean that they are libertarians and it certainly doesn't mean that we agree with them. It's just that according to the Constitution the government has no right to interfere with anything people do so long as they cause no direct harm to others, and we have this rather odd belief that the Constitution is a good document and we should go back to adhering to it.

We believe in a legal system that enforces contracts and punishes fraud and theft.

Regarding anti-trust, I tend to go my own way as I have posted here before. The problem with our economy is that corporations have more power than they would naturally have, because the government sets them up as the contemporary analogues of the aristocracy. You can't really punish them for anything, so they get to do almost anything they want and draw our attention while the government quietly does the really crappy stuff. The concept of stock ownership is dangerous. If entrepreneurs had to put up their homes for collateral or take on full partners, they would be more accountable and less able to run rampant. The limited liability of stock ownership makes today's most decidedly un-free market possible. Adam Smith envisioned a "free market" of buyers and sellers of more or less equal power. The concept of a holding company with the money and power of Bangla Desh "competing" with individual consumers would make him cry.

You don't have to belong to the Libertarian Party to be a libertarian. The Party is not quite as corrupt as the Republocrats, but only because it is not as big and there isn't as much opportunity or incentive for corruption. It's been suggested quite wisely that we should be a non-profit organization like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace. Look at how much more effective they are at achieving their environmental goals than the Green Party.

A giant club does not have to have a position on every issue, such as abortion, which doesn't fall into a category that unites either libertarians or environmentalists. A giant club can just pursue the issues that fall under its charter and not dissipate its money, energy, or popularity on the others.

BTW, it can be argued that without outsourcing, wages in the Third World will never catch up with ours. Another issue that libertarianism can't resolve. ^_^

I love Libertarians. I'm not a part of any parties, but if I had to be, I'd be Libertarian. Freedom; gee, what a concept.

- N