John, I'm going to take the high road here, and say only this: I piss on you. You little repellant maggot, you dipshit of a human being. I piss all over you and hope you end up on a leash some day. Too fucking stupid to even hide your own squalid hatred when trying to make an intellectual point about a serious issue.  

Sincerely,

Alec 

Lew [LewRockwell.com blog], it is indeed a huge disappointment to see Rummel on the dark side. I would never pretend to have anything on his excellent accomplishments in scholarship, however I have for a while had an intuitive skepticism of the ‘democide’ school of thought, especially as it relates to foreign policy.”

The most egregious statement of your entire post.  VIETNAM DIDNT IMPROVE ANY UNTIL AFTER THE US LEFT!! Oh you mean when the South Vietnamese fought off the Soviet backed communist north for TWO MORE YEARS?  Or was that when the Soviet tanks rolled into saigon that the lives of the average vietnamese person started to rise?  That must have been why 250,000 thousand of them fled in rafts, most to drown, fleeing the communist north, because they could stand the good life that awaited them! 

More people were murdered by governments in Indo China from 1974 - 1980 then all of the American war dead.  Stopping oppresive murderous dictatorial regimes is what ends wars, not the other way around.

Notice that South Vietnam scored a consistent 4,5, PF until overrun by the communists, where it was demoted to 7,7NF, and has never recovered.  At this rate, the people of Vietnam may have the freedoms that the people of South Vietnam had by, oh, 2050.

Anthony Gregory said:

Lew [LewRockwell.com blog], it is indeed a huge disappointment to see Rummel on the dark side. I would never pretend to have anything on his excellent accomplishments in scholarship, however I have for a while had an intuitive skepticism of the ‘democide’ school of thought, especially as it relates to foreign policy.”

How is it you can say "I would never pretend to have anything on his excellent accomplishments in scholarship,"  and in the very next sentance say "however I have for a while had an intuitive skepticism of the ‘democide’"  What is this 'intuitive skepticism' any way?  We intuit only what we know, and we rarely intuit something that contradicts what we all ready wanted anyway.  Our intuition is based on our values and our information set.  I doubt you and Mr. Rummel's values vary much, so the differentiation most likely lies in your information set.  While you pay lip service to Rummel's "excellent accomplishments in scholarship" you you patently reject them based on some vague feeling you get that it just isnt right.  Do you realize you are now arguing on an objectivists web site?  Clearly Mr. Rummels information set, especially concerning that on governments murdering their own people, is far more extensive then yours, unless you want to show us that list of 24 books and 100 peer reviewed published articles youve made on the subject that qualify you to so easily reject Rummel's comments on a 'feeling'.

Michael

Democide is death by government – excluding war, usually. This presents problems. First of all, many governments that have done the most in the realm of outright murdering "their" own people, have also been less warmongering, as Rothbard has shown. On the other hand, relatively "civil" societies, such as Britain and the United States, frequently have much less in the way of extermination programs and forced starvations, and yet can be remarkably violent in war. Millions of foreigners and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died because of US warfare, but to focus on democide as wholly separate from war-caused deaths can, though does not necessarily, serve to implictly advance the notion that being murdered by your own state is qualitatively much worse than being killed as "collateral damage" in a bombing raid, or as a conscript for empire. Liberventionists, of course, believe this, and imply that when a small dictatorship kills its subjects it's on a whole different level of moral repugnancy than when a superstate such as the US carpetbombs villages and cities.

Secondly, war itself is often a direct, or at least indirect, cause of democide. Democide occurs frequently in wartime situations, and thus democide done by foreign regimes historically is often less a case for foreign intervention than it is one against it. The liberventionists have often dubiously used the facts of democide to make their case: instead of realizing the evils of US government warfare, they point out that "democide" has been a bigger problem than war (even though the two cannot be totally separated historically) and therefore "we" should tolerate x amount of US-caused "collateral damage" in order to preempt x+y amount of foreign democide. I know a liberventionist who even argues that if state A commits less aggression against its own subjects than does state B against its subjects, state A therefore is allowed to commit more aggression, presumably up to the differential, against state B's subjects than B is against A's. This is exactly the kind of rationalization of mass slaughter that Rothbard warned against. It basically means that people who live under governments that severely abuse their rights don't have any rights against foreign aggression done by the "good states," since it's not like they'd be free and safe anyway.

Also, the "democratic-peace theory" relies on numerous theoretical problems. Whereas Hoppe has done much to point out the problems with democracy, the democratic liberventionists would argue that democracies never wage war on each other. And if you come up with a counterexample? They simply say "that's not a democracy! Look how brutal it is!" So they qualify and define "democracy" in a circular manner: to show democracy guarantees peace, they essentially end up defining democracy as the type of regime that is peaceful. The idea that Iraq will be one of these Jeffersonian democracies that respects the individual rights of its minorities and does not, categorically, aggress against other democracies is almost certainly a total fantasy. Also, if a "democracy" aggresses against a non-democracy, I still think that's wrong, though the liberventionists don't.

What is the cause of the Civil War? The Civil War was a direct result of the American Revolution.

The interventionism resulted from Lincoln’s Civil War, which increased the role of the Federal government in the economy and promoted a collectivist mindset.

(during which the US imposed some of the most devastating sanctions in world history -- sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands, a price Madeline Albright publically said was "worth it"     

I dont know why the anti-war and pro-isolationist libertarians are so ready to believe whatever propaganda comes spilling from the mouths of the slaves of brutal dictators. 

Asked what would have happened if he had disobeyed the orders, Dr al-Douri replied: "They would have killed our families. This was an important event for the propaganda campaign."

 

Dr al-Douri, who has worked for 10 years as a paediatrician, said the parades were orchestrated by officials from the ministries of health, information and intelligence.

 

He said: "All 10 hospitals in Baghdad were involved in this and the quota for the parade was between 25 and 30 babies a month, which they would say had died in one day.

 

"We had to tell the babies' families that it was a government order and that they would be paid to keep quiet. The reward was sometimes in money, the equivalent of $10 per baby, or in food: rice, sugar and oil."

Since you dont support sanctions, nor intervention, what moral ground are you standing on?  Your are asserting that we should leave well enough alone and let murderous dictators remain murderous dictators, as long as they dont kill anyone WE care about, right?  Saddam was only killing his own people, after all, so its none of our business.  And Iraq will go back to being that beutiful eden full of shiny happy people after the US leaves, just like Vietnam.  And Korea, we should have kept our heads out of that as well, so Kim Jong Ill could be rulling over 70 million Koreans instead of just the 20 in the north, and killing 10's of thousands more each year from faminie.  We lost some 50,000 people in the Korean war, after all, and it really wasnt any of our business anyway, right?  Never mind that South Korea is a progressive western democracy and one of the largest economies in the world with a GDP per capita rivaling any western nation today, while North Korea is arguably THE WORST country on earth.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ks.html

Since the early 1960s, South Korea has achieved an incredible record of growth and integration into the high-tech modern world economy. Four decades ago GDP per capita was comparable with levels in the poorer countries of Africa and Asia. Today its GDP per capita is 18 times North Korea's and equal to the lesser economies of the European Union.

Michael Dickey

Jason Pappas was doing fine with his explanation until the end when he wrote

What is the cause of the Civil War? The Civil War was a direct result of the American Revolution.

No, the War of Northern Aggression was a result of the denial of the American Revolution. It was the continuation of the mercantalist policies that some of the founders advocated. One does well to remember that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published the same year as the Declaration of Independence. It takes time for ideas to be understood and to propagate that understanding.

Yes, the United States and South Vietnam won that war, the US communist led anti-war protestors and communist sympathizing media lost it.  Militarily it was won.

ith only a modicum of support South Vietname would still be a country today, and would likely have eclipsed South Korea in freedom and standard of living 15 years ago.

I would like to know when, exactly, it was the life for the Vietnamese got better "after we left"  Clearly it went down hill as they continued to fight off communist north agression until finally losing, and then having half a million people murdered and a quarter million lost at sea.  And then lived for the next twenty years under a brutal communist hell hole which surpressed every civil liberty libertarians have pretended to value.

Rediculous, 1st of all I am against sanctions anyway, they tend to do little and cause more harm then an outright war to depose a murderous dictator would.  And the infiltration of western products, culture, and ideas does much.  But more importantly, the claim you are repeating is complete hogwash, if any children DID die 'from the sanctions' it is the moral culpability of the murderous dictator that brutally opprsess them. 

The West has no moral obligation to sell its products to anyone, anywhere, it only need do it if it wants to.

Since you dont support sanctions, nor intervention, what moral ground are you standing on?  Your are asserting that we should leave well enough alone and let murderous dictators remain murderous dictators, as long as they dont kill anyone WE care about, right?  Saddam was only killing his own people, after all, so its none of our business.

Anthony Gregory said:

My family also suffered under Communism, in North Korea. The Japanese war on Korea sure made it more ripe for a takeover by the murderous thugs who tried to slaughter my grandfather and steal his property. They left and went to South Korea, then left again to come here.

*Sigh* Mr.Gregory, do you realize that without the US intervention in Korea in the 1950s, there would have been no South Korea?  And who would have imagined fifty years ago that South Korea would make cars runinng on US streets everywhere today?! Now tell us was it worth it?

Of course, Hong Zhang is exactly right. It is philosophy that is the key. The dominant philosophy in continental Europe was collectivism in its national or international varieties. The communism of Asia was the cause of people acting like Communists (apparently this is hard for some of our nihilo-libertarian friends to follow).

The intension of my previous post was to show the reductio absurdum of the explanations purporting to show all evil as the result of the unintended consequences of American policy. I only had to remove the role of ideas to re-create this silly narrative.

(Edited by Jason Pappas on 1/22, 3:39pm)