Betas: 'Pinochet ONLY Killed 3,000 People!'

"Communism killed over 100 million people in the 20th century. Agosto Pinochet only killed 3,000 people!"  That's the excuse the alt-right and other fascist sympathizers cower behind.  For starters, it's a weak argument.  Let's not forget that between Italy's invasion of Africa as well as Japan's invasion of Manchuria and the end of World War II that fascism killed in 15 years almost as many victims as Communism killed in 75 years!

But alas, closeted white supremacists scream about the red menace while ignoring the others. They're like people who worry about swine flu, bird flu, West Nile virus, etc. while ignoring things like the common flu which kills way more people.  Worse yet, many Libertarians are too spineless to call these fascists what they really are (i.e. socialists hiding behind the colors of nationalism, or the kind of people which Ludwig von Mises trashed decades ago in his writings). 

Let's come up with a hypothetical character... a fictional revolutionary conservative we'll call Victus Romano.  If Victus hooks up with a transsexual prostitute in Orlando before physically removing him/her out of a helicopter, and he finds that he only has 1 wart on his dick whereas the hooker's last client has 100 warts on his dick, it doesn't matter that the other guy's herpes outbreak is way worse than Victus'.

VICTUS STILL HAS HERPES.

At this point, we're ONLY arguing about the number of sores, not the fact that he has a DISEASE.

Government is a disease. All this weak argument of "only 3,000" does is 1) distract from the main issue by making it about quantity versus quality, also distracting from the simple truth that tyranny is tyranny and democide is fucking democide; 2) It encourage confused libertarians to go full retard. Never go full retard!

The problem is these people were largely killed based on hearsay and without a trial. Even if 99% of them were communists, Pinochet still violated the individual rights of the innocent people wrongly killed. Libertarianism is about protecting individuals, not killing communists.

Unfortunately, the Pepe the Frog cult doesn't care about rights. Their idea of free speech includes every private event accommodating Richard Spencer's right to speak, but in their world, free speech doesn't exist for communists.  Communists only exist to be murdered... to somehow protect freedom.

No, the alt-right doesn't care about rights.  They only care about growing their state to protect their private property from the threat of left-wing... statists.  The government must be grown and a little bit of private property seized in order to protect us all from the boogeymen who want to... grow the government and take private property. They're Republicans who discovered the anarchy symbol, much like every 12 year old punk rock kid in the suburbs who discovers Ozzy Osbourne and Iron Maiden.

I'm willing to bet a whole bunch of liberals probably just made your average Kek cyber worshiper feel bad for being white. I'll be here waiting when those people get tired of conforming to the pure raw ANGER radiating from the alt-right.

Also, Victus, Mexico is still not paying for your god-emperor's Wall.

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Pinochet image courtesy of Know Your Meme.  Good Night Left Side and Anti-Antifa insignia courtesy of sexually humiliated angry men.  Full permission is granted to reprint the text of this article as long as the author is credited and a link is provided back to this page.

The Armed Libertarian Revolution in Mexico (Part 4)

Part 4: One of the finest libertarian moments of the Revolution

Revolutionary generals Zapata (center-left) and Villa (center-right) occupy Mexico City

One of the most libertarian moments of the Mexican Revolution came when Zapata and Villa occupied Mexico City.  For the first time ever, the residents of the Federal District saw genuine people’s armies.  Pancho Villa’s troops all wore distinct uniforms, had northern accents, and were known for partying and looting.  The Zapatistas were a bona fide peasant army and shocked the nation with their self-discipline and good manners.  They wore large straw hats, the clothing in which they worked the fields, sandals on their calloused feet, and carried whatever hunting rifles, muskets, or enemy weapons they could scrounge.  The Zapatists were remarkably respectful of private property, noted for knocking on doors and asking if the residents could spare a tortilla or a cup of water.

During the brief occupation of Mexico City, Villa and Zapata sat in the Presidential Palace.  Both revolutionary generals agreed that neither one of them should be President of Mexico.  As Villa said, “This ranch is too big for us.”  While Villa arguably craved some degree of power and prestige, he was happiest among his troops in the North and had no national political ambitions.  Zapata had no desire whatsoever to rule over Mexico.  Both generals and their armies left the capital and went home.  George Washington is praised for setting the precedent of stepping down from the presidency, but Villa and Zapata literally had it under their seats and chose to walk away.

Scholars and veterans of the Mexican Revolution agree that the Revolution was hijacked and corrupted.  Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution promised significant land reform to the peasants, but the Constitutionalist regime had no intention of expropriating the land from their wealthy backers.  The national revolutionary labor union, the CROM, mirrored the large unions in the U.S. and transformed from a platform for improving wages and working conditions into a cattle pen for delivering workers to state-backed enterprises.  The extreme anti-clerical measures against the Catholic Church went beyond justice against a politicized religious organization, and went so far as to outlaw the practice of Catholicism.  The vast and overwhelming majority of the population is devoutly Catholic, so it’s hardly a surprise that persecuted Catholics would rebel against the Plutarco Elias Calles regime in the 1920s.  Today, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) dominates most of the government, although both Revolutionary (PRI) and National Action Party (PAN) candidates and elected officials are often bought and threatened by drug lords.

Today, there are three fronts for advancing liberty in Mexico.  One is formed by the guerrillas, including the Zapatista National Libertion Army (EZLN) in Chiapas, who continue to resist eminent domain and illegal forced evictions. Another is formed by libertarian organizations like the Libertarian Party of Mexico (PLM), which openly advocates for limited governments and free markets, and organizes networks of people sympathetic to libertarian ideas.  These people are usually those with grievances against the government or against government-backed cronies in the private sector.  Finally, the third front for liberty in Mexico is formed by the various Community Police and self-defense militias operating throughout Michoacan, Guerrero, parts of Chihuahua, and in other Mexican states.  The most effective civilian militias with the greatest success in fighting the violence and predation of the drug cartels have been those who have not cooperated with the government.

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For further reading:

"The Uprising in Baja California"

Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

Friedrick Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution

The Storm That Swept Mexico (documentary film available on YouTube)

The Last Zapatistas: Forgotten Heroes (documentary film available on YouTube)

And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (HBO biopic available on YouTube)

Zach Foster, "Civil War in Mexico: Re-Examining Armed Conflict and Criminal Insurgency"

U.S. Libertarian Party Condemns Cuba's Incarceration of Libertarians

Ubaldo Herrera Hernandez and Manuel Velazquez Visea have lit some huge brush fires of liberty in the short time since their arrest by State Security and incarceration in the Cuban Gulag.  After 10 Libertarian state parties in the United States, as well as the Libertarian parties of Spain and Russia, condemned the action and called for the release of Herrera and Velazquez, the U.S. (national) Libertarian Party published the following:

The Libertarian National Committee of the United States condemns the arrest and detention of political dissidents Ubaldo Herrera Hernandez and Manuel Velazquez, who have been detained by the Cuban government since their arrest on February 2.

Both men were targeted for peacefully promoting small government, civil liberties, and free markets, for which they occasionally distributed flyers and put up posters.

Hernandez and Velazquez are members of Mises Cuba, an independent think tank which is based on the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Auburn, Alabama.

Mises Cuba has confirmed the activists’ ongoing detention.

“Hernandez and Velazquez are political prisoners whose actions have harmed no one and damaged no property,” said Nicholas Sarwark, Chair of the Libertarian National Committee. “We stand in solidarity with our fellow freedom fighters in Cuba.”

The Libertarian National Committee passed a resolution asserting that the activists’ arrest and detention “illustrate the threats to freedom we all face around the world.”

It further states:
“The Libertarian Party calls on the Cuban government to immediately release details of the above-mentioned arrests and detentions, including the specific charges being levied against the individuals in question. In the absence of such information, we call for the release of these prisoners.

“Libertarian activism worldwide must not be deterred by the attempts of authoritarian leaders, totalitarian governments, and dictatorial regimes to silence the voice of freedom. We condemn any acts of official oppression, and uphold the promotion of limited government and free markets in any country. Furthermore, we call on the U.S. Department of State to publicly denounce violations of the right to free speech, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right to due process abroad.”

For more information about this story:

Report: Arrested Mises Cuba Member Charged with “Distributing Enemy Propaganda”

Cuban libertarian activists sent to the gulag

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The Libertarian Party of Nevada extends a sincere THANK YOU to the LNC members who votes Yes on this resolution, on behalf of the libertarians of Mises Cuba and the Ben Franklin Library, and on behalf of the families of the now 6 imprisoned libertarians: Ubaldo Herrera Hernández, Manuel Velázquez Visea, René Ronco Machín, Rolando Guerra, Roser Ayala García, and Rafael Averof Rodríguez.  Repression against the ideas of liberty carries on in Cuba and elsewhere.  Days ago, Rodrigo Quintana of Paraguay's Authentic Radical Liberal Party was shot dead by police.  Less than 2 weeks ago, Javier Oteca was murdered in Colombia.  Oteca was a libertarian activist who'd been occupying and reclaiming lands stolen from indigenous peoples through eminent domain or forced evictions by paramilitary forces and given to crony corporations. Early in February, a libertarian and Community Police (anti-cartel self-defense militia) veteran named David (last name withheld) was murdered in Mexico City.  Last summer, libertarian activist Salvador Olmos Garcia was killed by crooked police in Oaxaca.  Sadly, the international libertarian movement has its martyrs, but it now also has international attention.

Also, Guatemalan libertarian author, activist, and talk radio star Gloria Alvarez recently dedicated an episode of the politics and current events talk show Libertopolis to the heroism of libertarians in Cuba.  Havana-based activists Nelson Rodriguez and Caridad Ramirez talked about the arrest and incarceration of Ubaldo Herrera and Manuel Velazquez, about the activism of Mises Cuba and the Benjamin Franklin Libertarian Library, and about the government's increased repression against libertarians and all other perceived opposition on the island.  Spanish speakers can enjoy the interview here.  LP Nevada extends a sincere thank you to Ms. Alvarez and to the independent Chilean libertarians who plan on protesting the incarceration in front of the Cuban embassy in Santiago in the near future.

Cuba's libertarians have officially asked the international libertarian community for help.  You can write to several human rights watch groups with the names of the libertarian prisoners. We recommend Amnesty International, The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, Human Rights Cuba, and the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation.  You can also directly contact Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Relations on Facebook and call for the immediate release of the libertarian political prisoners (@CubaMINREX on Twitter).  Finally, you can visit MisesCuba.org or email misescubacontacto@gmail.com to find out how to donate Bitcoins to Mises Cuba and the Benjamin Franklin Libertarian Library.

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Image courtesy of Haaretz.  This article was first published by the Libertarian Party of Nevada.  Full permission to reprint or republish this article on the condition that the author and first publisher are credited, and the reproduction links back to this page.

The Armed Libertarian Revolution in Mexico (Part 3)

Part 3: Villa, Zapata, and the citizen-soldiers

Francisco "Pancho" Villa (center), Commander, Northern Division

From 1910 to 1919, Emiliano Zapata led the Liberation Army of the South and is responsible for Morelos’ period of autonomy until his murder under a false flag of truce.  Like Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, and also like the irregulars at Concord and Boston, the Zapatistas fought a prolonged guerrilla war with the popular support of the public throughout Morelos and in parts of Puebla and Mexico State.  Like the Green Mountain Boys in the New Hampshire land grants, like the American Sagebrush Rebellion, like the militants at the Bundy Ranch standoff and the Oregon wildlife refuge standoff, and like the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas today, the government called the original Zapatistas criminals and terrorists when they took up arms to resist eminent domain. 

Pancho Villa is a controversial figure in the Mexican Revolution.  People from Northern Mexico still revere him as a man of the people, while the descendants of his enemies still revile him as a gangster.  The truth is that he was somewhere in between the two.  Testimonies of Villista veterans and civilians testifies that the Northern Division really did often provide food and badly needed public services to the civilian population.  In this sense, the exploited population were less exploited under the revolutionaries than they were by the federal and loyalist state governments.  However, Villa did have the ability to be brutal and have people executed at the drop of a hat.  Part of the brutality known among Villa and his lieutenants comes from having been gangsters. 

Villa never particularly wanted to be a gangster, but it came out of necessity.  His career as an outlaw began in his teenage years when he had to flee his native Durango after killing the local boss.  The feudal lord was in the process of sexually assaulting Villa’s sister when the boy intervened and killed the man.  Modern courts would recognize this as a justifiable homicide, and the rape of a maiden was certainly a crime in a conservative Catholic country.  Unfortunately, in those days, peasants had no rights in court.  Doroteo Arango, his underground name Francisco Villa, became a criminal when he decided not to let his sister be raped.

Villa was by no means a libertarian--his violent streak and willingness to "liberate" property attests to that.  Zapata was the libertarian, not Villa, but Villa and the Villistas had a series of magnificent libertarian moments and a long list of libertarian grievances.  Despite his record as an outlaw and later as a warlord, Villa was an underdog and a victim of circumstance like millions of other working men and women.  Villa reorganized his cattle rustling gang into a guerrilla army and, through victory and innovation, this militia quickly transformed into a professional army.  Villa’s army represents a true people’s army, recruited from a population hostile to the federal government and loyal to their local underdog whom songs and newspapers were describing as a Robin Hood figure.  The career of Pancho Villa is significant to so many Mexicans because Villa symbolizes victims finally getting back at their oppressors after suffering so long.

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Continued tomorrow in Part 4

Villistas image courtesy of Pinterest.  Full permission to reprint or republish this article is granted, provided the author is credited and this page is linked back to.

Colorado, Chile, and Guatemala Libertarians Condemn Cuban Government for Arrests

International support keeps growing for the now-famous Cuban libertarian prisoners, Ubaldo Herrera and Manuel Velazquez.  In recent demonstrations of support for the prisoners and opposition to the regime that sent them to Melena del Sur, the Cuban Gulag, libertarians in Colorado, Guatemala, and Chile took a public stand against the Castro regime's oppression of libertarians associated with Mises Cuba and the Benjamin Franklin Libertarian Library in Havana.  The parties involved are the Libertarian Party of Colorado, a libertarian talk radio celebrity in Guatemala City, and independent libertarians in Santiago, Chile.

In a recent press release, the Libertarian Party of Colorado said the following:

In early February, two libertarian activists, Ubaldo Herrera Hernandez and Manuel Velasquez Visea, were arrested in Cuba and convicted of attempted assault and the highly disturbing “distributing enemy propaganda” in short order. There is no evidence of any violence by these activists, and the subversive literature is in fact the type of items that Libertarians routinely read and distribute here in the United States. This conviction is a violation of the human right to peacefully declare one’s political convictions, and further, it is reported that the conditions of the prison where Ubaldo and Manuel are currently housed is the equivalent of the “gulag.” The Libertarian Party of Colorado joins the state Libertarian parties of Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Indiana, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Florida in calling for the Cuban government to free these activists by passing the following Resolution:

The Libertarian Party of Colorado condemns the unjust detention of libertarian activists Ubaldo Herrera Hernandez and Manuel Velasquez by agents of the Castro regime in Cuba on February 2, and demands the immediate safe release of these political prisoners who were targeted for their peaceful activism promoting limited government and free markets. We further ask the U.S. government's State Department to place diplomatic pressure on the Castro regime for their release, and encourage Libertarian Party members and supporters to contact their elected officials toward that end.

Recently, Guatemalan libertarian author, activist, and talk radio star Gloria Alvarez dedicated an episode of the politics and current events talk show Libertopolis to the heroism of libertarians in Cuba.  Havana-based activists Nelson Rodriguez and Caridad Ramirez talked about the arrest and incarceration of Ubaldo Herrera and Manuel Velazquez, about the activism of Mises Cuba and the Benjamin Franklin Libertarian Library, and about the government's increased repression against libertarians and all other perceived opposition on the island.  Spanish speakers can enjoy the interview here.

Libertarians in Chile also took a public stand.  Libertarianism is still in its seedling stages across Latin America, where CIA-sponsored terror has made socialism the default 'good-guy' philosophy for 60 years.  Despite their small numbers, independent Chilean libertarians took to the streets of Santiago to protest the incarceration directly in front of the Cuban embassy.  LP Nevada heartily extends a high-five to the handful of Chilean libertarians who did more for liberty with their one action of defiance than most of the armchair activists reading this article.  

In recent weeks, the incarceration was also denounced by the Libertarian parties of Spain and Russia.  This movement is growing.  Far from weakening political opposition, the Castro regime has only made libertarianism stronger. LP Nevada's sources in Havana say that Ubaldo Herrera and Manuel Velazquez are converting and new libertarians in the labor prison.  Even in their cell, the hunger strikers are growing the liberty movement in Cuba. Moreover, the Castro regime's repression has strengthened solidarity among libertarians across the world, but especially in the Americas.

Libertarians keep arguing against government intervention in favor of civil society voluntarily solving problems. Now is the time for libertarians to follow through on that standard with action. No one else is going to help our libertarian brothers languishing in the Cuban Gulag. Cuba's libertarians are officially asking the international libertarian community for help.

You can write to several human rights watch groups with the names of the libertarian prisoners. We recommend Amnesty International, The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, Human Rights Cuba, and the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation.  You can also directly contact Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Relations on Facebook and call for the immediate release of the libertarian political prisoners (@CubaMINREX on Twitter).  Finally, you can visit MisesCuba.org or email misescubacontacto@gmail.com to find out how to donate Bitcoins to Mises Cuba snd the Benjamin Franklin Libertarian Library.

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** Note: I was recently contacted by one of the Chilean libertarians.  Regrettably, they report that the protest at the embassy was postponed at the last minute in order to protest another, more local injustice, and a person's first priority is to clean up his own house.  Nonetheless, the Chilean libertarians insist they fully intend to follow through with the postponed Cuba protest in the near future.

Image courtesy of Region Coquimbo and has been cropped from its original version.  This article was first published by the Libertarian Party of Nevada.  Full permission is granted to reprint or republish this article, provided the author and first publisher are credited and the reproduction links back to this page.

The Armed Libertarian Revolution in Mexico (Part 2)

Part 2: Private Property and the Libertion Army of the South

Apart from the separatist anarchist Magonistas, two nations were fighting to preserve their autonomy.  One was the Maya people of Southern Mexico, who fought a long guerrilla war against Mexico until 1933 in the Yucatan region.  The Yaqui people in the North joined almost every revolutionary faction in their well-based hatred of the Diaz regime, but they served Alvaro Obregon’s Constitutionalist Army with distinction, with the understanding their service would earn their autonomy and right to resettle along the Yaqui River.  When the revolutionary state ignored its promises to the Yaquis, they revolted in 1920 and fought on until 1927.  They had a legitimate grievance in 1910, and they had kept up their end of their contract with the Constitutionalists. They had an entirely new and entirely legitimate grievance in 1920.

Emiliano Zapata, Commander, Liberation Army of the South

One state where Rothbard’s bandit analogy is taken very seriously is Morelos, the home state of Emiliano Zapata.  Emiliano Zapata was the beloved gentleman soldier of Morelos as Robert E. Lee was to Virginia.  Zapata was a property owner and a business man from Anenecuilco, but he was also a man of the people and one of the greatest libertarians who ever lived.  Though the communitarian culture of rural Morelos made him sympathetic to socialist ideas, his words and actions drip with key libertarian principles.  “It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”  He had a profound respect for the land as the source from which he and most of his home state earned their income and put food on the table.  He was kind and respectful to the peasants and the Indians and had a reputation for arguing peasant grievances to the government, for which he was widely popular.  One year before the Revolution of 1910 broke out, Zapata was elected chief of the Defense Committee by village leaders, in the tradition of the early American militias electing their officers.

The agrarian demands of Morelos reflect a very libertarian grievance of eminent domain and slavery.  The villages had titles to the land dating back to the colonial era.  The peasants were the rightful property owners and legally equal shareholders in the local agronomy.  In many cases, the land had been stolen from the villages by the government through eminent domain and given to a well-connected private enterprise.  In many other cases, the land was stolen through extrajudicial forced evictions which the authorities conveniently ignored.  The hacienda system featured court-sanctioned debt-servitude which allowed the haciendas to turn the working class into slaves working on the plantations.  In one or two generations the government had turned property shareholders into tenants and debt slaves.  The collusion between the Mexican state and select corporations turned the planters into feudal lords with total power over their de facto serfs, and the plantations operated as feudal states like medieval Europe.

The grievances and tactics of the Zapatista army are almost identical to those of the Green Mountain Boys in the Vermont Revolution, led by Ethan Allen.  A decade before the British fired the first shots at Lexington, the Green Mountain Boys fought a low-level guerrilla war against the Royal New York government in the New Hampshire Land Grants.  The New Hampshire colonial government had made land grants to settlers leaving New Hampshire to settle west of the Connecticut River.  These settlers worked the land for nearly a generation, earning a living and creating a functional and self-sufficient economy out of the wilderness.  When the New York government claimed the Land Grants for well-connected cronies and attempted evictions, the revolutionaries fought back, showing a remarkable degree of restraint to avoid collateral damage (See Rothbard's Conceived in Liberty, Volume 4).  As Ethan Allen was a man of the people and a charismatic leader largely responsible for his success in defending the property rights of the working class, so was Zapata to the peasants and Indians of Morelos who had never before been able to organize effective resistance.

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Continued tomorrow in Part 3.

This article was originally published in one piece by the Libertarian Party of Nevada.