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.

The Armed Libertarian Revolution in Mexico (Part 1)

Part 1: A revolution of libertarian and anarchist grievances

The Mexican Revolution is likely the most important chain of events in the history of Mexico, perhaps more so than Mexico’s war of independence.  Its crowning achievement is the 1917 Constitution, still in effect today.  One of the leading attributes of the Mexican Revolution is the rise of citizen armies, what U.S. legal tradition recognizes as the ‘unorganized militia’ of able-bodied armed men organizing into military units.  Though the grievances, politics, motives, and goals of the different revolutionary factions and leaders differed, there’s much about the Revolution to be seen from a libertarian point of view.

One of the central themes of libertarian political theory is that government is at best inefficient and incapable of adequately governing and providing for the people, and at worst a predatory criminal organization.  This is why the minarchist libertarians believe in a very limited ‘night watchman’ government under a strict interpretation of the Constitution that favors the liberty of the people, and why anarchist libertarians prefer no government at all and all power to the individual.  The minarchist grievance against the thirty-five-year Porfirio Diaz regime is the lack of free elections, repression of dissident press, and crony capitalist policies favoring well-connected big businesses over independent honest businesses. 

The anarchist libertarian scholar Murray Rothbard breaks down the state to its most basic components in Anatomy of the State.  The example he gives is the bandit gang that occasionally robs an unarmed village population, which then decides they would profit more if they lived among the conquered people as rulers and collected regular payments.  The bandit chief declares himself king, his bandit leaders are the lawful nobility of the realm, and a new state is born.  This is what Columbus was to the Arawak people, what Cortez was to the Mexican Indians, and what the Mexican state was to the peasants and the Indians.

While Americans debate over the issue of women in combat, the Mexican Revolution sorted out that issue over a century ago with the ‘soldaderas’, the women soldiers of the revolutionary armies.  The soldaderas served as rear-guard militia, nurses, couriers, spies, sentries, regimental cooks, and frontline light infantry.  Without the participation of women in logistical and combat roles, the revolutionary armies wouldn’t have been able to mount prolonged resistance against the federal government and later, against the corrupt revolutionary state.  The prevalence of revolutionary wives and sweethearts, especially Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s Northern Division, is likely the reason why desertion was so low in revolutionary armies.  Women’s participation made them equal stakeholders in the Revolution, and evidence that gun rights and the natural right to self-defense aren’t restricted to one country, gender, or one special class of people.

The anarchist grievances of the Mexican Revolution include the rampant state using eminent domain to steal land from its rightful owners, federal military conscription as kidnapping, taxes as institutionalized theft, and the constant imprisonment and murder of dissidents.  One faction of outright anarchists rose up in 1911.  The Magonistas were a battalion-sized volunteer army of anarchist Mexicans and Anglo-Americans who conquered several cities and towns independently of the Maderista’s war against the Diaz regime.  Although they were anarcho-communist, their attempts to establish a micro-state in northern Baja California represent the libertarian ideals of secession and political decentralization.  Moreover, the wary and apolitical general population were likely to receive better representation and public services under the Magonistas' micro-state than under the Mexican government.

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Continued tomorrow in Part 2. 

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

'From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution' painting by David Alfaro Siquieros

'Las Soldaderas' (1938) painting by Antonio Gomez.

Open Borders and Private Property After the State

Open borders is still a touchy subject in libertarian and conservative circles.  Many see the concept of open borders as a threat to the nation.  Nationalism isn’t dead, but it’s definitely evolving.  More and more people are coming to the idea that culture and people make a nation, not lines on a map.

America’s borders have changed constantly throughout its history.  Like other nations, America never needed borders for national identity.  Israel is a nation because of the long Jewish traditions from the days when the Israelites were a wandering people, not because nationalist social democrats drew lines on a map of British-occupied Palestine.  In the words of Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, “We are the Jewish nation.  Our homeland is our Torah, our Holy Bible.”

In Los Angeles County, home of 12 million people, city borders have become irrelevant...

Read more at The Libertarian Republic

Anarcho-Jarhead [flash fiction]

Flash fiction. noun. Fiction that is extremely brief, typically only a few hundred words or fewer in its entirety.

Chunks of mud brick rained down on Carter as he kissed the ground to dodge the bullets tearing through the compound wall.  Shit!  The tangos had a heavy MG.  With one hand he adjusted his Kevlar helmet, shifted out of whack in the dive.

He grabbed his M4 rifle, his knee pushed up and he dashed around the corner with his battle buddy on his heels.  They joined two others behind a Bradley fighting vehicle steadily making its way up the street as bullets clanged off the armor.  The tank’s side turret, mounted with a .50 caliber chain gun, returned fire at the al-Qaeda position as the tracks kept rolling and semi-crouched ground pounders trotted to keep up with their shield.

He huffed with deep heaves, pushing aside his nut-shriveling fear at the painful sound of the tango’s heavy MG shots ringing off the tank, lapping at his ear drums like jackhammers.  A tango, face covered in a red checkered shumoch, popped his head and rifle out of a window from an angle where the Marines were exposed.  Carter popped off two rounds from his M4 without missing a beat and the tango fell dead back into the house.

His sailor battle buddy pointed to their periphery.  Carter peeked in time to see the mortar crew mad-dashing toward an alley with access to an open yard.  They crossed the street, reeking of blood and shit, at a run past the bodies of two tangos with AK-47s still in hand and ruby caverns where their faces used to be.

The Marines were in this alone today.  Where the fuck were the security forces?

 “Corpsman!” someone desperately shouted, and his sailor battle buddy smack-patted his shoulder, saying ‘Come on!’  And they took off.  This was the eleventh day of the offensive and they still had three quarters of Ramadi to clear.  The cops they’d trained and heavily armed over the last two months were nowhere to be seen.

After the last tangos died or took off, their company lost three Marines killed and five wounded that day.  Carter had an epiphany on the ride back to the FOB.  If fighting for this country wasn’t worth it to the locals, then he sure as hell wasn’t getting blown up for this shit.

But he still had to finish his tour…

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“You’re in for a treat, dude,” Raccoon said (so named because his favorite hat had ears). Six guys were crammed into an old VW van that reeked of weed and peyote.  Carter had never been to ‘Billy Madison College,’ as they called the warehouse where Raccoon’s friends put on underground punk shows.  He was now a resident of Hemingway House, a collective that grew legal weed, let people crash on their couches, and generally helped each other out.

The paint-cracked, dented VW van pulled up to the warehouse where a crowd had already gathered.  Guys and girls sipped beers and Four-Locos in paper bags, smoked cigarettes and an assortment of retro pipes, and Carter even caught a whiff of a pot cloud hovering over the crowd.  These lovers of the DIY punk scene were milling around, socializing while the bands unloaded their gear around the back.

People in the crowd shouted to greet friends that they recognized.  A 6’5 punk with a Pabst Blue Ribbon ball cap and a full beard on his smiling cheeks appeared from the crowd to greet Raccoon with a lumberjack’s hug.  He even wore a green and black flannel shirt adorned with the buttons and patches of different underground punk bands no one’s ever heard of.

Raccoon freed himself from the lumberjack punk’s embrace and pointed to Carter.  “Carter, meet Party Marty.”  Party Marty beamed at him and offered his hands with a ‘What’s up, man.  Anybody who’s cool with Raccoon is cool with me.’  Marty took them inside the warehouse to give Carter the noob’s tour.  They stepped into a small office lobby converted into a box office.  Posters of bands that had performed here on sleeping-bag-and-shoestring-budget tours covered the walls.

Carter’s attention was focused on the fallen angel eyeing him playfully from behind the counter.

Long, raven hair worn in the trademark Bettie Page style accented her olive-tan complexion.  Subtle red lip stick clashed with her curious green eyes.  A black Misfits t-shirt met the tattered denim skirt hugging her hourglass curves, and her slender legs sported black leather Doc Marten boots.  He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to compare his vinyl records with hers or eat her face.

“Five bucks,” she said. She held the stamp and ink pad expectantly.  Carter fumbled in his pocket and pulled out wadded Ones.

“Aw, damn,” he said disappointedly, “I’ve only got three…”

She shrugged.  “It’s cool.  Just donate what you have.” And he did.

Party Marty and Raccoon led him into the main warehouse, magnificently adorned with punk murals of guitars, skulls, flowers, band logos, the giant circled jagged A that was the anarchy symbol.  Christmas lights lined the walls and people were kicking it, drinking their booze inside and passing a peace pipe just outside the loading bay.  It was incredible.

Carter looked back to the box office to notice that beautiful punk queen sneaking a peek at him.  She blushed and smiled.

When the bands began to play, over a hundred people crowded into that warehouse.  They jumped, danced, fist pumped, moshed, and the music vibrations from the loud stage speakers flowed through them like ripples in water.  Carter was dancing with the Hispanic Bettie Page who’d been eyeing him, and before long they were making out.  She was intoxicating to look at and to touch.

That’s when it hit him.  The fucked up war, Hemingway House, this network of people literally entertaining themselves, the donations, and the beautiful chaos of the music.  It finally occurred to him.  No need for government.  No need for authority…

Carter was months out of the Corps, but he was finally home.

END

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Marines photo courtesy of Eternal Spectator. VLHS photo courtesy of OC Weekly.

Toward a New Liberty: Why We Disagree

Photo by Judd Weiss

Many in the movement have called me a statist, and that pisses me off like you wouldn't believe. (For starters, calling someone inside the movement a statist is childish ad hominem. It's also a great way to get people to agree with you... NOT!

I'm a libertarian through and through, but I operate differently from most of you. Here's how:

Most of you have a brilliant grasp of libertarian theory. You're focused on the finish line. For some, the finish line is a government that obeys the Constitution to the letter; for others, the finish line is full harmonious anarchy.

You see how things ought to be, then you see how things are (police brutality, unjust wars abroad, obscene taxation) and the difference horrifies you.

It's TOO EASY to focus on the finish line and then self-righteously preach about how the police are pigs, how we don't need a standing army, how the state must be done away with, etc. Too easy!

I see the finish line and I want it just as badly as you do. But I also understand that we need to GET THERE first. It won't happen overnight, and we won't get to the libertarian society in one Great Leap Forward. It happens through baby steps.

Yours Truly reading "The Moral Revolution in Atlas Shrugged"

So when I disagree with you, I'm not negating the Rothbardian vision of a new liberty. I'm either making recommendations on the NEXT STEP on the long journey to get there, or I'm telling you to cool it on living in Theory Land and get back to the now, so that you can help me identify ways to get to that new liberty. Remember, simply identifying how things ought to be does NOTHING to change the reality of what's happening now in real time.

We need to consciously and constantly work towards the finish line, inch by inch and yard by yard. We do this by scaling back big government, having honest and productive discussions with those who disagree with us, and supporting market innovations that complement our worldview (i.e. Uber, Bitcoin, the Internet). Sometimes we'll need to make the best of a bad situation if it advances our cause.

The liberty movement NEEDS theorists--engineers--like you to help us keep our eye on the ball, the finish line, so that our movement never loses its soul. But the movement also needs people like me--navigators--to pay attention to "conditions of the road" so that our movement can get there rather than be a pseudo-religion.

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Five Libertarian Ideas #22 - Libertarian National Defense at Home and Abroad

The Second Amendment and the next generation

Being a rifle shooting instructor has been a privilege. I love being able to teach the next generation about proper gun use, sportsmanship, and self-defense. The police can't be everywhere, nor do we want them everywhere, and criminals will continue to disobey the rule of law and human rights (surprise, surprise!). I'm a firm believer that the best way to stop evil people with guns is to have more good people with guns. -7/23

US Army troops patrol Afghanistan's Highway 1

"Limited war" in Afghanistan

This half-assed policy of undeclared "limited war" is only getting my brothers and sisters killed. We either completely conquer Afghanistan so that it will never be the same, or we leave and give the Afghans the liberty to destroy each other rather than have more of our people killed by "allies." -8/5

Toward a small standing army

You want a small standing army like the one envisioned in the Constitution? It can be done in 3 years.

1) Increase and expand special operations in the regular forces so we can neutralize threats without conventional forces.

2) Increase and expand the state militias (i.e. the National Guard and state defense forces). This gives us Title 10 troops who can be activated to fight constitutionally declared wars, while giving the several states citizen-soldiers immune from federal activation. -8/5

National Guard Special Forces soldiers in counterterrorism training

Groupthink: hating the police

It disturbs me to see so many libertarians expressing hatred for the police. I thought we were the enlightened group who sees people as individuals--free agents--rather than lumping them all together based on race, religion, or occupation. Keep in mind, the vast majority of police officers have neither beaten protestors nor shot people. -8/14

Civilians who think they're military experts

Not gonna lie. When civilian libertarians lecture me about the military, it's like listening to a Keynesian try to "teach" me economics. Just 'cause you read Albert Jay Nock and watched 'Lone Survivor' does NOT give you the right to be a pain-in-the-ass know-it-all intellectual. We have plenty of THOSE in academia. MILITARY ORGANIZATIONS WILL NOT DISAPPEAR IN ANARCHY; THEY WILL MERELY BE PRIVATIZED. (Furthermore, don't assume the PMC or militia in your area will be libertarian...) -8/14

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Images by the Department of Defense and National Guard Bureau and are in the public domain.

Self-government is Not the State

One concept I've slowly been exploring is the idea of government versus the idea of the state. In the theoretical libertarian anarchy, government may still exist via self-government of communities or entities in which membership is voluntary. Self-government is not the same as the state.

When you boil "self-government" down to its purest, basest form, it all comes down to the individual and his decisions to self-regulate. If a confederacy of individuals decided to ban together and all voluntarily self-regulate according to the same standards, and collaborate for projects and ventures without collective theft, then there is true self-government without there being a state.

Just because the state has hijacked the label "government" as a euphemism does not mean voluntary self-government equals the state. If the self-governing association is 100% voluntary and if the state is coercion embodied, then voluntary self-government is not the state.

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Artwork by Libertatis in the public domain

Five Libertarian Ideas #8 - Liberty Movement a house divided

Anarchists and Minarchists

I consider myself a conservative libertarian, which I suppose could be the same as a libertarian minarchist. Other conservative libertarians might be anarchists who think it's not quite time for the state to go away, while the full anarchist libertarians are waiting for the rest of us to make the final conversion. Once you go libertarian, the "left" and the "right" simply become varying degrees of communism and fascism. I can tell ya that most an-caps are cool people. Anyone who automatically gets hostile just hearing that you're "minarchist" has gone where we can't follow: past reality, into a mental state where pure theory replaces reality. –2/3

IP and plagiarism

It's hilarious when people copy and paste my status updates instead of doing the Facebook share. Folks, just because we don't believe in IP doesn't mean direct plagiarism is okay...... –2/7

Organized religion and atheism equally threaten liberty

I've seen the infighting between libertarians and am not pleased. Organized RELIGION as just as big a threat to the liberty movement as is militant ATHEISM. Christendom was a death sentence of thousands in Reformation-era Europe, as was Reason a death sentence in revolutionary France and Russia. When dogma pollutes principles from EITHER direction, "life" and "liberty" become empty rhetoric. –2/10

Liberty: A house divided

The liberty movement is MUCH more divided than the standard "left" and "right". Leftists and neocons tend to agree with each other far more often because each group follows its standard line of dogma, hardly ever thinking for themselves to seriously question the prevailing dogma. In the liberty movement, people really do think independently, which is why we have lots of libertarians disagreeing on many details. Despite this, WE SET ASIDE THE SMALL STUFF TO WORK FOR THE BIG PICTURE. –2/13

Denouncing Lincoln on Facebook makes you look like a bigot

They've got a point. We need to keep in mind that, despite what we know, Lincoln is still one of the most beloved leaders in American history. Instead of just bashing Lincoln, come up with other 1860s Republicans, or even Southerners, who were anti-slavery but pro-liberty (in a libertarian context)...  If we do it tactfully, like saying, "Honestly, I've learned some things about Lincoln that kind of made me lose respect for him" then we may make inroads. If we jump out and just start shouting "LINCOLN WAS EVIL!!!" then please see [the title heading for this idea]. –2/17

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U.S./Tea Party flag image in the public domain.

Five Libertarian Ideas #7 - A new Pledge of Allegiance??? Romney vs Rand

A new Pledge of Allegiance?

I like my version of the pledge better: I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and to the preservation of the rights and liberties guaranteed therein. –1/23

Minimal state verses totalitarian state

My friends in the liberty movement know I'm not an anarchist, but they know I agree with many #libertarian anarchist ideas because they're first and foremost libertarian ideas. However, many anarchists have told me that the "minimal state" is just as dangerous as the totalitarian state. I have to disagree there for one (of several) reason(s): I can go out in public and talk about what a fool President Obama is, whereas if I insulted Kim Jong Un's name in North Korea, I'd be up against a firing squad faster than I can say "I'm a sovereign individual." –1/25

2014 State of the Union

Folks, he flat out said he's doing what he wants without consulting Congress. I'm neither surprised nor horrified. I was kind of expecting it anyway. Most second-term Presidents do whatever the hell they want anyway. I'm just gonna keep doing what I want, which is libertarian/conservative activism. Constitution, liberty, star-spangled patriot black-and-yellow awesomeness. Ron Paul! –1/28

Bonus thought: I'm amused that the center of attention at the State of the Union was NOT the President, but Duck Commander. –1/29

Romney vs Rand? Romney supporters joining the Paul camp

This week I've had online exchanges with modern conservatives (supporting Romney in 2012) who are frustrated enough with Republican leadership. For the FIRST time, THEY SUPPORT THE PAULS. It's happening!!!! I know it's all going according to Ron and Rand's plans, but after so many setbacks for the movement, it's freaking awesome to have one's faith rewarded. –1/29

What ‘conservatism’ means

The theory behind conservatism is to CONSERVE, ultimately preserving a laissez-faire way of life so our children can grow up without dependence on a monolithic state. This brand of conservatism was all but extinct, but Ron Paul has managed to light brush fires in people's minds that are giving old-school conservatism and new-school libertarianism a fighting chance in this country. –2/2

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Porcupine Gadsden flag by "Kowulz" and used via CC BY-SA 3.0 license.  Ron and Rand photo by Gage Skidmore and used via CC BY-SA 2.0 license.  Both images obtained from Wikimedia Commons.