When are we going to stop citing RJ Rummel?

I commend Jackson for standing up to tyrannical banksters.  I am disgusted at his treatment of the natives.

Yeah, the attitudes of the American settlers were pretty disgusting and the mass murders and relocations are of a Biblical magnitude (the Trail of Tears, for example). I was pretty disappointed when I learned about Jackson's campaigns against the Indians. The man clearly had some backbone - rare in a politician even in those days when (we suppose) American politicians were more moral and decent. But then he had to go murder Indians...

Clayton -

I wonder about the trail of tears though. Was it really that bad? Wasn't it just Indians walking from one place to another? Yes it was a government mandated migration but somehow I feel like this is something that has been historically distorted. Of all the episodes of mass death in American history how does this one distinguish itself. Who comes up with these figures of 4000 people dying? I don't have any proof, but it just doesn't really sound right. Plus wouldn't it be great for the bankers if the great bank killer of the 20th century was just a stupid brutal racist?

Sounds right to me. Whenever you have a forced march people die. You wouldn't say Bataan Death March was just Americans walking from one place to another, or that deportations in the Soviet Union were just Chechens riding a train from one place to another.

I don't know anything about the Soviet Chechen deportation, but I do know (from what I've read) that in the Bataan Death March the Japanese soldiers were whipping and knifing American troops. I thought with the Trail of Tears Jackson was basically like "Hey, you gotta start marchin, so hop to."

In ancient times, captivity was the psychological equivalent of the nuclear bomb. Rather than just killing the king and nobility, plundering all wealth and installing a foreign governor, a really powerful emperor would round up all the skilled laborers, women and healthy children and lead them off to be a slave class within the empire's homeland. All that remained behind were the dead bodies and the old and sick.

The Indians had already been trapped into a kind of captivity on their home turf but at least it was their home. The Trail of Tears was a leading into captivity and was one of the most brutal acts of the US government in its long, brutal history.

Clayton -

Everybody's 1/1th cherokee.  I've stopped buying into that myth long ago. 

But if I had any property to give the natives, or if I supported the property system in the first place, I would give some to them.

Native American Indians represented a primitive and inferior culture many of whom tried to murder en masse entire Western settlements -- men, women and children.

native american indians did not represent any single culture, so your ignorant and racist characterization has no basis in reality. As for any occurrences of aggression by tribes, you would first have to provide some details supporting your implicit assertion that the natives were not simply repelling a colonial invasion. Somehow I doubt such details will be forthcoming based on your previous behavior on this forum.

What happened in the 19th century was the emergence of Total War practiced by both sides.

are you referring to the campaign of extermination conducted by agents of the united states and the subsequent attempts at self-defense by various tribes?

At some point, the Indians were going to reliquinish their land -- it was preferable to Americans that the Spanish (in Mexico and Florida), the French (in Louisiana and Quebec) or the Russians (in Alaska) did not fill that void.

hahahaha land that is owned by people you consider to be subhuman is a "void"? Why dont you go to stormfront where you can find people who will take you seriously?

It is hypocritical that many self-aggrandizing humanitarians who lament the brutal treatment of Indians daily benefit from the act by owning property that, by your definition, belongs to Native Americans.

I dont think you understand what hypocrisy is. I should also point out that those native americans are dead, and so we cannot restore their property to them.

Your views would hold more weight if you did the right thing, by your definition, and returned the property you currently own back to its rightful owner -- Native Americans.

ok, how are we supposed to do that? Miracle them back to life?

Otherwise, you are a hypocrite in my book.  Btw, I am 1/16 native American so I will gladly take possession of anything you own when your conscious compels you to 'do the right thing' and match your rhetoric with action.

youre 15/16ths racist murderer so your claim is invalid.

I don't know anything about the Soviet Chechen deportation, but I do know (from what I've read) that in the Bataan Death March the Japanese soldiers were whipping and knifing American troops. I thought with the Trail of Tears Jackson was basically like "Hey, you gotta start marchin, so hop to."

well what if general petraeus said that to every resident of a specific cultural/racial category in, say, some county in alabama? Do you think he would say it without some troops there to enforce his word? Do you think every alabamian would just obey him?

@Centinel: Whatever shred of credibility you might have had before now has been completely destroyed. I don't understand how you think bald-faced bigotry and anti-human mores are supposed to pass for enlightened values. While even many surviving native Americans recognize the inevitability of European conquest as a result of the pitilessness of human nature and the technological superiority of the Europeans, no one who has moved beyond caveman morality would attempt to justify it as right or even indifferent. It was wrong, plain and simple. You need to do some soul-searching and shed your moral nihilism.

Clayton -

how am I going to engage in intelligent debate

dont pretend that you suddenly are interested in intelligent debate. There are plenty of substantive criticisms of your "position" that you could respond to if you wished.

against emotional vitriol like yours?

I'm sure your mother will give all kinds of shits about the names that the meanies on mises.org called you.

ANd malachi, arent you the dude who refused to cite a single objective source for your conspiracy theory that WMD are present in Iraq claiming that the CIA was behind the cover-up?

either you smoke crack daily, you were educated in public schools, or you arent even a real american, because your grasp of the english language is horrendous. You need to go back and read that thread (for the first time? You didnt appear to have read anything prior to your cowardly retreat), the cia supports my claims and you were/are the only one who mentioned conspiracy theories and cover-ups.

Forgive me, if I don't respond further to contributors who engage in this type of self-rightous invective

funny you would mention religion when we already established that your political beliefs are religion. That was a point open to intelligent debate but you are unable or unwilling. Perhaps you dont have the necessary prerequisites for intelligent debate.

Particularly those like malachi who rationalize that it is okay for him to own land in the US that was gained by murder and plunder (by his definition) because the former Native AMerican owners are dead.

Well I would be interested in any arguments to the contrary but I doubt you will be making them. Polemics dont seem to be your strong point.

maybe one day you will take Clayton's advice and perform a critical moral self-inventory. The sooner, the better, because one day, you are going to regret all the hatred and racism to which you have devoted your intellectual (using the term loosely) life.

It appears that you are citing a source that you acknowledge is not objective.

no shit. I had to tell you that like 4 times.

Furthermore, you have repeatedly questioned the credibility of the CIA

false. Are you so desperate to save face that, not only did you run, terrified from the battlefield, that you must lie about my positions in an unrelated thread? If you're not done, lets have at it. You gave up and ran, nobody did a ten-count on your prostrate body. 

yet this is your evidence that WMD are still unsecured in Iraq

another lie. That is not my source, that is evidence that corroborates my source, as I stated repeatedly. Is this all you can do? Lie to hide your shame at losing an argument ON THE INTERNET WHERE NO ONE KNOWS YOU ON A BOARDS WHERE NO ONE RESPECTS YOU HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

CIA report you cited was based on WMD uncovered or suspected  pre-2004, not present day unsecured WMD

no shit, you finally read it. Maybe if you had actually taken the time to understand my claims, you would have realized that before now. The cia report is exactly what I claimed it to be. Nothing more, nothing less.

I can't debate individuals who manufacture phantoms and conspiracy theories and become overly emotional and vitriolic when these phantoms and conspiracy theories are exposed. If you want to believe I am 'retreating' -- then so be it.

fixed it for you

Also, for the record, I am not a racist-murderer as you implied in a previous post.

Yah, I could tell you were a chickenhawk. Its irrelevant because you made a transgenerational claim based on aborigine fractional ancestry. I was simply observing that were your claim valid, the greater fraction would appear to have also inherited the guilt of past wrongdoing. Your facetious little quip was just as idiotic as the rest of your post, and I wanted you to know it. Of course, it went over your head because you are a crackhead.

@Centinel: I don't know you personally but I was in a similar position as you back before 2008, die-hard, empire-worshipping neocon. I've since realized that I was just being an ideological waterboy for the warmongers who run this country and most countries in the world. I'd strongly encourage you to ask yourself the question "How much of what I believe is the result of my own, unhampered, unmotivated investigation into truth and how much of it is influenced by what I was taught in school by professors (who can be motivated), how much of it is influenced by my relatives (who can be motivated). How much of it is the result of the peer-pressure of friends?" While there is no grand conspiracy, everyone tends to root for the ideas from which they are benefitting. The CEO of Lockheed-Martin's son is probably pro-military, pro-US empire, pro-police state, etc. Why shouldn't he be? He owes every blessing he has in life to these things.

When you "follow the money", even in personal relationships and friendships, you find that bias and motivation are a pervasive feature of human ideology. However, contrary to the postmodernists, this is not an excuse for fatalism and resignation. There is truth, there is falsity and only through a self-conscious awareness of the omnipresence of human bias and motivated belief is it possible to tease apart honest pursuit of truth from ideological propaganda masquerading as the truth.

Unless you're the son of a defense corporation CEO or working in senior position at some DC think-tank, you're not benefitting from the US empire that you're constantly defending. So, you need ask yourself whether you're standing for what you believe or whether you're carrying water for somebody else.

Clayton -

@Centinel: I don't do psychoanalysis. I've simply noticed some similarities between your positions and my positions pre-2008. My admonitions are friendly invitations, not condescending reprimands, I hope you'll take them that way and do with them what you like.

As for why democratic peace theory is wrong, I'd recommend you take a look at Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed. The central thesis of his book is that all governments without exception are aggressive and expansionary - monarchies, tyrannies, republics, democracies, whatever - and if there is a difference between monarchy and democracy it is that the temporary-care-takes/rulers of democracies have much higher time preference than monarchs, resulting in more rapacious plundering of the public's wealth and eventual siphoning of the country's entire capital stock. Furthermore, contrary to the DPT's contention that more liberal governments (domestic policy) have more liberal foreign policy, Hoppe shows that precisely the opposite is the case. The more liberal a government, the more war-like and expansionary it is precisely because of the greater resources at its disposal due to the greater economic prosperity of the public resulting from the government's liberal domestic policies.

So, DPT is backwards and upside-down. These conclusions can be reached from a praxeological approach. Data such as a list of democratic states is problematic for two reasons... first, because the data are subject to innumerable arbitrary judgments in what counts as a democracy or what counts as war, and so on, and second because an empirical observation is only true until it is not. Correlation is not causation... even if it were true that "no democracy has ever gone to war with another democracy", it still wouldn't give us any reason to believe that no democracy ever will go to war with a democracy. There is no causal theory, just a correlation.

Finally, as another poster noted above, it is not true at all that no democracy has gone to war with another democracy. France (republic) went to war with Germany (republic) just 80 years ago. That's two major representative governments engaged in total war. You can't wiggle out by saying "oh, but Germany wasn't a democracy at the time" because this is moving the goal-posts... any modern democracy could also vote in an Enabling Act for a charismatic leader and then become a warring ex-democracy within a year or two.

Clayton -

Centinel, you know full well that we don't trust you. It's that simple. So why should any of us accept "challenges" from such as you?

Notice how in his "challenge" he did not offer to put up his own money.  He made it so that if Clayton were right he would only take the $1000 he put up plus interest....to even be worth consideration it should have been $2000 plus interest - to even be worth considering.

@Centinel: I don't agree that wagers are a useful way to settle academic disputes. Not all questions can be resolved by academic methods (actually, most cannot be) and for these questions an entrepreneurial approach is the correct approach. However, for those questions which can be resolved by academic methods (deduction, induction, etc.), wagers and "putting your money where your mouth is" just don't make sense.

Complex social questions such as the tendency toward peace or war of different forms of government cannot be resolved by any empirical method, let alone wagering or venturing. The praxeological method, however, provides the ability to answer a difficult question such as "can a democratic government go to war with another democratic government or will democratic governments tend to remain at peace with one another?" and the answer is "yes, they can go to war and they are every bit as aggressive as any other form of government."

Finally, your wager is flawed. What constitutes war? Only an official declaration of war by the legislative body of the country and a subsequent standoff of tanks across the border or a de facto state of war with UAV airstrikes, black ops infiltration and regime destabilization by intelligence services?

Clayton -

@gotlucky: Nice catch. Never trust a neocon... :-P

Clayton -

Refusal to accept an ill-defined wager exposes ideas as fraud? Centinel, try less chest-pounding and more book-reading.

Clayton -

@ Centinel

I am not in a financial position to put away $1000 for 10 years.  I have financial obligations, and frankly, even if it were a $1 bet, I'd still rather spend that on  a parking meter now than recieve $2 from you in 10 years from now.

So the only way the DPT could be wrong is if there was a war between at least two of those 'liberal democracies' in the next decade?  Non sequitur.  I think the DPT is fallacious, but I don't think those states will make war against each other in the next decade.  Having 'democracy' in common is not the only reason for peace (or war) between states.

In any case - democratic Athens made war on democratic Syracuse, so you lose.

Centinel:

IN fact, I challenge Hoppe to put his money where his mouth is and deposit $10,000 into a similar fund from which interested parties can vote whether ANY these nations will engage in war with one another in the next 10 years.

I doubt Hoppe would take this bet, as he has already attributed this peace to the fact that "... an imperialist power such as the United States does not let its various colonial parts go to war against each other." 

Longer excerpt in case you're interested:

 

What appears to be standing in the way of peace and civilization then is, above all, the state and democracy; and specifically, of course, the world's model democracy the United States. But, ironically, if not surprisingly, it is precisely the United States which claims that it is the solution to the quest for peace. The reason for this claim is the so-called doctrine of democratic peace, which goes back to the days of Woodrow Wilson and WWI, and has been revived in recent years by George Bush and his neoconservative advisors. Now this theory of democratic peace claims the following: 

 

First: democracies do not go to war against each other.

 

Second: hence, in order to create lasting peace, the entire world must be made democratic. 

 

And, as a largely unstated corollary, three: today, many states are not democratic and resist internal democratic reform. 

 

Fourth: hence, war most be waged on those states in order to convert them to democracy and thus create lasting peace.

 

Now I do not have the patience for a full critique of this theory. But I shall provide a brief critique at least of the theory's premise, and of its final conclusion.

 

First thing: do democracies not go to war against each other?

 

Since almost no democracies existed before the 20th century, the answer must obviously be found within the last hundred years or so. And in fact, the bulk of the evidence that is offered in favor of this thesis is that the countries of Western Europe have not gone to war against each other in the post-WWII era. Likewise, in the Pacific region, Japan and South Korea have not warred against each other.

 

Now does this evidence prove the case? The democratic peace theorists obviously think so. As they see it, there are plenty of cases on which they can build their case. Germany did not war against France, Italy and England; France did not war against Spain, Italy and Belgium, and moreover there are pemutations involved also; Germany did not attack France and France did not attack Germany. 

Thus we have seeemingly dozens of confirmations and not a single counter example for more than 60 years - but, do we really have that?

 

And the answer is of course no. What we actually have is no more than one single case. With the end of WWII, all of Western Europe and Japan and Korea in the Pacific region became part of the United States empire as indicated by the presence of United States troops practically everywhere in these countries. 

 

What the post-WWII period of peace then proves is not that democracies do not go to war against each other, but that an imperialist power such as the United States did not let its various colonial parts go to war against each other. (You also did not see, by the way, any wars breaking out between all those countires that were dominated by the Soviet Union as long as the Soviet empire existed, from which we also do not draw the conclusion that communist dictatorships under Russian control do not go to war against each other so because of that we have to introduce something like this.)

 

Second point is, what about democracy as a solution to anything?

 

First point, the theory involves a conceptual conflation of democracy and liberty or freedom that one can only call scandalous. The foundation of liberty is private property. And private or exclusive property is incompatible with democracy which is nothing else but majority rule. Democracy is a soft variant of communism. And rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else but this.

 

Second, the theory of democratic peace distinguishes only between democracy and non-democracy - which it all summarily labels as "dictatorships." Everything that is not a democracy is a dictatorship for them. Thus not only disappear all aristocratic republican regimes from its view, but also all traditional monarchies. They all are equated with dictatorships a la Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. In fact however, traditional monarchies have little in common with dictatorships. Monarchies are the semi-organic outgrowth of hierarchically structured natural stateless societies. Kings are the heads of extended families, tribes and nations. They commmand a great deal of voluntarily acknowledged authority which was accumulated over many generations. And it is within the framework of such orders that liberalism, in the European sense, first developed and flourished. In contrast, democracies are egalitarian in outlook. Characteristically, the transition from monarchical age to the democratic age beginning in the second half of the 19th century, has seen the steady decline of liberal parties (again, in the European sense of the term liberal) and a corresponding strengthening of socialists of all stripes. Democracy and socialism go hand in hand.

 

Third, it follows from this that the view democratic peace theorists have of conflagrations such as WWI must be considered to be grotesque. For them, WWI was essentially a war of democracy against dictatorship, and hence it was progressive, peace-enhancing, and ultimately a justified war. 

 

In fact however, matters are very different. To be sure, pre-WWI Germany and Austria may not have been as democratic as England or the United States, but Germany and Austria were not dictatorships but increasingly emasculated monarchies and as such arguably as liberal, if not moreso, than their counterparts the United States and England. For instance, in the United States anti-war proponents were jailed. The German language was essentially otulawed and citizens of German descent were harassed. Nothing comparable occurred in Austria and Germany at that time. 

 

In any case however, the result of the crusade to make the world safe for democracy was less liberal than what had existed before and the Versailles peace dictate precipitated, as we all know, WWII. Not only did state power grow faster after wwI - after the democratization taking place - then before; in particular, the treatment of minorities deterioriated in the democratized post-wwI period. In the newly founded Czechoslovkia for instance, the Germans were systematically mistreated until they were finally expelled by the millions and butchered by the tens of thosuands after WWII by the majority Czechs. Nothing remotely comparable had happened to the Czechs during the Hapsburg reign, for instance. And the sitaution regarding the relations between Germans and South Slavs in the pre-war Austria vs. post-war Yugoslavia was quite similar. Democracy then - and this is something that Mises recognized in his 1919 book on Nation, Economy and State - democracy does not work in multi-ethnic societies. It does not create peace there but promotes conflict and has potentially genocidal tendencies. 

 

Fourth, the democratic peace theorists claim that democracy is a stable equilibrium. This has been stated most clearly by Francis Fukuyama who labeled the new democratic world order as the "end of history." However, evidence exists that this claim is patently wrong. On purely theoretical grounds - how can democracy be an equilbrium if it is possible that democracy can be transformed democratically into a dictatorship? That is, a system which is considered to be not stable. The answer is that makes of course no sense whatsoever. 

 

In addition, empirically democracies are anything but stable. As indicated before, in multi-culutural societies, democracy regularly leads to the oppression or even expulsion or extermination of minorities. That seems to be hardly a peaceful equilibrium. And in homogenous societies, democracy regularly leads to class warfare, which leads to economic crises, which leads to dictatorship. 

 

Think for example, of the post-czarist Russia, or of post-WWI Italy, or of Weimar Germany, or of Spain or Portugal, or in more recent times of Greece, Turkey, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, and Pakistan. Not only is this correlation between democracy and dictatorship troublesome for democratic peace theorists; worse they must face the fact that the dictatorships emerging from crises of democracy are not always worse, from a libertarian point of view, than what would have resulted otherwise. Cases can be cited where dictatorships were preferable. Think of Italy and Mussolini - definitely preferable for having a democratically established communist Italy. Or Spain and Franco. 

 

In addition, how is one to square the advocacy of democracy with the fact that dictators, quite unlike kings, who owe their rank to an accident of birth, are often favorites of the masses, and in this sense, highly democratic? Just think of Lenin and Stalin, who were certainly more democratic than Czar Nicholas II, or think of Hitler who was definitely  more democratic than Kaiser Wilhelm, or Franz Joseph. 

 

Now according to the democratic peace theorists then, it would seem that we are supposed to war against foreign dictators, whether kings or demagogues, in order to install democracies, which then turn into modern dictatorships, until finally, one supposes, the United States itself has turned into a dictatorship owing to the growth of internal state power, which results from endless emergencies engendered by foreign wars. 

 

Now better I dare say to heed the advice of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and instead of aiming to make the world safe for democracy, we try making it safe from democracy, everywhere but most importantly of course in the United States. 

 

Now after this excursion into the theory of democratic peace, I am back to the proposition that there is no greater threat to lasting peace than the democratic state and in particular, the United States.

 

Aristippus:

So the only way the DPT could be wrong is if there was a war between at least two of those 'liberal democracies' in the next decade?  Non sequitur.  I think the DPT is fallacious, but I don't think those states will make war against each other in the next decade.  Having 'democracy' in common is not the only reason for peace (or war) between states.

In any case - democratic Athens made war on democratic Syracuse, so you lose.

If Centinel were intellectually honest, he wouldn't even call it the "Democratic Peace Theory". He'd call it the "Higher-Order Democratic Peace Theory" since his claim is that only "higher-order democracies" don't go to war with each other. Of course, he hasn't bothered to explain just what in the world he means by that term!

Centinel:

@clayton

your passivity and lack of confidence  is palpable.

The wager's specifics have no been outlined, hence they can't be ill-defined.  The only thing ill defined is your ideological beliefs.

Again, I challenge you to accept this free market wager if you have confidence in your ideological beliefs.

Again, you find a 3rd party to hold the funds until the expiration date.

Again, you define the criteria that constitute war or better yet lets find a reputable third party authority to identify the criteria.

This is a challenge.

Match your rhetoric with substantive action or be exposed as a fraud!

Your desperation is palpable.

Clayton's refusal to accept your wager in no way means he necessarily lacks confidence in his beliefs. I submit that this whole wager thing is a giant red herring - a desperate attempt to distract the rest of us from the intellectual bankruptcy of your "Democratic Peace Theory". As I'm sure you're well aware, I already revealed this in a previous post. I'm not surprised that you haven't responded. But let's see if I can play your little game.

I hereby challenge you to respond to my post in full. Match your rhetoric with substantive action or be exposed as a fraud!

So the only way the DPT could be wrong is if there was a war between at least two of those 'liberal democracies' in the next decade?  Non sequitur.  I think the DPT is fallacious, but I don't think those states will make war against each other in the next decade.  Having 'democracy' in common is not the only reason for peace (or war) between states.

In any case - democratic Athens made war on democratic Syracuse, so you lose.

+1 Aristippus

The whole methodology is shot through with holes big enough to sail an oil tanker through. Imperial hegemony and colonial subjugation are good explanation for the low likelihood of war in the immediate future between most of the states in Centinel's list. I bet Texas won't be going to war with California any time soon... but that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Texas and California are liberal democracies and has everything to do with the fact that both governments are the tamed subjects of Washington, DC.

I think that France and Germany (WWII) also falsify the claims of DPT, unless the DPT theorist wants to mount wheels on his goalposts.

Clayton -

Brother, and I'm called a troll?  anyways, just for the record, besides superior technology, and a more centralized invasionary effort, the big star of the European conquest was unquestionably disease.  Imagine if some phenomena you couldn't explain concurring with the arrival of strange foreigners wiped out 95% of everyone you know.  I know I'd despair and likely roll over.