Guadalcanal: US Army troops on Hill 43 (Seahorse)
Posted on 11/18/2001 12:41:42 PM PST by annalex
Defense of Liberty: Two Articles On Anti-Terrorist Policy by Peikoff
Defense of Liberty: Just Intervention
The topic of national self-determination was discussed in:
Defense of Liberty: Attila In a Boeing
Defense of Liberty. National Self-Determination: An International Political Lie
This summarizes my own views.
Guadalcanal: US Army troops on Hill 43 (Seahorse)
For example, a swimmer capable of rescuing a drowning person, when no one else can render help, violates the drowning person's rights if he inacts. That is because his inaction -- not the incident that caused the vicim to fall into water -- is the immediate and wilful cause of death.
It is true that if there are two or more bystanders uniquely capable of preventing a certain injury to rights, then the duty dilutes among them.
Men drawn from all over the country man the border points. The outer lots themselves are armed to the teeth. Booby traps are everywhere. All this made the country an extremely unattractive target. And, in fact, no one has dared attack the country since Napoleon (after which the Swiss learned the principle of turning the entire country into an armed camp).
Both the French and the Germans drew up plans to attack through Switzerland in WWI. Both rejected them. Hitler never attacked even though he had the country entirely surrounded. After WWII, the country learned another lesson. Supplies are stockpiled in order to wait out a seige of many years.
The Swiss approach is to draw a line in the sand and tell the world that any attempt to cross it will be met with overwhelming force. The Swiss would never make incursions into neighboring countries, except in hot pursuit of enemy forces. This is collective self-defense. It works. The neutrality of the Swiss is respected everywhere and is almost never violated, even by non-governmental forces.
I have little disagreement with the concepts you bring up in this article. The problem is certain people equate self-defense with attacking other countries "in defense". Attacking other countries is not defense at all. It is attack.
Let's say that Israel drew a similar line in the sand. Then we might well decide to include it inside our defense perimeter. But it doesn't. It is the only country in the world which refuses to outline the boundaries it claims. This is precisely because Zionism is an expansive force which has, from the beginning, insisted on growing Israeli boundaries by force. And continues to do so today.
Therefore, including Israel inside a defensive perimeter is a contradiction in terms. Israel does not defend. It attacks. All American troubles with the rest of the world have come from our insistence on defining attack as defense.
The liberal project is to take this simple truth and distort it in three ways: assume away all knowledge that the doer has (everyone's stupid); convert the duty to inform into a duty to stop the harmful action (mandate seat belts); and attach that inflated duty to everyone (the taxpayer), rather than to the "bystanders" in a unique position to help, such as relatives or professionals.
Another security model wholly supportable by the natural law is this. The security firm identifies the security threat repeatedly coming from one particular location -- say, a camp of thieves up in the hills. The attackers always have the element of surprise on their side. The security firm recommends raiding the thieves' camp rather than going through the expense and aggravation of building up walls, getting armed to the teeth, and expecting an attack at all times. There is nothing unlawful in that policy either.
History here at FreeRepublic would suggest that annalex is not a liberal. You (and I) disagree with him that not saving someone is violating their rights, but that doesn't make him a liberal in any sense.
If Israel offered to return to the only boundaries over which it has even a smidgeon of a legal claim, those of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, this war would be over in an instant.
Even the Palestinians don't ask for this, and haven't for about 30 years. Their position is that the lands stolen in 1967 have to be returned, together with compensation for lands stolen in 1948-9. This show how far we have moved from legality to a recognition the realities of American and Israeli coups de force.
IMHO, the only reason you support this despicable notion of "attack as defense" is precisely because you support Zionism. It is also why Rand and Peikoff abandoned their principles too.
Not necessarily. Under natural law there are only individuals that carry their perimeter with them; and there are their properties that have their own perimeters. The security firm they hire may draw a perimeter where it's rightful if it thinks it is a good defensive strategy, but it doesn't have to.
The example in the article describes a contiguous area with lots inside only in order to illustrate the need for the individuals to cooperate. There is nothing sacrosanct about this large border, since only individual lots constitute rightful property.
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