Eric S. Raymond explains how someone of libertarian persuasion can sensibly support a government initiated war. I agree with him.
This particular view is a minority one in the Home Education community, or at least certainly the vocal part of it and the groups with which I am personally familiar. The most commonplace HE anti-war position does not result from the same anxieties that a anti-statist proponent is likely to express, but would be the end result of anti-capitalist, anti-American or pacifist inclinations.
I find it hard not to sympathize. War is horrid. I take the position I do because I believe the alternative to be worse.
3 comments:
You wrote "I find it hard not to sympathize. War is horrid. I take the position I do because I believe the alternative to be worse"
How strange you might think, a pacifist (in the article) in favour of the war. Not necessarily. I am not a pacifist, but am opposed to the war in Iraq on the grounds that it was to attack a sovereign country who had not attacked us, without the consent of the people and by the use of lies to support the cause. This makes us the aggressors in a war which is fast becoming a religious war, an evil thing, and falling into the hands of these extremists.
I wonder what is the alternative you think would have happened if we did not have this war with Iraq? What about the other Muslim countries with extremist preachers and schooling systems which hate us, such as the Saudi one. Should we declare war on/attack them?
Hi Barbara,
I really do find it a very, very hard one to call.
The thing is, I now believe that whilst that UK government may indeed have sexed up the facts about WMD, that at that time, they genuinely did think that Saddam represented a threat to the Western World. He had repeatedly demonstrated his belligerent nature in the past, and his brinkmanship had given the intelligence services very good cause to believe that he did have WMD.
Incidentally, I also believe that the notion of sovereign states should come second to the notion of respect for human nature and that if a totalitarian state routinely screws it's population, other countries would be right to consider intervention to prevent this from occuring.
We have certainly presented ourselves with a new set of problems, but I don't think that we can kid ourselves that we didn't have a serious problem in the first place. The war against the west by an aggressive Islamic political ideology was already underway. Given Saddam's history of aggression towards other countries, we could not take this combination lightly and we are now finding that it is indeed the case that our enemies' even very informal friends, were indeed our enemies.
Thanks for reply. I agree we had a serious problem already. Events have certainly shown how close we already were to a religious war. Uncertain times for us all whatever we intitially thought about the war on Iraq.
I think the time for mindlessly enjoying the benefits of western civilisation is slipping away for the time to buck up and get thinking!
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