Consensual Exchange Breeds Empathy

The antiwar, or positively pro-peace, movement is still alive. The Old Left, the Old Right, and the Libertarian writers at antiwar.com help stoke brushfires of peace in the minds of men. Last Sunday, after church, I had the supreme delight of attending an antiwar event. It was hosted by downtown L.A.'s ever vibrant The Last Book Store. The Last Book Store is a bastion of words, radical authors, and local artists. If I may digress, their upstairs area alone has over 100,000 books each for the price of 1 Federal Reserve Note. Go there, and buy books. The Nation Institute writing fellow, prolific peacenik, and documentarian Jeremy Scahill was giving a talk on his new book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. Also, the subsequent documentary similarly entitled Dirty Wars.

His work illuminates the darkness that Obama, and his administration, would like to shroud our eyes in. Scahill's flashlight on the State reveals an indiscriminate murderer of women and children. He shows that the so-called cleanly and targeted assassinations of Al-Qaeda "leaders", are verily dirty and international-treaty-breaking cluster bombs of unknown tribesmen. His qualitative research is legion. He tells us stories of people who had never even heard of America or the Pacific Ocean, but now want to see its decimation. This is the sad conflation of country and the State. The actions of the State bear blowback on the people in our country. The entirety of many Yemeni experiences are summed in the wanton explosion and dismemberment of neighbors, parents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, siblings, and grandparents. Imagine if Chinese troops severed the heads of your family members in broad daylight. Then imagine that these forces claim to be the victims, when you retaliate. Please, let the word empathy hover in your mind. How would you feel?

I am reminded of the pejorative use of the term isolationist. Often against, the greatest statesman that has ever lived, Doctor Ronald Paul. Warmongers slam their war drums with the grace of an inebriated Tasmanian Devil. The terms they propagate are inconsistent. What does left mean? What does right mean? Especially, when both survive by ceding power to perennial warfare and State cheese. Early 20th century writer Randolph Bourne tells no lie when he says

war is the health of the State.

An isolationist would prevent, prohibit, encumber, restrict, hamper, impede, or invade the consensual exchange betwixt people from sundry global neighborhoods. Republicrats promulgate policies of this flair all the time. The peacenik should promulgate more consensual exchange, never less. We don't want to be insulated or isolated from our sistren in Yemen. We want to get to know our sister, and see what mutual aid she may join us in. Ron Paul calls this position noninterventionism. That is a slimsy, flaccid, and disemboweled symbol for this idea. If we must use negation, we should call it noninvasionism. When the State hampers consensual exchange, the State is committing an invasion. When speaking affirmatively of our foreign policy concerns, we should say we want peace and prosperity.

Furthermore, we must end the State.


Post Scriptum:

Radio host Scott Horton has lovely discussions with guests on this subject often. Check out this interview with Jeremy Scahill. Peep his whole archive.