Sappho@SRI-NIC.ARPA (08/23/86)
Did this Murray Rothbard character actually say that he regarded the PLO and the Soviet Union as benign? And that the US was a worse threat to world peace? Or did he simply advocate dovish policies toward them, leading you to believe he must see them sympathetically? I don't approve of Soviet foreign policy, but I don't want to become like them in order to fight them. The libertarians I have known have also had principles they were not willing to compromise in order to protect the US from the Soviets, and so I have found myself working together with both libertarians and socialists on anti-conscription work. I see no inconsistency there. And, while the regimes we oppose in our defense of "freedom" throughout the world are fairly unfree, I question whether our method of opposing them really supports freedom. We support groups which are also oppressive of human rights in places where it is often doubtful that the people of that country wish us there, on the grounds that these regimes are less unfree than the ones we are opposing. Sometimes they are, but not always. In order to support these regimes or groups of "freedom fighters", we take money by force from everyone in the country, sometimes spy on people who oppose these policies, and sometimes draft young men to go off and fight in some war. Clearly a foreign policy which was based on a consistent defense of liberty would look quite different from what our foreign policy has been so far, even if it were based on the same assumptions about the Soviet Union. Lynn Gazis sappho@sri-nic ------- -------