As for the Iranian President’s alleged threat to “wipe Israel off the map,” the phrase now has a life of its own, untethered to its original context. Wikipedia’s article on it, which has come out since the Flogger last discussed the topic of map-wiping, informs us that “wiped off the map” has no equivalent in Farsi. Apparently the Iranian President's words are more accurately rendered “wiped away from the page of time,” which certainly has a different tone. And there are, after all, other ways for regimes to pass into history, and affect cartography, than by being invaded.

Czechoslovakia, for example, is no more. Czechs and Slovaks parted amicably and, consequently, Czechoslovakia was “wiped off the map,” if one must put things that way. And when Serbia and Montenegro did likewise in 2003, Yugoslavia went the way of all borders. It was “wiped off the map.”

And when the Yanquis cede the Southwest to the Mexican revanchistas in a few decades (because few Euro-Americans will be left, let alone enough of them willing to inconvenience themselves, to stop it) the United States of America will, in effect, be “wiped off the map,” bloodlessly.

As an anarchocapitalist, the Flogger believes no state is justified. All states come into the world, as Marx once ludicrously described capital, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” For that reason all states morally ought to be be “wiped off the map."

To call for a world without states, or without any particular state, however, does not entail calling for initiating violence against anyone. One does not have to be an anarchocapitalist to envision and hope for a Middle East that is more just to all of its current inhabitants, one that requires no injustice against current Israelis, but one whose map does not include Israel as we know it.

On this issue, with particular reference to Israel, Jewish philosopher Michael Neumann (whose folks as he put it "suffered greatly under the Nazis") put the practical dimension of the matter in words that repay careful reading, and with them we will close:

Israel has no legitimate foundation. If Israel collapsed simply because it lost external and internal support, nothing wrong would have happened.

Nor would it be wrong to destroy Israel as a political entity if its continued existence would have even worse consequences: limited violence might be acceptable, but not genocidal warfare. Israel has no right to exist in the sense that some means of putting an end to its existence may be justified.

But in another sense, Israel does have a right to exist. Given today’s political realities no one ought to try and wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

In some ways, the more cynical Zionists are right: Israel’s foundations, even if every single allegation of ethnic cleaning is completely accurate, are no worse than those of most other states.

Virtually no state has legitimate foundations, and in that sense virtually no state has a right to exist. In theory, therefore, everyone has a right to interfere with the existence of those states.

In practice, however, such “interference” is almost never justified. The mere fact that, say, the United States is founded on genocide, massacre, and exploitation is not sufficient reason to destroy the United States. This is because the cure of destruction is worse than the disease of illegitimate existence.

In practice, wiping out a powerful state such as the U.S. or Israel would cause even more suffering than letting it survive. More important, attacks on these states would almost certainly be unsuccessful and merely add to the evil of illegitimate existence the much more serious evil of catastrophic warfare.

So Israel, like any other illegitimate state, does for all practical purposes have the right to exist. It would be wrong to try to destroy these states, not because it would be wrong if they vanished, but because the attempt would, in fact, have dreadful consequences.

Israel’s existence is tainted, not sacred, but it is protected by the same useful international conventions that allow others, in the name of peace, to retain their ill-gotten gains.

Israel’s right to exist, as Yohoshafat Farkabi points out, can be distinguished from any right “to be born” or to come into existence.

Michael Neumann, The Case against Israel, Counterpunch and AK Press, 2005, pp. 89-90.

In an op-ed piece for today’s Los Angeles Times he discusses the reaction, including stony silence, to his latest book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. According to its author the book

describes the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what blacks lived under in South Africa during apartheid. I have made it clear that the motivation is not racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize choice sites in Palestine, and then to forcefully suppress any objections from the displaced citizens.

As for racism not being a motivation: Zionism is a settler movement, and settling Jews has meant displacing Arabs. It’s hard to displace by force people who enjoy equal dignity with yourself. It’s usually necessary to dehumanize those whom you would systematically mistreat. To spell out Gates’ implicit point (not his own political commitments, I hasten to stress): if the Iranians regard Zionists as proven Muslim-dehumanizers with nukes, they might very well conclude that they need nukes of their own to neutralize the Israelis'.

Everyone understands such reasoning, even if not everyone condones it. But you’re not only not supposed to talk about it, you’re not supposed to say anything that might draw attention to it. But Gates let the cat out of the bag, and the major media will now dutifully shepherd it back in.

Anyway, it’s one thing for a leftist intellectual to shine a klieg light on the Hell that Israelis have made for Palestinians. It’s quite another for a former President to do so. And when one of them does, he can forget about receiving the customary deference shown to members of his elite club.

Before Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid even hit the stands, for instance, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi clarified that Carter “does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel,” although he once did. What happened since those days? The New Republic chief editor Martin Peretz exuded his usual Zionist elegance, calling the book "tendentious, dishonest and stupid."

In a major American newspaper and with the candor shown recently by certain tenured Ivy League professors, also beloved of Mr. Peretz, Carter observed that

It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. Very few would ever deign to visit the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City or even Bethlehem and talk to the beleaguered residents.

What is even more difficult to comprehend is why the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines in the United States exercise similar self-restraint, quite contrary to private assessments expressed quite forcefully by their correspondents in the Holy Land.

Since those for whom support of Israel has the force of religious duty control those pages, however, it is not difficult to comprehend. Carter should press his implicit question: just why does Zionist-compliant behavior enjoy privileged status in America's media and corridors of power? Other than Zionist control, what are possible explanations for the united front of silence that has greeted his book?

This week, twice, the establishment spilled a few beans in front of the American people. Will they seize upon it and start snapping out of their thralldom to the Zionist enterprise headquartered in Washington?

Probably not. They’re too busy wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth while paying with their taxes for nukes and segregation in the land of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Galilee.

Prof. Harry Elmer Barnes . . . has produced a detailed account of the events leading up to Pearl Harbor (as reported in The Tribune, Dec. 7), using documents generally unknown to the public. And what does it all come to?

That Roosevelt, while hypocritically pretending to desire peace, was actually provoking, or rather plotting, a Japanese attack, and that Roosevelt was actually driving for war against the Axis from 1939 on, and never meant his “again and again” statement of the campaign of 1940.

I say Barnes is bringing a microscope to show us an elephant. If there were naïve souls in 1940 who did not know that Roosevelt was for war, and was pulling every wire known to political manipulation to get war, their simplicity cannot now be set right by any documentary proof.

As to Pearl Harbor, it was what Roosevelt had been hoping for. If he was very pious, it was what he had been praying for. If there had been any incantation that could have summoned it up out of a witches’ cauldron, he would have been boiling newts’ heads and snakes’ eyes in the White House kitchen.

But wherefore all the moral indignation? It was Roosevelt’s highest duty to the get the United States into the war by whatever means would achieve that result. Because the American people were so stupid, ignorant, and complacent as to believe in ignoble ease and complacent sloth, Roosevelt was compelled to lie, bamboozle, and scheme behind a façade of pacifism.

He had the courage to disregard morality to save the country, and his Machiavellian policy should be given its proper meed of historical praise. (Chicago Tribune, December 20, 1967)

In Murray’s moving reminiscence of his friend, mentor, and exemplar (one cannot take in his praise of Barnes’ character and scholarly industry without being struck by how well it also fits Murray himself), he justifies the publication of Barnes’ study (which for was little more than “raking up of old coals”) as necessary for facing up to a “crucial act” of American history:

[T]his subject, far from being antiquarian, is crucial to the understanding of where we are now and how we got that way. For America’s entry into World War II was the crucial act in expanding the United States from a republic into an Empire, and in spreading that Empire throughout the world . . . . Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent system of conscription. It was the crucial act in creating a Mixed Economy run by Big Government, a system of State-Monopoly-Capitalism run by the central government in collaboration with Big Business and Big Unionism. It was the crucial act in elevating Presidential power, particularly in foreign affairs, to the role of single most despotic person in the history of the world. And finally, World War II is the last war-myth left, the myth that the Old Left clings to in pure desperation: the myth that here, at least, was a good war, here was a war in which America was in the right. World War II is the war thrown into our faces by the war-making Establishment, as it tries, in each war that we face, to wrap itself in the mantle of good and righteous World War II.

The contemporary relevance of the foregoing should be obvious.

It is a joy for me to note that instead of unprofitably collecting mold in attics, all nine issues of Left and Right are available online in facsimile. Their inexpensive (and so charmingly ugly) typeface should remind bloggers of the costs that once attached to getting one’s point-of-view past the gatekeepers. Many of those for whom the Second World War (or, for that matter, the Vietnam War) is as psychologically remote as the Siege of Troy take for granted the contemporary abundance of online content. Few today have any idea of the labor that went into laying out the pages, sending them to the printer, lugging the bound issues back to one’s home for envelope-stuffing and -labeling, carting off to the post office those that were sold, and inventorying the unsold in one’s basement (or bedroom).

To put things in perspective: whereas Murray labored over three years to physically publish Left and Right’s 59 articles and editorials for the benefit of a few hundred subscribers, Lew Rockwell now posts online an equivalent quantity and quality in a little more than a week. And reaches millions.

Let’s take a moment today not only to reflect on Roosevelt’s 65-year-old infamy and the lives it destroyed to whip Americans up into a war frenzy, but also to remember courageous men like Barnes who exposed the official murderous lies behind the first Pearl Harbor, and David Ray Griffin, who has exposed those behind the second.

But ideas are not libertarian just because they do not inspire mass murder, but merely trim the legislative power of a political party as punishment for an unpopular war. Surely the return to power of that party’s welfare-warfare twin puts such trimming in perspective.

Elsewhere in the essay, Rockwell defines “ideology” as “the ideas that people hold concerning their rights, the role of government, the idea of justice, the role of freedom, their perceptions concerning the right and wrong of public policy, and many other abstractions that can be conceptually separated from self-interest.” Since he does not lift the veil obscuring the content of that set of triumphant ideas, however, he has not given libertarians reason to celebrate.

Of course, it not hard to predict what the ideas are being dusted off. As one prominent newsmaker asked rhetorically the other day:

Would it not be more beneficial to bring the U.S. officers and soldiers home, and to spend the astronomical U.S. military expenditures in Iraq for the welfare and prosperity of the American people? . . . As you know very well, many victims of Katrina continue to suffer, and countless Americans continue to live in poverty and homelessness.

No, that’s not John Murtha or even Nancy Pelosi, but rather Iranian President Ahmadinejad Reuters in a letter to his opposite number in the District of Corruption.

When Murray Rothbard wrote that the “socialist and the libertarian . . . may favor democracy as a means of arriving at a socialist or a libertarian society” [Power and Market], he did not overstate the libertarian potential of particular elections, as Rockwell has done since November 7 (for which verdict I argued here and here). Rothbard exposed the emptiness of all of democracy’s myths, and his gifted intellectual heir and 2006 Schlarbaum Prize winner Hans-Hermann Hoppe (whom Rockwell dubs an “international treasure”) has expanded upon this critique and integrated it into a theory of democracy as the State’s preferred method of rule. (I recently posted a sampling of that theory here.)

Rockwell asserts that in “leveling a political defeat against war, a majority of voters in the last election decided to think more broadly instead of in terms of their own self-interest.” Really, what is the evidence for that comparative judgment regarding the thoughts of millions of people? In the absence of any, Rockwell surmises that, there being no war tax or draft, the costs of the Iraq war have been borne only indirectly by most and directly by relatively few. Therefore, he infers, mass opposition to the war must be based on something nobler than economic self-interest.

We are frequently told today that ideology is dead, and that voters are nothing but self-interested automatons. . . . But every so often, other and more important considerations come into play. Libertarians have every reason to celebrate when ideology trumps self-interest. If interest only were to dictate political outcomes, democracy becomes nothing but a game rigged in favor of looting and pillaging through the law. But with ideology, democracy becomes a vehicle for change.

Yes, Rothbard realizes that “[o]ne’s views of democracy . . . depend upon one’s estimates of the given circumstances.” The character of the ideology will determine the direction of the change it guides, however, and unless it is recognizably libertarian ideology, democracy will tend to resemble “a game rigged in favor of looting and pillaging through the law,” as Hoppe has taught. It is germane to note that Rockwell omits to name the interest-trumping ideology worthy of libertarian celebration.

(By the way, I don’t know anyone who describes voters as “self-interested automatons.” For me, the more organic metaphor of pigs at the trough is more apt.)

Let us hear Rockwell further on the significance of ideology:

For example, it might be in your self-interest to steal a flowerpot off your neighbor's porch when he is on vacation, but you do not do it, not only because you believe it is wrong to steal, but also because you do not want to live in a society in which property is not secure. That's ideology at work. It includes considerations of morality but also something more broad: our understanding of ideal states of social order.

Rockwell here seems to be restricting “ideology” to its libertarian instance. But such usage would mean, which Rockwell surely does not mean, that when Marxists fight for a society in which private property is not secure, they’re not acting ideologically. To consistently favor a property rights-respecting “state of social order” over the enjoyment of any short-term benefit that would violate that order characterizes only libertarian ideology. Libertarians are not necessarily more “moral” than non-libertarians—there is more to being morally responsible than favoring a long-term goal over a short-term goal when the two conflict—but sound economic reasoning informs their understanding of the relationship between a social order and the decisions of its constituent individual members.

As Rockwell acknowledges, American voters are largely bereft of such understanding, and their voting can only reflect that deficiency. I could not agree with him more than when he argues passionately for increasing the educational outreach of Austro-libertarians, organized under one roof so ably by his leadership of the Mises Institute:

This is also why education is so important to the cause of liberty. Here we are not merely talking about a professor with a chalkboard lecturing to a captive audience. We are talking about a society-wide transformation of public opinion. We need to make resources available. We need to use every means at our disposal to teach economics, raise public consciousness, instill an ethic of liberty, and draw constant attention to the reality that statism in all its forms is a destructive racket.

Until such education has “taken,” however, I’m not going to suggest that the overwhelming majority of American voters are doing anything at the polls other than advancing one or another non-libertarian ideology in the hope of getting something for nothing. Most Americans who vote know (even if they suppress that knowledge) that they are voting their neighbor’s pocketbook. Economic education is impotent to discredit egalitarianism, the polymorphic ideology that infects the value system of most voters. I will never applaud any of its victories, which is the only thing we witnessed during last month’s first week.

Slightly more than half the voters want the money now being spent on the military, not to be returned to its rightful owners, but to be spent instead on socialized medicine, just as a few years ago they wanted money that was being spent on socialized medicine to be spent on the military. Until Austro-libertarians make some serious headway in the wider culture against both of these competing preferences, the reassertion of each will only continue to alternate with that of the other in saecula saeculorum.

December is here. If no hopes attach to last month’s public auction, none can be dashed.