Joe Stack and Nonviolent Civil Disobedience
Free Talk Live
18 February 2010
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Initial Comments by Alexander S. Peak
The hosts of Free Talk Live, perhaps the most popular libertarian radio programme available today, were commenting on the Joe Stack incident on Thursday, 18 February 2010. Joseph Andrew Stack was a confused man who thought the only way to spark meaningful change is through the use of aggression.
Aggression is defined as the initiation of force or fraud against the person or justly-acquired property of someone else. Libertarianism, the fastest-growing ideology in America today, is centred around the nonaggression axiom, which states that no person or group of persons has the legitimate authority to initiate force or fraud against the person or justly-acquired property of anyone else.
The libertarian position on self-defence is extremely varied. While Objectivists like Ayn Rand argue that it is one’s moral obligation to use defensive force so as to repel attacks against one’s person or justly-acquired property, anarcho-pacifists like Robert LeFevre argue that even defensive force ought to never be used. No matter what stance one takes on defensive force, to be a libertarian, one can never support the use of aggression nor the use of excessive defensive force, where excessive defensive force is defined as force that is not in proportion to the initiated force that one is trying to repel. This is known as the principle of proportionality.
Personally, I advocate nonviolent civil disobedience, not because I believe that natural law requires pacifism (like LeFevre), but because I do not believe we can build a free society without helping the oppressors to realise that their system is built on violence.
This position appears to be shared by the hosts of Free Talk Live. Below are various quotes from the episode that was broadcasted later in the same day that Joe Stack committed his horrible act.
Warning: In the comments listed under 02:34:20, some strong language is used. Reader discretion is advised.
00:17:04
Dale Everett:
And speaking of tactics, I have a suggestion for anyone whose mind is wandering into this area. If your mind is venturing into this area of, like, my life has been so screwed over by government that I’m ready to go sacrifice myself to do something, to, you know, try to draw attention to it or, you know, scare them into behaving better, or something like that—if you’re ready to sacrifice your life, and die, right now, to accomplish something, what about devoting your life to doing some peaceful activism?
Ian Freeman:
Absolutely.
Dale Everett:
Look! If you’re ready to die, for this cause, then there’s nothing they can take from you.
00:26:04
Ian Freeman:
I like what you had to say, Dale, about, if you’re ready kill yourself over the depredations and violence of the state, then that’s the time at which you just change your priorities in life to making liberty, achieving liberty, your number one priority. However, this guy doesn’t seem to be necessarily liberty oriented.
01:46:38
Ian Freeman:
If you’ve come to the point of frustration where you’re so sick and tired of the system and the violence that it does against people that you’re willing to turn it back around against them, that’s the time when it’s time to just completely change your life—it’s time to re-dedicate your life toward advancing liberty, and getting active, doing civil disobedience, rather than going out with a bang, and leaving us a more-difficult situation afterwards.
02:34:20
Ian Freeman:
I think that you’re right. I mean, the government is stealing from people, it is aggressing against people, but, what you have is, if you respond to the government stealing by, you know, shooting up the city hall, and going in and blasting away at the mayor and the city council—
Dave (caller):
Or flying a plan into a building…
Ian Freeman:
Or whatever—
Dale Everett:
That’s their element.
Ian Freeman:
That gives them [the state] the excuse to expand their violence against us, it gives them an excuse to get bigger, it gives them the excuse to recruit more people—“See? See? There are terrorists! See? We need the federal government! See? This is exactly why you need the government, to keep you safe! Now, who wants to join up? Sign up, we’ll give you signing bonus”— I mean, you essentially play right into their hands.
Dale Everett:
When you’re violent, they know how to deal with it. When you come at them boldly doing stuff, not being passive—do not confuse being peaceful with being passive—but if you go at them doing stuff, being active, and courageous, and having the courage to do stuff and speak your mind, and, I mean—
Ian Freeman:
That’s real courage.
Dale Everett:
—they don’t know how to deal with that.
Ian Freeman:
That’s real courage, though, what you’re talking about, Dale; whereas the guy who flew the plane into the building—I mean, that took, you know, some gumption, but—
Dave (caller):
The easy way out.
Ian Freeman:
I mean it’s an easy—exactly— He doesn’t have to deal with anything tomorrow, whereas the rest of us that are doing various other tactics and other activism movements, we’re—that’s real courage because you don’t know what the consequences are necessarily going to be and they could be fairly substantial. But if we get people together, that’s when that courage can amplify. If one person—we’ve seen examples of civil disobedience, the kind of effect that one person can have, doing civil disobedience, on conversations that people are having, on the ideas that are put forth—one person can make a big difference. What happens when you’ve got dozens of people, or, more than a hundred, or few hundred…
Dale Everett:
Just the few [people in Keene, NH] that we had [engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience]—you said “fuck their shit up”—just the few that we’ve had, we are “fucking their shit up.” We are already starting to “fuck their shit up.” Not with violence!
Ian Freeman:
Right. What happens—
Dale Everett:
With peaceful activism.
Ian Freeman:
—when a hundred people go and get, you know, some sort of parking ticket, and then refuse to pay the ticket—Mark, this is something you’re doing. You get a five dollar parking ticket, you’re taking that to trial. You’re making it so they have to, in their system, schedule a trial, and go through whatever processes they need to do and spend whatever money that they need to spend, to take a parking ticket to trial. What happens when hundreds of people start doing that, what happens when hundreds of people take the Peace Ticket that I designed recently and put up at forum.freekeene.com, and send in the—
Mark Edge:
(laughing) Please go see this!
Ian Freeman:
I love the Peace Ticket. It’s great. They gave me a ticket recently for some sort of registration violation—
Dale Everett:
Mark’s really red.
Ian Freeman:
—because I was driving around with a private plate on my car, and they gave me this ticket. The ticket says, “Well, you’ve got three options, you can either, you know, send us the money and we’ll make this go away—we won’t even schedule a trial! just send us the money.” There’s that option, and then there’s an option where you can plead “not guilty,” and they’ll schedule a trial; and then you can plead, I think, “no contest”—I’m not sure what the third option is, but, you know, basically you have to plead, and so— I don’t want to plead in front of these people, I’m not going to choose one of their three options, so I made up my own ticket, called the Shire Society Peace Ticket, and it has several different options on there. It basically says you’ve been aggressed against by one of their agents, and you can check off all the different aggressions that the agent did, and you can write his name in there, and the ticket number that they originally gave you, and so I took that—we designed it over at Free Keene, people put their input into it, and we finished it up and put it up there in .pdf and .doc format, and I printed one out, filled it out, and I folded it up, and sent that in with their little envelope to the Department of Safety. So, what happens when twenty people, and two hundred people start doing, just little incidences of civil disobedience like that, their system can’t handle it, you don’t have to go to violence.
Dave (caller):
And like you always say, imagine if five percent of the fucking people did that, they wouldn’t know what to do.
02:39:42
Nick (caller):
The violence thing, I think it’s really important—very similar to the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King. You’ve gotta show the distinct contrast between the violence of the state and the people who want to be free of it that aren’t violent; and that needs to play on the news every night, and people need to see it. That’ll change, you know, the national mindframe, because I think that [by] aggressing or showing yourself [aggressing], you’re automatically demonising [yourself]; they [the state] have got to be demonised one hundred percent, and people who want freedom have to be the one hundred percent peaceful ones.
Ian Freeman:
Absolutely.
Nick (caller):
An already-free society—I don’t think that you can have freedom without a means to protect it; I think there will always be people who are going to want to control you and are willing to aggress, so, you’ve gotta have means to protect you in an already-free society. But before we get there, we need to have the same stances as, you know, the people in the civil rights [movement]—they were on the news every night, people being beaten who were completely peaceful.
Ian Freeman:
Yes.
Nick (caller):
So…
Ian Freeman:
Yep, we’ve got to take the high ground—you’re absolutely right, we’ve got to make it crystal clear who the violent ones are and who the peaceful ones are. And anyone who tries to come into this movement and who tries to murky that up with their suggestions of violence needs to be talked to, they need to be taken aside, they need to have a conversation had with them, and if they continue to be advocates for violence—even quietly, even personally, even if they’re not posting it publicly on a forum—if they continue to be advocates for violence, that’s when they need to be ostracised at that point, as far as I’m concerned. That’s how it needs to be handled.
Nick (caller):
Yeah, I agree. And I think ostracism is the best form, obviously; and public ostracism even more. And I think we can ostracise this guy although he already has perished, in a way, and at least get some of the dignity back in our movement, because I think it’s really bad—I think that most of the news stuff that I saw, they were reading specific lines from his manifesto, and I think the one that I heard multiple times was, “Who says people never die for freedom anymore?” or something like that in his manifesto. I hate that, you know?
Ian Freeman:
Yup! They poison the movement, and they’re not doing it intentionally, they’re doing it out of emotion, they’re doing it because they feel like that’s all they have, they feel like that’s the appropriate response, to fight fire with fire, and I don’t blame them for that, that’s where they are, that’s where I was once, and when you’re alone, when you feel as though you’ve been backed into a corner, you back a wild animal into a corner, and you’re not going to like the results, typically, as to what that wild animal will do at that point, and human beings are animals, and so when they feel like they’re backed into a corner—they’ve got taxes over here, regulations over here, people being thrown in jail cells, cops murdering people—it can be very overwhelming, and you could just say to yourself, “My gosh, I’ve gotta get out, this is crazy.”
The hosts go on to say that there is hope, and that when you’re living amongst many freedom-oriented people, such as those who are joining the Free State Project, it changes your perspective, gives you hope, and decreases the false sense that violence is necessary for change.
The issue of Joe Stack-style tactics versus nonviolent rebellion was also dicussed by the Free Talk Live crew on Friday, 19 February 2010; Saturday, 20 February 2010; and Monday, 22 February 2010.
