Vol. 8.13, January 1976

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME VIII, NO. 13	JANUARY, 1976	US-ISSN0047-4517

U.S. Out Of Angola!

Vietnam, apparently, was not enough. The Ford Administration, driven by the need to save face for Henry Kissinger and perhaps by the looming threat of Ronald Reagan, is playing with fire and with the possibility of another Vietnam horror. This year’s candidate for counter-revolutionary bloodletting is Angola, an even more irrational area than Vietnam for the U.S. to intervene on behalf of the “free world.” To make a show of force for Ford-Kissinger, to prove their “decisiveness”, Kissinger is even willing to jeopardize his own tentative steps toward detente with the Soviets. In the course of heating up Angola, the egregious and monstrous Pat Moynihan, the thinking man’s Scoop Jackson, even trotted out the old Franklin Roosevelt canard about German (now Russian) “plans” to use Angola as a jumping-off point to invade Brazil, a hop-skip-and-jump across the Atlantic, and then, presumably, it’s on to Miami. (It is instructive that National Review has just endorsed Moynihan for the Democratic nomination for President — thus showing how high a value NR places on the free market when the trumpet sounds for international war.)

To understand the Angolan Caper, we must grasp the central political fact of the African Continent: namely, that none of the African countries are genuine “countries” at all. They were simply geographical districts carved out for the convenience of Western imperialism (British, French, Belgians, and Portuguese). Before the advent of Western imperialism in the late nineteenth century, there were no such “countries” in Africa, or, rather, the national units coincided with the numerous and disparate African tribes, separate entities with nothing, certainly not nationality, in common. Western imperialism carved up Africa for its own convenience, and the colonies thus created paid no regard to tribal divisions or realities. Hence, a given “colony” would forcibly include a myriad of separate tribes, and also place artificial frontier barriers athwart the territory of a given tribe, thus artificially sundering tribal entities. Throughout the twentieth century, such areas as “Angola” were administered as one unit by the imperial power, but this scarcely sufficed to make them one genuine nation.

A complicating factor in this equation was the fact that the imperial power generally trained a small minority of African natives as a comprador elite to administer the country under the aegis of the imperial masters. Often, this native elite was trained in universities of the home country, and, Western universities being what they are, they there imbibed Fabian and Marxian socialist ideology. Superficially, one might think that this socialism would run counter to the interests of the imperial power, but that was only the case “externally”, i.e. as the native elite began to agitate for ouster of imperial rule. For internally, the socialist ideology coexisted very cozily with the imperialists’ desire to centralize the country, and to exploit the native population for the benefit of the administrative State authorities. Generally, this also meant the development in each country of the administrative center as a capital city, a “parasite city” in Lewis Mumford’s sense, devoted to coercing and exploiting the native rural peasantry for its own benefit. Such parasite cities, centers of administration and military rule such as Accra (or Washington, D.C.), contrast starkly with productive cities which rest on commerce, industry, and market exchange. In Africa, the parasite urban center lived off taxation and control of the powerless, uneducated but productive, native peasantry.

When the weakened Western empires began to withdraw from Africa after World War II, they naturally retained the artificial central government structure, and simply turned it over to the existing, educated, socialist native elite. Thus, imperialism’s parting legacy to Africa was to insure generations of exploitation of the native tribes by the new power elite in charge of the parasitic urban centers. Hence, the “smoothness” of the typical transition to native rule.

Thus, it is no wonder that the United States, neo-imperialist heir to Western imperialisms, and possessed of an abiding counter-revolutionary horror at any “instability” or “disintegration” in countries abroad, should place its overt and covert might behind any existing central state in Africa. In the Congo struggles, for example, the U.S., wielding the covert might of the CIA, fiercely combatted the tribally-based Katanga secession movement of Moise Tshombe, and assured the coming to power in an artificially centralized Congo (now Zaire) of the military dictator, General Mobutu. Neither could the U.S., in its zeal to abet the suppression of the Katanga secession movement, use the old alibi of “fighting Communism”, for the Katangese were undoubtedly the most devoted to free enterprise of any group in black Africa.

Before the departure of the Western empires, of course, the United States was wholeheartedly behind the maintenance of imperial rule. Such was the case in Portuguese Angola, where the U.S. aided Portugal in its vain attempt to suppress the various guerrilla struggles to oust Portuguese rule. Ironically, the earliest guerrilla war in Angola was conducted by Holden Roberto and his National Front (FNLA). Ironically, because while Roberto and the FNLA are now held up by American warhawks as “guardians of the free world”, it was not very long ago that the pages of National Review, Human Events, and other rightist organs were filled with indignant charges against Roberto and his legions as Commies and as rapists of fair white Portuguese women. The FNLA are just as “Communist” now as they ever were (not very much, except that they remain statists and militarists), and the rape presumably still continues, if there are any Portuguese left in Northern Angola. Autre temps, autre moeurs, for presumably all other considerations must go by the board in reviving up a confrontation with the Russians.

This time, in Angola, the imperial power was a Portugal whose new leftist government wanted out of its empire fast, and so the transition was not the usual smooth one, and three armed guerrilla movements are contending for power. It is no accident that FNLA power is exclusively in the North, for it is basically a tribal movement of the Bakongo tribe, the same ethnic group that populates western Zaire, and which now dominates and runs that country. In fact, Bakongo chief Roberto is the brother-in-law of the U.S.-CIA-allied dictator Mobutu, and Roberto himself, as well as his kinsman, has long been on the regular CIA payroll. Hence, Roberto’s sudden rise to “pro-American” and “free world” status in American eyes.

The FNLA, indeed, began as a strictly Bakongo tribal association in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa, Zaire), the UPNA (Union of Northern Angolan People) in the mid-1950’s. Trying hard for Angolan national status, it added a few neighboring tribes several years later, dropping the “Northern” from its name, and added a few more in 1962 to achieve its present title.

The following year, the FNLA, feeling its oats as the leading guerrilla movement in Angola, formed an exile government, the GRAE (the Revolutionary Government of Angola in Exile), which was recognized as the legitimate Angolan government by the other African countries. However, this idyll collapsed the next year, when Dr. Jonas Savimbi broke off from GRAE, perceptively accusing it of American connections. Savimbi, a colorful character whose trans-ideological guerrilla heroes are Che Guevara and General George Grivas (the late rightist head of the Cypriote guerrilla movement EOKA), soon formed another guerrilla movement, UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Savimbi’s movement was also tribal, based on the Ovimbundu tribe of southern Angola. It is again no accident that, in the post-Portuguese period, Savimbi and UNITA now control the southern portion of the country.

In the meanwhile, a third grouping had formed, based on urban-educated Africans (often in Marxist Portuguese universities) in the capital city of Luanda in north-central Angola. This was the MPLA (the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola.) With its base only in Luanda, the MPLA launched an absurd urban uprising in 1961, which was quickly suppressed. Reorganized in the late 1960’s by Dr. Agostinho Neto, the MPLA became the dominant guerrilla group in 1974, as a result of the newly independent country of Zambia offering its territory as a base, and of the short-lived Tshombe regime in Zaire that same year taking revenge on the FNLA by depriving it temporarily of its traditional Zaire base.

According to the American press, the south is now controlled by a coalition of FNLA-UNITA forces, which seems to give the FNLA national rather than merely tribal status. But FNLA strength in the south is superficial, being the outgrowth of a breakaway from the MPLA in 1974 by a southern-based faction headed by Daniel Chipenda, whose forces now constitute a merely technical “FNLA” in the south.

Thus, if the U.S. had kept its hands off Angola, the country would probably have dissolved into its constituent tribal groupings, roughly consonant with the military position of the three forces now in the field. The north would be an FNLA-Bakongo territory, perhaps eventually uniting with its Zaire patrons; the south would be a territory under the control of the Savimbi-Chipenda forces based on the Ovimbundu; and probably the MPLA would be in control of Luanda and a narrow central strip stretching to the eastern border. And the three groups could have coexisted in relative peace.

Who, then, was responsible for the tragic heating up of a minor Angolan civil war into a global theatre for massive warfare and a possible general war? The U.S. has been aiding its preferred factions in Congo and Angola ever since the Congo crisis broke out in 1960, and it has recently been disclosed that Holden Roberto has been on a $10,000 annual retainer from the CIA since 1961 (New York Times, December 19, 1975). In response, the Soviets had supplied minimal aid to the MPLA. But who is primarily responsible for the massive 1975 buildup in Angola, launched after the Portuguese decision to withdraw come November 11? The Portuguese, riven between Communist and Socialist groups at home, declared neutrality between the Angolan factions. The United States has of course laid the blame on the Soviets for beginning massive aid to the MPLA in March and April of 1975. But it now turns out that it was the United States, in a secret meeting in January, 1975 of its supreme intelligence organ, the 40 Committee (headed by Kissinger), which first decided on massive aid to the FNLA and UNITA. In January, the 40 Committee decided to allow the CIA to give $300,000 secretly to Roberto. It was this decision that launched the present dangerous phase of international warfare inside Angola. As one high U.S. official admitted: “I think it’s very important. That money gave him (Roberto) a lot of extra muscle. He’d been sitting in Kinshasa for nearly ten years and all of a sudden he’s got a lot of bread — he’s beginning to do things.” (New York Times, Dec. 19).

As in most other things, the CIA is only “secret” from the American people, not from the Soviets, who have their own excellent intelligence network. Besides, the sudden accession of funds to Roberto was a clear enough signal. Hence, the Soviet airlift of arms to the MPLA in the spring, a response which in turn led to a massive American escalation of aid to the other factions, decided upon in a secret 40 Committee meeting on July 17. As a result, there occurred, in the latter half of 1975: a shipment of $14 million in cash to the U.S.-supported Angolan factions; additional cash payments by the CIA directly to Savimbi and Robert of $200,000 each per month; and a direct shipment by the CIA of arms to Angola worth $10 million — partially disguised by the CIA by being listed on the books as worth $5.4 million, and shipped indirectly through Zaire and Zambia (which had changed to support the American position.)

The massive American arms aid had an immediate impact on the Angolan fighting, and the FNLA-UNITA troops won significant gains after August. It was because of this intervention that the Soviets launched their massive airlift, and the Cubans sent thousands of troops, beginning at the end of October. A grubby and unimportant Angolan civil conflict had been escalated, thanks to U.S. intervention, into a massive international conflict with a potential for global war.

And that is by no means all. For the Ford administration has sworn that at least no American fighting men are or will be participating in the Angolan war, come what may. And yet, the respected and knowledgeable Christian Science Monitor (Jan. 2, 1976) has reported that the CIA is “recruiting American ex-servicemen, training them, dispatching them to southern Africa, contributing toward their pay (via funds for Zaire and Angola’s two pro-West factions), and providing them and the indigenous forces with light and heavy weaponry.” The Monitor added that “some 300 Americans are already operating within Angola”, largely with the UNITA forces in the south and that an equal number are ready to go as soon as the CIA provides the money, the latter troops including “American officers and men either or ‘indefinite leave’ from their special forces units in this country and the Panama Canal Zone or recently discharged under the ‘RIF’ (reduction in force) program . . .” Furthermore, over 150 of these men spent Christmas week “undergoing a refresher course at Ft. Benning, Georgia.”

On January 5, the Monitor reported that the U.S. training in this country of American veterans for mercenary operations in Angola had abruptly ceased, but that U.S. training had shifted to a European site, clearly less accessible to prying American reporters. To weaselly and guarded U.S. government denials, President Ford added his usual dumdum note: denying on January 3 that the U.S. was training any mercenaries in Angola; but of course no one had claimed that Angola was the site for training.

Finally, Senator Tunney (D., Cal.) charged on January 6 that American pilots, flying four or five missions a day, have been airlifting arms from Zaire into Angola in U.S.-built cargo planes.

Indeed, the most hopeful note in the Angolan mess is the determination of the Senate, led by Tunney, to cut off funds for American intervention. In particular, the notable Senate action of December 18 voted by 54–22 to cut off any new covert U.S. funds for military operations in Angola. The Senate action was galvanized by a decision of President Ford in December to authorize the CIA to ship a further $25 million of arms to Angola. Typically, Ford’s response to the vote was the usual interventionist blather about the “deep tragedy” this vote entailed for “all countries whose security depends on the United States” — as if the butchery of Angolans had not been greatly accelerated by U.S. intervention and escalation. Ford also added the further interventionist blather that the vote would “seriously damage the national interest of the United States.” (Just what is our “national interest” — if such a concept exists at all — in Angola?) Disturbed by indications that the Ford administration may try to evade the Senate resolution, even if passed by the House, Senators Dick Clark (D., Iowa) — who has matured greatly as an anti-interventionist leader on both Angola and the Middle East — and Clifford Case (R., N.J.) plan to introduce a resolution to cut off all money whatever from the U.S. government for any use in Angola.

The Senate resolve to oppose U.S. war machinations in Angola was stiffened greatly by the determined opposition within the State Department of its African experts — so much so that Nathaniel Davis resigned last August as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in protest against the July 17 decision. Davis and the other Africanists had urged the U.S. to avoid playing any active role in the Angolan civil war (New York Times, December 14, December 20, 1975).

One welcome feature of the Senate vote was that a few conservative Republicans broke ranks to vote in favor of the Tunney proposal: these were Garn (Utah), Helms (N.C.), Roth (Del.), and Scott (Va.)

Stung by the opposition to its covert machinations for war, the Ford administration, has come up with a diplomatic fallback line: the imposition of a coalition government of all three factions on all of Angola. Since coalition attempts have failed in the past, there is no reason to think that the U.S. will be any more successful than in the U.S. coalition attempts in Vietnam or, for that matter, in Laos — especially now that the war has escalated so gravely. The moral of this tangled tale is clear: for the U.S. to get out of Angola pronto, lock, stock, and barrel, and to abandon its secret decisions by an elite few that commit the entire country to war and intervention. To accomplish this, and for many other good and sufficient reasons, we should also abolish the CIA, root and branch.

FDR And The Isolationists

By Bruce Bartlett*

Recent revelations about the FBI’s misconduct over the long reign of J. Edgar Hoover, while clearly of interest to libertarians in general, have also cast much light on the pre-Pearl Harbor controversy over isolationism and interventionism. It seems that President Roosevelt used to have investigations run regularly on those who expressed opposition to entering World War II. This at last confirms the belief held all along by those who were the objects of interventionist smears, that the White House was involved.

We had already known, for example, that the President did not confine himself to public censure of isolationism, but brought his weight to bear in private as well. In 1939, Roosevelt wrote the following letter to Wilbur Cross, editor of the Yale Review:

Dear Wilbur:

Here is a personal protest against one of the most useful publications of our period — the Yale Review. It is based on the publication of articles by one John T. Flynn.

I love controversy — whether it be in literature, in economics, in sociology or in education. To us controversy is grand. You and I have reveled in it for many decades.

But it is your concept and mine, I think, that controversy is not merely a question of pro and con in any field of human endeavor.

Controversy, as I take it, concerns itself primarily with problems that call for answers. It is not controversy for one side to say in such a case, “I propose the following solution of the problem” and to have the other side say merely, “I am opposed to that solution.” I have watched John T. Flynn during these many years and the net answer in my mind is that he has always, with practically no exception, been destructive rather than a constructive force.

Therefore, Q.E.D., John T. Flynn should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine or national quarterly, such as the Yale Review.

Yours for construction, as ever yours,

Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It is not known what other measures Roosevelt took against Flynn. Perhaps he also had a hand in getting the New Republic’s not-so-liberal editors to unceremoniously end Flynn’s regular column, “Other People’s Money.”

What is known, and recently revealed in Wayne Cole’s heroic biography of Charles Lindbergh, is that Roosevelt went far beyond merely investigating isolationists or discouraging them from being published. He unleashed the whole apparatus of government up on them; with Lindbergh the prime target.

The nature of Roosevelt’s feeling was such that on May 20, 1940, he told Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” The next day he wrote to Henry L. Stimson: “When I read Lindbergh’s speech I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.” It must be an irony of history that Roosevelt, of all people, should accuse someone else of favoring a fascist economy when he himself had done so much to implement one here.

By 1941, with the organization of America First, the administration’s slanders against noninterventionists became the official line. Roosevelt appointed Harold Ickes to head a special cabinet committee to combat isolationism. He kept a complete file, fully indexed, on all Lindbergh’s noninterventionist speeches. Ickes publicly spoke out as well; time and again calling Lindbergh and other isolationists Nazis and fellow-travellers. On April 13, 1941, for example, he said that Lindbergh was “the first American to raise aloft the standard of pro-Naziism:” that the America First Committee be renamed the “America Next” Committee; and that the committee was made up of “antidemocrats, appeasers, labor baiters, and anti-Semites.”

To their credit, the isolationists were able to maintain their integrity and even gain strength. By November, 1941, with the big fight over repeal of the Neutrality Acts in full swing and a probable isolationist victory in sight, Roosevelt asked the Attorney General “about the possibility of a Grand Jury investigation of the money sources behind the America First Committee.”

To his great relief, however, and perhaps even due to his scheming, Roosevelt welcomed the attack on Pearl Harbor. It solved all his problems for him and smashed the noninterventionists. But Roosevelt could be petty and did not soon forget his enemies. When Lindbergh volunteered his services for the war Roosevelt personally made sure that they would not be accepted; in spite of the fact that Lindbergh was one of the world’s greatest aviators and experts on all aspects of aviation, a precious commodity in a war that was to be decided in the air. Roosevelt also made his petty vindictiveness felt against those of far less importance than Lindbergh in the infamous mass sedition trial. This was obviously intended as a warning to everyone that criticism of the administration’s interventionism would not be tolerated after the war either.

The isolationists made a brief revival when the truth about Pearl Harbor began to leak out and Congress launched a full investigation of the subject. However, President Truman had no desire or intention of allowing this to become a vehicle for the noninterventionists and made sure that numerous roadblocks were placed in the path of the committee. As he put it in a letter to Senator Harley Kilgore: “The objective of the isolationists still is to smear the Roosevelt Administration and, if possible, I am not going to let it happen.”

His fears were not really justified. With the defeat of such isolationist stalwarts as Senators Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye, the death of Hiram Johnson, and the reversal of Senator Vandenberg, the core of the isolationist movement in Congress was gone. Only Senator Taft was left with enough stature to effectively oppose intervention, and he proved to be a lone voice.

The pettiness continued long after complete victory by the interventionists had been won. Revisionist historians like Charles A. Beard were denied access to government archives while administration hacks like Herbert Feis were given full access. This policy continued for a quarter century and was only broken by the successive shocks of Vietnam, Watergate, and now, the CIA and FBI scandals. We should simply beware of thinking that these are unique or recent indiscretions. They are in the nature of big government and will never stop so long as it exists.

*Mr. Bartlett, a fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies at Menlo Park, Calif., is a doctoral candidate in history at Georgetown University.

Right-Wing Libertarians
And The Cold War

By Joseph R. Stromberg*

America’s foreign policy of perpetual counterrevolutionary intervention began officially with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine on March 12, 1947. In a paradoxical reversal of common stereotypes initial opposition to that policy came from an amorphous coalition of Left and Right embracing Senators Claude Pepper (D., Fla.) and Robert Taft (R., Ohio). The left-wing critics are generally discounted as naive or Russophile Wallaceites, while the rightists are written off as nostalgic “isolationists” unable to come to terms with new realities. Only recently, with the rise of Cold War revisionism and the failure of “containment” in Indo-China, has there been much interest in what opponents of Cold War Liberal “realism” had to say.

The arguments of right-wing non-interventionists are in fact quite striking. At a time when prominent Liberals in government and the press were calling for universal military training and massive expenditures for unlimited foreign commitments, a number of right-wing Congressmen and writers vigorously opposed the Truman policies. Unimpressed with America’s new-found imperial “responsibilities,” they attacked intervention and executive supremacy, predicting perpetual war, centralization, inflation and a permanent war economy.

But this was not the only tendency on the Right. From the outset, the China Lobby supported the Cold War, only insisting that Chiang Kai-shek be given his due. Gradually, bellicose anticommunism triumphed over “isolationism,” and elements William G. Carleton has aptly termed “crypto-imperialist” came into their own. Accepting the Cold War Liberal premise of a monolithic communist menace, often quite eagerly, the Right ultimately exceeded the militancy of its mentors and demanded “total victory” over communism. By the mid-fifties “isolationism” was the position of an inconsequential minority, but reappeared in the sixties when the New Left raised the issue of US imperialism.

Nonetheless, the right-wing non-interventionists had much to say. Congressman Howard Buffett (R., Nebr.), for example, characterized a proposal for a government-sponsored Arabian oil pipeline as a “gigantic long-distance venture into imperialism” likely to cause American conscripts “to die in far-away places in defense of the trade of Standard Oil or the international dreams of our one-world planners.”¹ When the Administration requested funds for intervention in Greece and Turkey under the Truman Doctrine, now that Britain was abandoning ah imperial role there, Buffett warned against American overextension: “we would soon be answering alarms like an international fireman, maintaining garrisons, and pouring out our resources.” Soon every program would be justified as anti-communist, and when the people protested against “continued militarism and inflation,” wartime controls could be reestablished “in the name of stopping communism at home.” Economic exhaustion, conscription, price control, a labor draft and the end of political opposition might follow imperial intervention. “Even if it were desirable,” Buffett said, “America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. . . .”²

Frank Chodorov, the most anarchistic of the right-wing noninterventionists, declared in the April, 1947 issue of his newsletter, Analysis, that “hopeless poverty” had made communism “the religion of Europe.” The solution was to allow “the people of Europe to produce and exchange,” not American intervention. If, unaided, they fell to the Soviets, they would still avoid another brutal war and the annihilation of European civilization. Chodorov feared the domestic consequences of the Cold War. A witchhunt for Reds was afoot and concentration camps were on the horizon. “Red” might come to “include every person who raises his voice against the going order.” When intervention at last brought war, liberty would be sacrificed to the exigencies of total warfare and “the vary thing we are presumably fighting to preserve will go by the board.” Our system would be identical to “all other forms of statism, from pharaoism to nazism.”³

Felix Morley, college president, author and journalist, was another noteworthy right-wing Cold War critic. A week before the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine he wrote in Human Events (which he co-edited) that America was about to make her most critical political decision since 1776: To remain a republic or to “become an empire by assuming responsibility for dependencies which Great Britain can no longer control.” Inflation, centralization, high taxes and conscription lay ahead if America chose empire.⁴ A year later, Morley assessed the policies adopted. The Administration had only managed to “throw our weight around,” and was preparing “for another war in which there is much to indicate that we would be the aggressor.” Assailing conscription, he wrote that “The lives of our youth are not the property of the State, to throw on a rubbish heap in Korea or Yugoslavia as some brass hat may ordain.” The struggle with communism should take place “in the realm of mind and spirit, saving conscripted bodies as a last and forlorn hope.” Morley went on to indict Truman for “two cold-blooded atrocities”: Nagasaki and victors’ justice at Nuremberg.⁵

Congressman Frederick C. Smith (R., Ohio), arguing during the Greek-Turkish aid debate that we were being maneuvered into war, asserted: “It is wrong to say that the United States is not launching upon a program of imperialism . . . we have already done so.” Lawrence Smith (R., Wise.), another rightist, considered the Truman Doctrine “the certain course to imperialism and the imposition of permanent conscription upon our people.” It threatened the very nature of our society, and would lead to “an unbridled race for armaments,” making war “certain.” He called the Doctrine “an immoral proposition, advanced chiefly on the assumption that we can get away with,” and equated it with the views of James Burnham, who favored American “world empire.” Congressman George Bender (R., Ohio) termed the Greek government a “corrupt and venal monarchy” legitimized by a phony election. He asked if our government intended “to hire every dictator or king. . . who will scream ‘Stop communism?’” The new policy was “interventionism in Europe” based on “power politics.” Bender, suspicious that the Greek-Turkish bill was connected with American oil investments, favored making it clear that it was “not an international charter for unlimited oil imperialism.”⁶

Like other Congressional “isolationists”, Senator Taft was critical of the Greek-Turkish proposal (writing later of the Greek regime’s “strong reactionary tendencies”); but he voted for it, hoping the program would be of short duration. He likewise criticized but voted for the Marshall Plan. He was at his most non-interventionist in the fight over NATO. Speaking to the Senate on July 11, 1949, Taft stated that the treaty “will promote war in the world rather than peace.” It violated the spirit of the UN Charter, and put us “at the mercy of the foreign policies of 11 other nations,” by committing us to defend any NATO ally attacked by any power. Further, America would be obligated by Article III to arm western Europe. Taft preferred a simple warning that if Russia attacked western Europe we would go to war. Arming Europe would be both costly and provocative to Russia, and arms given to our allies might be used for “action which may be considered aggression in their colonies.”⁷

Two days after ratification, the Administration requested $1,450,000,000 for military aid to our new allies, substantiating Taft’s contention that NATO meant arming “half the world against the other half.” The request, he said, “demands that Congress . . . authorize the State and Defense Departments to make alliances throughout the world and involve us in any and all wars, civil or internal, going on anywhere in the world. ”⁸

Fear that America would constantly risk unnecessary wars by embarking upon a “futile crusade” was a major “isolationist” theme. Ex-Congressman Hamilton Fish (R., N.Y.) testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March, 1947, and characterized the Truman Doctrine as “a policy of global intervention and imperialism.” He added: “I doubt if the establishment of a cordon sanitaire by dollar imperialism can halt world communism short of war.” Congressman Buffett felt that “instead of restraining communism abroad” intervention would “shore up ruling politicians everywhere and actually promote the spread of communism.” A scramble for US aid would ensue, since every ruler “will claim . . . communism is most dangerous in his land.”⁹

In a major speech on January 5, 1951, Senator Taft expressed the “isolationist” view: “we must avoid war like poison, except when it is absolutely essential to protect our liberty.” Modern war, he asserted, injured victor nearly as much as vanquished and promoted totalitarianism. In February, 1953, the Senator warned an audience that “the very independence we are trying to protect may be destroyed by perpetual war, which has established many dictatorships in this century.” The garrison state was a real danger to Taft.¹⁰

To the novelist Louis Bromfield, writing in 1954, America’s “attempt to dominate and direct the whole course, not only of Asia but of the world, is a policy of insanity which can only cause war after war and the eventual ruin of this nation.” If in throwing off colonialism Asians chose “the disastrous experiment of Communism,” that was “Asia’s problem and none of our own.” By supporting Western colonialism in the name of anticommunism we were “stupidly attempting to surround and contain what cannot be contained . . . .”¹¹

Frank Chodorov also raised his voice against useless wars. Writing in the Freeman in 1954, he urged that America “remove the tinder” of another war by withdrawing “our troops to the Western Hemisphere and (abandoning) our global military commitments.” We should let Europeans “go communist if they want to.” Soviet domination could not be worse than “a war in which their homes became the battlefield.”¹²

The desire to avoid war logically led the “isolationists” to protest executive supremacy and bipartisanship. Condemning the latter in 1951 as “a very dangerous fallacy,” Senator Taft averred that such “unity” would allow the adoption of disastrous policies by default. In debate over presidential power to deploy troops, Taft declared, “If the President has unlimited power to involve us in war, war is more likely.” He assailed as elitists those who “blithely dismiss all interest in the maintenance of popular government under the Constitution” because of their fear that the people “might oppose policies which seem to them to lead to war.” Felix Morley, too, later observed that bipartisanship implied that Americans should not be concerned with how they were governed, in which case they were “ripe for dictatorship.”¹³

“Isolationists” were as alarmed by the domestic consequences of imperial policy as by the risk of war. They regarded the draft as especially evil: Taft called it “essentially totalitarian.” Buffett asserted that Selective Service “would declare to the world that Hitler was right – that the threat of communism externally justified militarism and regimentation at home.” The bill was the product of “carefully created hysteria.” Conscription rested on “the totalitarian concept that the state owns the individual.” To Lawrence Smith, there would be “no Escape” from “economic controls, manpower controls, and the regimentation that goes with dictatorial power” if Selective Service passed.¹⁴

But conscription was only the most direct inroad of imperialism upon liberty. Writing in Human Events in January, 1951, Frank Chodorov foresaw “a new way of thinking and a new social order” with an economy “geared to military preparations for years to come.” Spending on education would “be with an eye to its contribution to war . . . .” The tendency would be “more and more toward totalitarianism.” Like Randolph Bourne, Chodorov considered war the health of the state.¹⁵

In a similar vein, Garet Garrett wrote in his 1952 pamphlet, “Rise of Empire,” that we were living in a “garrison state for perpetual war” characterized by “ascendancy of the military mind” and the intimidation of the civilian mind. Already, Congress could not get vital information — now “classified.”¹⁶

Louis Bromfield complained that nowhere did the military “have such an elaborate propaganda machinery . . . paid for by the taxpayers’ money” as in America. Cold War propaganda had nearly reduced Americans “to utter bovine subjection to a combination of big government, bureaucracy and militarism.”¹⁷

In A Foreign Policy for Americans Senator Taft cautioned his readers that “an indefinite surrender of liberty” to “an all-out war program in time of peace might mean the final and complete destruction of those liberties” supposedly saved by it. Inflation and a lower living standard would flow from such overpreparedness. In 1953, Taft warned of economic collapse from sky-rocketing defense costs.¹⁸

According to Felix Morley, centralization must accompany an imperial foreign policy. Our institutions, he observed in 1954, “rather than our imperial policy . . . will be modified.” Congress was becoming a mere rubber stamp for agencies operating in impenetrable secrecy like the CIA and AEC. In the summer of 1957, well after the Right had embraced the Cold War, Morley — sounding for all the world like C. Wright Mills — wrote in Modern Age that we were at a point where “we have a vested interest in preparation for war.” Defense spending on capital goods was a major prop of full employment, and we were dangerously addicted to it. Hence, US representatives did not talk seriously about disarmament. Given the contradiction between an imperial role and a republican system, our leaders bad to deceive public opinion continually. Imperial centralization in a formally federal structure meant that we were “losing the substance of self-government” to a rising “self-perpetuating managerial elite.” A New Left participatory democrat could not have put it better.¹⁹

The Korean War was at once a paradigm of the imperial policies right-wing libertarians opposed and an important circumstance in the decline of their views. The war found rightists in various postures of opposition. Senator Taft condemned President Truman’s commitment of American troops to combat as unconstitutional, saying, “it seems clear to me that the sending of troops without authorization by Congress,. . . as was done in Korea, is clearly prohibited.” The intervention was not even authorized by the United Nations as claimed by the executive, Taft stated, since the Security Council’s resolution was “only a recommendation.”²⁰

Congressman Buffett wondered why no one knew how we entered the conflict. Actually, on June 25, 1950, when fighting began in Korea, the Security Council had called upon UN members to help effect a cease-fire. “Nothing,” Buffett observed, “was said about entering the conflict.” But at noon on June 27, President Truman ordered US air and sea forces into action in support of the South Koreans. Eleven hours later, the Security Council asked for assistance for the South. Hence, Buffett said, “Truman entered that war by his own act. . .” This is the verdict, incidentally, of a recent student of executive warmaking, Merlo J. Pusey, who writes that “the President plunged the United States into the war without a shred of authority from the Constitution or the laws or treaties and without so much as a request for military help from the United Nations.”²¹

Cold War Liberals argued that the war-making power of Congress was “obsolete.” But as Garet Garrett commented later, their reasoning was “puerile”: Congress could have reacted within hours, and had we been under attack, the President could have taken defensive measures before a formal declaration of war. Coming to the heart of the matter, Garrett asked, “If constitutional doctrine is moulded by necessity, what is a written Constitution for?” Usurpation had its inner logic, however. As former Senator R. F. Pettigrew of South Dakota wrote in 1922, “If there is to be an empire, there must be a dictator, so that he can move with rapidity; so that decisions can be made in a day and armies marched and ships moved where danger is seen.”²²

Like the nation as a whole, the Right was divided by the war. One wing, whose spokesmen were Herbert Hoover and Joseph P. Kennedy, advocated immediate withdrawal from Korea and contraction of US defense perimeters to manageable dimensions (roughly, the Americas, Britain, Japan and Formosa). Speeches by Kennedy and Hoover in December, 1950, after Chinese forces had driven the US-UN army from North Korea, touched off a “Great Debate” in which “isolationism” went down to defeat at the hands of anguished Cold War Liberals. Hoover stated that a land war in Asia “would be a war without victory . . . .” Another wing adopted the crypto-imperialist position of General Douglas MacArthur. It included China Lobbyists, McCarthyites and sundry patriots confused by the official claim that the war was bound up with American survival — a claim contradicted by the actual limited character of the conflict. Believing the official rationale and seduced by the myth of American Omnipotence, this faction called for air strikes against Mainland China and the “unleashing” of Chiang’s Nationalist forces. Finally, a large portion of the Right, including Taft himself, alternated confusedly or opportunistically between the “isolationist” and crypto-imperialist positions. The latter viewpoint came to be typical of the American Right — hence Goldwaterism.²³

Thus it came about that right-wing “isolationism,” increasingly marginal anyway, was superseded by the anti-communist crusading of Senators Knowland and Goldwater and the editors of National Review. The gulf between Old Right and New Right is symbolized by the incredible statement of Senator Goldwater that “the President, as Commander-in-Chief and the primary author of foreign policy, has both a duty and right to take military action at any time he feels danger for the country or its freedoms.”²⁴ Imagine Robert Taft saying that! The Senate vote on the “war powers” act on April 13, 1972, also throws light on the matter. Senators Buckley (C.-R., N.Y.), Fannin (R., Ariz.), Gurney (R., Fla.), Tower (R., Tex.), Thurmond (R., S.C.) and Dominick (R., Colo.), hard-core rightists all, voted against restraining presidential military adventures. These same men have been among the most stubborn supporters of the brutal war in Indo-China. Taft, by contrast, declared a month before his death that “I have never felt that we should send American soldiers to the Continent of Asia” — including Indo-China.²⁵

The overlapping of old Right, and New Left positions is equally remarkable. We can perceive in American politics a non-interventionist tradition sometimes articulated by the Left or the Right, sometimes by elements of both. “Sooner or later,” Senator J. William Fulbright maintains, “war will lead to dictatorship.” It could as easily be Taft speaking. No wonder Carl Oglesby could state in 1967 that “In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.”²⁶

When US foreign policy after World War II took the form of imperial intervention, right-wing libertarians protested. Empire implied what C. Wright Mills called a “military definition of reality,” and led logically to peacetime conscription, massive rearmament and a ring of bases around the world. This extension into peace time of the authoritarian fixtures of war time was the essence of the garrison state; and the Cold War, by blurring the distinction between war and peace, provided a fertile environment for such a cancerous growth. The “isolationists,” who were classical liberals in most respects, foresaw that imperialism, the highest stage of statism, would be utterly destructive of liberal values. Individualism, the free market, free speech and constitutional government could not exist in a garrison state — except in attenuated forms.

Regarding modern war with its senseless brutality and enormous destructiveness as almost the greatest evil conceivable, these critics were eager to restrain the executive and decried uncritical unity. To stay Caesar’s fallible hand, they sought to assert the rights of Congress and some of them supported measures like the Bricker Amendment. None of them wanted to isolate America, but all of them desired minimal or no military entanglements abroad.

The domestic consequences of empire were anathema to the libertarian Right. The draft they denounced as slavery — a European importation foreign to the American tradition. Buffett indirectly warned that conscription would destroy the patriotism of the young.²⁷ Buffett and Chodorov predicted witchhunts. Bromfield foresaw endless war in Asia, ending in ruin. Taft and Garrett feared the garrison state. Morley saw centralization and a permanent war economy.

Now that we have seen the results of interventionist policies — undeclared war in Indo-China, bipartisan irresponsibility in Congress, a crippled and shackled economy, Army spying on civilians, thousands of our countrymen in Canadian exile — we can forgive the “isolationists” if they sometimes exaggerated. In 1947, Buffett predicted a labor draft; instead, we got “channeling”: “the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted.” Taft and Buffett foretold of economic disaster; instead, we got Seymour Melman’s “depleted society”: not much comfort in that. We have the inflation and controls they foresaw, and a surfeit of war. The “new social order” prophesied by Frank Chodorov did indeed emerge — though we know it as the Military-Industrial-University Complex — founded on the permanent war economy described by Garrett, Morley and John T. Flynn. Instead of the outright fascism Chodorov feared, we are living under something more like the “genteel fascism” Flynn saw coming in 1944. But whatever mistakes they may have made as to detail, the libertarian rightists were far more conscious of the main drift of imperial America than their Cold War corporate-liberal opponents or the gun-boat diplomats who took over the Right. The non-interventionists of Left and Right are indeed morally and politically coordinate.²⁸

NOTES

*Mr. Stromberg is a doctoral student in history at the University of Florida.

¹Congressional Record, March 2, 1944, A1036.

²Ibid., March 18, 1947, 2215–7.

³ Frank Chodorov, “A Byzantine Empire of the West?” Analysis, April, 1947; Congressman Buffett placed this article in the Congressional Record, April 29, 1947, A2015–6.

⁴ Felix Morley, “The Twilight of An Empire,” Human Events, IV, 10 (March 5, 1947), 1.

⁵ Felix Morley, “Here Let Us Stop,” Ibid., V, 12 (March 24, 1948), 1–2.

⁶Cong. Rec., May 7, 1947, 4732; May 9, 1947, 4945; March 28, 1947, 2831–4; May 9, 1947, 4974.

⁷Ibid., July U, 1949, 9205–8.

⁸ Quoted in Henry W. Berger, “Senator Taft Dissents from Military Escalation,” Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Cold War Critics (Chicago, 1971), 186.

⁹ Cong. Rec., March 31, 1947, A1365–6; May 7, 1947, 4721–2.

¹⁰ Robert A. Taft, “The Basis of American Foreign Policy” in Jay A. Sigler (ed.), The Conservative Tradition in American Thought (New York, 1969), 343–4; “Taft Calls Arming Threat To Liberty,” The New York Times, February 22, 1953, 29.

¹¹ Louis Bromfield, A New Pattern for a Tired World (New York, 1954), 235, 54–5.

¹² Frank Chodorov, “A War to Communize America,” The Freeman, V, 5 (November, 1954), 173–4.

¹³ Taft, “Basis of American Foreign Policy,” 341; Cong. Rec., March 29, 1951, 2988–9; Felix Morley, “Conservatism and Foreign Policy,” Vital Speeches, XXI, 7 (January 15, 1955), 978.

¹⁴ Robert A. Taft, “Compulsory Military Training in Peace Time Against Fundamental Policy of America,” Vital Speeches, XI, 18 (July 1, 1945), 557; Cong. Rec., June 15, 1948, 8363; Ibid., June 17, 1948, 8707.

¹⁵ Frank Chodorov, “Warfare versus Welfare,” Human Events, VIII, 2 (January 10, 1951), 1–4.

¹⁶ Garet Garrett, “Rise of Empire,” Part III of The People’s Pottage (Boston, 1965), 112–3. “Rise of Empire” was published first as a pamphlet in 1952.

¹⁷ Bromfield, New Pattern, 11, 283–4.

¹⁸ Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans (Garden City, N.Y., 1951), 69; “Taft Calls Arming Threat,” 29.

¹⁹ Felix Morley, “Conservatism and Foreign Policy,” 978; Idem, “American Republic or American Empire,” Modern Age, I, 1 (Summer, 1957), 20, 25, 29, 30.

²⁰ Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans, 33–4.

²¹ Cong. Rec., May 21, 1951, A3760–1; Merlo J. Pusey, The Way We Go To War (Boston, 1969), 89.

²² Garet Garrett, “Rise of Empire,” 124; R. F. Pettigrew, Imperial Washington (Chicago, 1922), 359.

²³ Herbert Hoover, “Our National Policies in this Crisis,” Vital Speeches, XVII, 6 (January 1, 1951), 165. On the divisions over the war within the Right, see especially Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse (New York, 1957), 448.

²⁴ Quoted in “War Power,” Commonweal, XCVI, 4 (March 31, 1972), 76.

²⁵ Quoted in Leonard P. Liggio, “Why the Futile Crusade?” Left and Right I (Spring, 1965), 60.

²⁶ On this non-interventionist coalition, see Robert J. Bresler, “The War-Making Machinery,” The Nation, CCXI, 17 (August 17, 1970), 109; John W. Finney, “Fulbright Warns of U.S. Decline Unless Foreign Policy Changes,” The New York Times, April 4, 1971; Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull, Containment and Change (New York, 1967), 167.

²⁷Cong. Rec., April 7, 1952, 3649–50.

²⁸ On “channeling,” see the infamous Selective Service memo reprinted on Karl Hess and Thomas Reeves, An End to the Draft (New York, 1970), 193–200; on “genteel fascism,” see John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (Garden City, N.Y., 1944).

MacBRIDE VS. REAGAN

Any libertarian candidate is faced with the difficult choice of deciding which of the cornucopia of libertarian issues to stress in the course of his campaign. Priorities of importance must be established: obviously, for example, no candidate will give top priority to such a worthy cause as denationalization of lighthouses, lovable and correct though that issue may be. We at the Lib. Forum have long believed that an anti-war, anti-interventionist foreign policy is the most vital single issue for libertarian politics and for the country as a whole. Hence, our sounding the tocsin of warning against the candidacy of Ronald Reagan (“Stop Reagan!” Lib. Forum, December 1975).

We are therefore delighted to report that Roger MacBride, the L.P. Presidential candidate, has been laying heaviest stress in his campaign on the importance of a non-interventionist foreign policy and on the menace of Ronald Reagan. On January 12, at a news conference at the San Francisco Press Club launching a Western campaign swing, MacBride denounced Reagan’s notorious “eyeball” remarks on Angola: “the most irresponsible that any candidate for President has made to date.” MacBride stated that he was “astounded that a serious candidate for President should talk in terms of ‘eyeballing’ the Russians over the Angolan situation.” MacBride added that “The real world is not a class B movie, but Mr. Reagan talks about confronting the Russians — which inherently entails the risk of a nuclear holocaust — as if he were doing nothing more than suggesting a shoot-out at the OK Corral.” MacBride’s reference was to Reagan’s January 5 statement that the United States should “eyeball” the Russians on Angola, and tell them “Out — we’ll let them fight it out ourselves, or you’re going to have us to deal with.”

MacBride pointed out at the news conference that, at the very time when Americans were becoming more “isolationist” and rejecting U.S. intervention abroad, that the Presidential candidates were repeating the old and failed interventionist slogans. “I am the only candidate running for President,” MacBride noted,” who is in tune with the people of this nation in the area of foreign policy.” Reagan offers no alternative to the American people from the interventionist foreign policies of recent decades. MacBride pointed out that “It is obvious that Ronald Reagan would only continue the interventionist policies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Rockefeller and Kissinger. I was worried that President Ford will turn the Mid-East situation into another Vietnam. Now it appears that Reagan would do the same over warring tribal factions in Angola.”

MacBride followed this hard-hitting position at a news conference in Los Angeles on January 14, in which he called for immediate U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East and from Angola. In fact, over the first weeks of his campaign, MacBride has particularly emphasized the need for “complete neutrality” in American relations with other nations. “Neutrality”, he reminded his listeners, is in the tradition of Washington and Jefferson and it is appropriate that we return to that tradition in this bicentennial year.” He has also pointed out that “non-intervention” is a better term than “isolationism” because Libertarians favor free international trade rather than nationalistic barriers to trade.

(See MacBride for President Committee News Releases, January 12, and January 14, 1976. From MacBride for President Committee, 1516 P St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.)

Meanwhile, the November-December issue of the L.P. News, official organ of the national party, contains an excellent and devastating research piece on Ronald Reagan and his claim to be “libertarian.” (Bill Evers, “Reagan: Hubert Humphrey of the Right?”) The article is indispensable for anyone who still thinks of Reagan as a libertarian or who needs ammunition to rebut that claim. (Obtainable from Libertarian Party News, 1516 P St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005 for $3 for six issues, or $5 for 12 issues.)

The MacBride campaign is off to a rip-roaring start.

The ABM Slips Away

Six years ago the ABM (anti-ballistic missle) system was one of the hot political topics of the day. The conservatives made a big fuss over this measure, which they held to be vital to America’s “national security”, while the pro-peace forces warned that the ABM could not work, that no missiles could be built that would infallibly shoot down all incoming missiles, especially with multiple warheads, that the ABM would not only foster illusions but also prove to be an expensive boondoggle. The ABM was saved in the Senate by one vote, and the right-wing cheered. But the prophets of boondoggle proved correct, and until now only one ABM site has been built, near Grand Forks, N.D. Now, to cap this ignominious failure, the one ABM site will soon be quietly shut down, after an investment of nearly $6 billion.

And so, after considerable militarist hysteria and $6 billion waste of taxpayers’ money, the ABM will quietly be allowed to disappear. Are there any mea culpas coming forth from the hawk ultras at National Review or Human Events? Wanna bet? (See New York Times, Nov. 25. 1975).

Libertarian Bicentennial

The American Revolution was a largely libertarian revolution, and it therefore behooves libertarians to make use of the Bicentennial Year to spread the message, and to counteract both the banalities of the official, Bicentennial and the outrageous distortions of the People’s Bicentennial,’ which takes quotes out of context to try to make the American revolutionaries into prototypes of Karl Marx and Eugene Debs. Hence, it is welcome news that a Libertarian Bicentennial Center has been formed, to act as a contact and coordination center for libertarian Bicentennial activities. Those interested should contact: Phil Fellows, Libertarian Bicentennial Center, 2216 40th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007.

IMPORTANT NEWS

We Are Offering For Sale A Limited Number Of A Handsomely Bound Single Volume Edition Of

Libertarian Forum

Vols. 5-6 (1973-74)

WITH FRONT PIECE AND INDEX

Stock Is Extremely Limited. Only One To A Customer. It Will Be Sent Immediately And Postcard Notice Of Mailing Will Be Sent Also.

SEND A CHECK FOR $20.00 TO:

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Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

The Man Who Would Be King. dir. by John Huston. With Sean Connery and Michael Caine. This is the great Huston’s best movie in years, a real “movie movie”, a joyous romp artfully combining humor and melodrama, marred only by the unhappy ending. It is not in the same league as Huston’s Maltese Falcon, but, then, again, what is?

The setting is Kipling’s India, and, indeed, the movie is based on a short story by Kipling. Connery and Caine, two lovable rascals, decide to travel into the mountains to a land which no white men had ever seen. The purpose; to make their fortune. Introducing British Army methods into one of the warring tribes in the new land, Connery is mistaken for a god, the son of Alexander the Great, and enthroned as God-King by the priestly keepers of the Alexandrine flame. In charge of treasures untold, Caine sensibly wants to fulfill their purpose by getting out with the treasures while the getting is good. But Connery begins to “grow into his kingly role”, beginning himself to believe in his mystic destiny and maybe even that he is the “son of Alexander.” Connery finally gets his comeuppance when he decides to marry a native girl, not something a god is supposed to do. The priests get the girl to expose him as a mere mortal by biting his neck and demonstrating that he is only flesh and blood, and Connery is doomed.

There are many fascinating and understated elements to the film. Thus, the priests only accept Connery as god when they find that he possesses the Masonic emblem, which to them is the divine sign of Alexander. Masonry revealed! It is also hinted, though not elaborated, that the priests begin to turn against Connery when he builds a rope bridge across a ravine which had made the capital town barely accessible before. For when they kill Connery, the priests do so by slashing the rope bridge. Presumably, the priests hate the bridge because this technological advance was creating greater mobility of trade in the land, as well as the rise of a nascent bourgeoisie which would eventually have threatened the perpetuity of their priestly rule over the country.

Many critics have complained that the movie is “sexist”, since Connery’s downfall is brought about by a female. Apart from the fact that this view ignores the role of the priests, it really misses the major point of the film: namely, that Connery is ruined by acquiring the hubris of power. If he had not been seduced by the mystique of power, and Caine would have cut out with the treasure, and lived happily ever after. And so the film has a libertarian rather than a sexist moral.

The acting is splendid, clearly reflecting Huston’s master hand. Michael Caine has been happily induced to shed his usual smart-alec and sophisticated Cockney image, and Connery makes the graceful transition from romantic lead to character actor. Christopher Plummer is excellent in the catalytic role of Kipling himself.

Free Doug Kennell!

Libertarians have all favored amnesty for draft resisters, but the argument has lately been carried on in abstract terms: the draft, after all, is moribund (though not dead); no one has been drafted for a long time: and draft resisters, holed up in Canada and Sweden, have been largely drifting back and have been, in effect, freed by the authorities. If the draft is ended, and amnesty here in practical terms, why worry about draft prosecutions? But amnesty is not here for everyone, and this truth has just been dramatically driven home to all of us.

For on Wednesday, October 22, a young but long-time libertarian activist from California, Doug Kennell, was arrested by the FBI and charged with violation of the Selective Service Act, on the basis of an indictment for non-adherence to the draft issued in June’, 1971. A fugitive from “justice” for over four years, Mr. Kennell now faces the possibility of five years in prison and a $5000 fine on each of three counts.

Doug Kennell must be free. He has retained counsel, and is basing his defense on the 14th and particularly the 13th Amendment, which presumably abolished involuntary servitude in America. Anyone wo wishes to contribute to Doug Kennell’s legal defense fund, should send contributions to: The 13th Amendment Defense Fund; P.O. Box 1202; Free Venice, California 90291. Please make out checks to Mr. Shawn Steel.

Libertarian Environmentalists

A new nationwide association of libertarian environmentalists has just been formed: the Association for Rational Environmental Alternatives (AREA). Consisting of professionals interested in the environmental area, including planners, architects, engineers, attorneys, and officials, the aim of AREA is to “objectively investigate, develop, and advance alternatives stressing private and non-governmental solutions to urban and environmental problems.” AREA will particularly oppose growing government regulations and restrictions on private property rights in the field of urban affairs.

AREA has been in the process of organizing for the past year, and already includes professionals in two dozen states. President of AREA is Dick Bjornseth, and urban planner from Houston, Texas; other officers are: Vice President, Paul Bilzi, a geotechnical engineer from State College; Pa.; Secretary, Lawrence Dwyer, Jr., an architect from New Orleans: and Treasurer, Lynn Kinsky, social scientist and an editor of Reason magazine from Santa Barbara, Calif. We wish AREA well, and are happy to see it join ALL as another professional group in important fields of libertarianism. For further information on AREA, write to: Dick Bjornseth, 5915 Fondren No. 235; Houston, Texas 77036.