Monday, September 29, 2014

Hobbesian Ideas Get A Refresh

By Chris Rossini

It appears the ideas of Thomas Hobbes are getting a little refresh of late.

Obama gets the ball rolling:
“But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos,” Obama said. “And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world.”
Jason Ditz refutes at Antiwar.com:
That’s a dramatic understatement, of course. ISIS and other factions didn’t simply go to Syria because the war made parts of the nation “ungoverned.” Rather, the jihadists went to Syria to join a rebellion the Obama Administration was loudly backing and bankrolling.
Deputy Secretary of State, William Burns, spins the same yarn in a speech at The Washington Institute:
Obama and Burns turn the situation (that they helped to create) into a Hobbesian 'without a State, life is brutish and short' fable.

As Murray Rothbard pointed out in his wonderful essay "Anatomy of The State," one of the primary ways that The State preserves itself is to "instill fear of any alternative systems of rule or nonrule."

So take note Americans. When a State collapses, violent extremists take over the "ungoverned" land. Take your nose out of LewRockwell.com. There's nothing to see there. You don't want to live in "chaos".

There is no life without The State, and as The Great Obama has declared: "America leads. We are the indispensable nation. We have capacity no one else has." 



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