I've read a lot of Rockwell's writings but haven't shared any. This is one of the better reads, a transcript of a talk he gave last week.

Iraq and the Democratic Empire

As all students today know, Iraq is the country that the US invaded with the attempt to convert the state and the people from enemy to friend. On the face of it, this sounds rather implausible, of course. Good fences make good neighbors. Friendship and peace are not usually the result of insults, sanctions, invasions, bombings, killings, puppet governments, censorship, economic controls, and occupations. If this generation learns anything from this period, that would be a good start.

The full read is a good example of libertarian thinking at its best. Those who know me and those who read here know that I've been headed on this political path for a while now. The most frequent complaint I hear against libertarianism is that it is completely impractical. I've decided quite recently that this is not a useful critique. I see nothing that is "practical" in the current world political environment doing much good. The "practical" alternatives would have us stay in Iraq until we "succeed", regardless of whether they think the war was right to start.

Of course, practicality has no bearing on what is right. I daresay that our government in its present situation is neither what its founders intended, nor will it accept as "practical" most anything that has a chance of returning it to that. I am an existentialist at heart; it seems dishonest to me to discount what seems the proper attitude because it strays from the current notions. And so, yes, we should leave Iraq now. Today. We should restore our government to its core functions. And we should not allow it to prosecute war abroad that unjust in every way.

The War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is supposed to achieve, and will only end in creating more of the same conditions that led to its declaration in the first place.

"Here and Now" thinking is crippling us. 9/11 was, after all, the "Pearl Harbor of our Time", waking up a generation to the dangers of the world. But these dangers have a long history that we have to try and understand. Planning must occur over decades and centuries, and base itself on the history that has gotten us to this point. We aren't "passing through history" as Belloq would say, nor are we victims of history. We're repeating it, making generations to come its victims. We can't disclaim responsibility for the situation at hand, since we are perpetuating it.

Also, Raimondo's Provocateurs.