TGIF: Spooner versus bin Laden

In his 2002 letter to America justifying the savage 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (himself killed in 2011) wrote after listing his grievances against the U.S. government:

You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:

(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.

(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates....

It's a flawed and evil argument, to say the least, but it is clever. He threw the grandiose claims about democratic rule right back in the faces of hypocritical U.S. leaders. (Remember the panic last  year when young TikTok users read the letter for the first time and as a result news sites took it down?)

There's nothing easier than criticizing bin Laden's crackpot theory of popular responsibility for the U.S. government's crimes. What needs to be better understood, however, is that bin Ladenism was not unique to bin Laden. Look at what's happening in Gaza. Look what happened in Vietnam Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the many other places I'm forgetting just now. The American and Israeli war planners are bin Ladenists! Those officials routinely kill noncombatants, regarding them as active or tacit guilty parties for not rebelling against their rulers. It's cruel to infer consent and approval from acquiescence. Overthrowing a government is no piece of cake, especially when the government has most of the guns.

But there is a difference between bin Laden and the others. The U.S. and Israeli governments devastate populations that don't even get to go through the motions of voting. Those leaders criticize bin Laden, but they should see him when they look in the mirror.

Bin Laden, like the American and Israeli rulers, never read Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), the libertarian anarchist and political/legal scholar who wrote in his short-lived periodical No Treason (nos. 2 and 6) that voting is no indication that the voters support the government. (If that's true of voters who picked the winners, it's surely true of voters who picked the losers and nonvoters.) Voters can have many reasons for voting that don't entail acceptance of the government's many impositions. Since the government will tax and regiment them whether they vote or not, they might vote to try to lessen the tyranny. It's self-defense. It does not imply acceptance of a candidate's plan for foreign intervention.

As Spooner put in No Treason: The Constitution, no. 2, and repeated in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, no. 6 (1870):

In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot—which is a mere substitute for a bullet—because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or ever consented to....

So lay off the noncombatants, war-makers of all parties. That means no more massacres of essentially powerless people. Even the unintended consequences are foreseeably horrific. You claim you're smart, so find another way.