An interesting discussion broke out yesterday on Facebook over my article “Conservative Hypocrisy on Oliver Stone.” One of the discussants asked why I hadn’t identified the people I was critiquing.
Ordinarily, when dealing with conservatives, I have no reservations in identifying the people I am critiquing. For example, as the Guardian reported, the conservative Wall Street Journal published on July 5, 2013, an editorial entitled “After the Coup in Egypt,” which stated in part: “Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.”
A bit more than a month later, on August 13, 2013, the Journal published an editorial entitled “Venezuelan Leader Seeks to Boost His Power,” which criticized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for seeking expanded powers.
That is standard conservatism — supporting dictatorships and opposing dictatorships at essentially the same time.
My objective in writing my article was to make the libertarian case, which rejects all dictatorships, and especially the Pinochet military dictatorship, which was evil to the core. In fact, in my opinion, the worst thing that has ever befallen the “free-market” movement has been to be associated with that evil regime. Milton Friedman clearly recognized this, as reflected by his attempt to distance himself from the Pinochet regime for the rest of his life.
Also, libertarians should reject the notion that the intentional destruction of a country’s democratic system through an unconstitutional and violent military coup at the hands of the national-security state branch of the government and its replacement with a military dictatorship is a proper means to “transition” to a free and democratic society or a “free-market” economy. The rejection of such a notion is especially important when it comes to dictatorships that engage in such evil acts as kidnapping, torture, rape, disappearances, extra-judicial executions, and assassinations of innocent people, as the Pinochet military dictatorship did.
The end cannot justify the means. As Ralph Waldo Emerson stated, “Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed.” As Leonard Read pointed out, “However lofty the goals, if the means be depraved, the result must reflect that depravity.”
I say: Let us libertarians continue leaving the support of dictatorships, as well as the support of foreign interventionism and imperialism, to conservatives. Libertarians should continue on the moral high ground by rejecting foreign interventionism, imperialism, and dictatorship.
This blog post was revised on February 16, 2015.