Re: Overcoming War with Information

[nobody@neva.org (Neva Remailer)]

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Nerthus wrote:
>War is often used to justify the existence of government.  If
>politicians can convince the people that they have an enemy that must
>be destroyed, the people willingly give their lives and livelihood to
>the government to fight this assumed enemy.  War feeds the expansion
>of a government's power over its citizens.  After the war has ended,
>the government maintains this newfound power.

Governmentally inclined organizations stir up violence and trouble all
the time to strengthen their positions.  I would make a more extreme
statement and say that the source of most wars are governments.  The
counter example would be a war in which a government was dragged
unwillingly to the battlefield by its people.  Can anybody think of a
single counter example?  I cannot, but there might be one or two.

>Interestingly, the 20th century, which has been the bloodiest in
>recorded history, has also been the century of failed experiments in
>large-scale government.  The former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are
>clear examples of what happens when different groups of people (who
>would rather not be associated) are forced to live together at the
>point of a gun.  The disolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia,
>and the subsequent violence and unrest clearly illustrate the results
>of forced association.

How much of this violence arises spontaneously and how much of it is
instigated by politicians?  I haven't studied the dissolution of
Yugoslavia, but it seems likely that the new governments which were
formed strengthened their somewhat weak positions through the
instigation of violence.  The post-Yugoslav governments probably
cooperated in creating hatreds and division to lock in their rule.

This can be hard to study because usually we don't have access to the
people doing this, their files, or their communications.

There are instructive examples, however.  On Christmas Day, 1914, the
men in the trenches in France stopped fighting and left their trenches
to celebrate the day together.  Officers on both sides worked very
hard to make sure nothing so terrible would ever happen again!

It's hard to understand what terrible thing would have occurred if
World War I were simply called off.

>We must remember that people are reluctant -- and for good reason --
>to go to war.  Common sense prevails, though it may not be exercised
>all that often.  War can be avoided if the truth of the situation is
>revealed to the populace: the spotlight shone on the puppetmasters.

Preventing war entirely might be hard.  But, we can certainly create
tools and customs which make it possible for many people to evade
participation in a war.  For instance, widely available highly liquid
assets means that it is possible to be somewhat independent of a
particular nation.  This means that spending a few years outside a
warring nation is far more practical.  If things settle down, you can
go back home.  If not, stay away!

A good real life example is the Jewish people living in Germany.  They
were not allowed to take their assets with them.  If you were worth,
say, $500,000 and your choice was to lose it all or stay in the
country, you might persuade yourself that things had already hit
bottom and if you just stuck it out, you wouldn't lose your life or
your fortune.  This is a bad decision to have to make.

If we think of human beings as points in a graph and their
relationships as the edges we can create a nifty model of the world of
the future.  Right now, nations are sets of people whose relationships
are almost entirely confined to the set.  The elites of nations have
some contact with each other, but for the most part nations are
disjoint sets.

What the Net and cypherpunkly tools create is a world in which there
are not easily identified disjoint sets because any particular net of
relationships that a person has tends to overlap the relationship nets
of other people who have a dissimilar set of relationships.

This is a more reliable and robust world to live in because there is a
great deal of redundancy.  That is, the elites of two countries cannot
conspire to use their respective sets of serfs as cannon fodder in
some ill advised adventure.  It's hard to get excited about a war run
by people who are not your friends against people who happen to live
in another part of the world but with whom you have a relationship.

You are entirely right in your observation that the governments of the
world work hard at keeping the sets of people disjoint from each other
without appearing to do so.  My favorite example is the outrageous
taxes imposed on cross border communications.

>At the same time, clear solutions to the problems that have
>accumulated due to blind faith in an unworkable system have to be
>presented and implemented.  The transition will not be easy.

Personally, I like the approach of finding easy ways to do things.  I
don't think the nature of the situation requires an all or nothing
approach.  Let's say crypto is completely outlawed in the United
States and the phones are all tapped.  It still won't be possible to
suppress an underground press since the reproduction costs are so low.
In the past people have managed to publish underground newspapers
under extremely harsh conditions.  Nowadays it's as hard as copying a
diskette.

I believe that the things we do to move in a forward direction are
additive, just like money.  This goes for techniques we develop as
well as people who are involved in our projects.

We should design our systems so that they do not rely on the goodwill
of the masses.

Monty Cantsin
Editor in Chief
Smile Magazine
http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html
http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.htm

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