Re: Anti-Militarism Posters?

Kevin Dempsey Peterson (peterson@ocf.Berkeley.EDU)
Fri, 13 Feb 1998 22:27:44 -0800 

On 14 Feb 1998, Daniel C. Burton wrote:

>Almost perfect!  It's not exactly what I was thinking of, but then again,
>it's mostly better.  We could use most of that if it could be polished into
>a poster form (removing spelling errors and references to the first
>person).  We could add a message at the end that says, "This message
>brought to you by the Cal Libertarianians, the CAPITALIST extremists
>against military intervention.  Interested in learning more?  Come to one
>of our weekly meetings...."

Well, yes, it needs some brushing up, but I think the "War is for
children who can't negociate; isn't it time we grew up (as a
civilization)" argument is the most emotionally appealling argument from
the libertarian point of view.  My idea on layout (good for all policy,
rather than event flyers) is big title, first paragraph in a fairly big
font (18pt?) below, then two columns of text in like 12 or 14pt, with
the boilerplate contact info/brought to you buy at the end of the second
column, maybe in a sans serif at the same point size (or smaller -- the
Arial family is sort of big)

>We don't actually need to reserve a weekly topic for it.  We can just put
>up the message to attract peoples' interest.

And as you reminded me at the last meeting, the meetings are a means to
the end of changing people's opinions.

>The one thing that's maybe wrong with this is that we don't anticipate all
>objections.  One is that this war is to make the world/our country a safer
>place, that kind of thing.  It also has a remarkable number of the
>anti-militarism arguments I was thinking of embedded in it, but one it
>doesn't have is that bullying tactics breed hatred towards us as a country
>rather than making us safter from enemies and make us a target for
>terrorists -- in other words, rather than protecting us from enemies, they
>make enemies.

The argument it is based on is that children with no social skills
resort to bullying and fights to settle differences, but adults can keep
their tempers in check, and realise that fighting doesn't settle
anything, even if it does get you what you immediately want.

The "breed hatred" argument is probably the strongest, but it isn't all
that emotionally appealling.  I'm sure there are complicated economic
analyses that show that, yes, war is a bad idea.  It's hard to explain,
though.  It would be good if anyone who knows a good rational argument
start writing it, with the intention of submitting it as a guest
editorial to the Daily Cal when (if? not likely from my reading of
newspaper headlines) we do invade Iraq again.  Ideally, we want to be
set to submit it within a day or two of war being decided on, so that
it's the biggest thing in the news, but before the war hysteria
convinces everyone that we are fighting the evil Iraqis (and Minitru is
working overtime to erase all references to the cold war...) and that
our ends are just and necessary.

--Kevin
reply-to: peterson@autobahn.org