A Universal Statement of Truth... Liberty vs. Slavery I’m an English teacher here in Ukraine, so I’m going to bore my readers at the beginning of this section with an interesting note with regards to linguistic history. The origin of the word “slave” in English comes from Old French and Medieval Latin words for Slav because many of the slaves captured in wars were of Slavic origin. If you’ve read my blog before, or you’ve read my posts on Facebook, you probably already know that I’m an anarchist, so probably my thoughts here won’t come as a shock to you. If you haven’t read my writing before, my thoughts here might be quite offensive to you. Either way, this is how I’d personally like to see things develop in Ukraine. I’d like it if the people of Ukraine threw off the chains of their oppressors and did away with the state entirely. I don’t think that’s at all likely to happen, given the conversations I’ve had with Ukrainians. Mostly the locals seem to be arguing, as most statists in any part of the world do, over whom should be the ones wearing the jackboots, and upon whose back and heads they should be standing. It’s unfortunate that around the world so many people don’t think to end the vicious cycle of oppression, but simply to shift a few of the people in the oppressor class around, or kill them off, or exile them, only to have a new oppressor take their place and install a new form of oppression. I suppose it’s not as surprising in a region like Eastern Europe, which, as we’ve already seen, has a long history of warfare, invasion, and dominance by foreign powers. Nevertheless, it troubles me that so many here are simply arguing over changing the people holding the reins of oppression rather than changing the system itself. It troubles me that there’s an argument over whether it’s better to be the weak little brother of the EU, or the weak little brother of Russia, as if either of these options were truly desirable to Ukrainian interests. I think the best course for Ukraine’s economic future is to remove as many of the internal and external barriers to trade as it can on all sides of its borders. Right now, products from the EU and USA are under such heavy import tariffs that some of them cost three times what they cost just over the border in Krakow, Poland, or sometimes five times the price of that in the USA. These barriers to trade are making Ukraine horribly expensive for Ukrainians in ways that simply wouldn’t exist without so much interference in economics from both the Ukrainian government itself and from foreign powers wishing to use their economic influence to satisfy their own selfish desires in Ukraine. Taking either side in this economic war is ultimately against the economic interests of the Ukrainian people. What’s in their economic interests is eliminating as many economic barriers as possible on all sides of their borders, and without choosing a side in the economic games of international politics. What’s best for Ukrainians, and best for any people anywhere is to cast off the chains of oppression in favor of self-sovereignty. It’s not a solution to simply change the faces of those in power. If you leave a corrupt and morally bankrupt institution like the state in power, you only make a slight change in the form of your oppression. If people want to get rid of oppression, they need to first wake up and realize that the state is the engine of oppression, and needs to be eliminated if there’s a true desire for liberty. Liberty cannot exist where there is an agent of power to whom special rules apply. The government is such an agent. It has permission to do things that would immediately be understood as illegal and immoral if they were done by individuals. When such an institution exists, it matters not who controls it, as it will always and forever be used by those who wish to do illegal, immoral, and corrupt things. You don’t eliminate corruption by getting on the corruption train and trying to steer it in a new direction. Those rails just lead to the same places. You can’t steer a train. You get to freedom and liberty by getting off the train entirely and establishing a society based on the notion that everyone has the same set of rights, that the use of violence, theft, and coercion are not among those rights, and that nobody is an exception. Perhaps of interest, given the earlier history lesson, is that one region of Ukraine once attempted to establish such a society called Вільна територія (Free Territory in Ukrainian), which existed from 1918 to 1921. Ultimately, it was a doomed experiment as the Bolsheviks were opposed, and crushed it. Nevertheless, certain members of the doomed society continued to spread their anarchist ideas until the 1940s. Sadly, today there seems to be no memory for these events, nor a substantial desire to establish bold alternatives to statism. -Evan Sarver
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 14:34:33 +0000
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