Beck: Just War Principles

From Billy Beck:

"In short, just war theory sanctifies the right of violent revolution within your own state if it is hostile to your well being. A bit of a sticky wicket there, eh what?"

Well, that goes both ways, Wendy. This is the part where the libertarians inclined to passivism must at least examine the value of war as a fundamental principle.

The necessity of war arises when people of evil intent join in a mass requiring a massed organization of the righteous in order to prevent the former from preying on the latter. This is a basic principle of human relations: there really are such things as bad guys in the world, and they really can get that big. The most important question here is organizational: how to meet them effectively. Certainly, no lover of freedom can abide forcing people into that against their will. Conversely, however, there is nothing wrong in individuals voluntarily agreeing to the project together in order to act for the value of freedom; no more than when they organize economically, through a division-of-labor economy, in order to produce refrigerators. Observe that the ethics drives the politics: the value of security against manifest military threat is the reason for the voluntary military organization of free people.

Understanding the basically military threat of the state, all of this applies to the matter of political rebellion. To reject the state is essentially an act of war, because of the state's radical claim on the use of force, and all else afterward is merely organizational.