I’ve almost finished formatting The Machinery of Freedom into a single, easy-to-read file, while simultaneously performing final editing (working at a speed almost like Shulman’s when she was proofreading Pinker). In essence, I’ve formatted everything that is already on the website, and now I’m tinkering with the second of three appendices, where he recommends various pleasant and useful literature. And there, I came across this description:
J. Neil Schulman, Alongside Night (New York: Avon, 1987), The Rainbow Cadenza (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). Two clearly libertarian novels. The first describes a libertarian uprising in the near future, the second—a society where the ratio of men to women is ten to one, and where women are drafted into prostitution corps. A movie is currently being filmed based on the first one, in which I am to play a small role.
Oh, I thought, how interesting, the movie has surely been made by now, I should look for it. I found it. It’s a freaking masterpiece! A low-budget production with a very low rating, because of which Neil Schulman decided to give up on trying to sell it—and released it for free on YouTube. The entire film consists almost entirely of memes and easter eggs, so I watched it for a long time, constantly hitting pause. I highly recommend watching it; with the right mindset, you will certainly derive great pleasure from this amateur artistic endeavor.
Friedman plays the very modest role of the King of Sweden in the film.
Yesterday, after I finished editing the article on the inefficiency of violence, I sat down to watch the movie “Black Hawk Down,” which I came across while following links related to the article. The film focuses on the episode mentioned in the article: how the US was forced to leave Somalia after the failure of what they considered a peacekeeping operation—losing nearly two dozen special forces operators in a single day and killing around a thousand locals in a dense urban environment, without much regard for who was a combatant and who was not.
In 2001, when Black Hawk Down was released, I was more interested in things like The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, which came out around the same time, but I’m glad I finally got to it; the movie is excellent. However, I want to talk not about the plot in general or the visual quality, but about literally two moments that were key for me personally, and to which all other narrative serves, in my view, merely as illustration.
The first moment is around the eighteenth minute. The Rangers are discussing a fact from a thin brochure they were given titled “All About Somalia”: if one local kills another, his clan must pay the clan of the deceased a hundred camels. To this, one of the soldiers notes that he couldn’t even afford one camel, and the locals must all be in debt now. And now, let’s listen to a lecture by Vladimir Zolotorev:
I am providing a link exactly to the moment where he explains how the civil war in Somalia was effectively stopped by a court decision: the combatants were quieted by their own clans because the relatives of the killers were tired of paying giant sums for other people’s debts.
Thus, the film brilliantly shows how expensive and pointlessly cruel the UN intervention was, and how little importance the self-proclaimed peacekeepers attached to the mechanism that actually stopped the war.
The second important moment is closer to the end of the movie, around 1:45. A Somali man is talking to a captured American pilot and explains: you took our hostages, we took you. The pilot replies: my government will not negotiate. OK, the Somali replies, then let’s negotiate between you and me, soldier to soldier. To this, the American replies that he has no decision-making power. The Somali huffs in response: you, apparently, are granted the right to kill, but not to negotiate, while for us, war is just another form of negotiation. Therefore, you have nothing to gain here.
Many thanks to Ridley Scott, who didn’t film a propaganda piece, but truly managed to show the difference between a dull and meaningless state military machine and an anarchic society. I especially recommend the film to those who repeatedly ask the same questions about how “Ancapistan” would defend itself from a state invasion.
Of course, Somalia is not Ancapistan—things are doing well with anarchy there, but significantly worse with capitalism, especially at the time shown in the movie. Nevertheless, even a pre-capitalist stateless society managed to teach a good lesson to the strongest superpower on the planet. States risk a lot when they try to impose their rules on anarchic orders, and if these orders are backed by a truly strong economy, then the outcome of a direct military confrontation between a state and Ancapistan can be considered predetermined.
