Brian Miller Lying and Purging

http://delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com/2008/12/another-hint-at-why-lp-is-such-train.html

"Obfuscation" is Brian Miller ignoring the fact that all his sources above about the LPUS founding that don't get the year wrong also cite the Nixon Shock of Aug 15 1971.  Widespread opposition to the Vietnam War had raged for at least four years, but Nixon's "Vietnamization" and troop withdrawals had started taking the wind out of its sails by the time the LP was formed. More significantly, the draft was winding down and already scheduled to end, and that significantly undercut antiwar activism among draft-age youth.

Gene Berkman now reports "I was working for SIL when Dave Nolan started the Committee to Organize a Libertarian Party, in protest over Nixon’s imposition of Wage & Price Controls."  Nolan's http://libertarianmajority.net/1972-temporary-lp-platform did indeed include a one-line call for withdrawal from "the Indo-China war", but it was the last item in a Military section that few Libertarians would recognize today.  It included language about "alliances with countries whose continued free existence is vital to our legitimate national interests" and about "defend[ing] the United States and its allies against aggression".  The first LP convention proceeded to remove from the Platform any mention of the Vietnam war.  It remains simply bizarre to claim that the LP "was largely founded in opposition to the Vietnam War", but the LP forgot to mention the war in its first official platform.

Miller's "Republican lite"/"conservative" smear is so tedious that I've posted my standard dismemberment of it at http://libertarianmajority.net/is-non-anarchism-just-republican-lite.  Miller has never once attempted to respond to it; he just repeats such name-calling whenever he's losing the argument.

In the LP's "early years" I wasn't a "Republican" -- I was in elementary school.  I've been a libertarian and atheist since college, but I didn't join the LP until I thought there was hope of weaning it from its platform's crypto-anarchism. Eight years later, my hopes were realized.

It's a typical outright lie of Miller to claim that I am "trying to characterize the LP as some bastard child of neoconservatism".  I already pointed out that neoconservatism is defined as supporting foreign interventionism, and I said "Nobody is disputing that the LP was anti-war — and especially anti-draft — from the very beginning."  Miller lies about me because he cannot answer my criticisms -- such as my pointing out his (deliberately?) false statements about Starr being an “outspoken proponent of foreign military interventionism”, or about Redpath's talking points taking “swipes at the UAW”.  I quote Miller's false statements; he smears and lies.

As for me being "pro-war", that's just another attempt to smear me because I happen to believe (like LP radical Starchild) that the self-imposed duty of a liberty-loving polity to defend human liberty should not vanish completely at lines drawn on maps by statists.  Miller's smear is obviously a red herring designed to distract from the multiple inaccuracies in his essay, but anybody interested in my views on intervention is invited to read http://knowinghumans.net/2007/04/defending-libervention-in-iraq.html.

I thank Miller for his invitation that I leave the LP -- I'll add him to my collection of radicals who have voiced a desire to cleanse the LP of people who disagree with them.