B Sandford responds:
> Martin wrote:
> > No, that's not a good idea because you can't disarm all the
> > governments.  Governments are sovereigns.  The only way to disarm them
> > is to make them not sovereign anymore, which implies creating a world
> > government that would then be the *only* sovereign.  I'm in favor of
> > that, because there can't be sustained world peace without a world
> > government, a single sovereign.  But I'm not holding my breath
> > waiting for it.
>
> But governments aren't really sovereign, are they? There's at least
> two ends to this - firstly, in any polis worthy of our support the
> people are sovereign and government their instrument. As this is so
> rare it just lends credence to Marx and Engels assertion that
> "modern state power is merely the executive committee charged with
> managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie".  Despite this claim's
> crusty and unfashionable roots, there remains more than a little
> truth in it. Secondly, if governments and people aren't sovereign we
> are left with non-governmental loci of power and, distinctly, the
> 'logic' of the dominant system or dynamic. It seems to me that far
> more power is mobilised through the co-option of instruments - govt,
> organisations, consumers - into tacit or explicit support of
> prevailing ideology, or even into an adversarial relationship with
> said ideology. This dynamic, which no one group owns, establishes
> the parametres within which ordinary conceptions of sovereignty act,
> and in so far as this is true, it is the dynamic that is
> sovereign.... all that to accuse the ideology of capitalism of
> primacy in the sovereignty stakes.

Agree.  I meant that governmnets are sovereign with respect to each
other.  Another quote from "Adler's Philosophical Dictionary", again
from the discussion of anarchy.

"The League of Nations after the end of World War I in this century,
and the United Nations after World War II, were steps in the direction
of peace, but they did not go far enough.  Only if a world federal
government were eventually established in the future, a government
that would possess a monopoly of coercive force, would we have a state
of global peace from which the anarchy of sovereign states and their
state of war with one another would be abolished."

The point is, and it has been made by others besides Adler, that
sovereign states are *always* at war with each other.  They may not be
shooting at each other (a state of warfare, as opposed to a state of
war), but they are always at war.  The *only* way to end that state of
war is to have a single sovereign state.  If you think you can't stand
that idea, then you are stuck with the constant state of war we have
today.

> <snip>
>
> > In Norway, a variant of the system you call a police state has been in
> > place for a long time.  It works just fine.  Norway has a vanishingly
> > small number of criminal shootings.  The police are not armed.  Norway
> > also has a high per capita gun ownership, since hunting and target
> > shooting are both very popular here, and since many men are members of
> > the national guard and are required to maintain a weapon.  If you mean
> > Norway is a police state, then, yes, I think there should be more of
> > them.
>
> On the surface, at least, Norway is one of the most agreeable countries I
> have ever visited. Everyone seems to smile (is it something in the water?).
> I'll be back there in February 2k, Martin, and I'd offer to buy you a
> coffee, but I'm not sure if I can afford it.

I'll buy you one.  So far, I have met three email friends for lunch at
the Grand Cafe in Oslo.

The only problem I have found in Norway that I attribute to the social
democratic culture, is a too strong tendency to conform and to expect
others to conform.  I suppose Norway over-emphasizes cooperation the
way the US over-emphasizes competition.  On the whole, however, I think
the balance of competition and cooperation is better in Norway.

martin

Martin Smith                    Email: [log in to unmask]
P.O. Box 1034 Bekkajordet       Tel. : +47 330 35700
N-3194 HORTEN, Norway           Fax. : +47 330 35701