Is Every Outlaw A Criminal?

Is Every Law By Definition Just?

Neither the language nor the law make a distinction between the criminal and the outlaw, but there clearly is such a difference, and it is significant. I should hope I can always say that I have never done anything to anyone that I should call a criminal act, yet I have been an outlaw most of my life.

Should every law be enforced, just because it has been made a law, and the law is the law is the law? I say surely not. Does anyone who has ever read even a few pages of the history of the world not know that kings and legislatures across the world and across the ages have made and enforced laws that were not just, and which did more damage to persons and to societies than whatever they were written to suppress, or demand? Can any American really say he believes that every law on the books in our country is just, and virtuous, and wise?

Consider a simple case, with which I think most Americans agree (except perhaps the most frightened and tractable sheep). That is the possession of firearms for personal defense. It seems clear to me that if a person knows he must go into a situation in which his life is at risk, and he knows only a pistol will enable him to defend himself, and he goes into that situation unarmed because the pistol is forbidden to him by law, he is a suicidal fool. There is neither justice, nor wisdom, nor virtue in obeying that law. Yet the one who disobeys it, who makes of himself thereby an outlaw, is treated as a criminal.

It is well known in spite of some eighty years of draconian prohibition that if I grow and smoke a joint of marijuana, I have committed a crime against no one. The enforcement of that prohibition has caused more destruction to persons, to families, to communities, and to the very fabric of trust between citizens and state than anything the herb itself has done or could possibly do. Books have been written on the extent of that destruction, to its effect on agriculture and its many beneficial products, the rise of police state destruction of our civil rights, the perversion of our system of justice. There is neither reason, justice, wisdom, nor virtue in the enforcement of that prohibition.

How many other instances are there in which to have common freedom to perform acts of no harm to anyone, acts to which everyone should naturally and reasonably have a perfect right, you must become an outlaw? How many such instances are there in which the enforcement of the law as written causes great injustice to persons, and great damage to society? Surely the laws being made and enforced on our southern border today are such instances. Whatever might be said about the ideology of fundamental and absolute obedience to the law, the result is surely to be great destruction and the breakdown of peaceful relations between our nation and Mexico. To prevent the presence of undocumented persons who wished to work for the lowest wages, and the importation of marijuana, we have already created a new wave of persons who are here in anger to do what damage they can to us, and the importation of the most addictive and destructive drug yet created, methedrine. Those who insist the law is the law is the law and it must be enforced because it is the law are prepared to initiate a true military war against the people of what should be our closest friend as well as our closest neighbor. The result is simply and inescapably many times more destructive to America and to the people of our border states, as well as the people of Mexico, who are also human beings and deserving of common decency in treatment. Where in this picture are even simple pragmatics, much less reason, righteousness, justice, wisdom, and virtue?

The American who goes into the deep and deadly deserts of northern Mexico and places caches of water to save the lives of those attempting to illegally cross our border is by the letter of the law an outlaw. The border patrol officer who destroys that water cache in the name of law enforcement has condemned people to die a most horrible death for no greater offense than to lack the papers of permission to be here. That, lawful or not, is a truly criminal act, and that officer a cruel homicidal goon, no less so than the good, patriotic, and obedient guard who lawfully threw the Jews of Germany into the crematoria.

It is not how your acts are defined, or whose permission you have that make them moral, virtuous, wise, or just, but what they are. There are times when only the outlaw can rightly claim to be any of those.

James Nathan Post
Albuquerque NM
www.postpubco.com/anticyclops.htm