Tho I have on occasion noted that he once said in pre-Haloscan comments that he most often agrees with those who describe themselves as libertarians. Of course, Jeff Goldstein fancies that he (Jeff) is a libertarian, so obviously there is room to maneuver in that definition.

That's what I admire about David Friedman:

"There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other about everything, but I am not one of them."

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/response_to_huben.html

Any anarchist or libertarian worthy of the appellation defines it for himself. Down with tyranny.

@ondelette

"Wikipedia lists estimates for WWII casualties at 60 million dead. The biggest "thug" on your list for casualties would be Mao, his toll is estimated by some at 41 million. Cambodia is about 2 million, and Stalin about 10 million. So even without adding in other wars, World War II tops the "'thugs.'"

Missing from ondelette's list are the fatal casualties from the Vietnam War, which many of us began publicly opposing in 1965, as it was obvious from even Corporate Media accounts (if one read between the lines),that North and South Vietnam were involved in a civil war which the US presence was gravely exacerbating. It was, of course, to become much worse after Johnson dramatically escalated the war.

I bring Vietnam up because of its being an example of a *non-defensive war*, pursued for power-political reasons, that two "liberal" Democrats and two "liberal" Republicans were primarily responsible for.

The Vietnam War, in other words, was the work product of four US presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. We currently have only one Republican presidential hopeful (Ron Paul) who has taken a principled stand against colonial/imperialist war-making by the US, and two Democratic candidates (Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel).

Question: Where do these candidates stand in the polls and in the affections of the power-brokers in both major political parties?

Second Question: Where do *you* stand on the relative importance of the question of wars of aggression, whether their perpetrators admit to their being "preventive" (unlikely) or insist on their being merely "preemptive." We have the instructive example of Iraq, and the groundwork for labeling a war of aggression against Iran as "preemptive" is being laid as we speak by everyone from Cheney to McCain to Obama and Clinton, *ad finitum*.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

The Vietnam War (also known as the Second Indochina War, the American War in Vietnam and the Vietnam Conflict) occurred from 1959 to April 30, 1975. The war successfully reunified the Vietnamese under a communist government which consisted of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV or North Vietnam) and the indigenous National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, (also known the Việt Cộng or VC, or derogatively as Charlie). To a degree, the war may be viewed as a Cold War conflict between the U.S., its allies, and the Republic of Vietnam on one side, and the Soviet Union, its allies, the People's Republic of China, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on the other. Others, however, viewed the conflict as a civil war between communist and non-communist Vietnamese factions.[3]

The U.S. deployed large numbers of troops to South Vietnam between the end of the First Indochina War in 1954, and 1973. Some U.S. allies also contributed forces. U.S. military advisers first became involved in Vietnam in 1950, assisting French colonial forces. In 1956, these advisers assumed full responsibility for training the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. President John F. Kennedy increased America's troop numbers from 500 to 16,000. Large numbers of combat troops were dispatched by President Lyndon Johnson beginning in 1965. Almost all U.S. military personnel departed after the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. The last American troops left the country on April 30, 1975.[4]

At various stages the conflict involved clashes between small units patrolling the mountains and jungles, amphibious operations, guerrilla attacks on the villages, and cities and large-scale conventional battles. U.S. aircraft also conducted massive aerial bombing, targeting North Vietnam's cities, industries and logistical networks. Cambodia and Laos were drawn into the conflict. Large quantities of chemical defoliants were sprayed from the air, in an effort to reduce the cover available to the enemy.

The Vietnam War concluded on 30 April 1975, with the Fall of Saigon. The war claimed 58,000 U.S. combat dead and the lives of between 2 and 5.1 million Vietnamese,[5] a large number of whom were civilians.[6] Although exact numbers are difficult to verify, the disparity in deaths illustrated the overwhelming superiority of U.S. military technology .[7]

...were a lot of things, including all but one war of the 20th century. I was just showing that it wasn't hard to top the thugs mentioned with wars. I looked at a couple of other lists, and it is probably a toss up between wars and thugs, with probably well above 100 million each for the 20th century.

There is a problem if you try to look too closely. The Great Chinese Cultural Revolution was started by Mao in his own country, I included it as "thug", but it included stuff that would properly be classified as war, like the Red Guard fighting the Southern Command of the PLA with tanks on both sides, and maybe it should be moved from one column to the other. Likewise, is slaughtering your enemy genocidally considered war or "democide"? A lot of democide totals include all genocides, the perpetrators might have called some acts of war. International law does allow war to be genocide. Is starving people in a siege in your own country because they are rebelling which? You can decrease one total and increase the other and vice versa. What about disease? Lord Geoffrey Amherst gave smallpox infected blankets to the Indians. What about starvation? Mengitsu starving the Eritreans counts as what? Does the fact that the 1918 flu epidemic spread and became so toxic in part because of soldiers packed on ships count? The 1870 flu epidemic is usually lumped in with the genocide against Native Americans, should it be? Do the people who got sick from Hiroshima count or only the ones who died during the war? Do the people killed when the government of Khyrgistan ordered troops to open fire count as democide because they were unarmed civilians attempting to flee the country, or as war casualties because they were terrorists and the government was at war with terror? Does working people to death count as war if they were on the other side and democide if they weren't? What if they were part of the resistance? What if a company works them to death?

And (especially for libertarians) if Blackwater kills is it neither war nor democide -- just business as usual? Does corporaticide mean it's okay as long as Wall Street approves? What if a war is started for business interests, does that fall in the corporaticide column or the war column? Does a government-corporate partnership which runs a concentration camp for manufacturing which eventually kills people count as what, e.g. the Silesian-American Corp. at Auschwitz? Is that a form of employicide? When they kill villagers in Nigeria to keep the oil running is that securicide?