By Nathan Barton

Self-Defense or Preventative Aggression? We can interpret Seoul’s recent announcement several ways. According to the BBC a few weeks back, “South Korea has a plan to annihilate the North Korean capital if it shows any signs of mounting a nuclear attack, according to reports from Seoul. A military source told the Yonhap news agency every part of Pyongyang ‘will be completely destroyed by ballistic missiles and high-explosives shells.’ Yonhap has close ties to South Korea’s government and is publicly funded. On Friday [9th September] North Korea carried out what it said was its fifth, and largest, nuclear test. The international community is considering its response. The US says it is considering its own sanctions, in addition to any imposed by the UN Security Council, Japan and South Korea.”

It is a situation that we can bring down very close to home. If we have a nasty neighbor (the kind that has a pack of dogs that run loose over the neighborhood, sets up his shooting range with our house and yard downrange, has teens that drag-race on the road while throwing their empty beer cans in our yard, and so forth) who starts telling us several times a week that one of these days, he is going to come over and shoot us all dead in our our beds, and we see him at his target range practicing with targets that are blown up photos of our family, and see a FedEx delivery to his house consisting of ammonium nitrate, fuel oil, and det cord, can we respond?

And if so, how?

Assuming that we don’t want to call the cops, due to our principles, or we have called the cops in the past and they have pooh-poohed the whole thing and refused to take any action – or if the guy’s oldest son IS a cop – what do we do?

Do we have to wait until the glass breaks in the front window as our neighbor shatters it with a brick before jumping into the living room armed to the teeth? Or until he has his little AnFo bomb mounted in one of his old junkers with the nose pointed to roll downhill in the direction of our house? Or do we have to wait until that junker actually starts rolling across the road?

Or do we warn him, long and loud, and possibly through some other people, that if we see him preparing to attack, that we will instead attack and destroy him and his house first?

And once we warn him, do we actually do it, if he crosses the threshold of what we’ve warned him not to do?

Government compared to private business claims more power but has fewer moral options. When private individuals and private business are forced to take more serious measures for self defense, and prevention of violence against themselves, they are handicapped if they live in a land which has government controlling (or claiming to control) a monopoly of violence, especially if it is (as virtually all are) a “government of people and not of law.” But there comes a time when anyone who cares about their family, themselves, and their liberty has little choice but to take SOME action to prevent what is surely going to happen otherwise.

But it IS a slippery slope. When does preventative aggression as a form of self-defense become just plain aggression?

That might be the case with the bullying family. Or with North Korea. Or… with government itself here in the Fifty States, and especially in the Western States.