From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Nov 1995 13:41:41 +0800
To: Duncan Frissell <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: "Industry Group Rebuffs U.S. on Encryption"
Message-ID: <199511130522.VAA09142@blob.best.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 09:04 PM 11/12/95 -0500, Duncan Frissell wrote:
> There were no nation states or cops prior to 1600.  
> It is perfectly possible that there will be no nation 
> states or cops at some point in the future.

To be strictly correct, there were no cops in the english speaking world
from the time of the saxon invasions to the nineteenth century.  There
were however the functional equivalent of cops at some places, and 
some times -- mostly in societies that collapsed or sank into utter 
tyranny.

One can reasonably argue that the persians and scythians 
etc were nation states, and that sometimes nation states 
existed during the dark ages and medieval period, but until 
fairly recently, most of what we now call western civilization 
regarded what we would now call a nation state as a rare, 
curious, and pathological aberration.

I expect that we will soon once again regard them as 
pathological, and I hope that we will be able to regard
them as rare.
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
              				|  
We have the right to defend ourselves	|   http://www.jim.com/jamesd/
and our property, because of the kind	|  
of animals that we are. True law	|   James A. Donald
derives from this right, not from the	|  
arbitrary power of the state.		|   jamesd@echeque.com