The following is a guest post written by Lysander Browne
Human history is a litany of destruction over different ways to rule over others. A good idea doesn’t require violence to back it up. If the ‘home of the free’ must sacrifice its youth, liberty cannot be true.
Natural rights pre exist governments, we all have the right to acquire property and wealth, defend ourselves and that which is ours, as well as live our lives as we see fit so long as we don’t bring harm to anyone else. Rights cannot be legislated, if in order to live freely we must obey the demagogues who claim governance over us and send our youth to fight a propagated threat then we are not free nor safe.
Vietnam, for example, was unnecessary. Lyndon B. Johnson stated “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” However, we were there and American casualties skyrocketed. Even the unfit, McNamara’s Morons, were thrown into the jungles and rat tunnels which were three times more likely to die. President Eisenhower promoted his domino theory, how if one country falls to communism then others would follow. If why we went to Vietnam was to prevent the spread of communism, then we failed when we evacuated Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. So 58,148 American fathers and sons died in vain? After that war, our Veterans were hated. The best way to thank them so that no other carry the burden of war is to stop making them. The African American veteran population were treated worst of all. They fought for their own freedom only for the state to turn their cheek.
War drastically diminishes the value one has to the other and neglects the human tendency to cooperate. On Christmas Day of 1914 in no man's land of the Western Front, Englishmen and Germans came out of their trenches to enjoy the company of each other and question the nonsense of war. My new friend is German, I wish to enjoy his company however I must kill him tomorrow because my command said so and if I refuse I will be shot by my own command. Propaganda crumbles when the light of humanity comes into being. "It takes a significant amount of conditioning to make war possible. It starts with the general propaganda of collectivism and demonization of outsiders. That the sacrifice of individuality and dehumanization of the self necessary to be a soldier makes it easier to condition a soldier to dehumanize the enemy. Once the enemy is seen as less than human, killing is much easier.” Adam Kokesh writes. When the posters get plastered with the face of what supposedly threatens the states, all our ties to that culture are to be forgotten. We fabricate an enemy and treat them as such so that when we’re faced with retaliation, it’s us that's the victim.
September 11th, 2001 became infamous in American history. We did not deserve to suffer, however that attack was not random. We provoked aggression against ourselves by meddling in foreign governments and making life hell for others. In 1996 when confronted with the question “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" In which Madeleine Albright of the Clinton Administration simply responded “We think the price is worth it.” We went to war and destroyed the attackers as well as destabilized the area. So why are we still there? Through collateral damage we are taking civilian lives thus creating more ‘terrorists’ who wish harm on us. Through their eyes, we are the terrorists. To the Vietnamese, we are imperialists and they are correct. To the words of John Q. Adams, “[America] does not go abroad looking for monsters to kill.” So then why are we interrupting other nations?
Once provoked, they retaliate, we go to war. Japan would not have bombed Pearl Harbor had we not pressed an embargo on them. After the attack, even Hitler had realized their mistake, that a dormant war machine had been awakened. And if they invaded? Japanese marshal admiral Isoroku Yamamoto predicted that if they were to invade our mainland, that there’d be a rifle behind every blade of grass. For this reason, the Middle East remains the graveyard of empires. The Mongols failed, the Russians failed, what makes us any different? They are a population which refuses to be governed. An armed population is the best defense against invasions and tyrannies. The first Americans stood up to the world's greatest empire, only to replace it. Now our government paints us as targets for foreign vendettas angered by politicians pretending to play god.
Thus, every time we get attacked, the state will claim to need more money to overcome the new threat. They require that we give up our liberties for security and a population which surrenders freedom for security will receive neither. So how then, do we gain freedom from dying in foreign lands?
Sources:
Vietnam Casualties: https://www.uswings.com/about-us-wings/vietnam-war-facts/
Iraqi Sanctions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq
ABCD line: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABCD_line