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Host: Mike Gaddy, with Cal Robbins and Daryl Wayne Claymore

WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
Debt and Death on a massive scale!

“Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops every other. War is the patent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people! No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

How many of the holidays which we now celebrate in this country have become nothing more than a celebration of war? How many wars in this country have been created with lies and deception?
I am disinclined to criticize soldiers, not because they are free from personal responsibility for their participation in institutionalized butchery, but because I prefer to focus my on the accepted systemic thinking which produces such insane practices. Soldiers—most of whom were teenagers when they entered the military— are more victims of statist indoctrination in the “glory” and “heroism” of warfare than they are culprits. But just as the state found it useful to exploit their lives in wartime, it capitalizes on their deaths and sufferings in peacetime as a way of getting us to recommit ourselves to the continuation of the war system. To be for peace is to denigrate the memories of those who “sacrificed” for our “freedom.”
The idea of soldiers “fighting for freedom” is an Orwellian-like concept riddled with self-contradictions. To begin with, wars have always reduced individual liberty, not only during but after the wars. The Civil War was conducted not to free slaves, but to aggrandize state power, thus restricting liberties. Lincoln should be hated by those who value liberty for having finished the construction of the present Leviathan state which began in 1788 with a standing army.
“Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.”

If the military has been fighting for our Rights and Freedoms for all these years, why is it all gone?

The Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, escalated the powers of the nation-state over the lives of Americans. Please recall how quickly and easily the Bush administration was able to greatly expand the American police-state with such measures as the Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the arbitrary arrest and detention—without trial or contact with family or attorneys—of virtually anyone the government wishes held. Is this not a concept created by Lincoln even in the Northern States?
How can it be seriously entertained that soldiers “fight for freedom” especially when there was a draft? They were unable to secure even their own freedom. To allow one’s life to be taken over, regimented, directed, and even destroyed by the government, hardly qualifies as a working definition of “freedom.” Slavery is a word more befitting such a subjugated condition.
Also, how can a person be said to be “free” when his or her life is embroiled in conflict? How can one be free when fighting others? Is a life fired by anger and hatred of of people you don’t even know, along with a willingness to torture, maim, or kill anyone designated by politicians as your “enemy,” consistent in any manner with a life of freedom?
Memorial Day speeches are filled with the prayer that “these dead shall not have died in vain.” But the truth is that the victims of warfare have always died in vain, and will continue to die pointlessly, for war is its own reason for being.
As decent and compassionate human beings, let us remember the dead and wounded of war—as well as their families—as the victims of a kind of thinking that must be transcended if humanity is to survive. But let us stop glorifying butchery with parades, medals, political speeches, and the erection of war memorials. Let us stop investing the lives and souls of our sons and daughters as our commitment to this vicious international banking enterprise. Let us learn to love our children more than we do the government which sees them as nothing more than fungible resources for the mass production of casualties and contributors to their wealth.