"Rising" to Empire, Falling from Grace

The following article is adapted from my contribution to a forthcoming collection of essays addressing America's descent into imperialism.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

This panegyric to what is commonly called “American Exceptionalism” could have been composed by any of a number of GOP-aligned media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, or their legions of local imitators. Those words were actually spoken by Madeleine Albright in 1998, when she was the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State. She was defending the U.S. role in enforcing an embargo on Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991.

Albright had memorably addressed that issue in a different fashion three years earlier during an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes. 

“We have heard that a half million children have died,” observed interviewer Leslie Stahl. “I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Without challenging the statistics, or displaying even a tremor of remorse, Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.”

By reconciling Albright’s statements we learn that when “we have to” impose policies that result in the avoidable death, through starvation and disease, of hundreds of thousands of children, “it is because we are America.... We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

For some reason, the self-styled seers and visionaries who defended the Iraqi embargo didn’t foresee how that policy, coupled with decades of U.S. meddling in the Middle East, would cultivate and nurture the seeds that bore murderous fruit on September 11, 2001. 

To ordinary people not blessed with Albright’s oracular insight, it seemed obvious that some variety of murderous blowback would be the inevitable product of a foreign policy that featured deliberate mass starvation punctuated with bombing raids. However, the custodians of permissible opinion have decreed that history began on the morning of 9/11 – that nothing the U.S. government did prior to that date has any organic connection to the motives and actions of those who carried out the attack (at least as that attack is described in the officially sanctioned narrative). To suggest that Washington’s policies had some relationship to anti-American sentiment in the Middle East is to commit a grave blasphemy against American Exceptionalism – the official creed of the ruling Establishment, irrespective of party.

What makes America exceptional, from this perspective, is not the blessings we have been allotted by Providence, or the individual liberties promised by our country’s founding documents. America is exceptional because of the power of the government that rules us, as manifest in its ability to kill people in distant lands. 

Death-dealing herald of empire: A Global Hawk drone.

That view, once again, is not limited to bellicose left-wing internationalists like Albright. On several occasions, Rush Limbaugh – who, like fellow late-blooming militarist Dick Cheney, had “other priorities” when he was of draft age during Vietnam – has related an anecdote about witnessing a military fly-over during a Super Bowl in the 1980. Aroused by the spectacle to the point of rapture, Limbaugh (by his own account) was moved to exclaim, “How can you see something like that, and be a liberal who hates your country?”

Offensive as it would be to both Limbaugh and Albright, a compelling case can be made that their reflexive militarism is a repudiation of our country’s founding principles. The Framers of the Constitution, painfully familiar with the uses to which large military establishments could be put, never intended for the united States of America (in Congress assembled) to have a standing, centralized army. While they did have the lamentable intention of creating a consolidated central government -- and pretty clear ambitions for territorial expansion to the West -- they did not entertain grandiose ambitions of policing the world. 

The most admirable members of the Founding Generation understood that love of country was not measured by one’s enthusiasm for government-inflicted bloodshed. That’s why Washington’s Farewell Address emphasized both adequate provision for defense and the compelling necessity to avoid entanglement in the affairs of other countries. 

Imperialism by joystick: A drone operator carries out an attack.

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” observed John QuincyAdams in his 1821 Independence Day Address. “But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” (Emphasis added.) 

Unlike the supposedly far-seeing Madeleine Albright – who couldn’t foretell how her arrogant endorsement of genocide in 1995 would help catalyze the enmity that led to the devastating 9/11 assault six years later – Adams displayed uncanny foresight in describing the degenerate state of American “patriotism” today, 190 years after he delivered his warning against interventionism: “Patriots” today celebrate force, not liberty.

Today, what Adams and his generation called “Independence Day” is simply called the Fourth of July. Rather than being a celebration of individual liberty, the “Fourth” has become an annual orgy of militarism, often involving saturation-level barrages of propaganda in the form of televised war “movie marathons” and military parades that wouldn’t be out of place in Pyongyang. 

Lest it be forgotten, Independence Day originally commemorated an act of insurrection against the “legitimate” government – an incomparably powerful globe-spanning empire on which the sun never set. The men who committed that act of rebellion would probably consider it perverse that they are “honored” by public rituals extolling the imperial power of a government that is more corrupt and oppressive – by several orders of magnitude – than that of George III.

America was unique because of its origins in principled rebellion against lawless rule, and because of a set of founding political instruments that, while imperfect, did provide individuals some protection against government aggression. Those traits that are typically celebrated as tokens of “American Exceptionalism” – an interventionist foreign policy; a Chief Executive with unqualified power to kill, imprison, and torture people at whim; a badly overgrown military establishment – are, in a specific sense, un-American. 

A commercial republic in which both citizens and their elected representatives are governed by law, and individual liberty is regarded as the highest political good, would be truly exceptional. A sprawling empire ruled by a corrupt oligarchy that plunders both the national treasury and the resources of distant lands is actually quite commonplace. 

 To catch a glimpse of the America that could have been, it's useful to pay a brief visit to the period between the end of the War for Independence and the mercantilist counter-revolution in Philadelphia that abolished the Articles of Confederation and created a more centralized constitutional Union.

 In 1782, a year after the British surrender at Yorktown and one year before the Treaty of Paris finalized American independence, a former French Lieutenant named J. Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur composed a series of essays entitled Letters from an AmericanFarmer. Six decades before Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, Crevecoeur devoted his considerable literary gifts to an examination of the question: “What, then, is the American, this new man?” 

Unlike Europe, a continent plagued by entrenched elites, there were “no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one” in America, he wrote. The inhabitants of this new-born confederacy of constitutional republics were “a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory … united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are equitable.” (Emphasis added.) 

At its best, the "mild" government to which Crevecoeur referred was self-government; it was the spontaneous cooperation of productive people, rather than the imposed order of a parasitical elite. This state of affairs was hardly uniform throughout the confederation, of course, but that it existed at all was something truly inspiring.

On "Evacuation Day," November 25, 1783, British troops ended their occupation of New York. In comments recorded by the New York Packet newspaper, a departing British officer expressed a bemused admiration for the Americans, who distinguished themselves by their unwillingness to be ruled:

“Here, in this city, we have had an army for more than seven years, and yet we could not keep the peace of it. Scarcely a day or night passed without tumults. Now we are [leaving] everything is in quietness and safety. These Americans are a curious, original people; they know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”

The promise of the War for Independence was the establishment of a system of individual liberty protected by law – and, at least at that early stage, that promise was being kept. That genuinely exceptional America earned the admiration of the world – not because its government possessed the power to murder people by remote control, or annihilate entire continents in a nuclear paroxysm, but rather because its people were free and independent, and its society -- although displaying all of the imperfections to which fallen man is heir – aspired to be governed by the Golden Rule. 

 

Tragically, "our" government’s rise to global power has meant our country’s fall from grace. 

Your donations to keep Pro Libertate on-line are urgently needed -- and deeply appreciated. God bless! 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Down With the Draft! or How Ron Paul Could Win

John Edwards may have performed an unintended service for the Ron Paul presidential campaign.

First, he has decided to position himself as an anti-war candidate, a move that attests to the political potency of that issue.

Second, Edwards has endorsed the proposal to re-institute slavery in the form of conscription, for both military and non-military purposes. This exposes him as a consummate fraud and opportunist, a fact that will throw Dr. Paul's authentic anti-war convictions into sharp relief. Edwards has also handed the Paul campaign a nearly ideal unifying element to build a youth movement that could – I'm not saying that it will, but that it could – redefine the 2008 electoral landscape.

Through the simple and repeated act of telling the unadorned truth about the impact and consequences of Washington's imperial foreign policy, Rep. Paul ignited the blogosphere, infuriated the gatekeepers of the Bu'ushist cult, and provoked astonished approval from those parts of the voting public who want to be treated as adults. His message, digested to its essence, is that our rulers have led our nation into disrepute and impending bankruptcy by bullying the rest of the world – and that this must stop immediately if we are to have any prospect of avoiding outright dictatorship and penury.

Rarely, if ever, has a national political figure of any stature called attention so forcefully to the inescapable connection between an imperial foreign policy abroad, and the constriction of liberty at home. And the fashion in which Dr. Paul has done so – speaking the truth in language devoid of cant or other rhetorical artifacts, retaining his composure and avuncular dignity amid the theatrical faux outrage of Establishment lickspittles (yeah, I'm talking to you, Hannity) and aspiring dictators (yo, that's you, Rudy) – has elevated his message above Republican primary politics: He has achieved trans-partisan status by speaking about freedom as the “common ground.”

I suspect that Dr. Paul's success in capturing the public imagination through an anti-imperialist campaign influenced John Edwards to re-brand himself as an anti-Iraq War candidate. But there is nothing principled about Edwards' current position: It would have taken a measure of courage to oppose the war clearly and forcefully in March 2003, as Ron Paul did.

Every other presidential aspirant on either side of the narrow Donkey/Pachyderm divide is a collectivist of some variety – from militarist nationalists like John McCain and Tom Tancredo to technocratic corporatists like Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton. John Edwards is trying to get some of that post-New Deal-labor movement-popular front Mojo going for him by opposing the war and calling for enactment of the eighth plank of the Communist Manifesto, which dictates a “universal liability of all to serve” as the State ordains.

“One of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America – not just the poor kids who get sent to war – are serving this country,” Edwards said Sunday (May 20) during a stop in Keene, New Hampshire. “We have people from all walks of life in America who are serving, including Reservists and National Guard. What we want to do is to have all Americans to have a chance to serve their country.”

Hey, don't think of it as a death sentence -- think of it as a "chance to serve your country" (in your case, as the main course).

I am constantly amazed by the unctuous dishonesty with which collectivists describe servitude as an “opportunity.” The words “mandatory” and “opportunity” are blood enemies. Those who force them into an unnatural marriage remind me of a story I came across years ago in a book entitled Showa: The Age of Hirohito.

As the Pacific War was grinding down, a Japanese commander summoned a squadron of fighter pilots and told them that they had received an opportunity to die for the Emperor in Kamikaze attacks. Each of them was handed two ballots and ordered to choose the one that best described his attitude regarding that opportunity; one ballot read “willing,” the other “very willing.”

The fearful summons: The State steals a young man's future.

Such is always the case when the State and those running it, out of their boundless generosity and magnanimity, extent to the rest of us an “opportunity” to surrender our time, property, and lives in the State's service. Our “privilege” in this transaction is to submit with docility – nay, with happy gratitude – to whatever imposition our rulers see fit to inflict on us, including the surrender of our lives in their service.

This is emphatically not the same thing as serving our country. Every individual who provides any useful service, whether as a volunteer, an employee, or a businessman, is serving our country. Collectivists believe that coercion is the magic ingredient that makes State-imposed “service” morally superior to private industriousness. They have the sovereign right to luxuriate in their delusions. Should they seek to inflict them on my family, they will do so at their mortal peril.

I am utterly and completely serious.

Conscription is chattel slavery of the most pernicious variety. It is intrinsically immoral and entirely unconstitutional. The Bible records that when apostate Israel sought a king, the prophet Samuel offered a detailed warning of the tyranny and corruption the monarchy would bring in its train; the very first curse he mentioned was conscription.

Conscripts were employed in King George III's war against the American colonies, along with enlistees and mercenaries. On one occasion, writes Stanley Weintraub in his splendid book Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire, 1175-1783, “A group of hungry [British] soldiers on short rations were shot while foraging for potatoes in an open field, and [General Sir John] Burgoyne warned, `The life of the soldier is the property of the king' – and that any Redcoat caught venturing beyond British lines would be `instantly hanged.'”

"The life of the soldier is the property of the king." Or president. Or dictator.

Such is the nature of conscription, which is why it has no place in any society that claims to be free.

In defending the Lincoln regime's imposition of conscription during the War Between the States, the New York Times published a house editorial on July 13, 1863 that digested the case for the draft to one simple proposition” “[O]ur national authority has the right under the Constitution, to every dollar and every right arm in the country for its protection....” (Emphasis added) As I've pointed out before, this makes obvious the fact that through conscription, the subjects exist to protect the government, rather than the government existing to protect citizens.

Bernard Baruch, Woodrow Wilson's commissar for war production, was similarly blunt in his description of the WWI-era “war socialism” system for which conscription provided a foundation:

“Every man’s life is at the call of the nation and so must be every man’s property. We are living today in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is his only as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and possessions at the call of the state.”

Edwards wants to remove U.S. Troops from Iraq, while designing a “strategic plan” to deal with the genocidal inter-communal war that has been made inevitable by US intervention. This would require a large permanent US presence in the region, and almost certainly mean involvement in military conflicts beyond Iraq. This, in turn, will mean expanding the ranks of the military through involuntary servitude, with civilian “service” being treated as a concomitant civic responsibility.

Assuming that Muslim radicals hate us for our freedom, the Edwards approach would solve that problem by extinguishing freedom.

Ron Paul's approach is much better: End the war, bring the troops home, resume the practice of genuinely even-handed diplomacy abroad, and reduce the size and expense of domestic government by several orders of magnitude. Opposition to conscription is an obvious and indispensable element of that program, and one that would capture the attention of freedom-focused young people.

Ron Paul's anti-imperialist campaign has already gone viral. Imagine how his campaign would expand and prosper if he mounted a youth appeal focusing on a promise not to let the State steal their future through conscription.

Thanks...

... are due to Kevin and Ellen Bearly for the exceptional generosity they displayed to me and my family while I was in Los Angeles to address the United Republicans of California convention last Saturday. Kevin and Ellen opened their home to Korrin, Katrina, Sophia and me, fed us extravagantly, and treated us with amazing kindness.

I'd also like to thank UROC for inviting me to speak, Scott Watson and family for helping with the travel arrangements, Marvin Pro-Life Richardson (his legal name is, simply, Pro-Life) and family for billeting our sons over the weekend, and Robert Malaby for inviting me to speak at the Bible Missionary Church in Pomona on Sunday. God bless all of you!

Please be sure to drop by The Right Source!