Questions for "Christians" and other so-called humanists

J’accuse: The War Criminal Rudolf Hoess Speaks to History’s Militarists, Including the CIA’s 'Drone Warriors'

by Gary G. Kohls

Previously by Gary G. Kohls: Brain-Altering Psych Drugs and the Batman Shooter

"Do not think you are better than me because you burn up enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done"

The Duluth Reader ran out of space for an optional ending of last week’s Duty to Warn column. My preferred ending was the powerful Thomas Merton prose poem that gave voice to the infamous international war criminal, the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess.
Merton has Hoess speaking from the gallows with the haunting accusation of history’s pro-war presidents, monarchs, dictators, Prime Ministers, and assorted politicians who know that wars always involve the mass murder of defenseless civilians (euphemistically known as "collateral damage") in the universal long-range aerial bombing and now, in the case of the United States, the extra-judicial assassinations of suspected "terrorists" by drone warfare (which meets the definition of international war-crimes).
The self-admitted war criminal Hoess accuses every commanding officer who has ever ordered lethal missile or artillery attacks (that inevitably involve innocent non-combatants, a war crime) and every Apache helicopter crew (and their commanders) who targeted "suspects" in Iraq and Afghanistan (see the horrifying war crime "collateral murder" video courageously made available by Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0).
Hoess seems to be accusing every combat platoon who has ever blindly participated in night raids or mortar attacks in areas where civilians are known to be present.
Merton has Hoess say, "Do not think yourself better because you burn friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done."
Merton also accuses the war-profiteering industrialists that bid for the jobs of designing, manufacturing and equipping the camps with increasingly efficient extermination machinery. German ingenuity in action.
Merton’s poem contains actual quotes from some of the documents that were found after World War II had ended. The innovative SS Lt. Col. Hoess was proud – and well rewarded – for his part in improving the craft of high-tech, industrial-strength mass murder.
He said: "Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chamber to accommodate 2,000 people at one time whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: We had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz."
Hoess and others among the Nazi hierarchy had noticed the terrible psychiatric toll (alcoholism, depression, suicide, etc) that the up close and personal massacres were having on the common soldiers who reflexively obeyed the illegal orders to kill noncombatants. The decidedly less personal killing methods of starvation, shellings, bombings and gassing was far less traumatizing to the soldiers who were there at the end of the chain of command.
Hoess was hanged in 1947 for his role in the deaths of 3 million people at Auschwitz during his 3 ½ years (May 1940 to December 1943) as the camp’s commandant.
In a postwar affidavit (April 1946), Hoess confesses to his crimes:
"I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944."
"It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped."
"These so-called ill-treatments and this torturing in concentration camps, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners that were liberated by the occupying armies, were not, as assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual leaders, sub-leaders, and men who laid violent hands on internees."
In his autobiography, written while he was awaiting his war crimes trial, Hoess wrote:
"I want to emphasize that I personally never hated the Jews. I considered them to be the enemy of our nation. However, that was precisely the reason to treat them the same way as the other prisoners. Besides, the feeling of hatred is not in me."
"It is tragic that, although I was by nature gentle, good-natured, and very helpful, I became the greatest destroyer of human beings who carried out every order to exterminate people no matter what."

From where in the human soul comes the willingness to kill?

One has to ask out loud, given the fact that Germany was an overwhelming Christian nation: "What kind of Christianity was it that justified, contrary to the teachings of Jesus, cruelty in parenting, hateful attitudes toward the "other", and the justification of the organized mass slaughter of war? What kind of Christian leadership was it that did not stand up and courageously and prophetically say "NO" to its nation’s manufacture and stockpiling of (and its willingness to use) weapons of mass destruction whose only purpose is to kill humans and scorch the earth?
From where in the human soul comes the willingness to kill, wound, torture, enslave, or starve another human or even cooperate with the evils of state-sponsored homicide or genocide, whether your militarized nation is fascist Germany or "democratic" America?
Harshness in child-rearing is one of the realities that can easily result in the willingness to obey illegal orders to kill. Rudolf Hoess was a victim of cruelty in child-rearing, a violent, xenophobic culture, a vicious anti-Semitism and an aberrant form of Christianity that was silent on or supportive of its militaristic nation’s glorification of war.
Being a part of the inhumane society that Hoess was raised in, he never had a chance to be all that he could have been.

May 3, 2013

Gary Kohls, MD [send him mail] is a family physician who, until his retirement in 2008, practiced holistic (non-drug) mental health care. His patients came to see him asking for help in getting off the psychotropic drugs to which they were addicted and that they knew were sickening and disabling them. He was successful in helping significant majorities of his patients get off or cut down their drugs using a thorough and therefore time-consuming program that was based on psychoeducational psychotherapy, brain nutrient therapy, a drastic change away from the malnourishing and often toxic Standard American Diet (SAD) plus a program of gradual, closely monitored drug withdrawal. Dr. Kohls warns against the abrupt discontinuation of any psychiatric drug because of the common, often serious withdrawal symptoms that can occur in patients who have been taking any dependency-inducing psychoactive drug, whether illicit or legal. Close consultation with an aware, informed physician who is familiar with treating drug withdrawal syndromes, who will read and study the appropriate literature and become aware of the dangers of psychiatric drugs and the nutritional needs of the drug-toxified and nutritionally-depleted brain. Dr. Kohls is a past member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is the editor of the occasional Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter..

Copyright © 2013 Gary G. Kohls, MD

This person speaks my mind

'We the Sheeple …'

by Scott Lazarowitz
Reason and Jest

To some people, referring to "sheeple" sounds demeaning. However, when we have an entire population of millions in the greater Boston area not going out of their homes, and an entire community under siege because of one lone criminal, I will say, "Sheeple."
Americans seem so dependent on the government for everything, and are so hypnotized now by the government’s fear-mongering and rationalizations for its abuse.
The people really seem to be saying, "Sock it to me!" like on the 1960s TV series, Laugh-In. The star would say, "Sock it to me," which would be followed by the star getting hit over the head by a giant club, a wall caving in on the chump, or a huge amount of water being splashed on the dupe’s person.
Well, I think that each time we have an election, like last November, the American people say, "Sock it to me, baby!"
And then they get socked. And then they act surprised. "Wha happen?"
What reminded me of this was one of the U.S. senate’s latest turncoats, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who attempted to pass a gun control compromise bill, which failed.
This was the "conservative" that Tea Partiers were swooning over in his failed bid to defeat Sen. Arlene Specter, but later did get elected to the senate. So, with Toomey’s latest gun control compromise, I was saying, "Sock it Toomey, baby."
In fact, one conservative Boston Herald columnist felt very betrayed by former Republican Sen. Scott Brown in his switch to the anti-2^nd Amendment side, and his votes for Dodd-Frank, raising payroll taxes and the Obama "jobs" bill. She compared such a betrayal to "leaving a bride at the altar."
But this pattern of the American people getting bamboozled by these professional pols never seems to stop. Americans continue to have faith in their Rulers, despite the betrayals, the squandering of the loot they steal, and their growing police state Leviathan that threatens each and every one of us.
And to get an idea of what masochistic sheeple the people of Massachusetts are, in 2008 they voted by 70%-30% against repealing the state income tax. (Who in his right mind would vote against being able to keep more of his own earnings?)
And now Gov. Deval Patrick and the legislature want to raise taxes even more!
So, like the people of Massachusetts, the American people continue to beg, "Sock it to us, government."
As H.L. Mencken wrote, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
And with that, Attention Deficit Democracy author James Bovard observed, "We now have the Battered Citizen Syndrome: the more debacles, the more voters cling to faith in their rulers."
And this is also how Americans tend to respond to crises, whether they be natural disasters, a mass shooter, or being attacked by terrorists. When these crises happen, the extremely naïve and gullible people plead with their Rulers – government bureaucrats – to increase the intrusions, their wealth confiscations, their police state, and so forth. "Anything to keep us safe. Please. Sock it to me – good and hard!"
And the government Rulers really do sock it to the people – good and hard.
So, this past week there was a "lockdown" situation in the Boston area to find one lone alleged killer, a 19-year-old "pothead" who played soccer and who most of his acquaintances couldn’t believe could be involved in the Boston Marathon bombings.
Outside of Police State Watertown, the entire Boston area was literally a ghost town, all day. Millions of people "advised" by the fascist government police to stay at home and don’t go out. And the martial law police state didn’t even achieve its goal of catching the suspect!
But how much of an added risk would it have been to people’s lives to just go about their business that day, go to work, do their shopping, or go to school, regardless of whether one lone criminal was on the loose?
Well, life is full of risks, but the sheeple of America have become phobic of any risk in life whatsoever, unfortunately.
In contrast to the fascists’ tyrannizing and terrorizing of the obedient sheeple, Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger had this more sensible alternative to the police state lockdown in Boston:

What should be the response is that every American who lives in that area should go about their business while openly carrying a pistol, rifle or both.
Go ahead – try that terrorist crap with the proper response to such an event and see how long you live.  That would instantly be the end of those terrorists and the economic disruption would be zero.  It would also send a strong message – pull that crap and we the people will do our duty as citizens to the common defense.

Unfortunately, such a scenario is too frightening to the sheeple who would rather be kept in their martial law prisons.
But while Toomey’s compromise gun-grabbing bill was voted down this week, Premier Obama has been hinting at yet another executive power grab. On the senate’s vote against the Toomey-Manchin compromise, Obama whined, "They blocked common-sense gun reforms…"
You mean "communist" sense reforms, don’t you, Herr Obama?
Anyway, it is truly a disgusting act of exploitation the way Obama paraded the survivors of the Sandy Hook massacre around to get votes for his fascist gun-grabbing.
While they continue to be emotionally manipulated by the simple-minded rationale that making them defenseless will "reduce gun violence," the sheeple do not see that they are making themselves more vulnerable to government’s gun violence.
As Judge Napolitano wrote,

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.
We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense.

And Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes passionately wrote a Pledge of Resistance against the government’s disarmament agenda.
Now, before readers panic and conclude that I am promoting any kind of "anti-government militia movement," no, I am not doing that.
I am merely pointing out the primary reason the writers of the Bill of Rights included the 2^nd Amendment: to protect the people’s right to defend themselves against government tyrants.
As we have seen with the Amerikan police state, Leviathan’s growing tyranny and recent Presidents’ starting of wars for no good reason, the early Americans had many reasons to oppose even the existence of a national standing army, as Jacob Hornberger wrote here and here.
However, the "conservative" Tea Partiers seem just as ignorant as many progressives, as seen by the Tea Partiers’ level of authoritarianism and deference to Washington’s central planners.
The conservatives, nationalists and collectivists of the right also say, "Sock it to me" in their love of men in uniforms, their worship of all things police and military, and their demonizing of anyone who dares to question the legitimacy of government police and military.
These authoritarians will have a very hard time understanding the possibility of tyranny happening here in Good ol’ US of A, as voluntaryist Larken Rose pointed out.
So, even if the "Law and Order conservatives" read William Grigg, Cop Block, Radley Balko, and Rick Horowitz every day, they still wouldn’t understand how like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany America is now.
And the people around here in Boston cheered all the militarized police in their fascist security theater. Most of the obedient sheeple would never believe the possibility of FBI or private agents involvement in the Boston Marathon bombings prior to the event itself. And nationally conservative and liberal statists tend to believe what government bureaucrats and the media propagandists will tell them. (Whether the "lockdown" and siege of Watertown was because of "sequestration" threats and needing to justify an overly-bloated federal agency budget, or the local police attempting to justify more federal handouts, or just because many of these "cops-n-robbers" neanderthals just get off on these situations, who knows. But I digress.)
Now, there have been many arguments over what exactly the phrases "promote the general welfare" and "provide for" the general welfare mean in the U.S. Constitution. My own interpretation is that "promote" means to advance and "welfare" means the general well-being of the people within the territory over which the federal government has jurisdiction.
Clearly, the federal government has gone against the promoting of our general welfare in the extreme, as have state and local governments. The terribly destructive consequences of government gun-grabbing, the Federal Reserve’s monetary central planning, the non-productive U.S. Congress’s stealing more and more private wealth from the actual workers and producers, and the executive branch’s continued lawlessness, provoking of foreigners and domestic overreach have all made us less prosperous, less safe, and less secure.
And in the past I have compared the federal government to an occupying foreign government in Washington, inflicting its criminality against the American people, and that is a more accurate way to view those buffoons and crooks: they are invaders.
How could we not view the federal government as an occupying foreign regime when its own military personnel are engaging in psy-ops of U.S. senators? Psychological operations are mainly used by governments against enemies in order to manipulate the enemies’ emotions, behavior and decisions toward one’s own advantage. But given that U.S. senators supposedly represent the American people (and given all the other threats against us such as the feds purchasing a billion rounds of ammunition for domestic use, and the IRS, the FBI and NSA criminally spying on innocent Americans), one would have to conclude that either the military or the feds in general view the American people as the enemy.
The feds have not only been AWOL in their abandonment of their duty to "promote the general welfare," but, with psy-ops, false flag ops, and intrusions run amok such as ObamaCare, they obviously do not have the American people’s interests at heart.
"But that’s what elections are for," cry the naïve and gullible.
U.S. elections are repeatedly just rearranging of deck chairs, as I have noted before. For conservatives and Tea Partiers, nothing has changed for the better since the elections of 1980, 1994 or 2000.
One can easily predict that in 2014 the conservatives will elect the same old slithering snakes and sleazebags dressed in Tea Party outfits, the same old turncoats who will promise to repeal ObamaCare and oppose gun control but then go on to vote for more socialized medicine and gun registration.
Before there is to be a real economic collapse, and civil unrest and martial law (which is obviously the direction in which America is heading), the people need to pry themselves from the grasp of government’s control and its tyranny.
Sooner or later, people will have to realize that as an institution of monopoly, compulsion and coercion the government is thus inherently an organization of criminality. The people need to stop being its willing victims.
So, rather than being sheeple saying "Sock it to me!" to the abusive Big Daddy Government, the people need to realize that what America needs is not reforming (which is impossible), but a complete dismantling of the federal government, because it should never have existed in the first place. Its existence has provided for nothing but a place for traitors, shysters and violent psychopaths, and it just gets worse and worse.
Decentralization, nullification, localism and secession are clearly in order, before it’s too late.

April 22, 2013

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

I'm all for peaceful rebellion

 

The Whiskey Rebellion

by Murray N. Rothbard

This article appeared in The Free Market, September 1994.

In recent years, Americans have been subjected to a concerted assault upon their national symbols, holidays, and anniversaries. Washington's Birthday has been forgotten, and Christopher Columbus has been denigrated as an evil Euro-White male, while new and obscure anniversary celebrations have been foisted upon us. New heroes have been manufactured to represent "oppressed groups" and paraded before us for our titillation.

There is nothing wrong, however, with the process of uncovering important and buried facts about our past. In particular, there is one widespread group of the oppressed that are still and increasingly denigrated and scorned: the hapless American taxpayer.

This year is the bicentenary of an important American event: the rising up of American taxpayers to refuse payment of a hated tax: in this case, an excise tax on whiskey. The Whiskey Rebellion has long been known to historians, but recent studies have shown that its true nature and importance have been distorted by friend and foe alike.

The Official View of the Whiskey Rebellion is that four counties of western Pennsylvania refused to pay an excise tax on whiskey that had been levied by proposal of the Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton in the Spring of 1791, as part of his excise tax proposal for federal assumption of the public debts of the several states.

Western Pennsylvanians failed to pay the tax, this view says, until protests, demonstrations, and some roughing up of tax collectors in western Pennsylvania caused President Washington to call up a 13,000-man army in the summer and fall of 1794 to suppress the insurrection. A localized but dramatic challenge to federal tax-levying authority had been met and defeated. The forces of federal law and order were safe.

This Official View turns out to be dead wrong. In the first place, we must realize the depth of hatred of Americans for what was called "internal taxation" (in contrast to an "external tax" such as a tariff). Internal taxes meant that the hated tax man would be in your face and on your property, searching, examining your records and your life, and looting and destroying.

The most hated tax imposed by the British had been the Stamp Tax of 1765, on all internal documents and transactions; if the British had kept this detested tax, the American Revolution would have occurred a decade earlier, and enjoyed far greater support than it eventually received.

Americans, furthermore, had inherited hatred of the excise tax from the British opposition; for two centuries, excise taxes in Britain, in particular the hated tax on cider, had provoked riots and demonstrations upholding the slogan, "liberty, property, and no excise!" To the average American, the federal government's assumption of the power to impose excise taxes did not look very different from the levies of the British crown.

The main distortion of the Official View of the Whiskey Rebellion was its alleged confinement to four counties of western Pennsylvania. From recent research, we now know that no one paid the tax on whiskey throughout the American "back-country": that is, the frontier areas of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the entire state of Kentucky.

President Washington and Secretary Hamilton chose to make a fuss about Western Pennsylvania precisely because in that region there was a cadre of wealthy officials who were willing to collect taxes. Such a cadre did not even exist in the other areas of the American frontier; there was no fuss or violence against tax collectors in Kentucky and the rest of the back-country because there was no one willing to be a tax collector.

The whiskey tax was particularly hated in the back-country because whisky production and distilling were widespread; whiskey was not only a home product for most farmers, it was often used as a money, as a medium of exchange for transactions. Furthermore, in keeping with Hamilton's program, the tax bore more heavily on the smaller distilleries. As a result, many large distilleries supported the tax as a means of crippling their smaller and more numerous competitors.

Western Pennsylvania, then, was only the tip of the iceberg. The point is that, in all the other back-country areas, the whiskey tax was never paid. Opposition to the federal excise tax program was one of the causes of the emerging Democrat-Republican Party, and of the Jeffersonian "Revolution" of 1800. Indeed, one of the accomplishments of the first Jefferson term as president was to repeal the entire Federalist excise tax program. In Kentucky, whiskey tax delinquents only paid up when it was clear that the tax itself was going to be repealed.

Rather than the whiskey tax rebellion being localized and swiftly put down, the true story turns out to be very different. The entire American back-country was gripped by a non-violent, civil disobedient refusal to pay the hated tax on whiskey. No local juries could be found to convict tax delinquents. The Whiskey Rebellion was actually widespread and successful, for it eventually forced the federal government to repeal the excise tax.

Except during the War of 1812, the federal government never again dared to impose an internal excise tax, until the North transformed the American Constitution by centralizing the nation during the War Between the States. One of the evil fruits of this war was the permanent federal "sin" tax on liquor and tobacco, to say nothing of the federal income tax, an abomination and a tyranny even more oppressive than an excise.

Why didn't previous historians know about this widespread non-violent rebellion? Because both sides engaged in an "open conspiracy" to cover up the facts. Obviously, the rebels didn't want to call a lot of attention to their being in a state of illegality.

Washington, Hamilton, and the Cabinet covered up the extent of the revolution because they didn't want to advertise the extent of their failure. They knew very well that if they tried to enforce, or send an army into, the rest of the back-country, they would have failed. Kentucky and perhaps the other areas would have seceded from the Union then and there. Both contemporary sides were happy to cover up the truth, and historians fell for the deception.

The Whiskey Rebellion, then, considered properly, was a victory for liberty and property rather than for federal taxation. Perhaps this lesson will inspire a later generation of American taxpayers who are so harried and downtrodden as to make the whiskey or stamp taxes of old seem like Paradise.

Note: Those interested in the Whiskey Rebellion should consult Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Steven R. Boyd, ed., The Whiskey Rebellion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). Professor Slaughter notes that some of the opponents of the Hamilton excise in Congress charged that the tax would "let loose a swarm of harpies who, under the denominations of revenue offices, will range through the country, prying into every man's house and affairs, and like Macedonia phalanx bear down all before them." Soon, the opposition predicted, "the time will come when a shirt will not be washed without an excise."

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School, founder of modern libertarianism, and chief academic officer of the Mises Institute. He was also editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and appointed Lew as his executor. See Murray's books.

Copyright © 2013 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided full credit is given.

The Best of Murray Rothbard

Laurence Vance. Another hero to me, along with William Grigg, posted this in Lew Rockwell today:

The Iraq War Was a Just War

by Laurence M. Vance

Recently by Laurence M. Vance: Janus Christians

The Iraq War began in Iraq on March 20, 2003, at about 5:30 a.m. In the U.S., it was still March 19. So that means that it was ten years ago today that the Iraq War began.
Although the Iraq War is now officially over, it actually ended three times.
The first time was on May 1, 2003, when President Bush announced – in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner – that "the United States and our allies have prevailed" and "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
The second time was on August 31, 2010, when President Obama proclaimed that "the American combat mission in Iraq has ended" and "Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country."
The third time was on December 15, 2011, when a flag-lowering ceremony was held at Baghdad International Airport in which Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: "The cost was high – in blood and treasure for the United States and also for the Iraqi people, but those lives have not been lost in vain."
I have argued for many years just the opposite – that those lives have been lost in vain (see "They Died in Vain" and "Why They Died in Vain"). But that’s not all. I have also said that the War in Iraq was immoral, unconstitutional, unjust, senseless, unholy, unnecessary, unscriptural, aggressive, offensive, and evil. I have also said that the U.S. troops killed in Iraq did not die for anyone’s freedoms; they died for a lie.
I wrote about the Iraq War on its third anniversary in 2006 ("Weapons of Mass Distraction"), its fourth in 2007 ("Four Years, Four Plans"), its fifth in 2008 ("Five Years and Counting"), its sixth in 2009 ("What Happened to the War?"), its seventh in 2010 ("The Forgotten War"), its eighth in 2011 ("When Will the Iraq War Really End?"), and its ninth anniversary in 2012 ("A Day of Dishonor").
But now, on the war’s tenth anniversary, I have come to my senses: The Iraq War was a just war.
In its essence, just war theory concerns the use of force: when force should be used and what kind of force is acceptable. The timing of force relates to a country’s justification for the initiation of war or military action; the nature of force relates to how military activity is conducted once a country commits to use force. The principle of the just war is actually many principles, all of which must be met for a war to be considered just. A just war must have a just cause, be in proportion to the gravity of the situation, have obtainable objectives, be preceded by a public declaration, be declared only by legitimate authority, and only be undertaken as a last resort.
A war that is not justifiable is nothing short of mass murder. Killing in a war that is unjust or not a war of genuine self-defense is wholesale murder.
Therefore, above all, a just war is a defensive war. As G. K. Chesterton once said: "The only defensible war is a war of defense." This is why I now say that the Iraq War was a just war. Even President Bush once said that the War in Iraq was a defensive war.
In fact, the Iraq War was such a just war that I see no need to write anything else about it again. No more articles on the anniversary of the war. No more articles about the origin of the war. No more articles about the duration of the war. No more articles about the cause of the war. No more articles about the morality of the war. No more articles about the cost of the war. No more articles about the architects of the war. No more articles about the effects of the war. These things are all so unnecessary because the Iraq War was a just war.
The Iraq War was a just war – if you were an Iraqi.
Iraq was not responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks – as the U.S. intelligence community briefed Bush ten days after September 11, 2001, and as Bush and Cheney eventually acknowledged.
None of the alleged 9/11 hijackers were from Iraq. And even if one or more of them were from Iraq, that still doesn’t justify the Iraq War. If an American citizen hijacked an Air France jet and crashed it into the Eiffel Tower, that wouldn’t justify France attacking the United States.
Claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were just a ruse for war. The speech that then Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations in 2003 in which he gave a detailed description of what turned out to be Iraq’s non-existent weapons programs was later said by Powell to be a permanent "blot" on his record and said by his chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson to be "a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council." According to the Duelfer Report – the final report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction by the Pentagon and CIA organized Iraq Survey Group – Iraq had no deployable weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, and had not produced any since 1991.
The Downing Street Memo (2002), which was made public in 2005, showed Bush’s long-standing intent to invade Iraq and his willingness to provoke Saddam Hussein into providing a pretext for war.
The necessity of going to war in Iraq was a lie from the very beginning. A student at the University of Illinois documented in 2004 twenty-seven rationales given for the Iraq war by the Bush administration, war hawks in Congress, and the media between 9/11 and the October 2002 congressional resolution to use force in Iraq. It was "the Bush administration, and the President himself" that "established the majority of the rationales for the war and all of those rationales that make up the most prominent reasons for war." A report prepared by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform in 2004 (Iraq on the Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements on Iraq) showed that in 125 separate appearances, Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice "made 11 misleading statements about the urgency of Iraq’s threat, 81 misleading statements about Iraq’s nuclear activities, 84 misleading statements about Iraq’s chemical and biological capabilities, and 61 misleading statements about Iraq’s relationship with al Qaeda." But even before these, Robert Sheer proved, in his 2003 book Five Biggest Lies Bush Told about Iraq, that every major assertion the Bush administration put forward to justify the invasion of Iraq was false.
Iraq was never a threat to the United States, and no Iraqi was ever a danger to an American, until Americans invaded and occupied Iraq. U.S. troops were not liberators, peacekeepers, or patriots; they were aggressors, destroyers, and mercenaries. Iraqis were perfectly justified in using whatever means were necessary to repel an invasion and resist an occupation – just like Americans would be fully justified in doing the same. If ever there was a just war, the Iraq War was a just war.

March 20, 2013

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State, The Revolution that Wasn't, Rethinking the Good War, and The Quatercentenary of the King James Bible. His latest book is The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom. Visit his website.

Moving article opposing the concept and operation of slavery

I haven't posted since July. Well, THIS moved me enough to add someting:

FreeConcord.org

Toward a voluntary society…

← Be an Anti-Aggressionist, Not a Libertarian

Killed for Refusing to Kill: Remembering Joseph and Michael Hofer

Posted on November 29, 2012 by freeconcord

by Garret Ean
Nov 29 2012

Earlier this month passed another Veterans Day, which formerly commemorated the signing of the armistice which would end Europe’s World War the first. Often forgotten in the celebration associated with the cessation of war are the victims who suffer from its ills long after alleged peace deals are signed. The effects of WWI on the culture of the US and the world were not fully actualized as events were transpiring. If history was any indicator, the nation would find itself in the same brutish death trap just over a generation later.

Conscientious objectors at Camp Lewis, WA. Nov 1918

A violent militarism, which could be described as an antipacifism, swept the United States, with an even stronger sentiment arising in the more war-ravaged Soviet Union. One of the darkest examples of this hostility towards civilians during WWI is the treatment of pacifist Hutterites following the draft which began just over a year before the war would come to an end. While saukerkraut makers were changing their product names to ‘Liberty Cabbage’ and South Dakota was banning instruction of the German language in government schools, four members of a 400 year old pacifist, communalist Christian sect received draft notices to risk their lives in Europe for the mythical Uncle Sam. Perhaps it was by chance and perhaps deliberately that four names from an antimilitant community found their way onto the draft register. There had already been tension building between the area Hutterites and their neighbors, as the community had refused to buy war bonds the year prior.
Of the four names, three of them were brothers, all married with children, and young. David, Michael, and Joseph Hofer boarded a military train in March of 1918 headed to Fort Lewis, Washington along with Joseph’s brother-in-law, Jacob Wipf. Though their religious devotion prevented them from training or acting as soldiers, they were expecting to accept a civilian duty once at the camp. Dressed in black, with long beards and long hair, and speaking mostly in their native language of German, the four orthodox men were quickly met with jeers and insults on the train. A conductor moved them between cars, in search of the least inhospitable environment. They spent a night on the train and a portion of the next day in relative peace, before the physical attacks began. During the afternoon the following day, a group of soldiers burst into their compartment and dragged each off one by one to have his hair and beard cut. Their antagonizers justified the treatment as “free barbering”.
At the camp, the four were quickly sent to a guardhouse for not complying with orders to fill out the universal draftee form, entitled the “Statement of Soldier”. They were convicted of being insincere in their refusal to serve. At the time, there were no protections in place for conscientious objectors. Their sentence was twenty years of hard labor to be served at Alcatraz. After about three months at the camp, they were on their way to the San Francisco Bay in July of 1918.
At the prison, the Hutterites first found themselves on the wrong side of the officers when they refused to wear what was given to them as their prison dress: a United States military uniform. The received no food and little water for the first four days, and were forced to sleep on the damp concrete cell floors. Guards taunted them by offering only the uniforms as defense against the cold. They were kept in solitary confinement for stretches as long as military code permitted, and while in ‘the dungeon’, were tortured by handcuffing them to the highest bars in the cell (known as high-cuffing) so that only their toes touched the ground.
After the armistice was signed on the eleventh of November, Alcatraz became decommissioned as a military prison. Unfortunately, the cessation of hostilities abroad would not mean better treatment for the war resisters at home. The four were led in chains across the country again to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they arrived on November 19. By the time they had reached their destination, Michael and Joseph were gravely ill. As David and Jacob were led away to solitary confinement (where they would be forced to stand in chains for nine hours a day), the others were led to sick wards. Family back home were alerted to their condition, and arrived the evening of November 28. Joseph’s wife was permitted to see him after he had died on November 29. The authorities had listed his cause of death as pneumonia and influenza, passing off to nature the responsibility for his inhumane treatment at the hands of his captors. As a final insult to his faith, in his casket he was dressed in the uniform that he had refused. Michael expired a few days later. David was immediately released and returned to South Dakota. Jacob Wipf would remain caged until April 13, 1919. Following the death of the brothers, then-Secretary of War Newton Baker ordered the practice of high-cuffing be suspended.
When the brothers’ bodies were returned for burial in South Dakota, the simple marker with the name and dates typical of the Hutterites had an additional word added to the engraving — martyr.
Few know the names of Michael and Joseph Hofer, just as few know the name of Eddie Slovik, the victim of a militant fervor during the next world war. Joseph Hofer and Eddie Slovik were both 24 at the time of their death, which is the current age of Bradley Manning. How history repeats itself, as Bradley Manning’s defense has recently asserted that his pretrial treatment would qualify as torture, including that he was forced to remain awake and upright in uncomfortable postures, prohibited from exercising, and forced to sleep naked.
One of the best articles available on the Hutterites’ conscription saga is written by Duane Stoltzfus and was published in February of this year. Another telling of the story is available from an Anabaptist informational archive, and there is also an entry on the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

Response to a "well intentioned person"

Re: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/436-2nd-amendment-rights/12615-regulate-guns-like-cars

Dear Carl (in my former town),

  I read with great interest your call for government programs designed to control who could and could not defend themselves. Idi Amin, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and others had similar early intentions. How that worked out tended to increase the food and other resources available to those unaffected by such economies. There were various Indian tribes that were deprived of their guns - just before being mowed down by surrounding government "educators". In Aurora, government (and the theater owners) self-defense restrictions (for their own "good", of course) tended to maximize the carnage, no? You, in your good intentions (paving the road to hell anyone?) somehow have the wisdom and foresight to outwit a bad actor intending to do great harm. I don't think so but I'm not you. If only you could design a program to disarm cops (who kill far more innocents than rampaging sociopaths, but who's counting?) I might find some agreement with you. My personal wish is to remove all coercive criminal gangs (yeah, government) and let the chips fall where they may. Since, during the 20th Century governments murdered close to 200 million of their (mostly disarmed) citizens and a lesser number of citizens of OTHER gangs besides, I know where I'd LIKE you to stand. Yes, murders and rapes and individual attacks would still occur but the vast numbers would not. What did Iced T say the other day? Check it out.

John Boanerges Redman

Real (to me) religion

I'm not sure why I feel the need to say this right now, but I do. Religion is a very personal relationship between the inner me and God. I believe that every choice is a moral choice. I believe that I have to check in about even the smallest things. I have a conscience. It is my interface. I wrote a paper yesterday where I stated that I use the Ten Commandments as guidance. Well, I do but my main 'Commandment' is Thou shalt not use force or coercion on your fellow humans. My second 'Commandment' is Do not sit on your ass while force or coercion is used on your fellow human being. I have stated this previously in this blog. What religion certainly is NOT is a list of rules that want to govern every aspect of daily life. That is micro-management and is a substitute for the personal decision concerning what is moral. The ULTIMATE in this non-thought is embodied in islam. I looked at an article today that said that islam is overtaking the western world. I believe that the western world is skidding backwards towards islam, the ultimate in telling people what to do in every situation. I believe that islam is a filth casting its statist shadow over human thought. I cannot speak strongly enough against islam. I cannot speak strongly enough against statism. For as long as I draw breath I will oppose, nonviolently, the substitution of 'rules' for human thought.