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Let Slip the Pigs of War
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Everywhere you go at the moment, the radio, TV, the Internet are full of establishment Republicans—the morons who enthusiastically helped the Democrats get us into this mess—attacking what they call Ron Paul's "isolationism", a slur first invented by the Franklin Roosevelt Administration (whose economic policies had only made the Depression worse, and which was desperate to get into a war that would cover up its failures) to insult Robert Taft and others who saw no reason for America to get involved in what became the Second World War.

A conflict that killed 60,000,000 individuals.

Paul is not an isolationist, any more than Bob Taft was. He is a non-interventionist, a leader unwilling to drop bombs on pregnant widows and ten-year-old goatherds, or starve half a million children to death in pursuit of a foreign policy that, for more than a century, now, has been an exercise in stupidity, insanity, and pure malignant evil. Paul, and an increasing number of people like him would rather sell things to people overseas than kill them. Dead people can't buy anything.

In terms of trade and other peaceful relations, Paul is a one- worlder.

So let's get something straight once and for all.

In the 20th and 21st centuries alone, so far, 630,744 Americans, mostly young men in uniform, have been killed in two "world wars" and at least seventeen other conflicts that the United States government will admit to. Since, famously, "Truth is the first casualty of war," it's reasonable to suspect that the actual number—both of wars and fatalities—is considerably higher. For example, when I was an Explorer Scout, at the start of the war in Vietnam, the military unit that sponsored my post was actively engaged in the African nation of Mali.

Six hundred thirty thousand, seven hundred forty-four American war dead, any one of whom might otherwise have found a cure for cancer, a source of free, clean energy, a faster-than-light star drive, or anti-gravity.

And what for?

To fight Spain in Cuba (an 1898 war I count as belonging to the 20th century) over a battleship explosion that was almost certainly an accident?

To fight tribesmen in the Philippines whom we had promised to set free?

To fish Europe's chestnuts out of the anti-colonial fire (as it turns out, an extremely bad precedent) during the Boxer Rebellion in China?

To interfere with a Mexican civil war on behalf of American corporations?

To occupy Haiti 20 years to benefit the National City Bank of New York?

To interfere, completely unnecessarily, in an idiotic squabble between Queen Victoria's spoiled and genetically impoverished grandchildren?

To refight the same war, equally unnecessary and the direct result of infantile, power-hungry blundering by the winners of the first— dragging the Far East into the melee—and end it by killing hundreds of thousands of innocent individuals with fire bombings and nuclear weapons?

To stick our noses—and our young people's already war-weary necks—into other people's business in war that has never really ended?

To imitate British and French stupidity in Southeast Asia with a war many believe was only meant to prove to the Russians and Chinese that we are crazy buggers willing to fight and die for no reason at all?

To send troops to El Salvador, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf (not just once, but twice), the island of Grenada, the Isthmus of Panama, the dirt heaps of Somalia and Bosnia to prove that we're the cops of the world?

And most recently to Iraq, on absolutely false pretenses, because America's rulers, like rulers all over the world, with their heads buried in six thousand years of dust, can neither conceive of or comprehend a major historical event that does not somehow involve a government?

When a century of incompetent, irrational, murderous foreign policy, climaxing in the deaths of something like half a million Iraqi children due a U.S./U.N. embargo that denied them food and medicine, blew up in their faces, as it was bound to do, they couldn't—or they wouldn't—believe that it wasn't the work of a nation-state. So they picked one, not quite at random, at which they would strike "back". Strictly by coincidence, mind you, it happened to be sitting on top of the second largest obsolescent source of petroleum in the world.

Which leaves Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, and the tragic inability of America's rulers—cranked out by the dunce factories of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale—to learn from the experience of others, in this case, notably, that of Russia and Britain which were never quite the same after pouring immeasurable money and blood into those mountains.

Six hundred thirty thousand, seven hundred forty-four American war dead in the 20th and 21st centuries alone. Note, too, that since the conflict in the 1940s, not one of the wars I have mentioned above were duly declared by the Congress, as mandated by the Constitution, which makes all of them criminal enterprises, and their perpetrators criminals.

And here's another thought. In Vietnam, where 58,169 Americans died for nothing, it is estimated that something like two million Vietnamese were killed. How many millions overseas in other countries might have lived if we'd had leaders who were sane, intelligent, and principled, instead of the drooling pack of homicidal swine we got, instead?

Cry "havoc" and let slip the pigs of war: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich—not one of these animals sees anything wrong with the carnage, the vast mountain of bleeding and rotting corpses, that best graphically represents the 20th century. They dream of continuing it into the 21st. (America has troops today in 150 countries around the world, sitting, waiting to be attacked so their masters will have an excuse to make another war.) They jeer at anyone who wants the killing stopped.

They call him crazy.

And 630,744 needless, useless deaths isn't?

So endeth the lesson—and here's the final exam: if the war dead could still vote, who do you suppose they'd choose in Iowa, in New Hampshire, and next November? How about the same guy that their living comrades send seventy percent of their political contributions to today?

Ron Paul?

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