War Is the Health of the State

From my personal blog Fascist Soup

"…The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd.

War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become—the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s business and attitudes and opinions…" -Randolph Bourne

Dear readers,

I am a former member of the US military that has served time in the Persian Gulf and I have done counter narcotics operations in the Caribbean. I am familiar with warfare and I’m not afraid to stand up in defense of the nation should the need arise. However, I’m also not afraid to confront what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling one gets when holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. Wiki describes it thusly, “The anxiety that comes with the possibility of having made a bad decision can lead to rationalization, the tendency to create additional reasons or justifications to support one’s choices.”

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently resolving the cognitive dissonance that arises from justifying the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with my strong limited government view points. On this subject, I have reached the conclusion the nation’s founding fathers reached centuries ago: War is the health of the State. Ultimately, if one holds that government is a coercive and dangerous institution, one must reject all wars that are not defensive in nature and that do not involve the stake of national sovereignty.

Washington had it right when he said, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a dangerous servant and a terrible master.” There is a reason why the Constitution does not establish a standing army. In fact, the Constitution mandates that the Congress review the need to even have an army every two years if one should ever be created. Congress has the power “To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”

You see, a truly free people don’t even need an army. Ladies and gentlemen we have over 65 million gun owners in this nation at last count. China’s entire military only numbers around 3 million active and reserve troops. It is impossible that any nation on this earth could ever invade and conquer us when so many of us own guns. The Constitution says we should have a standing Navy to defend our trade routes and our shores, but an army is an entirely different matter.

The nations of Afghanistan and Iraq are not threatening our national sovereignty. There is no invasion force of armed jihadists looking to land on our shores and conquer New York. The hijackers that attacked us on 9/11 were Saudi and could easily have been trained or funded anywhere on this planet, even on our own shores. The threat of terrorism can not be solved through warfare.

The nation has spent well over a trillion dollars fighting the multiple wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The results to-date have been somewhat disappointing. While we can look at Afghanistan and Iraq and say we have created and installed governments favorable to us, we also must look at the damage we have done to ourselves if we are to be fair.

A trillion dollars taken from the public and spent on the machinery of the State is a trillion dollars less the public has in their pockets. The government has no money. It has your money. The wars have massively expanded the State. I find that it is irreconcilable to hold the view that government is an evil institution of force that must be limited, while at the same time holding the view we must wage war to install favorable governments in foreign nations.

The founding fathers felt that warfare should only be engaged in to save the nation from tyranny. That armies should only be created when absolutely necessary to defend against an invasion of such tyranny, that standing armies are a direct threat to liberty. Jefferson was quoted as saying, “Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.” And while this may indeed be true, the last part of the phrase is just as telling as the first. Jefferson himself viewed a standing army as something to be feared.

I personally fear the government more than I fear terrorists. I have a gun and I can defend myself from terrorists. It is impossible to defend oneself from a coercive domineering government. We should be looking at ourselves as the defenders of this nation, not government. I do not need rough men standing ready in the night to protect me. I need the freedom to protect myself.

Ultimately this cognitive dissonance must be faced by each and every one of you that support the tea party while also supporting the wars. The tea party movement has grown from the basic distrust of government instilled in us by the natural rights of man and the founders of this nation. If you support the tea party and what it represents, in order to be in agreement with your position, you must ultimately reject foreign wars where the sovereignty of the nation is not at stake.

Out of almost every thread you have created, This thread I find should be your staplemark...brilliantly put..star and flag.

Might also want to shove in there....if we didn't have a half trillion or more military budget yearly, we could do some seriously kick arse space exploration and exploitation as a nation...let the tiny nations fight each other while America terraforms mars

reply to post by SaturnFX


I don't believe in government.

Before 9/11 and the "Army of One", I was just a lowly National Guardsmen; when we weren't training or sending rounds down range we were camping, barbecuing, etc.. We were ready for the floods, the riots, the wild fires, and we were proud of that. We weren't the real army, and we knew that.

In support of the war formerly known as the Global War On Terror, the National Guard went through what can only be described as a serious breach of faith, a conflict of purpose and role that has still not been resolved. When you say "cognitive dissonance" I think back to all the moments in my 8 years of service in the Guard when we were tasked with yet another mission outside our country, away from our homes, and we all said "Hooah!" because that's what American Soldier's do, while privately we proceeded to wonder about how ill-equipped and unprepared we were, and how inappropriate it was to send our National Guard unit (which hadn't been deployed since Korea) to Guantanamo Bay to guard "detainees", to Afghanistan to patrol villages, to Iraq to provide"force protection". Not just once, but over and over again. And NONE of our missions were what we trained for in the field artillery; our combat MOS's made us all 11B's, and the NGB just needed bodies.

This nation's use and abuse of the reserve components of the military is evidence in support of your "cognitive dissonance" theory. It is a matter of taking the good faith of our men and women in uniform and stretching it to breaking. Thousands of soldiers across this country have spent the last 8 years on the edge of their seats, never knowing when that alert order will come, where their destination will be, what their mission will be, and how long their lives will stop being theirs and become Big Army's. Guard and Reserve soldiers, along with their battalions and brigades, have served multiple tours, stretching the accuracy of the "National" and "Reserve" functions of the organization. It has only been with a schizophrenic detachment from reality, fueled by fear and anger, that we have done this. There were no threats of invasion, no skirmishes in the streets, but we sent them anyway. Without these irregular troops, and the mind-set that justifies their employment in this conflict, the GWOT would have simply been impossible to sustain.

I think it's time we stopped looking to the Founding Fathers and the mythology that surrounds this nation's origins for solutions to our problems. All we will get are more rationalizations that are more emotional than reasonable, more bad ideas founded on fictions. It's time for a new approach, based in the present day, and not some legendary past inhabited by benevolent slave-owners and clever theocrats who saw deep into the future. If we don't drop the Constitution and all of its "the Founders meant this" and "look, it says God right here", that's where we'll be as this country sinks into oblivion. Maybe it's too big for one government, maybe we don't need a standing army and the army of contractors and suppliers that go with it, maybe we don't have to believe in fairy tales about this land we inhabit, maybe the electoral college is a bad idea, maybe the Revolution was a failure and we need to start over again, maybe it's still happening? Tea Party's won't change a thing; everything they believe is locked up in a musty museum case, where Americans are defined, oaths are sworn, flags are waved, and "freedom" is rung dry. Patriotism is for zombies, subjects, not people.