We need to know who’s hitting us

Which of the following statements is politically correct?

A. End Foreign Aid to Israel and Everyone Else

B. Conscription Is Slavery

C. U.S. Soldiers Died for Nothing in WW I

D. Abolish the National Anthem

E. Memorial Day Is Based on a Lie

F. Abolish the FBI, America’s KGB

G. The Soviet Union Won WW II

H. Thank You for Your Killing

None of them, of course.  Each is the title of an article written by Jacob Hornberger and can be found in his blog at the Future of Freedom Foundation.  Hornberger, refreshingly, has never been delicate in his treatment of political issues.  He fires his thoughts straight at us, like a bullet on route to its target, without detour or apology.   

For example, we’re encouraged to thank the troops for their service.  But what does that mean, exactly?  What are we thanking them for?  

Killing people [Hornberger writes]. That’s what U.S. soldiers have been doing in Iraq since 1990 and in Afghanistan since 2001. They have been killing people. Lots of people. Hundreds of thousands of people. And they continue to do so on a regular basis. . . . 

Among historians Woodrow Wilson is considered one of the better US presidents.  With the help of a warmongering staff and Lincoln-like aggression against the American people, especially conscription, he was able to send young men overseas to fill the French landscape with American corpses in what became known as World War I.   And in Hornberger’s view were our soldiers heroes, helping to fulfill Wilson’s vision of saving the world for democracy?  Not exactly.  

The 117,466 U.S. soldiers who died in World War I died for nothing. No one can deny that. In fact, that might well be the reason why interventionists changed the name from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. They wanted Americans to stop thinking about the fact that all those American soldiers in World War I died for nothing.

In light of these and many other Hornberger articles, I was puzzled by a recent piece, Politicians Live in a Parallel Universe, in which he critiqued a Mitch McConnell op-ed.  McConnell, a faithful interventionist, thinks it would be a bad idea to withdraw from Syria, defending his position with stale, counterfactual assertions.  To pick just one, McConnell says when the US “threw off the comforting blanket of isolationism in the 1940s and took the mantle of global leadership, we made the whole world better.”  

Isolationism?  Really?

How can he not know about President Roosevelt’s interventionist machinations to embroil the United States in World War II? How could he not know about FDR’s Lend-Lease program with England, his military assistance to British forces, his oil embargo on Japan, his freezing of Japanese assets in the United States, and the humiliating dictates he issued to Japan, all with the aim of provoking Germany and Japan to attack and kill U.S. troops, so that he could manipulate the American people into entering World War II?

As an explanation for McConnell’s manifest ignorance Hornberger concludes he must be “living in a parallel universe.” 

If only that were true!  If only the political class would coerce their world and not ours.  

As he knows, politicians, to our demise, reside right here with us and are coercing us daily.   Yet even as a literary device, saying they live in another world, while making a colorful point, gets them off the hook.  We are led to think of them as oddballs rather than evil — people we have to get along with, somehow, if we want to live in a civil society.  

In McConnell’s worldview a rationale can always be found for the US military to meddle in other countries.  Of course certain people and industries profit from it while others pay.   Of course there are accidents, what the military and media call collateral damage.  Of course there is corruption and cover-ups.  So what?  Let’s admit, this is what’s holding the country together.  Who are we, in our world, to condemn an insider such as McConnell?  Live and let live.

This is no small point.  Hornberger is well-aware of the criminal nature of the state and those who run it.  He knows that people who have seen their families and livelihoods wiped out by American forces would not be impressed with literary allusions such as “parallel universe.”  Neither would other readers who need the full truth, that McConnell, who holds a doctor of law degree and is as fully earth-bound as the rest of us, filled his piece with outrageous lies in defending wanton murder and destruction.  

C’mon, Jacob!  The state has always shrouded itself and its motives in lies.  Its state-educated subjects are too occupied to question them or dig much deeper than mainstream sources.  And who today has the courage to challenge it since hearing about the torture of Julian Assange?  People need to know who’s hitting them (to steal a line from Cinderella Man), and you normally do a superb job in this respect.  They need to be reminded constantly that their government, like all others, is a war among gangs to grab the levers of power, and that unless we change it even a strong country like ours will one day disappear. 

George Ford Smith is the author of eight books, including The Flight of the Barbarous Relic, Eyes of Fire: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution, and The Fall of Tyranny, the Rise of Liberty.  He is also a filmmaker whose latest work is a whimsical tale about the threat of nuclear annihilation, Last Day.