Notwithstanding the near-assassination of former President Trump, I could not help but find a bit of humor in the response of Republicans, Democrats, and mainstream-press commentators to the shooting — the response that says that there is no room for political violence in American society.
Are they kidding? How can any reasonable person not guffaw at that statement? Ever since the U.S. government was converted into a national-security state form of government after World War II, perpetual political violence — as well as the threat of political violence — has formed the basis of America’s governmental system.
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It’s impossible to know exactly how many people that the U.S. government has killed in the last 75 years but it has to number in the millions. That’s nothing to scoff at. That’s a lot of dead people. When it comes to killing, there is no doubt that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA have made America Number One.
Invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, undeclared wars, coups, state-sponsored assassinations, bombings, shootings, kidnappings, torture, indefinite detention, dark sites, Gitmo, inciting conflicts between other nations, alliances with and foreign aid to brutal regimes, the drug war, the war on immigrants, sanctions, embargoes, and more.
Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Grenada, Congo, Chile, South America, the Cold War, Operation Condor, MKULTRA, Iraq 1, Afghanistan, Iraq 2, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and much more. Everywhere one looks, one sees death. If we go back to the immediate prelude to the national-security state, we see Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And of course, it’s not just death. It’s also injuries and maiming, oftentimes permanent. And then there is the massive destruction of people’s homes and businesses, along with the infrastructure of their countries.
Needless to say, most of the dead have been foreigners, whose lives are not considered to be as valuable as the lives of Americans. As long as American soldiers were not being sacrificed in large numbers, which tends to upset Americans, there has never been an upward limit on the number of foreigners who the Pentagon and the CIA could be permitted to kill, injure, maim, and destroy.
The idea the whole time has been that so long as the deaths are of people “over there,” the American people need not concern themselves or have to deal with their consciences here at home. Americans could continue living their normal lives, producing the wealth that could be taxed to continue funding the U.S. perpetual death machine over there.
But the notion was always flawed. When a nation’s government is engaged in perpetual killing, maiming, injuring, and destroying people and things “over there,” that was ultimately going to seep into the subconscious of people over here. The result is a massive dysfunctional society that is in large part infected by violence, not only by governmental officials but also by off-kilter Americans.
One might respond that the United States isn’t killing any foreigners today. But of course it is. The Pentagon and the CIA are killing Russian soldiers en masse by using Ukrainian soldiers as their proxy. Sure, it’s not American soldiers who are dying but it is Ukrainian soldiers who are dying in what is clearly a Pentagon/CIA war against Russia. Massive death, suffering, and destruction in Ukraine and Russia at the hands of the U.S. death machine.
There are also the U.S. sanctions and embargoes that target innocent people with death, economic impoverishment, and starvation as a way to achieve political goals. North Korea, Russia, Iran, and Cuba come to mind.
Let’s not forget that assassination is still a tool that the Pentagon and the CIA resort to when they consider it necessary. It’s also worth recalling the recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court granting immunity to the president — and implicitly the Pentagon and the CIA — for state-sponsored assassinations of both Americans and foreigners.
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Statists say that the problem is widespread gun ownership. Really? Then why aren’t there mass killings and assassinations in Switzerland, where gun ownership is widespread? Could the reason be that they don’t live under a national-security state that has been wreaking death, maiming, injury, and destruction for 75 years?
If Americans want a normal society, there is a price to be paid for achieving it. That price includes the dismantling of the national-security state form of governmental structure and restoring the limited-government governmental structure on which our nation was founded. That necessarily would mean the dismantling of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — the triune god that so many Americans have come to worship and idolize, convinced that they are necessary to our safety and well-being.
A restoration of normalcy also requires the restoration of America’s founding foreign policy of non-intervention, which would mean no more invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, assassinations, kidnappings, alliances (including with brutal regimes), foreign aid, trade wars, sanctions, embargoes, and all other forms of foreign interventionism.
If we do these two things — restore a limited-government republic and a foreign policy of non-interventionism — we would go a long way toward restoring a free, peaceful, harmonious, and prosperous society to our land.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
