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November 19, 2004
Why We Fight
Justin Raimondo goes back to the fundamentals with a more philosophical column entitled "Why We Fight." It's a good primer on the reasons to oppose war and a nice break from his usual news-driven writing. Here's a sample:
[The bottom line] is this: American imperialism is bad for America. It undermines our republican (small-'r') institutions, it renders the effort to roll back Big Government futile, and it corrupts our character as a people. It also kills those it is supposed to be "liberating" – a moral conundrum that none of the advocates of America's "benevolent hegemony" acknowledge, let alone have an answer to.
War has a degenerative effect on republican institutions, and fatally undermines the rule of law and constitutional government, for the simple reason that war is lawlessness. While we all pretend that there are "rules of war," and every nation swears to abide by the Geneva Conventions, everybody knows that this is balderdash pure and simple. If you want to see the "rules of war" in operation, take a look at that video of a U.S. Marine blasting the head off a wounded insurgent in a Fallujah mosque. That is the true face of war, which is why no American television station has dared show the full unedited footage.
War centralizes political authority and economic power, investing all power in the state – and assigning obedience, rather than freedom, to the top rank in the social hierarchy of values. This, for libertarians, is the crux of the matter.
Read it all. It's a nice reminder of exactly, um, why we fight.
Posted by Mike Tennant at November 19, 2004 11:25 AM