It is remarkable and admirable when people are willing to go into battle because their government wants them to. The days when soldiers personally pillaged the towns they invaded are mostly gone, and today the best a soldier can hope for is to end the day in one piece. America’s recent wars have involved our soldiers being much better armed than the people who wanted to do them harm, but they still suffered and died. Imagine being either Ukrainian or Russian soldiers who have endured the recent artillery duels and who now are fighting the drone wars, where death from above can strike any moment day or night. It is right and natural for the folks back home to want to honor those soldiers and do whatever they can to keep them safe. The parasitic financiers have consistently taken this proper feeling and turned it on its head to get us to send our soldiers into senseless conflicts to suffer death or injury rather than keeping them safe. We never learn their trick, because we never learn the difference between supporting a soldier and supporting a war.
Before and during every American war, we should all be furious at our government and remove every single one of the cowardly, corrupt creeps from office, top to bottom. Unless a war is truly necessary to preserve our independence as a nation, we shouldn’t be ordering our soldiers to die in it. If a war has become necessary to preserve our independence, then our government has completely screwed up, because with our geography and power that should never be necessary. Either way, we should utterly crucify the nitwits who got us there. We should honor and protect our soldiers, we should preserve them from the danger and depravity of war, and we should do that by dishonoring and destroying the careers of the people who make them have to go to war. Instead, we act like the criminal chickenhawks in Washington deserve the same honors as the soldiers. That confusion is unacceptable, and it is a grave disservice to our soldiers.
Before you let the craven creatures of the financiers wave the flag and say we should cheer to have our brave sons and daughters and husbands and wives go off to fight to crush any government that doesn’t play ball with the international financiers, let’s take a moment to absorb what our revolutionary founders and a few other honored Americans had to say on the subject. Consider whether they would approve of the financiers’ proposed foreign adventure. If the answer is no, they wouldn’t approve, then who has the right to wave the flag, the people promoting a war that our founders would despise, or the people bringing down the crooked cretins who caused it?
By living in peace, we can help and prosper one another; by waging war, we can kill and destroy many on both sides; but those who survive will not be the happier for that. - Thomas Jefferson
I hope...that mankind will at length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats; for in my opinion there never was a good war, or a bad peace. - Benjamin Franklin
My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth. - George Washington
Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. - James Madison
He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death. - Thomas Paine
If they are made war upon, their country invaded, or their existence at stake, it is their duty to defend and preserve themselves, but in every other light, and from every other cause, is war inglorious and detestable. - Thomas Paine
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses. - Thomas Jefferson
If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? - Martin Luther King Jr.
I believe that human life is a very special gift from God, and that no one has a right to take that away in any cause, however just. I am convinced that nonviolence is more powerful than violence. - Cesar Chavez
Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder – Thomas Paine
The desire to preserve our country from the calamities and ravages of war, by cultivating a disposition, and pursuing a conduct, conciliatory and friendly to all nations, has been sincerely entertained and faithfully followed. - Thomas Jefferson
[America] has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. ...
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters1 to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. - John Quincy Adams
Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America "you are too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God. Men will beat their swords into plowshafts and their spears into pruning hooks, and nations shall not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore." I don't know about you, I ain't going to study war anymore. - Martin Luther King Jr.
Testimony of all ages forces us to admit that war is among the most dangerous enemies to liberty, and that the executive is the branch most favored by it of all the branches of Power. - James Madison
I am for relying for internal defense on our militia solely till actual invasion, and for such a naval force only as may protect our coasts and harbors from such depredations as we have experienced; and not for a standing army in time of peace which may overawe the public sentiment; nor for a navy which, by its own expenses and the eternal wars in which it will implicate us, will grind us with public burdens and sink us under them. - Thomas Jefferson
If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within. - James Madison
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home. - James MadisonTo establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches. - Thomas Paine
Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations. - James Madison
That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true… - Thomas Paine
When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Governments constantly choose between telling lies and fighting wars, with the end result always being the same. One will always lead to the other.
Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject, as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is in their interest to go to war. - Thomas Jefferson
Wars are caused by financiers. They are fought by working people. Our nation was founded by those who fought a revolutionary war so that they could create a nation that would set a new example of evenhanded friendship with all countries and alliances with none. They hated war, and considered it to be stupid. They believed that wars are caused by rich and powerful people who seek to profit from them. They rejected the idea of fighting wars abroad to interfere in the concerns of others, and warned that wars are routinely built on lies. They considered war and militarism to be an unacceptable threat to liberty and democracy. They predicted that the American experiment in liberty and democracy would be undermined and destroyed by two things – concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and the rise of militarism. War, in short, is unamerican and a betrayal of the fundamental principles of the American revolution.
War costs the lives and health of working people. That does not really bother either wing of the Uniparty, but laborism stands for the protection of working people. American soldiers generally start out brave and good. I have spent time on military bases with some of our elite soldiers, sailors and pilots, and I have found them to be good, sensible, competent, level-headed citizens worthy of admiration2. I would gladly put veterans like Jesse Ventura and Michael T. McPhearson in charge of US military policy in place of the chickenhawk draft evaders and rich boys who have pushed our recent wars. Teenage men and women sent into the horrors of war can be corrupted, and we have had our share of soldiers who have brutally slaughtered women and children, while the incidence of sexual assault on our female soldiers by other soldiers has been unacceptable. But the people who volunteer to put their lives at risk, based on the promise that they will only be used to protect America, deserve our thanks and admiration. Laborism expresses such thanks and admiration by only risking their lives to counter an actual attack on America, and does not permit them to be used as tools and enforcers for financiers. Using our men and women in uniform to serve the financiers is the worst form of disrespect for their valor, and no truly patriotic American will stand for it.
War also costs us a fabulous amount of money. President Eisenhower warned us about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). Even he, the former Allied Commander, with all the power of the Presidency, was unable to suppress the power of the financier-driven MIC. Listening to recent federal budget discussions tells you all you need to know about the power of the MIC. The financier-owned politicians in Congress demanded that the military budget be increased by a large percentage, just because. They did not cite any particular need, any particular things that were needed for American security that the Pentagon didn’t have quite enough money to buy. They wanted to spend more just to spend more. In 2024 that was $928 billion in current military expenditure and foreign military aid, $346 billion for veterans benefits relating to prior wars, and billions more hidden in other budget lines. Through fiscal 2022, the US spent over $8 trillion on the post-9/11 wars. That is money taken from the pockets of working people and their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, with much of it ending up in the pockets of the financiers.
Laborism would follow the policy that Jefferson approved. All of America’s undeclared mini-wars would end. All of America’s foreign bases would be shut down and the soldiers brought home. We would maintain a Navy sized to protect American shipping and preserve the undersea leg of our nuclear deterrent3, but not to go pick a fight with China in the South China Sea. As an update for new technology, we would maintain a re-sized Air Force and those legs of the nuclear deterrent, being similar in operation to the Navy, but would keep most of the fighter planes in the state Air National Guard units. The military academies would be kept going, but we would restore the policy that the Second Amendment is really about, of putting the military back into the state militias, now known as the National Guard.
One of the intended protections for our liberty was that even if Congress declared a war and the President wanted to fight it, if they wanted soldiers they had to ask the states to send them, and states could refuse. In the war of 18124, when Madison proposed to invade Canada, the governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island did exactly that, refusing to send their militias to invade another country5. We have seen one weak-minded Congress after another fail to fulfill their Constitutional duty to control the President, so we know that the division of the war declaration power from the war execution power is not enough. Making the federal government dependent upon the consent of the states in this way helps to ensure that no war will occur unless the people really support it.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to maintain a standing Navy, but provides that Congress may only raise and support “armies” under appropriations lasting no more than 2 years, meaning that the framers did not intend for America to have a standing, perpetual army. Instead, military force was normally to be housed in the state militias, and the occasions on which Congress could call up the militias are explicitly limited: “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”
That list does not include invading Canada, or the Philippines, or assorted countries in Latin America, or North Korea, or Vietnam, or Cambodia, or Laos, or Iraq, or Somalia, or Afghanistan, or any of the countries where we have troops fighting in secret conflicts. It does not include acting as the World Police. The political hacks in Washington are very sensitive to the Constitution when the words happen to support the goals of their financier paymasters, but they completely ignore it when the Constitutional framework would require them to be good servants of the working people in the manner the framers intended. Laborism will make America the land of the free again, instead of the new imperial Rome. Under laborism, the President will have no ability to send troops across the world at whim. For the military to move, Congress will have to declare war, and the state governors will have to agree that the war amounts to repelling an invasion. It’s a simple mechanism. It’s what our founders intended. Laborists will do it.
At this point, many Americans brought up to believe financier propaganda will again be bouncing in their seats and saying “Hey, the framers were living in the 1700s. Times are different now, and if America isn’t out acting as the World Police then terrible things will happen! Don’t be naive!” So, my next post will begin the examination of that proposition. Let’s ask if the American people should have believed the financier calls to war, or should instead have pressed our leaders to obey the Constitution and work for peace.
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Dover Publications, 1997, p.52)
I have a number of relations who served in every branch in a variety of wars, again all honorable people, but my base visits were a more random sample.
A laborist government will also seek to reach agreements with the other nuclear powers to reduce our respective arsenals to levels less likely to end human civilization. However, keeping enough to make any attempt to attack the US inconceivable makes it easy to stand down the rest of the military.
One of my ancestors died in the War of 1812, being shot, falling overboard and then being eaten by sharks. The British were kidnapping American sailors, seizing American ships, and arming and encouraging Native Americans to attack the frontiers, which was harmful to both the white settlers and the Native Americans. In principle, then, that war was just protecting ourselves, but the proposed invasion of Canada was a different matter, and not one of Madison’s better ideas.
The Vikings had a very sensible policy about that. Men could be drafted to repel invaders within their own country, but could not be required to cross the border into someone else’s country. While they were warlike people, that did a lot to ensure that their attention was spent on voluntary expeditions to sack other countries, rather than pointless and bloody conflicts trying to conquer each other.