The Extremist

Iraq War Vet Figures Out War

Don't hold your breath until this veteran gets an interview with CNN or Fox News.

More on Dirty Tricks and Pretexting

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Technorati Tags P2OG /black ops/ secret/ war

Pretexts for War

“He hit me!” yells the schoolyard bully as he pummels his victim. He knows it doesn’t matter who threw the first punch as long as no one thinks he did. He knows if you can’t insult your target into striking, you just lie about it. Governments know it too. We all know it. Most of us know better.

No American war in this century has enjoyed majority support before it began. In spite of that, we’ve been at war almost constantly for the last 100 years. Uncle Sam maintains the support of a peaceful people in war after war because he’s mastered the schoolyard bully’s art. He’s always able to show he didn’t strike the first blow.

The American government didn’t invent the war pretext. Government deceptions have justified wars since Roman times. Although rarely enough to start a war by themselves, pretexts are critical to convincing peaceful people they’ve been attacked.

In the last century the U.S. government has evolved the war pretext from taking advantage of accidents to active creation of hoaxes for war.

Spanish America War, 1898
The pretext for this “splendid little war” was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. The American press blamed Cuban revolutionaries. The Maine’s commander, Capt. Sigsbee, said it was likely the ship accidentally exploded. Ships in those days often did. He was vilified in the press and silenced by his superiors.

Politicians and the press wanted a war. "Remember the Maine, To Hell with Spain!" was their battle cry. Artist Fredrick Remington, working for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, couldn’t find a war in Cuba and asked to come home. Hearst famously replied, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Two months later, the Spanish American War began. It ended with quick defeats of Spain in both the Philippines and Cuba. It made Teddy Roosevelt’s political career. The U.S. snapped up the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.

An investigation in 1975 concluded the explosion was accidental.

World War I, 1917-1918
Woodrow Wilson became President by promising to keep us out of war. He vowed neutrality, yet openly supplied Britain with arms and ammunition. On May 17, 1915, the British passenger ship Lusitania was traveling from New York to Britain, without escort at low speed, through waters patrolled by German subs. She carried passengers, freight and six million rounds of ammunition. A German sub took the bait and sank her killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. British scheming had created Wilson’s pretext for war.

Newspapers and politicians, once again, whipped up America’s appetite for war and, in 1917, we entered WWI.

World War II, 1941-1945
It would take more than a few dead Americans to get us into another foreign war. Americans remembered WWI with horror. To drag the U.S. into WWII, Franklin Roosevelt needed a spectacular pretext.

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor supplied it. If you need an excuse for war a “surprise attack” that kills over 2,000 Americans can’t be beat. But it was no surprise to the president. With the help of broken Japanese codes, FDR and key members of his cabinet knew exactly when and where the Japanese would attack. Historians have shown that not only did FDR know in advance about Pearl Harbor attack, he actively provoked it.

The Korean War, 1950-1952
The pretext for the U.S. invasion of Korea in 1950 was the presumed first strike on 6/25/50 by North Korea against South Korea. The U.S. whipped up U.N. support and went to war against North Korea. Evidence shows it is just as likely the first attack occurred two days earlier when S. Korean forces pushed north.

The Viet Nam War, 1964-1972
The pretext for the U.S.’s first strike against North Vietnam was an attack by a N. Vietnamese patrol boat on the U.S.S. Mattox in the Gulf of Tonkin. That attack never happened. Lyndon Johnson wanted it, even provoked it, but North Vietnam wouldn’t bite. So he simply invented it and began “retaliatory bombing.” The incident was half a world away in the middle of an empty sea and Al Gore hadn't invented the internet yet. Who was to know?

Panama Invasion 1989 
Reports of the shooting of a single soldier and the beating of an American soldier’s wife were enough for George I to invade Panama. Papa Bush declared he “would not stand by while American womanhood is threatened.” Not standing by is one thing, but launching a Helen of Troy style invasion is another.

The Wars in Iraq
The most recent war pretexts have been exposed with embarrassing swiftness. Hoaxes include the removal of the incubator babies in the first Iraq war, bombing an aspirin factory in Sudan, a fake concentration camp in Bosnia, and Saddam’s fearsome WMD’s. Only limits of space prevent listing dozens more. All have unraveled like cheap suits while new ones are tailored for new wars.

The possibilities for a pretext to attack Iran are legion. A nuclear explosion somewhere? In Israel perhaps? A ship sunk in the Red Sea? Use your imagination.

Documents declassified in 1997 revealed a 1962 plan named Operation Northwoods that circulated in Kennedy’s cabinet. The plan proposed (but never implemented) terrorist attacks against American targets. The attacks would be carried out by CIA spooks and blamed on Fidel Castro. They would provide a pretext to invade Cuba. The U.S. government wasn’t sufficiently corrupt at that point to execute the plan.

Nearly fifty years have passed since the Northwoods proposal. I leave it to the reader to decide whether our government has become more or less corrupt since then.

The War on Terror, 2001-????
The greatest attack on American civilians in our history occurred on September 11, 2001. Since that attack the government of the United States has massively expanded its own power and begun what promises to be a never-ending War on Terror.

The destruction of the Twin Towers was a mass murder. Among the many questions murder investigators ask is, “Who benefits?” More than a few who have asked that question about 9/11 have uncovered information that suggests the unthinkable. Knowing how our government has justified war in the past, a close look at the unthinkable, if only to eliminate it as a possibility, is worth taking.

Technorati Tags war /pretext/ conspiracy/ 9/11

9/11 Staged?

Here's an article you'll never see in a U.S. MSM newspaper. It's from the online Pravda. They make no "we're not conspiracy nuts" excuses. They flat out tell us they think 9/11 was staged, a modern hi-tech Reichstag's Fire. They are so bold as to suggest another staged attack would be a great boost to the sagging popularity of the President and his party. It would also conveniently provide the excuse Emperor George II has been looking for to bomb the snot out of Iran:

"The lesson of the staged 9/11 and the ensuing war in Iraq is clear: Americans will rally around the president and his party during distressing times. What could be more opportune for this president and his party than another staged 9/11-like event, followed by another war of retaliation, this time against Iran?"

There's reason to think they are right. To suggest it is to attract the ridicule of every right-thinking American, even those with a healthy mistrust of government

For instance: Where are the airplanes?

This is a photo of the crash site of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania:

Here's another. Where's the plane?

In case you think planes always just vaporize when they auger into the ground, think again. A loaded Boeing 757 weighs something like 100 tons. Much of that weight is indestructable steel. Every individual part is uniquely numbered. All flight-critical parts are assigned to the aircraft by its registration number. Not a single identifiable part was found at this scene, but the "black box" was.

The wreckage was hauled out in a single truck. Imagine 100 Toyota Tercel's crushed down to fit into a single dump truck.

Here's a picture of the wreckage of a similar plane that hit the ground going really fast:

It's a little morbid, but you can find photos of all kinds of plane wrecks here: Air Disasters. You will notice right away that the scenes of plane crashes feature many large and small pieces of airplanes.

Flight 93 is the only large commercial aircraft in history to vaporize upon impact with the earth. Oh, wait. There was one other. The one that crashed into the Pentagon that same day: American Airlines flight 77. Another 757.

Again: Where's the plane? Flight 77 was 125 feet wide and 45 feet tall yet it vanished into a hole less than 25 feet wide.

If you have any answers, I'd love to hear them.

Related links:
Address by Michael Rupert to the Commonwealth Club
The Rumor Mill
9-11 Journal
What really happened to 93?
From the Wilderness

Technorati Tags Iran /war/ politics/ 9/11

Hey, let's bring back slavery!

This article in Slate, with appropriate liberal hand wringing suggested it. The difference between a drafted soldier and a slave doesn't amount to a frosty mug o' mud. Reinstituting slavery or the draft will do nothing to enhance democratic fairness in America.

Mr. Weisberg uses the higher injury rate in Iraq as compared to Viet Nam to argue the injustice of death and dismemberment not being more democratically distributed.

He concludes that because Iraq is more dangerous than Viet Nam, forcing the unwilling to suffer and die is a morally superior option. In Mr. Wiesberg's calculus of how fair pointless death and dismemberment should be I'm certain there is a seamless logic at work, unfortunately, it escapes me.

His assumptions are the problem. He assumes that the invasion of a country that has never attacked or even meaningfully threatened this country is somehow "national defense." He assumes that the maiming and killing of America's young people (not to mention many thousands of innocent Iraqi's) is the price we must pay for "defending our country."

But American soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere in the world are not defending our country or our freedom. They are defending the American Empire of IOU's.

There is little danger of the sandy, oil-bearing backwaters of the world invading or seriously attacking the U.S. (A 9/11 every month wouldn't kill as many Americans as car wrecks do.) The real danger is that the camel jockeys might start requiring payment for their black goo in euros, or dinars or, heaven forefend, gold.

Such a move would deal a killing blow to the to the dollar, to American prosperity and ultimately to the Empire. It's a blow our government will struggle mightily to avoid, but which the average citizen is unaware of and utterly willing to sacrifice a son or daughter for.

Threatening Imperial Income

Saddam Hussein once toyed with the notion of pricing his country’s oil in Euros rather than Dollars. It wasn’t long before George II began chanting “Axis of Evil” and “WMD’s.” The U.S. Air Force created a steel thunderstorm over Baghdad. A hundred thousand Iraqis, electricity and indoor plumbing became memories in Mesopotamia. The U.S. Army dug Saddam out of a hole in his uncle’s backyard. He is now a prisoner. The U.S. Army occupies his palace.

You would think Saddam’s neighbors would take the hint. But leaders in Iran are finishing plans to trade Iranian oil in Euros. It’s not a coincidence that Baby Bush is whooping us up for an invasion.

Expect to hear a lot of reasons Iran needs to be democratized. Iran has THE BOMB. Iranians are terrorists. They are not nice to women. They are heavy smokers. They don’t have handicap ramps. But George II could forgive all those sins if those camel jockeys would just keep swapping oil for dollars. 

Not long ago I wrote about America’s peculiar empire. I thought the business model was all wrong. Imperial countries tax the conquered; they don’t subsidize them. Taxpayers in the Imperial Homeland are supposed to get fat off the sweat of outlanders. The American Empire appears to have it all wrong. As soon as America conquers a foreign land American taxpayers start printing election posters and building shopping centers for the vanquished. Where’s the profit in that?

What I hadn’t considered was the role of the Imperial Currency. The dollar standard changes all the old rules. Old fashion empires looted their subjects directly. Gold and silver were preferred, but slaves, women, horses, cattle, grain, silverware or whisky would do. The American Empire of IOU’s is the first in human history to tax its subjects indirectly through inflation. The Empire buys the world’s wealth with paper tokens — official promises to pay nothing at all. It’s easier and more efficient than old fashioned looting.

This scheme didn’t come about overnight. Our first experiments with international inflation ended in the Great Depression. To force Americans into the New Deal Franklin Roosevelt denied us the refuge of gold in the 1930’s. In 1945 the Bretton Woods agreement denied gold to everyone but foreign governments. Governments could exchange dollars for the barbaric relic until 1971. 

That was the year Richard Nixon realized his government was bankrupt. He “closed the gold window” stiffing the foreigners who held boatloads of paper dollars just as Roosevelt had stiffed Americans forty years earlier. Americans had exchanged an enormous number of paper dollars for an enormous amount of the world’s wealth. Nixon finally admitted we weren’t going to pay up.

Nixon’s default precipitated the “oil crises” of the early 70’s. It was really a dollar crisis. The Arabs, particularly the royal family of Saud, were not keen to trade oil for paper. We struck a deal with the sheiks that saved the Empire.

In exchange for military protection, the Saudis, and with them OPEC, would trade oil only for dollars. The deal would keep the Saud family in power and the world in need of lots of dollars. The dollar was suddenly backed by oil instead of gold.

While America appears to send help to those it conquers, it taxes the entire world to do so. America taxes the world through inflation. There is no need to invade a country to loot its natural resources if you can simply buy them with worthless paper chits.

Because everyone needs oil these days, the rest of the globe pays tribute to the Empire of IOU’s by using only dollars to buy oil. Creating dollars out of thin air makes the U.S. Government the game’s big winner. Other governments loot their own countries and subsidize the Empire by using accumulated dollars and Uncle Sam’s IOU’s as “reserves” to inflate their own currencies.

When a major oil producer breaks ranks to trade oil for Euros, or, heaven help us all, gold, it threatens the mechanism by which the Empire collects tribute.

If people didn’t need dollars to buy oil what would they need them for? There is little demand for money losing American businesses with more pensioners than employees. Foreigners already buy all the Brittany Spears albums and Ipods they want.  Americans make little else that the world cannot buy cheaper from Asian suppliers. Americans may be saddled with “legal tender” laws that force us to accept dollars, but foreigners are not.

Empires only go to war for two reasons, to conquer new lands or to protect income. The leaders of the American Empire have invaded one country to enforce the use of dollars. There is little doubt they will do so again.

What should be most troubling for Imperial America is that yet another pipsqueak, backwater sand patch is willing to risk invasion to break the stranglehold of the Imperial Dollar. There are many countries holding many, many, many depreciating dollars. More than a few of them would welcome the chance to diversify. We can’t invade them all.

The Peculiar Empire

America trudges down the road to imperial ruin like an ogre with a big stone hammer. I keep expecting the final pratfall, the step off the cliff into the void, the drop into the pit full of sharpened stakes, or just the steady banging of a great shaved head against a wall. But, of course, that’s not how empires end. Empires end in bankruptcy. There are no shortcuts to bankruptcy. You have to borrow until no one will lend to you, squirm, plead and bluster for a while, and then finally stiff everyone, hopefully with as little bloodshed as possible.

Americans now enjoy all the many, delicious delusions of empire and there are still plenty of people who will lend us money. The superiority of our culture is a certainty, confirmed daily by the international popularity of our music and films. We lord it over the rest of the world. We know what freedom is all about. Our soldiers pester the locals in dozens of countries around the globe. We’re there to set them free. We badger them to become good democrats. We like tyrants who understand the workings of an electoral machine. We choose them as our own leaders.

Since the beginning of the American Empire during the reign of Woodrow Wilson, Americans have increasingly worked to destroy the institutions we claim most to admire. We claim a devotion to freedom, but as soon as the flag gets to the top of the pole we stumble over one another to be inspected, injected, certified, registered, numbered, frisked and disarmed. Once there are G.I’s fighting in some godforsaken backwater there is no expense too great, no indignity too embarrassing, no violation of our own or some foreigner’s rights that is so serious that we would protest it. Yet we would set the world free.

In 1989 we had our chance to become again the peaceful republic we once were. Our only credible enemy threw in the towel. The Soviet Union gave a great sigh and decided world communism was just too much trouble. We won the cold war. There was no power on earth that could seriously threaten the United States.

Unfortunately, empires never dissolve themselves. Fish gotta swim, dogs gotta howl, empires gotta meddle in everybody’s business. Dismantling a vast military machine would effectively dismantle the empire. What’s in that for an imperial leader or for the noble people who bask in the reflected glory of world domination?

It wasn’t to be. Fortunately for our Imperial ambition, the world was still fraught with danger. A spectacularly successful attack by a handful of Arab fanatics on a couple of skyscrapers solved the enemy problem. The Empire of IOU’s now had the perfect new enemy. A tactic rather than any particular group of humans was America’s tormentor now. A war on terror is not unlike a war on camouflage, or a war on the surprise attack or a war on propaganda. That a war makes no sense has never been a deterrent to empire building.

And what a peculiar empire it is. The traditional model for empires features outlanders shipping wealth back to the imperial center. The Romans understood it. They took 10% of everything and sent it back to Rome. Romans lived large on the sweat of the conquered.

All the earlier conquerors of Baghdad, like Hulagu Kahn and Suleiman, enjoyed the customary looting and pillaging. They sold the locals into slavery. They carried off women, or abused them on the spot. They stuffed their tunics with candlesticks and flatware. Imperial conquest throughout history has been a moneymaker. Until now.

America is the first empire to turn conquest into a losing proposition. We conquer in the name of the Painted Whore, Democracy. We conquer so that we may borrow from the conquered. The only winners in America’s wars of conquest are the vanquished. The moment the imperial forces overrun your country you can expect the American taxpayer to start sending tribute to you. I’m surprised countries aren't lining up for subjugation.

American taxpayers will rebuild the waterworks, the electric company, the sewer system and the schools and hospitals the U.S. Air Force bombed into rubble just a few months before. They will rebuild them better than they were. The imperial taxpayer would have been better-off if the Iraqi’s had somehow managed to whip the U.S. Army.

But so consumed is America with its own good intentions that despite our steadily growing poverty we continue to approve of conquest for the benefit of the conquered. We only want what we know is best for everyone, meaningless elections, no smoking in restaurants, lead free paint in schools and granite countertops in every kitchen.

What peculiar imperialists we Americans are.

Public School Success

“It is impossible to give the soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.” — Henry David Thoreau

The leader of the Free World, Emperor George II, recently referred to our excellent adventure in Iraq as a “catastrophic success.” It’s a success that wouldn’t have been possible without another catastrophic success, forced public schooling.

For many years reports of the academic abilities of American public school students have been uniformly appalling. Only beneficiaries of the massive system argue that American public education is not in decline. By every observable standard American students are more ignorant and less able to think rationally, creatively and independently than they have ever been. 

Many parents and education experts point with alarm to this trend and call it a failure of public education. But is it a failure? A closer look at the history of forced public schooling reveals, not a failure, but a catastrophic success.

Napoleon’s French amateurs thrashed a professional Prussian army at the battle of Jena in 1806. The Prussians were humiliated. They turned to philosophy for insight. German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte told the Prussians that if they wanted to bounce back, Prussian children were going to have to learn how to obey orders. The Germans listened and agreed. Prussia became the first nation to institute education at gunpoint in 1819.

The Prussians were not concerned that their children were too poorly educated for their own good, but that they were too well educated to be good soldiers. They weren’t looking for independent thinkers or brilliant philosophers, what the Prussians wanted were obedient soldiers, workers who knew their place, faithful civil servants, and loyal, patriotic citizens who agreed about most everything. They believed self-reliant, well-read soldiers lost battles. If history is any indication, they were right.

Over the next 50 years Prussia became the dominant military power in Europe. Prussia united Europe’s German speaking states into what would become the famously warlike and relentlessly public schooled Germany of the two World Wars.

Erich Maria Remarque, in the powerful antiwar novel, All Quiet on the Western Front blamed the First World War on “the tricks of schoolmasters.” Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling — schooling in the Prussian tradition — schooling that removes from a young mind the ability to think for itself, either rationally or morally.

Education in colonial America was private and voluntary. Most parents taught their own children. Families often got together to hire a teacher for groups of children. The literacy rate was over 98%. American engineers and inventors built an industry that dazzled the world.

Under the influence of Horace Mann, a fawning admirer of the Prussian system, the first U.S. public schools appeared in Massachusetts in the 1850’s. They, like their Prussian models, did not spring from a desire to better educate children.

The Massachusetts public schools were the result of a fierce animosity toward newly immigrated Catholics. The “Know-Nothing” Party which ran the state in those days was terrified of losing political control to Catholic Irish immigrants. The Know-Nothings didn’t worry that little Irish tikes would grow up ignorant and illiterate. They were afraid the Catholics would fail to learn who was boss, and that the boss was a Protestant.

Compulsory public schooling was a hard sell in the U.S. Some early students were marched to school at gunpoint. Americans saw no advantage in having their children trained to obedience in a government institution. From the beginning the promoters of forced government schools had to hide their real goals. Public school boosters sold Americans on a free, liberal education that taught self-reliance and critical thinking equally to all. But they spoke the truth among themselves.

Labor shortages in northern factories after the Civil War convinced powerful industrialists that they had much to gain from pliable workers trained to subservience, educated, but not too well educated. With the help of influential industrial promoters, forced schooling took hold in the U.S. throughout the later 19th century.

By 1889, U.S. Commissioner of Education William Tory Harris assured railroad magnate Collis Huntington that American schools were “scientifically designed” to prevent “over-education.” How pleased he would be to see a modern high school junior struggle with a bus schedule.

In 1896, the famous educator John Dewey said, “independent, self-reliant people were a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future.” Dewey promoted eliminating phonics to teach reading, not because the “whole word” method worked better, but precisely because it was less efficient. Avid readers were harder to socialize, he said.

By 1991, Gerald Bracy, a leading professional promoter of government schooling wrote, “We must continue to produce an uneducated social class.” No problem there, Gerry.

Compulsory public schooling in the United States has been wildly successful at producing a huge uneducated class. Government schools are satisfied to impart an education sufficient to operate a touch screen at a Burger King or in an M-1 tank. They never intended to teach the critical thinking, creative expression and rational analysis that constitute a true liberal education.

An educational system where attendance is coerced, financing is compulsory and all personnel are government employees teaching a government approved curriculum is incapable of producing anything but obedient, patriotic, taxpayers. Liberally educated students would quickly try to escape before their twelve year sentence was up. Forced drug therapy is now required to keep the least pliable students focused on a daily routine that begins with a loyalty oath before moving on to stupefying boredom, unprovoked violence, random searches, constant surveillance and pee tests.

The widely held and apparently unshakable belief among Americans that children not socialized by an unruly mob of their peers will bear lifelong psychic scars is further proof of the success of generations of coercive indoctrination. While peer pressure may suffice to train young people to hide their private parts, eat with utensils and refrain from making messes in the house, children socialized by children will behave like children as long as such behavior is tolerated. Government organizations are tolerant of everything but nonconformity and disobedience.

Until we separate our schools from our government, both will continue to enjoy a catastrophic success.

Catastrophic Success

George II recently described his campaign to bring democracy at gunpoint to the Mesopotamian desert as a “catastrophic success.” Our silver-tounged leader inadvertently hit on the perfect description not only of the results of the Iraqi war, but of most government efforts to improve the world and the people in it.

One of government’s most comprehensive efforts at world improvement, public education, has made headlines lately with yet another study confirming the breath taking ignorance of American high school students — in this case regarding the purpose and application of the First Amendment. This, by the way, is the first item in the Bill of Rights — the amendment that affirms our rights to a free press, free speech, freedom of religion, to gather peaceably in public and to petition our government.

The study showed a generation clueless in matters of both our history and our Constitution. The study revealed that most high school students think the government should censor news reports of all kinds. Understandably, the report induced apoplectic dudgeon in conservatives and liberals alike over the failure of American public education.

There’s nothing like a threat to “freedom of the press” to send even the most ruthless, progressive world-improvers around the bend. The same progressive editors who blithely ignore the Constitution in support of victim disarmament, self-incriminating tax returns, airport strip searches and stealing land for the endangered slime gecko become vigilant Constitutionalists at the first whiff of a challenge to their right to harangue us with collectivist propaganda.

In my enthusiasm for the entire Constitution, I will defend to the death anyone’s right to advocate silly socialism. After all, debunking PC hoo-haw is my beat. Where would I be without self-righteous progressive busybodies? What would I write about? What would fuel my own engine of self-righteousness? To whom would I reveal the inner workings of government, like a father describing the hidden ingredients of a baloney sandwich to his teenaged daughter?

As always, I am happy to join the army of the well-intentioned for a good cause. In this instance, I share liberals’ fear for the future of the republic owing to the abysmal ignorance of our young people. But as usual we disagree about the source of that ignorance. To progressives, pliable, uninformed teenagers who trust the government to spoon-feed them the news represent a failure of the education system. A closer examination of public education, however, reveals not a failure but the “catastrophic success” of a massive government program.

Public education, like every government undertaking, is coercive. The law compels students to attend school. The law compels taxpayers to pay for it. Teachers and administrators are all government employees. Government bureaucrats approve every detail of the curriculum. Children are institutionalized in public schools as early as age four. They spend more time in school than most violent felons spend in prison. Many and particularly boys receive powerful psychoactive drugs to control their behavior. All begin each day by taking a government approved loyalty oath.

Such an environment will not produce adults with a healthy mistrust of official power. A curriculum produced and presented by government employees will never wander far from the smooth, straight path of naive trust in government and a solemn reverence for authority.

Considering teenagers’ natural inclination to rebellion, their deep ignorance both of their rights and of the dangers of overreaching state power is a triumph of government planning, not a failure of education. No organization, and certainly no coercive monopoly, will ever propose its own decline or dissolution.

What high school teacher would long keep his job teaching that the income tax violates Fifth Amendment prohibitions against self-incrimination? What government bureaucrat would approve a course that shows how drug warriors violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, or that the War on Drugs itself is unconstitutional? What government high school would teach that military conscription violates the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibitions against involuntary servitude? How often do public school students learn that the Second Amendment affirms the right of law-abiding adults to own and carry firearms?

We can expect calls from the left and right for more tax money for education to better teach our children about their history and their rights. But more government involvement in education will only intensify constitutional ignorance and strengthen trust in government authority. Programs like No Child Left Behind are quickly morphing into No Child Left UnPsychoanalyzed, No Child Left UnMedicated, and ultimately No Child Left to Think for Himself.

Government bureaucrats will never teach a proper respect and understanding of the U.S. Constitution because the authors of that document intended specifically to limit government power. We will reduce ignorance of history and human rights in future generations only when we reduce the “catastrophic success” government schools have had in producing that ignorance.

George II Defends the Constitution

“Delusions are states of refuge. The mind, unable to comprehend realities or to deal with them, finds its ease in superstitions, beliefs and modes of irrational procedure. It is easier to believe than to think.”           ― Garet Garrett

President Bush has for the second time sworn an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” His remarks immediately after he took the oath made it clear he intends to do no such thing.

To judge by his inaugural address, the President’s highest priority in defending our Constitution is “...the expansion of freedom in all the world.” I’ve combed the Constitution in vain to find where it requires the chief executive to spread freedom throughout the world. I’ve tried to recall anything the Founders wrote that would convince the President he is constitutionally bound to do anything beyond defending American freedom right here in America. My meager memory and a Google search of the Federalist Papers turns up no arguments by Hamilton, Madison or Jay for spreading anything throughout the world except peaceful American trade.

Using the royal “we,” George II said, “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”  I’m not a member of Scull and Bones but common sense leads me to a different conclusion. 

On the evidence, the President’s conclusion is not only wrong, but the opposite is true. By every measure Americans enjoyed a lot more freedom when two thirds of the world was enslaved in the socialist wastelands of Eastern Europe, Russia and China. Now that almost every People’s Paradise has collapsed under its own weight of injustice and repression, or become sufficiently capitalist to survive, Mr. Bush intends to show the world the right way to do socialism ― with liberty and justice for all.

The U.S. government under George II is pumping the lifeblood of liberty into other lands by draining it from American veins. Americans are “liberating” Islamic peasants from Islamic tyrants by destroying our own liberties at home.

While fighting terrorists like a blind tiger, President Bush has failed spectacularly in defending the U.S. Constitution. In response to a single, unique but wildly successful terrorist attack, Mr. Bush has effectively abandoned the Constitution.

With no constitutional support he has invaded two foreign countries, created several enormous, lavishly funded bureaucracies, expanded the powers of every police agency in the county and shattered protections against illegal search, seizure, arrest and imprisonment. Without evidence or charges he has thrown thousands of Islamic immigrant grocers, cabbies, barbers and accountants into prison. He has shackled future generations of Americans to a mountain of debt to finance “...the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

I’m certain the President sincerely believes our freedom depends on everyone else’s freedom. I’m just as certain his belief is a variation on an age-old delusion. The notion that “We can’t enjoy what we have until everyone has what we have” didn’t originate with President Bush. History’s busiest highways to perdition are paved hard and smooth with that absurd idea.

The Chinese government bestowed the blessings of socialism on the peaceful monks of Tibet in 1959. Few of those monks survived.

Napoleon was sure the Russians wouldn’t be content until they were eating escargot instead of borsht. His army froze to death eating their boots in the snow.

Germany’s National Socialist Party fielded an army with the idea of making Moscow part of the Fatherland. That army froze to death on the Russian steppes as well.

Europeans fought wars for centuries based on the idea that the joys of Catholicism were available only in a world entirely Catholic.

Crusaders from Peter the Hermit to Richard the Lionhearted pursued a murderous religious folly to rescue the Holy Land from unholy Islam and light the lamp of redemption for their Muslim brethren.

Unlike the Crusaders, George II isn’t killing Muslims to convert them to Christianity. He wants them to kneel before Democracy, the goddess of parliamentary whores.

The American War on Terror is a delusional folly as surely as the Crusades were. Unfortunately, human folly and mass delusion are easier to identify than explain, easier still to see in the past than in the present. The delusion that one people cannot be content until all people are like them has led millions to destruction.

Our President, with the best of intentions, is chasing that same ancient mirage of faith, believing rather than thinking. He is wrong when he says we safeguard our freedom best by spreading it at gunpoint. Americans will remain free only by holding our leaders to their promise to protect and defend the Constitution, by refusing to be enslaved for our own good, by thinking rather than believing.