Thanks (But No Thanks) For Your Service

It seems as though even the most fervent statist is capable of recognizing the ineptitude of government almost across the entire spectrum of its grasp. We know it is wasteful, corrupt, and intrusive. Of course, if you see these failures and remain a statist, your solution to this obvious, widely accepted problem will likely be more elections to try to fine tune government to become the machine it has never, ever shown any promise of achieving. 

To the statist, the government is like a man who shatters your kneecap with a baseball bat, hands you a pair of crutches, demands you pay him for the crutches, lest he break other bones in your body – your skull, perhaps – and then expects you to be gracious for his generosity. And “The People” are grateful. That analogy is absolutely flawless – indeed, if government is good at anything, it is good at engineering the fear, crises, and artificial scarcity it uses as justification for itself. The deception is obvious, we know it, yet we refuse to transcend it.

In that vain, the State has, throughout many decades, methodically designed a system that, in assembly line fashion, churned out generations of frightened, helpless cowards who could hardly get out of bed in the morning if they were not assured of the State's protection over their lives and property. If you actually watch television or read newspapers, not a day goes by that fear of some entity who's sole and solitary desire is to kill you and your family, for no other reason than their own lust for blood and hatred of “freedom” (I can hardly use that word without putting it in quotations). Today, we know, because it's what we've been told since we exited the womb, not to question these facts: without the State, you would die. Someone would come and kill you and your family, and take what's yours. Because that meme has been injected into our minds from such a young age, so persistently throughout our lives, it is a rare individual who is capable of reflecting on the logic and sanity of that line of thinking. 

This is despite mountains of evidence showing practically every external enemy we are demanded to fear was created by our own government. And, my god, we know this. It's become almost a punchline in America that we intervene in other countries' internal affairs, usually by giving weapons to factions fighting against regimes we don't like, and then at some point must then fight our former allies when we decide we no longer like them either. Yet we insist on war to destroy that enemy, and never deviate. Who hasn't seen this picture before:

That, of course, is Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. We all know how that turned out (well, it's still ongoing). During the 1980's, then-president Reagan had leaders of the Taliban at the White House, and referred to them as “our brothers, these freedom fighters ... the moral equal of America's Founding Fathers”. Here is Hillary Clinton explaining to congress that America created al Qaeda, and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski under President Jimmy Carter testifies that support for the muhajadin preceded the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. See here for more on how al Qaeda is the devil spawn of American government black ops (and here).

The “terrorist” who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 was an FBI stooge, who was given a real bomb to play with. Whoops? Today, practically every terrorist attack, carried out or thwarted, is an FBI black op (see also here). The rebels we supported to overthrow Ghadaffi in Libya were avowed al Qaeda militants (see also here), yet most were only outraged that then-Secretary of State Clinton didn't provide adequate security for Benghazi. Not, you know, that we deliberately turned an oppressive but relatively prosperous and stable state into a jihadist scumhole. And finally, the villain-du-jour, ISIS, was created by the Department of Defense to overthrow Assad in Syria. These are not conspiracy theories. They report on these in mainstream news, confident the average dupe is too distracted to notice.

All of this, perhaps, could be excused if the same policy of funding and arming our future bogeymen did not continue unabated, but the policy, carried out through several decades, is obviously written in stone,

By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.

– Lt. General William Odom, director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan

Of course, none of these “enemies” have the power or the scope to pose a realistic threat to anyone this side of vast oceans. They have no air force. They have no navy. If they are here now, within our imaginary borders, it's because they were brought here. In many cases, terrorists – that is to say, government stooges (see above) – were given visas and allowed into the country despite being on terror watch lists – despite being known “threats”.

I could go on all day, but let me bring this to a close by returning to the analogy of your broken leg. The government has created every threat to your life and liberty you think you need protection from, yet when most of us see a soldier in fatigues, we practically fall down at their feet, thanking them for their protection, i.e. “service”. Police are perhaps worshiped less, but only by degree. It's as if we know their employers – the State – are rotten scumbags, yet it doesn't even occur to us that the rotten scumbags give these saints their orders, and they obey. How quickly we have forgotten that Nazis were hung at Nuremberg (the ones who weren't airlifted out by our government) whose sole defense was, “I didn't have a choice. I was ordered.” No, I am not comparing our troops and our police to those who tossed Jews into ovens and gas chambers, but the principle still applies: following orders is not a viable defense for committing immoral acts. If your options are the brig or, as a for-instance, launching a hellfire missile at a wedding party which you know will kill many innocents, including women and children, then the moral and just choice is the brig. If you would rather murder people who are of no threat to you than spend time in prison, you cannot by any standard consider yourself moral. (See "Did We Just Kill a Kid?" Six Words That Ended a US Drone Pilot's Career)

The only reason we allow for this glaring contradiction – that our government creates the threats we demand it protect us from – is because to accept reality is a stinging indictment to the soldiers who follow orders to kill the enemies who would be no threat to us were they not specifically created as such. That, and, of course, the fact that our pathetic notion of “civics”, instilled (indoctrinated) into us throughout our internment in public schooling, teaches us that society would fall into chaos without soldiers to kill our enemies and police to protect us from “criminals” (a large percentage of prison inmates are non-violent offenders, i.e. not criminals), all based on lies.

Today, the troops we think we need to defend us against terrorists are now being protected by the civilians they are supposed to be protecting from terrorists. It seems to me that, if the "People" are capable of defending those who are supposed to be doing the defending, the whole concept of state defense is redundant as the people are perfectly capable of defending themselves. Perhaps we should just cut out the middle-man.

So thanks, but no thanks, for your service. I understand your motives might be well-intended, but they are grossly and disastrously misguided, and patting you on the bank and showing my gratitude is not only disingenuous, but does you a disservice. It deflects the moral responsibility on your part to not only disobey unjust, immoral, and usually illegal orders, but to take off the costume and refuse to participate in this entire fraud in the first place.

Ultimately it is not government agents who need throw their costumes in the trash for this delusion to end. It is for the masses to come into their own power, to overcome their irrational fears, so that there is no need, amidst empowered individuals, for the State to exist in the first place.

This is a lesson for humanity, not just Americans.