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Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Thoughts on warmongers


If one is against war and warmongers, then one is slapped with a multitude of strange sounding labels which are supposed to insult one into silence. Hah! It probably works when one uses those tricks on people who cower in fear at nothing. 

Wars were about defending one's homeland from invaders not about sending armies to far away lands to fight the armies of foreign nations whose rulers or government are falsely perceived to have caused us harm or might cause us ill in the future.  The modern warfare and propagandists for such are nothing but blood thirsty individuals.
  
If one kills in self-defence, and it is proven to be that, then one is not criminalized for that killing.
Why are the propagandists for wars, wars which are not in self-defence,  not put behind bars? 

Ryan McMaken writing at MisesEconomics blog:
....Since at least as early as the eighteen century, classical liberalism, and its modern variant libertarianism, have opposed warfare except in cases of obvious self-defense. We see this anti-war position clearly among the anti-federalists of eighteenth-century America (who opposed all standing armies) and more famously within George Washington’s Farewell Address. Thomas Jefferson frequently inveighed against war, although in moves typical for Jefferson, he acted against his own professed ideology on a number of occasions.

On the other side of the Atlantic, liberalism finally made significant gains in Britain with the rise of the Anti-Corn Law League in the late 1830s. The head of the league, a radical liberal named Richard Cobden, rose to prominence throughout the 1840s and is notable today for his active defense of laissez-faire capitalism as a member of the House of Commons, and also for his staunch anti-interventionism in foreign affairs.

For a time, his political star rose quickly, but by the time the Crimean War ended, Cobden, had been cast aside by both a ruling class and a public enthusiastic for both empire and war.

Prior to the war Cobden traveled Europe as an honored guest at international peace conferences while advocating for free markets, civil liberties, and libertarianism everywhere he traveled. But in the end, as has been so often the case, his political career was ended by his opposition to war, and his refusal to buy into nationalistic propaganda.

Like the Crimean crisis of today, the Crimean crises of the early 1850s were caused by little more than the efforts of various so-called great powers to tip the global balance of power in their favor. Foremost among those grasping for global power was the British Empire.....



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