http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer155.html
Memorial Day Alternative
by Butler Shaffer
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Paths of Glory – A Kirk Douglas film. A general sends his men on a suicide mission. When the mission fails, a few soldiers are arbitrarily selected to be tried – and executed – for cowardice.
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In my younger days, I loved war movies. I think it was Paths of Glory or perhaps it was The Execution of Private Slovik that killed that illusion.
Now I see and regret the error of my ways.
Maybe it was the anti-war folk songs of the Sixties. Maybe it was reading about countless kids coming home to their parents in body bags over the decades. Maybe it was the anti-war Socialist Left harping on the issue (to advance their own agenda). Maybe it was the MASH tv series.
Maybe it was just growing up.
I’ve since “learned” of the horror. The Japanese Internment, Dresden bombing, and A bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I “learned” it in school, but I was too stupid to really “learn” it.
I’ve since learned that venial leaders like Lincoln were pursuing their own agenda (i.e., that of the Northern mercantilists). Some were just lying like Wilson who campaigned on an anti-war platform and proceeded immediately to get us into WW1. Some were seeking to get out of economic trouble like FDR staging Pearl Harbor (see Stennent’s book). Some were silver-spoon sex-crazed drugged egotists like Kennedy, who knows what their motivation was (I’d have expected better of a vet who was almost killed). It seems we the people only find out the truth long after the bodies are buried. Our friends and family members bodies that is. We are led by a political class that has a positive motivation to put us more under their thumb. Hitler was an amateur. He should have had the income tax and inflation. That makes everyone a slave. Then you can kill them at your leisure.
“For the people, wars do not pay. The only cause of armed conflict is the greed of autocrats.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” ~ Jeannette Rankin
“War is the health of the State” Randolph Bourne
All drive home the point. We all lose in ANY war.
You can talk to me about war, when someone is landing troops on the Jersey shore.
Dona nobis pacem.
Reinke Faces Life 