Posted on 08/16/2021 10:15:11 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Ron Paul: “Madam Speaker, I have a few questions for my colleagues. What if our foreign policy of the past century is deeply flawed and has not served our national security interest?
What if we wake up one day and realize that the terrorist threat is the predictable consequence of our meddling in the affairs of others, and has nothing to do with us being free and prosperous?
What if propping up repressive regimes in the Middle East endangers both the United States and Israel?
What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and bombing Pakistan is directly related to the hatred directed toward us?
What if someday it dawns on us that losing over 5,000 American military personnel in the Middle East since 9/11 is not a fair tradeoff with the loss of nearly 3,000 American citizens no matter how many Iraqi, Pakistanian, Afghan people are killed or displaced?
What if we finally decide that torture, even if called “enhanced interrogation technique”, is self-destructive and produces no useful information and that contracting it out to a third world nation is just as evil?
What if it is finally realized that war and military spending is always destructive to the economy?
What if all war-time spending is paid for through the deceitful and evil process of inflating and borrowing?
What if we finally see that war-time conditions always undermine personal liberty?
What if Conservatives who preach small government wake up and realize that our interventionist foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?
What if Conservatives understood once again that their only logical position is to reject military intervention and managing an empire throughout the world?
What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?
What if we as a nation came to realize that the quest for empire eventually destroys all great nations?
What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq?
What if a military draft is being planned for for the wars that would spread if our foreign policy is not changed?
What if the American people learned the truth, that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security, that it never changes from one administration to the next?
What if war in preparation for war is a racket serving the special interests?
What if President Obama is completely wrong about Afghanistan and it turns out worse than Iraq and Vietnam put together?
What if Christianity actually teaches peace and not preventive wars of aggression?
What if diplomacy is found to be superior to bombs and bribes in protecting America?
What happens if my concerns are completely unfounded? Nothing.
But what happens if my concerns are justified and ignored? Nothing good.
And I yield back the balance of my time.”
I admire George Washington greatly, but it did take him 6 years to defeat Britain, when Great Britain had no allies. Germany in World War I had not only Austria-Hungary and Turkey as allies, but also Bulgaria. How would the American Revolution have turned out if the British had had Bulgaria as an ally in that war?
Lehrer’s still with us; aged 93 now. Wonder how many years he’s got . . . hope it’s not the COVID that gets him.
No allies? I would have hoped that you didn’t forget about the Hessians.
Washington, being an intelligent and precision-thinking man, would have certainly taken US industrial and military strength, vastly superior to what he had available over 130 years earlier, into account, as well as the imperialistic belligerence of the Kaiser. The Lusitania would have been the last straw. Remember, neutrality is a two-way street, not the cowering before bullies.
You mean the Lusitania, that was carrying about 173 tons of war munitions for Britain? That Lusitania?
World War I was, by any measure, a total disaster. It achieved nothing except to kill a generation of European men, give birth to Marxism, plant the seeds of the Great Depression and then Nazism, and create existentialist, post-modern culture which is causing the suicide of the West we are now witnessing up close ourselves.
European powers had been regularly warring for centuries to achieve their balance of power. UK vs. France, France vs. Germany, UK vs. Russia, Austro-Hungary vs. Russia. There was no end to their folly, and all the USA did was become a player in that game.
Some argue that without the USA, who was hardly neutral before (and was in full-blown Progressive mindset under Wilson) the two sides would have made a truce in 1917. Maybe yes, maybe no. The end result was simply a transfer global military and financial power to the USA, so sure Americans think it was worthwhile - but at a great cost.
Whomever those “some” are who “argue” the kumbaya scenario can be safely disregarded. The main goal the Kaiser had for taking over and “uniting” the continent under his rule was—as he plainly said—to use it to oppose the USA, which was never an aggressor towards his regime.
There is no such entity as “the West”. There are Western nations, but they have always been different; the only thing that actually held them together after the two highly-destructive wars (the second one not limited to Europe) was US leadership and dominance, from the US philosophy and not the left-wing philosophy.
National socialism is an outgrowth of Bismarckian state socialism, which was (and this was the error) left in place after WWI ended.
Why parrot the Kaiser’s propaganda? Bad enough the liberal media still spews it.
What propaganda? It was true the Lusitania was carrying munitions when we were supposedly still neutral.
According to whom?
We’ve only heard reports from leftists, making that claim. None of us went down to the wreck.
And why would it be the business of the Kaiser if we did or not? Why abide by his supposed terms, as if he were the legitimate ruler of those waters by that time?
Ron Paul: Clueless then, still clueless then with it being reposted.
Some people don’t read past the headline. A discussion on whether or not our foreign policy is flawed is fair game. But you read the actual content of the post, and it is the typical “America is evil” and conspiracy nonsense all too common with Ron Paul’s floor rantings.
The neoconservative conceit that everyone will put up with hostility and/or occupation as long as it’s America that’s doing it. So glad that your strain of conservatism is already in the dustbin of history.
But go ahead and set up some more strawmen if it makes you feel any better.
The king's use of foreigners against his own subjects in 1775 was something that caused a lot of his formerly loyal subjects in America to start to consider renouncing their allegiance to the king (along with his proclamation effectively removing them from his protection, his contemptuous reaction to the Olive Branch petition, and Lord Dunmore incitement of the slaves to rebellion).
Jim Lehrer who used to co-host an evening news program on PBS died last year (Jan. 23, 2020).
But that doesn't mean that history is like a VCR that you can just rewind, and to pretend that we can just take our ball and go home is childish.
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