Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Christianity and Ron Paul - The Just War Theory

All Christians who oppose Ron Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy should read this terrific blog post by the The Conservative Cowboy on that very subject:

Being a Christian man, I am amazed at the number of other Christians and Christian leaders that refuse to support Ron Paul's campaign. Countless times I have heard men and women say that Ron Paul has good ideas but his foreign policy is crazy, or insane, or isolationist. I believe the failure to recognize the merits of his foreign policy is dangerous and that blindly going into war is completely incompatible with Christian doctrine. It is becoming apparent to me that fewer and fewer Christians actually understand the lessons that Jesus taught while on this earth.

The idea of pre-emptive war is not, in any way, compatible with what I believe to be the heart of the message of Christ. To deny this is folly and will only sink us deeper into the mess we are in economically, and further diminish the respect that we once maintained around the world.

Read the rest

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Great Ron Paul Interview on Fox News Sunday

Give some decent time to Dr. Paul to defend his views and he really shines, as he did on Fox News Sunday:



Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Ron Paul Super Bomb Announced for 9/19

The Revolution PAC, a "Super PAC" dedicated to spreading the word about Ron Paul, has announced a Super Money Bomb for September 19, the anniversary of the Battle of Saratoga during the Revolutionary War. Here is the press release:

September Superbomb Announced by Ron Paul Super PAC

Revolution PAC calls on businesses, organizations, and individuals to act on one day Ron Paul fundraiser.

Northbrook, IL – August 9, 2011 – Revolution PAC, the Super PAC formed in July to support the presidential ambitions of Congressman Ron Paul, has announced a money bomb fundraiser – a “Super PAC Superbomb” – for September 19.

“September 19 marked the first of the battles of Saratoga, which taken together amounted to a significant turning point in the War for Independence,” said Revolution PAC President Gary Franchi. “We hope this Superbomb, and the resources it brings in, will propel us toward a victory no less dramatic for Ron Paul.”

In advance of the Superbomb, the Super PAC is emphasizing its grassroots nature, its low overhead, and its effective use of funds.

“We are regular Americans, each of whom has a track record of support for Dr. Paul and what he stands for,” said Thomas Woods, Revolution PAC Advisory Board Chairman. “We aren’t paying the six-figure salaries and five- and six-figure expense reimbursements we often encounter in the political world. We are simply dedicated to the cause, and we have employed every penny donated to us wisely and conscientiously.”

The Super PAC form of organization, made possible by two court rulings in 2010, has gathered steam quickly during this election cycle. Unlike a presidential campaign, it can accept unlimited donations from individuals, businesses, and other groups.

During an event outside the Chicago Federal Reserve over the weekend Franchi remarked: “We’re changing the game. Anybody can donate to us, but in particular those who have reached the $2500 legal limit in donations to a presidential campaign can now continue to help Ron Paul by supporting the Revolution Super PAC.

“We will devote whatever we raise to carrying out the most efficient and effective political marketing campaign Americans will see this cycle. Ron Paul and his message will be everywhere. The Ron Paul grassroots will have been underestimated for the last time.”

The Revolution PAC is asking foreign supporters of Ron Paul to patronize US businesses who support the Super PAC.

Ron Paul supporters are being asked to pledge to contribute to the September 19th Superbomb at http://RevolutionPAC.com

Contact:
Mary Putnam
mary@revolutionpac.com
3149 Dundee Rd. #176
Northbrook, IL 60062
Ph: 866-202-9367

###

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the U.S. Terror State (Anthony Gregory)

A terrific article by Anthony Gregory on the nuclear attacks on Japan and other terrorist acts by the US government:

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the U.S. Terror State
by Anthony Gregory

Being a U.S. war criminal means never having to say sorry. Paul Tibbets, the man who flew the Enola Gay and destroyed Hiroshima, lived to the impressive age of 92 without publicly expressing guilt for what he had done. He had even reenacted his infamous mission at a 1976 Texas air show, complete with a mushroom cloud, and later said he never meant this to be offensive. In contrast, he called it a "damn big insult" when the Smithsonian planned an exhibit in 1995 showing some of the damage the bombing caused.

We might understand a man not coming to terms with his most important contribution to human history being such a destructive act. But what about the rest of the country?

It’s sickening that Americans even debate the atomic bombings, as they do every year in early August. Polls in recent years reveal overwhelming majorities of the American public accepting the acts as necessary.

Conservatives are much worse on this topic, although liberals surely don’t give it the weight it deserves. Trent Lott was taken to the woodshed for his comments in late 2002 about how Strom Thurmond would have been a better president than Truman. Lott and Thurmond both represent ugly strains in American politics, but no one dared question the assumption that Thurmond was obviously a less defensible candidate than Truman. Zora Neale Hurston, heroic author of the Harlem Renaissance, might have had a different take, as she astutely called Truman "a monster" and "the butcher of Asia." Governmental segregation is terrible, but why is murdering hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians with as much thought as one would give to eradicating silverfish treated as simply a controversial policy decision in comparison?

Perhaps it is the appeal to necessity. We hear that the United States would have otherwise had to invade the Japanese mainland and so the bombings saved American lives. But saving U.S. soldiers wouldn’t justify killing Japanese children any more than saving Taliban soldiers would justify dropping bombs on American children. Targeting civilians to manipulate their government is the very definition of terrorism. Everyone was properly horrified by Anders Behring Breivik’s murder spree in Norway last month – killing innocents to alter diplomacy. Truman murdered a thousand times as many innocents on August 6, 1945, then again on August 9.

It doesn’t matter if Japan "started it," either. Only individuals have rights, not nations. Unless you can prove that every single Japanese snuffed out at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was involved in the Pearl Harbor attack, the murderousness of the bombings is indisputable. Even the official history should doom Truman to a status of permanent condemnation. Besides being atrocious in themselves, the U.S. creation and deployment of the first nuclear weapons ushered in the seemingly endless era of global fear over nuclear war.

However, as it so happens, the official history is a lie. The U.S. provoked the Japanese to fire the first shot, as more and more historians have acknowledged. Although the attack on Pearl Harbor, a military base, was wrong, it was far less indefensible than the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki's civilian populations.

As for the utilitarian calculus of "saving American lies," historian Ralph Raico explains:

[T]he rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.

The propaganda that the atomic bombings saved lives was nothing but a public relations pitch contrived in retrospect. These were just gratuitous acts of mass terrorism. By August 1945, the Japanese were completely defeated, blockaded, starving. They were desperate to surrender. All they wanted was to keep their emperor, which was ultimately allowed anyway. The U.S. was insisting upon unconditional surrender, a purely despotic demand. Given what the Allies had done to the Central Powers, especially Germany, after the conditional surrender of World War I, it’s understandable that the Japanese resisted the totalitarian demand for unconditional surrender.

A 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukings were not decisive in ending the war. Most of the political and military brass agreed. "The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing," said Dwight Eisenhower in a 1963 interview with Newsweek.

Another excuse we hear is the specter of Hitler getting the bomb first. This is a non sequitur. By the time the U.S. dropped the bombs, Germany was defeated and its nuclear program was revealed to be nothing in comparison to America’s. The U.S. had 180,000 people working for several years on the Manhattan Project. The Germans had a small group led by a few elite scientists, most of whom were flabbergasted on August 6, as they had doubted such bombs were even possible. Even if the Nazis had gotten the bomb – which they were very far from getting – it wouldn’t in any way justify killing innocent Japanese.

For more evidence suggesting that the Truman administration was out to draw Japanese blood for its own sake, or as a show of force for reasons of Realpolitik, consider the United States’s one-thousand-plane bombing of Tokyo on August 14, the largest bombing raid of the Pacific war, after Hirohito agreed to surrender and the Japanese state made it clear it wanted peace. The bombing of Nagasaki should be enough to know it was not all about genuinely stopping the war as painlessly as possible – why not wait more than three days for the surrender to come? But to strategically bomb Japan five days after the destruction Nagasaki, as Japan was in the process of waving the white flag? It’s hard to imagine a greater atrocity, or clearer evidence that the U.S. government was not out to secure peace, but instead to slaughter as many Japanese as it could before consolidating its power for the next global conflict.

The U.S. had, by the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed 67 Japanese cities by firebombing, in addition to helping the British destroy over a hundred cities in Germany. In this dramatic footage from The Fog of War, Robert McNamara describes the horror he helped unleash alongside General Curtis LeMay, with images of the destroyed Japanese cities and an indication of what it would have meant for comparably sized cities in the United States:



"Killing fifty to ninety percent of the people in 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional – in the minds of some people – to the objectives we were trying to achieve," McNamara casually says. Indeed, this was clearly murderous, and Americans are probably the most resistant of all peoples to the truths of their government’s historical atrocities. It doesn’t hurt that the U.S. government has suppressed for years evidence such as film footage shot after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet even based on what has long been uncontroversial historical fact, we should all be disgusted and horrified by what the U.S. government did.

How would it have been if all those Germans and Japanese, instead of being burned to death from the sky, were corralled into camps and shot or gassed? Materially, it would have been the same. But Americans refuse to think of bombings as even in the same ballpark as other technologically expedient ways of exterminating people by the tens and hundreds of thousands. Why? Because the U.S. government has essentially monopolized terror bombing for nearly a century. No one wants to confront the reality of America’s crimes against humanity.

It would be one thing if Americans were in wide agreement that their government, like that of the Axis governments of World War II, had acted in a completely indefensible manner. But they’re not. The Allies were the white hats. Ignore the fact that the biggest belligerent on America’s side was Stalin’s Russia, whom the FDR and Truman administrations helped round up a million or two refugees to enslave and murder in the notorious undertaking known as Operation Keelhaul. We’re not supposed to think about that. World War II began with Pearl Harbor and it ended with D-Day and American sailors returning home to kiss their sweethearts who had kept America strong by working on assembly lines.

In the Korean war, another Truman project, the U.S. policy of shameful mass murder continued. According to historian Bruce Cumings, professor at the University of Chicago, millions of North Korean civilians were slaughtered by U.S. fire-bombings, chemical weapons and newly developed ordnance, some of which weighed in at 12,000 pounds. Eighteen out of 22 major cities were at least half destroyed. For a period in 1950, the US dropped about 800 tons of bombs on North Korea every day. Developed at the end of World War II, napalm got its real start in Korea. The US government also targeted civilian dams, causing massive flooding.

In Indochina, the U.S. slaughtered millions in a similar fashion. Millions of tons of explosives were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. These ghastly weapons are literally still killing people – tens of thousands have died since the war ended, and three farmers were killed just last week. Among the horrible effects of the bombing was the rise of Pol Pot’s regime, probably the worst in history on a per capita basis.

The U.S. has committed mass terrorism since, although not on quite the scale as in past generations. Back in the day the U.S. would drop tons of explosives, knowing that thousands would die in an instant. In today’s wars, it drops explosives and then pretends it didn’t mean to kill the many civilians who predictably die in such acts of violence. Only fifteen hundred bombs were used to attack Baghdad in March 2003. That’s what passes as progress. The naked murderousness of U.S. foreign policy, however, is still apparent. The bombings of water treatment facilities and sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s deliberately targeted the vulnerable Iraqi people. Once the type of atrocities the U.S. committed in World War II have been accepted as at the worst debatable tactics in diplomacy, anything goes.

American politicians would have us worry about Iran, a nation that hasn’t attacked another country in centuries, one day getting the bomb. There is no evidence that the Iranians are even seeking nuclear weapons. But even if they were, the U.S. has a much worse record in both warmongering and nuclear terror than Iran or any other country in modern times. It is more than hypocritical for the U.S. to pose as the leader of global peace and nuclear disarmament.

The hypocrisy and moral degeneracy in the mouths of America’s celebrated leaders should frighten us more than anything coming out of Iran or North Korea, especially given America’s capacity to kill and willingness to do it. Upon dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, President Truman called the bomb the "greatest achievement of organized science in history" and wondered aloud how "atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence toward the maintenance of world peace." Nothing inverts good and evil, progress and regress, as much as the imperial state. In describing the perversion of morality in the history of U.S. wars, Orwell’s "war is peace" doesn’t cut it. "Exterminating civilians by the millions is the highest of all virtues" is perhaps a better tagline for the U.S. terror state.

August 3, 2011


Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.


Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Ron Paul's First Official Campaign Ad

This impressive ad is far better than anything the campaign put together for Dr. Paul's 2008 run:

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Tricked on the Fourth of July (Gary North)

Happy Independence Day? Don't say that to Gary North, who wrote this brief but intriguing argument that it was one big mistake:

I do not celebrate the fourth of July. This goes back to a term paper I wrote in graduate school. It was on colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775. Not counting local taxation, I discovered that the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% of national income. It may have been as high as 2.5% in the southern colonies.

In 2008, Alvin Rabushka's book of almost 1,000 pages appeared: Taxation in Colonial America (Princeton University Press). In a review published in the Business History Review, the reviewer summarizes the book's findings.

Rabushka's most original and impressive contribution is his measurement of tax rates and tax burdens. However, his estimate of comparative trans-Atlantic tax burdens may be a bit of moving target. At one point, he concludes that, in the period from 1764 to 1775, "the nearly two million white colonists in America paid on the order of about 1 percent of the annual taxes levied on the roughly 8.5 million residents of Britain, or one twenty-fifth, in per capita terms, not taking into account the higher average income and consumption in the colonies" (p. 729). Later, he writes that, on the eve of the Revolution, "British tax burdens were ten or more times heavier than those in the colonies" (p. 867). Other scholars may want to refine his estimates, based on other archival sources, different treatment of technical issues such as the adjustment of intercolonial and trans-Atlantic comparisons for exchange rates, or new estimates of comparative income and wealth. Nonetheless, no one is likely to challenge his most important finding: the huge tax gap between the American periphery and the core of the British Empire.

The colonists had a sweet deal in 1775. Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth. Switzerland was probably the most free nation, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any other nation in 1775 that was ahead of Great Britain. And in Great Britain's Empire, the colonists were by far the freest.

I will say it, loud and clear: the freest society on earth in 1775 was British North America, with the exception of the slave system. Anyone who was not a slave had incomparable freedom.

Jefferson wrote these words in the Declaration of Independence:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

I can think of no more misleading political assessment uttered by any leader in the history of the United States. No words having such great impact historically in this nation were less true. No political bogeymen invoked by any political sect as "the liar of the century" ever said anything as verifiably false as these words.

Read the rest, and also see this great article by Anthony Gregory on July 4th propaganda.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Audit the Gold! Hearing on Thursday 6/23

Back in April, Ron Paul introduced H.R. 1495, a bill to audit all the gold owned by the United States, and this coming Thursday, he's holding a Domestic Monetary Policy subcommittee hearing on that bill. The hearing should be live streamed here, and witnesses are scheduled to include the Inspector General of the Treasury Department and a high level bureaucrat at the General Accounting Office. Here's the text of H.R. 1495:

To provide for an audit of all gold owned by the United States.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2011'.

SEC. 2. ASSAY, INVENTORY, AND AUDIT OF GOLD RESERVES.

(a) The Secretary of the Treasury is directed to conduct and complete, not later than six months after the date of enactment of this Act, a full assay, inventory, and audit of gold reserves of the United States at the place or places where such reserves are kept, together with an analysis of the sufficiency of the measures taken for the security of such reserves.

(b)(1) The Government Accountability Office shall review the results of such assay, inventory, audit, and analysis and, not later than nine months after the date of enactment of this Act, shall prepare and transmit to the Congress a report of its findings, together with the results of the assay, inventory, audit, and analysis conducted by the Secretary of the Treasury.

(2) For purposes of such assay, inventory, audit, and analysis, the Government Accountability Office shall have access to any depository or other facility where such reserves are kept.

(c) The Secretary of the Treasury shall make available, in order to facilitate the review of the Government Accountability Office under this Act, all books, accounts, records, reports, files, correspondence, memoranda, papers, or any other document, tape, or written, audio, or digital record pertaining to the assay, inventory, audit, and analysis required by this Act, as determined by the Government Accountability Office.

UPDATE: Watch the hearing here or below:

Monday, June 13, 2011

Government “Waste” Is the Least of Our Problems (Anthony Gregory)

Anthony Gregory points out that if government simply "wasted" the money they steal from us, we'd be far better off than we are now:

Sometimes I swear we are living in a dystopian novel whose author is courteous enough to provide us mere extras in his story with plenty of comedic relief to make the days tolerable. The USA Today headline reads: “Obama, Biden again target government waste.” Yes. That’s in fact what it says. The administration that has given us a $3.7 trillion budget is so concerned about wasting money, you see, that its Vice President is heading up a “Campaign to Cut Waste.” The White House brags of having trimmed $33 billion of waste in the last year. That amounts to less than 1% of the budget—a budget that is, in nominal dollar terms, approximately double what it was a decade ago. Back in 2001 I remember thinking about how small our government was, and how if only we doubled its size, and were careful to cut back about a percent of that sum that happens to be “waste,” we’d be in great shape. Oh wait a second. That’s not what I thought at all.

Yet all this talk of waste misses the point. Perhaps there are better uses of our tax dollars than “waste,” but I must say, I prefer so-called waste to most of what the government spends money on. Government is destructive. Most of what it does is harmful. Being an agency of violence and the threat of violence, the institution of government runs counter to economic progress as a general principle. Even worse, its coercive grip strangles the freedom out of people as a matter of course, and, far more often than Americans seem accustomed to recognizing, it kills people.

If only the regulatory state’s budget were a matter of “waste.”

Read the rest

Thursday, June 9, 2011

The Next American Revolution Won't Be Like the First (Wendy McElroy)

Wendy McElroy lays out an interesting and persuasive case that the next American Revolution will far more closely resemble 1789 France than 1776 America:

One of my friends believes that a second American revolution is imminent and will be sparked by the economic instability now rocking the continent. Frankly, I doubt it. Insurrections may occur, but I expect the US government to lumber along, dragging the world deeper into poverty and conflict for many years to come.

Upon hearing my friend out, however, my first thought was, "if a revolution erupts, it will resemble the French one of 1789 more closely than the American one of 1776." Then I sat back and tried to figure out why I had arrived at that sudden conclusion, and whether or not it had merit.

One of the reasons for thinking that America might be "going French" is that current American society resembles descriptions I've read of pre-Revolution France more closely than America now resembles its young self.

Read the rest

Monday, June 6, 2011

Ron Paul on Libya: "Since we went in abruptly and illegally, we need to abruptly leave."

Dr. Ron Paul was able to speak on the House floor on Friday 6/3/11 to support a resolution (H. Con. Res. 51) introduced by Dennis Kucinich to direct Obama to withdraw troops from Libya:



If the C-SPAN link above does not work, try the YouTube at http://youtu.be/cptBMhhXsDI

Mr. KUCINICH. I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul).

Mr. PAUL. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I rise in strong support for H. Con. Res. 51. We need to pass this resolution to send a very strong message.

We have been told by those who oppose this message that we should not have an abrupt withdrawal from the region, but I would strongly suggest that what we should be talking about is the abrupt and illegal entry into war. That's what we have to stop. Since we went in abruptly and illegally, we need to abruptly leave.

It has also been said by those who oppose this resolution that they concede that Congress should assume its prerogatives over the war powers but to do it gradually. I would strongly suggest that when we took our oath of office we assumed that radically and suddenly. We took an oath of office to obey the Constitution, not to defer to the United Nations, and that we already have assumed that responsibility.

I would also suggest, if we do nothing, if we do not pass this resolution, it is the sin of omission that we commit.