Nota: a crítica às Guerras pelos conservadores tradicionais representam o melhor da América - um ódio estrutural a todas as formas de governo central e as guerras como um expoente da sua natureza - provocar a destruição e morte em massa induzidas pelas decisões de poucos (as suas "agendas", os seus ideias, as suas boas intenções, a incompetência) e colocando-se a cima de qualquer julgamento moral, usando a propaganda panfletária para levar a populaça a caminhar para o abismo, destruindo a ordem natural da sociedade civil, as familias, as comunidades. "War is the health of the State" e a Primeira Guerra resumo tudo isso ao provocar em 4 anos o fim de toda uma velha civilização alheia aos temperamentos excessivos ideológicos. A destruição provocada tornou as massas receptivas ao crescimento do leviathan e a ideia do comando centralizado para todos os aspectos da nossa vida. E pergunto: não será essa uma crítica Liberal?
Joseph Sobran: Land of the What?
"In 1845, President James Polk falsely accused Mexico of attacking the United States, thus using his office to initiate a war of conquest. Congress went along with him. Among the few who opposed him was a courageous freshman congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, who demanded proof that Mexico had really been the aggressor. Polk ignored him, Lincoln was branded a traitor, and when Lincoln lost his seat after only one term, his political career appeared to be over.
Unfortunately, Lincoln drew the wrong lesson from Polk’s success: He learned that a president can get away with anything in wartime. When, after an amazing comeback, he became president himself, he made war on the seceding states and crushed criticism and political opposition in the North with thousands of arbitrary arrests, including that of a congressman who opposed him as bravely as he had once opposed Polk. He had to misrepresent the Constitution in order to violate it as freely as he did. And of course when the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter (total fatalities: one horse), he had the inflammatory incident he needed.
In 1898, President William McKinley whipped up war fever against Spain over Cuba. Spain had neither attacked nor threatened the United States and was in fact so eager to avoid war that it tried desperately to appease McKinley. But when the American battleship the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor, probably by accident, McKinley had the pretext he needed. War was on, and it was quickly expanded all the way to the Phillippines, which the United States grabbed on the pretext of establishing democracy there. With Spain defeated, this “democratization” required the bloody suppression of a genuine independence movement. (Sound familiar?)
So the United States had already become an imperial power, sending its forces around the globe, by the time Woodrow Wilson schemed to get the United States into World War I on the British side against Germany, while professing to maintain neutrality and “keep us out of war.” He got his pretext for hostilities when German submarines attacked American merchant ships carrying — in violation of his proclaimed neutrality — munitions to England.
An eager learner from his duplicitous and successful methods was his young assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt.
And so it has gone, through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, not to mention Grenada and Panama. Typically, Americans are warned of a “threat” from a country that would be either very rash or out of its mind to attack us, usually followed by a suspicious incident that seems to justify the warning. How many times must we fall for the same old tricks?
The recurrent pattern is so striking that it suggests that this will never be the Land of the Free until it ceases being the Land of the Gullible. (...)"
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