REMINDER: Our online conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination” continues this evening at 7 pm Eastern time. Our presenter will be Douglas Horne, who served on the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. Horne is the author of the five volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board and FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated.
Horne’s presentation will be around 2 3/4 hours long. Therefore there will be no Q&A tonight. However, we are adding a panel discussion to the conference that will be held on Wednesday, May 19, at 7 pm Eastern. Horne will be participating on that panel and so there will be plenty of time to address questions to him.
Next Wednesday, May 12, will be my presentation—”Regime Change: The JFK Assassination.”
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If you haven’t registered for the conference and would like to attend tonight’s presentation, just register at our conference page and a zoom link will be sent to you.
Now that the U.S. government is ostensibly ending its forever war in Afghanistan, the question naturally arises: Why stop there? Why not end U.S. interventionism in other countries, such as Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and others? Why stop with Afghanistan?
Indeed, this would be an excellent time to end permanently America’s policy of foreign interventionism. What good has it done? All that it has done is produce death, suffering, destruction, hostility, anti-American terrorism, and ever-increasing budgets for the U.S. national-security establishment.
I say: Let’s bring all the troops home, from everywhere. They don’t belong in foreign countries, any more than foreign troops belong here in the United States. Once they return, we should discharge them into the private sector, which would save American taxpayers a lot of money.
That means, of course, that the U.S. government should abandon all of its military bases in foreign countries, including its longtime imperialist base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But even that isn’t enough.
We also need to end U.S. foreign aid to all nations. Foreign aid is nothing more than a bribe to foreign officials to get them to do the bidding of U.S. officials.
But even that is not enough.
We also need to terminate America’s foreign policy of sanctions on foreign countries, including the 60-year-old Cold War-era economic embargo on Cuba. The U.S. government should not be targeting innocent people with impoverishment or death as a way to secure a political goal. That’s what terrorists do.
But even that isn’t enough, not if we want to restore a peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society to our land. To accomplish that, we have to set our sights even higher.
America was founded as a limited-government republic. Under that form of governmental structure, the government’s powers were extremely limited. The Constitution enumerated the relatively few powers that the federal government was permitted to wield.
That form of governmental structure was abandoned after World War II in favor of a national-security state, which is a totalitarian form of governmental structure. Under a national-security state, officials wield omnipotent powers, such as the powers of assassination, torture, secret mass surveillance, and indefinite detention without trial. To place things into context, North Korea is a national-security state. So is Russia. And China, Egypt, Pakistan, the United States, and many more. There is no way that people who live under a national-security state can genuinely be considered free.
A national-security state is characterized by an enormously large and permanent military-intelligence establishment. In the United States, the national-security establishment consists of the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, the CIA, the NSA.
The restoration of a limited-government republic necessarily requires the dismantling of the national-security establishment. That means keeping a relatively small military force and ridding our nation of the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA.
The role of the relatively small military force would be to defend the United States from a foreign invasion. If that were ever to happen, the military would quickly expand with the addition of American men and women who would be volunteering to repel the invasion.
But there is no reasonable possibility of an invasion of the United States anytime in the near future. No nation-state in the Western Hemisphere has the military capability or even desire to initiate a war against the United States. The same holds true for regimes in Europe, Africa, and Asia; none of them has the military capability or even the interest in crossing the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans to successfully invade the United States.
With the ostensible end of the America’s forever war in Afghanistan, the American people have a wonderful opportunity to take a gigantic step toward restoring peace, prosperity, and harmony to our land. It would be a shame to not seize it. We should not settle for simply withdrawing from Afghanistan. We should bring all U.S. troops home from everywhere, abandon all foreign military bases, end all foreign interventionism, cease all foreign aid, terminate all sanctions, and, most important, dismantle the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA and restore our founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.
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The Future of Freedom Foundation was founded in 1989 by FFF president Jacob Hornberger with the aim of establishing an educational foundation that would advance an uncompromising case for libertarianism in the context of both foreign and domestic policy. The mission of The Future of Freedom Foundation is to advance freedom by providing an uncompromising moral and economic case for individual liberty, free markets, private property, and limited government. Visit https://www.fff.org