Ronald Reagan used to be called the Teflon president, on
the grounds that no matter what gaffe or scandal engulfed him, it never
stuck: he didn’t suffer in the polls. If Reagan was the Teflon
president, the military is America’s Teflon institution. Even people who
oppose whatever the current war happens to be can be counted on to “support
the troops” and to live by the comforting delusion that whatever aberrations
may be evident today, the system itself is basically sound.
To add insult to injury, whenever the US government gears up for yet
another military intervention, it’s people who pretend to favor “limited
government,” and who pride themselves on not falling for government
propaganda, who can be counted on to stand up and salute.
I had the rare honor of serving as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of
staff, and observed him in many proud moments in those days, and in his
presidential campaigns. But Ron’s new book Swords
into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity,
a plainspoken and relentless case against war that ranks alongside Smedley
Butler’s classic War Is a Racket, is possibly the proudest Ron Paul
moment of all.
It’s been calculated that over the past 5,000 years there have been 14,000
wars fought, resulting in three and a half billion deaths. In the United
States, between 1798 and 2015 there have been 369 uses of military force
abroad. We have been conditioned to accept this as normal, or at the very
least unavoidable. We are told to stifle any moral qualms we may have about
mass killing on the question-begging grounds that, after all, “it’s war.”
Ron, on this as on a wide array of other topics, isn’t prepared to accept
the conventional platitudes, and a recurring theme in his book involves
speculating on whether, in the same way the human race has advanced so
extraordinarily from a technological point of view, we might be capable of a
comparable moral advance as well.
There is much in this book for libertarians and indeed all opponents of
war to enjoy – for starters, a refutation of the claim that war is “good for
the economy,” a discussion of the dangers of “blowback” posed by foreign
interventionism, and an overview of the War on Terror from a
noninterventionist perspective. But there is a profoundly personal dimension
to this book as well, as we follow Ron’s life from his childhood to the
present and the evolution of his thought on war. I’ll leave readers to discover
these gems for themselves.
Likewise, Ron relates some little-known stories of war. In one, it’s two
weeks after D-Day, and Captain Jack Tueller decided to play his
trumpet that evening. He was instructed not to do so: his commander explained
that a German sniper had still not been captured from the day’s battle.
Figuring the sniper was a frightened young man not unlike himself, he played
the German song “Lili Marleen.” The sniper surrendered to the Americans the
next day.
Before being sent off to prison, the sniper asked to meet the trumpet
player. He said, through tears, “When I heard that number that you played I
thought about my fiancée in Germany. I thought about my mother and dad and
about my brothers and sisters, and I could not fire.”
“He stuck out his hand and I shook the hand of the enemy,” Tueller
recalls. “He was no enemy. He was scared and lonely like me.”
Another story takes place just before Christmas 1943. Charlie Brown, a
21-year-old farm boy from West Virginia was on his first combat mission as a
pilot when his B-17 was seriously damaged over Germany. With half his crew
dead or wounded, he was struggling to get his plane back to England when a
German fighter came within three feet of his right wingtip. But Franz
Stigler, the German pilot, did not fire. Instead, he simply nodded, pointed,
and flew off, allowing Brown to make his way back to England.
Some 46 years later, the two men met again. Brown finally got to ask
Stigler why he had been pointing. Stigler replied that he was trying to tell
Brown to fly to Sweden, which was closer. But since Brown knew only how to
get back to England, that’s where he went.
The two men became close friends, even fishing buddies. Stigler said that
saving Brown’s life was the only good thing that came out of the whole war
for him.
You won’t be surprised to learn that in addition to human-interest
anecdotes like these, Ron spends time in Swords
into Plowshares linking central banking and war, one of his
perennial themes over the years. It isn’t for nothing that again and again,
countries abandoned the gold standard when they went to war.
We rarely pause to consider what that tells us. If they needed to abandon
the gold standard to go to war, that means the gold standard was a
barrier against war. Of course, the ease with which governments could
abandon the gold standard serves to remind us of the need to separate money
and state altogether, and that the state cannot be trusted to maintain a
sound money standard.
As always, Ron is at his fiery best when he unleashes on the
neoconservatives, whose every overseas fiasco becomes a justification for
still another fiasco six months later. He invites us to consider a typical
remark by neoconservative Michael Ledeen: “Paradoxically, peace increases our
peril, by making discipline less urgent, encouraging some of our worst
instincts, and depriving us of some of our best leaders.”
Note that it is peace, according to Ledeen, and not war, that
encourages our worst instincts. This was the view of Theodore Roosevelt,
loved and admired by progressives and neoconservatives alike, who considered
prolonged peace a deplorable state that made a people flabby and otiose.
Neocons complain when libertarians describe them as “pro-war” – why, they
favor war only as a last resort, they assure us, and only because there are
bad people in the world – but how else can we describe the views of Ledeen,
who to my knowledge has never been publicly taken to task by any other
neocon?
(Perhaps my favorite of Ron’s collection of ghoulish neocon quotations,
though, if only for its obliviously Orwellian quality, is George W. Bush’s
remark from June 2002: “I just want you to know that, when we talk about war,
we’re really talking about peace.”)
Meanwhile, the American people have been indoctrinated into a cult of the
veteran, whom evangelicals blasphemously compare to Jesus Christ, and whereby
everyone is expected to salute, applaud, and offer ostentatious thanks for
the veteran’s “service.”
Here, by contrast, is Ron:
“Service” in our military to invade, occupy, and oppress countries in
order to extend [the] US Empire must not be glorified as a “heroic” and
sacred effort. My five years in the Air Force during the 1960s did not
qualify me as any sort of hero. My primary thoughts now about that period of
time are: “Why was I so complacent, and why did I so rarely seriously
question the wisdom of the Vietnam War?”
Ron calls upon the peoples of the world to resist their governments’ calls
to war and to refuse to take part in violent conflict. “If the authoritarians
continue to abuse power in spite of constitutional and moral limits,” he
writes, “the only recourse left is for the people to go on strike and refuse
to sanction the wars and thefts. Deny the dictators your money and your
bodies…. The more this is a worldwide movement, the better.”
This is why Ron is such a fan of the song “Universal Soldier,”
which he asked singer Aimee Allen to perform at his dramatic Rally for the
Republic in 2008. The man who enlists in the military and simply goes along
with the prevailing current of opinion is the universal soldier. If he
refused to “serve” and to fight, there could be no wars. Even Ron, a flight
surgeon who never fired a shot, looks back on his time in the military and
asks himself: why did I not resist? Why did I go along?
Needless to say, few among our political class – people who, generally
speaking, have rather more to repent of than mild Ron Paul – reflect
seriously on their moral choices, or rebuke themselves publicly.
When people read Swords
into Plowshares generations from now – and they will – they will
marvel that such a man actually served in the US Congress, and defied every
campaign of war propaganda right on the House floor. But what’s great about
Ron is not just his honesty, but also his constant intellectual growth – with
the passage of time he has become an ever-more radical champion of freedom.
His evolution is especially plain in this book, as you’ll discover for
yourself.
One of the most important things Ron accomplished in public life was to
show that it’s possible to oppose war without being a leftist. He likewise
explained that a foreign policy of peace and nonintervention was a central,
indispensable feature of the message of freedom, and not just an odd
personality quirk of Ron Paul – as the many people who said “I like Ron Paul
except his foreign policy” seem to have believed.
Bernie Sanders pretends to be antiwar, but as usual with socialists, a
closer look shows he doesn’t really mean it. But even if he did, as a
socialist he simply wants to point the guns at different targets – the
undifferentiated aggregates like “the rich” to whom he urges his followers to
direct their uncomprehending hate. Ron, on the other hand, is calling on us
to put the guns down, and for peaceful interaction both between nations and
among individuals.
It is a position most people had never heard of before 2008, since election
campaigns are all about grabbing the machinery of state and pointing its guns
at whatever group the eventual victor despises. But Ron captured the
imaginations of millions of intelligent young people, whose brains hadn’t yet
been deformed by an American political culture designed to deprive them of
humane possibilities.
Ron turns 80 this month, and shows no sign of letting up in his life’s
work of truth-telling. Wish Ron a happy birthday
by joining us for a celebration in Lake Jackson on August 15, and by reading
this extraordinary book.
The Best of
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
