With women now cleared to fill all military combat roles, a major push is on to force women to register for the draft. Is this a triumph of equality, or is it just equality in slavery?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
With women now cleared to fill all military combat roles, a major push is on to force women to register for the draft. Is this a triumph of equality, or is it just equality in slavery?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
With women now cleared to fill all military combat roles, a major push is on to force women to register for the draft. Is this a triumph of equality, or is it just equality in slavery?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Today we have a special guest, a friend of ours who has a lot of interesting things to visit with today.
We're going to end up talking a little bit about the draft.
But Karen Kwitkowski is a PhD.
She's retired from the Air Force.
She's gone to school at Harvard as well as the University of America's Catholic University of America.
And Karen, welcome to our program.
Thanks for having me.
Well, good.
One of the things that we did want to talk about, because it's been in the news, has been this idea of the proper role for women in the military and having women in combat roles.
And also, it brings up the question of the rights issue because some people now think it's proper to have equal rights by punishing women equally like they punish men.
But give us a little update on how you look at these issues, especially the idea of women in combat as well as on the draft issue.
Yeah, well, my 20 years were spent in the 80s and 90s.
I retired in 2003.
And I enjoyed my time in the military, my service in the military.
But I was in the Air Force and I was not combat, so I'm not familiar with the kinds of stresses other than just where I know from my friends they're soldiers.
And you have two things.
You don't want to deny women an opportunity to be all they can be, so to speak, to use the old Army slogan.
At the same time, what is our military really doing and what is its function?
What I saw, and one of the conclusions that I think I've come to is our military is really just a vast bureaucracy.
It is a playground for social policy.
Integration happened in the 50s, first in the military.
It is a tool of policymakers.
And it goes beyond defense.
Social policy is implemented in the military.
And I think that's what we're seeing with the advances, if you can call them advances, of women's rights in the military.
Then you have, and this is where the conflict is, what is the real function of any country's military?
It is defense.
Well, our military doesn't do defense.
It does offense, it does intrigue, it conducts social policy domestically and abroad, but it doesn't really do defense.
And so you can't really argue that women are defending their country if they're in the military.
I don't see that that's the best way to serve the country for men or women.
So there's that aspect.
On a physical sense, what do I think about, you know, women?
You know, we just graduated.
I think the Army had two special forces women, females, who made it through SEAL training or something like that.
It was a big deal.
That is rare.
That is unusual.
And it is a social experiment rather than true defense.
If you want to defend your country, you want the people doing what they do best where they're needed at the time.
This is the marketplace, okay?
Government doesn't do marketplace.
The military doesn't do marketplace.
The best the military can do is to test people and then combine that with social engineering and desires of the policymakers and put people in places where the government has decided they'll be better used.
Well, that's not just inefficient.
It's often very wrong.
It's certainly a waste of resources.
Male resources, female resources, talent of human beings is a waste of that.
So, to look up to the military and think they're going to do something good for women or men in terms of allocating resources and skills and values.
No, no, I don't expect that.
I don't look for the military to do that.
And they cannot do that by placing women in this job or that job.
It just doesn't work.
Karen, you know, there was an interesting piece on target liberty, I think it was yesterday or today, by Shane Kessler, who is a minister.
And he explicitly points out the problems with the idea of registering for the military draft.
And as you know, the New York Times is all gung-ho.
Now that women are in combat positions, they must register for the draft.
This is a great triumph for equality.
But here's what Cassler points out.
It sounds radical, but he says that the military draft is even worse than slavery of old, as bad as that was, because rather than just picking cotton, you're being called to register to do something where you may well be blown up and killed.
So your very life on the line, much more so.
How does that strike you, this idea now that, well, he points out that drafting men is evil, drafting women is evil and insane.
It's kind of a sick way of putting it.
Yeah, I agree with him.
I've always seen the draft itself as kind of violation of the 13th Amendment.
Isn't that the abandonment, you know, we don't do slavery.
It is slavery.
If people have to run to another country or mutilate themselves in order to avoid the draft, then clearly it's slavery.
Now, we don't have a draft today.
We have this selective service thing.
This certainly feeds the government's need for information and documentation about all young people.
I can see where the government would be very interested in having this additional control of all the females.
There's a huge database on Americans anyway.
This would enhance it.
It would integrate it with other databases.
I mean, you can't get a student loan if you're a male and you haven't registered for selective service.
So there's a huge amount of controls there.
So in that regard, I think maybe the selective service could be argued in itself as a violation of the 13th Amendment.
Nobody seems to do that.
I like what the minister is saying there, though.
It makes a lot of sense to me.
You know, along that line, Walter Williams, a black economist, made a comment about this.
He said, you know, asking black people to register for slavery is equivalent to any of us being required to register for the draft.
So he thought, of course, that it was insane.
But the principle that bothers me the most is this idea of this misconception from my viewpoint of what equal rights mean.
I think that people can't be equal, of course, but they should have equal justice.
But sometimes these social planners want to equalize things by making sure, you know, there's economic equality.
Well, to get economic equality, everybody has to be poor.
But here's a situation where men are being abused and these equal rights people, and they've been joined by some of these Republican candidates right now, say, well, what this means is we want to uplift the women's and make sure that they are equal, that they can suffer the consequences of being drafted and shot at, and they call that equal rights.
That seems so bizarre from our understanding of what individual liberty is all about, where, you know, liberty is an individual thing.
It's not a man thing, it's not a woman thing, and you don't bring about equality by eliminating some liberties of one group so they equal the other group.
That's right.
Well, absolutely.
And plus, you mentioned being brought in to have equal opportunity to be shot at, to die, to be separated from your families, also to be raped.
I'm sorry to bring this up, but we have a huge problem in the military, even today.
In fact, maybe it's getting worse, I'm not sure, with rape and not just rape of females, but rape of males, abuse.
It's almost runs a parallel to what we're seeing in our prison system.
So this is not something that we want to champion equal access to.
What we want to do is solve those problems, certainly to make it voluntary to join the military in any case.
But yeah, this is very sick and wrong thinking about advancement for women.
You know, I personally had a great 20 years.
I didn't have issues and problems.
But since I've retired, I've become far more aware of some of the things that do go on.
And to me, while I don't have a personal history of it or a personal experience of it, I do see the workings of bureaucracy and the workings of a controlled state, a state of complete power over people.
And this is the kind of abuses that you see.
So anybody who would, I don't know who the ERA, the equal rights groups are, maybe they have a platform, but any parent of a child, man or woman, son or daughter, should think long and hard before they allow their child to serve in today's military.
It is not a defensive organization.
It is an offensive organization in every sense of that word.
And it's a dangerous place, both for men and now perhaps even more so for women.
So, you know, I can't support what it is that they're advocating.
Karen, you talk about policy and what the military does.
And I think that's a good point: U.S. foreign policy, and how that's even more important in some ways because the military is not being used right.
If we turn back to 2004, is where you had a real brush with fame because you were essentially a whistleblower.
You retired in 03, and in 2004, there were so many profiles.
I was just looking at the Mother Jones one again, and this great profile of how you were in the Office of Special Plans.
You had worked with Doug Fife and Paul Wolfowitz and all the neocons, and you saw up close and personal how they were stovepiping intelligence, handpicking, juxtaposing things to make the scare of the Iraqi WMDs look so terrifying that we had to go to war.
And that was really tremendous, and it really gave a boost to people who opposed the war, like Dr. Paul.
You know, no heads rolled over this.
These guys simply moved on to the next project.
And sadly enough, it seems the American people have even forgotten about this whole incident.
So my question actually is: do you believe that this is still going on?
They talk about the terrible Russia threat, the China threat, the ISIS threat, how well we're doing in Syria.
Do you think these same neocons are still inside the informal apparatus, is what you call it?
Are they still operating in this manner?
Yeah, I want to correct one quick thing.
I was in the sister office of the Office of Special Plans.
The Office of Special Plans itself was drawn out of our group and it was completely neoconservative, political appointees for the most part.
But I worked for the same people.
We used their products, and through using their products, we could see how they were ignoring a great much of the intelligence that was valid and then amplifying and exaggerating other bits of intelligence that was really highly suspect.
So, yes, they did that then in order to bring us into war to build the concept of this enemy that must be taken out militarily.
Yes, and they're doing it today.
The people did not get punished.
Many of them are in influential places.
They are still.
In fact, what's frightening to me is if you look at the candidates that are running for president on both sides, their defense and foreign policy advisors, more cases than not, are straight out of the same people.
Some of them are the same people.
Others are from the same think tanks, and they're advocating much the same thinking.
So certainly it's not gone away.
You asked about Russia and China, Syria, ISIS.
ISIS is not a good sell.
for American people because it's little, it's tiny, we don't understand it, and our allies are actually supporting it.
So it's a quicksand for Obama and the next president to try to really push ISIS.
However, they get a lot better traction with Russia, less so even with Syria because people don't pay attention to Syria and it's a small country.
Russia is where I think they're going in terms of the exaggeration of the threat.
There are huge issues and of course Russia allows a continuation and a maintenance and even a growth of our Pentagon bureaucracy and the defense industries that are producing these weapons that we're not really going to use.
But if we did ever in our imagination, Russia would be the ideal place to use them.
So it is a perfect storyline.
It is being woven and produced and put out there by many of the same people.
And I'm really shocked myself.
Americans have woken up a great deal to some of this.
They are highly doubtful.
They do not trust the federal government at all.
But some of these politicians that are running for office to be the president, they don't seem to be as educated as the average American on some of this stuff.
And that's shocking to me.
It's very, very concerning.
Yeah, I'm sure of that.
You know, one thing that I did, I became very cynical or more cynical as the years went on.
And as they would lead up to some military adventure, they would have top secret briefings and members could go.
You know, nobody was allowed in.
I just refused to go to them because I didn't want to listen to their propaganda.
I didn't think they would ever tell me anything.
And besides, if I go there, I might be limited in what I can say.
I thought, did I hear that here or elsewhere?
Most of the time, you read it in a newspaper anyway, but I was convinced it was all propaganda.
Matter of fact, that was the convincing thing for Walter Jones.
He went diligently and sincerely listened to all the arguments.
And then after he figured out what was happening, he said he was lied into war and he's still resentful and he still feels like he has to amend that and change that.
But no, I think it's misinformation all the time.
I did want to, did you have a comment, Daniel?
Minds Convincing Minds00:03:00
I just wanted to mention one thing about your opening statement about women, what can they do and maybe they should use their talents in the best way possible.
And the point you make about defense and offense, I think, is perfect because I don't want to call it the Department of Defense because they're not defending anything.
And I keep thinking that under different circumstances, let's say our biggest threat was that maybe we would be threatened by somebody coming here besides our own government and undoing our liberties.
But right now it's our own government.
But I think women, I think of a woman living out in the country and we've been invaded, probably capable of taking care of yourself.
And I think a woman would be pretty darn good.
I think in our early history, they probably did a good job in defending the homeland and their own homes.
Yeah, absolutely.
You can't stop women from fighting when the country is invaded.
And we actually have experienced this in the many invasions that our government has conducted around the world.
Women will fight to defend their homes, their properties, their value.
Okay, so we know that.
How can women truly contribute?
I think that's a good question.
I've never thought of it before, but I'll tell you, it is said that women are good communicators, that we are persuasive.
We can communicate and convince people of different things.
Maybe what women should do is become more aware of our government's foreign policy in particular, but certainly the way it works, how it's motivated, how it supports itself, and the kinds of things that it implements and does to people all around the world, domestically and abroad.
And then if we can expand our minds a little bit like that, we actually may have an advantage over many men in being able to communicate and change minds.
I think that's really important.
And I don't mean change minds to agree with me or any of us here, but if you're aware of something and you're thinking about it, you're thinking critically, and you have a value system, we ought to use maybe some of our skills in communication to convince others.
And I mention this in light of what the libertarian community often complains about, that there are not enough women in that community.
And I agree with that.
I think maybe that's what we need to do.
But certainly, you're far better off starting a business, producing something for your neighbors.
I'm a farmer.
I do more productive work as a farmer for my community and for my country than I ever did sitting behind a desk and writing policy papers so we can figure out who our next enemy was going to be.
So, you know, I think there's lots we can do.
Certainly, we don't need to involve ourselves in this infrastructure of Pentagon bureaucracy.
It is not a good place to be.
It's not healthy.
And, you know, we talk about Walter Jones being lied into war, and certainly he was, and that's totally disrespectful and wrong, but they did it to everybody.
Government's True Purpose00:02:49
You know, these soldiers, many of them, soldiers and Marines and people coming back from these wars we've done just in the last decade, the last 15 years, these people were lied into war, and many of them know it.
I think the majority of them know it.
And they feel very betrayed.
And this is wrong.
The Pentagon did that.
So let's stay out of the Pentagon.
Well, very good, Karen.
And we're going to go now, but I want to thank you very much for a very nice and interesting program.
And best wishes in all that you do.
Sure.
Well, and thank you for all that you do.
Dr. Paul, thank you.
You know, this conversation reminds me of me being a planner on the draft because as a young person, I always assumed I would be drafted because I remember World War II and Korea and Vietnam and they were drafting people.
And that was one of the reasons I wanted to go into medicine because I knew I didn't want to be using a gun against people.
Even though I didn't have the full understanding how terrible the wars were, it was just my personal conviction.
So it is something to me that is very important.
And the draft just makes no sense whatsoever.
As far as I'm concerned, it is a form of slavery, very dangerous.
And I think there are likely to be more wars if they don't have to really call off draftees.
Eventually, the draft did end the Vietnam War, which was a tragic event.
But I think this is an issue because it brings up the issue of liberty.
You know, the draft was eliminated, I think it was in 73, and then it came back under Carter, and that had to do with the invasion of Afghanistan.
And this was a threat, and we had to do something about it.
So to show that we were strong, they reintroduced the draft.
I remember fighting tooth and nail with this, and we had one vote, and we won the vote, and we thought we were home on this.
But they were able to maneuver and come back and put the draft in place.
And here, all this drafting and signing up and talking about women, you know, they don't need any of those numbers.
That's just sort of to intimidate us, to teach us who owns us, just like the income tax.
We own you, and this means the government owns us, and they know exactly where we are.
But they go through this as a ritual.
It is to reinforce who's in charge.
And unfortunately, the government is still very much in charge, way too much, and we're a far cry from having a constitutional government.
So, that is my goal: working toward a constitutional, limited government where the goal and the purpose of government is to protect our liberties, not to maneuver and manipulate the economy, not to play mischief with our civil liberties at home, and not to police the world.