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May 29, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
16:00
Memorial Day: What Should We Remember?

Memorial Day should not be a celebration of militarism. It is intended to be a day to memorialize those who have died in battle. What to memorialize? Watch the program! Memorial Day should not be a celebration of militarism. It is intended to be a day to memorialize those who have died in battle. What to memorialize? Watch the program!

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Tragedy And Unnecessary War 00:07:08
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel Micah Adams.
Daniel, happy Memorial Day.
Happy Memorial Day, Dr. Paul.
Well, this wished it were a happy day.
It's always a sad day for me to think about it because I think about so many tragedies, so many deaths, so many injuries.
And of course, Memorial Day is to memorialize those who have died.
And I get to thinking that did they really have to?
And then it becomes rather sad.
Then you think about the families and then the punishment that families have to go through for years and years to go and visit graves and all.
And the one thing that has always been difficult for me on this particular day is because you can't talk about, was it absolutely necessary?
What should we remember by this?
What did we learn by this?
How much was achieved from all of this?
Now, this particular day was started after the Civil War, and the South had a separate celebration from the North, and eventually it came together.
Too bad the country didn't come together as well.
Now there's some people who are still wanting to fight the Civil War and removing memory of that.
But it was a tragedy.
And I think of it, one of the other things, the frustration of the uselessness of the war, but also the whole idea of what does it achieve.
I think there is, people want this.
They want to feel what came of this.
You know, this is good.
This is patriotism.
We have to feel good about this.
And almost you have to blank out stupidity and uselessness.
And maybe we shouldn't have done it.
And so in a way, it's almost the follow-up on the propaganda.
You know, we go to war after a lot of propaganda.
We work through that, you know, how the propagandists preach the war.
But then afterwards, there has to be some sense that, you know, it was really, really worth it.
And that is tough because does that mean you guys are saying they all died in vain?
Well, what I'm saying is we ought to learn a lesson, and it would be less vain if there was a lesson learned.
So it's very frustrating.
But to honor people who did what they thought was the right thing to do and believe in they were defending the country and all these things, you can't say, you know, you were a bunch of scoundrels.
I mean, how many of us had relatives in the military?
And I've been in the military, and we've lost over the years in our family.
We had a lot of friends, no close family member.
But there were a lot of people we knew, especially World War II as well as the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
We knew a lot of people.
And it's so tragic.
And then when you think about how we go to war, I just think this is a day that we ought to be more serious about thinking, was this necessary?
What should we remember about it?
What should we learn about it?
Maybe we can diminish the suffering if we come up with a better policy.
Yeah, maybe we should turn down the volume, you know, because this started as Decoration Day, as you point out, after the Civil War.
And it was the time where the relatives of those that were killed during the military conflict went and they put flowers on the graves of the loved ones.
I'm sure there wasn't a lot of yelling and waving flags and talking about war.
It was a quiet and solemn occasion.
I think that's what it should be.
And actually, Charlie Rees, who we both remember very fondly, I was looking back over some things that had been written about Memorial Day.
And I think if you'll indulge me, I'll read a short quote from him.
Charlie was such a great and astute observer from the old right.
He said, Memorial Day, it seems to me, should only be for the families of the dead.
It's really impossible to remember someone we never knew.
And then he went on to say, the fact is war is started by old men who never go near the war, and wars are always fought by the young.
And then he references a Belgian king.
He didn't say who, but it's a really great point.
He said, it takes 20 years of peace to produce a man, 20 seconds of war to destroy him.
Boy, what a tragedy.
It's a celebration of militarism.
And that is, of course, the philosophy that we have to deal with on an everyday basis when we talk, because there are people who believe that the military approach to things, spreading goodness, you know, at the point of the gun, you know, this neo-Jacobinism and neoconservatism that we have this moral obligation.
As we see it, we see it as a tragedy and unnecessary.
Those who produce, do this, they don't live with a bad conscience.
You know, just think in the last 20 years or so of all the fighting and killing that's been going on and all the deaths.
I don't think there's any leader.
I don't think there's a neocon that might have been very instrumental in getting the conditions ripe for the people to accept these wars and pay for these wars.
I don't think that they have a problem with their conscience.
I think unfortunately the people that might have more control with their conscience are the ones who didn't yield, that did yield to the pressure and go in there and start shooting and killing people.
Young people from this country killing young people from another country and they had no beef with them.
You know, if they've been allowed to be left alone, maybe they'd have been playing soccer or something.
But no, governments can't stand that.
So that to me is the real tragedy.
And hopefully, and I've written about this, is why I believe that the human race can progress and eventually move toward a more peaceful society.
Lots of advancement, you know, in the economy and human conditions, but not so much, not a whole lot on working for peace.
But I believe that's a possibility.
I mean, if it wasn't, why should we even talk about it?
Why don't we just go hide or something?
But I think that it is a day, and I think Charlie Reese has it right.
Why is it so grandiose and the show of strength and making anybody who ever served in the military a hero?
You know, I have room to analyze that a little bit.
I had a total of five years in the military.
Come Thank a Troop 00:02:02
And I have no desire for somebody to come and say, you know, thank you for your service.
You really helped me out a lot.
Yeah, helped you out because of your conscience because you didn't serve.
And yet you pushed the wars and you're glad there's somebody else that's going to yield to this.
But no, I think that is a great quote from Charlie about this way you recognize the value of human life in a more spiritual way and even avoiding this conversation of the controversy of policy.
He said, yes, it should be humble, it should be quiet, it should be family, recognizing the value of human life.
And I think that probably is the best we can do for that celebration on that particular day.
But, of course, I can't help but think about, I'd like to make sure there aren't so many people dying in war.
Yeah, exactly.
And isn't it funny how the warmongers are stealing every single holiday?
July 4th is now about war.
Memorial Day is about war.
Even Christmas, they're stealing it.
Thank a troop, you know, if you can do this.
It's amazing, the more they push these wars that destroy things, the more they steal the holidays that we should be celebrating.
Well, it's the National Police Force we have now, you know, with the defense of our own country.
You know, we have so much militarization here.
The Department of Homeland Security, that's an army, you know.
And of course, the Army is not protecting us.
It's undermining our liberties.
You know, they're the ones who are spying on us.
It's just totally out of control.
I had a couple of suggestions in lieu of waving the militaristic flag on Memorial Day.
And if I may humbly suggest a couple of things.
The first one was something written by our friend Butler Schaefer, who of course is on the board of the Institute and a good friend of ours.
Government Power and War 00:06:37
He wrote something on Lew Rockwell's side a few years ago.
Hold an anti-war film festival.
There are a lot of great anti-war films out there.
We'll actually link to Butler's article because some of those I'd like to see I hadn't seen.
The second one I would say is don't run around waving the flag.
As we pointed out earlier, it's a solemn day.
It's remembering the dead.
So keep that, I think, in mind, that decorum.
Maybe imagine our country without a trillion-dollar a year military budget.
What might be possible?
How might people's lives be improved?
The other thing, the last I would say is, which is what I just did, is do a Google search for LewRockwell.com's articles on Memorial Day.
Just LewRockwell.com Memorial Day.
Some of them are a little strong, but most of them are very, very informative.
You know, and what you're describing there is this super nationalism, you know, on these days.
It's nationalistic, and if you don't do it, then you, of course, you're unpatriotic, and jingoism is a common trait these days on why we have to, you know, spread our efforts to kill every single enemy in the world.
And there are a lot of personal enemies out there, but that's not quite the approach.
But, you know, on Memorial Day, I generally have thought about Rudyard Kipling, you know, because he went through, you know, an ordeal because he more or less supported, you know, World War I.
And he had a son at the age of 16, John Kipling, who wanted to go and wanted to go.
He said, well, you're not old enough, old enough.
And Kipling supported the war.
And then when he was 18, he was having trouble getting in.
And Kipling went, Rudyard Kipling, you know, went and helped him get a commission or get into the service.
And he was sent out to beef up some forces on one of the early battles.
And I think within two days he was dead at 18 years of age.
Kipling then had some rethoughts about the war and started writing about the war.
Probably has some guilt on his hands here and wrote a lot of poetry of it.
But the one that a lot of people remember, and that is his conversation with his dead son.
And his son says, if any questions why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.
And boy, does that summarize something.
And Kipling maybe figured he was one of the fathers, you know, since he was arguing the case for really, really beefing up the forces.
And he didn't like the Germans and a few things like that.
But it's the lying business.
How many times have we been told lies to get us involved?
I mean, I think I would.
I imagine there's always distortions, but there aren't many times in our history where there hasn't been some incident that either was created or brought about, you know, false flags and things.
It's always some reason to galvanize the people.
And, you know, there's plenty of stories written about how Roosevelt contrived to galvanize the American people.
And we've heard recently even Neocon, you know, at the time of 9-11, that actually they were subtly saying, you know, what we need, even before 9-11, said, what we need is another Pearl Harbor event to justify and get the people galvanized.
And they weren't saying this just to have war.
They were saying that, to save the world, because the world needed them.
They needed them, and they needed an American empire.
So, yeah, I just wished I could stick to the tone of Charlie Rees and just say this has to do with the loss of loved ones, and they should do their best to reconcile that.
But for me, I can't help but thinking about the tragedies of all the war and why I'm motivated to try to prevent this.
And I just am always so saddened when I see so much propaganda, so many of the lies and the current fathers now who are lying to the people, the lies being told in the media, in the government, and it's endless.
I mean, we hear very little talk of true peace and non-intervention on any of our networks or how about our universities.
It's always the propaganda and as Kipling said, the lies of our fathers and the current lies that we constantly hear.
Exactly.
I think we need to take back the holidays.
I mean, we are the patriots.
We're the ones who want less war dead in the future.
Boy, that would be a godsend if we can help contribute to that.
And believe it or not, I'm optimistic that human beings can change.
They've changed over the millennia, and we can change, and we can usher in at least some respectable attitudes toward peace versus war.
And people say, well, you can't get rid of evil.
There's always evil out there, and that's why you have to have war.
That is true.
There's always evil out there.
But that doesn't mean you have to have wars.
Because it's when you have a system that has prevailed for hundreds, if not thousands of years, that we have a system that people have accepted that governments, you know, allow evil people to get in control of the government.
So even if the pro-warmongers are out there, if they didn't have the governments to hide behind and use the force of government, it'd be a lot different.
Push them all back where the evil people can be dealt with in a different manner.
But it's the size and scope of government and the special interests of monies involved and national interests and all the things that go on makes government big and the bad guys getting in charge of government.
I think that is a tradition rather than an exception.
So I believe the transition away from accepting the notions that governments should be huge with a lot of power and to go to war without permission of the people, which is something the founders tried, that would go a long way toward working toward a more peaceful world, obviously not a perfect one, but a more peaceful one.
And we certainly could do with that.
We could do with a lot more peace and a lot less war.
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