War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery

A host of American Christians have violated the First Commandment by an idolatrous veneration of the U.S. military. Man's sinful condition renders defensive warfare necessary, but Americans have for generations justified their wars of convenience and conquest by self-righteously wrapping themselves and their "cause" in the flag (see Isaiah 64:6).

What they do not understand is that they are playing right into the hands of those who seek to enslave them. In an article found in Chalcedon Report, Samuel Blumenfeld quotes from Norman Dodd's Congressional report on tax exempt foundations:

In 1908 the trustees [of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace] had raised this question. "Is there any way known to man more effective than war, assuming that you wish to alter the life of an entire people?" They discussed this question academically and in a scholarly fashion for almost a year and came up with the conclusion that war is the most effective means known to man, assuming that you want to begin concentrating power in government and abandon the dispersion of authority contemplated by the Constitution. They then raised Question No. 2: "how do we involve the United States in such a war?" This was in 1909. . . . The trustees answered the question this way: "We must control the diplomatic machinery of the United States."

. . . . That tied in with prior information our committee had uncovered indicating that the hand of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had already become a powerful policy-making force inside th eState Department. ("WHO ARE "THEY"? THE SHADOWS BEHIND THE SCREEN, June 1994, pp. 26-27)

The idea that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace settled on war as a means to its ends bears a chilling resemblance to the Orwellian "War is Peace".

Since World War I, the power elite have focused their major efforts to control the State Department through the Council on Foreign Relations, and after World War II, their militaristic interests coalesced into the Military Industrial Complex.

Altthough the institutional expressions were new, the elite understood the role of war from the beginning. The following excerpt from "A Covenant with Death" by William N. Grigg chronicles that fact:

As Bruce D. Porter explains in his valuable book War and the Rise of the State, each American military conflict, beginning with the War for Independence, has expanded the domestic power and redistributive reach of the government through what he calls "Titmussian linkages" between veterans and their dependents on the one hand, and the central government on the other. That somewhat inelegant phrase refers to the work of socialist British academic Richard Morris Titmuss, "A vigorous advocate of social welfare reforms" and, therefore, of the militarization of society in the interest of expanding the welfare state.


In fact, as Timuss noticed and Porter points out, the very "origins" of the welfare state are found in the military. Veterans and their dependents, who are guaranteed pensions and various disability, health, and housing benefits provided the first permanent clients of the redistributionist state. Both world wars abetted the breakdown of family norms, and offered valuable field experience for promoters of sexual emancipation and related social "reforms." And the WWII-era conscription of millions of men, and the recruitment of their wives into war-related industries, led to the enactment of the first federal child care legislation.


That the military would abet the growth of a huge and ever-expanding welfare state would not have surprised James Madison, who famously denounced war as "the parent of armies; and from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few."


What Madison lamented -- the centralizing effect of war, particularly in propagating debt -- the execrable Alexander Hamilton frankly celebrated. Porter points out that Hamilton was delighted by the lingering debts accumulated by the colonies (and later states) during the War for Independence; he pressed for Congress "to assume the full debts, believing this would turn the debts into a potential `cement' of the Union. This, in the American case, as in the Dutch case before it, war debts helped consolidate a fractious polity by binding creditors across the nation to the fate of the central state."


The Empire Hamilton Built is racing toward the unpleasant end that awaits all imperial projects: Incurable, undisguised insolvency, the ruin of the official currency, political collapse, and -- most likely -- internal schism. At some point the Power Elite will probably call most of the troops home from their far-flung garrisons, not because our rulers will have renounced aggression, but rather for the purpose of putting down internal resistance. This, too, was foretold by Madison in the Constitutional Convention, when he warned that "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense [against] foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."