13 September 2016
By Jacob G. Hornberger
The following is a modified version of the speech I delivered at the Ron Paul
Institute's ''Peace and Prosperity'' conference in Virginia on September 10,
2016.
On the Fourth of July in 1821, John Quincy Adams delivered one of the most
remarkable speeches in American history. The speech is entitled, ''In Search
of Monsters to Destroy.'' In his speech, Adams described America's founding
principles on foreign policy. He pointed out that there are lots of bad,
monstrous things that go on in the world — dictatorships, tyranny, famines,
starvation, wars, discord, corruption, and the like. America, however, does
not go abroad in search of such monsters and attempt to save people from them.
Instead, Adams said, Americans would strive to build a model society of
freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony here at home for the world to emulate
and also to serve as a sanctuary for people who flee such monsters.
Adams was building on the ideas and the philosophy of people like George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who had spoken against America's ever
entering into alliances with other countries or being part of blocs to serve
as counterweights to other blocs and against bearing enmity against particular
nations.
America's founding governmental structure did not permit it to go abroad and
intervene in the affairs of other nations. The Constitution had called into
existence a limited-government republic, one that had a basic military force
but nothing like the enormous military-intelligence establishment that we have
today. That's because of the deep antipathy that our American ancestors had
toward standing armies, which, they believed, posed a giant threat to the
citizens of a nation, directly as well as indirectly through the incessant
wars in which standing armies inevitably embroil a nation. As James Madison,
the father of the Constitution had pointed out, of all the enemies to liberty,
war is the biggest because it encompasses all the other ones, including
centralization of power and ever-increasing debts and taxes.
Adams added an admonition in his speech. He said that if America were ever to
abandon its non-interventionism foreign policy, she would become like a
''dictatress'' — that is, a government that would wield and exercise
dictatorial powers, both at home and abroad, and that would begin behaving
like a dictator. The point was clear: To remain free, America would have to
keep a constitutionally limited-government republic. Abandoning that
governmental structure would mean abandoning a free society.
Let's jump ahead 140 years to the year 1961, when President Dwight Eisenhower
delivered another remarkable, even shocking, speech. It was his Farewell
Address after serving eight years as president. Ike pointed out that America's
federal governmental structure had undergone a fundamental, almost
revolutionary, change. The federal government had been converted into a
national-security state, which he called the ''military-industrial complex,''
which consisted primarily of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and the
ever-growing multitudes of weapons producers and ''defense'' contractors who
were feeding at the public trough.
Eisenhower, who had served as Supreme Allied Commander in World War II and,
therefore, had a good understanding of militaries and military establishments,
issued a stunning warning to the American people in his Farewell Address. He
told them that the military-industrial complex posed a grave threat to the
democratic processes and liberties of the American people.
How had this remarkable change in governmental structure come about?
At the end of World War II, U.S. officials converted the Soviet Union, which
had been America's World War II partner and ally, into an official enemy of
the United States. They maintained that an international communist conspiracy,
based in Moscow, was planning to take over the United States. It was therefore
necessary, they said, for America to ''temporarily'' become a
national-security state in order to defeat the Soviet Union in a Cold War.
Why was the concert of a national-security state important? Because it is a
type of governmental structure that characterizes dictatorships. The Soviet
Union was a national-security state. Communist China is a national-security
state. So is North Korea. So is Cuba. And so is the United States, post-World
War II and continuing through today.
Here was the genesis of America's foreign policy of regime change, which
sometimes involved the destruction of democratic regimes. Iran. Guatemala,
Cuba. Indonesia. Congo. Chile. And others.
Here was the genesis of America's formal program of assassination. The
CIA-Mafia partnership to murder Fidel Castro, whose army never attacked the
United States or even threatened to do so. Also, the CIA's partnership in
Operation Condor, which might be the biggest international assassination
program in history.
Here was the genesis of America's formal program of torture. The CIA's MKULTRA
program, which involved medical experimentation on innocent and unsuspecting
Americans.
In 1989, however, to the shock of the military-industrial complex and most
everyone else, the Cold War suddenly and unexpectedly came to an end. There
was one big problem, however. The national-security establishment, which had
come into existence ''temporarily'' to fight the Cold War, declined to go out
of existence or even to permit a major reduction in size. By this time, the
military-industrial complex had become the most powerful and influential
component of the federal government, one to which the other three branches of
the government inevitably deferred.
It was soon after the Cold War ended that the national-security establishment
went into the Middle East in search of monsters to destroy. There was the
Persian Gulf War, which killed multitudes of Iraqi people, followed by the
brutal sanctions on Iraq that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi children. There was the infamous statement by U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, who declared that the
deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions was ''worth it.''
By ''it,'' she meant the efforts at achieving regime change in Iraq. There was
also the stationing of U.S. troops near Islamic holy lands. The no-fly zones
over Iraq, which involved firing missiles that were killing even more Iraqis,
including children. The unconditional support of the Israeli government and
brutal authoritarian regimes in the region.
All that deadly interventionism, not surprisingly, was turning the Middle East
into a boiling cauldron of anger and rage against the United States. Two high
UN officials, Hans von Sponek and Denis Halliday, resigned their humanitarian
positions to protest what they considered was the U.S. government's genocidal
policy of sanctions against the Iraqi children.
The anger and rage manifested itself in 1993 with the terrorist attack on the
World Trade Center, followed by the attacks on the USS Cole and the U.S.
embassies in East Africa, culminating in the 9/11 attacks.
Thus, when President Bush and other U.S. officials maintained that the 9/11
attacks had been motivated by hatred for America's freedom and values, they
were lying. The truth was that the terrorists were motivated by the death and
destruction that the U.S. national-security establishment had been wreaking in
the Middle East since the end of the Cold War.
That's when U.S. officials decided to use the 9/11 attacks to double down,
with even more deadly and destructive interventionism. The invasion and
occupation of Afghanistan, followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq,
which not only sacrificed U.S. troops but also killed multitudes of people who
had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The more people they killed, the more
people who would be filled with even more anger and rage. The invasions and
occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq became the biggest terrorist-producing
machine in history, and a perpetual one at that.
Not surprisingly, U.S. officials used anti-American terrorism to suspend the
rights and liberties of the American people. That's why we now live in a
country whose government wields the omnipotent power to assassinate any of us.
And the omnipotent power to round up Americans, put them into concentration
camps, and torture them, without due process of law and trial by jury. And the
omnipotent power to spy on us, listen in on our telephone conversations, read
our email, and monitor our Internet activity.
Those are the powers wielded by dictatorships, not limited-government
republics. That's what John Quincy Adams said would happen if America were
ever to start going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. That's why
Eisenhower warned the American people about the ever-growing power and
influence of the military-industrial complex. In the name of keeping us safe
from the enemies its policies have produced, the national-security
establishment has destroyed the freedom of the American people.
The national security state has not only destroyed our freedom, it is also
destroying our prosperity. Every year the federal government is spending far
in excess of what it receives in taxes. Federal spending is out of control,
with the government's debt mounting exponentially. The national-security
state, with its ever-increasing spending, is heading our nation toward
bankruptcy and a grave monetary and financial crisis.
Nonetheless, no one should be contemplating ingesting cyanide capsules. Ideas
on liberty have consequences. They have the potential of bringing a monumental
shift in society, toward what everyone at this conference wants: a free,
peaceful, and prosperous society.
Several weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times published a remarkable op-ed by a
professor at Texas A&M named Elizabeth Cobbs. It's entitled ''For U.S. Foreign
Policy, It's Time to Look Again at the Founding Fathers's 'Great Rule.''' It's
a great article and I highly recommend it as a blueprint for getting America
back on the right track.
Cobb pointed out a statistic that absolutely stunned me. She said that the Pew
research organization conducted a poll this year in which 57 percent of
Americans now believe that the United States should ''mind its own business''
and leave other countries to deal with their problems. That is up from 52
percent three years ago.
That is obviously a remarkable number. It reflects that an enormously large
number of Americans are now subscribing to the non-interventionist,
limited-government philosophy of John Quincy Adams, George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers. In fact, we might well be getting
close to that critical mass of people needed to bring a gigantic paradigm
shift in American society, one that moves us in the direction of a free,
peaceful, and prosperous society.
And that is where all of you here at this conference come into play. You're
here for the same reason I'm here — because you want to know what it's like to
live in a free, peaceful, and prosperous society. We — all of us — just have
to keep spreading ideas on liberty, with the aim of finding more people who
will help bring us that paradigm shift in the near term.
Keep standing your ground on your principles. Keep forwarding those good
articles to your friends. Keep writing those letters to the editor. Keep
advancing liberty in your own way. If we all continue to do that, we will
prevail. We will see the restoration of a free, peaceful, and prosperous
America.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become
director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has
advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the
country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and
he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context.
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