Bob Bird: A renewal of anti-war conservatism

By BOB BIRD

American History has always been taught from a perspective that centralization and an increase of government power is good. Thus, the maligned Articles of Confederation have long been tossed into the dustbin as short-sighted, inefficient and merely a stepping stone towards improved “government efficiency”. Expansion, meaning the growth of the American nation into a coast-to-coast empire, has always been painted as the right thing to do. 

“Just how were we to become powerful enough to win both world wars if we had not brought democracy to the Pacific coast?” is a frequent man-on-the-street response to the idea that perhaps the USA ought to have kept its western boundary at the Mississippi River.

We are taught that the misnamed American Civil War was a triumph not only over human slavery, but also the dangers of “Balkanization”, meaning the break-up into squabbling rivals of sovereign states, replete with trade wars, border disputes and cultural differences.

When we ran into the waters of the Pacific, our restlessness looked overseas for more expansion. Fascism, aka “national socialism”, may be defined as centralization of national power, extolling the virtues of a nation’s culture or race as to be somehow exceptional and above all others. It always means a reduction of individual freedom for the sake of a common good.

If you read the speeches of the war-monger Teddy Roosevelt, even before he became president, you will not hear merely the echoes of fascism, you will hear fascism. Mussolini, who pre-dated Hitler by more than a decade, seems to have borrowed his speeches.

All the great masterful races have been fighting races, and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then, no matter what else it may retain, no matter how skilled in commerce and finance, in science or art, it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best.

George Will, a conservative opinion columnist for decades, says that Teddy Roosevelt loved war, and set the table for America’s central participation into the “Century of War” that was the Twentieth. “We should look at Teddy’s legacy with dry eyes.”

Teddy’s speech was filled with contradiction. In it, he gave a tip of the hat to avoiding outright aggression, but was, along with others like William Randolph Hearst, the prime shaker that launched us into exactly that. Hearst’s syndicated newspapers were instrumental in warping American public opinion into diving headlong into it.

It did not come out of nowhere, but there were elements that have long resisted. We can start with one of the greatest of all “constitutional presidents” Grover Cleveland, whose 2^nd term became quite unpopular as he refused to pander to demands from the industrial expansionists, demanding to annex Hawaii, then a sovereign nation with a queen.

According to the website Responsible Statecraft, the Marine Corps’ General Smedley Butler was haunted later in life by the role he played. As the author of War Is a Racket, Butler has been an inspiration to many antiwar and anti-imperialist Americans over the years. Twice awarded the Medal of Honor, he never believed he had done anything to deserve it, and the massacre that he took part in at Fort Rivière in Haiti haunted him.

The demonization of all-things-Spanish, inherited from British and Protestant prejudices, helped to create the Spanish-American War, a war that repudiated even our own much-vaunted Monroe Doctrine. Playing upon real and invented Spanish atrocities in Cuba, the United States became what John Quincy Adams had warned us to avoid: 

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. 

And most of us have heard what Washington said in his Farewell Address, to avoid “entangling alliances.” But we have been told, and it requires no citations for proof, that the Globalists have always demonized such advice as unrealistic and “isolationist”.

Thus, the Span-Am War of 1898 is often ignored by supposedly “less-government conservatives” as to how it set the table for world war in the Pacific. With all the newspaper hype of poor-embattled Cuba needing a noble self-sacrifice of American military intervention, our first action was on the other side of the world in … the Philippines! And the “pacification” war that followed for years far outdid whatever Spanish misdeeds had been occurring in Cuba. It led to 4,000 American KIAs and perhaps 200,000 Filipino deaths, guerilla and civilian alike! 

Thus, the outright annexation of Hawaii, Guam and Samoa necessarily followed as the needed chain-link to support a Pacific imperial presence. 

In the parade of blame that historians ascribe to all wars, it is foolish to believe that Japan, Germany and Italy were entirely at fault. Any fair assessment of the American presence in the Pacific can see how Japan felt threatened, and could not understand why it was being punished for its own imperialist expansion. Their culture is famous for observing, imitating, and then improving upon those of others, and they were doing exactly that by the example of western culture.

“Less-government” conservatism has been captured by the so-called “neo-cons,” who are worse than being mere globalists. Foisting abortion, transgender madness, the pseudo-science of climate change, unproven vaccines and atheism, the neo-conservatives and globalists are — by any fair assessment — anti-humanity. 

Donald Trump likely is not a willing participant in this, but he has his blind spots, which is natural for any patriotic American. The three-way mess of Ukraine, Israel and Asia are indeed the sort of “entangling alliances” that George Washington forewarned us about.

Conservatives need to awaken to this truth, shake off the sweet lies that have been fed to us for generations, and forge a new consensus based upon peace, not war. 

Bob Bird is former chair of the Alaskan Independence Party and the host of a talk show on KSRM radio, Kenai.

Bob Bird: A shock for the ages