War and the Common Good

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:24:20 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Anthony Gregory at AntiWar.com - based on a talk given on June 7 at the Future of Freedom Foundation's conference, Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties. Why war is the mortal enemy of the common good and individualism is its best friend.

The warfare state is the greatest of all threats to the individual in our time. It is a threat materially, philosophically, spiritually, culturally and intellectually. It displaces all the voluntary, civil associations we champion -- the family, community, church and honest business. It is the total negation of the dignity of the individual, the rights of all men and women to live their lives in liberty. It is a mixture of cold, anti-libertarian modernism and barbarism, the worst remnants of the Middle Ages combined with a new callousness and technocratic fervor. It is the most persistent form of American collectivism. It is an unparalleled threat to world peace. It is the greatest enemy of humanity and individual liberty in our midst.

One day the modern warfare state will be looked upon the way we look upon the failed socialist experiments of a past time, the way we look upon chattel slavery, the way we look upon the gravest and most universally reviled episodes of the individual being dispensed with to make way for the march of collectivism and institutional inertia.

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