In their ongoing war against America‘s foundation, the protestors who rallied last weekend against the United States-led war against Iraq enable our enemies seething to destroy us.
Before staging the rally it organized in New York City, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) distributed a press release that complained of “the commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars to war while urgent domestic issues suffer from neglect.” Among these issues are “Americans without healthcare, the staggering level of child poverty, the criminal ‘injustice’ system and the administration’s gutting of civil rights and liberties.”
In short, the antiwar protestors want to abandon our self-defense against terrorist regimes wagging war on America for a domestic “war on poverty.” A government’s primary purpose, however, is to protect the individual rights of its citizens from domestic and foreign aggressors. Yet the protestors claim people have a “right” to health care and to be lifted from poverty. This means, in essence, they want the US government to point its guns, not at its would-be destroyers, but at its own citizens.
The socialized medicine they demand, for example, forces the young, the healthy and doctors to sacrifice for the old, the sick and patients. Their “war on poverty” forces the most productive and wealthier Americans to sacrifice for the less- or non-productive, poorer Americans. All the sacrifices and redistribution of wealth demanded by these programs are executed at the point of government guns. If an individual refuses to be a sacrificial animal for others, if he refused to subordinate his right to his liberty and property to the pseudo- rights of any collective, he will be fined, jailed or even killed.
Because the protestors radically uphold the legalized looting of such socialist programs across the board, they cannot claim allegiance to justice or legitimate rights, civil or otherwise. Instead they give allegiance to our greatest threats, dictatorial terrorist states such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, by practicing the very statism, the very consistent crushing of individual rights, these regimes perpetrate against their own citizens.
Most telling, the organizers of the nationwide rallies, the UFPJ, the Workers World Party, and Not in Our Name, for instance, are headed by or closely allied with proponents of communism — an ideology that calls for the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, “society,” and that in practice has lead to slave-labor camps and the slaughter of some 100 million people. Further, among the endorsers of the New York rally was the Council on American Islamic Relations, an organization that wants public libraries to display books that favorably portrait Hezbollah and Hamas, Iranian-backed terrorist groups who have murdered thousands of innocent Israelis and Americans. Any person then that rallies under these anti-American organizations provides them a moral sanction that only emboldens them and sustains their evil existence.
At root, the so-called “peace” protestors invert the very foundation for life. There can be no health care system provided by doctors, for example, if the protestors stop our government from destroying our enemies before they destroy our (semi)-capitalist nation that makes that system possible. At a time when dictators such as Saddam Hussein collaborate with al-Qaeda terrorists who, given the opportunity, would unleash nuclear, biological or chemical weapons on us, the protestors advocate that we instead initiate force against our fellow Americans.
The protestors claim that Hussein poses no (immediate) threat to the US, and that, if anything, Bush should deal first with North Korea. How do they propose dealing with terrorist regimes, including communist North Korea? It is not to use crushing military force to eliminate their obvious threat to our nation, but instead to engage in the appeasements of unending inspections, diplomatic talks and increased, never-ending foreign aid. The latter, of course, means forcing Americans to sacrifice more of our property to support regimes poised to destroy us.
If America is to win this war against Islamic terrorists, it is precisely this moral appeasement and self-sacrifice pushed by the protestors that we must war against and decisively defeat on the intellectual battlefield.
As philosopher Ayn Rand wrote in her Cold War-era essay, The Roots of War,
“If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged ‘good’ can justify it — there can be no peace within nations and no peace among them.”
