Goering Quotation Explains the Current ISIS Crisis

Jacob Hornberger in his Future of Freedom Blog quotes Goering at his Nurenberg Trial

Naturally the common people don’t want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Then goes on to make the point:
“Isn’t that what the latest scare, this one relating to ISIS, is all about? Oh sure, ISIS hasn’t actually attacked the United States but it did behead two Americans in retaliation for U.S. bombing raids against ISIS in Iraq, and that has been more than sufficient to get the American people are stirred up.

Look at how many Americans are going bananas, just as Goering suggested they would. As he pointed out, it’s just not hard for government officials to bring people around to the support of the government. Right now, many people’s knees are knocking and many of them are quivering in their boots. ISIS is the scariest thing they have ever faced—scarier even then Hitler, Stalin, the Soviet Union, communists, North Korea, North Vietnam, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Iran, drug dealers, illegal aliens, and all the other things that have scared the heck out of the American people ever since U.S. officials grafted the national-security state apparatus onto our governmental structure. They are all convinced that ISIS is coming to get them, kidnap them, cart them back to Arabia, waterboard, and behead them.

And if anyone questions any of this, he is derided for failing to appreciate the grave danger America is in, or for not being brave, or for not being a patriot, or for not being willing to come to support of the nation, or for not supporting the troops.

The entire situation is about as ridiculous as could be. ISIS is not coming to invade, conquer, and occupy the United States. It does not have hundreds of thousands of transport ships and planes. It does not have millions of troops. It does not have billions of dollars.

Oh sure, they might take over Iraq, just as Saddam Hussein did or just as the military dictatorship in Egypt has. There are brutal dictatorships all over the world, some of which the U.S. government even partners with. That doesn’t mean an invasion, conquest, or occupation of the United States.

Or some of them might commit a terrorist attack on a building or a mall here in the United States. But that’s not exactly an invasion, conquest, and occupation of the nation. That’s the murder of a limited number of people.

Is that bad? Of course it is. But that’s the price of empire and intervention. Such attacks, if they come, will be in retaliation for the U.S. government’s bombing raids in Iraq. When you have a governmental apparatus that consists of a standing army and an all-powerful president, you have to accept that terrorist retaliation is one of the prices that must be paid for maintaining that type of governmental apparatus. If you don’t want terrorist strikes against Americans, then there is a simple solution, the one that Madison and the other Founding Fathers favored: Dismantle the standing army, the CIA, and America’s foreign empire of military bases, and end America’s foreign policy of interventionism and support of dictatorships. Absent that, just prepare yourself for the inevitable cost.

The irony is that so many of these frightened Americans are calling on the president to use his military and CIA to do the same things that generated ISIS  in the first place—that is, more bombs and more killing of people in Iraq. This time, such Americans are apparently expecting different results. When ISIS lies destroyed three years from now, only to be replaced with ISISGodzilla, Americans will once again be confronted with the definition of insanity, the same definition, by the way, they are confronted with each time the feds destroy some drug lord or drug cartel.”