“Without the Veterans, We Wouldn’t Be Here”

A clerk told me this today. She was a friendly woman of 50, by all appearances a typical middle-class American, perhaps even a grandmother.

Which veterans I wonder? The ones who fought the Spanish and the Filipinos? They had no known designs on America in 1898.

The vets who fought the Iraqis twice? The latter didn’t make war against America or even launch sporadic attacks. The vets who have been killing Afghanistan Taliban? Ditto for them. The vets of the Korean War? North Korea didn’t attack America either. The vets of the Grenada War? Grenada is just a tiny island. The World War 1 veterans? That war was among European powers until the U.S. got into it, for no reason that had anything to do with making sure that “we would be here”.

The vets who fought the Vietnam War? It is a terrible thing to have to say, given the lives lost and mangled, that North Vietnam had no designs on America and that the U.S. presence on the South Vietnamese side had absolutely nothing to do with our being here in America at that time or at any time since, other than to make our lives worse, as in the case of the other wars.

The vets who fought the Japanese? That’s a stronger prima facie case due to the Pearl Harbor attack, but, as Robert Higgs explains, the U.S. government provoked an attack and got its war with both Japan and Germany.

We would be here without the vets and without all these wars.

We will be here without American involvement in current wars and trouble spots.

The notion that vets saved us from being enslaved or worse at the hands of assorted foreigners is absurd. What has happened as a result of these wars is that Americans are now enslaved by various elites within this country.

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12:12 pm on November 11, 2013