STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Ron Paul on the Cognitive Dissonance of the Political Class
By Daily Bell Staff - October 13, 2015

Politicians Exploit School Shooting While Ignoring Bombing Victims … Following the recent Oregon school shooting, many politicians rushed to the microphones to call for new gun control laws … The reaction to the shooting stands in stark contrast to the reaction to the US military's bombing of an Afghanistan hospital run by the international humanitarian (and Nobel Peace Prize winning) group Doctors Without Borders. Our Nobel Peace Prize winning president did apologize to his fellow Nobel laureate for the bombing. However, President Obama has not "politicized" this tragedy by using it to justify ending military involvement in Afghanistan. – Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

Dominant Social Theme: There is too much violence in the world and government ought to stop it.

Free-Market Analysis: This is a very good point that Ron Paul is making. The horrible tragedy in Afghanistan – where US pilots bombed a hospital and killed some 22 patients and doctors – was not even the subject of a formal apology when it happened. Contrast this reaction to the Oregon shooting that immediately received responses agitating for further gun control.

The Afghan bombing was described by the Pentagon as resulting from reports that Taliban were fighting from the hospital. After this, the Pentagon claimed that bombers arrived because the Afghan army requested them. Finally, there began to be talk of accusing Obama of a war crime, and the Pentagon suddenly decided to take responsibility.

Here, according to ZeroHedge:

While Obama did apologize … and demanded a deeper investigation to "get to the bottom of things" like any alleged peace prize holding war criminal, it is what he did yesterday that showed just how alleged "war criminals" treat collateral damage aka human casualties: as goods whose ultimate value can be expressed in dollar (or rather loans, since as we noted the US has 3.5x more debt than it has GDP).

According to the WSJ, the Pentagon is offering "condolence payments" to the civilians injured and the families of those killed by a U.S. airstrike that destroyed a hospital near Kunduz, Afghanistan. Because, the thinking probably goes, human lives are like any other commodity and can be measured in reserve notes.

However, what is more disturbing is that since the US prints the world's reserve currency, should Obama proceed to exterminate countless other "collaterally damaged" civilians, all that the US will need to do is print a few more million to wash its – and that of the "free and democratic world" – conscience, and all shall be well in all future cases.

ZeroHedge makes a good point about how the US responds to such atrocities – and there have been countless such over the past decade and a half. It costs the US Treasury literally nothing to pay "blood money" because the US can basically print all the money it needs.

Ordinarily, as we have pointed out many times, the payment of blood money is part of an elaborate private judicial system that was worked out over millennia. It created a series of traditions in which people negotiated with each other over perceived transgressions.

The payment of money was a necessary part of the settlement procedure because there was no such thing as a prison complex. Before central bank money made incarceration affordable, people were not put in jail in any quantity. People tended to settle their grievances privately – hence, duels, vendettas etc. It was the threat of violence that compelled the settlement, usually.

The Pentagon is playing an especially cynical game with the use of blood money because such money has no relationship to past realities when offering wealth to the victim impoverished the aggressor and his or her family.

Pentagon officials do not suffer from cash settlements. Those who bombed the hospital will not miss a paycheck. There is an investigation that will now be undertaken, but it will not amount to anything.

Ron Paul's main point is that US policies are misplaced. The emphasis should be on human lives not on scoring political points. But there is a deeper issue that Paul hints at here and it is a fundamental one.

The issue is the military-industrial complex itself and the part it plays in increasingly driving the mechanism of US technocracy. It is the bankers that provide the dollars but it is the US military – and NATO generally – that provides the justification and the conduit for spending those dollars.

Each war, each act of violence further empowers the military both at home and abroad. This is basically a way to ratchet up authoritarianism and to create a sociopolitical and economic superstructure that at this point has little or nothing left of its republican roots.

When contemplating what we call lifestyle insurance – the ability (in part) to be able to travel and live in other countries – the evolution of the US military-industrial complex ought to be taken into account.

Modern militarism seems to feed on what we call false flags. The Russians, for instance, are now fighting in Syria and claim that they have made more progress against ISIS in a few days than the US has made in several years. The implication is that the US WANTS terrorism to exist in Syria to justify the removal of domestic rights and freedoms.

The US long ago ceased to be a "free" society in the traditional sense of the word. What it has become is a society run by a handful of elites wielding enormous power through public and private facilities – government and corporations.

Such elites are endlessly terrified by those whom they rule. Understanding better than their subjects the tenuousness of their authority and the hidden brutality of their methods, they seek expanded control any way they can get it.

This is the tie that binds together US foreign wars and domestic gun control campaigns. Elites will not rest, apparently, until not a single citizen has access to weapons that can at least hypothetically provide a modicum of defense and offense.

These same elites endlessly entangle the US – and the West generally – in foreign wars that continually strengthen society's evolving command-and-control structure.

History shows us these trends DO NOT reverse themselves. Ron Paul asks why the current administration politicizes mass shootings but does not make use of a horrible hospital bombing tragedy to agitate for an end to the Afghan war.

The reason is because the Obama administration – and fedgov generally – uses war as a tool to increase power and uses mass shootings as a tool to decrease the percentage of armed citizens via aggressive regulation and legislation. Ron Paul comes to much the same conclusion at the end of his article, as follows:

The disparate reactions to the Oregon school shooting and the Afghanistan hospital bombing shows the political class is unwilling and unable to acknowledge that the US government cannot run the world, run our lives, or run the economy. Clearly, politicians will never stop expanding government and give us back our lost liberties unless and until the people demand it.

Ron Paul seems to suggest that at some point people will demand their lost freedoms. Here at The Daily Bell, we are focused on providing information about ways individuals can protect themselves against the trends that are now unfortunately manifest in the US.

Lifestyle insurance includes the acquisition of gold and silver, potentially a second residence abroad, additional passports and other tools and services that facilitate global freedom. You don't have to be trapped in one country or one locale. By taking advantage of easily available resources, you can provide your family with necessary flexibility and international resources.

After Thoughts

Do what you can for yourself, your family and your local community. Independence begins at home. Our good friends at Sovereign Man have some excellent options one interested in such lifestyle protection may want to consider. Visit them by clicking here if you are interested in taking personal responsibility for ensuring your family's safety.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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