Days 13 & 14 - A Presidential Quote

"War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today."

It came as a surprise to me that this was written in a letter to a Navy friend by the late President, and one-time Sailor, John F. Kennedy. The quote is referenced on the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum about a third of the way down the page. I'm certainly not looking for prestige, and I've had the expectation from the start of this process that some people would undoubtedly hold me in quite the opposite regard.

Nevertheless, I do hope that the publication of my request is the cause of at least some questions as to why it is that we, as humans, wage wars, and what are other actions that can be morally justified and thus rightly instituted instead. If JFK was right in believing that war doesn't have to exist, what else is there?

While I believe that any war is immoral, my present situation makes the Iraq and Afghanistan wars particularly prescient for me. Therefore, I plan to share just one possible scenario by which American lives could have, and still can be, protected, without going to war. Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but the fact that this possible solution still has not been implemented makes it particularly relevant in my mind.

In this brief discussion, I wish to suspend the very important, although not justifying, factors that prompted the 9/11 hijackers to enact their evil plans. My goal is to postulate just one possibility of what might have mitigated their evil, after their plans were already underway. I believe the answer can be found in two words, words that I believe are also the key to protection without war, individual self-defense. If there had been even one pistol in each of the cockpits of the hijacked planes, I think the damage done by the hijackers could realistically have been limited to the loss of their own lives. However, thousands of people died that day, and multiple times more have died since then.

Although the hijackers bear 100% of the responsibility for their actions, who is responsible for having limited the self-defense capabilities of the rest of the individuals aboard those planes? The answer, of course, is the United States government. The government, in claiming a monopoly on defense, so limited the capabilities of the other passengers and crew, that they were incapable and/or didn't feel responsible to try and defend themselves. In the aftermath of this tragedy, the U.S. government has remained unwilling to relinquish any power, and has instead expanded its restrictions on passengers and crew, while simultaneously ordering thousands of service members to use deadly force in two different wars that have resulted in an untold loss of human life.

I don't intend this to be an all-encompassing solution of a morally justified response to the disaster of 9/11, but I do hope that it has made you think and consider what might be an alternative to war in this, or any situation.

This post owes much to the writing and podcasts of Wes Bertrand, specifically Chapter 2, section three, of his book Complete Liberty. Available for free online reading here, or as a free podcast on iTunes.

See also The Myth of National Defense edited by Hans-Herman Hoppe.