Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and , therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.
Yet it is capitalism that today’s peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate – in the name of peace.
Ayn Rand: The Roots of War – 1966
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Today’s paraphrase:
People who want to make money have no interest in war as it destroys both personal fortunes and national economies.
Some people say that they are against war, but their socialist ideals quickly prove that they’re actual goal is to rule their fellow man at the point of a gun.
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On a point close to this one, Lee at Right Thinking on the Left Coast has written down his thoughts on the anti-war left and their motivation:
The last major war the United States was involved in was Vietnam. The modern Democratic Party leadership all came of age during that war, as did most of the editorial staff in the manistream media. It wasn’t just a defining moment in the modern American left, it was the defining moment, the prism through which the left would view the world from that moment on. Vietnam was justification for every pacifist tendency that every liberal has ever had. When they said that war didn’t solve anything, they could point to Vietnam. When they wanted to show the consequences of war, they could point to Vietnam. When they wanted to show the failure of military force as a tool for political change, they could point to Vietnam. It was the last major war this country was ever involved in. Sure we’ve had military operations, from Grenada to the Gulf War to the Balkans, but Vietnam our last big one, and it was a war we ended up losing. Vietnam has been their de facto answer for everything for the past 30 years.
Iraq threatens their entire belief system.
I think that Lee has it half right.
It is my belief that they have two reasons for opposition to the war. While Lee has hit one x-ring with his thoughts, the other target to be hit is the left’s need to implement socialist ideals in America that was interrupted by September 11th and then again by Bush’s attempts at stemming the tide of radical Islam.
They know that we won’t be listening to, among other things, their rhetoric on socialized medicine while we’re listening to the news about the daily happenings in Iraq. They know that it will be impossible to implement sweeping gun control when we’re thinking about madmen with bomb belts lighting themselves off in the mall or taking an elementary school hostage.
In their minds, if we could just get out of Iraq ASAP, they could get back to telling people how wonderful Canadian medicine is with their taxpayer funded doctors and how crime free Europe is without all those nasty guns.