| | Andy:
As a military brat whose father and older brother served with distinction during Vietnam and the Cold War, you may want to discount what I have to say - but hear me out first. These men were rational. They understood they were defending liberty, even if our government wasn't always doing so. But then they were not serving a government. They were serving the country, their home, that they loved.
No, I won't discount it. If I understand correctly what you're telling me, your father and brother viewed service in the government's military as a means to an end: defending their home and country. I respect their reasons, but their reasons would not convince me to put on the uniform. While there are probably good and brave men in nearly every rank of the armed services, I think that the civilians given command over the military are nothing but villains.
I'd have fought beside Washington, beside Jefferson, and beside Madison. I could not have fought under orders from Kennedy, or Johnson, or Nixon, or any of their successors.
I'm just old enough to remember that the Soviet Union was a real threat to us. It was not armed to the hilt with nuclear warheads for nothing.
Having been born in 1978, I grew up watching the Berlin Wall come tumbling down, and the Soviet Union with it. But before either fell, I remember as a younger child being told to run for a basement bearing a 'fallout shelter' sign if I heard the air raid siren, and had been made to practice the old "duck 'n cover" at school.
I know that the Soviet Union was a threat, but I suspect that the means the US government used to defeat the Soviets served only to arm new enemies. Osama bin Laden was the US' puppet long before he was our bogeyman.
While we can and should argue whether there was a better way for us to meet that threat, I don't think militias would have been the only answer. Objectivism does recognize the validity of national defense.
I won't dispute that Objectivism recognises the validity of national defense. Nor will I dispute its validity myself. My argument is with standing armies. I think that those who seek power do best in a country that is always at war, always under threat, and thus always under pressure to sacrifice liberty in the name of security.
As I said, maybe to you, in another thread, Objectivism is not a suicide pact.
Yes, you said it, and probably to me. But I have my pride, and if it came down to it, I would rather fight alone and fail than fight under the orders of villains and succeed. What good is living if one must live in shame?
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