Libertarian Institute managing editor Keith Knight opened the Rage Against the War Machine rally on September 28, 2024 in Washington DC. You can read his full speech below.

War is a euphemism for theft funded mass murder based on lies often involving slaves known as conscripts.

Almost all Democrats and Republicans hold two contradictory beliefs:

1. If our domestic government violates our freedoms, we must embrace calm disagreement, but never resist. When officers give you an order, you must obey them, lest you get killed like Ashli Babbitt.
2. When any foreign politician potentially or hypothetically violates your freedom, you must go to war and advocate the mass murder of civilians.

Since the costs of violence are extremely high, often immoral, and outcomes very uncertain, I suggest we take the peaceful route as often as possible.

Regarding warfare, here are twelve facts the fake news and fake historians have omitted:

1. On September 20, 2001, President [George W.] Bush said ‘They hate us for our freedom and democracy’; yet in Al-Qaeda in It’s Own Words published by Harvard University Press, Bin Laden’s grievances consisted of U.S. deadly sanctions on Iraq, U.S. support for Israeli crimes in Palestine and Lebanon, and U.S. military occupation of Saudi Arabia. This lie led to NATO’s first ever declaration of war, and after twenty years, tens of thousands of civilian and military deaths, the Taliban seized Kabul in eleven days.
2. The U.S. government armed and took the side of Al-Qaeda in Syria to fight Bashar al-Assad, see Operation Tymber Sycamore
3. The U.S. government sided with Al-Qaeda in Libya—the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—to oppose Moumour Gadaffi.
4. The U.S. government fought alongside Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula against the Houthi government in Yemen.
5. The 1946 Congressional Pearl Harbor Investigation cites Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s Diary dated Nov. 25th, 1941, saying, “The President brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked, perhaps (as soon as) next Monday…The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves…”
6. In the first world war, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill said in his book The World Crisis 1911-1918, “The British blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population— men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission.” Not Kaiser Willhelm, but the whole population.
7. It was Neville Chamberlain who declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939 after the National Socialists invaded Danzig, Poland, a town which was roughly 95% German. And it was Winston Churchill who initiated the terror bombings of civilians in May of 1940. Chamberlain & Churchill’s War for Polish Independence resulted in seven million dead Poles and Poland occupied by the Bolshevik regime.
8. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in his book Argument Without End, claims the August 4, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident never took place meaning the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and mass murder campaign of Vietnam was based on a lie. Senate [vote was] 88-2, House [vote was] 416-0.
9. Vice President Dick Cheney said on Meet the Press, “that’s been pretty well confirmed, that he [Muhammed Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.” Fake news.
10. We’re told that we must bear the costs of hundreds of thousands of lives in Ukraine for the benefit of democracy. Yet, [Volodymyr] Zelensky did not hold his March 31 election of this year after outlawing eleven competing political parties. His military bombed NATO ally Poland on November 15 of 2022, he conscripts (enslaves) men to fight in his war—just so he could stay on the throne in Kiev.
11. The real aim behind our current Russia policy is in the Pentagon’s February 1992 Defense Planning Guidance draft, stating “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival…We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
12. The origins of the Russia-Ukraine conflict were explained by President [Barack] Obama in his book, A Promised Land, p. 464:

“The U.S. decision seven years earlier to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and its plans to house missile defense systems on Russia’s borders continued to be a source of strategic instability. The admission of former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO during both the Clinton and Bush administrations had steadily encroached on Russia’s “sphere of influence,” while U.S. support for the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan—under the specious guise of “democracy promotion”—had turned Russia’s once-friendly neighbors into governments hostile to Moscow.”

This is isolationism. Provoking enemies is isolating, not seeking friendship and free trade.

The national security elites in every country since the beginning of time must lie and sensationalize potential foreign threats in order to get their domestic populations to surrender their freedoms and bear the high cost of dying and getting their limbs blown off.

To Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken and National Security Advisor [Jake] Sullivan, don’t just avoid war because it’s the right thing to do, do it for yourself.

Overexpansion and engagement in unnecessary wars brought down: Napoleon’s French Empire, Czar Nicholas’s Russian Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Hirihito’s Japanese Empire, Hitler’s Third Reich, the British Empire, and the Soviet Empire (in Afghanistan!)

With the state having a monopoly on the money supply, the right to take money without consent—taxation—and the right to conscript, politicians seldom have an incentive to consider obvious peaceful alternatives to war.

Consider the comment by Congressman Selth Moulton of Massachusetts:

“[T]he U.S. should make it very clear to the Chinese that if you invade Taiwan, we’re going to blow up TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.].”

Hello, Attorney General, if inciting a riot can get someone arrested, what should happen to politicians who incite war?

Instead of war with China over Taiwan, let’s decriminalize all economic activity between consenting adults both—here and abroad—to make sure our economy out competes all other countries. This is the true way to empower Americans.

One question we need to ask ourselves to practice basic empathy: When would another country be justified in invading America, killing civilians, bombing cities, blockading ports, and installing a new government?

If the answer is basically never, we should reject moral double standards and have the same principle for other countries.

History shows, we can talk to our “enemies”:

• [Dwight D.] Eisenhower shook hands with [Nikita] Khruschev in America in 1959.
• [John F.] Kennedy wrote letters to Khruschev to avoid nuclear exchange over Cuba.
• [Richard] Nixion shook hands with Mao [Zedong] in Beijing.
• [Donald] Trump shook hands with Kim Jung Un in Singapore.
• [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and [Harry] Truman had a formal alliance with Joseph Stalin
• We can be friends with Xi [Jinping] and [Vladimir] Putin for the sake of avoiding a nuclear exchange which would make the crimes of the Third Reich seem miniscule by comparison.

My friends on the right, the prolLife, pro-family position is anti-war. When God says Thou Shalt Not Murder, there were no exceptions for politicians and soldiers.

My friends on the left, the biggest inequality is when one person takes the life of another unjustly, which in war occurs on a massive scale. Nothing is more “exploitative” to the average person than watching cities which took centuries to construct be blown to bits, while getting conscripted into war, watching your loved ones get murdered by bombs.

My friends in the military, I was asked in grade school, “If someone told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” The point was, you are directly responsible for the actions you take. “I was told to do so, I was just following orders” is not a valid excuse for school children or members of the military.

Americans, we don’t have to admire psychopathic politicians. We can admire:

• Cornelius Vanderbilt for lowering the cost of steamship travel from $7 to 6 cents.
• The Wright brothers for giving the gift of flight to the common American.
• Henry Ford and the Ford auto workers for making the automobile accessible to the masses.
• The 3,400 construction workers who in 1931 built the Empire State Building in a record breaking one year and forty-five days.
• Rosa Parks for disobeying unjust laws.
• Martin Luther King for holding us Americans to the very standards we claim to uphold.
• Steve Jobs and the Apple employees for giving people access to phones and computers on a scale never imagined.

The great crimes of history—slavery, Ghangis Khan, genocide, Jim Crow, etc—all had one thing in common. They involved some people initiating violence against peaceful people.

Americans must lead the world in embracing a consistent morality, rejecting war recognizing it for what it is: Theft funded mass murder based on lies often involving slaves known as conscripts.