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Jacob G. Hornberger

The First Amendment Does Not Give Us Freedom of Speech

Tuesday January 30, 2018

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A special insert in Sunday’s New York Times reflects that it’s not just people in countries run by totalitarian regimes that are indoctrinated by the state. It also happens in representative democracies like the United States, especially owing to the government’s educational system.

The insert, which consisted of a variety of articles on different subjects, was oriented toward children. One article was entitled “What’s the Deal with North Korea?” and summarized the decades-long dispute between North Korea and the United States.

The article tells children that Americans are far freer than South Koreans are. It points out, for example, that North Koreans go to jail for criticizing their ruler, Kim Jong-un, while Americans are free to criticize their political leaders.

Here is where U.S. indoctrination come into play. The author of the piece, Elise Craig, writes:
The First Amendment gives Americans the right to be critical of elected leaders without punishment.
That statement is engrained in every single American from the time he enters the first grade and, unfortunately, produces a mindset that continues through adulthood.
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The British Empire in Yemen

Thursday January 11, 2018

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Over the holidays, I began watching a Netflix/BBC series entitled The Last Post, which revolves around a contingent of British troops in the early 1960s stationed in Aden, a port city in Yemen, the Arabian country today that Saudi Arabia and the United States are bombing to smithereens.

The British troops were there as a remnant of the British Empire, which once controlled foreign lands all across the globe but which, mostly as a result of World War II, had been pretty much dismantled. The British troops in Aden were able to have their families living with them. One of their favorite pastimes was enjoying the amenities of a beautiful seaside resort in Aden.

But not all was hunky dory. Periodically British patrols were being ambushed and killed by Yemeni terrorists. The terrorists also kidnapped the 8-year-old son of a British officer and threatened to kill him if the British refused to release a Yemeni terrorist who had been arrested for killing British troops.

One British soldier innocently asked another, “Why do they want to kill us?” He really didn’t know. The soldier to whom he addressed the question responded, “I just don’t know.”
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What Good Are Domestic Military Bases?

Wednesday November 29, 2017

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In an excellent 2016 article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “For U.S. Foreign Policy, It’s Time to Look Again at the Founding Fathers’ Great Rule’” (which I highly recommend reading), Texas A&M Professor Elizabeth Cobbs wrote:
In 2013, for the first time since the Pew organization began polling Americans on the question five decades earlier, the majority (52%) said the United States should “mind its own business” and allow other countries to get along on their own. Today, Pew finds, the number has risen to 57%.
That is an incredible statistic. After the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, it seems that Americans are finally questioning the interventionist paradigm that has held our country in its grip since the Spanish-American War in 1898. They are questioning the notion that the U.S. government should serve as the world’s policeman, intervener, interloper, aggressor, assassin, kidnapper, and regime-changer.

The United States was founded as a non-interventionist, limited-government republic, one whose government did not “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” as John Quincy Adams put it in his Fourth of July address to Congress in 1821.
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A Basic Principle About Drug Laws

Thursday November 23, 2017

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Drug laws bring into existence drug gangs. it’s just a basic principle of economics. If you like drug gangs and the violence that comes with them, then you should support drug laws. if you oppose drug gangs and their violence, you should oppose drug laws.
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JFK, the CIA, and Secrecy

Wednesday November 22, 2017

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Today marks the 54th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who famously said,
The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings…
Isn’t that the ultimate of ironies, given that the “investigation” into his assassination was shrouded in secrecy and continues to be shrouded in secrecy?

It’s been that way since the day of the assassination. Everything was said to involve “national security,” which were (and are) the two most important words in the American political lexicon. Most of the proceedings of the Warren Commission, which was charged with pinning the assassination on Lee Harvey Oswald, were conducted in secret. The commission ordered that records relating to its proceedings be kept secret from the American people … for 75 years! When Warren was asked if Americans would ever be permitted to see the records, he responded, “Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime….”

Immediately upon JFK’s death, a team of Secret Service agents, following orders from new President Lyndon Johnson, forced their way out of Parkland Hospital, where the president had died. Brandishing guns and screaming profanities, they made it clear to Dallas Medical Examiner Earl Rose that they had absolutely no intention of complying with Texas law, which required that Rose conduct an autopsy.
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South Korea Should 'Brexit' the United States

Wednesday November 8, 2017

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With President Trump being accompanied by three U.S. carrier groups during his trip to Korea, South Koreans should pull a “Brexit” on the United States. As I counseled last April and August in two separate articles, South Korea should dissolve their alliance with the United States and kick all U.S. troops out of the country. (See “South Korea Should Give U.S. Troops the Boot” and “South Korea Should Give U.S. Troops the Boot, Part 2.) The time to do so is now, before it is too late.
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Oliver Stone Was Right About the CIA

Thursday November 2, 2017

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I can’t decide which is more amusing: the CIA’s use of “national security” to justify keeping secret its 50-year-old records in the JFK assassination or the mainstream media’s response to the continued secrecy.

On the one hand, the CIA’s use of “national security” to justify keeping 98 percent of the still-secret records is palpably laughable. However one defines that nebulous term “national security,” one thing is patently clear: Nothing — absolutely nothing — would have happened to the United States if the CIA had been forced to let the American people see its still-secret, 50-year-old JFK records on October 26, 2018, as the 1992 JFK Records Act mandated. The United States wouldn’t have fallen into the ocean. The federal government wouldn’t have turned Red.

After all, what happened to the United States when only 2 percent of the long-secret records were finally released last week? Nothing. The United States is still standing and the commies have not taken over the federal government. But don’t forget: For more than 50 years, the CIA has maintained, falsely as it turns out, that disclosing those 2 percent of its records would threaten “national security.”

Although the mainstream media doesn’t seem to be buying this national-security nonsense, they simply cannot bring themselves to reach the commonsense and logical conclusion: The 98 percent of the long-secret CIA records contain more circumstantial evidence of guilt — circumstantial evidence that demonstrates that Oliver Stone was right when he posited in his movie JFK that the CIA did, in fact, effect one of its storied regime-change operations right here in the United States on November 22, 1963.
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US Violence Abroad Begets Violence at Home

Tuesday October 3, 2017

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Although ISIS is claiming that Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock was one of theirs and was acting on its behalf, so far no independent evidence has surfaced to confirm ISIS’s claim. If such evidence does emerge, it will be one more of a long series of deadly “blowback” occurrences arising from US interventionism abroad.

But even if Paddock’s mass killing spree turns out to have no rational explanation, I continue to contend that these bizarre, unexplainable acts of violence are also rooted in the US government’s decades-long killing spree abroad.

Here is the critical question: If the Pentagon and the CIA are killing masses of people abroad, will that have an adverse effect on people here at home?

The standard answer is no. Ever since the US national-security establishment began killing people in foreign countries, the mindset has been that as long as the death and destruction is “over there,” there would be no adverse impact on American society. As US military and intelligence personnel wreaked death and destruction in faraway lands, Americans would continue to go to work, go on vacation, take their kids to soccer practice, attend sports events where they express thanks to troops, and just continue to live their lives in their regular ways.

The US media has played its part in all this by declining to display photographs of dead bodies and body parts that are the result of US shootings, bombings, or missile attacks. The notion has been that there is simply no good reason why Americans should be exposed to the effects of US violence abroad.
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America: The Dictatress of the World

Monday October 2, 2017

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On July 21, 1821, John Quincy Adams, who would go on to become the sixth president of the United States, warned that if America were ever to abandon its founding principle of non-interventionism in foreign affairs, she might well become the dictatress of the world.

Adams issued his warning in a speech he delivered to Congress, a speech that has gone down in history with the title “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.”

Adams was referring to the fact that the United States was founded as a constitutional republic, one whose military forces did not go around the world helping people who were suffering the horrors of dictators, despots, civil wars, revolutions, famines, oppression, or anything else. That’s not to say that America didn’t sympathize with people struggling to experience lives of freedom, peace, and prosperity. It was simply that the US government would not go abroad to slay such monsters.

Here is how Adams expressed it:
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
Adams was summing up the founding foreign policy of the United States, a policy of non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations, specifically Europe and Asia.
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North Korea Would Be Stupid to Trust the US

Thursday September 28, 2017

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To many mainstream pundits, the solution to the crisis in Korea is for US officials to sit down and “talk” to North Korea in the hopes of negotiating a mutually beneficial agreement. While it won’t guarantee that a deal will be worked out, they say, “talking” is the only chance there is to resolve the crisis.

They ignore an important point: Any deal that would be reached would involve trusting the US  government to keep its end of the bargain. And trusting the US government would be the stupidest thing North Korea could ever do. That’s because as soon as US officials found it advantageous, they would break the deal and pounce on North Korea, with the aim of achieving the regime change they have sought ever since the dawn of the Cold War more than 70 years ago.

Look at what US officials did to Libya. Its dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, agreed to give up his nuclear-weapons program in return for regime security. That turned out to be stupid move. As soon as US officials saw an opening, they pounced with a regime-change operation. Today, Qaddafi is dead and Libya is in perpetual crisis and turmoil. That wouldn’t have happened if Qaddafi had a nuclear deterrent to a US regime-change operation.
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