State Sanctioned Murder

By Laurence Vance - "State Sanctioned Murder" - The full article and others like it can be found at www.lewrockwell.com

*Used by permission

If no one in the military obeyed orders, then, it is argued, the military would not function very well. Good. That is exactly what we need, and for two reasons. One, if our soldiers are given orders to bomb, torture, maim, kill, and destroy people (and property) half way around the world that have never lifted a finger against the United States then those are the types of orders that we don’t want soldiers in any country obeying. And second, since the military has very little to do with actually defending the country, the fact that it was not able to function very well doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.

Just think, if the military was dysfunctional enough then there would be no more bases built overseas, there would be no more U.S. troops stationed on foreign soil, there would be no more bombs dropped, there would be no more land mines buried, there would be no more torture disguised as interrogation, there would be no more “regime changes,” there would be no more invasions, there would be no more creating terrorists because of our reckless foreign policy, there would be no wasting of billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money, and finally, the root would be destroyed — the insidious policy of interventionism.

Maybe, just maybe, the military could actually patrol our coasts and guard our borders. In that case a Christian could in good conscience “join up.”

It is a sad day when conservative Christian pastors preach that Christians in the military should not commit treason by refusing to drop a nuclear bomb on a city when ordered by the state to do so instead of preaching that it would be immoral to incinerate tens of thousands of people by using such a weapon.

What are these pastors going to say when U.S. troops are directed to attack American citizens in the name of fighting terrorism? Will they still encourage their young men to join the military? Is it going to take an assault by the military on their own family before they preach the Scripture that “we ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) instead of repeating the mantra “obey the powers that be”?