She Goes Not Abroad, In Search Of Monsters To Destroy

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 commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force….

She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….

[America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

^{https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/july-4-1821-speech-us-house-representatives-foreign-policy}

Thus spake John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of these United States on Independence Day in 1821 in an address to the U.S. House of Representatives. His speech that day is best known for one line “But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”. His point, if I may paraphrase his eloquent words into the vulgar language of contemporary America, is that the U.S. wishes the people of every nation freedom and independence, and likewise will defend to the death our own, but America does not languish under the tedium of peace and go forth to solve the world’s problems and slay the world’s dragons. Specifically he would have been thinking of Europe and her endless wars. He spoke of this directly in a line just preceding the paragraphs above:

She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.

Aceldama means “field of blood” and John Quincy Adams correctly saw that Europe would continue to be engulfed in wars for some time to come, although he could not have imagined the carnage of the two World Wars. What he did know, as did Washington in particular before him, was that America ought not be entangled in foreign wars. His words ring especially true today: our glory is not dominion but liberty. Modern Presidents for decades have sought to impose a false form of liberty on the often unwilling world by force with disastrous consequences.

Adams was hardly the only one to warn against foreign entanglements. Our first President, George Washington, warned about the danger of foreign entanglements in his farewell address, emphasis mine:

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

^{https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/george-washington-farewell-address-1796}

His closing paragraph included this line:

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world

George knew the danger even back then.

The Monroe Doctrine, named for the fifth President James Monroe, was formed in a different era when Latin America was mostly a colonial playground for Western powers and essentially declared that Europe could do what it wanted over there, but the Americas were off-limits. It expanded the non-interventionist stance to divide the world between Europe and the U.S. The pattern should be clear. The fledging United States wanted nothing to do with picking sides in foreign conflicts in Europe.

Over time this position was rapidly eroded, finally destroyed for good by the World Wars. America entered World War I under false pretenses, getting into a conflict that was none of our business, and in doing so directly and significantly contributed to the creation of the conditions that not only made a second World War possible but I would argue inevitable. World War II was not the fault of Adolph Hitler, it was more accurately the fault of Woodrow Wilson who pushed America into the war on the side of England and France and in doing so tipped the balance against Germany, leading to the German surrender and the unjust conditions of “peace” that led to the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich.

After World War II, another famous speech from a President, this time Dwight Eisenhower, warned about the danger of a permanent state of militarization and it’s influence on public policy, the famous “military-industrial complex”….

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

^{https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address}

While Eisenhower had stated that he believed the U.S. needed a credible and current military force, he also understood the danger that posed. It is a warning that has proven accurate:

Rather than building armaments in response to genuine threats to American security, now we create new threats in order to provide demand for armaments.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of the arms industry in America. It impacts every state and most Congressional districts. It is the biggest chunk of discretionary spending in the budget and that makes it the most important source for pork spending in Congress. In order to keep the pork dollars flowing, there needs to be some sort of existential threat to justify the spending. The Soviet Union provided that for half a century but when it fell apart, new dangers needed to be created, starting just a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and culminating in 9/11. Now we have new wars to fund with American taxpayer dollars, as we saw in the recent bi-partisan betrayal in approving $95 billion in new “aid” to Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and other nations.

In direct opposition to the warnings of John Quincy Adams, we spent most of the 20th century going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. To make matters worse, not only have we endlessly gone in search of monsters to destroy but all too often those monsters are ones of our own making.

Looking back at the Soviet Union. Few people understand the enormous amount of aid the West provided the Soviets, our “allies” in fighting Germany. That aid played a major role in the Soviets stopping and then turning back the Wehrmacht. After Stalingrad, the Soviets pushed back across Eastern Europe and into Germany itself. When the war ended, the Iron Curtain fell over half of Germany and all of Eastern Europe, imprisoning millions under Communism. A better strategy might have been to let Germany and the USSR clobber each other and the come in to pick up the pieces to liberate France and Western Europe, although given the atrocious state of France, England and the rest of Western Europe I am not sure that was all that positive an outcome.

Later we found ourselves fighting in Iraq against an adversary we had propped up in the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, including providing “chemical and biological warfare related technology” that later was tied to Gulf War illnesses in American veterans (see the Riegle Report). When the American people were told that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” including chemical and biological weapons, it must be remembered that we knew Iraq had some of those weapons because we provided them to Iraq.

Of course the second Gulf War and toppling of Hussein came in the aftermath of 9/11 and, assuming you believe the official story, the attacks were masterminded by one Osama bin Laden. Back in the 1980s bin Laden was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan alongside the mujahideen. While the U.S. government claims that no direct aid went to bin Laden, I don’t think anyone really believes that. The CIA might not have directly handed weapons and cash to bin Laden but it is without serious question that some of those weapons ended up in his hands and that the CIA knew about it.

After the Soviets were bled enough to finally be forced to withdraw, Afghanistan collapsed into chaos but America didn’t care because we had bloodied the nose of the Russian bear. A few years later the Taliban took over and we know how that went. 20 years of American occupation, thousands of American casualties, tens of thousands of Afghan civilians killed, well over 100,000 Afghans killed in total and America fleeing in abject humiliation leaving behind enormous stores of weapons in the hands of the Taliban.

This has happened on a smaller scale for decades. We pushed for the “Arab Spring” and you see how that worked out, slave markets in Libya and missiles flying at cargo ships from Yemen. I can’t really think of a foreign entanglement in my lifetime that ended up with anyone better off except the military-industrial complex. Despite our lengthy record of making monsters to slay that end up biting us back, our elite class continues to double down.

After decades of fighting monsters we created, our overlords became impatient with the pace of monster-slaying. Rather than simply creating monsters abroad to smite, now we invite the monsters we created to come live in our land and often continue their squabbles on our soil.

This has been on display for some time with groups of “migrants” attacking different groups of “migrants”, often over some squabble back in their homelands. Now it has reached a entirely new level of madness with the spreading chaos over the genocide taking place in Gaza.

At first it was the occasional random group blocking traffic for half an hour. Now these protests have spread to college campuses: “Situation Is Unraveling”: Pro-Palestinian Protests Erupt Across America’s Woke Colleges. It poses an interesting situation for colleges that love to talk about “people of color” and “colonizers” which would seem to favor the Palestinians but they also get loads of money from Jewish billionaires. Who is right or wrong isn’t relevant here, for the record I hope both sides lose, but what is pertinent is this:

We have this problem because we have allowed millions of non-Americans to settle in our country, bringing with them their ancient squabbles.

Apart from the fact that the Israelis are using American funds and munitions to slaughter tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians it simply isn’t our fight. Nevertheless we are paying for it on both sides, in terms of money spent directly and the resulting chaos it is causing in our country.

There was trouble enough in assimilating the various European migrants but when you start to toss millions of non-Whites from every garbage dump in the world, you are importing the same people that caused such trouble in their homelands in the first place. Their fights just carry on here. In a way I find it entertaining. One of my fundamental truths is that once the various non-White groups stop seeing Whites as their main adversary, they will remember how much they hate each other and turn on one another. We are starting to see that now. This is especially amusing once the group that has been the most responsible for pushing mass migration is now being attacked by those same “migrants”. The main problem is that we now need to be especially cautious of being caught up in the blast zone.

It is a complete reversal of what JQA said of the United States. Not only does America go abroad in search of monsters, not only do we create additional monsters to help meet the demand for monster-slaying, now we bring those monsters to America. While it is far too late to reverse course, it is a time to give serious consideration to the existential crisis to the American experiment that ignoring the advice of wiser men than any who lead us today.