Swords to Plowshares

A life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity

mw. A brave and uncompromising book is presented by the US American Ron Paul*, “dedicated to a new generation seeking peace and rejecting the concept of inevitable war.” The doctor and long-standing Congressman turns to the people around the world, but especially to the people of his own country, the United States, whose governments, since he was a little boy, have been waging war and are waging war almost uninterruptedly. Based on his personal deep conviction, but also with a sound knowledge, he appeals to the readers and calls them up to resist the war. Born in 1935 in a US family with German roots, Ron Paul, as a boy, got an insight into the meaninglessness of war in which brothers fight against brothers and kill each other: “Even at the age of ten, when World War II ended, I was quite certain that war should be avoided if at all possible.” In his college days, during the Korean War, Ron Paul expected that he could be drafted to military service later  – it actually happened – and he decided to study medicine : “I knew that I wanted no part of the killing and believed that being in a position to save lives was more to my liking.” (p. 21) In the early sixties, Ron Paul became a doctor at the Air Force, but “certainly no hero,” as he recalls retrospectively; as “heroic” he characterises the world-famous boxer Muhammed Ali, whose arrest as a war service denier became known all over the world.

As an opponent of war in the congress

In the course of his long-standing mandates as a member of the Congress Ron Paul became an active and increasingly determined opponent of war. The fact that the US was always involved in conflicts at great financial and human cost “continued to strengthen my belief that a noninterventionist foreign policy is a necessity for a free society to exist and thrive. [...] With each year, starting with my first campaign 1973/74, through leaving the office in January of 2013, my conviction grew that most of the wars throughout our history should have been avoided.” (p. 50). He was repeatedly reminded that war is almost always carried out not for “humanitarian reasons” but because of “oil, power, military-industrial complex profits, etc.” (p. 111) for economic and power political reasons. In chapter X, “Central Bank influence on foreign policy,” Ron Paul also shows the fatal role of the FED, which since its founding in 1913 has not only financed the American wars, but also directly interacted with foreign policy. He comes to the conclusion: “A policy to achieve peace and prosperity will never be fully realized, so long as there is a central bank with secrecy power to issue, at will, a fiat currency and to engage in central economic planning by manipulating the market and interest rates and providing benefits to friends.” (p. 114)
Again and again he was denied access to influential congress committees on the grounds of Paul’s clear attitude to the US-led wars, but he “was after persistent, polite requests assigned to the Foreign Affairs Committee.” There, he endeavoured to counter the “the neocons obsession with remaking the Middle East” and the resulting war propaganda. (p. 53) During this time, he had to witness that President George W. Bush took the congress authorisation, given after 9/11, as a carte blanche “to pursue perpetual war anywhere in the world”: “The invasion, war, and occupation to transform Afghanistan, went far beyond the limited congressional authorization. These actions in Afghanistan were undertaken illegally without a declaration of war, in Iraq and in many other places.” (p. 54)

Man is peaceful by nature

Through his intense analysis of war and peace, the author is convinced that wars are not in the nature of man. On the contrary, humans are peaceful by nature, and the vast majority feels repulsed by “systematic slaughter of innocent victims in senseless wars as promoted by the few.” (p. 35) Wars between Christian nations stand in contrast to the peace message of Christ, but the mutual combating of Christian and Islamic groups is not inherent in these religions. The famous example of the spontaneous interruption of the battles for a joint Christmas celebration on the Christmas Eve of 1914 between British, French, Belgian, and German soldiers “demonstrates the age-old conflict between man’s natural peaceful inclinations and politicians obsessions with war.” (p. 36) Only through continuous propaganda and lies people are unhinged so far that they are willing to give their lives and pay for the wars. Ron Paul reminds the lies and hysteria in the run-up to the Gulf War (babies allegedly thrown out of their incubators) and later in the attack on Iraq (alleged weapons of mass destruction). Continuous campaigns of lies by proponents of war and armaments industry managers were supported by complacent media: “To keep propaganda alive after the hostilities had erupted, the jounalists ‘embedded’ themselves in the military and reported only, what was approved by our military and political leaders.”(p. 71)

Decentralised organisation and neutrality instead of state war policy