This is the best book by Ron Paul that I have had the joy to read. It is an intimate look into the private thought life of Ron Paul as he grew up and lived in an age under the constant threat of war. He talks about his experiences growing up during World War II, how the events of the Korean war shaped his school years and how the war in Vietnam caught him up as a young medical practitioner.
He talks about his intellectual journey and what resources brought him to a pro-peace philosophy. Of course, he ties everything together into a consistent liberty philosophy as he did with his entire political career. In this book, he actually chides himself for not being more anti-war!
This book may be the closest to an autobiography that we may get from Dr. Paul. It is chock-full of anecdotes, quotes from sources that he has gleaned from over time, and each chapter heading includes lines of poetry that are appropriate to accompany each chapter’s main point. If his Youtube videos of house floor speeches and grillings of Fed chairmen and Presidential debates show the analytical and public side of Ron Paul, this book shows his emotional and deeply personal side. He mourns the tragedy of people he knew who were sent off to senseless wars never to come back, recounts stories of war in which the individuals sent to fight were able to rebel against the chickenhawks who sent them, and he fiercely cuts down the political class and military-industrial complex that profits off of lies and murder.
There is a part in chapter one in which he reflects on how as a boy he cheered when FDR died and his father scolded him for cheering the death of anyone. I think this was deeply formative in his life and taught him that our political opponents are still human beings. It is the chickenhawks that make us dehumanize others. If we are to pursue peace we must constantly be seeking the good in others. This does not make us weak and can only make us stronger as we gain a greater perspective rather than to simply write people off as Democrats or Republicans or liberals or conservatives or irrational “others” in foreign lands that must be controlled with the coercive violence of the State. However, he takes no prisoners and has no pity in his condemnation of those who have lied us into the welfare-warfare state we now live under.
While ruthless in his take down of the political masterminds behind these murderous schemes he remains gentle in his pleas for the public to be persuaded that peace is not only morally right but in America’s best interests.
Of course, he shows how the Federal Reserve and the perversion of the monetary system, the wrecking of the economy, the loss of civil liberty at home, and the terrible blowback of endless unjust foreign wars all tie in together in a cohesive political philosophy of liberty. This is not how the Founding Fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution envisioned America to be. One gets the sense in reading this book that not only is this book intended to be a restatement of many of the political opinions Ron has tried to get the word out on but it is also a deep reflection of his entire life and what he feels to be most important in passing on.
This work is deeply personal and from the heart and philosophically probing. At the same time, he presents logic and facts swept aside by the establishment history revisionists, and persuasively argues for the pro-peace position. Buy this book. If you had to have only one book by Ron Paul, make it this one.
Reprinted with permission from LewRockwell.com.
