[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV contributor, Mark E. Jeftovic]

“The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians, and social workers as ominous and dangerous.” - W. G. Hill 

It's that time of year again where we are all encouraged to "Remember the Fallen". The words "Lest We Forget" adorn everything from bus shelters to fast food wrappers. What is it we're not supposed to forget? Ostensibly, we're not supposed to forget those who killed and were killed by, other people (usually "over there") in the course of "defending our freedom".

This is a platitude and anybody who cares to delve just a little deeper will soon come across a plethora of unpleasant facts that we all would do much better to not forget.

We should remember that World War I, "The Great War" which gave rise to this ritualized faux solemnity was bumbled into from all-sides in a carnival of diplomatic foppishness, "higher ideals" of patriotism and delusions of gallantry that gave all sides more than they bargained for and irrevocably changed the nature of warfare itself.

(I suspect looking at that war, certain financier and policy wonks, proto-kleptocrats of yesteryear, came to the conclusion that the newly emergent paradigm of industrialized "total warfare" was the most lucrative vehicle to power and wealth imaginable)

We should remember that out of that war emerged one Major General Smedley Butler, to this day the most decorated US Marine in history, an undisputed "war hero" and unassailable living legend who stunned the overlords by refusing to take part in a financier backed plan for a Coup D'Etat against the United States government.

He went on to write "War Is A Racket", wherein  he plainly states that wars are created and perpetuated by politically connected industrialists for profit and material gain:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

We should remember that the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles realized that the Next War had just been baked into the cake, remarking “This is not peace; it is an armistice for 20 years.”

Knowing that the peace had been imposed in a way that guaranteed the next war, we should remember that the same shadowy financier/overlords behind the scenes began the work of locking in their next wave of profits. Their plot to stage a coup d'etat in the US was scuttled, they proceeded to finance a certain young Austrian corporal in his political pursuits in Germany.

These financiers had names like Fritz Thysen ("I Paid Hitler"), and Prescott Bush (George Sr.'s grandfather) - who's name comes up in connection with both the aborted US coup and as a US business associate of Thysen (Bush had his assets confiscated under the "Trading With the Enemies Act").

We should remember Eisenhower's farewell address. Here we have another undisputed war hero, after another global total war, stating for the record that the shadowy few who benefitted enormously from the phenomenon of war itself, had modified it's tactics and were now slowly but surely usurping the very nature of power itself:

"Now 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 Statehouse, every office of the Federal government...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. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted."

We should remember that behind the scenes, the US were already spoiling for another war in 1949, where they helped foster a veritable police state in the Republic of Korea and helped engineer a UN response when North Korea ostensibly "shot first" when in reality they were responding to a South Korean artillery barrage.

Following on that pattern, we should remember that every single war since has been premised on a lie. We would be remiss not to mention the ill-fated invasion of Iraq - that "slam dunk" case for weapons of mass destruction which instead wreaked mass civilian casualties and plunged the mid-east into a chaotic regional war which is accelerating in intensity as I type this.

We should remember then, that war consumes the masses to the benefit of the few. We should remember that ideals like "patriotism" and "freedom" are more accurately understood as propagandized "marketing memes" to convince the masses to fight and die in order to further the private, obfuscated, personal agendas of the political/cronyist overlords.  (We should remember that Napoleon was astonished to realize that "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon." - and the observation didn't stop him from capitalizing on that fact to his own dreams of grandeur).

So when one wears the poppy, one is in reality signing on for more than bargained for. You are tacitly approving a global machine that will order you to kill, and to be killed, should you be called upon to do so. Not for your reasons, not to your benefit but for somebody else's. You are volunteering yourself and your loved ones to become meat for the global meat grinder known as the Military Industrial Complex.

You are agreeing to be a pawn in somebody else's chess game.

You are absolving yourself of your personal responsibility to live by a moral compass you define and understand.

You are renouncing your own self-sovereignty.

P.S. Both sides of my family were in the thick of World War II. My father flew a Spitfire in the RAF during the Battle of Britain (and elsewhere), while my mother''s father was a German air-force judge, who died shortly after his release from an Allied P.O.W camp, where he was intentionally starved to near death (see Bacque's Other Losses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losses )

I think they would both agree with the substance of this article.

Mark Jeftovic is the CEO of easyDNS Technologies Inc. the Toronto-based domain registrar and DNS provider who lives by the credo "Power & Freedom™". In his copious spare time he blogs about anarcho-capitalism, bitcoin and tectonic shifts at Wealth.net and is the guitarist/singer for indie-rock sensations The Parkdale Hookers."