“Believe that we too love freedom and desire it. To us it is more than anything else in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again, and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.”
On April 24, 1916, an Easter Monday in Dublin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organization of nationalists led by Patrick Pearse, launched an armed uprising against British rule, known as the Easter Rebellion. Soon, the rebels controlled much of the city and proclaimed the independence of Ireland, which had been under the repressive thumb of the United Kingdom for centuries. However, British authorities launched a counteroffensive crushing the uprising in the next days. Nevertheless, the Easter Rebellion is considered a significant marker on the road to establishing an independent Irish republic. The British executed Pearse and 14 other nationalist leaders for their participation, though they were held up as martyrs by many in Ireland.
On April 24, 1904, the Lithuanian press ban was lifted after almost 40 years in force. The ban was imposed in 1864 by administrative order after the failed January Uprising of 1863. The ban made it illegal to print, import, distribute, or possess any publications in the Latin alphabet within the Russian Empire. Tsarist authorities hoped to decrease Polish influence on Lithuanians and return them to their ancient historical ties with Russia.
On April 24, 1898, the U.S. Congress declared war on Spain, following the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor. The Spanish-American War marked the first U.S. foreign intervention outside the Americas.
On April 23, 1954, Hank Aaron hit the first home run of his Major League Baseball career. Twenty years later, he would break Babe Ruth’s career home run mark of 714.
On April 23, 1968, students at New York City’s Columbia University held a demonstration to protest military research and the condemnation of part of the neighboring Morningside Heights section of Harlem to make way for a new student gymnasium. The protest escalated into a week-long occupation of five campus buildings before police moved in. Some 712 students were arrested, and over 100 injured during the forcible eviction. After the university-ordered police response, a student strike shut down the campus for the rest of the semester.
“What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted!
Thrice is he armed that has his quarrel just,
And he but naked, though locked up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.”
“Over the past decade, this all-volunteer force has been put to the test and has succeeded,” wrote Thomas E. Ricks, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Sunday’s Washington Post.
But Ricks argues that this success is “precisely the reason” that now is the “time to get rid of the all-volunteer force. It has been too successful.”
Scrap success! Instead, Ricks raves we should “[resume] conscription . . . to reconnect the people with the armed forces” even though, admittedly, a draft “would cause problems for the military.”
Though on this latter point I catch a whiff of understatement, Ricks has a legitimate concern. “Our relatively small and highly adept military” makes “it all too easy for our nation to go to war,” he wrote, “and to ignore the consequences.” America now takes to war far too easily. Only one man (the president) decides, really, where and when the U.S. goes to war, and he puts it all on the national credit card.
So the answer is giving the Commander-in-Chief more resources? What Ricks risks is giving the president and his back-room boys a blank check on the manpower of our children.
The only effective check (as in check-and-balance) would be, I guess, a vote every four years. Oh, and the presidential term limit.
You are probably thinking: What about Congress? Unfortunately, it’s congressional dereliction of duty that’s got us here in the first place.
Which brings us back to first principles. And here the case is clear: Ricks’s prescription is wrong because conscription is wrong. Dictators conscript “their” subjects; a free society finds voluntary defenders.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Townhall: Rationally green
It’s Earth Day, so let’s cerebrate. Go to Townhall.com and help out in the great collective struggle to rethink environmentalism.
And then come back here for a whole ecology of further food for thought!
- Bruce Yandle’s PERC report: Earth Day 2012
- The Wikipedia entry on Bruce Yandle’s “Bootleggers and Baptists” thesis
- Economist Russ Roberts chats with Yandle about regulation, on EconTalk
- And another fascinating conversation with Yandle:
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Pat Tillman
“It doesn’t do me any good to be proud. It’s better to just force myself to be naïve about things, because otherwise I’ll start being happy with myself, and then I’ll stand still, and then I’m old news.”
On April 22, 1898, U.S. Navy began a blockade of Cuban ports and the USS Nashville captured a Spanish merchant ship in the early days of the Spanish-American War.
On April 22, 1889, at high noon, the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 began with roughly 50,000 people lined up for their piece of the available two million acres of land in what is today Canadian, Cleveland, Kingfisher, Logan, Oklahoma, and Payne counties in Oklahoma.
On April 22, 2004, Pat Tillman, the professional football star who left his lucrative career after 9-11 to join the U.S. Army Rangers, was killed in action in Afghanistan. The Pentagon would later determine that Tillman died from friendly fire.
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Video: Randy Barnett on the Obamacare Case
This is fascinating:
“Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth.”