Slightly edited and stolen from Guido‘s blog, but I can do that because I’m the one that put it there. Besides, information wants to be free, right?

Someone asked if I thought Blair and Bush declared war on Iraq just for fun.

I don’t think they have wars for fun; I think they have wars to “secure their place in history” to outdo their fathers, and to gain or retain political power. Far more Americans and Brits have died as a result of their wars than died as a result of the terrorist attacks, and the effect of the tightening noose of fascism on the formerly free peoples of the US and the UK is a horrible thing to see.

It’s a kind of autoerotic asphyxiation. It is obscene.

They could never have done it without us. I never thought I’d witness it, but the easy acquiescence of the people to these controls is an offense to the eyes and the soul of every free-born human being. Britain is where representative democracy in its modern form originated, and America was forged in the belief that only the people who lived in a country had the right to decide how that country should be ruled.

What happened to that?

The government and popular actions of the past several years are nothing more than the grotesque spectacle of a citizenry falling on their knees to their rulers. Isn’t this the battle against tyranny we thought we’d won centuries ago?

If we give up our freedoms to preserve our pathetic skins, what exactly gives us our moral authority? When they say they’re bringing “Western-style democracy and freedoms” what can they possibly mean by that? The kind we’ve just forfeited?

As Benjamin Franklin said, those who would trade personal liberty for bodily safety deserve neither.