Adam Kokesh, an ex-Marine and libertarian activist, interviewed people seeing the movie American Sniper.  There is a 27-minute video where he really gets to the heart of the matter.  It is amazing how many people are either ignorant or just downright confused.

The movie has been huge at the box office and many people (not just Republicans) are calling Chris Kyle an American hero.

First, I have to point out that Chris Kyle was a liar.  For him to say that he shot several looters from the top of the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is ridiculous.  If it were true, he should have been charged for murder just for that act alone.  How can anyone accurately judge a situation from that far away?

But the fact that Chris Kyle was a liar does not change the rest of the story.  Even if he had been completely truthful, it would not change my opinion of him.

While many Americans see Chris Kyle as a hero, I see him as a murderer.  We know that he killed a lot of people.  He admitted it.  He had 160 confirmed kills in Iraq.

Most Americans view these 160 kills as justified.  In many cases, he was protecting his fellow Americans.  This view needs to change.

This took place in Iraq.  It wasn’t in the United States.  The American military went into Iraq and blew up buildings, blew up utilities, and killed a lot of people.  Then they occupied the country and effectively put it under martial law.

If the Chinese government, or any other government, came into the United States and devastated cities and killed a bunch of your friends and relatives, what would your reaction be?  Would you be justified in taking up arms against the Chinese military men?  If a Chinese sniper killed you because he saw you walking around with a gun, should he be called a hero for protecting his fellow Chinese soldiers?

So many Americans are so hypocritical when it comes to foreign policy.  They view their own country and their own government as righteous.  They believe everything is right because “we are Americans”.

Many people still believe that the invasion of Iraq was linked to 9/11. It wasn’t.  The only link was the implication by the Bush administration and all of the apologists.  They lied.

But even if Iraqi officials had been involved in 9/11, it still would not have excused killing innocent people and devastating the country.

None of those 160 people killed by Chris Kyle had been convicted by a jury.  None had been formally accused of a crime.  They were people living in their own country trying to fight off people they saw (and justly so) as occupiers.

It doesn’t matter about Saddam Hussein.  Maybe he was a bad man.  There have been a lot of bad men who have sat in the White House too, but it doesn’t mean I want another government to come in and bomb my country.  Still, even with that said, most Iraqis would probably much prefer to have Saddam in power than to have a devastated country occupied by foreign troops.  It has been chaos there ever since the war started, particularly the second time.

I think some Americans see the reality of the situation, but unfortunately are too cowardly to speak up.  They don’t want to be accused of being anti-patriotic or anti-American or pro-Saddam or any number of other names they will be called.

But it is time to tell the truth.  It is especially time to stop defending someone who was a cold-blooded murderer.

I don’t know what the motivations were of the guy who killed Chris Kyle.  Maybe he was just crazy.  But I can’t help but think that he actually had a conscience.  This is not a defense of what he did.  It is just to point out that he probably felt a lot of guilt for having been violent and felt resentment towards Kyle that he didn’t feel the same.

The military worship has to stop.  Murder is murder.  Chris Kyle should be looked at as a thug.  If he had been a true hero, he would have refused to go to Iraq.  He would have refused to kill innocent people who were trying to defend their homeland.