Swords into Ploughshares
What if the citizens of Germany during the 1930s somehow could have known in advance how World War II was going to end? Would they have bought into the lies of Hitler and the Third Reich? Would they have gone along with the wanton aggression knowing it was a suicide mission and would turn their beloved homeland into a pile of rubble and put nearly 9,000,000 of them in early graves?
What about Japan? Before World War II, Japan was securely locked down. No dissent from the imperialistic designs of the emperor and his military class was permitted. Even so, if the vast majority had known that like Germany, their nation would be almost completely destroyed and they’d lose over 3,000,000 people for nothing, would they have so willingly and enthusiastically rushed to the battlefield to invite annihilation and defeat?
Our leaders — our cowardly, divisive, destructive, unimaginative, delusional American leaders — from Barack Obama to Joe Biden to Donald Trump, are taking America into another war. Sure, the confrontation with Russia in Ukraine will soon be over. While Trump supposedly gets America’s house in order, war will be put on the back burner. But only for now. Only because we have been humbled by Russia and spared from total humiliation by the statesmanship of Vladimir Putin.
But make no mistake about it. So far it’s been Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine. Next it’s Iran, and eventually — the big target in our game of thrones — China. It’s all part of the same flawed over-reaching strategy that predates even Bill Clinton, even Ronald Reagan. Our pathological plan for achieving unnecessary and ill-conceived hegemony over the Middle East and Eurasia, over the entire planet, may at times appear to be on hold, but it will not go away, and it won’t go away unless we make it go away.
As uninformed and misinformed as we Americans generally are, we know how this is going to end. It doesn’t take a genius to see that despite our incredible military prowess and huge advantage in the quantity and sophistication of weaponry in our arsenal, we are really bad at war. Maybe it feels good to thump our chests and yell “mission accomplished” with a big shit-eating smirk on our faces, but our self-congratulations bear no relation to reality. We lost terribly in Vietnam. We lost in Afghanistan. We made a mess out of Iraq and now have little control over the developments in that country. Libya is a disaster. We fingered Syria for destruction and with the recent fall of Assad, instead of gaining credibility in the world, the US become the object of derision, condemned for starving the country into submission and being complicit in the takeover of Syria by hateful, head-chopping terrorists. As a result of our immoral and barbaric support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, we have been shamed and assaulted by vilification from overseas and a surprising and encouraging swell of criticism at home. In Ukraine, the US and NATO are about to suffer one of the most humiliating defeats in recent history, as Russia dictates an end to the war exclusively on its terms.
The unavoidable truth is, we have a horrible track record over the last sixty years of muscle-flexing military escapades, and except for the Russian army in Ukraine, haven’t even had to face what might be regarded as a formidable world-class enemy. God help us if we do go toe-to-toe with China, now joined at the hip with Russia and other BRICS nations.
Actually, God help the entire human race!
As we swagger into the OK corral twirling our guns and acting all cocky and cool, because after all we are so exceptional and so entitled and so self-righteous and so powerful and of course always have God on our side, what are the options? Apparently the only way we might possibly “win” a real war against a serious enemy is if we go nuclear. And if we go nuclear, they will too.
And we all know how that will turn out.
So if we know in advance how World War III will end, why would anyone — except the demented neocon imperialist cotorie of hell bent fanatics, who can plead the insanity defense — push for war? Which is the same as saying, why would anyone in their right mind go along with this madness?
Because we — you and I — do know how it will end.
Either we’re going to get our asses kicked or we’re going to destroy all civilization and risk the extinction of the human race.
Ask the Germans how things worked out for them when they tried to conquer the world.
Ask the Japanese.
I live in Japan. I already know how the Japanese feel about war. I know the shame they feel about their dark and vile history of aggression in pursuit of all manner of illusory glory and mountains of booty.
No, I don’t live in America any more. But I’m still a loyal American. I deeply care for my country. And I know this.
We can’t count on the lying liars who claim to have our interests at heart, the play-for-pay politicians who are the lapdogs for the military-industrial complex and the bankers who build their staggering fortunes on the corpses of our soldiers and the tens of thousands of civilians who are collateral damage for our drones, carpet bombings and ordinance.
We cannot look to the barbaric megalomaniacs in positions of power who claim to share our values, and have the unmitigated audacity to talk about humanitarian bombing and merciful intervention, to claim we are protecting innocent people against ruthless dictators — killing thousands of innocent victims in the process — all in the name of promoting democracy and human rights, when every one of these wars is about gas and oil interests for their corporate butt buddies. To add even more hypocrisy to the insults and injuries, it is our military which possesses and employs more weapons of mass destruction than any other country in the world and it is our nation which counts among its friends and allies some of the most ruthless tyrants on the planet.
We sure can’t look to the leadership of the most sociopathic president in our history, a man who has telegraphed up front his intent to steal the Panama Canal, who openly confessed that the U.S. was in Syria purely there to steal the oil, who is intimidating one of our own allies to grab Greenland. Biden was thoroughly an irredeemable warmonger beginning to end. Our last best “hope” might have been Barack Obama. But after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, he put the whole world on notice in a U.N. speech: “The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure our core interests in the region. We will confront external aggression against our allies and partners, as we did in the Gulf War.”
True to form, currently there is no one in Congress or in any way associated with the White House who wants peace.
That means it’s up to us.
It’s up to each and every American to say ‘NO’ to the madness.
It’s up to us to stop all the talk about war.
It’s up to us to demand a true and honest commitment to diplomacy and cooperation with other countries, not the simpleminded, hollow, meaningless blather that we’re being fed as the trigger-fingers of our war mongers tingle and twitch, just waiting for the right moment to churn up more carnage, destruction and hatred in the rest of the world.
Yes … we do know how this story ends.
It’s time for a new story.