(Note: Normally Mondays are reserved for our weekly positive posts, but not on holidays — then we do it Tuesday. Instead, this is a perfect chance to get to the first of a series of articles detailing the steps I think an incoming Trump administration should take. It’s also fitting this article runs first because Trump said he’d end the wars “before he took office.”)
When was in school, I had an excellent US history teacher who had one wall of his room covered in famous historical quotes. Most of them were straight forward — as famous quotes usually are. One, however, sort of stuck in my brain. There are many ‘versions’ of this floating around, but this is the one I remember:
“It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it.” — Robert E. Lee
This sort of broke my brain a little. How can it be WELL that war is TERRIBLE? And why would we grow FOND of war, knowing how terrible it is?
A little more experience in the real world revealed the ugly truth — psychotic people are fond of war because they want natural resources and land and generally everybody else’s stuff, and they’ll kill to get it.
On the contrary, normal people are horrified by what actually happens in war and demand the psychos stop the death and destruction. Although it was a little before my time, I’ve read the public turned against the Vietnam war because of press coverage highlighting the war’s costs.
But as they tend to do, the psychos adapt. By the time the first Iraq war rolled around, the press was constantly showing “zoomed-out” (for lack of a better word) coverage that sanitized the war.
During that first Iraq war, then-President George H.W. Bush (with his trusty DOD head Dick Cheney!) banned photographs dead soldiers’ coffins. It seems that Bush learned a few things about psyops during his stint as head of the CIA.
With few exceptions, this merging of the corporate press interests and military industrial complex interests persists. The Afghanistan war ran for TWO DECADES — about 15 of which were simply “in the background” of American life.
During that time, the very human cost of war was being paid halfway across the world — and was once again hidden from view by our pro-war media. But the soldiers fortunate enough to come home from those wars are faced with a mess of a VA system, which is bloated and inefficient as the rest of government.
Seeing no alternative, many veterans make the horrific decision to end their own lives:
Faced with these horrific, inconvenient facts, the psychos adapted again. We’ve removed (most of) our troops from active war zones, so now we’re simply funding PROXY wars. Make no mistake — the human cost is still being paid, it’s just hidden inside a smaller nesting doll.
Pulling our war funding from Ukraine and Israel stops the wars and therefore the continuing human tragedy. I feel like Ukraine is a fairly easy case to make, considering played a huge part in screwing up the area in the first place.
Israel is a harder case to make — imagine somebody like Justin Trudeau telling you how to react to 9/11. I completely understand the need to make Hamas pay for what they did on October 7th. And the case is made more difficult precisely BECAUSE of our reaction to 9/11. If we try to moralize Israel over this issue, they can just hit us back with:
But one thing normal Americans learned from that multi-decade reaction to 9/11 is there comes a time in which you’re just blowing up rubble. The leadership of Hamas is decimated and everybody who’s left pisses themselves every time their pager goes off. And if Israel spends another year bombing Gaza, they might slightly decrease the number of Hamas members — but they’ll be growing an entirely different group of “terrorists” (perhaps Justice Is Humans Acting Defiantly) for entirely different reasons.
During covid we saw health experts place big pharma profits ahead of health, aided by a media industry that put its own profits ahead of informing the public. This is exactly the playbook to sell endless war. The American people by and large don’t want never-ending war, but the very small segment of people who DO want it are constantly on TV — not disclosing that their personal profit motives very coincidentally align with their “professional” opinions.
It wasn’t all that long ago that war profiteering was considered an extremely serious crime, but now the Military Industrial Complex and its spokesmen trumpet the billions spent on Ukraine as a positive thing because the profits are going to big American defense contractors. After all, it’s not like AMERICANS are dying in Ukraine…..
This is an extremely dangerous (and expensive) viewpoint. Americans can’t simply agree to fund every war (and sometimes both sides!) on the planet. It looks like gen x swung the recent election, and I think one of the reasons is that many of them fought in Dick Cheney’s wars — and almost all of them came back disillusioned with the disconnect between objective reality and the war propaganda they were fed.
The simple truth is that when you fight fewer wars, you have fewer post-war problems. Donald Trump seemed to understand this during his first term, but the proof will be in his upcoming appointments. Ending wars must be one of trump’s top priorities. His “new” team is full of people who understand the real costs of war. Filling positions with such people would send a loud signal he’s learned from his first term — and failure to do so will prove the opposite. This is a good start:
Soldiers sign up to protect America — even at great personal costs to themselves. The VERY least America can do is to only send them to war as a last resort. And once their service is complete, the VERY LEAST America can do is provide the resources to allow our veterans to reintegrate themselves into “normal” life.
That’s how we REALLY thank our nation’s veterans.
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I am in my sixth decade riding this mortal coil, and "my" government has been at war, in one place or another, my entire life.
To a large extent, my political awakening and anti-war views were forged watching the evacuation of Saigon. I was still but a child, but I will never forget it.
We had family and friends that fought and died in that war, and when the choppers took off from the embassy several were in our living room watching it unfold. There was much sobbing as the shock of it sunk in.
Only years later, after reading books such as John Paul Vann's *A Bright Shining Lie*, did I understand the enormity of the catastrophe and the criminality of the mountebanks that led us into it.
In the years following I learned that every single war the US has engaged in, save the Revolutionary, and perhaps the Korean, was based on blatant lies and were to a large extent orchestrated by our rulers.
Of all the laudable things that Trump has promised, I hope and pray that he will stop these wars, withdraw all US troops to our own soil, and dismantle the machinery that has cost our nation so much blood and treasure for so long.
Let us hope that enough is finally enough.
I love the proxy wars and nesting dolls analogy.