PEACE IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

By Rick Ehrlich

USA leaders presently push for peace in Ukraine. Hallelujah. Meanwhile, we bomb Yemen, we bomb several African countries, push intrigue against Venezuela and other Southern enemies du jour, and threaten war on Iran. We also arm other countries to make war (Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan).

(Photo via CGTN)

Meanwhile, no country threatens the U.S. here at home. We, the United States, are financially underwater. Why must we be morally underwater too?

When did peace in our time stop being a good thing? Christians go to church to worship the Prince of Peace. Jews and Muslims start and end their significant conversations with “Peace,” and “Peace on you, too”. (Variations of Shalom and Salaam).

Why does the USA have war culture so ingrained in our national ethos?

Statistically we’ve been at war 222 of our 249 years in existence. But the real ramp-up of absolutely unneeded, even fraudulently pursued wars started just after WWII. From our small military of 1939 to our huge military of necessity by the end of in 1945, we industrialized tremendously. Nothing on U.S. soil was ruined during WWII, whereas Europe and Asia were torn up, so we haven’t needed to warmonger. But since then, there have been two main motives for our continued warmongering. (1) to keep our Military Industrial Complex (MIC) fat, selling military arms products, and (2) hegemony, or the feeling we deserve to be boss of the world.

Our arms industry (MIC) leaders, not wanting their gravy train to end as WWII ended, have conspired with our War Intel, trading personnel, creating “think tanks” which publish false justification for opposing our “enemies” (who really are not). They are paying lobbyists to push the “need” for arming, threatening, bombing, making regime changes and making war business thrive. Even though there was no reason (then) to continue our huge military industry apparatus, it began running our country since Truman’s time. When Eisenhower made his famous warning of our Military Industrial Complex (MIC) running the show, it was already too late. NATO was created by our salivating CIA and Defense Department leaders in 1949, to super-charge the MIC’s sales. By charter, NATO is a strictly defensive alliance of Atlantic rim countries, to “protect” against the Soviet “threat”. Yet it never had to do one defensive act for any members during the USSR’s remaining life. The USSR ceased to exist in 1991 and since then NATO still has never once had to defend members. Being an organization of “boys with toys” and they want to use them, no problem as the U.S. easily convinces them to join our (offensive) wars of choice. During all those seventy-five years, NATO countries were pushed to buy arms from our American MIC.

How did / do they justify it? Propagandize an “Enemy” to fear. They portrayed the Soviet Union and Communism as THE ENEMY. Even though the USSR was devastated in WWII, they falsely media-peppered us that the Commies would destroy us if we didn’t continually make bigger weapons and have bigger-standing armies. So, we did. But what hostile act did the USSR ever do to us? Zip.

China had its internal Communist revolution. Not our concern, yet we intervened as much as possible, propping up their tiny opposition in Taiwan, now for seventy-five years. Our biggest post-WWII wars, Korea and Vietnam, both used “fighting Communism” as their only rationale. Yet if they want to be Communist (Socialist), how would that harm the United States? Not one bit. It is not a reason to go to war.

AFTER the breakup of the USSR in 1991, being too farfetched to continue that enemy, they needed a new enemy or sales would crash for our MIC. So, they promoted the “radical terrorist Muslim threat”. Our CIA vowed to destroy seven Muslim countries in seven years. Why? If viewed in this way, it is easy to understand how so many protective standards did not operate on the September 11 event of 2001. Attacked by only a small group of insanely radical nutcases, we invented a whole new group of enemies. Sales were good again. And eventually, when everybody realized the “Muslim threat” was vastly overstated, they again needed a new enemy, so back to Russia and China even though neither country has ever done one war-like thing to us.

Our country is in an unsustainable financial mess, now $37 trillion in debt, annual interest expense nearly as much as our entire discretionary budget. It is absolutely not sustainable. It would be wonderful to bring the country into financial equilibrium: for moral and ethical reasons, for sensible financial reasons, for diplomacy and friendly relations reasons, and in recognition of obvious reality, we must stop our warmongering ways and drastically reduce this function.

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