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Edited on Sun Jan-25-09 01:56 PM by Peace Patriot
at that moment, on 9/11, for a few hours. I pretty quickly came to my senses, but a lot of Americans did not, and swallowed that bullshit hook, line and sinker. However, Americans began to think harder after that, and, by Feb '03, the eve of the invasion of Iraq, nearly 60% of the American people opposed the war on Iraq--but they were ignored, or, to be more accurate, their opposition was noted, and electronic voting run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls, had been devised as the remedy (passed in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution), and was being fast-tracked all over the country to take care of the American peoples' revulsion at this war, in the 2004 election. From there, the American people have had a long journey toward their awakening, not yet completed. Our "military-industrial complex" is no longer something merely to be wary of, as Eisenhower warned--it is eating us alive.
Unfortunately, our new, young, hopeful president is quite into the Forever War. He has never lied about this. He intended to move it from Iraq--now pacified, with the oil contracts signed--to Afghanistan. But his reason for this is where I fault him. The purpose of this Forever War, now to be moved to Afghanistan, is not that there is anybody there we can kill whose death will make us safe, but because of this strangulation of the war profiteers. They will permit nothing else. War profiteering, and a few other attendant enterprises, IS our economy.
Looked at abstractly, we could have a very adequate defense, sufficient to any threat, if we cut the military budget by 90%, and stopped this new policy of preemptive, aggressive war in its tracks. We would accomplish far, far, far, FAR more for our own safety, if we were to give the trillions of dollars wasted on war to the world's poor. But we have this cancerous growth on our backs as a country, that is literally eating us alive, comprised of those who make bombs, guns, tanks, fighter jets, helmets, helicopters, gunboats, aircraft carriers, military uniforms, medals, c-rations, barracks, nuclear warheads, missiles, high tech surveillance networks, military hospitals, surgical equipment, bandages, hospital beds, computer systems, accountants, hundreds of military bases around the world, language schools, combat schools, officer training, and on and on and on--all the stuff of war.
In practical terms, we cannot just yank all this--unless our utter bankruptcy does it for us--and start over. That is what needs to be done. But no politician (except maybe Dennis Kucinich) would dare propose such a thing. They all pray to the God of War. And, as James Douglass' new book, "JFK and the Unspeakable," so eloquently lays out, with meticulous documentation, the price of a U.S. leader stepping onto the path of peace is death.
I like Kennedy's idea of starting to bend the war budget toward peaceful uses--the NASA program for putting men on the moon. I guess you have to have lived through that era to know how militaristic it was, and what a revolutionary idea that was--that we could have a goal with independent scientific and human value, and put all these engineers to work, not to make better nuclear bombs, but to awe the world with aiming at the stars. It was not all militaristic subterfuge, nor was it all "beating the Russians" into space. I know some of those engineers. They longed to have their talents put to peaceful use. They were dreamers. Many of them were, not just a few. And I've since learned, from Douglass' book, how fully committed to peace Kennedy became, before he was assassinated. He wanted to END the "Cold War." He was fully committed to it. It was his death warrant.
So I am not talking idly here. I know how hard it is even to imagine a world without nuclear weapons, and without this gigantic war machine, let alone the difficulties of achieving it. It is as if we live under a dark, dark cloud--our own "Iron Curtain"--under which some things are simply unthinkable or unimaginable, and, for our politicians, unsayable. The war profiteers rule. But they are bad masters. And we must begin to think how we can throw them off, if we want our democracy and humanity to survive.
Although the American people wanted peace, and voted overwhelmingly (a huge landslide) for LBJ, after Kennedy's death, because LBJ pledged himself to peace in Vietnam and in the world, LBJ was lying. I remember this well. It was my first vote for president. I had been too young to vote for Kennedy (though I volunteered for his campaign in 1960). I voted for LBJ because he wanted peace. It was denied to us by this powerful, malignant, economic force of the manufacture of war. It does not have to be this way. It was clear then, and it is clear now, that the American people are a peace-minded people, but our leaders cannot produce peace for us on their own. We have somehow to make it possible for them to do it.
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