Friday, February 24, 2017

The US War Against Peace

For the past 100 years, we have been using war to try to end war:

This April 4th will be 100 years since the U.S. Senate voted to declare war on Germany and 50 since Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the war on Vietnam (49 since he was killed on that speech’s first anniversary). Events are being planned to help us try to finally learn some lessons, to move beyond, not just Vietnam, but war.

That declaration of war on Germany was not for the war that makes up the single most common theme of U.S. entertainment and history. It was for the war that came before that one. This was the Great War, the war to end all wars, the war without which the conditions for the next war would not have existed.

As well recounted in Michael Kazin’s War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918, a major peace movement had the support of a great deal of the United States. When the war finally ended (after the U.S. had actually been in it for about 5% the length of the war on Afghanistan thus far) just about everybody regretted it. The losses in life, limb, sanity, property, civil liberties, democracy, and health were incredible. Death, devastation, a flu epidemic, prohibition, a permanent military and the taxes to go with it, plus predictions of World War II: these were the results, and a lot of people remembered that they had been warned, as well as that the ending of all war had been promised.

You can read the rest @
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/02/100-years-using-war-try-end-war.html#more-65715

Guess what? It hasn't worked.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”.
Albert Einstein (attributed)

All we have done is wasted our blood and treasure, killed and/or maimed millions of people who did not deserve it, and made a few people filthy rich.

We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

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