Kelly Denton-Borhaug: The True Costs of America’s All-Consuming War-Culture / Chris Hedges: Chronicle of a War Foretold
The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win...
Lately, random verses from the Bible have been popping into my mind unbidden, like St. Paul’s famous line from Galatians, “A person reaps what they sow.” The words sprang into my consciousness when I learned of the death of the 95-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who helped encourage Martin Luther King to declare his opposition to the Vietnam War so long ago. For decades, I’ve been moved by Hanh’s witness and his writings, which shined such a light on the destructive consequences of our country’s militarism. As he said, “To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come.”
We reap what we sow. It seems so obvious, but in these endless years of U.S. war-making across the globe, this simple truth seems to have escaped most Americans. Why? It’s not as if no one’s noticed that the U.S. has, in so many ways, become a more violent society. Many public intellectuals (progressives and conservatives, too) are wringing their hands regarding the dangerous uptick in social violence of all sorts in this country, including voluminous gun purchases, distrust and anger, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, rising deaths from avoidable causes like refusing to be vaccinated — and the list only goes on.
But a thinker like
Thich Nhat Hanh stands out from the rest. His insights differed from the norm
because he saw so clearly how the seeds of violence in war-culture sprout into
a kind of invasive kudzu vine capable of spreading across every aspect of life,
while crushing, asphyxiating, and killing so much along the way.
War-Culture as an
Invasive, Destructive Vine
I wonder why the media
haven’t more thoroughly investigated the psychology that enables our
congressional representatives almost unanimously to approve outlandish, ever
larger military budgets, no matter how poorly the U.S. military may be doing in
the world. The violent infrastructure of this nation is like a noxious vine
with destructive results for us all, but few connect this to other rising forms
of violence in the U.S. For instance, our leaders couldn’t
find it in their hearts to approve an extension of the child tax
credit, even though it played a role in lifting 4.6
million children out of poverty. One
study even showed how such cash stipends and tax credits, when
provided to poor mothers with babies in the first year of life, resulted in
changed brain activity in their children and improved cognitive development.
But West Virginia
Democratic Senator Joe
Manchin (along with all the Senate Republicans) refused to support
continuing that program, while, like almost every one of those Republicans and
most of his Democratic colleagues, he had no problem whatsoever approving an
astronomical defense budget, even in the wake of the Afghan withdrawal.
Parents, he insisted, should have
to work to receive any assistance for their children, but the
military doesn’t have to work for that $738 billion dollars to
be approved. There’s no requirement for a financial accounting or any demand
for evidence that the U.S. military solves “national security” problems of any
sort.
And it’s not only
Manchin. That budget
passed in the Senate by a staggering vote of 88 to 10. (The dissenting
lawmakers were Senators Cory Booker, Michael Braun, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mike
Lee, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Alex Padilla, Rand Paul, Bernie Sanders, and
Elizabeth Warren.)…
https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/22/the-true-costs-of-americas-all-consuming-war-culture/
Chris Hedges: Chronicle of a War Foretold
After the fall of the Soviet Union, there
was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion
would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think
the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.
I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting
on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led
to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the
breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev
reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would
include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration,
along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the
Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the
new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and
France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend
dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that
characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social
programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the
insatiable appetite of the military…
https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/hedges-the-chronicle-of-a-war-foretold/
Mauritius formally challenges Britain’s
ownership of Chagos Islands
Robert Reich - Beware of this deadly mix:
oligarchic economics and racist, nationalist populism
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
Andrew Bacevich: High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century
TOM
ENGELHARDT: A World at the Edge
Alfred McCoy: The
crumbling delusion of Washington's endless world dominion
Mohammed Hanif: The
rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise
Donald Trump's gift to America: Realizing we've never been a liberal democracy
The Break-Up of Britain / The US today resembles the Soviet Union just
before it fell
Special
Double number - Mainstream, February 2022 / Om Thanvi: Photos of Cuban
revolutionary Che Guevara's visit to India
Guantanamo Bay- Obama's shame: The forgotten prisoners of America's own Gulag
Vanessa Thorpe: MI 6, the
coup in Iran that changed the Middle East, and the cover-up
Uki Goñi - A grandmother's 36-year hunt for the child
stolen by the Argentinian junta
Zack Stanton: Violent
Christian Extremism in the USA
