We have just celebrated the independence of our nation with fireworks and other reminders of the “glories” of war. Only a few weeks ago I saw our president laying a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Somehow it doesn’t seem enough for presidents who have sent so many soldiers into battle and been responsible for so many deaths of people all over the world to lay just one wreath and be absolved of all responsibility.
We are now facing an election that will bring us a new president who either has “never met a war she didn’t like” or is a buffoon who could carelessly get us into war because of his whim of the day. Either way, the American people will be responsible for more war because we haven’t bothered to deal with what is really going on in this country.
The American people have been blindly supporting one of the most war-mongering cultures the world has ever known for decades because it doesn’t seem to cost us anything. After all, only a few of us ever go to war, and the massive financial costs of our military and ceaseless wars are covered up in complicated budget manipulations that make it difficult or impossible to know the real costs. The arms industry is doing just fine, thank you. They’ll be doing even better now that the president has opened the market in Vietnam to them, even though that government has not agreed to address their human rights violations.
Some Americans are against war, but there has been no major public outcry since 2003. Mostly Americans just swallow whole the nonsensical government explanations for all these wars. We have to be at war to spread democracy (which clearly isn’t happening) and/or to stop terrorism (which has obviously increased the level of terrorism exponentially), etcetera ad nauseam. No thinking well-informed citizen should believe all this nonsense and yet most Americans appear to do so.
When I was a child and found out about the Holocaust, I wondered how an entire nation could ignore the evil it was doing. Now I realize that I live in a nation like that. Nothing stopped the willful blindness of the German people but loss in World War II. But what can stop the United States from continuing to bully the world? We are still the most militarily and economically powerful nation in the world. Our predations of other countries will continue until something stops them. In the foreseeable future, only an uprising by the American people seems likely to be able to stop our wars and constant breaking of international laws.
How many more Independence Days will go by before Americans wake up and stop their government from committing evil in the name of our murderous foreign policies?