Anti-War

Prior to any analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, prior to the casting of blame and outrage — at Putin’s hubris, at NATO’s pernicious westward expansion over the last three decades — there’s this:

“Our world has become so interdependent that violent conflict between two countries inevitably impacts the rest of the world. War is outdated — nonviolence is the only way. We need to develop a sense of the oneness of humanity by considering other human beings as brothers and sisters. This is how we will build a more peaceful world.”

Too simple? Yada yada?

War is fairly well known for killing, injuring, traumatizing, destroying, and rendering homeless. It's somewhat well known for diverting massive resources from urgent needs, preventing global cooperation on pressing emergencies, damaging the environment, eroding civil liberties, justifying government secrecy, corroding culture, fueling bigotry, weakening the rule of law, and risking nuclear apocalypse. In a few corners it's known for being counterproductive on its own terms, endangering those it claims to protect.

I sometimes think we fail to properly appreciate another ill effect of war, namely what it does to people's ability to think straight. For example, here are some opinions I've heard in recent days:

Russia cannot be at fault because NATO started it.

NATO cannot be at fault because Russia has an awful government.

To suggest that more than one entity could be blameworthy on the same planet requires claiming that they are each exactly equally at fault.

Nonviolent noncooperation with invasions and occupations has proven itself very powerful but people shouldn't actually try it.

Only threat, pain and inflicted hell preserve peace, right?

Get the bad guy! Russia: bad. If it invades Ukraine, such a “voluntary war of aggression,” according to David Leonhardt of the New York Times, “would be a sign that Putin believed that Pax Americana was over and that the U.S., the European Union and their allies had become too weak to exact painful consequences.”

One can frequently disagree with government policies without necessarily regarding them with disgust, but the Joe Biden Administration has turned that corner, first with its senseless promotion of a new Cold War that could turn hot with Russia and, more recently, with its actions undertaken to undermine and punish Afghanistan. The fact that the White House wraps itself in the sanctimonious, self-righteous twaddle that is so much the hallmark of the political left is bad enough, but when the government goes out of its way to harm and even kill people around the world in pursuit of an elusive global dominance it is time for the American people to rise up and say “Stop!”

There are a number of things that have to be said first. They have to be said because virtually no U.S. television viewer knows or is likely ever to know them. They have to be said because if I’m going to suggest any flaws in the actions of the Russian government, I have to establish at least the possibility of doubt that I’m bought and owned by NATO or the Pentagon. Here are those things:

Ukraine has in common with Yemen, Iran, Taiwan, Korea, Syria, and every other global hotspot, a central role by the U.S. military.

The U.S. globally dominates weapons sales, base building, military alliance building, dictator-arming, coup-facilitating, and war launching.

Russia’s military costs 8% what the U.S. military does.

The U.S.-driven expansion of NATO and militarization of Eastern Europe is at the root of the crisis.

The new U.S. bases in Slovakia, tank sales to Poland, and giant weapons sales to Ukraine and throughout Eastern Europe are not incidental here.

When I suggest not stealing billions of dollars from Afghanistan, and thereby not causing mass starvation and death, otherwise intelligent and informed people tell me that human rights demands that theft. Starving people to death is a means of protecting their “human rights,” in fact. How else can you (or the U.S. government) stop Taliban executions?

When I respond that you (the U.S. government) could ban capital punishment, stop arming and funding the world’s top executioners from Saudi Arabia on down, join the world’s major human rights treaties, sign onto and support the International Criminal Court, and then — from a credible position — seek to impose the rule of law in Afghanistan, sometimes people think that over as if none of it had ever occurred to them, as if basic logical steps had been literally unthinkable, whereas starving millions of little kids to death for their human rights had somehow made sense.

By Dave Meserve, February 8, 2022

Here in Arcata, California, we are working to introduce and pass a ballot initiative ordinance that will require the City of Arcata to fly the Earth flag at the top of all city owned flagpoles, above the United States and the California flags.

Arcata is a city of about 18,000 people on the north coast of California. Home to Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt), Arcata is known as a very progressive community, with a long-time focus on the environment, peace, and social justice.

The Earth flag flies on the Arcata Plaza. That is good. Not many town squares include it.

But wait! The Plaza flagpole order is not logical. The American flag flies at the top, the California flag beneath it, and the Earth flag at the bottom.

Doesn’t the Earth encompass all nations and all states? Isn’t the well being of the Earth essential to all life? Aren’t global issues more important to our healthy survival than nationalism?

It’s time to recognize the primacy of the Earth over nations and states when we fly their symbols on our town squares. We cannot have a healthy nation without a healthy Earth.

Smedley Butler is generally left out of U.S. history. If you bring up a guy who prevented a Wall Street coup against FDR, you do real damage to the tale of peaceful respect for government from the beginning of time up through January 6, 2021. If you mention the scandal that erupted when he recounted how Mussolini had run over a little girl with his car, it’s hard to leave out the U.S. government’s friendly relations with Mussolini.

Interestingly, it was Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, who had been in the car with Mussolini and who had told his friend Smedley Butler about it, who later recounted in his autobiography a second Wall Street coup plot that he said he had exposed to Eleanor Roosevelt and thereby her husband, and successfully put a stop to. For some reason we never celebrate Vanderbilt as the savior of the U.S. government in the way that those of us who’ve heard of him do Smedley Butler, even though Vanderbilt turned against oligarchs as Butler turned against warmakers.

Hidden in plain sight, the extreme hypocrisy of the U.S. position on NATO and Ukraine cries out for journalistic coverage and open debate in the USA’s major media outlets. But those outlets, with rare exceptions, have gone into virtually Orwellian mode, only allowing elaboration on the theme of America good, Russia bad.

Aiding and abetting a potentially catastrophic -- and I do mean catastrophic -- confrontation between the world’s two nuclear superpowers are lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Like the media they echo and vice versa, members of Congress, including highly touted progressives, can scarcely manage more than vague comments that they want diplomacy rather than war.

The drama currently unfolding in which the Biden Administration is doing everything it can to provoke a war with Russia over Ukraine is possibly the most frightening foreign policy misadventure since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1967 Lyndon Johnson attempt to sink the USS Liberty and blame it on Egypt, either of which could have gone nuclear. I can well recall the Robert Heinlein sci-fi book The Puppet Masters, later made into a movie, which described how alien-slugs, arriving by way of a flying saucer landing in Iowa, invaded the earth and parasitically attached themselves to the central nervous systems of humans and became able to completely control their minds. What the humans know, they know. What the slugs want, no matter what, the human will do. And the tale gets really scary in geopolitical terms when some Secret Service Agents are “occupied” by the invaders and they are thereby poised to capture the President of the United States. I would point out that the movie came out when Bill Clinton was president, which should have provoked some concerns about whether it was fact or fiction.