Protest Reports
It’s hard not to focus on the fact that Trump has picked the 100th anniversary of the first Armistice Day celebration for his weaponry parade (more on that below). But there was another parade a month and a half before the armistice that cries out for comparison because of its remarkable stupidity. I’m thinking of the Liberty Loan Parade in Philadelphia:
This was a parade to squeeze more money out of people to pay for war, to celebrate patrioti-nationali-militarism, and to reject fake news. I’ll explain that last one.
World War I brought us a number of wonderful gifts: professional propaganda, alcohol prohibition, World War II “The Sequel!,” and “Spanish” influenza. But one reason that this disease epidemic was called “Spanish” was that Spain was not at war, so Spanish media outlets were allowed to report that thousands of people were dying of a horrible disease. In nations at war, such a report would have been unacceptably un-cheerful — and therefore illegal. Few editors wanted to risk jail time to report on the flu in Woodrow Wilson’s brave new world. The flu was fake news.
I would like to announce the publication of a new book entitled “The Devil's Dynamo”. It is a collection of articles and book chapters that I have written about the way in which military-industrial complexes throughout the world drive and perpetuate the institution of war. A considerable amount of new material has also been added. The book can be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link:
http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/devil.pdf
Why call a book about military-industrial complexes “The Devil's Dynamo"?
A military-industrial complex involves a circular flow of money. The money flows like the electrical current in a dynamo, driving a diabolical machine. Money from immensely rich corporate oligarchs buys the votes of politicians and the propaganda of the mainstream media. Numbed by the propaganda, citizens allow the politicians to vote for obscenely bloated military budgets, which further enrich the corporate oligarchs, and the circular flow continues.
On March 1, 2018, I was very privileged to take part in a discussion of issues of racism, freedom of speech, patriotism, and war at Saint Mary’s Hall, a private high school in San Antonio “Military City USA” Texas.
Daniel Ellsberg has a message that managers of the warfare state don’t want people to hear.
“If you have information that bears on deception or illegality in pursuing wrongful policies or an aggressive war,” he said in a statement released last week, “don't wait to put that out and think about it, consider acting in a timely way at whatever cost to yourself…. Do what Katharine Gun did.”
If you don’t know what Katharine Gun did, chalk that up to the media power of the war system.
People have a wide range of reasons for opposing a military Trumparade through Washington.
Got a problem? Simplify and project.
When you have a country to govern and you have no idea what to do — and, even more to the core of the matter, you also have a crony-agenda you want to push quietly past the populace — there’s a time-proven technique that generally works. Govern by scapegoat!
This usually means go to war, but sometimes that’s not enough. Here in the USA, there’s been so much antiwar sentiment since the disastrous quagmires of the last half century — Vietnam, the War (To Promote) Terror — we’ve had to make war simply part of the background noise. The military cash bleed continues, but the public lacks an international enemy to rally against and blame for its insecurity.
Creating a scapegoat enemy domestically has also gotten complicated. Thugs and punks — predatory (minority) teenagers — shoulder much of the responsibility for keeping the country distracted, but in this era of political correctness, politicians have to be careful. Thus the Trump administration has turned to the immigrants. Not all of them, of course — only the ones from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. In particular, it has turned to . . . the illegals!
Having spent years going to events organized by peace groups, at which people tell each other they should stop “preaching to the choir,” I’ve started doing another kind of event. I debate war supporters in front of mixed crowds that include lots of war supporters, as well as people who haven’t really formed an opinion yet on the question of whether war is ever justifiable.
Definition: An iatrogenic disease is an illness that occurs as a result of a therapeutic or diagnostic procedure undertaken on a patient; a healthcare professional-caused disease, usually due to properly-prescribed prescription drugs, vaccines or surgical procedures.
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The following information concerns the serious toxic effects of fluoroquinolone antibiotics - which include Bayer’s Cipro, Janssen’s Levaquin, Bayer’s Avelox, Merck’s Noroxin, Pfizer’s Trovan and the generic drug Ofloxacin.
The information outlined below is excerpted from three sources that I have only become aware of recently.