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Donald Trump and Joe Biden were athletes who got deferments and dubious medical-based exemptions to participating in the mass slaughter of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian men, women, and children.

The common criticism of one or the other of them, based on partisan loyalty, is that he should have participated in mass murder. Questioning this notion results, most often, in ad hominem attacks against the questioner: but you weren’t there, you can’t know what you would have done, etc.

But we know what thousands of young men did: they refused to go. Many chose not to use available deferments, preferring to refuse to go.

On October 8th, you’ll be able to screen online the film The Boys Who Said No.

Why would people risk 5 years in prison to take a stand against mass murder?

Were they all losers and suckers, as Trump might claim?

An earlier version of this article can be found at: https://www.globalresearch.ca/weaponizing-the-term-conspiracy-theory-disinformation-agents-and-the-cia/5524552

Many people are now painfully aware that the United States is on the verge of falling under an iron fist of repressive rule, crushing basic democratic possibilities, if Donald Trump gets a second term as president. Yet the Democratic Party nominee is weak, uninspiring, often inarticulate and apt to be distasteful or worse when he’s intelligible.

What are progressives to make of this truly dire situation -- and, most importantly, what are we to do? Right now.

At this potentially cataclysmic moment, I haven’t seen better answers anywhere than on the new website NotHimUs.org, where a basic precept is laid out in big letters on the first screen: “We’ve got our own reasons to vote for Biden, and Joe ain’t one.”

The next words are from Cornel West: “A vote for Joe Biden is . . . a way of preserving the condition for the possibility of any kind of democratic practice in the United States.”

Over half of the money that Congress decides what to do with every year is for wars and war preparations, year after year.

When you add in police and prisons, and the militarization of police and prisons — and of borders and airports — and the Veterans Administration, you’re talking about two-thirds of the money.

So the big question is, of course, why do I hate Veterans?

Oh, go Dick Cheney yourself. I support universal free healthcare and education and guaranteed retirement and childcare and transportation and sustainable energy for every human being, veteran or not.

So the serious question is how the hell am I going to pay for that?

Well, with a fraction of what’s spent now on the militarized budget, of course.

Plus a fraction of what should be taxed from corporations and the ultra rich.

But what about the non-discretionary spending?

What about it? Much of it is for Social Security and healthcare, but a big chunk of it is for militarism — including debt for past wars.

So really I think we’re left with: why do I hate the troops?

As we start the 21st century and the new millennium, our scientific and technological civilization seems to be entering a period of crisis. Today, for the first time in history, science has given to humans the possibility of a life of comfort, free from hunger and cold, and free from the constant threat of infectious disease. At the same time, science has given us the power to destroy civilization through thermonuclear war, as well as the power to make our planet uninhabitable through pollution and overpopulation. The question of which of these alternatives we choose is a matter of life or death to ourselves and our children.

The crisis of civilization, which we face today, has been produced by the rapidity with which science and technology have developed. Our institutions and ideas adjust too slowly to the change. The great challenge which history has given to our generation is the task of building new international political structures, which will be in harmony with modern technology. At the same time, we must develop a new global ethic, which will replace our narrow loyalties by loyalty to humanity as a whole.

Harvey Wasserman hosts a meeting with organizers from around the country trying to protect our elections. https://grassrootsep.org/

It is odd that the White House is gloating over its claimed peace agreement in the Middle East at the same time as one of the signatories is bombing Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. It all suggests that peace in the region will exclude designated enemies and the friends of those enemies, since the ties among the three parties – Israel, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain – is transparently in part an offensive alliance directed against Iran and its friends, to include Syria and Lebanon. A significant amount of the horse trading that preceded the gala signing ceremony in the White House involved who would get what advanced American weapons down the road. The UAE wants F-35 fighter bombers while Israel is already asking for $8 billion for more top-level weapons from the U.S. taxpayer to maintain its “qualitative edge” over its new found friends.

Palestine can never be truly understood through numbers, because numbers are dehumanizing, impersonal, and, when necessary, can also be contrived to mean something else entirely. Numbers are not meant to tell the story of the human condition, nor should they ever serve as a substitute for emotions. 

Indeed, the stories of life, death - and everything in-between - cannot be truly and fully appreciated through charts, figures and numbers.  The latter, although useful for many purposes, is a mere numerical depository of data. Anguish, joy, aspirations, defiance, courage, loss, collective struggle, and so on, however, can only be genuinely expressed through the people who lived through these experiences. 

Is this the future, leaking into the present moment?

“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

The speaker, of course, is Donald Trump, playing, so it seems, the Nazi card at a campaign rally last week in Bemidji, Minnesota — tossing genetic superiority out to his white supporters.

The greatest impediment to doing anything, for homo sapiens, is often that it hasn’t already been done. “Well, sure, that sounds easy enough, but I just don’t know. I’ve never seen it done and my cousin’s friend heard it was impossible.”

The greatest means of smashing through that impediment is for the thing that needs doing to have already happened. “Impossible or not, we just did it 3 feet from where you are standing, while you were standing there. Here’s the video.”

The best chance homo sapiens has of surviving includes converting the resource-draining, environment-destroying, climate-collapsing, hatred-fueling, oligarch-enabling, secrecy-justifying, nuclear-holocaust-facilitating, murderous war industry to peaceful enterprises aimed at protecting and benefitting humanity and the earth. But who doesn’t have a cousin whose friend has heard that that’s impossible?