The recent triumph of anti-democratic Republican Party politics was made possible with the criminal complicity of the Democratic Party, the mainstream news media, and the rise to political power of Christian fundamentalism.
In the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes, and then appointed George W. Bush the winner, in what was nothing less than a judicial coup d’état.
The Cheney-Bush Administration then launched a lie-based war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of which now exceeds two trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East, and widespread Muslim hatred of America. In 2008, the Cheney-Bush Administration climaxed its reign of deficit spending and global terror with a domestic economic meltdown which saw American citizens suffer the greatest recession since the Depression of the 1930s.
Meanwhile, America’s homegrown economic apartheid becomes more extreme with every passing week; the Pentagon budget blooms to finance more wars; fifty percent of university teachers are slave-wage adjuncts; more than fifty million Americans are deprived of healthcare; and the planet careens toward nuclear war and ecological apocalypse.
Hence we might conclude that Immanuel Kant implicitly points to a national motto that ought to read: “Treat all people always as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means” to personal gain.
Hence also – as Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, I. F. Stone, Buckminster Fuller, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, Dot Walsh, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis and Meg Randa, Howard Zinn and John Lennon would applaud – we should revise America’s Pledge of Allegiance to read:
“I pledge allegiance to the planet, and to all the people and creatures on her; one ecosystem, universally sacred, with nourishment and beauty for all.”
World War I Victory Parade – 700 Block Hamilton Street – Allentown PA. 1919. In the public domain
Just google “perpetual war,” and you will find many articles on US involvement in what appear to be endless military actions around the world. Google “PTSD” and you will find many more articles on the pernicious effects of war on those who are sent to wage it.
Given the huge costs of war–financial and humanitarian–why do so many Americans continue to support their government’s military undertakings?
These excerpts from an article in Transcend Network by Johan Galtung provide one thought-provoking answer.
“Very well known is post trauma stress disorder, PTSD; no doubt a very painful disorder experienced by many, most, maybe by all of us. Something went very wrong: a shock, violence, physical, verbal, by and to individuals, groups in society, societies, groups of societies….
What would be the opposite of trauma? Evidently something positive…. [One] type of trauma is defeat in a war and the opposite is victory. Basking in the glory, not suffering the gloom of trauma. And then, if trauma could lead to a state of stress,…maybe deep and repeated glory could lead to a state of, let us call it exuberance?….
Death in a war is a major trauma for the bereaved and all, victory a major glory for many and all. The loser is traumatized, the winner glorified. The loser may suffer deep disorder, like nations traumatized by Western colonialism. Or they may say “Never Again” and launch a peace movement. The winner will do his best to keep war as an institution. Till his time comes to lose….
Because to any PTSD it makes sense to postulate a PGED [Post Glory Exuberance Disorder] as a strong cause having that PTSD as effect. If we want to reduce the PTSD, it is obviously insufficient to work on the victim side only, with therapies and remedies, when PGED reproduces PTSD. A whole system has to be changed….
Take the war system, … as alive as ever with threats of major wars in many places in the “Middle East” (West Asia), the USA-EU-Ukraine-Russia complex, and in the “Far East” (East Asia). The relatively peaceful continents are in the “Third World”, Latin America-Caribbean and Africa; the enormity of violence against them being structural more than direct war.
In this there is a message to those who naively believe that “development leads to peace”; right now it looks more like the other way around. Why, given all the suffering, the PTSD, caused by wars?
Because of PGED enjoyed by the winners. Not only basking in the glory of ticker tape parades and similar orgies, but in billions to the winners, incidentally also to some of the losers…. Wars make money flow.
The world’s major war machine is the United States of America. No US president winning a war has ever been blamed for human suffering caused…. The war in Vietnam was lost, a terrible trauma for US leaders, population, and the bereaved of 58,000 killed. But not of 3 million Vietnamese? Grotesque insensitivity. Questions raised were not about the political use of war but how to win future wars to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”.
To win means collective glory and exuberance, individual profits in the billions high up, and some heroism, glory, and medals lower down. Of the millions killed and tens of millions bereaved: no word.
Try one minute, or an hour rather, to contemplate the total PTSD perpetrated by US warfare on the peoples of Afghanistan from 2001, and Iraq from 1991, and 2003. True, there has been no US PGED but even some US PTSD from the “unfinished wars” as CNN calls it. Also true, lots of US psychotherapy for PTSD has been made available both places.
But most in need of counseling are Americans hit by wanting PGED, demanding winnable wars as therapy; disasters to the victims all over, even counting in the millions, with enormities of PTSD in their wake.
We are victims of a negative psychology of individual therapy. And short on a positive psychology to provide work for negative and positive peace, for security and good relations to higher ups who want PGED. And to remove causes of war: unsolved conflicts and unreconciled traumas.”
A line of Syrian refugees crossing the border of Hungary and Austria on their way to Germany. Hungary, Central Europe, 6 September 2015. Author: Mstyslav Chernov. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
By Guest Author Paul Shannon
Here we go again! Our leaders have learned nothing from their disastrous war in Iraq. That brutal intervention destroyed Iraq as a country, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, created a terrorist government in Baghdad, and set off a sectarian war, opening the gates of hell. Through those gates still another extremist group called ISIS has emerged. And then, of course, we decided to change the regime of Libya, opening the door to ISIS and all kinds of extremist groups there.
Over the past 15 years our country has already spent one trillion, five hundred billion dollars for war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the Middle East and South Asia. These military actions have drained our country of the resources needed to create jobs and support a well-functioning society.
And yet, after all this bloodshed and all this treasure wasted, we are now told that the dangers in the Middle East are even greater than before we got into these wars!
A sane and moral person might see by now that war is not the best “solution” to the tragic and complex developments we are now seeing in the region. But our leaders have neither common sense nor morality. War seems to be the only thing they know how to do.
In response to being bombed by the U.S., ISIS has called for and stimulated violence against the West wherever it can. Now these brutal acts are being used by most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment to whip up war fever once again.
In its earlier sweep through Syria and Iraq, ISIS used modern American weapons that we sent into the region during previous military actions. We were promised that these weapons would bring stability; instead, they were and are used by ISIS to conquer large swaths of territory. ISIS’ success has also been possible because of the brutality inflicted on the Iraq people by an Iraq government that we armed to the teeth, but that refused to fight when challenged by ISIS.
A war on ISIS coordinated by the United States will cost billions more dollars and further weaken programs that all Americans need. It may or may not stop ISIS, but what new horrors will emerge in response to still another military incursion by foreign “Crusaders”?
The United States does not have an answer to the turmoil in the Middle East, a turmoil that we helped to create, starting with our military support to Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan to fight “Communism” and “religious fundamentalism” in the 1980s.
We oppose the President’s long term war in Iraq and Syria, an enterprise involving air combat, thousands of special forces and weapons, and training to some very shady groups. We especially oppose all efforts to promote a bigger war against the Syrian regime.
Now is the time for the United States to play a different role, a role designed to promote peaceful solutions over time and support humanitarian aid to war victims through international institutions.
Now is the time to change course, and that change begins with the policy: No War in Iraq and Syria. We promote this policy not because we are blind to the suffering now occurring in the area, but because we know that any real solution must come from the peoples of that region themselves, not from a new U.S. war.
Paul Shannon is a member of the program staff of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in New England and a coordinator of the local Budget for All campaign and the national Peoples Budget Campaign. He is past editor of the Indochina Newsletter and director of the national film library of the AFSC. He has been teaching social science courses at a number of colleges for 39 years, including a course on the history of the Vietnam War. Currently he is working on several efforts to bring social justice, climate change and anti-war efforts together into a convergent movement for social change.
As a supporter of human rights and locally-controlled democracy in Iraq, I am dismayed to see Fallujah fall to Al Qaeda.
Al-Qa’ida training manual, CIA Virtual Museum. Image in public domain, from Wikimedia Commons
Some may see poetic justice for the U.S. in this development: the U.S. war of aggression has clearly backfired in Fallujah. But there’s no justice in it for the people of that historic city. I would have been happy to see Fallujah residents lead a nonviolent civil disobedience movement to regain control over their communities, but the ascendance of Al Qaeda there is a tragedy.
The people of Fallujah have already endured enough massacres, destruction of the city’s ancient buildings and mosques, and chemical weapons horrors from the U.S. siege in 2004. And although the draconian rule of the U.S.-aligned Iraqi Security Forces should be overthrown by local democratic rule, the siege by Al Qaeda is, if anything, a regression, not an improvement.
Al Qaeda is not a progressive organization, and there is nothing redeeming about it. It’s a violent oppressive scourge on Islam in much the same way that the Christian Coalition–and the U.S. military-industrial-ideological machine generally–is a violent and oppressive scourge on Christianity.
It is not a coincidence that Al Qaeda as a movement arises largely from the Arabian Peninsula, most of which is controlled by an oil-rich U.S.-Israeli ally (Saudi Arabia). Saudi Arabia–one of the most draconian autocracies in the Middle East–is playing a disgraceful role in the Syrian disaster right now; it just got around to abolishing slavery in 1962. Al Qaeda is at odds with the Saudi regime in obvious ways, but in other obvious ways Al Qaeda mirrors its core values.
And I don’t think that violent decision-makers in the U.S. actually want Al Qaeda to disappear (though until more evidence pours in, this is more of an accusation against our leadership’s unconscious intentions than their conscious ones).
Even at the time of 9/11, Al Qaeda was originally a pretty paltry and unpopular group. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the drone assassinations, and the other Joint Special Operation Command-CIA paramilitary killings all over the world seem to have only magnified Al Qaeda’s international presence.
Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.
World War I Victory Parade – 700 Block Hamilton Street – Allentown PA. 1919.
