"Do Wars Really Defend America's Freedom?" (Homage To Marine Commandant, Major General Smedley Butler)
My request to retired nuerologist friend Arthur Clark, Founder of The Calgary Center For World Peace that I post his weekly letter below:
Hello, Family and Friends worldwide!
The recent New York Times (February 20) front page includes an article with the headline, “One Year into War, Putin Is Crafting the Russia He Craves.” In essence, the longer the war goes on, the more any liberal voices are silenced by the state. Increasingly, schools are indoctrinating Russian youngsters in patriotism. The second paragraph of the article reads as follows:
“Schoolchildren collect empty cans to make candles for soldiers in the trenches, while learning in a new weekly class that the Russian military has always liberated humanity from ‘aggressors who seek world domination.’”
In the current context, the aggressor seeking world domination is NATO. Russia’s historic defeat of the Nazi invasion in World War II features prominently in this indoctrination.
To me, what is conspicuous by its absence from the article, is any mention whatsoever that this is just standard nationalistic indoctrination, and its intensification in wartime. I experienced an American counterpart in my grade school years; and I know enough of WWII history to be aware of how it played out in those years in the USA. As for the current version of the Russian indoctrination, the idea that NATO “seeks world domination” is not too far off. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany was reunited, anyone paying attention understood that the reason for NATO’s existence – defense against the Soviet Union – no longer existed. Nonetheless, it was kept in place. The promises made to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward were broken, and I do not see how Russia could fail to see that as a threat. The February 20 New York Times article is a contemporary example of nationalist indoctrination. It avoids framing the article in a way that would cause readers to connect the dots of Russia’s recent shift even further to the right and the behavior of NATO over the past thirty years. As always, I emphasize that this is my way of thinking, based on many years now of paying attention to these issues. My way of thinking is generally in accord with that of General Smedley Butler and also of Chris Hedges. I mentioned in a previous email to you that I would send you my synopsis of a very recent book by Chris Hedges. I will simply append herewith the dialogue email I had sent back in January in which I included that book synopsis. The book by war correspondent Chris Hedges, The Greatest Evil Is War, was published in 2022. General Smedley Butler’s 1935 book War Is a Racket is described in a Wikipedia link included in my email.
Political leaders are trapped in a system of nationalism (which pits nation against nation) and a system of global capitalism (which pits rich against poor). The games they are playing may lead to apocalypse soon. Even now, we have a dangerously unhealthy global community, as political leaders keep ignoring what needs to be done to achieve something better. Of course, there are also good results of the two games, otherwise they could not have continued. The main thing, however, is that political leaders are trapped in the system. This is just my way of thinking, and I have no problem with others having a different way of thinking, as you know.
Keep well,
Arthur
Here is the email sent out to Calgarians on January 12, more than a month ago. It includes the book synopsis I mentioned:
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” – Retired General Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket (1935) bit.ly/
“If we don’t end war, war will end us.” - H.G. Wells
“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” – Albert Einstein
“If not me, who? If not now, when?” - Emma Watson
It’s been said that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world – in fact, it’s the only thing that ever has. I’m beginning to believe it.
Our next peace museum dialogue will be a couple of weeks from now, on Tuesday January 31 in the auditorium of Parkdale United Church. A Zoom link will be provided in case you cannot participate in person. We’ll brainstorm ideas for how to move the peace museum initiative forward in Calgary.
Even as we act locally, we must also think globally. I’ve appended herewith my synopsis of an important recent book by Chris Hedges.
Arthur
Book: The Greatest Evil Is War (Chris Hedges, 2022)
Chris Hedges was a war correspondent for two decades in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He does not mince words. His book is a punch in the face to the warfare system and a wake-up call for us.
In the opening chapter, Hedges writes, “I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police. I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base in Honduras to see if they should kill me, and again in Basra after the first Gulf War in Iraq, never knowing if I would be executed, under constant guard and often without food, drinking out of mud puddles.”
In Chapter III, “Worthy and Unworthy Victims,” he explains, “Rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali, and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable.”
In a chapter entitled “Permanent War,” he writes, “Permanent war, which has defined the United States since World War II, extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It cheapens culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open economy, become impotent.
“It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, that killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the twentieth century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States.”
In “The Pimps of War” (Chapter IV), we read “The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists, and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo-intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.
“They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks – Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council, and Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including ours, leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.”
My synopsis can scarcely begin to convey the life-or-death importance of this book. Reading one chapter of the book or even a few paragraphs from each chapter would be better than my synopsis can be. I have purchased several copies of the book and can lend them to anyone interested in this issue (human survival). “If we don’t end war, war will end us,” H.G. Wells observed. Read the book by Chris Hedges and let me know if you’re ready.
In that same chapter on the pimps of war, Hedges writes, “They, and their coterie of fellow war lovers, went on to push for the expansion of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, violating an agreement not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany and recklessly antagonizing Russia. They were and are cheerleaders for the apartheid state of Israel, justifying its war crimes against Palestinians and myopically conflating Israel’s interests with our own. They advocated for air strikes in Serbia, calling for the U.S. to ‘take out’ Slobodan Milošović. They were the authors of the policy to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, with their typical cluelessness, wrote in April 2002 that ‘the road that leads to real security and peace’ is ‘the road that runs through Baghdad.’
“We saw how that worked out.”
In a chapter entitled “Wounds that Never Heal,” Hedges describes his visit with Tomas Young in Kansas City. Tomas was 33 years old at the time. Paralyzed in Iraq in 2004 as a result of an attack by insurgents, the Army veteran was transferred back home, then began to suffer a series of complications, including venous thrombosis causing swelling in his right arm, pulmonary embolism, and coma with an episode of anoxic brain injury in 2008; and such severe pain in his abdomen, associated with bowel dysfunction, that he had his colon removed and was fitted with a colostomy bag. “I made the decision to go on hospice care, to stop feeding and fade away. This way, instead of committing the conventional suicide and I am out of the picture, people have a way to stop by or call and say their goodbyes.”
Chris Hedges includes Tomas Young’s Last Letter, written to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Here are excerpts from that letter: “I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my Fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. …My life is coming to an end. …I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of … some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all – the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
“I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. …I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans – my fellow veterans – whose future you stole.
“Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. …
“My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. …I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.”
Tomas died November 10, 2014. “Mangled bodies and corpses, broken dreams, unending grief, betrayal, corporate profit, these are the true products of war. Tomas Young was the face of war they do not want you to see.”
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