August 19/20, 2023 -
Information Clearing House - "World
Beyond War"
---The better part of a
year into the current phase of the war in
Ukraine, General Mark Milley accidentally
blurted out that peace talks might be a good
alternative to an endless bloody war for the
same results. Now it’s becoming more
acceptable in Washington, D.C., to
anonymously whisper that he was right.
But we’re lifetimes away from it becoming
acceptable to mention that every single
principled peace advocate on Earth had
expressed that opinion openly and clearly
several months earlier. It hasn’t even yet
become acceptable to admit who was right
about any past wars. The Korean War comes to
mind as a vastly more destructive debacle.
Smart people predicted what would happen at
the start but have not been listened to the
slightest bit more in the years after
millions were killed by those with lives
that matter, of whom tens of thousands would
“die for a tie.”
As we hit the 1.5-year point in the
current catastrophe in Ukraine — and other
wars, larger and smaller, roll on without
end — the polls are beginning to do what
they always do. With Afghanistan and with
Iraq, after about this much time you began
to have U.S. majorities declare that the
wars never should have been started. With
Ukraine, this indicates a certain ability to
care about (white) people who are not from
the United States, but more so an ability to
recognize that wars and militaries cost
money. That could yet prove an incredibly
valuable breakthrough. With Afghanistan and
Iraq, the polls showed, for years, strong
majorities both sure that the war they’d
cheered and drooled and screamed for should
never have happened and hesitant about
ending it. This was principally a result of
the doctrine of troopism: Thou shalt
kill more troops so as not to have already
killed troops in vain. But with
Ukraine, it’s weapons (or, in the misleading
media narrative, dollars) being sent, not
troops. Nobody is proposing to send more
weapons for the sake of the weapons already
sent. So, there is the possibility of the
U.S. public really turning against this war
more quickly. (Of course it’s a public of
the other partisan makeup, so we’ll have to
see what that means.)
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When the public turns against a war, the
corporate media begins searching for wise
voices. These are the voices of people
who’ve supported disastrous war after
sadistic horror after losing debacle for
decades but who made some comment about
certain reservations they might have had
about this particular war. Maybe they
accidentally exclaimed something about the
financial cost in the presence of a
reporter, or they put their name on a report
at a weapons-funded stink tank about the
greater importance of planning a war on
China, or whatever. Today you have people
shamelessly campaigning for Congress on
their record of helping to destroy Iraq and
murder a million Iraqis. And one reason why
is that there was never any acknowledgement
of the many individuals who were right about
that war before it was begun, or even of the
majority of voters who in 2006 said they
were voting to end that war but ended up
electing a Democratic Congress that esclated
the war instead.
Of course, there were people inside the
military establishment admitting privately
(but not so privately) that the “surge” in
Iraq wouldn’t accomplish its purported
goals, and pointing out problems with the
war from before day one — never moral
problems, of course, but real and accurate
and fairly obvious problems with foreign
occupations. And of course there have been
people on both sides of the current war in
Ukraine privately (but with leaks) pointing
out that there’s no victory in sight for
either side. One of the reasons that peace
activists have such an incredible streak of
accuracy is that they look at what
militaries are whispering and leaking,
rather than believing highly improbable
hype. But in the media’s “first draft of
history” every intelligent person alive is
supposed to have believed stupid stories
about speedy victories, so that Milley’s
accidentally saying the quiet part aloud is
not understood as blurting out something
forbidden but as actually grasping some
unique insight into a problem the world’s
thinkers were otherwise universally failing
to comprehend.
But the people who get wars right time
after time after time do so not simply by
being willing to say what the corporate
communications system forbids, but also by
considering factors outside of how much
money can be made off weapons, how many
votes can be gained from machismo, how many
interviews can be garnered by wartime
rhetoric, or even how many years and bodies
will be required to achieve some purpose.
Other factors often considered include the
increased risk of nuclear apocalypse, the
financial tradeoffs, the impediments created
to global cooperation on non-optional
crises, the environmental destruction, the
damage to politics and society at home, and
of course the possibilities for resolution
without killing, with better results
possible prior to more death and destruction
and bitterness and the building up of
propaganda by each side about the other.
I’ve been reading a new book called
My Country Is the World, a collection
of speeches and interviews and articles by
Staughton Lynd. Here’s someone who was right
about the war on Vietnam prior, during, and
after. And as a reward he was driven out of
academia and erased. For some years in the
1960s he was able to find a voice in
corporate newspapers and television. The
transcript in the book of a debate with
William F. Buckley is an exchange of
opposing worldviews that never happens in
U.S. media today — not because the “two
sides” isolate, but because Buckley’s views
are now pretty well established as the only
possible views by every media outlet with
money.
In Jonathan Eig’s new biography of Martin
Luther King, there’s a part, near the end,
where some of King’s friends and allies are
upset at how willing he is to go against the
advice of all of them, and yet how concerned
he is not to displease others. When King
wants to keep an appointment with Staughton
Lynd, Bayard Rustin exclaims “Who the hell
is Staughton Lynd?” The whole damn country
might ask that. He’s certainly not someone
with a national holiday, children’s books,
monuments, and so forth. But, tweak the
details, and he’s someone who has already
eloquently debunked the next war the
Pentagon comes up with. He’s one of
thousands about whom we really should be
asking, in all seriousness, and with the
intention of educating ourselves: who the
hell are they?