ThinkingBlue: WORKING CLASS, WAR SLAVES FOR WAR HAWKS

Today's posting will be a thumbnail sketch of the ANATOMY OF WAR.

Homo sapiens have been at war with each other since THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION. The main reason for this from my point of limited view is GREED. I have repeated over and over that I believe the seeds of war are cultivated by the insatiable lust for MORE. Whether it be real estate, goods, money or power, there is never a "just right" everything always "taste like more".

Ordinary people, you, me, who live within small frames or spheres, such as, family, friends, earning a decent living and having an occasional laugh or two. We unequivocally, without a doubt DO NOT WANT WAR.

We do not want the killings, annihilation and utter sadness that comes with war. It does not matter what continent we come from or country we live in, war to the ordinary, is equivalent to the fear of death, except that dying is an inevitable reality we have to live with, war is NOT! We do not want the darkness of thought and the obscene reflections in our face. Even if it is far away from us, and the warmongers make laws prohibiting images of death and mutilation to be published. You cannot hide or escape from the visions of war. They ooze out from cracks in the blockades of prohibition and seep into your very soul.

War is a game that leaders play and enjoy but they can't implement it without tools. They need materials of war to indulge in this lustfully pleasurable sport of the wealthy and powerful. They need weapons, cannon fodder and a whole slew of cash.

Where do they get their inventory of war?

We all know the answer to this, THEY TAKE IT FROM US, the common folk who would rather just go on making a living, raising a family and have a laugh or two now and then. But first they must suck us in, make us believe we must indulge them their schemes and battle plans. How do they draw us in to their game plan for war?

Simple, THEY LIE TO US!

Lies about protecting us, lies about helping others, lies about creating a better world and demonizing lies about the enemies they have chosen for their contest.

The article below says it best and hopefully will open a few eyes or minds to how the working class, those on both sides of a war equation are used by the war hawks, without we, the common folk, they could not entertain their delusions of war.

It is time to stand up to the WAR-MONGERS and tell them we refuse to be used to fight and kill those we do not know and do not have any feelings of hatred or animosity towards. There are billions of us and only a few of them, you do the math... It doesn't make sense to continue to be used by those who never really have any skin in the game. If we put a stop to the desires, the lust, the insatiable appetence for power from those who stir up war, there would never be a war again. Oh, if only it were that simple, maybe it is. thinkingblue

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WAR HAWKS SHOW CALLOUS DISREGARD FOR WORKING-CLASS TROOPS
By Cynthia Tucker
Sat Mar 25, 8:06 PM ET

"If I didn't believe we had a plan for victory, I wouldn't leave our people in harm's way. ... I understand people's lives are being lost." -- President Bush, March 21, 2006

The average American understands that soldiers who fought in Vietnam were unfairly blamed for a war they did not start, for lies they did not tell, for mismanaged battle plans they could not salvage. So we're determined not to make that mistake again. This time around, most of us salute our soldiers.

Even determined peace activists, for the most part, are committed to two things -- ending American involvement in Iraq and honoring the soldiers who volunteered to serve there. In a bitterly divided country, the vast majority of us agree that rank-and-file troops should not be held accountable for the politics that led to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Ironically, there is something else most of us agree on, whether in red states or blue: We don't want our loved ones to go to war. Three years ago, when the invasion of Iraq was still widely supported in the United States, the prospect of a military draft was not. Whether Democrats, Republicans or independents, most Americans -- especially among the affluent classes -- were virulently opposed to the idea that their sons and daughters might be forced to serve the nation's military. We still are.

The politics of discussing a draft became this weird during the last election cycle: Conservatives savaged anybody who suggested the possibility of military conscription as a whiny appeaser who really wanted to end the war. OK. Let's unravel that. If it is a given that a draft would have been so unpopular that it would have ended support for the war in Iraq, what does that say? Doesn't it suggest that many of those who so easily supported this war in the beginning did so because it didn't affect them or their families?

Military recruits are pulled largely from the nation's working class -- from those whose economic prospects are less than stellar, from high school graduates who know they have little chance of affording college tuition, from young parents whose civilian jobs don't come with health insurance. Enlisted men and women tend to come from households earning between $32,000 and $33,500, according to a 1999 Defense Department study. (The median American income is $43,300.)

This is not a truth the middle class is eager to confront. Each time I write a column about the disproportionate burden borne by our working-class men and women, I get countless angry letters and e-mails -- tirades from the affluent denouncing me for fomenting race-consciousness (I've said nothing about race) or class warfare. Others write to me that they know somebody whose son or daughter or nephew or co-worker is a college graduate who volunteered to serve. (That's the exception that proves the rule.) We don't want to admit that we've left the burden of defending an affluent nation to those who enjoy less of its affluence. That's too ugly to think about.

Ah, but they volunteered, you say. Yes, they did. All the more reason to honor their commitment by making sure they aren't cannon fodder in a dubious cause. They took to heart the common platitudes and easy slogans
about duty and honor and service while many who are wealthier did not. Soldiers shouldn't be ill-used simply because they believed in their country and its leaders.

And they have been ill-used. They were sent to fight on a false pretext -- that Saddam was linked to Sept. 11 -- by civilian leaders who refused to plan for anything but quick and certain victory.

Of course, combat veterans were rare among the armchair hawks in Congress and the White House who rallied the nation for war. Vice President Dick Cheney has said he had "other priorities" during the war in Vietnam. And President Bush ... well, that story is well-known. Even if you credit him with conscientiousness and brilliance as a National Guard pilot, he never left the United States.

Their callousness about other people's children aside, it's not just Cheney and Bush whom I hold responsible for the deaths of more than 2,300 hundred Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. It's also men like Sen. John Kerry and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vietnam veterans who had seen young men die in combat. They knew better than to take the
nation to war on the wings of a lie.

That they did was not only unjust; it was immoral.
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Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: cynthia@ajc.com.

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Peace Odyssey 2001
Anatomy of War
War is a women's issue. Women are
doomed by their sex to endure many of the greatest horrors of war. Thousands are forced into sexual servitude, or compelled to bear the children of rape.

War is a poverty issue. World military expenditure exceeds $750 billion a year while one fifth of the world's people go hungry every day.

War is a development issue. Real dollars spent on defense have more than doubled since 1965. In developing countries, where one of every three people lives in poverty, military
expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is even higher than in industrialized nations -- three times greater in terms of annual income.

War is a refugee issue. One in every 200 people worldwide is a refugee or displaced person. Seventy-five percent of these are women and children.

War is an environmental issue. The world's nuclear stockpile is the equivalent of 1.8 tons of explosive power for every man, woman, and child on earth. Used, it would destroy
the world. Unused, it presents an almost insurmountable cleanup problem. Toxic waste -- much of it military waste -- pollutes vast tracts of land, making them unfit for agriculture or human habitation.

War is a legal issue. International law already prohibits weapons or practices that
indiscriminately kill civilians or cause inordinate damage to the environment. Strengthening and implementing existing law would provide a solid foundation on which to build.

War is a humanitarian issue. Every fifteen minutes -- of every day, every year -- someone falls victim to a landmine. At the current rate of clearance, it will take about 1100 years to clear the landmines that have already been laid, but only if no new mines are laid beginning in 1996!

War is a conservation issue. Energy used by the world's armies equals that of all the energy used in Japan.

War is an economic issue. The developed countries spend as much on the military every year as the poorest 2 billion people on earth earn in total income. The poor countries spend $130 billion a year, money that could be redirected to social needs.

War is a health issue. Many countries spend three times as much on arms as they do on the health and education of their people, and have twenty times more soldiers than doctors. In 1991, 2.5 million died for lack of immunization for measles, tetanus and whooping cough. The cost of saving them would have been $15 a child. Arms spending worldwide costs $49 a person.

War is a moral issue. Until we create a culture of peace, until we define limits, until we substitute outrage for compliance, we will not end war.
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Ideologies at War Ralph Zuljan
The imperialist world order died on the battlefields of the Great War. From its ashes arose three forms of socio-political organization that would, in the span of twenty years, initiate an even bloodier war aimed at determining which of the competing ideologies would govern the
post-imperial world. Under the banners of democracy, communism and fascism, armies once again marched into battle. Although the Second World War is sometimes seen as a continuation of the First World War, and is implicitly considered a sequel, the issue at the core of World War II was the form and substance of this new world order and that makes it a radically different war from World War I which began with fairly broad, if tacit, agreement about the existing order.

At the start of the twentieth century most of the world was divided up into a small number of great empires competing for power on the world stage. Each had some level of popular representation, but in essence these empires were ruled by a privileged elite of land owners with aristocratic origins, or pretensions. An emerging capitalist class was gaining in influence everywhere. For all of the slight differences between those empires, there was a remarkable level of conformity in form and substance.

Meanwhile ever greater numbers of the masses toiled in the factories that were slowly displacing peasant farms as the backbone of civilization and employment. The new industrial economy thrived on peaceful production, trade and consumption. Warfare seemed to promise nothing but mass destruction. It was at this time that ideas about the end of war first arose.

Within twenty years, three of those great empires disappeared into the dustbin of history and two more were shaken by the experience of world war. A radically new communist model of social organization emerged in place of the shattered Russian Empire and proclaimed a world revolution. Democrats promised to impose their worldview as well. Britain and the United States were the surviving representatives of the new deal democracies which, while having experienced no governmental overthrow as such, had been transformed during the twenties and thirties. In Italy and later Germany, fascist governments arose and they demonstrated dynamism that also promised a new world order. Of all the great powers, only Japan retained even a semblance of adherence to traditional imperialism.

At issue among the competing ideological positions were questions such as governmental form, in which the communists and fascists adopted a one-party dictatorship in opposition to the multi-party, rotating, rule found in the democratic countries. Fascists and democrats agreed on private ownership for the means of production while communists favored state or public ownership. Democrats and communists accepted the principle of individual freedom (though they derived rather different conclusions from it) while fascists did not.

Long-term accommodation among the competing ideologies proved impossible. Fascism and communism initially aligned in opposition to democracy before the outbreak of World War II however, a realignment during the war produced a temporary alliance between communism and democracy for the purpose of defeating fascism. Such pragmatic short-term decisions later led some observers to conclude ideology was irrelevant but in the long-run it was all that mattered. The alliance between communists and democrats broke down before the fighting stopped. It seemed to last only long enough to ensure that fascism was defeated and discredited.

Fascism suffered defeat because of the evident inability to effectively mobilize the populations and industry under its control. Production statistics, that were later used as some sort of proof of the inevitability of the "allied" victory, certainly demonstrated the miserably poor performance of the fascist states in comparison to the overwhelming efficiency achieved by democratic and communist countries. By the time the war ended there was relative clarity about the need to have either dictatorial state ownership or multi-party private ownership of the means of production in order to achieve efficiency.

There was no certainty, however, about which of the two remaining ideologies would ultimately prove itself superior to the other. There could be little doubt about the fact that communist planned industrialization in the prewar Soviet Union - the first communist state, for all of its inherent brutality, managed to produce the conditions necessary for the USSR to survive the fascist challenge (albeit with democratic help). It is doubtful that the democratic model could have done the same. A "cold war" broke out between democrats and communists in the wake of the devastation produced by the world war. Neither side sought a final reckoning; a neo-imperialist competition was rationalized instead.

For forty-five years, the more-or-less peaceful ideological competition continued. Communist growth rates easily outpaced those of the democracies in the first postwar decade and this was reason enough to believe that communism would ultimately "bury" democracy. Early communist successes in the military, political and economic arenas proved ephemeral. By the beginning of the last Cold War decade the balance had already swung inexorably in favor of the democracies. Communist military and economic policies proved untenable and calls for the abandonment of the commitment to communism began to arise from within those states which adhered to it. In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down -- one of the last vestiges of the allied victory in the Second World War -- and the following year, the American president declared victory at the "end of the Cold War" and announced a "new world order". No one could realistically argue against the fact that democracy had "won" the war against both fascism and communism, although some bitter adherents to the other ideologies tried to do so.

Thus, at the end of the twentieth century, once again, the world powers are united in a relatively uniform worldview. This time, the end of history, as well as war, has been declared. A new and poorly defined technocratic elite is emerging that shows all the signs of supplanting the established capitalist elite in wealth and power -- much as the capitalists had done with aristocrats around the end of the nineteenth century.

Originally published in "World War II" at Suite101.com on July 1, 2000. Revised edition published in "Articles On War" at OnWar.com on July 1, 2003.

More reads on war:

Seeds of Abu Ghraib

Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History

Saving Civilization in a War Zone

THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION

Thought for the Day: The difficulties of the United States are quite different. It has provided well for most of its working people until recently. It is now becoming a two-tiered society, which is not generally conducive to a peaceful and stable milieu, as the French, Russian and Iranian revolutions attest. It has followed a pragmatic foreign policy based on power projection and self-interest and there is nothing politically wrong with that. The problem is it has preached a benevolent altruist behavior from a moralistic pulpit of human rights, while unilaterally interfering where it suited its interest. It refused to sign the land mine treaty, Kyoto treaty, CTBT, submission to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and yet indicts others as war criminals. This to someone not wearing blinders elicits some objection, amused tolerance or benign contempt and is consistent with the behavior of most human beings, in wishing to portray themselves as being far better, than they truly are. What really incenses many countries and persons is not the lascivious guru, mullah, rabbi or bishop seducing the poor ignorant, innocent barmaid parishioner, but his constant sermon that his act is motivated by general benevolence to mankind and is essentially for her salvation. click to read more

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SEE AMY GOODMAN'S INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY