Are we about to go to war again? I see the question being asked more frequently and it gives me the creeps. Here is a List of wars involving the United States If you count them there are around 70. They are of varying lengths but even if each were 1 year long it would be a war every three years more or less. It is clear that we experience peace far less than war.
I was born in 1936 and got to "enjoy" looking at newsreels of WWII. It ended when I was nine. Then the Korean War while I was in high school. I went to college on a Regular NROTC scholarship and learned about war as part of my education. I chose the Marine Corps option because I felt lonely at sea during my freshman eight week summer cruise. It turned out that the Navy would have fit my personality better, but I did get to go home most nights.
What does war mean to you? I am now a pacifist and an anti-imperialist. I have been since my tour of duty 1957-1960. In 1965 I cut my three year post doc in Israel short by a year to come home and get involved in the anti-war movement. I was a leader in many ways and am proud of that service.
Read on below the fold and see if you can take an honest look at what this country is all about with regard to war.
In the "military science" courses I took in college we were quickly given this definition of war:
War is the extension of National policy by force.
Oddly enough here is the definition of
Imperialism:
Imperialism, as it is defined by the Oxford Dictionaries, is a policy of extending a country’s power and influence through colonization, use of military force, or other means." Lewis Samuel Feuer identifies two major subtypes of imperialism; the first is the "regressive imperialism" identified with pure conquest, unequivocal exploitation, extermination or reductions of undesired peoples, and settlement of desired peoples into those territories.The second type identified by Feuer is "progressive imperialism" that is founded upon a cosmopolitan view of humanity, that promotes the spread of civilization to allegedly backward societies to elevate living standards and culture in conquered territories, and allowance of a conquered people to assimilate into the imperial society, an example being the British Empire which claimed to give their "citizens" a number of advantages.
The term as such primarily has been applied to Western political and economic dominance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some writers, such as Edward Said, use the term more broadly to describe any system of domination and subordination organized with an imperial center and a periphery. According to Marxist theorist Vladimir Lenin, imperialism is a natural feature of a developed capitalist nation state as it matures into monopoly capitalism. In his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin observed that as capitalism matured in the Western world, the economy shifted away from real commodity production towards banking and finance, as commodity production was outsourced to the empires' colonies. Lenin concluded that the competition between empires and the unfettered drive to maximise profit would lead to wars between the empires themselves, such as World War I in his contemporary time, as well as continued future military invasions and occupations in the undeveloped world to establish and expand markets and exploit cheap labour for the monopolist corporations of the empires.
It is mostly accepted that modern-day colonialism is an expression of imperialism and cannot exist without the latter. The extent to which "informal" imperialism with no formal colonies is properly described as such remains a controversial topic among historians.[6] Both colonization and imperialism have been described by Tom Nairn and Paul James as early forms of globalization:
“ Even if a particular empire does not have a ‘global reach’ as we would define it today, empires by their nature still tend to contribute to processes of globalization because of the way that imperial power tends to generate counter-power at its edge-lands and send out reverberations far beyond the territories of their immediate control. ”
The word imperialism became common in the United Kingdom in the 1870s and was used with a negative connotation. In Great Britain, the word had until then mostly been used to refer to the politics of Napoléon III of obtaining favorable public opinion in France through military interventions outside France
Our military science teacher would have never made the connection. Too few people really do. Yet there is no doubt that we are a very imperialist nation and our use of the word "defense" is one of the biggest cons ever pulled of on an entire nation.
It seems ironic to me that as I near the end of my life, which has been dominated by our imperialism and capitalist greed, chickens may be coming home to roost. Let me explain. There is no way imaginable that we can go on waqing war and preparing to wage war and keep the economy from collapsing. Thomas Piketty points out that during the two World Wars the trend for the capitalist oligarchy to grow without limit was temporarily reversed. This time we have the entire accumulation of Global warming, pollution, scarce resources, agriculture that has raped the soil, and so on. This will not be a repeat of what happened during the world wars. We are approach or passing too many interrelated tipping points.
We are no longer being governed and that charade has become transparent. The ruling oligarchy is desperately trying to avoid having to crush us by seeing if it can keep control of the electoral process. One wonders how much patience they will have if we do well in the fall elections. But if crush us they must, crush us they will. Or at least they will try. The definition of war above seems to put the police at war with the people already. The system seems to be coming apart at the seams and we all now can see the man behind the curtain clearly.
I'll end with a story I have told many times before. During the Vietnam War I was on the faculty at SUNY at Buffoalo. I was the leader of a coalition of about 17 organizations from communists to WILFP. I worked with RESIST to end the Draft. One thing we did, being so close to Canada via the Peace Bridge, was run an "underground railroad" for Draft resisters who could not stomach a stay in American prisons. Our firnds at a nearby Canadian university worked with us to help our people after we got them across. One day they called and said that we needed a break from this grueling routine so they were throwing a Part over there for us. We had a bunch of us faculty and students go there and were treated royally. Now to get to the point of the story. We got into a conversation about the possibility of violence being part of the American anti-war movement. The Canadians were genuinely concerned. One of our students answered with great pride:
Our country was started by a violent revolution
After a moment of shocked silence one of the Canadians answered:
Ours wasn't
. I'll never forget the impact that bit of drama had on me. There you may have it in a nutshell.