Before publishing this I had to ask myself, why is this important...now? The simple answer is because we’ve still got it wrong, and it’s killing us. We are still an imperial power presently occupying two different countries – and that’s if you don’t count the 737 US military bases overseas. This is not out of necessity either. Rather it is a wicked and cruel game that we have been playing for far too long. These travesties are costing us trillions, not to mention the more serious toll in human suffering. For our own survival, if for no other reason, we must stop this madness.
My father served in wars during WWII, Korea and Laos. If he hadn’t retired in ’64, he’d surely have made Vietnam too. I just barely missed it myself, and only then by a simple twist of fate or two. Always plenty of wars to go around it seems.
My dad was part of the American occupation of Japan right at the end of WWII where he walked the streets of Hiroshima within days of its becoming the first city ever to have been attacked with a nuclear bomb. His descriptions of the horrors he witnessed there are chilling.
He said that most everything was flattened but then there would be a single building or a lone smokestack standing in irrational defiance. He remembers finding it puzzling at the time.
He speaks less about the human costs, just sort of shakes his head and grits his teeth. It’s too hard to speak of...even now.
Too often the cultural message we receive as Americans is that we only fight when we have to or to serve a higher cause. That’s not true. Never was.
I was surprised to learn that my father did not know who General Smedley Darlington Butler was. I guess they don’t speak of him much in military circles...even though when he died in 1940, he was the highest decorated Marine in American history, having won two Medals of Honor.
Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940), nicknamed "The Fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye", was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.
During his 34 years of Marine Corps service, Butler was awarded numerous medals for heroism including the Marine Corps Brevet Medal (the highest Marine medal at its time for officers), and subsequently the Medal of Honor twice. Notably, he is one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Medal of Honor, and one of only three to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor, and the only person to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor for two different actions.
Wikipedia
Few have known war like Smedley Butler knew war. Here is how he explains its true nature:
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench?
How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies.
Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its
attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I
retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
(snip)
All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people -- not those who fight and pay and die -- only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.
There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.
Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
From General Smedley Darlington Butler’s War is a Racket
How I learned to think about war
Growing up in the 50s and early 60s, I was steeped in the post-WWII era propaganda. We Americans were the good guys in white hats and if any decent folk anywhere in the world got in trouble with bad guys, why we’d save their bacon –because that’s just the kind of guys we are. And regular Americans often enough are quite a bit like that – just not their government. Nope. The American government is a different story altogether.
My dad, being a soldier, reinforced the pro-military, nationalistic propaganda that we all received via John Wayne movies and the like. My dad and my brothers ate it up and so did I. My dad had his reservations though. I sensed it at the time, though I didn’t understand their nature. I had to wait for that knowledge.
My real thinking about war goes back to Laos, 1960. I was eight years old. We lived on the outskirts of Vientiane in a small compound along the bank of the Mekong River. We had lived there for what was for me one extraordinary and wondrous year when there was a very sudden and very shocking coup d'état. We woke up one day to the sound of machine gun fire and the deep rumble and clank of tanks churning up the road in front of our house. I wrote about it in An American Tale.
After being trapped in our home for three months as the fighting raged all around us, we one day received a call saying that the government forces had re-taken the airport and that we had 15 minutes to pack. On the way to the airport we passed burned out buildings and the scorched husks of vehicles of all kinds. Heavily armed soldiers were everywhere. All was chaos - everyone seemed frightened and confused. Houses and walls were reduced to rubble and what was left standing was pockmarked by bullets. There were bodies lying in the streets. The fighting at the airport had been so savage that the runway was hardly still usable, but use it we did. As we made our escape to Thailand I cried for my beloved Vientiane. It had been ravaged almost beyond recognition.
I came away from it all profoundly impressed with how unlike the movies it all was...how much more horrifying, grim and grisly...how scary it is and how wasteful and hateful it seems, how monumentally stupid the scale of destruction. Even at that young age I learned that the true tenor of war is not so much heroic as tragic. A part of that comes from having to leave my Laotian friends to unknown fates...they were kind and gentle people who deserved so much better. I would never learn what happened to Tuy (Tooey) or Champaign.
War causes great suffering, terrible fear, mindless destruction and deep everlasting sorrow. Those are the lessons left with me from my year in the Land of a Million Elephants.
Then came the war in Vietnam. Over 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians violently murdered in one useless convulsive act of barbarism. What a waste. All for nothing. Well except for the profit to be made on it all. What a shame and a pity. The Vietnam War turned out to be the CIA’s dirty little secret gone public. It was their ‘splendid little war’. The horrors they perpetrated are unimaginable. To this day I remain convinced that they should be forever disbanded.
I was against the war in Vietnam from early on while my father was all for it...at least at first. I was conflicted though. While against the war, I really sort of wanted to go back over there. I thought maybe I could go over as an Army photographer or something. I wanted to see what was happening there and bear witness. I was so fascinated with that part of the world and this was the biggest event of my generation. So I decided I was going to try to sign up as an Army photojournalist. I discussed it with my father and he was supposedly taking me to sign up but he took me by my brother’s place instead where they both talked me out of it. They convinced me that I wasn’t the sort of guy who would enjoy military life, that they’d promise me photography school and make me a grunt and that maybe this one just wasn’t worth it after all. This was 1969. I was a seventeen-year-old hippie and the war was a’ ragin’. This was where my father was first forced to confront his own misgivings about the war. He told me he was afraid it would be for nothing if I died over there. That rocked me back on my heels for him to admit that. My dad, the uber patriot. My brother, a veteran himself concurred. They succeeded in talking me out of it. I’ve often wondered how my story might have been different had I gone that route. Ahhh, but such is life, eh?
I was against the war but riveted by the story of it and the news about it. I followed it intently. I knew people who went there.
... my next heartbreak was at 16 when I went to visit a much-admired older friend who used to play in our neighborhood touch football games. He was only eighteen at the time and it was hard for me to see him so badly broken. He was just returned home from Vietnam where he’d left the better part of his right leg.
He was walking point, he told me, on a trail through tall elephant grass. He turned a corner to confront a man with an AK47 who got off the first shot. The round hit him in the thigh knocking him down and blowing him off the trail.
It didn’t hurt he said, it felt like a dull thud. He found himself on his back staring in shock through the arching elephant grass at a merciless sky.
He told me how he ran his hand down his leg trying to determine how badly he was hurt and when his hand got to the wound...it fell in.
The Secret History of My Foolish Heart
Over time, as did most of the thinking people I knew, I came to bitterly oppose the war in Vietnam. I even harbored or helped several GIs who went AWOL the instant they stepped foot back on US soil. I later did time with a surprising number of Nam vets too. None of them were confused about who the bad guy was in Vietnam – it was our own government. Turns out that the CIA’s splendid little war was a real stinker – just an orgy of war profiteering, shameless killing and needless sacrifice. They’re all stinkers anymore. There are better ways of expending our energies and resources – and far better ways of resolving conflict. It’s just such a complete waste...not to mention that whole moral abomination thing.
These wars all start with a series of lies and deceptions:
Vietnam – The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
Iraq I – The April Glaspie deception
Afghanistan – had to attack the whole country to get one guy (who we never really cared about anyway)
Iraq II – WMDs and the AQ connection
How devastating is it to learn that all these wars were unnecessary? Why haven’t we stopped them yet?
This is not a proud history. This is a tale of shame.
Please take the time to watch The Real News Network's Paul Jay interview film maker Eugene Jarecki about his new book, The American Way of War. This is important stuff.
Parts 2 and 3 of this interview are posted on The Real News website.
The inhuman bastards who profit from war use the media and their wholly owned politicians to whip us into a frenzy of fear, fear of commies, socialists, terrorists or Islamo-fascists, and then exploit that fear to cause us to support their mean and stupid game. We are at a point in history where such folly threatens our continued existence as a species. Enough!
The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.
Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.
But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and
explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of
building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all
make more money out of peace than we can out of war -- even the munitions makers.
So...I say,
TO HELL WITH WAR
From General Smedley Darlington Butler’s War is a Racket published in 1935
I think of war widows and orphans. I think of shell-shocked veterans. I think of my uncle who was never again sane after returning from the Korean War. I think of whole peoples who have been wiped out by genocide. I think of all the Iraq and Afghanistan vets with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injuries. I think of all the naïve young boys who have been tricked into thinking an immoral war was a noble and necessary endeavor. I think of all the little children shaking in fear as they hear the bombers approaching or the fighting getting closer. I think of the screaming millions staring in abject horror at the bloody stump where their hand, foot, arm or leg used to be. I think of the lives lost and the resources wasted even now when we desperately need to be marshalling what scarce resources are left to try and ensure the continued existence of humankind – and all I can do is shake my head.
Our pathetic and immoral addiction to war will be the final nail in our coffin if we don’t wise up and find a better way. We have very real and very serious problems to confront. We need to be done with fear mongering, false boogeymen and unnecessary war.
Besides, we couldn’t afford to keep funding such madness even if it were otherwise a fine thing to do. It’s high time we stop it. It’ll be the end of us if we don’t.
We need to:
* Cut ‘defense’ spending to sane levels
* Get out of Iraq
* Get out of Afghanistan
* Shut down our foreign military bases
* Use the money saved in sane pursuits
* Make fear mongering a crime
* Make war profiteering a crime
* Make war crimes illegal (What’s that? They already are? Aww go on.)