There has never been an honourable war. There are always atrocities, there is always torture, rage, regret, recrimination, secrecy, lies, more lies, justification and no matter how just the cause appeared to either side at the start…the conduct of the war teaches us only that the strong win. We learn more effective ways of killing people, destroying the resources of the “enemy” and yes we manage to make some advances in medicine and science. We in the west live with the conceit that because our lives are good…it must be a product of our democratic system and the benefits of capitalism. It never occurs to us that exploiting the third world…just as all previous colonial hegemonies did…is one of the foundations of our prosperity. And we seek to redeem our exploitation by exporting our notion of “democracy” to many of the countries we have exploited. It’s a time honoured process. European colonialists exported the church and the sword while they enslaved thousands to dig and smelt gold and silver for the lords and ladies back home. Now that North America is becoming “energy self-sufficient” our version of history can begin to deny that we have impoverished millions of people in the middle east, installed puppet governments to keep the oil flowing and looked the other way when our tame government leaders filled Swiss vaults with money that could have kept poverty and starvation from devastating their people. Oh yes and when those hungry and poor people rise up to claim a piece of the profits…our own leaders come to the aid of the “friendly” governments who keep the oil flowing. The mess we leave behind lasts for generations…and eventually global opinion shifts and off we go to “fix” the problem. Never enters our mind to “fix” Wall Street or the State Department. And lest we think this is only in America…Great Britain, France, Germany, and others have equivalent bodies that could use some fixing too. Did I mention Canada?
I agree that some wars are inevitable and probably necessary. It means that somebody, somewhere has fucked up so badly that no other option is available. Sometimes the fuck ups are simply mistakes by people who didn’t foresee the consequences of their actions. I’m sure it happens all the time. But sometimes what appears to be a fuck up is a carefully engineered event planned in back rooms and board rooms by people with big brains, big technology, big ambitions and big resources…who have every intention of hanging onto every “big” thing they have and making it all bigger.
We’ll probably never know the simple mistakes from the engineered disasters…but I think we all have a responsibility to understand that our own leaders have lied and will lie to us about who are the “bad guys”…about weapons of mass destruction…about which dictator is a “friend” and which ones need to be brought down. If Saddam Hussein was bad for killing his own people…how bad is Assad? Never mind…there are dozens of despots to choose from. The point is that some of those despots are sitting in office towers in New York, Washington, Dallas, Toronto, Ottawa, London, Paris, Berlin. And it’s about damn time we put the magnifying glass on their behaviour.
We now have the most technologically smart generations we’ve ever had…we know how to use the internet…we know how to do research. Forget the big mass media outlets…the network T.V. corporations. They’ve all been corrupted. Their job is to sell things. They exist to stay in business and they are careful to shade their content in ways that do not alienate sponsors or their cash flow. Do your own research, look for the story behind the story…get some different perspectives
And next time there’s an election…pay attention.
Chagal4's Blog 
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