According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study released in 2016 the US Government was spending over $1 Billion annually on Public Relations. Approximately $626 Million of that was used by the Department of Defense to fund its PR campaign glamorizing and supporting endless wars.
We see the propaganda everywhere. Fighter jets zoom over NFL stadiums on Sunday afternoons while a huge American flag is unfurled by uniformed military personnel. Billboards along the highway extoll the virtues of military service. Of course there is much, much more.
But what the public is rarely if ever shown is the tragic human carnage of our never ending wars and military adventurism. As a young boy in the 1960’s I saw firsthand the “glories” of war. I grew up close to McGuire Veterans Hospital on the Southside of Richmond, VA. My older brother and I would scavenge for discarded pop bottles to turn in for the deposit money and head to the PX at McGuire for ice-cream.
The hospital had been built hastily during WWII. In fact, it was built so fast that some of the wards were constructed to the lay of the land. Long hallways were inclined making it difficult for immobile patients to move. It was 1967 and the Vietnam War was heating up. Security at the hospital was very relaxed and my brother and I could roam the halls at will.
As a nine year old I was amazed by the human carnage I witnessed up close. Men with no arms, legs or intestines. The faint smell of human waste couldn’t be masked by the powerful cleaning agents used by the staff as many of the men had bags attached to their gurney’s to collect their waste. As the patients struggled to maneuver their wheel chairs and gurneys up the long inclined hallways my brother and I would often give them a push up to the top on our way to the PX.
Over time we got used to seeing the mangled, disfigured men as we walked the hallways. But one scene is indelibly etched in my mind. A young boy, a little younger than me was standing outside the door of a patient’s room. I struck up a conversation with him and he told me they were there to see his Dad who’d just returned from Vietnam. I peeped inside and saw a pretty young woman holding a sleeping little girl, and she was sobbing.
Her eyeliner was running down her cheeks as her tears flowed. All I could see of the boy’s father was his head and most of his face wrapped in gauze with tubes sticking out. His eyes were filled with despair and hopelessness. I hastily turned away and silently thanked God that wasn’t my Dad as my brother and I walked home.
This poor soldier, like tens of thousands like him, suffered incredible physical and mental trauma from the Vietnam War. Not only did they suffer, but so did their families. Their best years stolen from them by psychopathic liars with no conscience.
Our government told us that if we didn’t stop those Communist in Southeast Asia the red horde would somehow show up and destroy our way of life; but that didn’t happen. Today we know that it was all a grand lie. The human cost of needless war is beyond measure. Not only for our troops, but also for the innocent civilian men and women who get caught in the crossfire.
War is not and never has been glorious. It is a heartless, cunning monster that devours the combatants and destroys the innocent while the maniacs who promote it wax wealthy at our expense.
Jeff Harris and his wife own Puddle Moon Farm an organic grass fed beef and pastured pork farm in South Carolina. Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
A moving piece, describing the suffering war causes: we must admit to what causes war.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
The fact that you Humans after so many thousands of years of supposed evolution still find increasingly more violent ways to exterminate yourselves demonstrates that as a species you are done.
I can’t wait for my assignment on this wretched planet to end…
Just curious, but which star system are you from?
The Dog, child of the mighty Orion system
mirror on the wall…
Mirror, mirror on the wall…
pogo told you a long time ago
tomorrow
abomination was born in a womb
skipping across the pond
Sniffing for profit
you ‘discovered’ an eden
but others were here first
for 20,000 years
So you waved a gun
you abused a book
from sea to shining sea
your trodden path
‘breathing space’
To initiate
manifest destiny
a continental ethnic cleansing
white-washed iniquity
red-skin genocide
So you planted a flag
morphed into the borg
a plague of locust
to roll your bones
across the globe
You exalted yourselves
divine and exceptional
so much better than all the rest
convinced yourselves
your indispensable
such a xenophobic hegemonic faux
As you robbed, bombed bribed and bullied
seeking to seed;
via the leeching loins of an oligarchy
behind a hidden plutocracy
crony capitalism
neoliberalism
corporatism
imperial fascism
Oxymoron incarnate
A wolf in sheep’s clothing
you’ve degraded into the monster
you swore to destroy
as you berate and terrorize any
who dare to
refuse to bow and pay tribute
to your incomparable magnificence
While dumb-downed
brainwashed patriotic kids
pledge to and praise the odium
5 days a week, year after year
fingering other kids in the sandbox
what about them?
They’re even worse
So sparta
becomes
a detestable filthy polluted
house of cards
teetering shaking
in an easterly wind
To perceive its fate
inevitable to be
locked within a gilded golden cage
choked within by toys from greed
Easter Island
As the world breathes finally
A collective sigh of relief
Buried deep
Down the rabbit hole
A flood of pee
Anointing the grave…
Now we build a peace
wo it actuakky is a good one gratz
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/df8c48d65a2adf00735b76f9256baa980faa835f3af38f734bc9acf46b881cd1.jpg
NOW THE TROOPS WILL BRING SOCIALISM. Why? Because the neocons preferred their military addiction to budgetary sanity and freedom and peace. The neocons rejected Ron Paul for trying to end these criminal wars, but now the troops will deliver socialism to get it. I hope they are pleased. You can’t have freedom AND endless war and a standing army. James Madison warned about both standing armies and war. He was right.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bernie-sanders-leads-trump-all-2020-candidates-in-donations-from-active-duty-troops-946188/
Our society places a lot of value on the hoarding of power, money, and natural resources. It’s still hoarding, no matter how you slice it. It’s a sickness that we find desirable as a society. The worse your affliction, the more “successful” you are termed as being. Conceptual Power. The use of force to maintain the apparatus of the hoarder is almost always necessary on a constant basis.
Bombing, maiming and killing are just a minor side show to the main activity of war. The main activity is, and always has been buying and selling.
Puhleez. Our government didn’t tell us that if we didn’t stop those Communist in Southeast Asia the red horde would somehow show up and destroy our way of life. It was a noble aim to keep communists contained anywhere and everywhere. It was a hideous tragedy that they took over in Cambodia.
No one said anything about their showing up in CONUS. As McCarthy made clear, however, they were here already.
But, yes, yes, of course. War is terrible. Does anyone think it’s not?