“...empires rise and fall at a wave of the pointer, the blood is blotted out – And only one small boy, who was not paying the least attention, will ask between two victorious wars: and did it hurt in those days too?“
(Miroslav Holub, tr. George Theiner)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Diversity is life
Peace Can Be War too
Ukraine
Genocide is good for business
The destroyer of worlds
Our world today is the one Eisenhower warned about
Remembering the atomic atrocities
Further research
So many of our global political issues, and so much human suffering, stem from the increased militarisation that was necessary during WWII but that continued long after to today.
Before discussing the US-Israeli war machines, we should remind ourselves of the urgent necessity of cooperation of all the world’s powers, countries and people to find solutions to the many issues that humans and others species currently face. We must be honest about the great challenges we face, the fact that we are quite simply running out of time. We must ensure that all of our leaders are fit for the enormous task ahead.
We can only solve these issues by working together globally, relying on science and technology to help us and good faith.
The fascist autocrats, that we must now resist and defeat, know very well what the science tells us all. They lie about it, not because they are anti-science but because they have no desire to be part of the solution. They are anti-truth, anti-justice and anti-humanity. They are like the cannibals in the story The Road, just in their case they actively hasten the degradation of the world and human civilisation. They want to create a ‘man eat man, woman and child’ world and aim to ensure they are first to the table with sharpened knives.
How Europe can survive the new Russian-American-Israeli Axis powers
We must resist
The Men
Who will
(For starters)
Wolf down
Our children
We are the flames We carry the fire
Planet Earth relies on a wonderful diversity of life-forms to maintain its ability to support all life throughout the biosphere.
“the truth is that the Earth’s environment has been massively adapted to sustain habitability. It is life that has controlled the heat from the Sun…the Sun is gradually emitting ever more heat. In fact, over the last 3.5 billion years its output has increased by 20 per cent. This should have been enough to raise the surface temperature of the Earth to 50°C and bring about a runaway greenhouse effect that would have sterilized the planet. But it didn’t happen. “
(James Lovelock, ‘Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’)
However, we continue to destroy the planet’s capacity to carry us and so many other wonderful species.
We accelerate into a man-made natural catastrophe which could destroy Earth as home for humans and many other complex life-forms.
The risks are so serious and startling they require all the major countries and powers to collaborate in ways never before managed or imagined, if we are to avoid billions of deaths and a severely depleted natural environment. A runaway fiery catastrophe.
Indeed, the planet could very soon become so degraded that it is pushed past a point of no return.
“The best available data suggests that what we decide over the next 10 years will determine the long-term fate of human civilization.”
A 1972 MIT study predicted that rapid economic growth would lead to societal collapse in the mid 21st century. A new paper shows we're unfortunately right on schedule. Image: Getty A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has
Yet much of the world is still practising a business as usual growth model. Despite such an approach making it impossible to meet our global warming mitigation targets. Research shows that an updated version of the ‘Business As Usual’ (BAU) scenario, with slightly modified assumptions shows “a clear collapse pattern” with “a steep decline to set in around 2040”.
According to Gaya Herrington’s analysis, this scenario indicates economic and industrial growth stopping and then declining, which would “hurt food production and standards of living”. (Gaya Herrington, ‘Update to limits to growth‘, 2020)
Other studies confirm that we must rapidly recalibrate our global efforts to an extraordinary degree – to save the human species from a future that no one would wish to live in (even if they could survive).
Instead of using our collective intelligence to solve these urgent problems, a new coalition (a new Axis powers) comprised of Russia-America-Israel believe that now is the time to carve up the world.
Trump and his friends want to remove or criminalise environmental protections, eradicate civil rights and make much of the world into their personal fiefdoms.
Netanyahu is systematically dismantling the Israeli democracy (that exists for Jewish Israelis) whilst aiming to make ethnic cleansing and Genocide great again.
Putin’s aggression in Ukraine has resulted in up to 1 million casualties on both sides, as well as widespread systematic torture, rape and the forced abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.
All of the Axis powers publicly gloat about committing crimes against humanity. The very antithesis of all that is blessed or holy (whole) in our universe.
Trump and his collection of international fascist friends
want to turn the world into Mordor
In short, this is precisely the opposite of what the world needs to solve our myriad complex problems. They can only be solved by collective universal collaboration and cooperation, based on respect for diversity of humans and all life-forms.
"At this stage of history ... either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community-interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others; or ... there will be no destiny for anyone to control."
Between WWII and the break up of the USSR, America has been involved in more than 90 wars, regime changes, coups, insurrections and support of bloody dictators.
It is very hard to get agreement on the exact numbers but tens of millions of civilians have been killed and tens of millions of people have been displaced.
(IBON Foundation)
US' military interventions globally range from direct military actions to covert operations to military support for client states. Lasting from days or weeks to over many years, these result in significant loss of life.
With a peace this bloody, who needs wars?
Obviously, because nearly all of this happened elsewhere, most people in Europe and America are largely oblivious. Most of the mainstream media has no financial incentive to report the truth.
After the break up of the USSR and the end of the cold war, US military spending declined significantly (the so-called peace dividend). When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, American military spending stood at 7% of GDP.
However, that peace dividend did not last for very long. American geopolitical power is based on being able to enforce its will against nearly any other country in the world (irrespective of international laws). Perpetual war is baked into the American political system.
Without perpetual warfare, the US would soon lose its military dominance and technological edge in new weaponry and war machines. This would force its administration to have to comply with international laws, and to collaborate and cooperate with others. It has evinced no desire to do so since WWII.
"It's abjectly terrifying that the personal benefit of any member of Congress is factored into decisions about how to wield and fund the largest military in the world," said one critic.
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength“
(George Orwell)
US military spending has increased more than 48% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms in the first 24 years of this century. This growth has occurred despite the end of the Iraq War and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
US military spending is currently around $900 billion (3% of GDP). However, this only tells part of the story. If we factor in all Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and direct sales between 2019 and 2023, the United States accounted for 42% of global arms exports.
In 2022, the year of the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine, arms transfers through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program increased year-over-year by 49% to $51.9 billion and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) transactions increased by the same percentage to $153.7 billion.
In 2024, the United States’ Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) of military equipment reached a combined total of approximately $318.7 billion.
The United States continues to sell record breaking amounts of arms on the global market, with $318.7 billion in total sales in Fiscal Year 2024, per US State Department figures released last Friday. This is the third consecutive year that has seen the total increase, driven in large part by Russia's ongoing aggression against Ukraine, [...]
Sustained warfare is really great
for some American corporations, investors and politicians
but really terrible for nearly everyone else.
This extraordinary level of foreign purchases, represents substantial growth from the Cold War period, when US arms exports totalled approximately $13.4 billion annually (1987-89 average), representing 0.28% of GDP. With US GDP of approximately $29 trillion in 2024, the $318.7 billion in all foreign military sales that year accounts for about 1.15% of the US GDP.
The proportionate scale of American military spending is evident when viewed in relation to other major powers:
The US spends approximately 4 times more than China on defence
US military expenditure is nearly 7 times larger than Russia’s defence budget
American defence spending exceeds the combined military budgets of the next 10-12 largest defence spenders globally
As the European Commission sets out its vision for a single market for defence in its white paper due on Wednesday, we take a close look at global and European trends and the industry's readiness to meet new challenges.
With these statistics it is no surprise that increased foreign military purchases of US weapons are a key component of the Project 2025 authoritarian fascist takeover of America first and then – working as part of the new Axis powers – much of the rest of the world.
Project 2025 and the 180 Day Playbook Tracker
How to prepare for the fire and the storm
These mafioso warlords want the rest of the world to pay continuous tribute to them. For Trump and his collaborators, that plan includes further strengthening the American industrial-military base (using other people’s money), making those other countries even more dependent on America for those weapons to be able to work. A perpetual cycle of servitude, where the enslaved pay for their own increasingly advanced and secure chains.
The American military strategy, is a great strategy
only if the rest of the world is both stupid and scared.
Sadly, this American strategy is not a product of wild outlandish speculation. Indeed, it has worked very well in Europe for decades, and it is a fair reflection of Europe’s historic geopolitical and military lack of intelligence (excluding France).
Between the start of Russia’s war in 2022 and June 2023, 78% of defence acquisitions by EU member states were made from outside the EU, with the U.S. alone representing approx 64%.
“While the U.S. supplied 52 percent of European NATO members’ military equipment between 2015 and 2019, the share rose to 64 percent in the subsequent five-year period.“
European NATO members have become even more dependent on U.S. weapons than before, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released Monday. European ar...
Europe is re-imagining its entire security architecture and defense capacity amid concerns over both Russia and the US. With the bloc still buying huge amounts of US arms, can its own companies ever catch up?
Norway, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands: Over 90% of their arms imports came from US suppliers between 2020 and 2024.
The UK: Sourced over 80% of its arms imports from the United States during 2020-2024.
Germany: Experienced a dramatic increase in US arms imports, rising from less than 10% in the 2015-2019 period to 70% in 2020-2024.
Poland: Is a significant purchaser of US equipment (such as F-35s and Abrams tanks), however IISS data suggests that between February 2022 and September 2024, Poland spent almost as much on European equipment (37%) as on US systems (38%). Contracts with Korean firms during this period also amounted to 25%.
European countries have been funding the American-Israeli war machine without any thought or strategic planning. They have failed to consider the basic question of whether this purchase of US-Israeli weaponry actually secures and increases European defensive capabilities.
Do you remember where you were, when the union of Europe finally began? It wasn't in 1957 or even 1993. It was the day that President Zelenskyy of Ukraine went to the White House and was ambushed live on TV by some mafia thugs.
There is also the shocking cost of our hypocrisy in largely supporting a US-Israeli Genocide – the great mass sacrifice of 20,000 or more Palestinian children.
And we / Who did not / Light the fires or / Wield the knife / Can never be cleansed
“Every war is a war against children.”
It is clear that America has benefited the most from the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, receiving hundreds of billions in weapons orders and military funding.
In addition, some of the responsibility for the conflict must also be laid on America, given that it actively encouraged Ukraine to join NATO despite knowing that the Russian administration had always considered this a red-line – due to the understandings between the superpowers reached during and after the fall of the USSR.
“U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University“
Angela Merkel was also well known for treating the Russian fears of NATO expansion seriously.
That said, this is still not a sufficient justification for the invasion of Ukraine and, if it was the real reason, a peace plan could be established immediately which prevented Ukraine from joining NATO whilst protecting its territorial and political integrity and sovereignty. Putin has shown no desire for such a peace plan, and instead seeks unilateral disarmament of Ukraine, to keep the territory Russia has invaded and for the installment of a Russian-puppet President.
In addition, the other reasons given by Russia for the invasion are Putin’s lies that it was necessary for Russia to do so “to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine”.
In fact, Russia and Israel are the greatest supporters of far-right and neo-Nazi groups across Europe.
The military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about has found one its most stable profitable manifestations in the US-Israel relationship. A marriage made in war-mongering fascist heaven.
The US is the world’s largest arms exporter (42%), and Israel is the eighth-largest (3.1%). Their combined influence on global arms markets is without peer.
In addition to European countries, major purchasers of US weaponry include Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Qatar. India and Germany are also significant buyers of Israeli weapons. The arms exports of the USA and Israel also contribute to militarization in many other regions including the Middle East and South Asia (they are largely agonistic as to who buys the weapons).
Israel is the US’s laboratory for the dark arts: the attack dog of the Middle East and the experts in perfecting murder, torture, misinfo (Hasbara) and the use of cutting edge technology to control, compromise and inflict suffering on people.
Israel operates under a ‘Permanent War Economy’ where military considerations are deeply integrated into its identity and economy, with technologies often tested on Palestinian populations before international marketing.
Finance editor Ed Ongweso on Israel's strategy to weaken Palestinians' ability to resist through the use of technology and water deprivation.
In many ways, geopolitically, Israel must be seen as the 51st State of America.
By February 2022, the total bilateral military assistance from the U.S. to Israel had reached approximately $150 billion (non-inflation-adjusted) since WWII.
Since the conflict in Gaza began in October 2023, the U.S. has spent over $18 billion on military aid to Israel and committed, in an MOU, to spend an additional $20bn by 2028. As with US support for Ukraine, much of this support feeds back to US arms manufacturers. However, a unique feature of the relationship is Israel’s privileged position in being allowed to use U.S. Foreign Military Financing (FMF) for ‘offshore procurement’ – purchasing from Israel’s own defence industry.
The 51st state relationship has enabled Israel to build significant military capabilities to become a genocidal expert in addition to its world leading expertise:
(i) in spyware (frequently used against politicians, lawyers, human rights experts, judges etc) where it also collaborates with Russia as well as far right groups around the world and in Europe; and
Israeli-made Pegasus cyberweapon used in hacking attempts on at least seven journalists and activists in EU
(ii) the use of AI to surveil and kill civilians.
The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.
In addition, US defence contractors openly acknowledge the financial benefits derived from conflicts involving Israel and state that it is “good for business”. The CEO of RTX (formerly Raytheon), America’s largest defence contractor and a major Israeli weapons manufacturer, bluntly declared after the war on Gaza commenced “across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking”.
The companies listed here have provided Israel with weapons and other military equipment used in its attacks on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria since October 2023. *Companies marked with (*) are included in our divestment list .
We should therefore expect a forever war in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank are currently the main victims of this military-industrial complex.
The Israeli military killed, wounded, starved, and forcibly displaced Palestinian civilians in Gaza in 2024, and destroyed their homes, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure at a scale unprecedented in recent history.
However, the people of Europe cannot be complacent, and may soon find that conflict is not contained to Ukraine and our children are next.
Indeed, if the fascists are unopposed or win, once they run out of easy weak targets, we should expect war to be waged against their own people (as Trump’s administration is already showing).
“In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.“
(George Orwell, 1984)
Fascist regimes are cannibalistic. They always eat their own too.
We are the flames We carry the fire
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
(Oppenheimer citing the Bhagavad Gita)
To understand how we got here there are, of course, many complex interacting forces at work. There is the traditional historic analysis – which sees American imperialism within the context of a long line of empires going back before the British all the way to the Romans.
It is true, all countries or civilisations require military power to maintain and defend their territory. The great empires also focus on enlargement (whether by force or agreement). Those that have the power to enforce their views on weaker people and territories will also have the power to determine what is right and wrong, what is lawful and punishable.
We are told that history is written by the victor. Churchill is often attributed with this phrase – though he in fact said:
“I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself”
(Winston Churchill, House of Commons on Jan. 23, 1948)
Even when the laws in place determine such acts are unlawful, misdeeds and immorality are of course capable of being dealt with by ignoring the laws in a culture of immunity and impunity (the Iraq war, Nicaragua, Trump’s sedition etc).
“..Yet law-abiding scholars write: Law is neither wrong nor right, Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times..”
(W. H. Auden, ‘Law Like Love’)
The macro-historical approach is of course useful but, in this article, I want to take a different approach and zoom-in on a specific moment in time. A moment when I believe the US military war machine crossed a rubicon and turned from a (largely) justifiable defence footing to that of a violent worldwide aggressor without compunction. A moment when the baton of imperial cruelty and violence of European civilisations was definitively passed on to the new Europeans of America as the global superpower.
For me, that moment occurred towards the end of WWII. With the unjustified purposeful destruction of the civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The greatest of war crimes, by any other country in any another time.
In analyzing these events, firstly, one should be aware that we must always give a huge discount to any narrative which we find too comforting.
As an experiment, ask a few of your more thoughtful friends what they think about the use of atomic bombs in Japan. I have tried it, nearly everyone repeats to me the historic party lines “it hastened the end of WW11”, “it saved lives”. It soon became clear from such discussions, that none of the people asked had actually looked at this point in history, and yet they seemed remarkable confident with their blithe ethical assessments about the moral rightness of killing civilians with atomic weapons. It truly is a short walk from that position to justifying other atrocities such as Vietnam, Iraq and the Genocide in Gaza.
This is also not a ‘woke’ apology for winning WWII. I simply ask whether the danger is that Nazi’s were so clearly evil, we have never had to come to terms with our own part in the causes of WWII and our own war crimes. A less evil opposition might have forced us to look in the mirror more. We have never wanted to face the self-serving justification for our intentional mass killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
"My God, what have we done?”
(Capt. Robert Lewis,
co-pilot of the Enola Gay)
In addition, we have often used success in WWII to deprecate or forget our own imperial crimes. To avoid facing up to the historical injustices perpetuated by capitalist 'democratic' societies – and to ignore our continuing depredations (e.g. in America against the large population of black people who still did not have equal rights and opportunities after WW11).
“The Second World War conveniently wiped the slate clean for the liberal elite, as if they had had no involvement in countless genocidal projects throughout the era of colonialism.”
(Aurelien Mondon, ‘Really existing liberalism, the bulwark fantasy, and the enabling of reactionary, far right politics‘)
“I have always condemned the use of the atomic bomb against Japan but I could not do anything at all to prevent that fateful decision”
Given the factual and counterfactual difficulties and the scale of intentional civilian suffering, we must be particularly careful when evaluating the ethical justification for events especially if we benefit emotionally from holding those views (writing from the ‘victorious’ side that committed the horrific acts).
Some say that by the time of the bombing the Japanese knew they were defeated, and the Russian intervention was more important than the bombs in ending the war. From this perspective, the bombs were more a show of strength aimed at terrifying the Russians than any attempt to avoid further loss of life.
THE AMBASSADOR HAD just had a long private meeting with President Harry S Truman, in office less than six weeks following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman had told him two extraordinary things: First, if all went well, the United States would soon possess a weapon of awesome and hitherto unknown power.
“Some girls could not close their eyes. Some girls – their lips were all melted with their chins so they could not close [their mouths].”
(Koko Kondo)
These events remind us that, even if we are on the winning side of a war, we must always be skeptical and critical of our leaders and their purported aims and justifications (including post rationalisations as per Sec. of War, Henry Stimson).
Otherwise we are simply asserting that ‘might is right’.
There is good evidence that Pres. Truman was misled about Hiroshima being a military target and base and that he also was not advised of the bombing of Nagasaki. An earlier draft of his press release to be published following the bombing stated:
“The world will note that the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima which is purely a military base. This was because we did not want to destroy the lives of women and children and innocent civilians”.
(Pres. Truman)
After the Hiroshima bombing, and before Truman knows the full extent of civilian casualties, the reference to Hiroshima as a purely military target is edited to indicate that it was not “purely military”. Once he discovered the true nature of Hiroshima (a city with a military base) he ordered a halt to further use of nuclear weapons, saying again that he could not deal with the idea of killing “all those kids.”
A remarkable set of speech drafts from August 6-9th, 1945, shows an evolution in Truman's thinking about the bomb - from an unambiguous good, to a horror that needed to justified.
Truman was consistent about not wanting to use the atomic bomb on civilians whereas his military advisors were not concerned by that suffering. America has changed a lot since WWII, now the Presidents also have no concern about killing women and children.
“Secretary of War Stimson… informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan…the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test..and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.”
(Gen. Eisenhower)
General Eisenhower was in as good a position as nearly anyone to assess whether dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was necessary to bring the war to halt. His position was clear that it was not and he noted Sec. Stimson “was deeply perturbed by my attitude…”:
“my belief [was] that Japan was already defeated … and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid…the use of a weapon whose employment was…no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives…”
(Eisenhower)
Two consecutive US Presidents appear to have been misled or had grave misgivings about the alleged reasons for using the atomic bombs. It is more than striking (it is chilling), that a military establishment man like Eisenhower went on to warn about the dangers of the establishment of a “military-industrial complex” in his last message to the American public.
Farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961; Final TV Talk 1/17/61 (1), Box 38, Speech Series, Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President, 1953-61, Eisenhower Library; National Archives and Records Administration
EnlargeDownload Link Citation: Farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961; Final TV Talk 1/17/61 (1), Box 38, Speech Series, Papers of Dwight D.
“we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence..by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power..will persist.”
(Eisenhower)
The world we live in is precisely the world Eisenhower tried to warn us about, where American might is right and there is serious money made from bombing large parts of the planet and killing millions of men, women and children. It makes little difference whether red or blue figureheads are in the White House.
We have a natural blind spot to our own failings, especially when there is money to be made from mass murder.
I was very disappointed with the film Oppenheimer because it did not close the film with a look at the impact of the atomic bombs on real Japanese civilians. Too much truth for Western audiences to buy presumably. Ethical and artistic cowardice by the director (with serious consequences).
Since WWII, the USA (often with allied support) has maintained military dominance over the world at the cost of terrible suffering for many millions of people in many different countries.
Some will say that this is the cost of a fragile global peace and is an imperial norm, but I fundamentally disagree. Never has there been a more murderous destructive ‘peace’ in the history of the world.
In this same post-war period, even Russia has been in no way nearly as aggressive to other countries as America.
China’s aggression has largely been confined to the destruction of many of its own people between WWII and the 1970s. Russia has also done the same to its own people in the decades after WWII, in addition to horrific destructive wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Ukraine more recently. Is it really any surprise that Russia and America make such good bedfellows with the Trump administration?
You still find apparently intelligent people (who I assume read history books) saying things like: “The United States is the incarnation of enlightenment. Never in history was a hegemon this unselfish”. Yep, keep dreaming that American dream.
Yet no one can advise with any accuracy, even to within a figure of 5 million, how many people have been killed, injured, tortured and displaced in the last 80 years: due to US military aggression, covert operations, overthrown governments, supported dictatorships and the rest of its arsenal of tools used to dominate or extract value from other people.
“the CIA dropped more explosives on Laos than the official air force
dropped on Germany during all of the Second World War“
What is striking is the ignorance of most people in America and Europe about the impact of this military-industrial complex and sociopathy on the rest of the world, presumably because they think it has been good for us and that’s all that matters really.
To take just one, of a hundred examples, look at the appalling treatment of the people of Laos:
I have visited Laos and it was the most beautiful country I have ever been to. It has a strong Buddhist culture and the people are generous and warm-hearted. The USA conducted a secret, unlawful and immoral war against it and has never made reparations for it.
Of course, all dominant imperialist mind-set empires are cruel in the means used for maintaining their position. The question in those societies, is who chooses how cruel and who benefits from that cruelty. A cursory glance at modern history shows the people are lied to continuously, to justify the unlawful and unnecessary use of force and to perpetuate the machines of war.
Read 37 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Facts are and must be the coin of the realm in a democracy. Unfortunately, for citizens in ...
This disconnect between public reasons given for extraordinary violence and the actual motives seem even further apart today than ever. The WMD lies based justification for the Iraq war was the latest pinnacle of this disconnect. Lies that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Currently we see the military and political lie machine in full force in Israel, where the US is fully behind a Genocide of Palestinian civilians who were already living under a cruel and barbaric apartheid regime for decades. I hope we one day we will discover the full extent of Israeli lies used to justify the genocide in Gaza and the destruction and displacement now occurring in the West Bank and Syria.
Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.
In any event, if we are to improve, we must start with a lot more honesty about how we got here, with knowledge of who actually makes decisions that kill or hurt millions of people and what is the quality of information behind those decisions. Like a detective we must start by asking in every military conflict ‘Cui Bono?’ Who benefits?
Also, look what happened to the last US President that started to really preach the language of peace (leaving aside his failings and his own record of aggression):
“the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women”
Kennedy was killed only a few months after making this speech.
Are we to believe entirely coincidentally?
So where do we go from here?
The American war machine created during WWII is out of control. It makes little difference whether a Democratic party or a Republican party is in power (as Obama and Biden showed).
As with America’s economic issues, the issues are much deeper than party politics and go the heart of who actually runs America (as Eisenhower warned). The imperialist mind-set is precisely the opposite mindset to that which we are going to need to solve our global problems collectively.
We must not confuse the non-violence of necessary self-defence with the violence and wage of war of aggression and the military industrial complex.
In WW2, the Americans came to the defence of the allied powers. This time Europe must come to its own defence, and to the defence of the many weaker nations now facing the aggression and rapacity of the new Axis powers of Russia-USA-Israel.
Do you remember where you were, when the union of Europe finally began? It wasn't in 1957 or even 1993. It was the day that President Zelenskyy of Ukraine went to the White House and was ambushed live on TV by some mafia thugs.
In the current necessity for European rearmament with non-US weaponry and technologies, we must never forget the purpose of this rearmament.
It must be intended solely to ensure that we are one of the great powers of the world, and that those great powers are the ones willing to collaborate and cooperate to ensure our planet is hospitable to all life-forms and human civilisation. We must turn away from the imperialist mindset, consign it to history, so that we can collaborate on a planetary basis and use our technologies to make life better for all and ultimately ensure it is viable at all. In the meantime, we work, hope and prey for that day when peace reigns on Earth:
“Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace.”
(Yehuda Amichai)
Let us also never forget the terrible human cost in Japan of our actions.
In Hiroshima alone 70 per cent of all buildings were destroyed and it caused an estimated 140,000 deaths by the end of 1945 (getting close to half of the largely civilian population), along with increased rates of cancer and chronic disease among the survivors.
The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people, and their effects are still being felt today.
Iri and Toshi Maruki are the subject of the documentary ‘Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima‘. They went to Hiroshima after the destruction of the city and tried to help survivors. Visions of charred bodies and the smell of death stayed with them long after.
We lost our uncle to the atomic bomb. Two young nieces were killed. Our younger sister suffered burns, and our father died after six months. Many friends and acquaintances perished. Iri left for Hiroshima on the first train from Tokyo, three days after the bomb was dropped. Toshi followed a few days later.
“They lay dead in heaps along the riverbank, their heads pointing toward the water they had been seeking. Having reached the river, the water remained out of reach below the steep bank, and they died with their thirst unquenched.“
“Parents were forced to abandon children pinned under fallen houses, children abandoned parents, husbands abandoned wives and wives husbands…Still, in the midst of this, many witnessed the miraculous sight of children who survived, held tightly in their dead mothers’ arms.“
In Nagasaki (which was actually a fall back secondary target for the city of Kokura), the plutonium atomic bomb exploded near the Urakami Cathedral killing an estimated 80,000 people within the year (including as many as 10,000 Christians)
10,000 Christians out of 15,000 lost their lives
It is 75 years since the US dropped atomic bombs on the two Japanese cities, leading to WW2's end.
Recommended documentary (including interviews with US servicemen) – White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (HBO).
Statue of Mother and Child in the Storm, by Balon Greyjoy – Own work, CC0, – Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum collects and displays belongings left by the victims, photos, and other materials that convey the horror of that event, supplemented by exhibits that describe Hiroshima before and after the bombing and others that present the current status of the nuclear age.
This is an official website of Nagasaki City for learning about the atomic bomb and creating peace. Information on Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and Peace Park, records of the atomic bombing, and efforts to abolish nuclear weapons and promote peace are introduced.
How to prepare for the fire and the storm
Peter Howitt
