Hardly a day can go by without calls for the U.S. to militarily “do something” in some foreign land. Whether it be Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Syria, etc…it’s a never ending carousel. And let’s not forget that if there’s ever a lull, some North Korean alarm will always pop into the news cycle to fill the void.
MotherJones published the above map showing the locations of U.S. Special Forces all across the planet.
With U.S. Special Forces sprawled out over half of the Earth, is it any wonder that the U.S. always seems to be involved in every flare up that occurs? Back here at home, we’ve reached the point where a professional sporting event cannot occur without some, and often multiple, homages to “the troops”. Football-field sized flags are constantly unraveled with fighter jets screaming overhead.
Misguided beliefs about troops “protecting freedoms around the world” must always be fresh in every American citizen’s mind. It’s the fuel that fires the Empire.
Why must the homages at sporting events, and in many other places in American life, always be towards war? Why isn’t the national anthem sung by a peaceful and productive member of society, like a nurse, optician, or butcher?
Why isn’t peace extolled, yearned for, and exalted?
Well, if the goal of government is the creation of what we see in the map above, then peace is its antithesis. It has to be one or the other. The U.S. government has, for the last 100 years, chosen to unconstitutionally become the policeman of the world. Peace has become the enemy.
We can go back to the 1950’s, when General Douglas MacArthur spoke about the mindset of war hysteria and the avoidance of peace:
Indeed, it is a part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusory foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.
Sadly, those words were spoken about 70 years ago, and still ring true today. Do you think that John McCain has a “greater fear of peace” than he does of war? How about Lindsey Graham? How about every President in recent (and even not-so-recent) memory?
It’s not as if the U.S. hasn’t had opportunities to embrace genuine peace. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a grand opportunity. Sadly, it was squandered away.
Recall Gen. MacArthur’s words of a “greater fear of peace” when you read the following from Jan. 29, 2000 by RPI Advisory Board Member, Lew Rockwell:
I recall noticing a distinct lack of jubilance on the part of the ruling class when it woke up one day and found its reliable enemy (Soviet Union) had ceased to exist. Since then, the ruling class has engaged in a series of attempts to find some effective substitute for the Soviets, an enemy so formidable that it suppressed the libertarian impulse and inspired the old civic loyalties that the ruling class has come to know and love. But no matter what they have dreamed up…nothing quite works like it used to.
Tragically, a little over a year after Rockwell’s words were spoken, on 9/11/01, “an enemy so formidable that it suppressed the libertarian impulse” appeared.
One month later, neocon Dick Cheney would say:
one of the things that’s changed so much since September 11th is the extent to which people do trust the government, big shift, and value it, and have higher expectations for what we can do.
The rest is history, as they say, and here we are with much less liberty than any previous generation of Americans .
The time has come to break this vicious cycle…to smash the “incessant propaganda of fear”. It’s time to speak out for a foreign policy of peace, to honor those who peacefully serve their neighbors, and who tolerate and do not aggress against those who are different.
If a critical mass change their minds, perhaps future Americans can look back at the map shown above in disbelief; wondering why their ancestors would ever choose to go so far off track. If they are to inhabit a peace-seeking America, the ideas for such a place must be planted today.
