Our "corrections" industry is not educating prisoners, but it is educating the rest of us to accept mass incarceration. The prison and war industries are promoted as jobs programs, as life-giving, as pro-peace. But we are perfectly capable of a coherent worldview in which that sort of nonsense sounds like nonsense. We should strive to develop that perspective.
Nuclear weapons are sometimes imagined as keeping us safe, but Day and Sartre and Albert Camus responded with appropriate horror immediately upon their creation. It turns out that horror is an appropriate response to all sorts of developments announced as progress or not announced at all. We are filling the skies with killer drones these days and suffering a corresponding deficit of horror.
What new horrors await us? This book warns of some of what we can expect: resource crises, climate catastrophe, mass immigration, refugees, and minority societies existing within hostile larger ones. These problems have solutions and means of prevention, and we should be thinking our way through them now.
Our politicians are largely ignoring Syrian refugees at the moment in which I write, while supporting violence in Syria for the supposed benefit of Syrians. If we had a better understanding of refugee crises in the world, could they get away with this?
We cannot know what all the problems will be. The unknown unknowns await us. But we can know for certain that the unknown knowns--the products of human thought that some people in places of power choose to avoid awareness of--will dominate many a future Donald Rumsfeld.
War is not only the product of the idea of war. It is a product of irrational madness and willful ignorance. It does not hold up on its own terms. The cakewalks are never cakewalks. The liberated are never grateful. The resources slip through the fingers of the plunderers. The bombs persistently fail to generate popular democracies. The freedoms we kill for are inevitably sacrificed to support the killing.
David Swanson Charlottesville, Virginia
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