One hundred years ago today, an armistice was signed to end the War to End All Wars. Unaware, the troops went right on killing, raping, and plundering. But the Great War led to an up-wising, as people the world over figured out that they had been snookered into a murderous, devastating, tragic and pointless world war. Numerous bills limiting war profits were introduced and narrowly defeated, and in 1934, Congress passed the Vinson-Trammell Act, which capped some war profits at 10%. In 1928, the US led the world in outlawing all future war, with the Kellogg-Briand Pact. This treaty remains in force today, and all acts of war are criminal, by US law and by international law.
After decades of lending money and supplying technology to Hitler, FDR taunted the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, and had his excuse for drawing the US once again into a World War. Temptation to profit from Nazism had finally created a situation in which war could be put forward as the only option.
The myth of a global communist plot was used to drag the American public into pointless, horrific wars in Korea and Vietnam. After Vietnam, the American public was once again energized and passionately dedicated to peace, but a decade later Reagan was once again slick-talking the American people into sanctioned murder and plunder, this time invoking the Existential Threat to our Republic that came from the political choices made by people on the 15-mile-long Caribbean isle of Grenada.
The people have never demanded war of their government. There has never been a popular war. Every war has been justified with lies and authoritarian coercion. Hence the rise of war in the 21st Century has been heralded by a suppression of democratic rule. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine all warned us that the Constitution was no lasting guarantee that We the People would control our government. It is demanded of every generation that we rein in our own government. Electoral politics today offers us no candidates for peace--even Sanders would not call out the American military machines for the criminal enterprise it has become. (Jill Stein did that, but she was denied a seat at the table and a place in the debates.)
Hence it is our job to cultivate peace within our own hearts, to meditate on peace and visualize a peaceful future, to practice non-violence in our every interaction with humans and with nature, to engage in acts of protest and non-violence as necessary to end the perennial holocaust.
-- Josh Mitteldorf
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