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In her new piece, TomDispatch regular Kelly Denton-Borhaug discusses the eerie psychology of America's elected representatives as they continue, using ever more staggering numbers of taxpayer dollars, to plant the seeds of future violence around the planet. And what a time for it when, from Ukraine to Asia, Syria to Africa, this country continues to play tag with war in such a big-time way.
To use Denton-Borhaug's imagery, how we've sown those seeds in this century is a truly grim tale. I mean, just look at Afghanistan. Yes, 20 years after the rash invasion of that country in response to the acts of 19 mostly Saudi hijackers, we're officially done with our disastrous war there. (Okay, okay, the Biden administration and the U.S. military have continued to mutter about "over-the-horizon" air strikes there, so who knows.) But the "seeds" we planted over those two long decades of war-making have, by now, turned into nightmare forests - if you happen to be an Afghan, anyway. Our "nation-building" effort in their country quite literally left it as perhaps the most calamitous wreck on Planet Earth. Then, having finally dumped it on the trash heap of history, the Biden administration froze at least $7 billion in Afghan funds so its central bank couldn't access them for use in that desperate, devastated land.
And just the other day, Joe Biden (undoubtedly fearing pressure from Republicans for being "soft" on the Taliban) decided that only $3.5 billion of those funds should ever go to actual Afghans, while the rest should go to the survivors of those who died in the 9/11 attacks. No matter that a million or more innocent children may die of starvation in Afghanistan over this winter in a land where paychecks, bank accounts, and food have, for so many, become things of the past. As Chris Gelardi pointed out recently in the Nation, "Whatever recompense those American families of Taliban victims - who number less than one hundredth of 1 percent of the number of Afghans depending on the frozen funds - deserve, robbing millions of people to such an end would be a mockery of whatever notion of justice to which Biden is appealing." Our Afghan War has, in other words, ended in an act of theft, while the seeds we're continuing to plant are going to come to fruition in what's turning into a hell on earth.
In essence, the U.S., it seems, continues to ensure that crops of death will still be harvested there. With that in mind, consider Denton-Borhaug's thoughts on the ways in which this country has sacralized its version of global war and what the world is indeed likely to "reap" from it. Tom
The Sacralization of War, American-Style
Reaping What We Sow
Lately, random verses from the Bible have been popping into my mind unbidden, like St. Paul's famous line from Galatians, "A person reaps what they sow." The words sprang into my consciousness when I learned of the death of the 95-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who helped encourage Martin Luther King to declare his opposition to the Vietnam War so long ago.
For decades, I've been moved by Hanh's witness and his writings, which shined such a light on the destructive consequences of our country's militarism. As he said, "To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come."
We reap what we sow. It seems so obvious, but in these endless years of U.S. war-making across the globe, this simple truth seems to have escaped most Americans.
Why? It's not as if no one's noticed that the U.S. has, in so many ways, become a more violent society. Many public intellectuals (progressives and conservatives, too) are wringing their hands regarding the dangerous uptick in social violence of all sorts in this country, including voluminous gun purchases, distrust and anger, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, rising deaths from avoidable causes like refusing to be vaccinated - and the list only goes on.
But a thinker like Thich Nhat Hanh stands out from the rest. His insights differed from the norm because he saw so clearly how the seeds of violence in war-culture sprout into a kind of invasive kudzu vine capable of spreading across every aspect of life, while crushing, asphyxiating, and killing so much along the way.
War-Culture as an Invasive, Destructive Vine
I wonder why the media haven't more thoroughly investigated the psychology that enables our congressional representatives almost unanimously to approve outlandish, ever larger military budgets, no matter how poorly the U.S. military may be doing in the world. The violent infrastructure of this nation is like a noxious vine with destructive results for us all, but few connect this to other rising forms of violence in the U.S. For instance, our leaders couldn't find it in their hearts to approve an extension of the child tax credit, even though it played a role in lifting 4.6 million children out of poverty. One study even showed how such cash stipends and tax credits, when provided to poor mothers with babies in the first year of life, resulted in changed brain activity in their children and improved cognitive development.
But West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (along with all the Senate Republicans) refused to support continuing that program, while, like almost every one of those Republicans and most of his Democratic colleagues, he had no problem whatsoever approving an astronomical defense budget, even in the wake of the Afghan withdrawal. Parents, he insisted, should have to work to receive any assistance for their children, but the military doesn't have to work for that $738 billion dollars to be approved. There's no requirement for a financial accounting or any demand for evidence that the U.S. military solves "national security" problems of any sort.
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