Viet Nam

“But what of the price of peace?” asked Jesuit priest and war resister Daniel Berrigan, writing from federal prison in 1969, doing time for his part in the destruction of draft records. “I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder.

Now that the corona virus is making its rounds it seems a good time to illustrate the great divide between calamities’ effects on the filthy rich (aka the power elite) and the rest of humanity. With perhaps one exception to be identified near the end of this piece, the difference has endured down through history because the worse aspects of human nature never seem to change.

UK protest against iraq war February 15, 2003. (Credit: Stop the War Coalition)
February 15 marks the day, 17 years ago, when global demonstrations against the pending Iraq invasion were so massive that the New York Times called world public opinion “the second superpower.” But the U.S. ignored it and invaded Iraq anyway. So what has become of the momentous hopes of that day?

As an American, one can reasonably ask: “What’s happened during the last hundred years, or 36,500 days?”
Presidentially speaking, America’s gone from a pedantic, virulently anti-Communist Woodrow Wilson to a bombastic, virulently anti-Islamic Donald Trump.  Coincidentally, Wilson was the most recent U.S. president to authorize an invasion of Mexico (March 15,1916), while Trump’s obsession with “our Southern border” has been more than well-documented.

I heard a rumor that the poles have melted on Mars. Could this be in anticipation of US plans to colonise the planet?

Ruinous and deadly wars throughout history should have given people everywhere down through the ages cause and pause for thinking about what has happened and why it has happened. While many people presumably have and continue to do just that, what they know and understand is usually controlled by their nation’s power elite. That is never more the case than in America from its beginning and continuing.

After years of teaching school and university, observing with dismay — to put it mildly — the institutional promotion of illiteracy and communicative incompetence, under the pretext that the soft prisons which are maintained for the incarceration and indoctrination of children are there to promote their personalities and get them through examinations so that they can replace their automaton parents, it took enormous digestive discipline to withstand the barrage of the past few days.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
— from Shakespeare’s Macbeth