Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
― Dwight D. Eisenhower
Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics.
Earlier this year, the Sisters of St. Brigid invited me to speak at their Feile Bride celebration in Kildare, Ireland. The theme of the gathering was: “Allow the Voice of the Suffering to Speak.”
All it takes for a society to express fear, paranoia, confusion, and a sort of mad country (riffing on mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy) mental disease is a toxic brew of narcissism, propaganda, amnesia, planned and perceived obsolescence and a transnational economic barbarism against the collective masses, and we end up here:
So I wish you well, Sarge, give ’em Hell!
Kill me a thousand or so
And if you ever get a war without blood and gore
I’ll be the first to go
— Phil Ochs, The Draft Dodger’s Rag
Guess that makes me a proud bitch.
— Teresa Kaepernick, Colin Kaepernick’s mother’s in response to Trump’s comment about her son
While war is perceived by many as an inherent institution of the nation state, few people fail to recognize and regret the horror, death, destruction, suffering, and misery it inflicts. Another consequence of war, however, is less often considered, though it is in the long run even more damaging to the cause of human well-being. That is the waste of resources in preparing for, and waging, war that could otherwise be used to help meet the physical, economic, social, and cultural needs of ordinary people.
Welcome to our fifth episode of Probable Cause. For this episode we will pick up where we left off last time, and further our discussion of our current education system. We begin by addressing whether the current system naturally evolved (or devolved) into its current state, or was created by a well-calculated design. We will look into the ultimate beneficiaries of our public education system, and pose and answer questions such as: How does our current education system directly benefit the war industry?
Freelance writer Brandon Martinez debunks the myth of Canada’s benevolence vis-a-vis foreign policy and the “good war” legend of World War II.
The post Brandon Martinez on Canadian “Remembrance Day” Jingoism appeared first on Intifada Palestine.
