Ending Western Warmongering Should Be Our Number One Priority
First and foremost the west needs to stop murdering people. Ending western warmongering should take priority over every other societal concern, in the same way your husband being a serial killer would be a more urgent concern than his refusal to wash dishes.
It’s a sign of a deep sickness how much more political attention is given to domestic policy in our society than the fact that our governments are butchering human beings on other continents. This is not to say that those domestic policy issues are not important; it is only to say that they aren’t as horrifyingly urgent as the way imperial core nations are actively participating in actual mass murder.
Healthcare? Very important. Immigrants’ rights? Very important. Social justice and equality? Very important. But imagine if you lived in a place where western-made bombs were tearing your family and neighbors to shreds and then catching sight of a western social media post about the supreme importance of LGBTQ issues or ending discrimination against neurodivergent people. Just pause and put yourself in those shoes for a minute.
Again and again and again thrice over, I am not saying that those issues do not matter. I’m just saying that ending the mass murder should feel like a more urgent concern. I don’t think this should be controversial.
In no other area of our society do we have trouble making this distinction. If a mass shooting kills twenty people in your country, that’s going to receive more attention than all the other injustices and abuses that happened in your nation on that day. The murder of a seventy year-old woman is going to be far more traumatic and significant for her community than if the same seventy year-old woman died of lung cancer. You would not continue your discussion about intersectional feminism at the restaurant if you saw someone being strangled to death at the table across the room.
When it happens near us, to people who look like us and live like us and speak the same language as us, we have no problem understanding that murder is an urgent problem and preventing it is a foremost concern for our society. But when our own governments are involved in the murder of people with darker skin, speaking different languages, practicing different religions and living in different cultures, we’re able to compartmentalize away from the urgency of the situation.
This says terrible things about us as a civilization. We’re no different than the wife of a serial killer who ignores the bodies being buried in the backyard because she’s more worried about what his online gambling addiction is costing the family. We’re disconnecting ourselves from something precious and important within us in order to psychologically dissociate from the crimes of the empire in the way that we do.
This hurts our fellow human beings, but it hurts us too. We’re doing something ugly to our insides when we twist ourselves into knots to avoid facing the cold hard reality of western military slaughter. It warps us as people. It profoundly impacts the way we experience life. It scratches the lenses of our perceptual filters. How could it not?
All these wars and genocidal atrocities are an invitation to reclaim a sacred part of ourselves by treating them with the urgency they deserve. There’s no way to live an authentic life and move into a truth-based relationship with reality without doing so.
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Feature image by Marine Corps Sgt. Trent A. Henry via US Department of War.
"It’s a sign of a deep sickness how much more political attention is given to domestic policy in our society than the fact that our governments are butchering human beings on other continents."
It's even sadder and sicker that so much attention is given to celebrities and senseless materialistic pursuits. For example, the recent Met Gala. Every time I landed on a news page, there were photos and articles about the useless people wearing overpriced fashion (some of it downright stupid and ugly). No mention of what's happening in Gaza or Lebanon or even Iran. Just stupid celebrities doing overpriced stupid things. The West has sold its soul to the zionist mass murderers and we're not better than they are.
In his book Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire, the political scientist David Michael Smith calculates that the US has been responsible or shared responsibility for the death of 54 million people between 1945 and 2020. Add in domestic social killing and move the time back to the founding of the American Empire in 1776 and the body count climbs to 300 million. In his 2013 book America’s Deadliest Export, William Blum reported that the United States after World War II: worked to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments; interfered in elections held by 30 sovereign nations; tried to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders; bombed more than 30 nations; and tried to suppress nationalist, leftist, and populist movements in at least 20 nations. (These numbers need to be updated for the last three years of the Obama administration and the Trump and Biden presidencies to include, among other things, US funding and protection of Israel’s 2023-20?? genocide in Gaza, Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s sovereign elected president, and Trump’s reckless and failing fiasco of a war on Iran.) The United States is the only country to have attacked human beings (unnecessarily) with nuclear weapons (twice) and has brought the world remarkably close to nuclear annihilation on multiple occasions. It is the clear leader in the global march to societal collapse if not human extinction via climate collapse, ecocide (broadly understood), nuclear proliferation, pandemicide, and artificial intelligence