War Is The Worst Thing In The World

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

War is the worst thing in the world. It is the single craziest behavior exhibited by humans. The most destructive. The most traumatizing. The least sustainable. The least conducive to human thriving.

All the things we fear most become the norm in a land ravaged by war. Death. Pain. Suffering. Rape. Chaos. Uncertainty. Losing loved ones. Losing homes. Losing limbs. Living in terror. Being attacked. Being brain damaged. Being faced with impossible choices. All the things we frighten ourselves with by watching horror movies become a reality from which there is no escape.

War creates a waking nightmare which any sensible person would want to avoid except in the direst necessity. And yet we are ruled by people who actively seek it out. Who will lie and manipulate to make wars happen. Who will smear and slander anyone who resists in the name of peace. Who will actively fight against every healthy impulse in everybody in their society to push their war agenda forward.

They always tell us the new war they want us to fight is about self-defense, or about liberating an oppressed population from a tyrannical dictatorship, or about preventing terrorism, or about spreading freedom and democracy. Usually they tell us it’s about all of these things.

But it never is. They are always lying. Always. They are pushing human beings into the worst circumstances they could possibly experience here on earth for no other reason than power and profit. To advance the hegemonic agendas of empire managers and to fill the coffers of war profiteers. That’s all it ever is. Always, always, always.

They say whatever they need to say and move whatever chess pieces they need to move to get their war, and then they send a bunch of poor suckers to go fight in it, lying to them that they are doing something noble and heroic.

They ship them off to a foreign land, and then they are trapped. They can’t flee into the wilderness because they don’t know how to survive and have no way of getting home. They can’t ask the locals for help because the locals are their victims. They have no choice but to either fight and kill people who have never wronged them, or lay down their arms and be caged like animals.

If they choose to fight, the best case scenario is that they spend the rest of their lives knowing that they killed other human beings who wanted to live just as much as themselves, and who had just as much right to. All because some people who already had far too much power wanted a little bit more.

It’s about the most insane and backwards thing you could possibly imagine. The most powerful individuals in our world are people who actively push for the absolute worst outcomes that could possibly happen. It’s the exact opposite of the way things should be.

Yet we are told it’s normal. We are trained to believe this is just the reality we live in which we should expect and accept, first by our parents and teachers, and then by our news media and by Hollywood. War is aggressively normalized by pundits, propagandists and politicians, and enthusiastically glorified in movies and documentaries.

Those who were forced or duped into fighting in these insane arrangements of mass-scale violence are framed as heroes, and anyone who disagrees with what they were sent to do is framed as disrespectful and ungrateful. Those who push for peace are framed as treasonous freaks who must surely have covert loyalties toward whatever government the empire is trying to target this time around. Those who suggest that there might be some solution apart from war are dismissed as infantile dreamers.

And once the war has started, it is almost impossible to stop. The entire political/media class treats the war as the new normal, and any suggestion that it’s time to wrap things up is regarded as outlandish and suspicious. It’s never time to end the war, because this or that objective has not yet been achieved, or because this or that faction might come into power if troops are pulled out, or because this or that disempowered group might suffer without our military there to protect them.

Ending a war is as difficult as beginning a war is easy. All the institutions which lined up perfectly to help get the ball rolling toward war suddenly transform into giant tar pits of inertia when it comes to ending the conflict. The warmakers say the war must continue for this or that reason, the politicians back the warmakers, the media back the politicians, and the person saying it’s time to end the madness is left standing there looking like they’re the crazy ones.

But they’re not the crazy ones. The ones pushing us toward war are crazy. This whole system is crazy. This whole civilization.

The ones resisting the push toward war are the ones fighting for sanity. They’re the ones who are trying to reverse the tide of madness and drag us into a healthy world.

If this is you, do not falter. Do not let the warmongers shout you down or shut you up. You are right, and they are wrong. Let your voice thunder with confidence. Let nothing cause you to waver.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Don’t let anyone trick you into doubting what you know to be true.

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