It's Not a Pretty Picture

We have to stop judging war by the one "good one" - WW2.

For most of our wars, our dead and maimed soldiers have suffered and died to promote the private interests of wealth and expansion (Mexico 1848; Philippines 1899-1902) to keep the natural resources flowing into our nation, to manufacture cheap goods to sell to them back to the nations we've defeated, fundamentally deindustrializing those nations and forcing them into dependence. 

For what purpose?

Dear Readers, it's not a pretty picture ... and to be blunt, to be frank, our national cemeteries, beautiful as they are, filled with the remains of the young and lovingly tended, are mostly the province of American industry - steel, coal, oil, and agriculture, and our sense of entitlement, that we can have what we want, and what we want, we'll get.

Remember, too, that WW2 was fought by the citizen-soldier, and when it was over, they returned to civilian life, to carry on and build this nation.

They were not the neo-con "warriors" we've created ... an army of poor hoping for a chance, repeatedly deployed to hell again and again, led by a strange and bizarre Southern Elite Warrior Class, who upon leaving the armed forces often enter law enforcement to carry on their colonializing effort.

Am I being unduly harsh?

Perhaps.

But better to be harsh in quest of the real story, the truth that liberates, rather than maudlin myths, myths created by Big Biz and power-drunk politicians and evangelical preachers of American First.