Tag: war what is it good for

Guest Post by Jeff Deist

I recently saw the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, an account by English soldiers of their experiences in the Great War of 1914-1918. Culled from hundreds of hours of colorized actual wartime footage, it’s a beautiful and heart wrenching film. It’s also a superb antiwar film, simply through its graphic and accurate depiction of mass death and casualties across blood-soaked European battlefields.

Refreshingly, the film relies solely on audio transcripts from about 200 English soldiers who fought in World War I. There is no script, and no narration. The viewer simply hears the gravelly, aged voices of the soldiers themselves, never identified by name or rank. They are anonymous, but judging by the towns from which they hailed and the farm or factory jobs they left, most were enlisted men.

Continue reading “‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ is a Superb Antiwar Film”

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

So we’re going to do this all over again? Well, not if I can help it. Not that I have much hope that I can, mind you. As the bastions of war chime on, my voice, like so many others, will be drowned out. The military industrial complex knows how to do propaganda, better than anyone. But I’ll try.

Vietnam gave the US its biggest ever defeat, both militarily and morally, and yet mere years after its deeply humiliating withdrawal was put into action, the country was back at sending its promising young boys and girls not to its school systems, but to far away battle fields to be crippled, traumatized and slaughtered.

I know, I know, the UK and France do that too, but few other places do. Russia today uses its troops to defend its territory, China has yet to reveal its intentions. But the intentions of the US have been known ever since WWII ended.

In 1956, president Eisenhower, himself a longtime military man, warned the country upon taking leave of office, of the military-industrial complex that was threatening to take over its government. Less than 10 years later, that’s exactly what the complex did, and it’s never looked back.

Continue reading “War And Young Americans”

In war, truth is the first casualty.

~Aeschylus

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

~Aesop

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

~Aldous Huxley

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

~Barbara Tuchman

Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

~Benjamin Franklin

Terror is a tactic. We can not wage “war” against a tactic.

~Ron Paul

The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.

~Ron Paul

“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

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

G.K. Chesterton

“When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Continue reading “QUOTES OF THE DAY”

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

For sixteen years the US has been at war in the Middle East and North Africa, running up trillions of dollars in expenses, committing untold war crimes, and sending millions of war refugees to burden Europe, while simultaneously claiming that Washington cannot afford its Social Security and Medicare obligations or to fund a national health service like every civilized country has.

Considering the enormous social needs that cannot be met because of the massive cost of these orchestrated wars, one would think that the American people would be asking questions about the purpose of these wars. What is being achieved at such enormous costs? Domestic needs are neglected so that the military/security complex can grow fat on war profits.

Continue reading “Washington Has Been At War For 16 Years: Why?”