The Goal Is An Endless War

 

Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds. --Arundhati Roy

Random thoughts about the current state of the world while a cat sits on top of my head while I lie awake in bed during the dark hours before dawn. Happy "Independence" Day, USA. 

The Goal Is An Endless War (Not A Successful War)

By C.A. Matthews

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange once said “The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”

Whatever did Assange mean by that? Surely, the goal of warfare is to beat your opponent(s) and achieve the results you wanted when you began the fighting, right? Otherwise, what is the point of war? It can’t simply be about endless death and destruction and if-I-can’t-have-it-neither-can-you, can it?

The endlessness is what really gets to me. Who comes up with the concept of endless war? Only persons who see a need for endless growth and endless chaos would even consider endless war as beneficial—or possibly even necessary—to their side of the conflict.

Endless growth of the economy, endless chaos of competitors, endless hoarding of wealth, endless destruction of the environment and the Earth’s ecology… Hmm, all that sounds oddly familiar.

Could it be it’s capitalists who have behind all this endless warfare in the last hundred+ years? 

 

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This article is the 526th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. 

--H.L. Mencken

Make History—Don’t Repeat It!

by C.A. Matthews

I have to stifle my giggles whenever an acquaintance goes on about how “Trump is the worse president ever! He’s supporting a genocide in Gaza! He’s taking away our freedom of speech! He’s trying to steal Greenland! No other president has ever done such horrible things!”

(Yes, I know that Biden also supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza among other horrendous things, but to these poor dears, Joe Biden is a kindly old man who likes licking ice cream cones and playing with little girls’ hair. He’s some sort of saint apparently in Dem circles. No kidding.)

The reason I want to giggle—actually I want to laugh out loud in their faces—is because it’s just too obvious how well our government’s propaganda works. These people are clueless! Any US history classes they may have taken in high school or college were woefully inadequate. Their instructors obviously never went into depth on certain topics, and the textbooks used in those classes didn’t waste much print on those topics, either.

It’s as if American powers-that-be don’t want to air our dirty laundry to the working masses. If American workers really learned about their country’s actual history, they might get ideas. Bad ideas. Ideas and examples of how Americans stood up against oppression, intolerance, bigotry, and outright theft of land, labor, and resources in the past.

In A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn doesn’t beat around the bush. He tells things straightforwardly, without the narrative spin that always seems to make the wealthy, white, occasionally slave-owning male elites the heroes in your average US history book. From now on, whenever somebody says a silly thing like Trump is the “only president to support a genocide,” I will point them to Zinn’s classic tome.

Here’s what Zinn has to say in the seventh chapter of A People’s History about one particular incident of genocide that was not only supported by the United States government, it was actually committed by the US government against several groups of indigenous people...

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This article is the 513th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years.

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or at Buy Me a Coffee or at Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

 

 

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. —Martin Luther

What Are You Thankful For?

words and holiday parade photos by C.A. Matthews

About this time of the year in the good ol’ USA there comes a national holiday that pretty much is celebrated by all Americans (except for Jehovah Witnesses, of course). It seems a benign enough harvest-time holiday with no overtly religious overtones, but with some covertly religious ones for those who partake. Americans of all persuasions and socio-economic backgrounds celebrate this holiday, with or without help from their local food pantry or soup kitchen.

This national holiday is called “Thanksgiving.” It was supposedly the brain child of English colonists who invited the local Native Americans over for a grand meal in thanks for the Native’s assistance they unwittingly gave their white invaders. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of the Native Americans, the English colonists would have completely died off their first winter at the Massachusetts Bay colony. Later, the Natives would come to regret their good manners when the Europeans stole their land and passed small pox on to them, but white historians conveniently leave out all those unpleasant details.

Instead, historians have chosen to emphasize the happier aspects of the Thanksgiving feast—good food, togetherness, neighborliness, and sharing leftovers with anyone who’ll take them off your hands so you’re not stuck eating turkey for the next three weeks. These aspects make it a pretty nifty national holiday to celebrate in the short, dark, and damp days of late autumn in North America—as others called “Canucks” also celebrate this harvest festival about a month earlier. (Apparently they forget the calendar includes months after October.) Thus, border families of mix American-Canadian heritage have the chance to eat two Thanksgiving dinners, with the added bonus of putting on enough blubber to survive the arctic onslaught of the coming winter.

While everyone sits around the dinner table feasting on the traditional meal of roast turkey and stuffing—which is no where close to the supposed original Thanksgiving feast of venison and seafood—guests are supposed to share what they are thankful for in their lives. This is when the problems begin.

In presidential election years, Americans with big mouths not filled with mashed potatoes and gravy might make mention of how thankful they are their favorite presidential candidate won the recent contest. Others, who are not feeling quite so happy about this outcome, will then attack the sanity of the first party and call them some rather nasty names. The atmosphere of Thanksgiving thankfulness will immediately evaporate. Thrown bread rolls and tossed turkey drumsticks can be turned into semi-lethal weapons if calmer heads don’t quickly prevail.

This is why on pain of having a pumpkin pie topped with whipped cream thrown in their face that most Americans do their best not to bring up politics at Thanksgiving. No one is more thankful than the hosts of the traditional meal that politics have been left where they belong—in the trash can out back—before entering their home. With dinner table small talk limited to sports, the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and how everyone will go about losing all the weight they’ll gain from gorging on turkey and several desserts, the day proceeds much more smoothly than things did ultimately between the Native Americans and the English colonists.

So, here it is another US presidential election year and Thanksgiving approaches. This begs the question for Americans and Non-Americans alike: What are you thankful for?

 

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