Our War Mongering Country

In the late 1960s and into the ’70s, radical baby boomers on campuses across the country protested the U.S. involvement with the war in Vietnam.  The civil demonstrations were known for the peace symbol and the musical chant from John Lennon’s famous “Let peace have a chance.”  Although most protestors were inclined to the Marxist ideology, there is one indisputable fact:  It was the last time many American citizens protested against the United States’ involvement in wars.

America’s participation in major wars for the past 150 years is worth noting: World Wars 1 &2, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, The Iraq War, The Afghanistan War, and now, a proxy in the Ukraine and Russia War.

On the evening of Superbowl Sunday, the Senate passed a foreign aid bill authorizing 60 billion dollars to go to Ukraine, over and above the billions already sent.  The insane amount of money sent to a country that doesn’t have a chance to win only prolongs the misery and assured deaths of many more people.

Included in the bill was a hefty amount going to Gaza for humanitarian aid. House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled that the Senate bill would not be voted on in the House. We can thank the House Republicans for showing some restraint, but that is hardly the point. When 2/3 of the Senate vote to keep funding Ukraine ad infinitum, then there can be no other conclusion that the Military Industrial Complex is enriching a lot of people. This is another tragic case where money is more important than human life.  

The constant drumbeat of the need to fund Ukraine keeps the conflict alive. Even Republicans like Mike Pence, Niki Haley, and the twenty-two Republican Senators who voted for the funding are advocating war instead of peace. The flow of borrowed money from the U.S. to Ukraine guarantees Zelensky will have little reason to come to the negotiation table and engage in peace talks. The war-mongering foreign policies of the U.S. will inevitably cause more deaths and injuries while filling the bank accounts of oligarchs here and abroad.

The United States, with its permanent Military Industrial Complex, has created a new economic category for the past century and a half. It is not capitalism or socialism or communism, but rather an economy by which those in the war industry profit not by creating products and services but by lawfully taking taxpayers’ money to enrich companies and those associated with them. This is exactly what happened in the last 150 years and continues today.

Precisely because the money flows and those being enriched are isolated from the tragic results of war, the carnage will continue unless there is pushback from the taxpayers and moral citizens.  The country needs the hippies again to protest our involvement in Ukraine. Our leaders are tone-deaf to the wishes of their constituents who oppose additional funding to Ukraine.

The disconnect between the Industrial Military Complex and the voting public could not have been made more explicit by Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina. “Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins.”  

No one needs to be specially briefed about the money we need to borrow to send to Ukraine, which only prohibits any talk of peace in the near future.

No one needs to be privy to classified information suggesting Putin’s military machine is so powerful, for if it was, he would already take over Ukraine. 

No one needs to hear from the corrupt foreign intelligence agencies another batch of lies, “Russia, Russia, Russia.”  

We do not need to be specially informed that the country is going bankrupt, supporting Zelensky and his fellow goons (millionaires & billionaire oligarchs), so they can stay in power.

 And no one needs to hear from a president who filled his bank account with money from Ukraine to tell us it is criminal not to support the money laundering capital of the world.

We as a nation must stop thinking armed conflict is the only means of diplomacy. On the hands of the U.S. government and her leaders is an awful amount of blood. No matter who advocates it whether Democratic or Republican, the U.S. must stop its war-mongering ways and work out international problems another way.  

Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine are long overdue. Call or write your representatives and tell them to stop funding Ukraine.