Tag Archives: antiwar politics

Everyone’s Anti-War Until The War Propaganda Starts, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on April 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

One day the U.S. is filled with people who couldn’t write a coherent sentence about Ukraine or find it on a map, and a week later they’re waiving Ukraine’s blue and gold, putting up the emojis, and hating Russia because politicians of both persuasions told them to. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout and waving the flags the flags they’ve been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.

Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked.

This is because the theory of being anti-war is very different from the practice. In theory people are just opposed to the idea of exploding other people for no good reason. In practice they’re always hit with a very intense barrage of media messaging giving them what look like very good reasons why those people need exploding.

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Posted in Governments, Media, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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In An Insane World, Revolution Is The Moderate Position, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on December 7, 2020 | 1 comment

When your choice becomes slavery and misery or revolution, the latter becomes an attractive option. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose mass murder for profit and power.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the globe-spanning power alliance that is perpetrating most of that mass murder on the world stage today.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of secretive government agencies which have extensive histories of committing horrific crimes.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to say that everyone ought to have a basic standard of living instead of being deprived of food, shelter and medicine if they have the wrong imaginary numbers in their bank account.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of a small class of elites who use their vast fortunes to manipulate our entire society toward their advantage.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want plutocrats and government agencies to stop deliberately manipulating people’s minds using mass media propaganda.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want everyone to have an equal chance of getting their voice heard in our information ecosystem instead of a few select power-serving lackeys.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want a society that is ruled by the many for the benefit of the many instead of one that is run by the few for the benefit of the few.

It is very normal, sane and healthy to want a world where everyone has what they need to live, where everyone is free to do, say and think whatever they like as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else, and where nobody is being murdered by powerful governments. This is a very basic, intuitive, common sense desire to have for yourself and for your fellow human beings; it’s wanting for your society what you want for yourself.

Yet people who promote policies which are aimed at creating this kind of world are consistently marginalized and dismissed as radicals and extremists. It’s okay to say you oppose war in principle, but if you oppose any specific acts of warmongering being perpetrated by your government you’ll get labeled a Russian asset, a dictator apologist and all sorts of other pejorative labels which exist solely to justify keeping you off of mainstream platforms. It’s okay to think we should live in peaceful collaboration with each other and our ecosystem, but if you promote specific policies to make that happen you’re an evil commie, a class warrior and a moonbat in the same way.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, Insurrection, Politics, Propaganda, War

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End the Wars, Win the Antiwar Vote, by Peter Certo

Posted on November 28, 2019 | Leave a comment

Many of Trump’s voters voted for him because he questioned the US government’s perm-wars and war policy. Trump hasn’t started any new wars, but he also hasn’t ended any of the old ones. So the antiwar vote is still out there, waiting to be harvested. From Peter Certo at antiwar.com:

Hard data shows ending our wars would be smart politics – and the first step toward repairing a moral calamity.

Like anyone else who was around that day, I can tell you exactly where I was on 9/11.

I was a Catholic school eighth grader, fresh off my 14th birthday. The school day lurched along for a while, but eventually we dropped the pretense of carrying on. Teachers ushered us into the adjoining church for a prayer service, then sent us home early.

Later on, in the car with my dad, we heard what sounded like an explosion – a sonic boom from the nearby air base. My dad pulled over alongside other panicked drivers, all of us scanning the sky. In our agitated state, we genuinely believed that our little corner of Ohio might be attacked, too.

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Posted in Government, Military, Politics, War

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The Great Myth of the Anti-War Left Exposed, by Andrew Moran

Posted on January 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

Maybe because some of it’s prominent older members demonstrated against the Vietnam War, there is still a widespread belief that the Left is anti-war. That’s no longer true, if it ever was. From Andrew Moran at libertynation.com:

Otto von Bismarck once said, “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” For decades, a common myth pervading the American political arena has been that the left is anti-war. But they are as much opposed to war as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – at least he is honest about his appetite for blood and desire for perpetual regime change, no matter who occupies the Oval Office. So, from where did this mendacity come?

In 2008, the United States was entrenched in an election battle and two major wars – Afghanistan and Iraq. The Democrats portrayed themselves as the anti-war party, promising to correct the foreign disasters of the incumbent administration. Since then, it’s as if former President George W. Bush never departed. The Democrats have championed military interventions, twiddled their thumbs under President Barack Obama, and nominated a hawk to lead the party in 2016.

Progressives, the same ones who, under Republican administrations, routinely held massive anti-war rallies on days that ended in “y,” have been eerily silent for the last ten years.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Government, Imperialism, Military, Politics, War

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America Has No Peace Movement – Blame the ‘White Supremacists’, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on November 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

Politics make strange bedfellows, but many “progressives” who would oppose America’s idiotic foreign war policy won’t align with many conservatives who also oppose that policy, and vice versa. Identity politics trumps policy. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

The United States of America has no peace movement even though the country has been mired in unwinnable wars since 2001 and opinion polls suggest that there is only lukewarm support among the public for what is taking place in Afghanistan and Syria. This is in part due to the fact that today’s corporate media virtually functions as a branch of government, which some might refer to as the Ministry of Lies, and it is disinclined to report on just how dystopic American foreign and national security policy has become. This leaves the public in the dark and allows the continued worldwide blundering by the US military to fly under the radar.

The irony is that America’s last three presidents quite plausibly can be regarded as having their margins of victory attributed to a peace vote. George W. Bush promised a more moderate foreign policy in his 2000 campaign, Obama pledged to undo much of the harsh response to 9/11 promulgated by Bush, and Donald Trump was seen as the less warlike candidate when compared to Hillary Clinton. So the public wants less war but the politicians’ promises to deliver have been little more than campaign chatter, meaning that the United States continues to be locked into the same cycle of seeking change through force of arms.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Military, Morality, Politics

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