War and Peace

“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Systems and isms do not attack anyone or start any wars. Hitler was a madman and needed to be stopped. But in waging war against the Nazis, Americans became like their enemies. We brutalized and murdered prisoners and then dropped two bombs which could have been avoided.

abomb Dropping the first atomic bomb was sick, the Japanese were ready to surrender. And dropping a second bomb was perverse. But that these American atrocities took place, does not imply it would have been OK to allow Hitler’s genocide and murders to continue.

And recently, when Obama spent 1.5 trillion building more nuclear weapons while engaged in unprovoked attacks across the globe…. we have become the ones who need to be stopped. Unfortunately Trump is on board with dozens of wars.

The solution is not a surrender to war, but to stand up and secure the peace.
But political “reality” intervenes.

https://thewordsmithcollection.wordpress.com/2013/12/25/why-we-must-seek-peace/

Reality is not all it’s cracked up to be. Some say life is merely an illusion. But over time we find small truths, big lies, radical science and brilliant ideas.

Unfortunately, most of the time war trumps peace, aggression spreads and myths abound. Too many live in personal fictions and find facts too great a burden to bear.

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”

https://thepeaceresource.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/truth-and-lies-peace-and-war-fact-myth-magic-science-and-fiction/

“At home, militarized police departments allow officers to kill unarmed citizens at will with zero accountability, two weeks paid vacations and get out of jail free cards. And our leaders export this aggression overseas with illegal drones known to kill an average of 50 innocents per strike.”

https://thepeaceresource.wordpress.com/2016/05/22/the-dream-is-over/

It is critical that we shut down corporate wars and reinvest in jobs with justice. We can rebuild sustainable infrastructure and restore human resources by choosing peace over war. These are the tasks at hand.

The pirates in charge of ongoing U. S. wars of choice are profiteers, pure and simple. Their military arrogance and disdain for the public and the law is astounding. But there are more of us, by a long shot… than there are of them. This is our time.

https://thepeaceresource.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/war-is-good-for-nothin/

“Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.”

― Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train:
A Personal History of Our Times

“Peace is the only battle worth waging.”

― Albert Camus

https://thepeaceresource.wordpress.com/about/

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I cannot be Silent.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.

https://thewordsmithcollection.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/malcolm-and-martin/

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.

https://revolutionresource.org/2015/08/16/malcolm-and-martin/

This is a time for new and revolutionary beginnings…

“Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else.”

― Malcolm X