War is the worst outcome

I was just reading The Greatest Evil is War and read Chris Hedges’s statement that bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima were war crimes. They certainly were, especially in light of the admitted history and reasoning behind it.

Anyone who’s read the actual history pretty much accepts that the U.S. bombed these cities because (A) there was nothing else left to bomb because cities like Tokyo had already been firebombed beyond recognition, but also that the U.S. was (B) already gearing up for its next conflict with Communism, to be started immediately after it finished taking care of the Germans—while still and temporarily allied with the Communists in the Soviet Union. The mendacity and amorality is breathtaking.

So we just accept that the U.S. used its nuclear weapons, not for any military purpose, but to send a message. Of course that’s a war crime. It is, at the very least, immoral as hell. But those people who decided to drop those bombs are venerated as great leaders; not one of them is disparaged by any western history, as Hitler and Stalin and Tojo are. History is written by the winners, indeed.

This continues today: no-one is ever disparaged by history or the media, not even for being grossly incompetent, to say nothing of being actually evil.

Witness the response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Where was the outcry about the lack of ability to prevent it? Is this not an utter failure? Where was the outcry about not having stopped it despite it having been predicted ad nauseam for a year and a half prior? Instead, the world accepted the story that this madman Putin just attacked out of nowhere. They absolved everyone else of having done nothing to slow it or stop it. They didn’t even think to ask whether someone else might have started it.

The actual history shows that these people—these evil monsters who always end up on the right side of history—actually did everything they could to get Putin to “start” the war. They sanctioned and provoked as much as they could. They pushed for economic and military advantage, all the while hiding behind the diaphanous shield of their actions not being “technically acts of war”. How are these actions not war? They led inevitably to a so-called hot war—although it took a lot of pushing—but somehow no-one is blamed for any of these actions. Almost no-one even considers them acts of war or even bellicosity.

But these people who poked and prodded and provoked and schemed and machinated have endangered all of our safety with their bellicosity and mendacity and greed. They started a war. They started a war heedless of the inevitable consequences of actual war. They will not be punished; instead, they are lauded. They are rewarded for having provoked a conflict that will engender untold suffering for millions who are not them. They and their families and their friends will grow richer and more powerful. We reward them. They will do it again.

I speak of the Kagans and Blinkens and Bidens and the innumerable military masterminds and defense-industry meatheads who push and push and push for more and more and more. There are more names than I can list here. They know who they are. They grow fat on suffering.

Putin is at fault for starting the invasion. Russia has its own mirror image of our mendacious press and hierarchy of the powerful.[1] They have their own ultra-war-hawks and their own defense industry. I do not know the Russians as well as I do the west—and especially the U.S. I can only surmise that they have not avoided the all-too-human tendency for destruction and self-aggrandizement. I can only assume that any generous interpretation of their actions in war are just as false, just as propagandized as those of NATO and the U.S.

I know, though, what the country of which I am a citizen does. I have paid very close attention, in fact. I see what rises to power there. I see what they do, and what they are willing to do. I see that they are all about personal benefit, regardless of the costs and detriment to untold others.

They are left unpunished. They are left employed. No-one is ever fired for having let a war start, to say nothing of having provoked a war. Instead, they are celebrated for their ability to fight the war that they so obviously wanted.

Instead of falling from grace for having made a huge mistake that will cost millions of lives, destroy the economy for millions of others, destroy the food-delivery chain for even more, they are lifted up even higher. We are foolish and uncaring. We are led by the nose into celebrating war, as if it were a sanitized game instead of the absolute worst possible outcome.