Syria, Russia, And What I Can Say With Certainty (Part 3)

What I Can Say With Certainty

It came without warning like a force of nature, a tsunami crashing upon the land, sweeping all other concerns away. It was like a sudden lightning storm in the dark of night, making clear what was previously obscure. And yet there was a sense of coordination to it, perhaps more like a blitzkrieg than thunderstorm. One moment everything was in the shadows, the next everything so clear, so fully certain.

And fear. Although we were oh so very certain of so much, fear was nevertheless part of the equation. We were both absolutely certain of many facts while possessing a gaping hole in our knowledge where our worst fears could reside.

I refer to the revelation of Russian hacking, where in no time at all the story became the story of stories, driving everything else from our consciousness. The media only broke from the story to report on Syria, which only further highlighted the insidious nature of the Russians.

The source of all this certainty and fear, at least initially, was unnamed. Sometimes this source was an unnamed intelligence insider, sometimes the source was an anonymous senior congressional staffer. Here is an example of the typical news article reporting on Russian hacking, containing many different esteemed sources without names or faces: NBC News In this case, the source was listed in the title as “U.S.”

This is not journalism, this is not even reporting. This is simply putting into print press releases sent from government agencies. And yet they somehow needed three reporters names on the byline: what exactly did they do?

As far as I’m aware, not a single news agency did any actual investigation into the matter. They simply reported what was told to them by government officials, reported the narrative and in the process swallowed it whole. In the weeks and months that have now followed, never once did I witness in any mainstream American news outlet any sort of critical questioning of the official narrative. It was simply accepted as fact.

Never in the history of germs, conspiracy theories, or cute puppy videos have I ever seen anything spread so quickly, so authoritatively.

Well, that’s not quite true. I have seen this sort of behavior on the part of the media before, many times in fact, though the previous practice has obviously made for perfection. It was the very likeness of those other examples that made me question the Russian hacking story, even more than the story’s inherent flaws.

I have seen it played out before, in the build-up to wars. I have seen it played out when we wished to demonize a country or a government. I have seen it every time our government is about to do something very bad and knows it needs to invent justifications for why they are doing it.

Usually such media blitzes are accompanied by first-hand accounts of babies being killed. Usually words like “genocide” or “WMD” are used to pepper arguments that are strong on emotion and weak on facts and logic. But as such typical propaganda tools didn’t seem to apply, we relied on unflattering pictures of Vladimir Putin to become a focus for our rage. His very Russianness was enough for us old enough to remember Rocky IV or Rambo III (you remember, when Rambo went to help the heroic “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan, those same types who later killed little girls for trying to go to school, who blew up statues of the Buddha and harbored the likes of Osama Bin Laden. Those freedom fighters are still alive and well today, fighting our enemies in Syria as they once did in Afghanistan).

It turns out it’s not the strength of the argument that counts but the conviction in the voice of those who deliver it and the frequency of times it is delivered. Cults indoctrinate members by surrounding them with people repeating the same message while cutting recruits off from those who might say something different. The Russian Hacking story is a similar case where the story was everywhere at all times while any voices to the contrary were made to seem like Russian propagandists or ignorant, racist Trump supporters.

I suppose that’s why the story caught hold in the more liberal sections of the population, among those who despised Donald Trump and could not fathom how Hillary could be likewise despised by anyone with morals and a brain. Surely Russian hacking is the only possible explanation.

Besides, what if it is true? What if the Russians did hack our election and managed to get their chosen candidate elected? If this is the case, then is not all of the fear warranted? Isn’t it only common sense that the media spend so much time getting to the truth on an issue of such importance?

Perhaps, but that is not what the media is doing. It is not attempting to unearth facts and string them logically into different possible narratives. The media is merely repeating what certain government agencies are leaking to them. Many, often the ostensibly most “progressive”, are amplifying it. Funny, but I can no longer recall what Rachel Maddow used to talk about before the Russian hacking story came along.

In short, the only thing the media has done was to foster panic and hatred. It has used the Russian hacking story as a focus for all the hatred Hillary voters are feeling while ignoring all the horrible things Trump is doing. The Democrats have now become the party of war and imperialism and they just don’t seem to see anything wrong with that.

Thank God for the deep state. They are the heroes in this narrative. The cry is that something must be done and the only people who can possibly get us out of the crisis we’re in are those anonymous, unaccountable government agents who want what is best for us. We must surrender thoughts of being in charge of our own government in moments like these, must relinquish control to the experts who have selflessly prepared their whole lives for a situation like this. Once the crisis has passed, they will gladly cede the power they have temporarily taken on as a burden. The only thing you need concern yourself with now is maintaining a proper amount of fear and helplessness.

That is the argument being given by the deep state. The media does not merely not question it, it wholeheartedly endorses it. I have a different take. I believe there is never a good time to panic, there is never a good time to refrain from critical thinking. One needs to keep one’s head, especially in a crisis. When a group foregoes reason and abandons themselves to the herd mentality, that is when things go horribly wrong. That is when people stampede each other in an attempt to escape a burning building, it is when economies collapse because of runs on the market. It is the start of wars.

Human beings should never forsake their higher faculties in troubling times, nor should the media ask them to. And while we’re at it, there is never a good time for the media to abandon their central tenets, their standard operating procedures and their principles. Which brings me to the point of this post.

In the first two parts of this three-part blog, I spoke of what I was not sure of, whether Russia hacked or Syria gassed. Now it is time for me to speak of what I know with certainty: when the government has an agenda to push—a goal it is intent on achieving—it is then that the illusion of an independent media dissolves. When called upon, the media abandons its alleged commitment to objective journalism in favor of channeling the official line. Of that there can be no doubt. Never have I seen it work otherwise. It seems to be a universal law that power wins out over principle.

NPR, The New York Times, CNN, etc., they all capitulated to the official story that had at its source anonymous officials from private and unaccountable government agencies. They did not do what news organizations are supposed to do, dig for the truth and corroborate testimony.

There is not a single reason for the failure of the U.S. media, not a heavy-handed power that is easy to point to. Don Henley made it all too clear in his song Dirty Laundry just how vapid TV news was in 1982 and it has rapidly gone downhill since then. Where once news sources made some pretense of putting truth over profit, now just as in every other field, profit is the only justification for anything. It would be foolish to believe that the same media that obsesses about Caytlain Jenner can switch gears when an important story arises. Talking heads are cheaper than hiring a staff of investigative journalists, and a whole lot less troublesome.

There are few independent media outlets anymore, institutions that aren’t funded directly or indirectly by powerful interests. There are some real investigative journalists still out there but they have been pushed to the edges. And now those edges are being labelled “fake news” by those who wouldn’t know news if it bit them. Journalists who practice the long-established craft are either forced to beg for contributions like Greg Palast, or have gone to work for RT like Chris Hedges. Do your country a favor and throw a few bucks in the tin cup of one of the last of the old-time journalists: Donate

Journalism is dead. What they now call news is whatever they feel will draw and keep the interest of viewers for their advertisers. Investigation is expensive, while talking heads from the pentagon are willing to come in and recite the official position for free. War is profitable, not only for the weapons manufacturers but for ratings as well.

I can’t tell you if Russia was in any way involved in the hacking of the 2016 presidential election, nor can I tell you if President Assad used Sarin gas on his own people. The information is not available to me. The mainstream media has no interest in or ability to deliver the information citizens require to make the best decisions for ourselves and our country. Of that I am quite certain.

Syria, Russia, And What I Can Say With Certainty (Part 2)

In my last blog I stated that I couldn’t be certain that President Assad did not use chemical weapons on his own people. Today I would like to state that I do not know for certain that Russia did not do the thing. After all, I am not privy to the information available to the people who make the secret documents that said Russia did the thing. Of course, the very fact that the people who said Russia did the thing are not forthcoming with the evidence is one of the reasons why I am unable to state anything with certainty. In fact, the very people who say Russia did the thing are hiding in the shadows. The people who have the secret knowledge that leads us to war couldn’t find someone to step forward to put his face and reputation on the product they are selling. Perhaps everyone learned from Colin Powell’s example.

Now I’m sure a lot of people reading this are angry about my characterizing what occurred as “Russia doing the thing”. In their minds it is quite clear that Russia hacked the DNC’s files in order to release them and cause embarrassment for their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, causing her to lose. We will discuss the likelihood and possible impact of that later. My point is, once that idea got into the minds of those who wanted Hillary as president and were in denial about the election of Trump, it opened whole new vistas in their minds. Vague notions floated in the minds of Hillary supporters. Unlimited depths of subterfuge must have been involved in order for them to be so out of touch with reality. An explanation was required (one not blaming Hillary Clinton or the DNC), and Russian hacking was something to hold on to.

I’m not saying Russia didn’t hack the DNC, I’m just saying the story has taken control of the minds of the Democrats and is being used as an excuse to avoid confronting the President on the issues that mattered to Bernie Sanders supporters: climate change, peace, single payer health care, etc. Instead, the Russian hacking story can now be used to support the wars the Democrats never seemed to have a problem with in the first place, though they are ostensibly the peace party by default. The line between Democrats and Republicans needed to be clear, and Russian hacking was just the issue. It was the perfect distraction for the fact that the neocons in the middle were agreeing far more than appearances dictated.

The idea was seized upon by Democrats whose comfortable and convenient conception of reality just got flushed down the toilet. It was a convenient escape hatch for those who didn’t want to face reality. And Putin was the perfect strawman, the Darth Vader or Valdemort in their adolescent escapist fantasies. The all-seeing eye that sat enthroned in the lands to the east sees all, pierces clouds, shadow, earth, and flesh. Let the theories and the imagination run wild.

If Putin was capable of swinging the election, just how far did his involvement go? Is Trump a dupe unwittingly controlled by Russian operatives? Is he a willing traitor to his country? Is he a Manchurian Candidate who was mind-controlled through the use of brainwashing and drugs?

Did the Russians help him overcome his Republican candidates as well, knowing that he could then defeat Hillary? Did the Russians have secret videos of Russian prostitutes peeing on Donald Trump which they were using to blackmail him? Did Russian hackers cause Brexit? Did Russians hack a Vermont utility grid? How much more are the Russians responsible for that we’ve been unaware of until this moment?

All of these theories accepted as fact rest upon the statements of anonymous agents with dubious motives. Cults are formed on revelations that don’t stand the light of criticism, reason, or facts. Cult leaders do everything in their power to assure you that the world is out to get you and that they alone possess the facts you seek.

That’s the problem with speculation without verification. Once you start down that road there’s nothing holding you back from traveling a road free of facts. There’s nothing keeping you tied to reality. That is the road to madness.

When reality becomes too unpleasant, it’s time to create a fantasy world to live in. You may disagree with my assessment that this is what you’ve done, but anyone viewing it from the outside can see it quite clearly.

It might all seem as clear as day to you, but to someone willing to pepper their thoughts with a degree of skepticism, it seems much different. One could compare it to Orwell’s 1984, but I prefer comparing it to Franz Kafka’s The Trial. In it a man is accused of some unstated crime by anonymous sources. Throughout the entire novel he is never given the relevant information as to his situation but must instead rely on the government’s assertions. With the entire Russian hacking story, we are not given the information thoughtful people require to make intelligent decisions but are instead given the choice between accepting the narrative supplied by anonymous authorities or else be labeled ignorant and traitorous by the official media outlets.

Which puts a lot of Left-leaning people in a very difficult position. To say that Clinton lost because of the positions she chose to defend, and perhaps worse, to suggest she lost because she refused to defend the principles most important to the left, has become tantamount to treason. To want more liberal and progressive policies from the left is no longer acceptable. A line has been drawn in the sand as to what can and cannot be discussed. There is such a thing as being too liberal, and those who ask too much from the left are not actually leftists but persons willing to betray their country and leave it in the hands of the enemy, namely Donald Trump, AKA Putin’s puppet.

Of course, the underlying rationale here is that the reason the establishment candidate lost is because the stupid traitorous Bernie Bros didn’t accept the only rational choice and vote for Clinton. Because of this we now have Soviet troops goose stepping down main street (don’t worry about inaccuracies or mixed metaphors, only Russian stooges would do such a thing. In fact, it is best you keep your mouth shut and your critical thinking skills in neutral). And whatever you do, don’t stop to think that the Republicans won by voting for the outsider candidate and perhaps that is a tactic the Left might employ. This is not the way Democrats do things—better to vote for the compromise candidate and lose than risk what lay beyond the accepted limits proscribed by the party. Whatever the Democrats say, it is they and not the Republicans keeping socialized medicine from becoming a talking point.

Here are some of the problems I have with the official story as delivered by James Comey and the anonymous minions who are quoted by reporters who do not investigate:

• ·         The portrait drawn of Putin is of some grandmaster chessman both complicit in everything that is wrong in the U.S. and as evil as Boris Badinov. His motivations are that of an imp looking to create chaos in any manner possible for us. Such a template is the same one used over and over whenever the U.S. wants to take military action.
• ·         Implicit in our demonization of Vladimir Putin is that something should be done about him. We miss the old days when a Western backed drunk like Boris Yeltsin permitted his country to run according to our blueprint. In other words, our worst fears are that Russia might be doing to us what we have already done to them.
• ·         If Russians hacked the DNC then Clinton’s use of emails was every bit as damaging as the Republicans said it was.
• ·         If the Russians were responsible for Wikileaks’ revelations, then the assertion is that they were the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election, not James Comey’s late hour announcement that they were reviewing her emails. Not being a fan of Hillary Clinton myself, I perused the evidence Wikileaks released and found them a bit of a yawn. Believe me, if there was something there I thought was particularly damning against Hillary, I would have shared it. But I did not do so even once.
• ·         The revelations in Wikileaks were too elaborate to be effective propaganda. They required thought and an attention span. If Russia had wanted to influence the elections in favor of Donald Trump, there were far more effective means of doing so. Do what all politicians everywhere do: lie. Make allegations that ISIS had video of prostitutes peeing on Hillary, cast doubts upon the nation of Hillary’s birth. Just make something up. How naïve must the Russians be if they think truth has any part in swaying the U.S. elections?
• ·         Intelligence agencies reveal information for a specific reason, not because they believe the American public has a right to know. Any information they release is in order to advance an agenda. Hence the reason we were never told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until we wanted to overthrow the man we sold such weapons to in the first place. Ironically, by that time he no longer had them. The point is, there is a reason the intelligence agencies released information—or, rather, assertions—that the election was hacked. They want the population to react in a certain manner, or else they would have dealt with any possible hacking covertly as they do with most things.
• ·         If we truly had any interest in protecting our nation against the influence of other nations, we would have done something about Israel and Saudi Arabia long ago. No candidate can hope to gain the presidency without first kowtowing to AIPAC, the lobbying group whose job it is to promote strong support for Israel. As for Saudi Arabia, you might want to check how much they’ve contributed to The Clinton Foundation, all for humanitarian concerns, no doubt. It’s hard to find people more concerned about the welfare of others than the House Of Saud.
• 
  
• Lastly, the primary doubt I have about the Russian hacking story is the media that has presented it. But that I will save for my next blog, the third and final of “Syria, Russia, And What I Can Say With Certainty”.

Syria, Russia, and What I Can Say With Certainty (Part 1)

Part 1: The Behavior of President Assad

I cannot say for certain President Bashar al-Assad did not use chemical weapons on his own people. It would have been a foolish thing to do, epically foolish. If he did so, his actions will go down in history as one of the stupidest deeds ever committed, along with the Trojans deciding to open their gates for a present from their enemies. But I have no way of knowing whether or not he actually did it.

If Assad gassed his own people right when his chances for survival seemed most likely, he would have had to been out his mind when he did it, because the U.S. has been looking for an excuse to overthrow the government in Syria for three decades and the impulse has been growing in intensity these last few years. He would have to be more than clinically depressed or even suicidal to hand the U.S. the perfect excuse. The insanity required to do what Assad is accused of doing would have gone way beyond even Norman Bates-dress-like-your mother-and-murder-people crazy, because Norman Bates at least had the good sense of keeping his behavior out of the public eye. No, using chemical weapons on his own people would have required President Assad to be full-on, bath salts, eat-the-face-of-some-dude-while-the-cops-are-watching kind of crazy. But I’m not saying he didn’t do it.

And if Assad did use chemical weapons on his own people after making a bargain to get rid of all his chemical weapons, he must have been out of his mind on more than one occasion, the other time being when the Russians explained to him what it would take for him to make it out of his predicament alive. See, Russia stuck its neck out in a way it never has before for President Assad. They made a very diplomatic move and got the world to agree that Assad could stay in power if he agreed to give up his chemical weapons. Russia must have been very clear in its instructions to Assad, telling him exactly what he needed to do to survive. For Assad to have ignored the Russians when they explained this must mean he was out of his mind then as well. Perhaps not bath salts crazy, but at least stoned out his gourd. “Bashar, you must not give the U.S. the slightest bit of provocation or they will use it to overthrow your government and Syria will be a steaming post-apocalyptic version of its former self. Do you understand?” “Yeah, dude, we’re cool. Hey, you got any Twinkies, Boris?” But I’m not saying Assad did not do what he is accused of.

If Putin stuck his neck out the way he did, and Assad was keeping a couple of chemical weapons stashed away just for a special moment, then I would think Putin would want to bomb Assad himself. What kind of man betrays the person who has saved his life just so he can go out in a blaze of glory, chemical weapons blazing? And how stupid must Putin be—while at the same time being smart enough to get his candidate elected President of the United States by deceiving everybody who didn’t vote for Hillary, of course—to put his faith in someone with a death wish?

But Assad cannot be behaving the way he is as a way of suicide-by-cops, as we say here in the U.S. He knows just what is at stake. He knows if the savages—I mean moderate rebels—take control of his country what will happen. He’s seen it before when the American-backed brutal-er, moderate rebels anal-raped Gadhafi before killing him. It will be worse for Assad. They’re not just going to rape him, they’re going to kill his family, and brutally oppress the Religious minority to which he belongs.

Moderate though they may be, the rebels the U.S. has been backing have been capable of some rather immoderate behavior, behavior such as beheading twelve-year-old boys and eating the internal organs of their slain foes. They are the same type of people who killed dozens of Coptic Christians as they were in church for Palm Sunday service last week. They’re the same sort of people we use as an excuse for not allowing Syrian refugees into our country. Far better to let them stay in Syria and fight for freedom. They’re good enough to be the face of freedom against tyranny in the perpetually messed-up Middle East, but God forbid they ever get within our borders. Let’s face it, as far as moderates go, they’re kind of on the far end of the spectrum.

By the way, don’t believe it is mere speculation as to the behavior of these cannibalistic moderate rebels. The video of the actions of these child murdering moderate rebels is available for all to see on the internet. No need to take the word of anonymous sources from secret agencies, the facts are pretty hard to deny.

But all of this is not my way of saying Assad did not gas his own people at the very moment his safety, the safety of his family and his fellow Alawites seemed assured after a years-long bloody struggle. There are many people in this world with extreme sexual fetishes, perhaps being anal raped before being murdered is one of Assad’s. I have no way of knowing for sure. Unlike our news media, I have no access to anonymous sources from agencies who only want what’s best for Syria.

War Without End (If We're Lucky)

The War Generation

We now have a generation reaching adulthood that has never known our nation at peace. We now have people old enough to join the military  to fight the war on terror whose earliest memories included the war on terror. Terror is all they’ve known, terror is the mindset they’ve been raised on.

And there is no end in sight for these children raised on terror. There is no end zone to be reached, no promised land, no ultimate objectives in this war. They have known nothing but war, and peace doesn’t seem to be raising its head anytime soon for them.

No other generation of Americans has ever been through anything like it. World War 2 lasted 4 years. People went to war and came home, intent on enjoying the peace and prosperity they fought for.  World War I lasted a brief year for us Americans,  and our entry into it was with the understanding that it was the war to end all war. That is after all the idea behind war, right? To put things to right so that the world is returned to its normal state and we can once again enjoy peace?

But that’s no longer the world we live in, not a world some of us have ever known. War is the new normal, war is just a part of life, a part of who we are, or at least who we have become.

And we’ve saddled an entire generation to the vision we’ve created. We’ve subjected our youth to an existence without the hope of--or the blueprint for--peace.

I wonder what it must be like for them. I was born in the Vietnam Era, can remember the end as helicopters rose from rooftops with people trying to hold on. I was of a generation who experienced wars that ended. Perhaps they didn’t have a clear-cut purpose or justification, but they eventually ended.

The war we’re involved in now has no end. It has no justification, summary, no purpose. It is merely war. It is the inheritance we bequeath to the generation that follows us. It is the unanswered question we never got around to solving because we were too busy taking our children to soccer practice and karate class. It was what we ignored in order to work extra hours so we could purchase a little something for under the tree come Christmas. I hope you enjoyed your new gaming system, junior.

I wonder how they view the world we’ve created for them, wonder if they can see things through the same twisted lens we see through. Perhaps when the television presents them with the information that we’ve bombed some country they’ve never heard of, it won’t register much in their consciousness. After all, why should they find it odd when it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s just what America does.

I can’t imagine them questioning it or evaluating the morality of it. It’s just something the government does, and they are not the government. The government is some foreign entity, unanswerable and uncaring to people such as they. How can they feel culpable for what the government has done, even though it ostensibly does it in their name? The people who make the decisions to bomb are as distant to them as the countries that are being bombed.

Given their lifelong immersion in it, how can they view war as anything other than a force of nature? How can they perceive of it any differently than primitive man saw the weather? Rainfall last night, bombs fall tomorrow. Earthquakes or explosions in some other part of the world but it doesn’t affect us.

How will they ever appreciate the value humanity has placed on peace when we have not educated them on the subject? How can they appreciate peace as a desired goal when we have for so long tolerated not having a goal or an honestly debated cause for war? Our wars are justified by lies and when the lies are discovered they are justified by the fact that we’re too far involved to stop. What do these children-now-become-adults think of when they hear the phrase “Blessed are the peacemakers?”

Maybe they’ll come to accept war the way other cultures accepted human sacrifice. Perhaps they’ll just accept it as a cost of existing: the gods, in this case weapons manufacturers, need to be appeased. Maybe they won’t see it at all, so detached from it as they are.

But just maybe they will see it with fresh eyes. Maybe more innocent eyes will see through the complex web of justifications we have spun for ourselves and see the incredible waste, horror, and immorality behind war. I’d like to think so. Somebody has to. For all the horror that war creates in the world today, it is but the birthing pains of the ultimate horror, one which we are marching closer to, our footsteps forward sounding with every explosion.

Nuclear war is every bit the threat it was in the cold war era, it’s just we don’t seem to worry about it, or even think about it much anymore. Once we had time for such matters but lately we’ve had other things on our mind: retirement investments, lawn care, and binge watching TV series on Netflix. We’ve gotten used to the possibility of nuclear annihilation, just as our children have gotten used to perpetual war.

So let us think no more about it and get back to matters more dear to our hearts. Let us return to Facebook and Fantasy Football. Let us shut out the world outside our window we can no more change than we can the weather. After all, there are new videogames to be played, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Battlefield. That’s an activity you can engage in with your child, a bonding experience. Or instead you can read a book, one of those post-apocalyptic ones that seem so popular these days. Don’t worry unduly about the children’s future, they’ll work it out, just like we did. What we don’t think about can’t hurt us, right?

Charlie Brown, Lucy, and War

I give Charlie Brown a lot of credit, he really tries hard to kick that ball. Granted he’s foolish for trusting Lucy to hold it for him when she’s lied to him EVERY SINGLE TIME, but he’s a trusting individual and he really wants to show what he can do.

And Lucy always has the best excuses. Well, maybe they’re not the best excuses, but they’re what Charlie Brown wants to hear.

All right, let’s face it, Lucy’s mean for constantly making Charlie Brown fall for the same old trick, and Charlie Brown is stupid for falling for it over and over. More than stupid, there is some egotism involved that urges Charlie Brown to believe her. There is something deep in his psyche that makes him want to believe.

But for all of Charlie Brown’s shortcomings, he is the one to pay for his folly. He comes charging up to kick the ball, Lucy pulls it away, and Charlie Brown falls flat on his back, knocking the wind out of him. Time after time. You’d think he’d learn, but he never does.

As George W. Bush once tried to say: fool me once, shame on you, full me twice, shame on me. At some point you have to stop feeling sorry for Charlie Brown, although you never have to stop blaming Lucy for her behavior. At some point Charlie Brown has to wise up. At some point you have to call him a blockhead for trusting someone who’s fooled him countless times.

Now imagine what we would think of Charlie Brown if each time he fell for Lucy’s prank, people died. Imagine if he went to kick that ball, Lucy pulled it away, and little children got blown into bloody chunks. How tolerant would we be of Charlie Brown then?

Because that’s what is happening, over and over again. Every time a nation gears up for war, it (Lucy) prepares its population (Charlie Brown) by telling it anything necessary to get it to go along.

There are many reading this who remember the Gulf Of Tonkin incident. It was an alleged attack on a U.S. ship by the North Vietnamese that President Johnson used as a pretext for escalating our involvement in Vietnam. Except it never happened. Lucy, dressed as Johnson, held the ball for us, the American public, and we charged. Only when she pulled the ball away 58,220 of us died, far more scarred for life by a war that shouldn’t have been. Oh, and if we count the suffering of non-Americans, a million men, women and children more died, a country defoliated, and generations of suffering ensued.

Fast forward to the First Gulf War. Babies were being ripped out of incubators and thrown to the floor to die, said Lucy, posing as a nurse who had actually witnessed such things. Except she wasn’t and it didn’t happen, but we all fell for it and fell flat on our back. Fortunately, few people died in the ensuing war, less than a hundred and fifty. Well, unless you count Iraqis, in which case tens of thousands died, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who died as a result of later sanctions, not to mention the deaths caused by depleted uranium used by us. But we don’t have to worry about depleted uranium, Lucy said so.

How about the time Lucy dressed up as Colin Powell and started talking about chemical labs being transported on trains and trucks around Iraq? Boy we sure were going to clobber the ball that time, weren’t we? We’ve gotten up and moved on from that incident but people are still killing and dying because of our naivete. What has it been, now, 14 years? It’s hard to keep track, especially since Lucy’s been keeping us occupied with her old games since then.

Remember Libya and how we were going to help them? This is what it looks like today.This is what happens when we let Lucy sweet talk us. Shame on you, Lucy, shame on us.

And yet we go on with our lives as though nothing has happened. And Lucy now holds the ball for us and somehow we’ve all forgotten our entire history with her. But it’s not cute and it’s not funny because people die. And while we try to pass the blame by saying it’s not our fault, we are responsible. Charlie Brown had issues, but they were almost endearing. We have issues and it’s costings millions of lives. It’s costing people their limbs and their health and their sanity. The billions of dollars we spend on war is money taken from those who do not have enough to eat, do not have a decent education. Hell, we can’t even afford drinking water for Flint. But Lucy is sweet-talking us, and what she says appeals to a weakness within us.

I’ll tell you what that weakness is. We are lazy cowards. Working for peace is hard work and can even be dangerous. Look what happened to Martin Luther King.  So instead we permit the government to make our decisions for us, so that we don’t have to be responsible. We fear in moments of crisis to stand alone against the herd and speak against the popular narrative. We wish to blend in, not make waves, or else shout loudly as one in the crowd. We prattle on about peace all the while acquiescing to the warmongers.

We don’t want a nation of the people, by the people, for the people, because then we the people might have to make adult decisions and that idea terrifies us. Better to listen to someone else, even if in our heart of hearts we know that that someone else is lying, has always lied.

This is the road that leads to fascism. Fascism is the bending of the individual’s will to the state, to power, to war. That is our fate if we do not choose our course for ourselves, if we continue to listen to the seductive lies Lucy speaks.

Governments don’t demand peace, people do. If we ever want peace, it’s up to us as human beings to create it. We cannot leave it up to our governments, because they will always insist the way to peace is through war. How many more times will we let the ball pulled away from us? Because when we fall flat on our back, people die.