It’s way past time to end the power games

We read today of yet another nuclear scientist murdered almost certainly by the state of Israel with support from the United States government.  We see war mania rising toward another Mideast oil country coupled now with increasingly bellicose military rhetoric against the advancing “threat” of China.  US military spending, meanwhile, matches the rest of the world combined and is higher than any time during the “Cold War”.

While average people try to cope with the demands of daily life, there seems to be a separate alien existence hovering above that sees the world as if it were a giant chessboard.  It’s a game of power and each person below is something quite a bit less than a pawn.  It’s a fun manly game and it’s been played with exceptional vigor by the United States government since the time it dropped two atom bombs right smack in the middle of two cities at the end of World War II.  The game’s brought us the Korean and Vietnam Wars that ended up killing over 100,000 American soldiers and untold millions of civilians, both in service of corrupt undemocratic dictatorships. The game’s concentrated mainly on the Middle East lately with two Iraq wars and an Afghanistan war resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

The powers also enjoy playing covert versions of the game and have supported overthrows of democratic regimes throughout the world.  The US government’s been the primary force for decades in propping up right wing dictatorships in Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

Measured even by their own metric, not one of the wars can be considered a success; not Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  Yet the powers, through massive propaganda, continue to convince average Americans that a huge military is needed to protect them from a “dangerous world”.

The top elites are actually playing two inter-related but slightly different games – one for financial and economic power, the other for pure naked power.  The capitalism game’s been on the hot seat for a while now; it’s way past time the other one gets put there as well.  The issue isn’t any particular war, it’s the game itself and we lose the battle as soon as the cry becomes “End the War in country X”.  Here’s a simple idea for peaceful change – how about we demand the US government make a global peace proposal offering to cut its arms by 80% if all other major governments do so as well.

Update: And shame as usual on the NYT for its typically biased reporting on the presumed Israeli mafia like hit.  One can only imagine the explosion of horror if Iranian agents murdered a few Israeli nuclear scientists.