Struggling to make some kind of sense of the war in Ukraine, the risks it entails, and the economic crisis it has supercharged? Praying for peace? Me too.
I'm thinking the fighting could end sooner than some observers expect, sooner certainly than those who wish to profit from a protracted war would prefer. There are some interesting pieces of analysis available. How about that eye-opening interview by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate at Greyzone with Col. Doug Macgregor. Or this panel discussion at the end of which the moderator, the inimitable George Galloway, reveals himself to be an optimist!
In 1988, when I was an Officer of the University and a Harvard Extension School student, I took Prof. Donald Bell's course, Political Terrorism in Historical Perspective: The Case of Western Europe. (Prestigious schools are only as good as the educators they employ, and you can still find talented, dedicated, and underpaid teachers at every school, college, and university in America. As a student in America, the important thing is to suit up, show up prepared, and do your best. Several years ago I updated my formal training in political terrorism studies in a course at a local community college here in Iowa as part of a legal assistant certificate program. That course was taught by a professor who had conducted original research in the field among far-Right militia groups here in the States. I will not mention his name here only because I don’t know where he is or what he is doing now. I was delighted to find that his course, which had a broader historical and geographical focus, was at least as well planned and taught as the earlier Extension School course. The future belongs to those who prepare for it. Learning never ends.)
Busy preparing for a wedding and a honeymoon in Europe, I enrolled in Prof. Bell's course in non-credit status. I attended class, did the required reading and more. but I did not write a term paper. After returning from Switzerland, I took the class again the following semester for credit. What a memorable classroom experience that was, more than half of the students being active duty US Army personnel who were stationed at Fort Devens just west of the Boston area. Some of my classmates were just back from Europe, too, and others had only recently returned from Lebanon where the Lebanese Civil War was winding down. Several had served in both Europe and the Middle East. An interesting group that, with tales of Army life on the front lines of the Cold War in Europe and a hot war in the Middle East. I read well beyond the required and suggested reading lists and earned an honor grade in the course. Well, you know, I took the class twice.
Soon thereafter, I left Harvard and relocated to West Germany with no definite plans to return to the USA. (We fled, actually. Resigned positions with the administrative equivalent of academic tenure. Our home and my Harvard office had been burglarized. My phone had been tapped. A Harvard physician had falsely informed me that I had AIDS, but that's all part of a longer story for another time.) Isn't the German government's recent decision to arm up for war with Russia disappointing? Can you imagine anything more likely to alarm Russian leaders and bolster their determination to act to prevent yet another invasion from the West? An unexpected sight greeted me at Frankfurt International when I stepped off the plane in the spring of 1990. A graffiti artist with a wry sense of humor and a keen sense of history had scrawled on a newspaper vending box next to the USA Today logo: "Tomorrow the World." (The phrase recalled Hitler's threat, "Today Germany, tomorrow the world.") The most memorable bumper sticker I chanced to see during the seven months I spent working and traveling in Europe during 1990 was one that proclaimed, "Everyone is a foreigner, almost everywhere." The graffiti and the bumper sticker were and are representative of a then not atypical European awareness of history and the wider world that still, today, far too few Americans are equipped to understand or appreciate.
I was working as a maintenance carpenter for a US military contractor at Sullivan Barracks near Viernheim, West Germany, on a US Army Europe Fifth Signal Corps compound when Iraq invaded Kuwait and what became known as the first Gulf War broke out. I learned a good deal more ground level military history while playing cards at lunchtime with a diverse group of expat Army vets who had seen service all over the world. The retired Master Sergeant I worked for had served in Germany after WWII, in Vietnam, and at Fort Leavenworth. Among that group, service in Korea and every war and action to date then was represented. It's amazing what you can learn if you pay attention. In 1990, my wife and I drove on the autobahn across what was then still East Germany to West Berlin. There were horse-drawn carts in the fields. We got our temporary visas from a thin-lipped, pasty-faced East German border guard at Checkpoint Charlie, and walked into East Berlin to see for ourselves the results of half a century of communist rule. The obvious differences between East and West as represented in Germany in 1990 were startling, but processing the less obvious differences, the similarities, and developing a perspective that takes in the relevant history and appreciates nuance would take more time and study.
I resumed my part time studies after we returned to the States, first in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I volunteered in the newsroom at WUOT-fm, the university's NPR-affiliate station. Leveraging the name recognition the radio work afforded me, I founded the Knoxville Writers Guild. Later I served as executive director of the Tennessee Writers Alliance and as project director for WDVX-fm, a community radio station, while taking classes at the local community college. When the ADL Spy Scandal hit the headlines in the spring of 1993, I headed for the public library where I found Alex Cockburn's report on the FBI’s investigation of the ADL in his Beat the Devil column in The Nation magazine, along with a New York Times piece. Realizing that I had long been one of many ADL psyops targets, I decided to focus my journalism studies on bias in media. In 1996 we relocated to Ames, Iowa, where I continued my studies while serving on the Ames Interfaith Council. From 1999, the year I finally completed my journalism degree, Kappa Tau Alpha at Iowa State University’s Greenlee School, until 2018 I wrote regularly for a national magazine founded, edited, and published by distinguished retired United States foreign service officers. My editor there had retired as Chief Inspector of the United States Information Agency. My publisher had retired after serving as the United States ambassador to Qatar. Dick and Andy published everything I sent them, including this piece, and edited my work with a light hand. It was Dick who first pointed out to me that Official Washington was, in his words, "a cesspool of special interest money and corruption."
I have no illusions whatsoever about the former USSR, today's Russia, Vladimir Putin, or the invasion of and war in Ukraine. Nor do I harbor fantasies about run amok late stage capitalism or the politicians and bureaucrats who broke their promises to Mikhail Gorbachev to refrain from expanding NATO eastward and who refused both Gorbachev's and Putin's requests to join NATO after the collapse of the USSR. Our government could easily have had Russia as an ally. Instead, a bunch of filthy rich arms makers chose profits over the promised "peace dividend" and have been selling weapons of war to Russia's neighbors ever since, thus driving Russia and China ever closer together as allies against a common competitor with a massive defense budget and an interventionist foreign policy. What might have been? and where would we be today? had US leaders responded positively, or at least without deceit and evident disdain and contempt, to Russian leaders' expressed desires to Westernize, join NATO, or “interact with responsible and independent partners with whom we could work together in constructing a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all,” are questions that goes unasked. To ask them and seriously contemplate answers would reveal more starkly still Western leaders' obdurate commitment to a scheme of material conquest by force of arms and world hegemony at any cost, even at the real risk of a civilization-ending nuclear conflagration.
The US government, its NATO partners, and Israel are often thought of as "the West" though other nations far removed from the USA and Western Europe often participate in NATO operations. The West's arms industry is a gravy train of mechanized death and destruction. One of its laboratories is illegally-occupied Palestine, where Israel tests weapons and tactics on captive civilian populations routinely exploited as human lab rats, weapons and tactics that are exported to other repressive regimes around the globe. With the enthusiastic assistance of major Western broadcast media moguls who control both what passes for a public discussion and the throttle of the US campaign finance gravy train-cum-powder train, the West's arms industry has in recent decades instigated, intervened in, supplied weapons for, and profited from wars in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere, wars that have killed millions and loosed a flood of refugees around the globe. Before that it was the Iraq-Iran war (the West likes nothing better than inciting foreign wars and selling weapons to both sides). Noteworthy, is it not, that Western media outlets now so outraged that Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine has put blond-haired, blue-eyed Ukrainians in harm's way have never expressed a remotely comparable level of concern about people of color, indigenous populations, dying and displaced in their millions under equally illegal and often more indiscriminate bombardment by NATO forces and weapons manufactured by Western arms makers?
Western corporate media news and opinion presenters breathe the rarified air of corporate boardrooms. They are attuned to the expectations of the billionaire media moguls who hire them, provide their marching orders, and pay them salaries far, far in excess of the earnings of ordinary Americans, the hoi polloi, people like you and me. We are where we are today in the USA largely because Big Media corporations, which have produced and profited from a bloody deluge of violent and hyper-violent media products like there was no tomorrow for half a century, are out of touch with America and view ordinary Americans as masses to be exploited and manipulated for profit and narrow political advantage. Systematically conditioned for decades to suspend disbelief, to turn off their critical thinking faculties around fictional violence, gun violence glamorized and glorified in dramas freighted with political messaging, in order to experience pleasure through emotional catharsis, Americans have been divided against one another along political, racial, religious, and class lines. Painfully evident and palpable is the death, destruction, pain, and suffering thus wrought, across the world and across the land. Add to that the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic and more than 900,000 American lives lost. Donald Trump, a reality TV show host, sociopath, and well-heeled con artist, tapped into that anger, confusion. and frustration ever so successfully and has exacerbated it in spades. Corporate media made the most of the Trump White House show and the competing Democratic Party narratives and milked them both for all they were worth.
Now the West's arms makers and their hired politicians in Washington and other Western capitals are flirting with a nuclear holocaust, waltzing toward Armageddon. One ethnic special interest group is busy whitewashing Ukraine's neo-Nazis and other White nationalist extremist groups. We may all pay the ultimate price for the deceit, arrogance, greed, and stupidity of this rich man's proxy war against a major nuclear weapons power. Who but those who are spiritually blind would dare to so presume upon divine mercy?
As Wendell Berry has observed, a corporation is "a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. ... the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money." That quote jumped off page 36 of the February 28 issue of The New Yorker. The article, by Dorothy Wickenden, the magazine’s executive editor, is titled “Late Harvest.” It is the most interesting magazine piece I’ve ever read about Wendell Berry and his work. I’m still contemplating Wickenden’s artful exploration of social and technological change, community, and “a placed people” and their tools. How many have thought to consider the custodians of our planet as “a placed people”? or wondered how they might respond when men provoke or blunder into a war with the potential to catastrophically interrupt the progress of human civilization?
I heard Wendell speak at Iowa State’s Memorial Hall in 2007. After the lecture and panel discussion, I spoke with him briefly at the book table. I thanked him for Jayber Crow. And then, as he was signing Citizenship Papers for me, I blurted out, “God bless you, Wendell Berry!” Feeling as foolish as a schoolboy who had called out to his classroom teacher, “Mother!” I blushed. Wendell looked up, met my eyes with as genuine a smile as I have ever seen, and replied, “God bless you!”
Because we have been blessed, we are able to bless each other. Does that not come near to the essence of the ethic of reciprocity, the Golden Rule?
We are here, on this world, to grow, to learn to be productive, to learn to love our neighbors as ourselves. Our Creator gives us free will, and life presents us with challenges and opportunities to make decisions. We choose to be either creative and constructive or destructive. Some men mistake meekness for weakness. I tell you in truth, Jesus spoke the truth. Indeed he is the truth. The meek shall inherit this earth. Fac Recteneminem Time. Our Creator may not have his way in the hearts of each and every one of his creatures, but he does not lose worlds. But how do we bless those who know not the blessings and who reject out of hand the ethic of reciprocity? Perhaps sometimes the best we can do is to restrain them.
I no longer claim any political party allegiance. Both major parties are utterly corrupt and have failed us. Too often the only thing they can agree on is more money for more weapons and more wars. Members of Veterans For Peace tend to understand these matters. I look for fearless journalism and independent thinkers with little regard for whether they are deemed "liberal" or “conservative.” Those terms have been rendered largely meaningless by war psychosis. We live in the era of and under the administration of political spoilsmen; when their reign ends our lot will improve, if we have not too severely damaged the planet in the meantime. I'm against war for intensely personal reasons, not least among them a pointless war that killed one dear friend and blighted the lives of several others. Philip's name is on a black granite wall in Washington. Others suffered longer and died later as a result of physical and emotional wounds they brought home after service in Southeast Asia. Glen Ray devoted his life after his Army service to his family and to helping others as a substance abuse counselor. He is memorialized by a facility named in his honor by his last employer. Sam was a poet. He served as a USMC combat radio operator. He found solace in writing and reading poetry and in the love of his family. It is one thing to die in battle and another to suffer for years with PTSD and debilitating physical disease.
Philip, Glen Ray, Sam, and I grew up in the most corrupt and vice-ridden city in Texas when it was run by WWII veterans who suffered from undiagnosed and untreated PTSD. As physicians and the general public come to better understand PTSD as a spectrum disorder, that is, one that is much more common than most realize, with psychological effects that have long gone largely unrecognized for what they are and undiagnosed, effects that subtly and not so subtly impact the perceptions and shape the attitudes of groups, nations, and peoples across generations, as well as individuals who become hateful and unhinged murderers (outliers actually), the thinking about war and militarism is changing.
There are many, many ways to experience psychological trauma and suffer from PTSD, a range of severity and of symptoms directly related to an individual traumatic experience or experiences. Military personnel; people caught up in war, in organized crime, or trapped in domestic violence situations; law enforcement officers and other first responders; health care workers; journalists and others may repeatedly or even routinely experience psychological or physical trauma. War engenders group trauma dynamics that play out over time in society across generations. Because, to a child, God is in many ways a magnified father figure, a generation reared by a generation of combat veterans with undiagnosed and untreated PTSD experiences and sees the world differently than does a generation reared by those who have not known combat and the horrors and trauma of war. Even when women do not go to war, they may nonetheless suffer the trauma of separation and loss associated with war and the symptomatic behaviors that impact relationships later.
Historian Thomas Childers painted an entirely new, unsentimental, and compelling picture of the struggles of "the Greatest Generation" in the aftermath of World War II in America in his 2009 book, Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation's Troubled Homecoming from World War II. Even Hollywood, in the critically-acclaimed 2019 crime epic The Irishman, hints broadly and graphically in a flashback to WWII at the role combat-related PTSD plays in later criminal activity and the terrible damage inflicted on family relationships over time.
A nation, a people, a culture that experiences constant war over many generations, a culture in which war is systematically glorified for profit and political advantage, will be a nation, a people, a culture enmeshed in and blighted by individual and group violence, corruption, and the many associated psychological traumas and disorders.
Let me tell you about one experience that stands out in memory as having shaped my personal views on war. In 1984, almost two years clean and sober, I was working as an erection foreman for General Dynamics Quincy (Massachusetts) Shipbuilding Division, the Fore River Yard. I pushed a crew of 20 to 30 shipfitters installing, or erecting, prefabricated units on Military Prepositioning Ships, hulls under construction in drydock. We worked around the clock and there was a lot of overtime and weekend work. (At lunch one day, another erection foreman mentioned that his wife had informed him while pouring his morning coffee that his unintelligible shouts had awakened her in the early hours of the morning. He had then, his wife had told him, suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, fired her, and ordered her off the ship. He had no memory of any of it, he said. His small audience laughed appreciatively.) No heating or cooling on the ship, the work was often bitterly cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Some hourly employees, at least as stressed and miserable as their foremen, required more supervision than others and, on occasion, assistance or a warning. Late one summer morning I found myself searching for a missing shipfitter, a man new to my crew that day, who had wandered off seeking relief from the heat of the sun blazing down on steel decks hot enough to fry an egg. Before turning away to avoid my gaze, another shipfitter would say only that the missing man was “around somewhere.” I smelled him before I saw him, leaning against a bulkhead in the shade of an overhanging unit. His shirt, soaked with sweat that reeked of whatever he’d been drinking the night before, hung on his thin frame. His complexion was sallow. He was a picture of late-stage alcoholism. I sought to engage him in friendly conversation but in mood and manner he was listless. When I segued into a sobriety pitch, he stopped me cold after a moment or two. Looking at me with the deadest, emptiest eyes I’ve ever seen, he said with little emotion, “I’m going to drink until I die. Nothing you can say will change that. I fucked dead Gook women in ’Nam. They’re better if you get ’em while they’re still warm.”
I was stunned. I had no answer for that. My tool box at not yet two years clean and sober contained no useful reply. I have not had to look into it for a response to a similar situation since. Now, approaching 40 years one day at a time, I note that the conversation took place on a ship named for a USMC Medal of Honor recipient (posthumous), a ship that has seen service and is likely still in service. Some people exhibit great and selfless courage under fire. Others become completely demoralized. For some, death in war is instantaneous and painless. Others suffer for decades unto death. In the Middle Ages, when mighty armies clashed, in fields not far away men might be at work tilling the soil. Today, civilian populations are often targeted and modern weaponry kills indiscriminately, often without warning and in countless ways. What will it take to persuade modern man to spend more time tilling the soil of the heart?
I am against war as a matter of principle as well as for personal reasons, and unashamedly so. Indeed, I have devoted my career as a journalist to bringing the views of antiwar, peace, and social justice advocates and activists to wider audiences. War should always be a last resort, not a shop-worn excuse to further enrich politically influential warmongers so morally depraved and so lacking in creativity that they can imagine no better way to accumulate wealth and power than by killing people, poor people of color, subsistence farmers mostly, who live in poor countries far away or right next door and who represent no real threat to anyone. If there is a good reason to cavalierly risk a civilization-destroying nuclear holocaust as the Washington foreign policy elite is doing now, it escapes me. Ironically, what seems to have escaped White supremacist neocons and neo-Nazis bent on war is that the disaster they are courting, a major nuclear exchange between the West and Russia, if it did not end human life on this planet, would certainly reduce the number of White people in the mix even if it did not otherwise serve to speed up the admixture of the races. Shouldn’t that tell you much of what you need to know about the mindset of White supremacist race warriors?
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had their differences, but regarding the most important topic, these two most influential psychoanalysts seem to have been very much in agreement despite their somewhat dissimilar approaches.
Freud wrote, "The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man." (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930)
Jung wrote, "We are living in what the Greeks called the Kαιpos – the right time – for a 'metamorphosis of the gods,' i.e., of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. As at the beginning of the Christian Era, so again today we are faced with the problem of the moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical, and social developments. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man. Is he capable of resisting the temptation to use his power for the purpose of staging a world conflagration? Is he conscious of the path that he is treading, and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present world situation and his own psychic situation? Does he know that he is on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner man, which Christianity has treasured up for him? Does he realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall him? Is he even capable at all of realizing that this would be a catastrophe? And finally, does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales?" (The Undiscovered Self, 1957)
Some say a new Cold War is on the near horizon. Arms makers, bullet-headed generals, bent politicians, and the filthy rich media moguls who cheer them on while shaping and limiting the public discussion have brought us to the brink of war with nuclear-armed Russia. A new Cold War would certainly be preferable to a nuclear holocaust, but it too would scuttle substantive climate change mitigation efforts, which are dependent upon international cooperation. One wonders, was that part of the plan all along?
Consider the massive Western propaganda exercise in progress complete with censorship on an unprecedented scale. It is working. Russia is hated as never before in the West where its president, Putin, is widely compared to Hitler (never mind that he lost an older brother he never knew in the siege of Leningrad where his mother almost died of starvation). Ukraine's President Zelensky, lauded as I write by NPR’s On Point as the West’s newest heroic Jewish head of state, leads a puppet government riddled with neo-Nazis and other militant White nationalists. That government, set up for the purpose of enrolling Ukraine in NATO and putting US missiles on Russia's front porch, was initially installed by the NED and the US government, which in subsequent years spared no effort to incite and subsidize violence against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern provinces. War hysteria/psychosis is now a bi-partisan effort in Official Washington. Even Robert Reich is now openly promoting anti-Russian feeling as the sentiment that will at last bring Americans together. Readers who wish to respond to Bob's pro-war pandering on his site must pay for the privilege. I found it easier, if less satisfying, to unsubscribe.
A close examination of news reports reveals that Israeli PM Bennett has been to Moscow and met with Putin in an attempt to mediate the crisis precipitated by Washington’s persistent provocations and Zelensky’s neo-Nazis’s attacks on Russian-speaking Ukrainians. US Secretary of State Blinken is reported to have expressed appreciation for the Israeli efforts. A subsequent Jerusalem Post report indicated that "Bennett is pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands to end the war." Both the Israeli and Ukrainian governments promptly denied that report.
Then came the news from Haaretz that "A representative of Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s Kahol Lavan party raised an initiative last week to purchase islands in Greece using money from the Jewish National Fund 'for the good of the Jewish people.'
"Avri Steiner – Kahol Lavan’s representative on the board of directors of Himnuta, a company owned by the Jewish national fund – brought the unusual proposal to the board last Thursday. According to several sources who were present at the meeting, Steiner, who was appointed to the board by Gantz, argued that the islands should be purchased 'to create a haven for the Jewish People in case of emergency, as a place for Jewish refugees in times of war.'"
One wonders, given the trauma attendant upon tragic loss of some six million Jews who perished in the Nazi holocaust, still within living memory if only just, and the far-reaching effects of that terrible loss and trauma, should the West have paid a bit more attention to the trauma associated with the loss of some 26 million Russians who perished in the USSR's successful effort to defeat the Nazi war machine? United States dead in all theaters as a result of WWII hostilities numbered less than one-half million. Has Gantz looked into Russian eyes and perceived there an unflinching resolve that unnerved the Israeli defense minister? Is Gantz the only player in an incredibly dangerous scheme of material conquest by force of arms who is having doubts about the supposed wisdom of setting up and lionizing a Jewish Ukrainian comedian as the head of a puppet government tasked with poking the nuclear-armed Russian bear in the eye with a neo-Nazi tipped spear?
How unfortunate that Official Washington seems never to have seen an off ramp it did not wish to block.
Some people assume that the worst can’t happen. It can, and it is more likely to happen if our leaders, presuming on divine mercy, persist in reckless brinkmanship. The world of the cross is a decimal planet. Despite the best efforts of our guardians, accidents can and do occur.
Heaven help us all.
