WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #89, AUGUST 31, 2022
Chris Hedges. “Ukraine and the Politics of Permanent War.”
World Beyond War. The War Abolisher Awards of 2022.
Dick Bennett. “Finding Hope.”
Chris Hedges. “Ukraine and the Politics of Permanent War.”
The prosecution of permanent war requires permanent censorship.
No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design.
On August 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general. Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require Congressional approval.
Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia's February 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts.
The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades have invested heavily in controlling the public narrative. The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor.
The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions. MORE https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/29/chris-hedges-ukraine-and-the-politics-of-permanent-war/
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Dick: Finding HOPE, all around and in us.
Despair: to lose hope, to be without hope.
To a Christian, despair denies Jesus. Through Jesus and a God of love we can understand the universe and solve human problems With Jesus we cannot despair.
To a humanist, despair abandons reason and science and the other affirmations of human thought and action by which we understand the universe and solve human problems. The colleges of the arts and sciences exemplify humanist hope.
These two ways to truth are not essentially, inevitably antagonistic. The Dalai Lama led the Tibetan nation and faith while affirming all religions and science and social sciences. Both can agree with Thomas Hardy’s way to truth: “If way to a better there be/It exacts a full look at the worst.” ( “In Tenebris II”) Both eschew denial of reality, evasion, naiveté, wishful thinking, ignorance, partial thinking, inadequate perception, bigotry, jingoism, xenophobia, which generate illusions. Both seek action based on full reality. And both are imperfect, always to be improved.
The present confluence of wars, threat of nuclear war, planetary heating, global racism, population growth, economic inequality, and pandemics exacts a full look at the worst, if we are to act wisely for peace.
OMNI’S WWW AND CMM seek to provide parts of this full reality.
Ref.
The last page of every number of Free Inquiry provides “The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles” by Paul Kurtz.