When Peace Breaks Out

News that former missile silo sites are for sale in the Red River Valley might cause one to believe the U.S. was undergoing a nuclear-age beating of swords into plowshares.

Not so. We simply have fewer missile silos with multiple warheads, the same deadly standoff.

It’s easier for Bush Two and his nutball neocons to scare Americans about potential threats of Iranian nukes, than to level with us about two real horrors: Russia’s continuing nuclear ability to reach remaining silos in North Dakota, and Iran’s nuclear neighbor, Pakistan, descending into an anarchy tailor-made for Bin Laden’s faithful to get their hands on some seriously dangerous shit.

I’ve always thought it strange when historians tell of war “breaking out,” as if it were a surprising occurrence, like a case of the measles.

Unfortunately, historical records show that war is an everyday occurrence around the earth at any given time or place in the last five thousand years.

The “State of the World Atlas” lists for 1973-1986, 15 general wars, 6 anti-colonial wars, 13 regional civil wars, , 42 general civil wars, and 30 border wars.

In addition to this depressing list there is the twilight zone of 11 active border disputes and 6 dormant border disputes.

Not listed are violent coups d’etat by the U.S. against democratic governments, like the ones engineered by Henry Kissinger andPresident Nixon in 1973 against the government of Salvador Allende of Chile, and by the CIA and President Eisenhower in 1953, against Mohammed Mossadegh’s Iran.

It is more historically correct to speak of peace “breaking out,” since it is that phenomenon that is so rare, not war. Throughout the so-called peaceful reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901, for example, there was not a single year in which British soldiers were not fighting for “her” empire.

Victoria’s little wars were eclipsed in 1914 by a really big one, when a few men in the British Empire agreed with a few men in the German Empire that a nice little war between them and their allies in the Russian, French, and Austro-Hungarian Empires would be just the thing to prevent peace from breaking out.

War with each other was nowhere near as horrifying to these big shots as granting votes to women or empowerment to working people. and so the horrible 20th Century was ushered in, to be close with the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989-91.

The nation which had the most to say about what would or would not happen during this period was the United States of America--not simply because it had great power material and human resources, but because the majority of its people loathed war for Empire beyond its borders in the 48 (50) states.

The American people voted against war in 1916, 1918, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, until Pearl Harbor convinced us that we would have to become a military empire, albeit a democratic one, for self-preservation.

World War II only became glamorous in retrospect, as American leaders used it to justify interventions in places like Korea (actually a war with China), and Vietnam (actually a war with ourselves).

As in 1914, big shots like Robert McNamara in1961 thought they knew better than the average American what was good for them. and so he and his fellow educated morons in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations wedded the Democrat Party to lies which took us into war in Southeast Asia. The Democrat Party, however, was actually democratic, and had the decency to tear itself apart in 1968 over the issue.

No such decency governs the Republican Party which lied us into theBush/Cheney Corporate Empire War in Iraq. Like McNamara before them, Donald Rumsfeld and his fellow educated morons sought to market and manage this war as if it were no different than when he was pushing Diet Cola as CEO of Searle Corporation. Because of the Vietnam experience, disaster was predictable. And it came.

Now the Republicans trot out John McCain, a tired version of the bubbly, bumbling George the Second, selling the same snake oil.

McCain may have the decency (or ineptitude) to look like he doesn’t really believe what he is saying, but he is trapped in an indecent political party which will soon go into a full attack mode on any and all Democrats who responsibly address the Iraq disaster, rather than look in the mirror.

I grew up in Donald Rumsfeld’s Republican culture of smugness and arrogance inEvanston, Illinois, in the later 1940s and 1950s. It’s not pretty, but I can read the minds of these people, simply because I had those big ears that children who are seen and not heard seem to have.

I would sit at the breakfast table and acquire allthe swear words I would ever need as an adult, along with my corn flakes. The swearing often centered on Eleanor Roosevelt, who had the audacity to work for peace and equality. Back then I thought “Eleanor” was her third name, the first two being “That Goddamned.”

The problem with Republicans, their Rumsfelds and their Cheneys, aside from worship of greed and power without responsibility, is that they think, in the words of Jonathan Swift, that “there is no odour in their ordure.” They believe that they are born better than lesser Americans, that is to say the rest of us.

Such a belief is un-American in the extreme, the very thing that we fought against 200 years ago, but it is there nevertheless. It is the single greatest stumbling block to an America committed to fighting a war against terrorism with weapons of potable water and public sanitation, as well as with bullets, and of a resort to negotiations rather than negative stereotypes of those nations who differ with us on matters like the pursuit of happiness.

Americans should neither be too morose nor too proud of the world power we have inherited since World War II. Our pride should be that our democracy didn’t want it, but took up the mantle when empires threatened in 1941.

The more than 200,000 Germans whoshowed up in Berlin Recently to cheer Barack Obama sense that while peace may not exactly break out, Americans are once again about to throttle the imperialists in their own government in a way the German, French and English forefathers failed to do even once.

But warmongers are so resourceful…