Earlier this year, I was honored to become a Research Fellow at The Libertarian Institute, which of course opposes the US government’s criminal policies in international affairs. Keith Knight, the institute’s managing editor and host of the Don’t Tread on Anyone podcast, recently invited us all to share our views on being anti-war.
Watch the resulting excellent compilation of anti-war messages in the following video, “Why We Must Choose Peace Over War: An Urgent Plea for Humanity” (my contribution begins at about the 15:25 mark):
Here is a transcript of my message in the video:
We live in dangerous times.
Two nuclear-armed powers are facing off against each other in Ukraine, with US-supplied weapons being used against Russian forces in a war taking place in the context of US government provocations including the broken promise not to expand NATO eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014.
Israel has been perpetrating a genocide in Gaza while the world watches, which risks destabilizing the entire Middle East, with the Houthis in Yemen attacking ships in the Red Sea linked to Israel or the Western countries supporting the devastation of Gaza and massacring of Palestinian civilians, the assassination by Israel of senior Iranian military officers in Syria, Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, and now Israel’s detonation of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies to target Hezbollah members in Lebanon, accompanied more cross-border strikes on both sides. [Note: I recorded my video message before Israel added to this list by assassinating Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on September 27.]
Israel’s genocidal retaliation for what Hamas called “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023, comes against the backdrop of the US government’s longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, which is partly explained by the role of what is termed “the Israel lobby” but is also largely a manifestation of the influence of Christian Zionism, with some evangelicals even wanting to usher in a war of Armageddon as a necessary precursor to the return of Jesus.
To that end, we’ve even seen Christian Zionists in the US collaborating with religious extremists in Israel to try to help Jewish groups obtain an unblemished red heifer for the purpose of sacrificing it in a purification ritual enabling orthodox Jews to return to the site of the Temple Mount, where Jewish extremists have long aimed to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock in order to build the Third Temple on the site where Solomon’s Temple originally stood and where the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
And the Israeli government has long empowered religious extremists and violent Jewish settlers, with the Temple Mount frequently serving as a flashpoint for conflict, including as a result of the annual “Flag March” through East Jerusalem, in which religious extremists protected by Israeli security forces can be heard chanting things like “Death to Arabs”.
With all the violence and risk of wider regional if not global war and outright nuclear holocaust, it is tempting to just shut ourselves off from the news about the world around us, but then we could hardly protect ourselves from the threat of global warfare and blowback like the 9/11 attacks if we don’t inform ourselves about the problems and act to try to change things to make the world a safer place for our children and future generations of humanity.
The challenge is that most of what people think they know about the world just isn’t true. Most Americans believe all kinds of historical myths, and they effectively consent to the US government’s criminal policies that serve special interest groups like the international central banking cartel and the military industrial complex at the expense of everyone else in society. Americans actually favor policies that are contrary to their own interests because they are duped by state propaganda. The government incessantly lies to us, and the mainstream media effectively do policy advocacy instead of journalism, serving the state by fulfilling the propaganda function of manufacturing consent for the evil deeds of the criminal organization in Washington, DC.
And to ensure that the public discourse consists of only regime-approved messages, the Democratic establishment is now openly advocating censorship, with the Biden administration throughout the COVID-19 pandemic having secretly colluded with and pressured social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to block factually accurate information correcting government-approved disinformation, which propaganda wasaimed at convincing Americans that the regime’s incredibly harmful authoritarianism was really in all of our best interests.
Among the government’s disinformation, of course, was the claim that the idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the lab in Wuhan, China, was a “conspiracy theory” when in fact the evidence supports the lab origin hypothesis, with the virus having been created through risky “gain of function” research funded by the US government, including the NIH subagency formerly directed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who himself was deeply involved in the orchestrated coverup of the probable lab origin, and who perjured himself before Congress by lying that the NIH never funded such research in Wuhan and that he had no role in the coverup.
It seems that no matter how much the government demonstrably lies to the public, most Americans just go on placing their faith in this institution. That is the power of the indoctrination into the state religion, which begins in early childhood under the government school system.
So, the question becomes: How can we help people de-indoctrinate themselves? And the answer in many cases is that we cannot. As the late foreign policy critic William Blum once told me, some people will go on believing the government until it sends its goons to kick down their doors and steal their firstborn. Such people cannot be helped. We must learn to identify and focus on educating those individuals who are capable of being reached.
There is reason for optimism. As a result of the regime’s overreach with its lockdown madness with its coerced mass vaccination endgame, we’ve seen a wave of mass awakening to the reality that the so-called “public health” establishment is completely unworthy of our trust. Unfortunately, the critical mass of awakened citizenry required to effect the paradigm shift necessary to eliminate the threat of authoritarian governance at home and criminal policies abroad remains far off.
That’s why it’s so important for news consumers not merely to passively inform themselves but to take an active role in helping to get the truth out. The idea of taking a public stance on issues can be intimidating. Anyone who does so is likely to upset family members and risk losing friends, but, then, the fact that it is hardly possible for people with opposing views to have a serious discussion about critically important issues is just another indication of the sickness in our society that requires anyone with a moral conscience to free themselves from the herd mentality and to stand up and speak out against the insanity.
Those of us who are doing independent journalism absolutely depend on our readers, listeners, and viewers to help us get the truth out. Silence is not an option if we want to each do our part to help create a brighter future. We all need to actually work at building an alternative society, one self-organized around the principle of non-aggression and individuals engaging in voluntary exchange for mutual benefit, resulting in scarce resources being directed toward the most productive ends as determined by the will of consumers, which is to say by all of us, as opposed to having a central authority threatening or using violence to achieve aims determined by corrupt, wicked, or at best just clueless politicians.
To learn more about the US role in the Israel-Palestine conflict, read my book Obstacle to Peace, which Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton has described as “the definitive scholarly account of the American role in the entire disaster”!
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
