The well-defined need for war.

I’ve seen “Why we Fight” a few days back, and it’s a strong, pretty unbiased documentary on the US ‘Military Industrial Complex”. As a character that later burned himself to death with gasoline on the streets said in Linklater’s Waking Life (a Movie); “I believe all these wars, disasters and famines meet well-defined needs.”

And it’s a scary thing to realize, but that’s just that. We’ve become entangled, globally, in an arms race to an unattainable goal. Making money. While our society itself is already thriving on people’s misery (let say you’d want to feed the world, then we’d have to make some serious compromises), we are also enriching ourself with war. The United States is, of course, a prime example of a state that has been thriving on war, misery, and death for it’s life-span, and Europe, the birth-ground of this entire cultural phenomenon, hasn’t become pacifist in the last 60 years either. The refusal of renouncing nuclear weapons from all sides, and the more rapid and spontaneous uprising of armament of nations across the globe is an increasingly alarming signal we have to take seriously. I don’t consider anyone reading my blog to be ignorant enough to truly believe in the threat of terrorism. It’s no new threat, and it’s been debased countless times - it’s not a ‘threat’ to us in it’s form today or yesterday, not even in statistics.

Global warming, and global uptake of weapons, are fundamental threats to our existence. Increasing numbers of Orwellian laws in, by now, almost all of our ‘first world’ countries being introduced to fight off ‘terrorism’, is a fundamental threat to the way society is today. At the moment, history is balancing on a thread; either we plunge into our own history of bloodshed, regressing into more fundamental religious beliefs, the dismissal of science or the distortion of it, and a controlling state that thrives ever more on war, or we plunge into a controllable, but fierce struggle with the issues man created. Our world is knocking on our door, and we can’t keep it out much longer.

I often feel powerless about the situation around me. I have seen the politics in the Netherlands (for those who still don’t get it, I live there) grow ever more conservative, discriminative (foreign policy, foreigners) and religiously oriented. It’s startling that 30 years ago, when in the Netherlands, a political party would have suggested to re-introduce mandatory ID-checks, would have been branded fascist. Today, everything including tapping all communications, storing even the most profiling data on people in a centralized fashion (the exact thing that caused the most devastating effects of the holocaust in the Second World War), or extraditing people who know only Dutch culture to Iraq or Afghanistan, has become a facet of the times. We look upon China with disgust, because of true censorship, but in my country, the secret service has tapped media, lawyers, newspaper journalists, or even prosecuted them with this information. All with the great laws that will one day, allow us to stop terrorists in their tracks.

All I ask of you, is that when you turn on the TV next time, and look at those images, of suicide bombings, wars, and famines, just realize that there are people that profit from this. There are societies that profit from this. Don’t look upon corpses and explosions with a perspective of ideals and motives, but a goal. There is only one goal, and that is to keep US in power. WE are the power of the Earth, and the throne is going by the heat of our own fire. You are one of the people, the reason. We are all the reason. Our legacy is coming, for the Earth, for our race, as humanity. In what world do you want your children to live? It won’t be yours.