Thursday, May 15, 2014

War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength | The Big Picture

War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength | The Big Picture

"American Public Turns Anti-War … Warmongers Desperately Reply, “But War Is GOOD for Us!”



The American people are now overwhelmingly opposed to more war in Ukraine, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.


Those who get rich from war (the military-industrial complexers and big banks) and their lackeys are desperate to reverse this trend.


As such, they are resorting to more and more outlandish justifications for war.


For example, Ian Morris has written an entire book arguing that war is the best thing ever, the only thing which has lifted us out of poverty and barbarianism. And – yes – he even says that war brings peace.


David Swanson provides a must-read dismantling of Morris’ book.

Morris writes this week in the Washington Post:


War has not only made us safer, but richer, too.
In reality, security experts – conservative hawks and liberal doves alike – agree that waging war in the Middle East weakens national security and increases terrorism. See this, this, this, this, this, this and this. So it doesn’t make us safer.


And there is now overwhelming evidence that war is horrible for the economy, and makes us poorer


Morris continues:


Thinkers have long grappled with the relationships among
peace, war and strength. Thomas Hobbes wrote his case for strong
government, “Leviathan,” as the English Civil War raged around him in
the 1640s.
In reality, Hobbes was an authoritarian who argued – just like (1)
the leading Nazi legal scholar and philosopher who created the
justification for “total war” to destroy those labeled an “enemy” of the
Nazi state (Carl Schmitt), (2) Machiavelli, and (3) the father of the Neoconservatives (Leo Strauss) – that the public should be intentionally whipped into a frenzy of fear so that they would be willing to give up their rights and cede their freedoms to the sovereign.


Indeed, Morris accidentally reveals that he is cut from the exact same cloth when he states:


People almost never give up their freedoms — including, at times, the right to kill and impoverish one another — unless forced to do so.
In other words, freedom bad … authoritarian leader good.


Morris writes:


Since 1914, we have endured world wars, genocides and
government-sponsored famines, not to mention civil strife, riots and
murders. Altogether, we have killed a staggering 100 million to 200
million of our own kind. But over the century, about 10 billion lives
were lived — which means that just 1 to 2 percent of the world’s
population died violently. Those lucky enough to be born in the 20th
century were on average 10 times less likely to come to a grisly end
than those born in the Stone Age.
In other words,  War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength."





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