{"id":210710,"date":"2022-05-02T12:01:35","date_gmt":"2022-05-02T11:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=210710"},"modified":"2022-05-02T09:08:53","modified_gmt":"2022-05-02T08:08:53","slug":"the-global-suicide-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/05\/the-global-suicide-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"The Global Suicide Budget"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em>27 Apr 2022 – \u201cUnder the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I truly wish these words of Ike<\/a>, uttered seven decades ago, were no longer quite so relevant. Perhaps what he should have called it was a \u201ccross of irony.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2021, the human race, in order to keep itself safe, invested $2.1 trillio<\/a>n in the ability to make war \u2014 to kill one another, even (if necessary) to end life altogether. It\u2019s the planet\u2019s largest collective military budget ever, but \u2014 oh, the irony \u2014 the budget will keep on growing . . . as long as the budget keeps on growing. The more we invest in keeping ourselves safe from the enemy, the more \u201cthe enemy\u201d will have to invest to keep itself safe from us.<\/p>\n

Gun culture\u2019s sidekick is fear culture. The two are inseparable. Alas, in the public domain, fear culture morphs into what theologian Walter Wink has called the myth of redemptive violence. It sounds like this:<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom Ia Drang to Khe Sanh, from Hue to Saigon and countless villages in between, they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideas we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions of our Armed Forces.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was President Obam<\/a>a, in 2012, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Vietnam War, but leaving out a few details: the fact, for instance, that the U.S. dropped 6 million tons of bombs and other ordnance on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1964 and 1973, along with some 19 million gallons of toxic chemicals, including Agent Orange; the fact that multi-thousands of vets (highest estimate, 150,000, triple the number of American combat dead) committed suicide after they were finished upholding the highest traditions of the Armed Forces; the fact that as many as three million Vietnamese, including two million civilians, were killed in the war, and hundreds of thousands more were injured and permanently displaced; the fact that the term \u201cecocide\u201d was coined to describe what we did to the Vietnamese countryside.<\/a><\/p>\n

Somehow all this never quite hit home in the U.S. of A. \u2014 never quite landed in the national conscience and caused a change in the country\u2019s relationship to the world. From the point of view of American leadership, the shattered country of Vietnam became an inconvenience. We lost. The war was perceived as an utter failure and the use of American military muscle plunged in the national polls. \u201cVietnam syndrome\u201d gripped the country, forcing it to wage proxy wars for the next 17 years. Finally, George H.W Bush launched Gulf War I<\/a>, which was a huge success from the American point of view. Yellow ribbons were everywhere! As many as 100,000 Iraqis died, compared to 144 Americans.<\/p>\n

But the success was bigger than just winning the war at hand. In its wake, Bush 1 proclaimed: \u201cBy God, we\u2019ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome<\/a> once and for all.\u201d<\/p>\n

America was now fully free to use its military again! This eventually opened the way for Bush 2\u2019s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for the ever-expanding U.S. military budget, which amounts to nearly 50 percent of that jaw-dropping global total.<\/p>\n

And several thousand nuclear weapons sit ready to go, whenever one or several global leaders decide the time has come for humanity to commit suicide \u2014 in the name of keeping itself safe, or at least protecting various interests.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s really only one question here, which is: How do we change? Virtually every stable human being on Planet Earth is in favor of never waging nuclear war, I would imagine, yet global cluelessness rules, or sort of rules. I fear we\u2019re trapped in what might be called a metaphorical mousetrap. We live counter to our deepest values in order to, as Obama put it, \u201cupheld our highest traditions.\u201d Or something like that.<\/p>\n

But perhaps even something as overwhelming as war can be dismantled one personal connection at a time. So, returning briefly to Vietnam, I consider a miniscule speck of a moment in the life of Paul Meadlo, one of the participants in the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968. Seymour Hersh, who as a young freelance journalist broke the story to the American public, wrote about it again many years later in the New Yorker<\/a>. He described how the Americans had rounded up the villagers and held them at gunpoint in larger circles. At one point, Lt. William Calley called out:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Get with it. I want them dead.\u2019 From about ten or fifteen feet away, Meadlo said, Calley \u2018started shooting them. Then he told me to start shooting them. . . . . I started to shoot them, but the other guys wouldn\u2019t do it. So we\u2019 \u2014 Meadlo and Calley \u2014 \u2018went ahead and killed them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hersh adds: \u201cThere was official testimony showing that Meadlo had in fact been extremely distressed by Calley\u2019s order. After being told by Calley to \u2018take care of his group,\u2019 one Charlie Company soldier recounted, Meadlo and a fellow-soldier \u2018were actually playing with the kids, telling the people where to sit down and giving the kids candy.\u2019 When Calley returned and said that he wanted them dead, the soldier said, \u2018Meadlo just looked at him like he couldn\u2019t believe it. He says, \u2018Waste them?\u2019\u201d When Calley said yes, another soldier testified, Meadlo and Calley \u2018opened up and started firing.\u2019 But then Meadlo \u2018started to cry.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This to me addresses the global military budget, and the cross of irony, with terrifying clarity. The bullets fly in all directions. Sometimes they hit the soul.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2021, the human race, in order to keep itself safe, invested $2.1 trillion in the ability to make war \u2014 to kill one another, even to end life altogether. We live counter to our deepest values in order to, as Obama put it, \u201cupheld our highest traditions.\u201d Or something like that. The bullets fly in all directions. Sometimes they hit the soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":122360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1817,1161,1188,2161,291,1105,91,429,1301,450,2571,112,254,461],"class_list":["post-210710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-anti-militarism","tag-arms-industry","tag-arms-race","tag-militarism-and-science","tag-military","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-nato","tag-nuclear-ban-treaty","tag-nuclear-war","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-pentagon","tag-security","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}