Global

Here’s an anniversary no one wants to celebrate: The Columbine school shooting — April 20, 1999 — just passed its 25th anniversary. Fifteen dead (including the two shooters), twenty-one injured. A new era begins . . .

Why, why, why bring up such a horrific event? Perhaps because it hasn’t stopped.

Even though I sit here in the comfort of my study, feeling perfectly safe, I can’t emotionally disentangle myself from the news, which is always, in one way or another, about the human need to kill itself — or rather, the human assumption that it’s divided from itself, and “the other,” whoever that other is, either needs to be killed or is, at best, expendable. For instance:

“The Senate has passed $95 billion in war aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, sending the legislation to President Joe Biden after months of delays and contentious debate over how involved the United States should be in foreign wars.”

Dwight David Eisenhower, the Prophet-President of the United States, sixty-four years ago warned of the ascension of the military-industrial state, presently morphed into the military-industrial-intelligence complex, which, fully in control of our government, induces and manipulates our fears, creating serial enemies, justifying endless war for profit, openly canceling long-cherished constitutional rights, within  the hoary rubric of “National Security,” read: Plunder of the American taxpayer.  

Congress, as an Article One creation is in the thrall of  murderous interest groups which  are actively driving mass killings, assassinations, famine and ethnic cleansing, the progeny of genocide, in plain sight, recycling  U.S. taxpayers’ hard-earned money to tighten its grip on American politics, all the while using its media influence to deny any of this is happening, denying even the existence of a people, or how they died,  as  bodies pile up by the tens of thousands in Gaza.

Given the lying and fact twisting that have routinely been part and parcel of accounts of what is occurring in the Middle East, the past several weeks have nevertheless been shocking in terms of how an abysmally low standard of truth can be reduced even farther. Looking at developments objectively, one comes up with a series of facts. First of all, Israel was not at war with either Syria or Iran during the first weeks in April. Iran had never attacked Israel prior to that point and Syria last fought Israel in 1973, over fifty years ago. Israel, however, has regularly been assassinating Iranian officials and scientists and it has been frequently been bombing Syria since 2017, increasing the pace to weekly and sometimes even daily attacks over the past six months paralleling the Gaza fighting.

The western discourse on the circumstances behind the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 75 years ago, is hardly convincing. 

 Yet, that over-simplified discourse must be examined in order for the current decline of the organization to be appreciated beyond the self-serving politics of NATO’s members. 

 The history records page of the US State Department speaks of the invention of NATO in a language suitable for a US high school history book. 

 "After the destruction of the Second World War, the nations of Europe struggled to rebuild their economies and ensure their security," it reads, which compelled the US to take action: "(integrating) Europe as vital to the prevention of communist expansion across the continent."