AWAKENINGS
One of the most distinct memories I have of an incident that took place during the last 35 to 40 years happened on January 16th of 1991. A friend and I were driving home from a movie theater where we’d just seen a film called “Awakenings”. We had the car radio on when suddenly a “special announcement” began playing. It was George Bush Senior saying that the US was going to war. We pulled over in astonishment. My friend and I sat there in the car for close to a half an hour after the announcement ended. We couldn’t believe it. We’d read about wars in our school textbooks and we’d seen movies and TV programs about war, of course, but it always felt like something that no longer went on in what we conceived of our world at the time.
IN DEFENSE OF THE WEAKENED WESTERN NERVOUS SYSTEM
I’d imagine that to many Americans who were born in the 1990s or later, the paragraph they just read might seem terribly naive. This is because most people who are in their 20s or 30s now probably can’t remember a day in their lives when the US wasn’t involved in a war or in multiple wars of some kind. Speaking here as someone who’s lived about half of their life in the pre-perpetual wars era and the other half in the current era of nonstop wars, I can say with some confidence that there’s been a difference between the two periods as far as how they’ve played upon our nervous systems.
In my case, within the first few years that followed 2001, I was overcome with the feeling that everything that our US and other allied Western governments were doing when it came to foreign policy was actually aiming to generate the opposite result to the one they were advertising. Their “War on Terror” was obviously a war OF terror aimed at generating fear and restrictive control at home while inflicting massive destruction, chaos and death abroad. I remember feeling both infuriated and also a bit perplexed, thinking, “Are our leaders really this drop-dead stupid or are they trying to do something other than what they’re telling us they’re trying to do?”(1)
A BRIEF REFLECTION ON WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN
Jumping back briefly to early 1991: After the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell the world suddenly found itself in a historically unique set of conditions. Promises were made and plans were beginning to be drawn up that had the potential to unite the world in peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately, there was a tight-knit group of US statespeople known as neocons, who had other ideas.(1a) After brazenly breaking the promises that were made to Russia and to other nations in the 1990s, these neocons, who had managed to take over US foreign policy by the end of the 20th century, began a massive, ruthless campaign that centered around the creation of seven wars that were to take place between 2002 – 2007. What began as a five year plan turned into a nonstop 25 year blood-drenched rampage that has utilized constant Western media propaganda in order to attempt to justify the slaughter of millions of people in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Iran as well as in Africa, Asia and South America.(2),(2a)
WHEN IT FINALLY BECOMES CLEAR THAT YOU’RE NOT “THE GOOD GUY” ANYMORE
By 2010 it became pretty clear to me that the US, with the UK and the rest of NATO in tow, was the duplicitous instigator and main offender when it came to the bombings and invasions that were undertaken in a quest to uproot and kill “potential evil doers” that were said to be gearing up to journey Westward in order to “take our freedom” from us. It was a sad and also a creepy feeling – to realize that I no longer felt comfortable being a member of the “Comfortable West”. In fact it began to feel a bit like I was in a horror movie in which the lunatic’s calls were coming from inside instead of from outside of the house. From the early 2010s up until the present, both major US political parties and all of the mainstream Western media have been walking and talking in near lockstep when it comes to pumping the public up with fabrications that aim to convince us of how evil any and/all noncomplying countries are.(3)
According to the talking heads in our media and in the military industrial complex, many of the nations that have refused to reorganize their economies and to align with the US and NATOs hegemonic neoliberal plan, have needed to be “freed” from either a Hitler-like dictator or from the “wrong kind” of democratically elected government. “Freeing” these countries has generally involved either bombing and/or invading them or using other adjacent nations as proxies to fight against them as NATO has done with Ukraine. After over a decade of US/NATO intervention in Ukraine’s politics coupled with a decade and a half of anti-Russian propaganda and bear poking, Ukraine’s US installed, NATO armed and funded government took on its appointed role as a battering ram that the US/NATO have used, unsuccesfully, to attempt to weaken Russia and to force regime change there. In the process the US and Europe have sacrificed Ukraine’s future along with about 2 million of its inhabitants’ lives. I’ve written about this subject in a few different articles, one of which you can access in the citations section below: (4)
Additionally, we’ve now witnessed two and and a half years of an ongoing, bipartisanly approved, US funded and armed genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.(4a) Add to this the absurdity of the Trump administration’ s current war with Iran, which has already caused the deaths of over 10,000 people.(4b)
It doesn’t stop there though. In Europe now, Conservative and Labor party leaders in NATO countries such as Germany, Britain, France and other prominent European nations are (seriously) proposing a decade of war between Europe and Russia as a solution to their economic woes. This is essentially their entire plan to revive Europe. This is what they’re offering the youth of Europe for their future – constant war, austerity and a corresponding decrease in the quality of life. These leaders’ other motivation of course being the fact that the war in Ukraine has been a cash cow for wealthy European donor elites.(5),(5a) Funnily, these leaders are currently wondering why they’re beginning to be voted out of government positions by a European public who are now favoring newly formed “far right wing” parties that want peace and diplomacy with Russia instead of an upcoming decade of war with them.(6)
I challenge anyone to present any metric that would indicate that the Collective West (The US and its European NATO allies) have been anything other than a duplicitous, reckless, hyperviolent, imperialist global scourge in the 21st century so far.
WDS (AND THE NECESSITY TO BUILD A WORLD WITHOUT WARS)
If you don’t think all that I’ve just mentioned about the last few decades of constant lying by our leaders along with unending, unnecessary wars, millions of dead bodies and an ongoing US-enabled genocide haven’t kicked the sh_t out of our collective sense of meaning as a country and as members of this human species, well then, I don’t know what to tell you. With the exception of a minority of sociopathic Americans who couldn’t care less about anyone except themselves, the vast majority of us, whether we’re fully aware of it yet or not, are suffering from WDS.
We’re living in a pivotal, transitional historical period in which continuing with business as usual (with the absurdity of perpetual wars undertaken to generate profits for the very few) will soon very likely bring an end to our species. As US Colonel Douglas McGregor, one of the world’s top military experts has said, “We live in an era where war no longer works. It’s obsolete, and as a cultural modus operandi it’s suicidal.”(7)
I’ve included links here to organizations (one of which I’m affiliated with) whose aim is to put an end to war: 1-https://worldwwars.org/ 2-https://worldwithout.org/ 3-https://everydaypeacebuilding.com/pacifist-organizations/
CITATIONS:
1-https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-true-failure-of-bushs-war-on-terror/
1a-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxgxlZxsN0Q
2-https://afsc.org/newsroom/long-shadow-war-terror-and-world-could-have-been
2a-https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/9/22/us-plans-to-attack-seven-muslim-states
3-https://cassandravoices.com/history/gradations-of-evil-neoliberalism-and-neoconservatism/
4-https://www.pressenza.com/2024/08/the-us-calculated-sacrifice-of-the-ukrainian-population/
4b-https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/09/17/trump-united-states-losing-iran-war/
5-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LW87eVNbqc
6-https://www.dw.com/en/german-state-elections-deal-a-blow-to-chancellor-friedrich-merz/a-79348585
7-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AZPNUaXJ-k
