Ancient Wisdom

The perpetual war has a dual objective. Besides establishing and maintaining an empire and controlling the world's most important resources. The chefs who cooked up this war also aim to keep the citizens of the home country impoverished, indebted, and desperate, otherwise those citizens might have the leisure to inform themselves about what's being done to them, and why. In addition, channeling most of the country's resources into the endless war also makes it easier to keep the citizenry in a state of frightened, ignorant, homicidal fanaticism.

That last part hasn't worked out so well, though. Polls show that more and more American citizens as time goes by are recognizing that they are being robbed to feed a war machine that is weakening the country, not making it stronger.

There was a time when the anti-war message was delivered by people in very high places. Guess who said this?

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

That was a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who was also the supreme commander of allied forces at the D-Day landing and invasion of Europe in 1944. He was speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April of 1953.