Endless War and Endless Lies

The war based economy of the US drives senseless destruction, death, and misery across the globe. As I look back over all the US instigated wars of my lifetime, I can't think of a single one that wasn't justified by lies. The war of my youth, Vietnam, was promoted with the Tonkin Gulf false flag narrative.

“American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression”, announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.
That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”
But there was no “second attack” by North Vietnam — no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.” By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.
A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media…leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.

Seems the US has been warring or conducting coups my entire life. I think the CIA is largely to blame. I suspect it is their goal to keep the MIC fed, plus all their off the books grifting with drug sales, arms trades, blackmail, and sex trafficking. I often refer to them as the mafia branch of our government. I wonder if the replacement of Henry Wallace as VP by Truman was to insure the creation of the CIA.

Excellent summary of recent and some older wars..
https://truthout.org/articles/lies-and-consequences-in-our-past-15-wars/
Here's a condensed version...

AFGHANISTAN
When the United States attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the Taliban again offered to negotiate for the handing over of bin Laden. When President George W. Bush refused, the Taliban dropped its demand for evidence of guilt and offered simply to turn bin Laden over to a third country. Bush rejected this offer and continued bombing. At a March 13, 2002, press conference, Bush said of bin Laden “I truly am not that concerned about him.”[i] When President Barack Obama announced, in May 2011, that he had killed bin Laden, the war didn’t even slow down.
LIBYA
Gadaffi had given up his nuclear program. His subsequent fate (butchered and displayed in a meat locker), along with the fate of the nation of Iraq, sends a strong message to other nations already inclined to believe that only nuclear weapons will protect them.

But Gadaffi had displeased the West and displeased the Arab dictatorships. He was unreliable. He wanted too much of Libya’s wealth for Libyans. He was too independent. He even called the Saudi monarch the worst thing in the book: “made by Britain and protected by the U.S.” And he made that remark in Qatar, another nation that became his enemy.
DRONE WARS
The bombing of Libya was intense and sustained, but U.S. drones are also being used to kill in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. They are used to kill individuals, including U.S. citizens, including children, including both identified individuals and people targeted because of a pattern of behavior that is deemed suspicious, and of course including many people who simply happen to be too close to an intended or accidental target. If drone strikes are law enforcement, the president or his designate is judge, jury, and executioner.
IRAQ II
President George W. Bush had decided on the war and sought ways to get it started for many months, while publicly pretending to be striving to avoid a war. Vice President Cheney pressured the CIA to fudge the facts, and set up an even more compliant “intelligence” operation within the Pentagon. Secretary of State Colin Powell made a war sales pitch to the United Nation despite his own staff having warned him that many of the claims he would be making were not backed up by the evidence. The U.N. refused to authorize the war, but Bush launched it anyway, resulting in over a million deaths and over 4 million people displaced from their homes, along with such complete devastation of Iraqi society that commentators began popularizing the term “sociocide.” This disaster cost the U.S. trillions of dollars in direct expense and indirect economic impact
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And then there were all the subordinate war crimes that came along with the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq: targeting civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, using antipersonnel weapons including cluster bombs in densely settled urban areas, using white phosphorous as a weapon, using depleted uranium weapons, employing a new form of napalm found in Mark 77 firebombs, collectively punishing populations including by blocking roads and electricity and water, by planting bombs in farm fields, by demolishing houses, by plowing down orchards, by detaining people without charge, imprisoning children, torturing, raping, and murdering captives. An increased use of mercenaries created a force lacking even the pretense of accountability to any body of law.
BOSNIA
In 1995, President Clinton announced that he would “help the people of Bosnia to secure their own peace.” Almost two decades later, U.S. and other foreign troops have never left , and the place is governed by a European-backed Office of High Representative.[xiv] U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia gave NATO a reason to exist after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was also not unrelated to lead, zinc, cadmium, gold, and silver mines, cheap labor, and a deregulated market.

IRAQ I
Far-fetched claims of humanitarian intention did not begin with Bill Clinton either. On October 9, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl told a U.S. congressional committee that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers take 15 babies out of an incubator in a Kuwaiti hospital and leave them on the cold floor to die. Some congress members, including the late Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), knew but did not tell the U.S. public that the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, that she’d been coached by a major U.S. public relations company paid by the Kuwaiti government, and that there was no other evidence for the story. President George H. W. Bush used the dead babies story 10 times in the next 40 days, and seven senators used it in the Senate debate on whether to approve military action. Thus was born the Gulf War, a war that would never really end, but would be radically expanded in 2003.

PANAMA
When Bush the Elder had first sought, among other things, to prove he was no “wimp” by attacking Panama in 1989, the most prominent justification was that Panama’s leader was a mean, drug-crazed, weirdo with a pockmarked face who liked to commit adultery. An article in the New York Times on December 26, 1989, began:

“The United States military headquarters here, which has portrayed General Manuel Antonio Noriega as an erratic, cocaine-snorting dictator who prays to voodoo gods, announced today that the deposed leader wore red underwear and availed himself of prostitutes.”

Never mind that Noriega had worked for the CIA, including at the time he’d stolen the 1984 election in Panama. Never mind that his real offense was refusing to back U.S. war making against Nicaragua. Never mind that the United States had known about Noriega’s drug trafficking for years and continued working with him.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC AND GRENADA
Often one of the initial excuses for military action is to defend Americans in a foreign country who have supposedly been put at risk by recent events. This excuse was used, along with the usual variety of other excuses, by the United States when invading the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989. In the case of the Dominican Republic, U.S. citizens who wanted to leave (1,856 of them) had been evacuated prior to the military action.
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In the case of Grenada (an invasion that the United States banned the U.S. media from covering) there were supposedly U.S. medical students to rescue. But U.S. State Department official James Budeit, two days before the invasion, learned that the students were not in danger. When about 100 to 150 students decided they wanted to leave, their reason was fear of the U.S. attack. The parents of 500 of the students sent President Reagan a telegram asking him not to attack, letting him know their children were safe and free to leave Grenada if they chose to do so.
KOREA
The forgotten war in Korea, however, was the war that did away with Congressional declarations and established war as a permanent industry and global project, with the heavy taxes that go along with funding that. Americans were told that North Korea had attacked South Korea and had done so at the behest of the Soviet Union as part of a plot to take over the world for communism. In fact, the evidence suggests that the South was the aggressor. But, whichever side attacked, this was a civil war. The Soviet Union was not involved, and the United States ought not to have been. South Korea was not the United States, and was not in fact anywhere near the United States, yet this war was advertised as “defensive.”

Even WWII was cooked...
On September 4, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a “fireside chat” radio address in which he claimed that a German submarine, completely unprovoked, had attacked the United States destroyer Greer, which — despite being called a destroyer — had been harmlessly delivering mail. Really? The Senate Naval Affairs Committee questioned Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, who said the Greer had been tracking the German submarine and relaying its location to a British airplane, which had dropped depth charges on the submarine’s location without success. The Greer had continued tracking the submarine for hours before the submarine turned and fired torpedoes.

A month and a half later, Roosevelt told a similar tall tale about the USS Kearny. And then he really piled on. Roosevelt claimed to have in his possession a secret map produced by Hitler’s government that showed plans for a Nazi conquest of South America. The Nazi government denounced this as a lie, blaming of course a Jewish conspiracy. The map, which Roosevelt refused to show the public, in fact actually showed routes in South America flown by American airplanes, with notations in German describing the distribution of aviation fuel. It was a British forgery, and apparently of about the same quality as the forgeries President George W. Bush would later use to show that Iraq had been trying to purchase uranium.

as well as WWI
In the case of World War I, the U.S. public was told that Germany had attacked our good and innocent allies, might eventually attack us, and had in fact attacked innocent American civilians aboard a ship called the Lusitania. German submarines had been giving warnings to civilian ships, allowing passengers to abandon them before they were sunk. When this exposed the U-boats to counterattacks, however, the Germans began attacking without warning. That was how they sank the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. But, through other channels, the Germans had already warned those passengers. The Lusitania had been built to specifications of the British Navy which listed it as an auxiliary cruiser. On its final voyage, the Lusitania was packed with American-made war materiel, including ten-and-a-half tons of rifle cartridges, 51 tons of shrapnel shells, and a large supply of gun cotton, not to mention 67 soldiers of the 6th Winnipeg Rifles. That the ship was carrying troops and weapons to war was not actually a secret. Before the Lusitania left New York, the German Embassy had obtained permission from the U.S. Secretary of State to publish in New York newspapers a warning that because the ship was carrying war supplies it would be subject to attack.
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And so it goes, back through the claim that the Civil War was launched to end slavery and was needed to end slavery, even though so many other nations ended slavery without wars. Back through the endless lies about, and to, Native Americans. Back through the War of 1812 that we like to imagine as a defensive struggle and a continuation of a war for independence, although it was actually launched by the U.S. government three decades after the revolution ended, and launched with the intention of conquering Canada. Back indeed beyond the American Revolution that we justify by averting our eyes from the nonviolent liberation of many other nations.

Yes and so it goes...endlessly. Much more at the link.

Chris Hedges is back with a new show at the Real News.

Rulers divide the world into 'worthy' and 'unworthy' victims; those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. This bifurcation of the world into worthy and unworthy victims is a key component of propaganda, especially in war. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, award-winning journalist Peter Oborne joins Chris Hedges to examine how worthy victims are used to allow citizens to see themselves as empathetic, compassionate, and just; how they are an effective tool to demonize the aggressor; and how they are used to obliterate nuance and ambiguity.

War Made Easy, made by the Media Education Foundation and based off the book by Norman Solomon, reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. This film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion & exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations. War Made Easy gives special attention to parallels between the Vietnam war and the war in Iraq.

Governments lie to justify wars. Newspapers and TV news programs assist governments by forwarding those lies to the American public.
The US Government has gone to war over and over based upon lies. This video focuses upon the deceit used by the government and the news media to sell wars to the American public since the end of WW2.

Bill Moyers: The Secret Government [1987]

This is the full-length 90-minute version of Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government to carry out operations which are clearly contrary to the wishes and values of the American people. The ability to exercise this power with impunity is facilitated by the National Security Act of 1947. The thrust of the exposé is the Iran-Contra arms and drug-running operations which flooded the streets of our nation with crack cocaine.
Many more anti-war films are here: https://www.addictedtowar.com/films

But what about today's war in Ukraine, which is clearly a proxy war between Russia and NATO. Well it is same ole same ole...lies and more lies.
Here's Alex morning report on the current situation from this morning. Tactical nuke talk projection. Poland's "Stop Russia Now!" campaign. Green US Military.

The US And Ukraine Have Every Reason To Lie About The War
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Unproven claims by the Russian government are laughable absurdities presented without evidence; unproven claims by the US government are just The News.
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The US-centralized empire is censoring and propagandizing as though it is in a hot war with Russia currently. Officially the US and its allies are not at war, but the imperial narrative management machine is behaving as though we are. This makes sense because when two nuclear-armed powers are fighting for dominance and know a direct military confrontation can kill them both, other types of warfare are used instead, including propaganda campaigns and psychological warfare.
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For this reason it is necessary to take everything claimed about what happens in Ukraine with a planet-sized grain of salt, whether it’s by Russia, Ukraine, or the US and its allies. Be very skeptical of anything you hear about chemical attacks or any other narrative that can be used to get military firepower moving in a way that it otherwise would not. All parties involved in this conflict have every reason in the world to lie about such things.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/03/12/the-us-and-ukraine-have-every-re...

...hot occupations involving constant violence must be distinguished from the many cold occupations consisting of foreign troops stationed permanently in allied nations. And what to make of operations involving the steady bombing of a nation from unmanned drones piloted by men and women on the other side of the world? Is that war? Are secret assassination squads sent into yet other nations to work their will also taking part in war? What about arming a proxy state and encouraging it to launch attacks on a neighbor or its own people? What about selling weaponry to hostile nations around the world or facilitating the spread of nuclear weapons? Perhaps not all unjustifiable warlike actions are actually acts of war. But many are actions to which domestic and international laws of war should be applied and which we should have public knowledge of and control over. In the U.S. system of government, the legislature shouldn’t cede the constitutional power of war to presidents simply because the appearance of wars has changed
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Once a war is underway, however, we don’t continue it in order to defeat the evil enemies or to bestow benefits on them; we continue wars primarily for the good of our own soldiers currently deployed on the “battlefield,” a process we call “supporting the troops.” And if we want to end an unpopular war, we do that by escalating it. Thus we achieve “victory,” which we can trust our televisions to accurately inform us of. Thus do we make a better world and uphold the rule of law. We prevent future wars by continuing the existing ones and preparing for ever more.

https://worldbeyondwar.org/introduction-war-lie/

Phil Ochs wrote many good antiwar songs. Here's one

What Are You Fighting For?

Weapons of mass destruction. Bombing a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant. The Gulf of Tonkin incident. There’s plenty of good reasons for journalists to question US military claims. Most importantly, because that’s their job.

In the span of a few hours one day last week, two separate Biden administration press representatives accused two separate reporters of siding with America’s enemies for asking government officials to provide evidence for public claims.

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Much like Psaki, Price wasn’t keen on giving any evidence. Price told the reporter, “If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government, of other governments and want to, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do.”

https://www.rightsanddissent.org/news/our-government-has-a-history-of-ly...

Most of the investor class knows what is really happening. Now their analysis doesn't always ring true, but they are pretty good at seeing through the public narrative.

Russia Secretly Hoarded Gold for This Moment; Sanctions to Backfire on U.S
"Europe has just placed its entire energy economy at risk with natural gas and oil sanctions," as the dollar strengthens and the euro weakens, asserts Byron King, author of Whiskey & Gunpowder at St. Paul Research. Russia has been increasing its gold reserves to prepare for economic sanctions, "for the last eight to nine years," he tells our Daniela Cambone. Lawmakers in the West, "did not truly understand the medium and long-term risk of truly weaponizing the dollar," King claims. The inflation levels that the United States is currently experiencing have been, "structurally built into the economy," he continues. King declares that the world is moving to a different type of international trade, "and it's going to be a basket of things including energy, gold, and various commodities." Gold has plenty of upside potential and will be a part of the commodity currency of the future, he concludes.

None of the sanction measures against Russia will have any impact on saving a single Ukrainian life. But it will devastate the European economy: Irish MEP

I wish we had politicians like her in the US, and the EU could use several more of her ilk.

"How is not selling Kerrygold butter to Russia going to save any Ukrainian lives? How is buying filthy fracked US gas going to stop the war?" Clare Daly (Daly), an Irish politician and a member of the European Parliament, asked earlier this month. In an interview with Global Times (GT) reporters Bai Yunyi and Li Aixin, Daly said, "NATO has never brought peace anywhere in the world," and sanctions against Russia will "devastate the European economy."

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202204/1259925.shtml

Yes,so it goes. Again and again. Now a days with a corporate consolidated media machine spouting CIA talking points painting Ukrainians as worthy and Russians as unworthy victims as Chris discusses above. Additionally there's social media conglomerates guarding accepted conversation and disappearing those who do not comply. What is the last war the US won? If you think it is WWII, I believe Russia deserves much more of the credit for that victory than the US. Too bad we didn't remain allies, but in fact it was after WWII when we created the CIA and made Russia the enemy because they dared to try a different form of government.

Round and round. So what to do? Enjoy the day. Speak your truth to those who need to hear it, and be a happy as you can while the war machine rumbles onward. Have a great Sunday!