A Nation Ignores the Perils of Empowering War-Promoting Groups Within
Groups emerge in society, whose message is, "empower us, so that we can fight the bad guys, who are a threat to our society".
The wars these groups seduce the nation they are inside of into fighting, benefit these war-promoting groups financially and also by way of government legislation passed as a result of the war(s) and preparations for the war(s), legislation that increases the powers of the war-selling groups. Even before they start their wars, they the war-selling groups become powerful as the nation they seduce gives them funding and passes laws that empower them.
Once the nation is plunged into war by the war-selling group, it usually becomes disgusted with the war because it sees the war as a fruitless, futile waste of time, energy, and money, a waste of human life, a source of injuries and disease that is not worth the changes produced by the war, a violent poicy that arouses enmity and decreases rather than increases security.
(which leads one to wonder, could it be peoples see wars in this light, because wars indeed generally flunk the cost/benefit ratio test, costing more in time energy money, injuries, diseases, fatalities, and decreased security for the combatants, compared to the benefits such wars produce?)
As the nation rebels against the war(s) it has been seduced into fighting, the anti-war movement becomes myopically focused on issues such as: the immorality of the damage caused to the enemy nation by the war; the immorality of the damage caused to the home nation by the war; the reduction in national security as a result of the enmity produced by the war; the failure of the war to enhance security; the war's waste of human and non-human resources.
In its myopic focus on such matters, the nation forgets all about the elephant in the room, which is the war-selling group in the home nation, and the question of whether a reduction in the financial and legal powers enjoyed by the war-promoting group might benefit and enhance security in the home nation and in the rest of the world.
Like a deer mesmerized by headlights, like an audience failing to notice a magician's sleight of hand because the magician has distracted them, the war-weary nation fails to even consider questions such as: how dangerous is an increase in power fo the war-selling group? How dangerous are the reductions in power for groups other than the war-selling group that accompany increases in power for the war-selling group? Instead, the nation becomes hypnotized into debates such as, "on a scale of 1-10, 1 being not at all dangerous, and 10 being very dangerous, how dangerous do you think it would be to fail to attack ____________?"(fill in name of nation targetted by war-selling group).
Yet it should be very obvious, that the mere fact that a war-selling sub-group of society, comes to the society and points the finger at a foreign nation, saying "empower us so we can attack them, so that by attacking them we can be empowered even more", does not indicate in and of itself, that the finger-pointing, war-sellling group, is a group whose empowerment (either with or without the war(s) it seeks) causes more good than harm for the home nation and for the world.
@2007 David Virgil Hobbs
The wars these groups seduce the nation they are inside of into fighting, benefit these war-promoting groups financially and also by way of government legislation passed as a result of the war(s) and preparations for the war(s), legislation that increases the powers of the war-selling groups. Even before they start their wars, they the war-selling groups become powerful as the nation they seduce gives them funding and passes laws that empower them.
Once the nation is plunged into war by the war-selling group, it usually becomes disgusted with the war because it sees the war as a fruitless, futile waste of time, energy, and money, a waste of human life, a source of injuries and disease that is not worth the changes produced by the war, a violent poicy that arouses enmity and decreases rather than increases security.
(which leads one to wonder, could it be peoples see wars in this light, because wars indeed generally flunk the cost/benefit ratio test, costing more in time energy money, injuries, diseases, fatalities, and decreased security for the combatants, compared to the benefits such wars produce?)
As the nation rebels against the war(s) it has been seduced into fighting, the anti-war movement becomes myopically focused on issues such as: the immorality of the damage caused to the enemy nation by the war; the immorality of the damage caused to the home nation by the war; the reduction in national security as a result of the enmity produced by the war; the failure of the war to enhance security; the war's waste of human and non-human resources.
In its myopic focus on such matters, the nation forgets all about the elephant in the room, which is the war-selling group in the home nation, and the question of whether a reduction in the financial and legal powers enjoyed by the war-promoting group might benefit and enhance security in the home nation and in the rest of the world.
Like a deer mesmerized by headlights, like an audience failing to notice a magician's sleight of hand because the magician has distracted them, the war-weary nation fails to even consider questions such as: how dangerous is an increase in power fo the war-selling group? How dangerous are the reductions in power for groups other than the war-selling group that accompany increases in power for the war-selling group? Instead, the nation becomes hypnotized into debates such as, "on a scale of 1-10, 1 being not at all dangerous, and 10 being very dangerous, how dangerous do you think it would be to fail to attack ____________?"(fill in name of nation targetted by war-selling group).
Yet it should be very obvious, that the mere fact that a war-selling sub-group of society, comes to the society and points the finger at a foreign nation, saying "empower us so we can attack them, so that by attacking them we can be empowered even more", does not indicate in and of itself, that the finger-pointing, war-sellling group, is a group whose empowerment (either with or without the war(s) it seeks) causes more good than harm for the home nation and for the world.
@2007 David Virgil Hobbs
posted by David Virgil at 12:47 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home