Endless war is a terminal disease

matt taibbi in rolling stone via alternet...

After four years of Iraq, we still can't talk about peace in public! This evil bullshit has been buried in the commercial media's descriptive campaign language seemingly forever by now, but it may be time -- in the wake of this Iraq disaster -- to start thinking about where it comes from and what effect it may have on the national psyche.

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A country that feeds itself through the manufacture of war technology is bound to view peace, nonviolence and mercy as seditious concepts. It will create policies first and then people to fit its machines, finding wars to fight and creating killers to fight them. If that's true of us, and I think it is, our troubles won't be over even if someone brings the Iraq war to an end. We'll be treating the symptom and not the disease. And the reason our elections are a sham is that the disease is never on the table.

no argument here... i keep reading the blogs of my esteemed colleagues - markos moulitsas and john aravosis to name two - who repeatedly make this kind of statement: "i'm not against war, i'm against THIS war..." markos, in a lengthy front-page post, excoriated dennis kucinich for his pacifist views and for spouting new age jargon...

"Higher evolution of human awareness"? "Transform consciousness"? "Paradign [sic] shift"? What the hell is this crap? I expect this kind of crap out of Deepak Chopra (or Tom Cruise), not a serious presidential candidate.

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Clearly, Kucinich resides in a higher plane of existence than I do. But my plane is on the planet earth. I want my president to reside here as well.

And by the way, the "Department of Peace" already exists. It's called the "U.S. Department of State".

i hold no brief for kucinich, but i, like matt, believe that the stranglehold the defense industry has on the u.s. and the resulting glorification of all things military, is most definitely a debilitating disease... pursuing an endless war, the undeniable objective of the bush administration, may well be a terminal one...

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