Monday, July 23, 2018

Music Monday ~ A Choice

Peace or Armageddon: Take Your Pick
by Paul Atwood
Snip
...The drumbeat is incessant and appears to have won most of the public to the faith that Russia is our mortal enemy again and a dire threat to our security. The lesson all should have learned in the wake of the missile crisis has been deep-sixed so long that few citizens today understand how our deliberately overwrought relations with the Soviets during the Cold War brought us within an eyelash width of nuclear holocaust. As many who were embedded in the national security state during those fraught years, like Daniel Ellsberg and former Defense Secretary William Perry and many others, have admonished us lately we are now in circumstances every bit as perilous as the darkest days of the Cold War. We have utterly forgotten the fact that the intense and growing extreme nationalism that is overtaking the planet is precisely the social virus that promoted two global wars in the last century.

Final paragraphs:
I personally hold Donald trump in contempt for many of the obvious reasons. Given everything he has supported since appearing on the political scene he seems the least-likely president to seek genuine rapprochement either with North Korea or Russia. Yet he is also ramping up conflict with Iran and supports the criminal war by Saudi Arabia against Yemen, the poorest and perhaps most ravaged nation on the planet. Still I cannot but support his attempt to find some way to reduce and stop the growing tensions with Russia and so should every sane American and demand key actions for a more peaceful world before events run out of control. Trump’s emphasis on reducing the threat of nuclear war and of shrinking the military spending that is bankrupting the U.S. by seeking some solid non-hostile relationship with Russia is astonishingly the sanest argument to come out of Washington, perhaps ever. Sanity exists in Russia too. I would fervently hope too that we can perceive that a growing antagonism toward China bodes ill as well.

But we must beware! The Hawks and the vultures are circling.


On Music Monday, what else is there to say but.....



2 comments:

Wisewebwoman said...

Ah we all need some hope and there hasn't been peace in our lifetimes, we don't know what it feels like. I grew up under the threat of nuclear war along with the rationing of the previous war and the horror stories of my uncle.

In the seventies we posited that China was the only threat the racist "Yellow Peril" we should all feel. And now it owns the US.

I'm detaching from much of this, it was affecting my health and at my age I can't protest and activist as I used to. Not that it does much good.

XO
WWW

Twilight said...

Wisewebwoman ~ I understand how you feel, WWW. I feel the same much of the time, but media hysteria about the Trump/Helsinki issue got me feeling more annoyed than for some time.