It’s been over two years since I posted here, last posting about the continuing acceleration of conflict in our world. It’s difficult to make any statement these days without being pegged as taking one side or the other of some divide that has a firm grip on the mind of the listener. It seems that our world is truly divided-and-conquered—or very close to it.

But we can observe evolutionary events, turning points leading to an unstoppable movement toward truth. Here are two:

In May, the US Army flushed some propaganda down their official tweetlet about the wondrous effects of life in the Empire’s Army on one soldier, and then asked for comments on how life in the Army had impacted others.

Instead of the cheerleading they anticipated, thousands replied with experience: broken bodies, minds, and hearts; PTSD; drug and alcohol addiction; depression; rage; suicide. Some of it was captured by Caitlin Johnstone in the post The US Army Asked Twitter How Service Has Impacted People. The Answers Were Gut-Wrenching. It’s a difficult read but I recommend it. Expect to shed a few tears

Here are just a few examples of responses:

“Left my talented and young brother a broken and disabled man who barely leaves the house. Left my mother hypervigilant & terrified due to the amount of sexual assault & rape covered up and looked over by COs. Friend joined right out if HS, bullet left him paralyzed neck down.”

~

“I’ve had the same nightmare almost every night for the past 15 years…”

~

“i met this guy named christian who served in iraq. he was cool, had his own place with a pole in the living room. always had lit parties. my best friend at the time started dating him so we spent a weekend at his crib. after a party, 6am, he took out his laptop. he started showing us some pics of his time in the army. pics with a bunch of dudes. smiling, laughing. it was cool. i was drunk and didn’t care. he started showing us pics of some little kids. after a while, his eyes went completely fucking dark. i was like man, dude’s high af. he very calmly explained to us that all of those kids were dead ‘but that’s what war was. dead kids and nothing to show for it but a military discount’. christian killed himself 2 months later.”

~

“My parents both served in the US Army and what they got was PTSD for both of them along with anxiety issues. Whenever we go out in public and sit down somewhere my dad has to have his back up against the wall just to feel a measure of comfort that no one is going to sneak up on him and kill him and walking up behind either of them without announcing that you’re there is most likely going to either get you punch in the face or choked out.”

When thousands who were deployed in the service of divide-and-conquer come forward and speak truth, it creates a real conundrum for the senders. When it isn’t just a Manning or a Snowden or an Assange that has the shining courage to reveal truth, when it’s tens of thousands or many more, can we all be imprisoned? I guess they could try, but it seems unlikely. Sure, they killed Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King as soon as he started speaking repeatedly about the war in Viet Nam, John Lennon who asked that they “give peace a chance.” Now they label anyone who earnestly calls for peace a “Russian asset.” Maybe they do realize they can’t jail or kill all of us.

I guess they can delete all the truthful tweets like they ban online accounts for offering unwelcome views. Likely the Empire’s Department of Defense will increase its movie/television budget to take their propaganda game to a higher level:

A year ago we featured a detailed report by authors Tom Secker and Matthew Alford exposing just how vast the Pentagon and CIA programs for partnering with Hollywood actually are, based on some 4,000 new pages of formerly classified archived documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The report noted at the time that “These documents for the first time demonstrate that the US government has worked behind the scenes on over 800 major movies and more than 1,000 TV titles.”

—Here Are 410 Movies Made Under The Direct Influence And Supervision Of The Pentagon

With thousands of people stepping up, you can see why the Empire so badly wants to throttle Assange. Perhaps they can frighten the rest of us into silence?

But back to our overwhelmed soldiers: The tragedy for many is that the Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA), which is supposed to help US soldiers hurt by war, tells them to straighten up and fly right—as a way of denying them coverage or any help with their difficulties. The tragedy for many others is that the VA does agree to help them:

Above is a screen shot from the magnificent documentary From Shock to Awe. That’s a real photo of the medicine cabinet of a veteran treated by the VA for PTSD: they gave him ninety different mind-altering pharmaceuticals over four years. This fellow is very strong: he survived years of war duty in Afghanistan; and then survived four years as a testing ground for Big Pharma’s mind crushers. But just barely. He was nearly dead when he made contact with the makers of From Shock to Awe.

This is the second outstanding film on this problem from director Luc Côté. His first, Operation Homecoming – Crash Landing, now available on youtube, was an account of the damage done to Canadian soldiers who survived the horrors experienced on peacekeeper missions in war zones around the world.

For From Shock to Awe, Luc teamed up with content producer Janine Sagert to show that there are ways to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with great success, allowing people to move beyond trauma to liberating connection with the vastness of their mind. However … these methods are illegal in the US. If they were legal, a great deal of pain and many suicides could be avoided; but the owners of the pharmaceutical companies might make just a little less money from supplying traumatized people with drugs that attempt to deaden their spirit.

Few of us are aware of the pervasiveness of the difficulties experienced by war veterans. Here is an article published this month in the Chicago Tribune: 36,000 veterans were asked if they’d recently considered suicide. A third of them said yes.

For those unaware, the Tribune is no “radical anti-war rag.” It’s been the voice of conservative politics in Chicago for decades. But more are realizing: This problem is an epic tragedy as the inhumanity of war extends far beyond its battlefields in both space and time.

Please see the movie From Shock to Awe, available now for streaming on Vimeo, Amazon, iTunes, and on DVD. It shows that, like all of the problems we face on this planet, there are amazing solutions, but the owners of our society prevent these solutions because they might bring people liberation, and might slow the hyper-flow of money from the rest of us to them. And such solutions might show people the falseness of so many of the divides at the base of the furious conflicts plaguing our world, helping people realize: We’re all in this together, folks.

(I have no financial interest in From Shock to Awe.)