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.”
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.
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.
Sometimes, the principles of life seem veiled in obscurity. At other times, the demonstrations are clear. Let’s see what principles are shown by these events of just the last six or seven weeks:
As a side-note, if you think Afghanistan has always been a hell-hole of conflict, here is a what it looked like around 1970: before the “great” powers decided it was an important country in their quest for domination:
Yikes. These were just the “newsworthy” items that found me on the sites I typically read, I did not go out looking for them. It’s very likely that some searching would turn up more of the same, especially in the Middle East, which often receives scant treatment in the Western press. As an indication of that, according to the Washington Post:
Since the beginning of 2015, the Middle East, Africa and Asia have seen nearly 50 times more deaths from terrorism than Europe and the Americas.
The Middle East and northern Africa account for over two-thirds of terrorism deaths since January 2015, with multiple attacks occurring daily, each claiming on average at least a dozen lives.
So what principles are being demonstrated through these events? First, we are seeing:
Acceleration of insanity, which has beenmentionedanddocumented, especially including excruciating detail of insanity in the financial world.*It is difficult to not see rampant examples of insanity on this planet at this time so that documenting them seems almost needless to say.
Next, we are seeing:
Acceleration of conflict. Conflict is on the rise in so many (all?) fields of human endeavor. We may even find ourselves in scrappy conflicts these days, even with loved ones, often with trivial causes. (We’ll talk about what to do about that in Part 2.) In public, we see political parties, and factions within political parties, at each other throats, with the factions screaming each other down at political conventions; governments seemingly at war with their own people; inter-racial hatred; religious wars; police versus citizens; hackers waging cyber-warfare with governments, corporations, anyone; environmentalists versus resource extractors and polluters; organic growers versus Industrial Food; Big Pharma versus the alternative health care field; Monsanto versus democracy; global warming versus global cooling factions…well, it goes on and on. Read the seething Comments sections on popular internet sites…on second thought, don’t!
Acceleration of the Wheeler Cycle of War and Political Change, described here and updated here.
And because this is another principle in play:
The transition through which we and the planet are going is taking place across the energetic spectrum.
that war energy from the Cycle of War does not impact only the military and political spheres, it impacts nearly everything, as we are seeing.
Worse still, as explained in a previous post on the Cycle of War, this instance of that cycle began around October, 2014. However:
The worst part of this is: major wars begin around the cycle date, but the fighting generally builds to its greatest intensity four to six years after the start date.
So perhaps general conflict will finally peak and then start to wind down sometime between late 2018 and late 2020. Until then, the likely scenario is accelerating intensity of conflict. If things play out that way, then two other principles are being demonstrated:
Life moves in cycles, not straight lines.
Based on past repetitions, the starting points and duration of some cycles can be usefully estimated.
The Military Conflicts
What about the military aspect of this conflict energy?
So much for “no boots on the ground.” You may have heard that military spending is decreasing. Of course, it isn’t true. The war profiteers show no sign of letting up:
The world defense market climbed to $65 billion in 2015, up by $6.6 billion from 2014 the consulting company IHS Inc said in its Global Defence Trade Report. That’s the largest yearly increase in the past decade, led by Saudi purchases which jumped about 50% to $9.3 billion in 2015 according to Bloomberg.
…the United States was the top weapons exporter in 2015, supplying almost $23 billion in goods and equipment, of which $8.8 billion went to the Middle East.
Yes, that’s the same Saudi Arabia that beheads more people than Daesh (IS), but it’s a US “ally” (or does that mean good weapons customer?), so few in the press will discuss it.
After two years of bombing, the U.S. recently marked a horrendous milestone in a war with no clear end in sight. Vocativ reported that the American-led coalition in the Middle East has now dropped 50,000 bombs in the ongoing campaign against ISIS that began in August 2014.
The U.S. Navy, which has already developed a 30-kilowatt laser that has been used operationally, will soon test a new directed energy weapon that is five times more powerful, said the vice chief of naval operations July 23.
The Office of Naval Research “will perform a shipboard test of a 150-killowatt laser weapon system in the near future,” said Adm. Bill Moran during a speech at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Directed Energy Summit, which was held in Washington, D.C.
The Navy’s 30-kilowatt laser weapon is currently onboard the USS Ponce. The system, which has been used operationally in the Persian Gulf, offers military leaders precision accuracy at a low cost, Moran said.
The laser weapon system, or LaWs, “has an extremely low-cost per engagement ratio,” he said. “We’re spending pennies on the dollars … every time we use that capability.”
While the U.S. military is developing laser weapons that can be installed on platforms across the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, military leaders must be cognizant that potential adversaries are as well, Moran said.
“These technologies are being developed and fielded by a growing number of countries all around the world, it’s not just us,” he said. “If we don’t get ahead of that capability by our adversaries, we’re going to find ourselves in a very difficult position in the future.”
As the Navy considers its future fleet design, laser weapons must be a part of the equation, Moran said.
“If we have to continue to rely on projectiles, propellant-driven projectiles, we will run out of our ability to defend ourselves over time,” he said. “This capability in directed energy is incredibly important.”
Note the military-industrial-complex’s ever present excuse for developing deadlier weapons: if we don’t do it, somebody else will.
And of course, drones. Here’s a 6 minute video that shows how weapons are now marketed. The only thing missing is a Hollywood star or two. This one advertises the latest drone in General Atomics product line:
The US wants unmanned robot fighting ships cruising the ocean for months at a time without anyone on board. The guy who runs this program calls the Earth “the battlespace”:
Remember that support for all this comes from the major political parties in each country. That’s where money gets spent to assure that candidates are placed in office who will support these programs.
The US sends so much military hardware to the Middle East that there are battles where both sides have had their armaments supplied by the US. Sometimes US troops are being killed by US-made weapons. This is from one of the most conservative newspapers in the US, the Chicago Tribune, not some anti-war site:
Islamic State militants have not only stolen a majority of the military Humvees provided to the Iraq Security Forces (ISF) by the U.S.,they are now re-purposing them into car bombs.
No one is sure where some of the arms shipments go. This is from the NY Times:
Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency … intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials.
Despite all the spending, according to NPR, the US nuclear arsenal is controlled by systems with floppy disks (hat/tip to RG for the link):
Over the course of the past few months, the United States has pushed NATO to build up troops on Russia’s border, held war games in its backyard, and deployed aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean. The rationale for such actions has always been very vaguely communicated, but as NATO European Command General Philip Breedlove said, it has all been to send a signal of deterrence to Russia. However, the reality is that, according to General Petr Pavel, chairman of the NATO Military Committee,there is no intelligence that suggests Russia is planning any broad-scale aggression whatsoever.
The UK certainly doesn’t want to be left out of all the “fun”:
In a unanimous decision at their 84th annual conference, the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) passed a resolution condemning President Barack Obama’s decision to set the U.S. on track to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to “maintain and modernize its nuclear bombs and warheads, production facilities, delivery systems, and command and control.”
Stay tuned for Part 2.
________
*Speaking of insanity in the financial world, between the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the central banks of the world are now printing up $180 Billion per month. There are only two national governments in the world that spend that much per month, the US and China. And what are they doing with all that new money printed from nothing? Buying bonds and stocks! A billion people on the planet don’t have clean water (half the hospital beds in the world are occupied by someone with a water-borne illness) or enough food each day, not to mention reasonable health care, and these bozos are printing up money to prop up asset markets, making the rich richer, to get everyone to think that everything is OK. The BOJ is one of the Top 10 shareholders of 90% of Japanese companies and the ECB is buying bonds with negative interest rates. That’s the best thing they can think of to do with $180 Billion per month. And these are allegedly intelligent people? Sane people?
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.
Thundering Heard 