Russia’s war in Ukraine — like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right.
The belief in the justice and glory of past wars is absolutely critical to the acceptance of current wars, such as the Ukraine war. And the gargantuan price tags of wars is highly relevant to imagining creative alternatives to escalating a war that’s placed us closer to nuclear apocalypse than ever before.
The worst possible outcome of the war in Ukraine would probably be nuclear war. People’s desire for revenge as a result of this war is getting stronger by the day.
The war-or-nothing disease has a firm grip. People literally can’t imagine anything else — people on both sides of the same war.
On March 09 2022, Montreal for a World BEYOND War hosted a screening of War Made Easy: How presidents and pundits keep spinning us to death.
The war in Ukraine is both a wake up call about the folly of war and rare opportunity to move toward a more peaceful world.
For decades, the U.S. public seemed largely indifferent to most of the horrible suffering of war. The corporate media outlets mostly avoided it, made war look like a video game, occasionally mentioned suffering U.S. troops, and rarely touched on the countless deaths of local civilians as if their killing were some sort of aberration.
We hold in our hands vast power to both create and destroy, the likes of which have never been seen in history.
Watch World BEYOND War’s David Swanson speak on ‘How to Think About Ukraine’ in an event in Washington, D.C.
