THE GREAT WAR AND OUR TIMES

There is no so-called apolitical, because all that fosters inertia is automatically pro-status quo.

The outcome for democracy in World War Two made clear our final responsibility to resist this war, our important historical necessity to fight any war, and especially to resist the final war, until the so-called End of the World. But we object! Consider the common soldier, those privates who would not resist, or rather they could not betray their subservient will power, whether for fears of subjugation or whatever reason else. Yet, they subjugated others by the very consequence of the inevitable results in any war. Somebody must win. Another must lose. We are thinking about those who do not resist, and we should start keeping better score, simply because the one who makes victory writes history. The Nuremburg Trials instructed us to resist orders considered unjust. It asserted those privates who did not resist just as responsibly capable as any big-league generals giving the orders, a big man drinking wine and eating fine cheeses while those countless privates fought and killed, and countless died on the frontlines.

Who will care about the mass slaughter, nameless deaths now likely unknown to the modern Millennial? They were carrying out orders, despite whether they felt invested in their nation’s cause, eating Big Macs and McNuggets in the White House, with large fries on the side. Served on a silver platter while the government shut down. The democratic block of nations held Nazi foot soldiers to the same standard, perhaps even as any Hitler would’ve been. All of this of course, within those oh-so-famous Nuremburg Trials beyond democratic victory: the enemy soldiers were selected and summarily executed.

Never mind the mass wars of the European monarchs even before the Middle Ages, all of this across the then-known world, the many so-called great wars before colonialism turned home to roost in Europe, this, within the so-called War to End All Wars. It was then we witnessed their colonialist battles in the very heart of empire, when colonialism still had presumed a heart. Now there is no heart to be found, and nowhere exists without an external colony. Even roosting describes something more natural than this, because, no matter where we go, we position ourselves within the colony and its native collapse.

The late Howard Zinn claimed that we can’t be neutral on a moving train, as history has shown us. All that depends on how you see the subject. These seemingly “upright model citizens”, the no-one who did nothing supposedly wrong, no one who is just going with the flow, peer pressure. These people take the path of least resistance, so we shall see where it leads us. They are part of the collective inertia, they belong to it now, as individuals with their own desires which have yet to matter historically. Countless folks did the footwork of the great ones of history, especially during such times in history as then, and now, in points of great social contention. Their ancestors became the ones upon whose shoulders we now stand, a common and trivial saying, the beings who paved the paths we walk today regardless of any notions, a notion which we might hold of “good and evil” forces at play in society. Fight Club showed us that on a long enough time scale, the survival rate drops to zero. But I’m still talking about war!

The empire doesn’t confront you like a hostile subject. It is an environment, precisely, of hostility, no matter how unspoken. The primary concern though being, what extent does a person within the fields of advertising, politics and religion find reasons to go on believing as they already do believe, and this concern is the subject matter of the logical fault, better known as a fallacy. As Jaques Ellul demonstrated, based on a cursory reading of his book, Propaganda, the most vulnerable portion of the human population is very much not the ignorant, yet the smart man, the one most comfortable with his presumed ideas who could arrogantly assume that his view is correct, the right and proper one. We are not concerned with Hippie notions of Free Love, rainbows and butterflies from the cultural revolution. On the contrary, it is the liberal who believes himself in the same lineage as the Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire in the Age of Reason. It is the liberal who only sees numbers and products, things and how much they cost. But what is the price of freedom? The money grubbing liberal would simply answer, “nothing.”

This the same was then the very epoch to which these people who were free thinkers in a different manner, who collective developed the very mindset responsible for paradigms which further partitioned this earth in a war of philosophical progress, all for the sake of profit motive, not a God or a king. To be liberals, we must serve the planetary work machine, a machine killing the known world, this very nature which maintains our lives, even our livelihood: because every ounce of capital, every dollar bill, every product of our global economy, is the direct intervention in affairs separate from those living in isolation, separate from the life of war.

This separation has made the shape of our world, and it was strangely like war. They attacked the Big Macs and McNuggest with fries, as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out. Many in the White House thought they were not only making lumber but liberating the country from the meat. Families of cattle were ripped apart for those vast numbers of burgers, and entire lands were wiped free of forest. Baudrillard was wrong in that very real-world occurrences maintain this very spectacle, so you can live your first world lifestyle, Mr. Politician.