Casualty Of War

The first casualty of war is the truth. We're so used to pictures of armed conflicts and the ongoing American wars all over the globe, that we forget what a strange phenomenon war actually is.

What I mean is that under a dictator or, in the days of old, under the king or emperor, it's clear for everyone to see and understand how the people are motivated to send their children in to a war. You go or you get punished, you fight or forfeit your own life, it's that simple: fear is the motivator here. Same goes for theocracies where there's also an absolute power giving the commands. But how do you get the people in a "free and open democracy" to freely send their young men and women to possibly die in a foreign country?

With lies, that's how. I said it in so many discussions, and I'll repeat it here: I cannot believe there has ever been a point in history when a group of young humans took up arms and left for a far away country to go and kill young people they've never met before. People, cultures, countries or other groups of people don't fight other groups of people. They just don't, there's no point. It's always the small circle of the ruling class that want something material, (land, natural resources) from another small group of rulers. And if they aren't a dictatorship but a democracy, they'll just have to lie, demonize "the enemy", or resort to a false flag operation to incite the people's rage. And the lies are always to incite fear of the selected enemy of course.

One of the best and most recent examples of how governments lie to get and keep us in war, were the "Afghanistan Papers." They were published in a Washington Post article titled "At War With the Truth" on December 9, 2019. Two decades of war based on lies and extended with more lies; watch the below linked video for a reminder. The Great War never ended, as there's always been some armed conflict in this globalized world for over a century now. Maybe the pinnacle of of this is the fact that there was an actual PR Firm (Hill & Knowlton) hired to literally sell the first Gulf War to the American people by spreading lies about throwing incubator babies on the floor. Here's the first paragraphs from the Wikipedia article about this PR stunt:

The Nayirah testimony was false testimony given before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old girl who was publicly identified at the time by her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H. W. Bush in their rationale to support Kuwait in the Gulf War.

In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was Al-Ṣabaḥ and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign, which was run by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah's testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.

In her testimony, Nayirah claimed that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, take the incubators, and leave the babies to die.
_{source: Wikipedia}

This truth, that the truth is the first casualty of war, holds up for any large scale conflict. Never forget that the class war is just another war and that we're constantly being fed lies about the economic system that produced its winners. In that war "The American Dream" is simply war propaganda, an advertising slogan for capitalism. In that war Elon Musk is a carefully crafted figurehead surrounded by a fake "rags-to-riches" myth. In that war everything that was once considered communal, like care for the sick and elderly, education for our kids, and the utilities have been conquered with lies about the "efficiency of the markets" and the empty promises of privatization. It's more of a psychological war, not fought with guns but with a constant barrage of messaging through the media that are owned by the perpetual winners in that war. And in that war, we're the second casualty, after the truth.

I stress that there's no use, and it wouldn't be fair to get angry with the soldiers that are sent abroad; they do so, generally speaking, out of love for their fellow countrymen and their country. The only reason I want to show this is because the news in the mainstream media is not to be trusted. And it's also very hard to find really trustworthy news-sources on the internet, where any random person, like myself, can have a voice. Always be critical of anything you see or hear and try to seek out different points of view is the best advice I can give here.

That's it for today my friends. Tomorrow I'll be back here, and hope you will be to :-) Thank you for reading, as always.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!