Something to understand about Defence and Force

It has always been rather obvious to me, but seemingly not other people that America is a land of dreamers. People are asleep and the government works with lies. Well all ruling powers do, but most countries have a wise population to laugh at the pretensions of their rulers. The USA however is not old enough to have this perspective and the people swing from blind faith to outright distrust.

I learned the other day that in the 1950s while the US was amassing a vast nuclear arsenal of hundreds of nuclear warheads to "defend" itself from the Soviet threat, in reality the Soviets had 4 nuclear war heads. It was lies by the military to get money. We had seen it before in the Tonkin Incident, Pearl Harbour and would see it again in 9/11. The military needs to have a threat to justify its existence, and the US (very obviously to me since I was a child) always has a threat of some type.

But Britian is not much smarted. Churchill struggled very hard to convince people that Nazi Germany was a threat. In reality, like the Soviets, it never was. The phoney war was the embarrassing period where Churchill was being mocked for starting war with a country that appeared to have no tyrannical aspirations. It took a lot of trickery to force the Germans in attacking Britain.

I also discovered that the Japanese surrendered in WW2 because the Russians invaded. It appears that the US forced through live weapons testing on civilians in Japan in order to get in before the Soviet invasion. As argued in this blog before no valid justification of the atomic bombs was ever given. They were never justified beyond US military supremacy.***

Cuban Missile Crisis was another myth where the US pretended that it was in mortal danger from a threat. Of course the reverse was true. The year before the US had tried to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion. In response Cuba asked for military defence from Russia. What was portrayed as a threat to the US, was in fact the US being a threat.

It appears that the general rule is that those who wish to use force to gain power but disguise that force. And they do that but first pretending that they are under threat. Once this is established then the force appears to be justified.

But as I have argued in the blog before: force is never ever justified. So we know that the powerful are lying when they speak of force.

*** The justification we learn by rote is that the dropping the bombs ended the war much more quickly and so saved lives. Standard US logic that ends justify the means (this is a fallacy anyway). But it is an obviously false argument because it means that had the Japanese had the bomb the US would have accepted them dropping in US to end the war quickly. And if ending the war quickly and saving lives is what mattered then why didn't the US just withdraw their troops? Japan was never an actual threat to US. The obvious truth is not that the bombs ended the war quickly, but that they secured a US victory quickly. The Japanese civilians were killed so that the US could win. Which makes the bombs the same as any terrorist atrocity in history. 9/11 (we are told) was only carried out by terrorists who wanted the US to end occupation of Afghanistan and the Middle East. Even more justified that Hiroshima in fact which was against a country that had only attacked military targets on one occasion!