The cowardice of war.

I agree with Mike Shedlock on so very many things that it amazes me sometimes.  Not that he says stuff and it strikes me as true when I read it but rather that I have already written similar things many times and then I read his independent thoughts on it only to find nearly a 100% overlap.  So when he writes an article like the one today which is a follow up to the original, I really don't have any major additions to offer and the main purpose of mentioning it in these pages is to help pass it along.

To summarize, Mish doesn't really know who started what over in Russia/Crimea/Ukraine but likely thinks that US placement of a puppet ruler in Ukraine was the first move in the recent (purposeful) destabilization of the region.  His point is that rushing to judge the Russians is a move driven by the warmongers of the US and others.  From an economic standpoint, Mish argues that sanctioning Russia is a backdoor way of sanctioning the sanctioner given the global interconnectedness of everything today.  While Mish doesn't catch on this part of it, the sanctioning countries really need local crises in order to push their people into war but unless there are supply shortages, etc., where is the crisis?  Con men running the show know that if there is no crisis you can easily manufacture one, this time perhaps using the stupidity of sanctions.  They never work and it is like cutting off your right hand to spite the left one.  If millions of people in the EU are freezing this winter because of natural gas shutoff from Russia then it should be pretty easy to vilify the Russians.

More important to me, however, is the testimony of Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg war crime trials (see the original article for the full quote):
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. ... But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As you can see from the expert testimony of Herr Göring, war is not an accident.  It is not natural either.  Dear leaders have to work long and hard to convince their Marks and Patsies to go die for king and country.  They make up fairy tales and stories about WMD and how all of us are in danger from this threat.  If you don't go, you are either a coward, unpatriotic an isolationist or some other pejorative, to say nothing of being a felon who loses his rights.  Of course the leaders don't go to war and they don't send their kids there either.  To fight and die is generally a past time left to the uneducated rabble.

Dear leaders play on human emotion and human herding instincts in order to get us lemmings to go scrambling off the edge of cliffs that they create.  I am not a coward.  I even served in the US military just a short time after the end of Vietnam.  I was not a hero, it was just a job.  Anyone trying to portray our military rank and file as some big mass of heros is a con man trying to convince you to engage in stupidity.  I am also quite patriotic.  But I know what true patriotism is and I know what the patriotism of false economy is.  There are only two wars I would ever willingly engage in: the breach in force of US mainland or rightful territory by hostile foreign forces OR US government canceling the constitution whether pitched temporarily as a suspension of it or in perpetuity.  I believe that the latter is the more likely.  Note: a Russian plane crossing into US airspace is a total yawn.  When I talk about "breach in force" I mean paratroopers, tanks, ships in our harbors, etc.  If a nuke goes off in some US city, this is not immediate cause for war because it is most likely that the US government did it in order to start a war in order to cover up the economic collapse that it created.  Science can tell us exactly where the nuclear material came from and a full forensic investigation would have to be done to figure out who did it and why.  It would not pay the American people in any way to assume it was the Russian people attacking us even if some Dear Leader of Russia ultimately was convicted of the act.  Don't assume their leaders speak for their people in these matters just as con men Obama and McCain do not speak for intelligent conservatives in the US.

It takes courage to fight the herding instinct because nobody wants to be ostracized.  It is, to me, an an act of cowardice to fall in line with the herd simply to avoid the threat of being ostracized.  The article talks about a small price to pay, blah blah blah.  The real small price to pay is that of speaking out against the con men when you know they are just using human nature against us to get us to do things that we don't really want to do and which will harm us or our children:

• Sending your kids to fabricated war is an act of stupidity and cowardice.
• Applauding at the airport when troops disembark the plane because someone told you to clap for the "heroes" is an act of cowardice.  You can see the discomfort in the eyes of the troops when cowards, who are afraid of being ostracized by the brain washed herd members around them, begin to clap.
• Driving around town with a sticker on your back window reading "support our troops" is really a sign that you have caved to peer pressure, thus making you a coward in this matter.  How many people with those stickers have any clue what it is to go to war, to fight, to die, to be mentally scarred for life just because government needed Halliburton, Lockheed Martin and other warmongering enterprise to have better profits paid for by piles of US debt?

Don't let the con men or public opinion make up your mind for you.  Independent critical thinking is what is needed in order to get us through the coming collapse.  Do not forget, THEY caused this mess but it was only possible because we the people did not engage in enough critical thinking.  We outsourced that activity to dear leaders who quickly used it as a weapon against us.