War on Wars:

This week we witnessed the seventieth anniversary of V.E. Day (Victory in Europe by the allied forces over Germany) A long time ago for all but the few who now remain.

Someone I know well, remarked to the effect that this was the last War where there actually was a victory in the real sense that there was also a looser and a peace treaty.  There where victory parades and immense  celebrations and as the end for tyrannical despots neared and the gloomy skies became blue again. 

In the seventy intervening years we have had real wars and phony wars, but no victories.  To name a few, first we had the Korean shindig and the falling dominos  a brutal contest that was a push with North Korea, and we now witnessing once, more how this ended up.  

Then we had Vietnam,another civil war, between North and South that America managed to convert into a communist  dominos contest at enormous cost in lives and money.  America ultimately declared victory and retreated home in ignominy.  (Definitely not a victory).

Then thanks to Linden Johnson we had the first phony war, the War on Poverty. Just why it was called a war no one seems to know but typical of all wars it cost billions of dollars with no clear victory.  

Then came the first Gulf War, or was it merely a military exercise for the Industrial Military Complex?. Whatever, it might have been, it  had to be done all over again in the Second Gulf War that was, despite the “Mission Accomplished” comment by the American President, at best, a push.

In between all of this someone started the phony  War on Drugs, that requires an enormous leap of faith to call anything other than a defeat, but we will leave it as an ongoing push.. 

Finally we come to the N.A.T.O War in Afghanistan that has morphed into something else that we seem to have lost track of. Was it the War on Terror? or was it Alquieda? Whatever it was it was, is no longer and we now have I.S.I.S. (no doubt another neverendum.)  

It seems to me the common theme in this continuing insanity is the need for a boogeymen, that could  take almost any form,  to justify the expenditure of insane amounts of money. We  are not allowed to know how much since it is redacted from published data, but a  loose count might be a trillion dollars a year for North America and Europe combined.

So lets take a wild guess. How many boogeymen are there out there? Do we only count the real bad guys or do we include the foot soldiers, the idiots that ride around in old Jeeps waving their guns, and the peddlers for the drug cartels. Or how about the latest incarnation the Home Grown kind of lunatic.? According to the ruling knobs  there might be a few thousand of these.

By any count the mathematics of this equation will not work.  There just are not enough bad guys to justify anything close to the expenditures involved. So there must be something else afoot.

My very uneducated guess would be that it all has to do with the concept of rule by fear. It is so much easier this way, Scare the hell out of everyone and then convince them that the ruling class is on their case. This way there is no need to justify the horrendous mistakes made in the name of doing the common good.

Will it ever end? Not for A while yet. Certainly not until the mass paranoia of 9/11 dissipates, and judging by the experience of Pearl Harbor this could  take a while.