Peace as the intelligent option

Manuel E. Yepe

01/03/2015

Opinión

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At the end of World War II, the United States was in much better material condition than the rest of the world. It, therefore, had the opportunity to be at the forefront of a world of peace and justice, truly globalized and in solidarity. But the excessive hegemonic ambitions of the US power elite wasted that historic opportunity and prevented other countries from the prospect of achieving such a utopia.

If, instead of aiming at total world domination, the United States had promoted the creation of a democratic and fair system of international relations, it could have paid history the enormous moral debt it had incurred for the crimes of its shady foreign policy since the closing years of the 19th century when the nation assumed its imperialist character.

At the end of World War II, the US power elite tried to dominate the world through the force of its monopoly on nuclear weapons. To that end it unleashed a very dangerous arms race which still has the planet sitting on gigantic barrels of gunpowder and nuclear warheads.

Based on constraints and outrages, it designed an uneven and unfair global order it can no longer sustain by force of arms.

Today, it leads the world only in the military field and thus goes about promoting preventive wars, foreign occupations, selective bombings, destabilization of governments and constant armed aggressions, among other misdeeds of which the people of that nation cannot be blamed because, as everybody else, they also crave peace.

A gigantic world-wide media manipulation apparatus for the United States and the world distributes the "US point of view" around the globe, creating the conditions for world opinion to "accept" its misdeeds.

With these formidable resources of disinformation, the United States proclaims to the world its wellbeing, freedom, equality and humanitarian feelings. It has appointed itself guardian and judge of the civil and political rights of the citizens of the Third World. Meanwhile it cruelly tramples on these rights in its own country and especially in countries against which it fights or funds wars whose ultimate purpose is stripping these countries of their natural resources.

The systematic manipulation of the media –to the benefit of the interests of the military-industrial complex– which is exercised on the legal and political systems as well as the prison system in the United States, is in contrast with the alleged objectivity with which their representatives aim to be identified as arbiters of the respect for these rights throughout the world.

After the still-unsolved events of September 11, 2001 –which many historians already include among the excuses the US has manufactured prior to all of its wars (the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin and many more)– the number of persons whose civil and political rights have been curtailed –for reasons that have nothing to do with actual deeds, but with aspects of their political affiliations, skin color, social background, or immigration status– has multiplied.

In the bi-polar world in which humanity lived following the World War II, a precarious balance of forces prevented US imperialism from imposing its absolute hegemony throughout the world based on the nuclear blackmail it could threaten with its genocidal bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Neo-liberal capitalism, with its proclamation of the market and not the human being as the highest basis for the functioning of society, has increased poverty and expanded inequality on a universal scale.

As a permanent generator of crises, the capitalist order uses the asymmetries it causes to unload the calamitous effects of these crises on the workers and poor people in the planet.

To control the energy resources of the planet, it uses –with absolute disrespect for human intelligence– absurd pretexts such as wars against drugs, terrorism, or alleged human rights violations. It denigrates those nations whose governments do not submit unconditionally to imperialist domination.

Today, significant financial resources are invested increasingly in the creation of new technologies for war and weapons of mass destruction, without there being the least defensive justification for this in the conditions of the post-Cold War world.

Humanity today has enough culture and experience to reject the idea that peace must be imposed by war. Peace can and must be a conscious objective of human intelligence and solidarity.

February 25, 2015.

- Manuel E. Yepe http://englishmanuelyepe.wordpress.com/

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann. http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs4299.html

https://www.alainet.org/es/node/167852