Wars
In this indeed you have hit true prophecy.
But now I am willing to let go all history
to settle a truce with those ruin-demons of fate:
I’ll swallow my pain if the Furies will go from our gate
to drown someone else in their murderous misery.
A small price to pay for the end of this circling hate! - Aeschylus
Aaron Mate is one of the best journalists in America in the last decade. He’s recently wrote an excellent piece, What 10 Years of U.S. Meddling in Ukraine Have Wrought (Spoiler Alert: Not Democracy) This should be read by every American, especially those who think it’s a grand patriotic idea to keep pumping 100s of billions of dollars and weapons into Ukraine.
Aaron frequently partners with Max Blumenthal, another fine American journalist, there’s not nearly enough. I’ve told Max over the years he did “God’s work” writing about Israel-Palestine. Every American should read Max’s work, most especially Goliath.
What Ukraine and Israel-Palestine have in common is they are both projects of the American National Security State, the number of brutal, bloody failures over seven decades not simply despairing but despicable. I started reading Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Not sure, I’ll finish. Till the end, McNamara remained truth challenged, though revealing. He said his goal in writing the book was so future generations could learn, but it’s pretty clear to me we remain incapable of learning, an inability to move beyond ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous brutality with a smile.