ABSTRACT
I’ve stopped endorsing, writing for, participating in, sending money to First of the Month because events in Iraq and the USA have confirmed some basic understandings I’ve held to with varying degrees of tenacity since about the age of 16 (circa 1956) when I decided to register as a CO (Conscientious Objector): war is hell on humans and Nature, war is waste, war is the health of the state, war solves no significant problems, war creates new and worse problems, war oppresses men by training them to kill or be killed on command, and, in the era of proliferating kinds and quantities of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction deliverable by a single person, the reign or hegemony of patriarchal military-industrial-power is clearly over, finished, kaput, finito. The only question is whether we want what’s left of western snivelization to go down in flames, a final ecocatastrophic, flare-out of Fascism & Imperialism, Inc., or do we want to work rationally for a diversity of species and cultures within a sustainable ecologic? Do we go along with some version of the corporate military stat=us quo, or do we not? The fact that First of the Month’s editors still want warmongers
and peacelovers to have a dialogue in their pages seems like a serious waste or misdirection of precious time, energy, thought and feeling. Arguing with people who want to spin rationalizations for the insanity of war makes no sense to me.
