- Can war be prevented?
- Discover the truths of war and the propaganda that governments used to justify them
- Propaganda paved the way for the United States to enter WWI
- How President Roosevelt (FDR) provoked the Japanese to attack, leading the United States into WWII
- Efforts to “establish world peace and security” in Korea
- The U.S. enter the Vietnamese conflict to maintain superpower credibility
- Iraq War and false testimony of Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter
- Desert Storm and the “Weapons of Mass Destruction”
- Intentional misdirection and provocation lead to “Forever Wars”
- What strategies can we use to prevent war?
Before going off to the American military occupation of Viet Nam in the mid-1960’s My father who had fought in WW2 taught me 2 things to know about war.
- The first casualty of war is Truth.
- To the victor goes the spoils.
War is an activity that needs protection, and every major battle now has a bodyguard of lies. Here are examples of lies that led to false flag military strikes to dehumanize the “enemy” and begin the process of the entry of the United States into major military conflicts that ended with unnecessary amounts of massive human pain and suffering.
WWI
When WWI began in Europe in 1914, many Americans wanted the United States to stay out of the conflict, supporting President Woodrow Wilson’s policy of strict and impartial neutrality.
Why did the US get involved in WWI?
The accepted narrative in our history books – Germany’s resumption of submarine attacks on passenger and merchant ships in 1917 became the primary motivation behind Wilson’s decision to lead the United States into World War I.
Lying propaganda – In 1915, a German U-boat sank the RMS Lusitania 11 miles off Ireland’s coast. The sinking, which killed 128 of 139 Americans aboard, became a symbol of German cruelty and helped prepare the US people for WWI.
Truth – Every aspect of the Lusitania’s public story was a deliberate fabrication or omission.
The boat wasn’t carrying 3,813 40-pound (unrefrigerated) containers of “cheese” and 696 containers of “butter,” as the official manifest said, but guncotton for the Royal Navy’s Weapons Testing Establishment. It was sunk by secondary explosions from the ship’s (illegal) ordnance.
When the war concluded in November 1918, with a victory for the Allies, more than 2 million U.S. troops had served at the Western Front in Europe, and more than 50,000 of them died.
The estimated number of military and civilian casualties in World War I, was around 40 million. There were around 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians.
WWII
Why did the US enter WW2?
A little over 20 years after the WW1, as the disease of war was destroying human lives in Europe, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, killing 2,400 Americans. Pearl Harbor is best regarded as a scheme to mobilize the American public for war by first provoking and then enabling a Japanese attack on American targets.
In January of that year, one poll found that 88% of Americans opposed the idea of declaring war against the Axis powers in Europe. As late as June, only 35% of Americans believed their government should risk war to help the British.
Why did we enter WW2?
Conflict with Japan in the Pacific Ocean
How did President Roosevelt (FDR) provoke the Japanese to attack?
In June 1941, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes advised FDR to embargo Japanese oil to goad them into war: “The embargo of oil to Japan might create a scenario that makes it not only conceivable but easy to enter into this war effectively.” Roosevelt seized Japanese properties in America and prevented Japan from buying American oil, which accounted for 45% of Japanese oil imports.
Americans heard of Japanese military preparations via radio after the provocation. Diplomatic and military attachés warned of an attack. The Honolulu Advertiser foresaw the attack days earlier. Roosevelt delivered a message to all military leaders saying, “We want Japan to act first.”
Warnings were ignored.
Nearly 80 years after the attack, new records and memos suggest fresh warnings Roosevelt and his government ignored.
FDR’s wish came true. The Japanese onslaught in Pearl Harbor was effective, killing 2,400 Americans. Outraged, the nation rallied around the flag and joyously into war.
US MILITARY CASUALTIES IN WORLD WAR II
TOTAL Dead 407,316 Wounded 671,278
Source -National WW2 Museum
According to Britannica.com, an estimated 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 people died during World War II. Among the Allied powers, the U.S.S.R. suffered the greatest total number of dead: perhaps 18,000,000. An estimated 5,800,000 Poles died, which was 20 percent of Poland’s prewar population. Among the Axis powers, there were about 4,200,000 German deaths and about 1,972,000 Japanese deaths.
“The welfare of the people…has always been the alibi of tyrants and provides the servants of tyranny a good conscience.” -Albert Camus
The Korean War, fought under the UN flag and marketed as a mission to preserve the South from communist invasion, should never have happened.
The separation of Korea into North and South was not an organic decision of the Korean people but a plan from a 1944 article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, which advised dividing the country and giving its governance to the Allies, including the Soviets. In 1945, the newly founded UN partitioned Korea along the 38th parallel, with the US governing the South and the Soviet Union the North.
Nor was the war the outcome of Korean decisions.
The war began on June 27, 1950, when the UN Security Council called for military aid to “establish world peace and security” The Soviet Union could have vetoed the resolution and blocked the UN from going to war, but they abstained.
Owen Lattimore, a Carnegie and Rockefeller-funded Institute for Pacific Relations member and State Department expert on East Asian problems, wrote in 1949, “Let South Korea fall, but don’t make it look like we drove it.”
The bloody Korean conflict ended with a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. With a demilitarized zone to keep them apart, not reunification.
Nearly 3 million civilians died, and the country was torn apart in the name of an UN-backed military intervention that should never have escalated into war.
The human casualty result:
- British forces: over 1,100 killed and 2,600 wounded.
- American forces: nearly 37,000 killed and 92,000 wounded.
- South Korean forces: at least half a million were killed or wounded.
- Chinese forces: over 110,000 killed and 380,000 wounded.
- North Korean forces: at least half a million were killed or wounded.
- Estimates suggest that at least two to three million North and South Korean civilians died.
The Viet Nam War
Why did we enter the Vietnamese conflict?
The United States supported France when Vietnam’s nationalist movement, led by Ho Chi Minh, who had accepted communist support after being ditched by America, sought independence from French colonial rule.
After the Vietnamese defeated French forces in 1954, the U.S. became increasingly involved in supporting the non-Communist South Vietnamese government’s military resistance to the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam based in the North.
American credibility as a global superpower was at stake.
In August 1964, President Johnson wanted to escalate American military involvement in Vietnam. The USS Maddox, a warship on a peaceful mission in international seas, reported a North Vietnamese torpedo boat strike on August 2. It reported another attack two days later. Johnson retaliated and signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, initiating the Vietnam War.
Years later, the Maddox narrative was also a fraud. The Maddox wasn’t leisurely floating near Vietnamese seas; it was helping the South Vietnamese launch attacks on the North.
US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, withheld information about US support of South Vietnamese raids on North Vietnamese radar stations and other targets in the period leading up to the attack. Other evidence that suggested the second attack had not occurred was not passed on to the US Congress.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – US Congress gave President Lyndon Johnson permission to wage war on North Vietnam. The first major contingent of US Marines arrived in 1965.
For the next ten years, the USA’s involvement increased. By 1968 over half a million American troops were in Vietnam and the war was costing $77 billion a year.
As with the Lusitania and Pearl Harbor, this information was suppressed long enough to rouse the people for war.
Result – In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died.
“For peace to reign on earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.” – Immanuel Kant
The Iraq War
By the 1990s, the post-Vietnam public was cautious of war appeals in far-flung countries many had never heard of. In 1990, when politicians and deep state controllers needed the American public to wage war against Iraq for invading Kuwait, they recruited a PR agency to sell Joe Sixpack and Jane Soccer-mom even more brazen lies.
The most famous hoax included Nayirah, a “young Kuwaiti girl” who shocked the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1990. In a tear-stained address, she described the horrors she observed at a Kuwaiti hospital where she volunteered.
“With 12 other women, I volunteered at Aladein Hospital. Youngest volunteer other women were 20-30. I witnessed Iraqi soldiers with rifles entering the hospital. They stole the incubators and left the babies to die on the floor.”
Kuwaiti rights violations
Today, it’s hard to appreciate how essential this testimony was in defining the tone of the argument over whether America should protect Kuwait. It was breathlessly carried on the evening news and reiterated six times by President Bush before the battle.
Problem? “Nayirah” was actually Nayirah Al-Sabah, daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. Hill & Knowlton, a PR firm hired by the Kuwaiti government-backed astroturf group “Citizens For A Free Kuwait” to sell the Gulf War, wrote her testimony. Nayirah testified before the “Congressional Human Rights Caucus.” It was a Hill & Knowlton front.
“We have to be active about kindness and about peace. I’ve always fantasized that it would be great if there was a Department of Peace.” – Dave Matthews
Desert Storm
The second Gulf War in 2003 was similarly based on lies. We all remember Colin Powell’s UN falsehood regarding Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. This time, the media drove the public relations effort for the war.
The New York Times led the way with Judith Miller’s now-infamous Iraqi WMD story, based on false information from untrustworthy sources, but the rest of the media quickly fell in line, with NBC Nightly News asking, “what precise threat Iraq and its WMD pose to America” and Time debating whether Hussein was “making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq’s WMD.” Headlines asserted the existence of chemical weapons caches before they were proven. Any media figure who questioned the claims—even Phil Donahue, MSNBC’s then-highest-rated host—was pulled off the air.
War results – the facts are hard to nail down from multiple sources, but this below statement alone stands out as to how shameful the Iraq war, a war based on false information turned out
Displacement: Refugees and Internally Displaced
The number of displaced persons, both internal (within Iraq) and external (refugees, mainly in Jordan and Syria) ranged from estimates of 3.5 million to 5 million or more, which were directly attributable to the war. Virtually all first-hand accounts blamed violence as the cause of moving or threats of ethnic or sectarian cleansing of neighborhoods.
The ravages of displacement, which remains at about 3 million, are bad enough. But it is also another indicator of the scale of mortality. All wars since 1945 have ratios of displaced to fatalities of 10:1 or less, typically more in the range of 5:1. If this typical ratio holds for the Iraq War, that indicates mortality of about one million Iraqis. – https://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” -CIA Director William Casey in 1981
Forever Wars
I could go on and on with other examples like the lies supporting the US-Led NATO operations to destroy oil producer Libya, and then of course there is US Involvement in Syria and Afghanistan, and now the Proxy war with Russia based on more lies.
Misdirection. Conflicts provoked. Fake news and crusades. In the past, many strategies were used to keep the public playing the military-industrial complex’s game. Untold millions have died because of war lies throughout history.
They say war’s first victim is the truth. If we want peace, we must expose the war liars. Armed with this fact, the public can halt the next conflict before warmongers start it.
Result
We know that between 184,382 and 207,156 civilians have died from direct war-related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through October 2019. The violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred through aerial bombing, shelling, gunshots, suicide attacks, and fires started by bombing. Many civilians have also been injured.
War and the first casualty of war = Truth, continues to this day.
Can we prevent a war?
War is not inevitable; it is a man-made disaster.
Here is something that we can all work towards.
“Be the harmony in the melody echoing in the heart of humanity.” – Abhijit Naskar
It’s time for a movement to rise one based on Truth, Freedom, and Health to combat satanic levels of power, profit, and control that only continues death and destruction.
There are billions of people who want these manufactured wars to end. The odds are in our favor.
Truth is Love. In the end, Love will win!
