Sedona, AZ — Humans have been killing each other since the beginning, as depicted in the biblical story of Cain and Abel.
Mass killings, such as the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S., the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis, the killing of even more millions by Stalin, and the modern killings of today, continue unabated.
There was mass killings in the ancient world by great conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Mongols.
And, of course, the Crusader campaign against the “Saracens” in the Middle East and the Cathars or Albigensians in southern France in the 13th century.
Then there are the actions of the Spanish in the New World in the first half of the 16th century, where they wiped out the indigenous populations of North and South America.
It’s what we humans do. War is war.
And now, we have the killing in Gaza, where the entire population of Palestine is huddled in the south, dying from explosions, starvation, and disease, displaced and no longer functioning as a society, their culture and identity as a nation, destroyed.
Call it what you want. Little difference does it make to the women and children, elderly and infirmed that are suffering and dying every day, in great numbers, with no end in sight.
Yes, it’s war, and collateral damage is all a part of it and is to be expected. Still.
The war started when Hamas invaded Israel, killed 1,200 people, and kidnapped 250 souls, resulting in a full-scale invasion of Gaza by Israel that so far has claimed the lives of over 20,000 Palestinians, according to Palestinian authorities.
Imagine what the families of the dead or injured on both sides must be feeling; those whose relatives are still held hostage; and those in Gaza witnessing their spouses, children, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers crushed in buildings, starving, living in filth, and losing all hope.
Think of the mothers who can’t feed their kids, living in tents or under plastic garbage bags, dirty, smelly, unable to bathe, no toilets, wondering when death at any second will come plunging from the sky and blow them all to bits.
Unfortunately for the innocent, the guilty hide behind them, and no bomb is that sophisticated that it can tell the difference.
The world has to put a stop to this. The hostages need to come home, and the bombings have to stop. Aid needs to be received. Food and medicine need to be provided. Relief needs to be allowed in. Hamas must understand that soon, there will be no Palestine left to rule.
One would think in the course of human history that by now, we humans would have ended all wars. All this talk of universal peace, spirituality, and evolution as a species. Baloney! Maybe we have become more civilized but even more barbaric at the same time
From killing each other with rocks and pointed sticks, we now do so with drones and hypersonic missiles.
And, of course, we have not forgotten how to kill the old-fashioned way, with knives and bullets.
Now we have the saber-rattling of North Korea. The world can only hope to God the North Koreans don’t do anything too stupid because the U.S. has nuked cities twice before and given a choice between a protracted war between the Koreas, nuking Kim might be the quickest way to end it.
Iran is satisfied just lighting firecrackers and running away, watching everyone around them fight while they twiddle their thumbs and whistle innocently behind the scenes.
China will play the benevolent peacekeeper and has no intention of messing with their best customer — meaning us.
In Ukraine, the beggar is running out of cash, and it won’t be long before the Russians quit playing around and bomb him into submission. After all, the U.S. is going to have to redirect its bomb-making resources to deal with an aroused Middle East should the Hamas/Israeli war blister.
But none of this means anything to the Gazan civilians forced to live like animals in the streets, no home to go back to, and only darkness ahead.
Humanity needs to find its soul. The suffering must end. Now!
By Tommy Acosta / Editor Sedona.biz
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6 Comments
Like I’ve said again and again- war in and of itself is a crime! Almost always a crime committed upon civilian non combatants committed by world governments and their surrogates. Usually under the guise of Religion when it is really just a greedy land grab combined with ethnic cleansing in one form or another. War fighters unless they are paid PMC mercenaries are also frequently the victims of crimes committed by or against their own governments.
War is an excuse to be lethal rather than just. It’s a money making sham that makes the rich richer and the less fortunate suffer and die en mass.
The plotters and planners of war sit comfortably in secure locations hundreds or thousands of miles from the fighting. They get fat off of the military industrial complex and their stocks in it, they get all of the what we’re previously highly esteemed medals for heroism and valor while the grunts who are the actual valorous heroes get shat upon.
What they don’t realize is that the people see this! We see their criminal behavior and won’t follow their bullshit blindly any longer! Hence the lowest enlistment and re-enlistment levels since Vietnam. They’re also blind to the fact that the weapons of mass destruction they so cowardly use from thousands of miles away like cruise and hypersonic missiles and now armed drones can and will now reach them too as the Orange Insurrectionist Idiot’s pals Putin and Hamas can surely testify too after being on the receiving end of these weapons.
When I was a kid stupid boys fist fought one another, this progressed into fights with bats, boards, chains etc. and ultimately in firearms. Maybe next schoolyard fights will be settled with drone strikes. I mean why not? We let kids 9 and younger possess fully automatic weapons and teach them to “hunt” with them. What’s the worse that could happen? When I was a kid we had “hunter’s safety” classes during the hour after school. We brought our shotguns to school, put them in our lockers and then retrieved them for the class. Could you imagine if that insanity was still going on today? Kids openly carrying firearms to school in the age of mass and school shootings! Sheer insanity even without the hunters safety courses is what you have now.
We are a culture of war, a culture of violence and a culture of intolerance so unless someone’s “God” magically appears and does something to change things then we will most certainly all of humanity one conflict at a time!
It would be nice if we could have a world with no war, but that is an extremely naive hope. Human beings, as you point out above, have always been evil and warmongering, and that is simply not going to change. The only way to ensure peace is unfortunately to be prepared to defend yourself – as it is in our personal lives. You can be a peace martyr if you have no reason to live, but the evil beings in our lives – and that’s most of the people in the world – will be glad to accomodate you. The Israelis and the Ukrainians are fighting to be able to live a peaceful life without interference from the evil people who want them eliminated. That’s just the reality of humanity.
I agree and disagree Bruce. Yes temporary survival depends on knowledge, skill and preparation. But even the best laid plans go to hell in combat. If by being prepared you mean to dress up and arm up and act like an idiot terrorist by joining a make believe military militia then I’d say you’re a fool and wasting your time and money because professional soldiers and law enforcement WILL take you down and rapidly should the shit hit the fan here in the US.
So far as Israel and Ukraine go, what you state about Israel could and should be applied to Gazan civilians who are being made to suffer because of the actions of an Iranian terror groups who hide in the shadows within their borders. Israel has ever right to go after and kill if necessary every single member and supporter of Hamas. It does NOT have the right to kill innocent civilians en mass as it has been doing since October 7th! Ukraine on the other hand has been fighting a world super power attempting to ethnically cleanse Ukraine and Ukrainians just to get a foothold in Russian efforts to land grab back all of its former Warsaw Pact territories all the way to Berlin and very likely to our own shores.
Both Israel and Russia are pushing the world into widespread conflict if not an actual First World War by committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in order to land grab land that does not belong to them at the expense of the people currently and rightly occupying them.
You did a great job of making my point. A world without war is a naive belief. There will always be wars because people are inherently evil. I am in total agreement that innocent civilians should not be the victims of war, but Hamas and its followers are not innocent civilians. Every war in history has had innocent civilians as victims – more victims usually than military casualties. If I were religious, I might even say that it’s God’s plan to control population. Cowardice in confronting evil does no one any good, and we’re living in a post-World War II culture of avoidance and cowardice. We no longer try to win wars to combat evil, we just try to mitigate evil to try to make it more palatable to us. There is no question that Velodya Putin is an evil person surrounded by evil people in the Russian government, but the world tolerates him because of his nukes and the prospect of an even larger world disaster because of his evil. The Israelis and the Gazans are both fighting for their freedom, but the Palestinians have as an objective the elimination of the Israeli people – that’s pure evil, and the Israelis are right to try to eliminate the evil. How innocent are the Gazans really? They nurtured and supported Hamas for years knowing full well their plans and objectives. They knew about all the tunnel building and the weapons stockpiling and the elimination objective, and did nothing. So how innocent are they really? As Sherman said “War is hell”, but he also was one of its lead perpetrators because he knew that only through war does peace become possible. That’s been the course of history, peace follows war because war is not tolerable for long periods and war sometimes tries to eliminate evil to attain peace. It’s been that way forever and will continue to be the case.
“Palestinians have as an objective the elimination of the Israeli people – that’s pure evil, and the Israelis are right to try to eliminate the evil. How innocent are the Gazans really?“
The exact same could be said of Netanyahu and his Likud Party which secretly provided arms and cash to Hamas in hopes that they would do exactly what they did on October 7, 2023 so Israel would have the excuse to ethnically cleanse Gaza and could take the land for themselves to expand their illegal settlements on Palestinian land.
War may bring a temporary peace but it leaves angry young victims who grow up seeking vengeance which almost always leads to war anew. It’s a vicious never ending cycle we have witnessed over and over again in the Balkans, Middle East, Africa, South America and is coming to the US in retaliation for the Civil War and war on slavery, human and individual rights and freedoms should Dump make it back into office although his personal motives are to avenge the “unfair” way his daddy was treated for being a racist misogynist ass like he is.
Sherman was a war criminal that committed war crimes and should have been tried and executed for them not hailed as a hero! And our nation should never ever have permitted bases to be named, statues to be erected, schools towns and roads to be named after Confederate, Union or any other of our war criminals but we did and it has inflamed our nation all these years later. Statues have been removed and some bases, schools and roads have been renamed but for how long? It’s only been 9 years since the Confederate freakin flag was removed from flying over the SC statehouse and there are actually Americans pissed off about it? Makes zero sense but that goes to show you how long persistence of hatred and lust for vengeance can be. Israeli’s and Palestinians, Bosnian Serbs and Muslims, Ukrainians and Russians all have generations of people who have suffered loss in war and want to settle the score.
Mankind will never learn from history. It never has and never will!
Amen.