Former Air Force officer William Astore — stuck an insightful shiv — into our blood-suckingly bloated military, yesterday

© 2021 Peter Free

 

17 November 2021

 

 

Theme — is sour realism a spiritual virtue?

 

I seem to be sourly realistic this month. See here and here, for instance.

 

Both those blurbs dealt with the war criminal nature of the United States' military leadership.

 

 

Perhaps this acerbic focus is appropriate, what with Christmas coming

 

Christmas in the United States is the season that supposedly honors Christ. But our most pertinent weeks of 'celebration' are entirely about hauling in 'the' Shining Lucre.

 

December merely continues our culture's love affair with Avarice. And every other conceivable deadly sin.

 

Those (not so slyly indulged) misdeeds are happily (and conveniently) concealed under Christ's conveniently borrowed mantle of reportedly holy birth.

 

Christmas, like virtually everything else Establishment American, is a Celebration of Hypocrisy.

 

 

In that astringent vein, yesterday

 

Perhaps by coincidence or 'tide', former Air Force officer William Astore took up a similar theme.

 

He began his essay this way — here in selected extracts:

 

 

Who is America’s god?

 

The Christian god of the beatitudes, the one who healed the sick, helped the poor, and preached love of neighbor?

 

Not in these (dis)United States.

 

[T]his country doesn’t serve or worship Jesus Christ, or Allah, or any other god of justice and mercy. In truth, the deity America believes in is the five-sided one headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

 

America’s true god is a deity of wrath, whose keenest followers profit mightily from war and see such gains as virtuous, while its most militant disciples, a crew of losing generals and failed Washington officials, routinely employ murderous violence across the globe.

 

It contains multitudes, its name is legion, but if this deity must have one name, citing a need for some restraint, let it be known as the Pentagod.

 

Paraphrasing Joe Biden, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you worship.

 

America worships its Pentagod and the weapons and wars that feed it.

 

Prefabricated war is how the Pentagod has ruled for so endlessly long. There is, as a start, the fabrication of false causes for war.

 

War is prefabricated on 750 military bases scattered across the globe on every continent except Antarctica, in America’s giant arms corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and by Special Operations forces that act much like the Jesuits of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, spreading the one true faith to 150 countries.

 

© 2021 William Astore, The Pentagon as Pentagod, TomDispatch (16 November 2021)

 

 

Astore's sharp words are worth reading. Provided that one has a marginally open mind.

 

 

Of particular relevance . . .

 

. . . is Astore's recall of J. Robert Oppenheimer's remembered perception at Alamogordo, New Mexico — where the US atomic bomb was tested on 16 July 1945.

 

Oppenheimer had had a major hand in that bomb's creation. And thus:

 

 

“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

 

 

What is significant about Oppenheimer's reference . . .

 

. . . is its origin in Lord Shiva's mouth in the Bhagavad Gita.

 

Like the Christian Bible, the Gita is another of humanity's purportedly valuable collections of spiritually oriented writings.

 

One should (arguably), be wondering whether 'Supreme Being' Shiva's words — and his status as one of a Trinity of such — justifies a mere nation (generally comprised of conniving and comparatively low-life humans) in perpetually forwarding Shiva's "destroyer of worlds" business.

 

Oppenheimer himself, presumably after making his quoted connection to the Gita's spiritual thinking, thereafter opposed development of the hydrogen bomb, as well as the concept of strategic bombardment:

 

 

Oppenheimer rejected the idea of nuclear gunboat diplomacy.

 

"The purposes of this country in the field of foreign policy", he wrote, "cannot in any real or enduring way be achieved by coercion".

 

© 2021 Wikipedia, J. Robert Oppenheimer (visited 17 November 2021) (Wikipedia cites the above quotation to Oppenheimer's book, The Open Mind)

 

 

Foreseeably, these comparatively Peace-oriented ideas got him into trouble with the even-then-burgeoning American Military Industrial Complex. McCarthyism took a long and disposing poke at him.

 

 

Nothing really, these days, is different

 

Which is Astore's point.

 

The American masses — and the Military Industrial Complex that controls their thinking — worship forced death's profitable fount.

 

Avarice and murder, combined.

 

 

The moral? — Are we the tolerant, spiritual and insightful people — whom we pretend to be?

 

No.

 

Ergo, the validity of Sour Realism.

 

Pucker-prone truth has the power to become a doorway into more ethically defensible behavior.

 

Prompted by Truth's light, we just need the will to go through its gateway.