Presidents and Peace

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60 years is a long time, the life of a human being. Yet, since the beginning of industrialism, the world has sped up. Today, the rapidity of change in one life, in 60 years, dwarfs all change preceding it. Maybe nothing exemplifies this change more than the above speech Jack Kennedy gave in 1963.

The speech was delivered a half-year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, by the same man who had sat in a room with a dozen others and seriously talked about a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, an exchange that would instantaneously change life on earth. Nonetheless, they still had that discussion and they had the power to literally launch such change.

The speech is Kennedy's recognition this event was insane, only made possible by new technology. Whatever you want to say about Jack Kennedy, he did show an ability to learn, unlike most of those who followed him in the presidency and as we should all clearly recognize most of the American political class since.

Kennedy states the nut on war,

“It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all the Allied air forces in the second world war, it makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe.”

Nukes made me first ponder the politics of technology, a politics that still today remains ignored, even as the transistor now offers destructive change as great as the splitting or fusion of the atom. Kennedy had had his mind opened, his thoughts,

“I have therefore chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived, and that is the most important topic on Earth – peace. What kind of a peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war, not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace. The kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living and a kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children.”

60 years later this has been entirely flipped on its head. Not only would this topic never be broached by our warmongering presidents today, but the Pax Americana took history's long traveled, bloody path of dividing and conquering, enforced by the weapons of war. In the last 30 years, the entire American political class has supported a policy of blowing up the Middle East, creating chaos on America's imperial borders, first with Iraq, then Libya, Syria, and now Iran.

Revoltingly, our current president nostalgically adopts what was once considered top nuclear intelligence strategy, playing the role of the “madman,” calling on Iranians to abandon Tehran, under the threat of America’s beastly, bestus buddy in the region launching one of their own not so secret nukes.

In what now might be the most through the looking glass part of the speech, Kennedy declares, “Our primary long range interest in Geneva however is general and complete disarmament designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms, the pursuit of disarmament.”

Phew, what’s today's Pentagon budget? One trillion dollars! Kennedy concludes, "If we cannot end now our differences at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures."

It is an interesting fact, though whether it means anything and to this point it has meant little to nothing, in the last century, for the first time in human history, the vast majority of people on this planet understand we are together all on this small, blue rock, circling a star, in an imaginably large universe. Our science and technology have allowed us to unleash the forces of the universe, yet we remain the same hairless apes willing to foolishly destroy each other for a small piece of ground offering false notions of advantage and security.

Most maddening about all this is thirty years ago, when the Neo-Cons – emphasis on the con – ex-commies and draft-dodgers all, started floating ideas about blowing up the Mid-East, consensus opinion even in the National Security State was they were nuts. Yet here we, the last domino looking to be toppled, finally revenge for Iran's decades ago toppling of the CIA installed shah.

America evolved from a new example to the world of modern self-government to just another old tired story of empire run by a debauched oligarchy. Technology reshaped the once vibrant republic to the degenerate idiocies of imperial hubris and avarice, where an incessant flow of lies and misinformation from the top is not only held unaccountable, but celebrated. As the man caught in the flames of Dresden once said, “So, it goes.”

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