All the countries the U.S. has bombed since WWII. The list represents the nations of approximately 1/3 of the humans on earth. The next largest military spender, China, spends 1/10 what we spend and has bombed no other nations since WWII.

A preface:

When I was a high schooler, the History Channel flew myself, our history teacher, and a couple other classmates to DC. They interviewed us for our work at the cemetery near us. We had discovered documents in county archives that indicated there was a part of this cemetery where Civil War veterans of color were buried. They had been segregated into their own regiment of sorts: the “U.S. Colored Troops,” or USCT. Unfortunately they had not been given headstones, so we didn’t know where their bodies were. We used ground-penetrating radar to locate them, and we applied to the VA to get them headstones. (As you may know, if a veteran cannot afford a headstone, then one will be provided to them.) Then we installed the headstones at their gravesites. The VA Secretary at the time brought us to his office and gave us nice letters of thanks. But we had done the work for those soldiers. And now more people would know about their sacrifices.

I wanted you to know that before I say what I’ll say here.

We have a vote Tuesday, on the Hartford Selectboard, to weigh in on placing banners honoring local veterans on poles in downtown White River Junction. I’d like to explain my position on that, which cannot be separated from my larger views on the blood and treasure we devote to the military. (I’ll discuss those too.)

I would prefer to not help local military recruiters, if at all possible. This awful economy, and especially the paucity of services and safety nets compared to other developed nations, does the recruiters’ work for them.

My belief is simple: “support troops and veterans, but oppose all wars,” a belief many—if not most—vets and active duty service personnel share.

I think these banners would give the idea, to the more impressionable of young folks, that serving in the military is the most, or at least one of the most, honorable life paths. We don’t seem to honor any other life path with banners downtown. I don’t fault folks for signing up for the service, and I’m sure it takes lots of courage and skill. But I’ve talked with a heck of a lot of veterans who say that, once they were in, they learned how pointless (or simply empire-bolstering, take your pick) our military actions have been. Many other vets say that, if they had been able to access the social services every other developed nation provides by virtue of paying taxes—particularly healthcare and education—then they wouldn’t have joined up.

If it’s looking like we’re heading toward approving these banners (again, I do heartily support veterans), I would advocate for every other banner to be from an organization that opposes all wars, such as War Resisters League or Veterans for Peace. Poll all local veterans; I bet a majority would support this.

I’m a huge fan of—Republican war hero!—Dwight Eisenhower’s views of our warmaking apparatus once he became president. I think you’ll be surprised to hear what he said. It’s even more true today than it was then.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

I fear that it’s impossible to have a president today who would speak this. Our current system of funding federal elections, which requires giant checks from giant businesses like defense contractors, all but ensures nothing like this could be said by a mainline candidate, ever again.

As you might be able to tell, I am fairly passionate about military spending—that is, cutting it. To say nothing of the moral issues of death & destruction, and meddling in other nations’ affairs, it’s just such a waste. Eisenhower said it more eloquently, but here’s an adjacent thought: put a dollar into education, or into a business startup loan program, and that dollar makes 5, 50, or 500 dollars of “dividends” for our society. Put a dollar into a bomb and it yields $0 of future value for us. It has the same effect as setting our cash ablaze. And frankly, if we did that, the world would be better off.

Easily 50% of our taxes goes to war and warmaking. Some say realistically it’s more. Back when the Pentagon budget was $470B, we were spending nearly double that (~$1T) on warmaking, annually, because the DOD budget doesn’t include all kinds of other expenses the war juggernaut requires:

• interest on debt due to “defense”
• the VA
• the nukes program (it’s in DOE)
• the actual wars being fought at any given time (most folks don’t know that doesn’t come from the DOD budget)
• the warmaking parts of the CIA
• the war-prosecuting parts of the FBI… and on and on.

With the DOD budget in 2024 now at $840B, and the bulleted items likely costing as much or more, that’s nearing half of our ~$4.9T tax revenues.

Oh, and the military has never once passed an audit. See this 2019 article about the clown show that is trying to audit the military, and know that we haven’t passed an audit since then, either.

In one of the many failed audits in recent years, the margin of error was something like 20x the budget of the Army. In another, the margin of error was several times the U.S. GDP. In other words, audits of so-called defense in this country are a farce; those who run this machine laugh in the faces of those who would try to hold them accountable. And remember, they *can* spend roughly infinite money, since money comes into existence when the government writes a check. So all the hemming and hawing about the DOD budget means—as my grandma would say—diddily squat.

“But we have to defend ourselves!” you might say. Well, even our official military budget is 10x the next largest spender in the world, China. So if we only spent as much as them, chances are we’d still be fine because we have a mutual defense pact with so many other countries. For it’s part, China hasn’t bombed or invaded *any* other country since WWII. It has military bases in *no* other countries. Since WWII, the U.S. has bombed countries that collectively contain 1/3 of the people on the earth (see the list at top of this post), and we currently have military bases in about 90 other countries.

Perhaps attempting to reduce military spending is the “conservative” position, in the old definition of that word. Prudent. Thinking of long-term benefit rather than short-term goals. What has happened to this country’s conservatives? Now, the word “conservative” tends to mean you want to strip-mine every resource, natural and human, for the most profit as quickly as you can get it. In other words, the opposite of its original definition. This makes me think of the government from George Orwell’s fictional dystopia, which has convinced the public of its slogan: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

C’mon, folks. Words have meaning. And that meaning matters.

So no, I’m not keen on flying banners implying that it’s among the most honorable of paths to choose death, or risk of death, for the system I describe above. The path is courageous for sure. But alas, we don’t know whether the lost souls whose photos would blow in the wind, and who may have otherwise been our neighbors, would choose the path again. Especially if they understood what I’ve outlined today. For all we know, they might have vehemently opposed using their image in this way. (If they’re your relatives, sure, you may know. At least until the point at which they last communicated, openly and honestly, with the outside world.) I think the best data is from vets who’ve returned—and they’re generally pretty salty about it all, if not outright war protesters now.

Speaking of the prescience of fiction: I’ll paraphrase a social media post by user @austerrewyatt1: We all root for “the resistance” to empire when it’s portrayed in Star Wars, The Hunger Games, The Matrix, V for Vendetta. When it’s fiction we understand. But so many of us refuse to see it when it’s the reality we’re living in.