Exposing the Myth of the ‘Good War’

By Nicky Reid / CounterPunch

Every single American war has been bullshit. They all come with different excuses and some of them are pretty goddamn convincing but every major conflict that this country has ever engaged in has been motivated by greed and power, and every single war we’ve fought has ended the exact same way, with piles of bodies, fewer civil rights, and a growing thirst for more.

Even our so-called Revolution, which so many otherwise peaceful libertarians hold in such high regard, was little more than another blood thirsty power grab. Let me be frank here, even I can get behind a good old-fashioned grass roots revolution as an act of societal self-defense, but the idea that you can have any kind of real revolution on illegally occupied territory is absurd. The American Revolution was really more of a colonial mutiny. A bunch of slave-trading Indian killers got tired of kicking up to the Crown and after catching wind that the British were making moves to curtail some of their slave trading and Indian killing, they went all Colonel Kurtz on their ass and declared their encampment to be a sovereign nation.

“But what about the Civil War?” I can hear some bright young social justice warrior call out from the back row. Surely, the fight to free the slaves is an exception, and maybe it would have been if that bloodbath was actually motivated by slavery. Don’t get me wrong, the Confederacy was a racist cartel of genocidal scumbags who seceded specifically so they could keep buying, selling, raping, and killing human property. But the Union didn’t give one solitary fuck about the slaves, and they pretty openly admitted as much on multiple occasions.

Abraham Lincoln himself was an outspoken white supremacist and he and pretty much all of his Republicans whole heartedly endorsed the original 13th Amendment, passing it in both the Senate and the House, which explicitly prohibited the federal government from interfering with southern slavery and served as a much-touted justification by Dixie to secede on constitutional grounds. The South may have been motivated by slavery, but the North was motivated by consolidating their power and fortifying the Executive Office. The biggest results of that slaughterhouse, aside from millions of dead bodies, was the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the transplanting of Black bodies from the agrarian chattel slavery of the plantation to the industrial wage slavery of the factory. Frederick Douglass himself proclaimed in horror that he couldn’t tell the difference, but the industrialists who lined Lincoln’s pockets sure as fuck could.

And then of course we have our sainted World Wars, where America the indispensable saved humanity from fascism in the name of world peace and global democracy. Yeah, sorry progressives, but that’s just more imperial bullshit. The First World War was a senseless imperial clusterfuck with a bunch of antiquated empires like France, Germany, Russia, and the UK clawing each other’s eyes out over their dwindling spheres of influence. After about three years of this shit, everybody involved was pretty much ready to call it quits and negotiate a settlement. Then Woodrow Wilson jumped into the mosh pit to keep the bloodbath running so he could achieve his dream of establishing America as a progressive global superpower and use his massive new war powers to reorganize the economy beneath a cartel of massive corporations while simultaneously reorganizing the Constitution beneath an engorged police state….

https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/15/exposing-the-myth-of-the-good-war

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