Ted Grimsrud—April 22 2024
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” (Dylan Thomas)
I have come to feel one little sliver of gratitude for the current devastating violence that Israel (with the backing of the United States) is visiting on Gaza. It helps us see more clearly the reality of the US/NATO backing of the doomed Ukrainian war against Russia and the reality of the scaling up of American war cries in relation to China. The US Congress’s recently passed spending bill to fund billions for war and war preparation in Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan makes obvious the actual dynamics.
The motives of the US Empire: Corporate profit and domination
I’d say first of all, the US/NATO pursues these wars and possible wars in order to redistribute money from their taxpayers to corporate war profiteers. And, then, second, these wars and possible wars are justified as necessary to further the empire’s obviously failing agenda of being the dominant power in a “unipolar” world. This agenda, of course, is framed in terms of resisting the expansionist intentions of Russia and China. However, when we look at the whole picture in light of the destruction of Gaza, we see more clearly that there is nothing defensive about any of these situations—Gaza is simply about conquest and devastation. To see that about Gaza in turn helps us see what, in reality, the others are about as well.
A recent, typically insightful essay by Aaron Maté helps make all of this clear. He points out, first, that this new bill is all about directing money to the war corporations. He quotes House Armed Service Chair Mike Rogers: “Nearly all the money we’re spending to arm Ukraine [and, I may add, Israel and Taiwan] doesn’t leave this country,” but instead “goes directly to US companies and American workers to produce more weapons at a faster pace.” As it turns out, a lot of the money in this particular bill won’t even go to Ukraine or Israel in any direct way but rather will be spent simply to rebuild the American store of weaponry.
Part of the moral bankruptcy of this arms-spending bill may be seen in how this influx of funding will mainly have the effect of meaning thousands more Ukrainians will die or have their lives grievously impaired due to US/NATO insistence in continuing to prosecute a failed war. Ukraine has no chance to prevail against Russia, but extending the war means that more money can be made by the war corporations, and it is probably also thought that Biden’s re-election chances will be diminished should it become clearer how the US/NATO war effort has failed. The money will buy Biden some more time, perhaps, and put off the reckoning until after the election.
Maté cites a British journalist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of The Economist, who made the rationale clear: Arming Ukraine “is the cheapest possible way for the US to enhance its security. The fighting is being done by the Ukrainians; they’re the people being killed.” Of course, one of the terrible ironies that is still hidden from most Americans is that US security has actually been diminished by American support for this war. Russia’s strength has been enhanced and Europe’s and America’s strength has been lessened. This cynical war, devastating for Ukrainians, has also inflicted major damage on the US and its allies. No matter what one thinks of Putin and Russia, they have, ironically, grown in power due to this proxy war that the US/NATO pursued with the misguided intent to hurt Putin and Russia.
Maté concludes his piece with a quote from former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that makes it clear that the agenda of US/NATO from the start was expanding its power, not the defense of the Ukrainian people: “If Ukraine falls, it will be a disaster for the West,” Johnson said last week. “This will be an end to Western hegemony.” Maté adds: “Johnson, who instructed Zelensky to ‘keep fighting’ rather than make peace with Russia at the April 2022 talks in Istanbul, has newly made NATO elites priorities clear. Fearing an end to Western hegemony, Western proxy warriors are willing to end countless more Ukrainian lives. All it takes is for their taxpayers to remain sidelined from the discussion, misled on the facts, and footing an ever-growing bill.”
What is there to do but to “rage, rage”?
As I understand it, Dylan Thomas’s poem from 1947, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” may have been written to encourage his seriously ill father to struggle against his impending death. However, the powerful words have a much wider application. I find them fitting to give voice to my response to the profoundly distressing actions of the warist American Empire: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
One manifestation of that rage, it seems to me, is to work at understanding who it should be aimed at. It’s not so much Russia and Hamas, or China, even given the violence and injustices they are responsible for. More so, it is the decision-makers in our nation and its allies who have refused even to try to find peaceable alternatives to dealing with the various points of tension in these conflicts but instead have simply opened the spigot of an unimaginable flow of cash directed to war profiteers. But perhaps most of all, it our system itself, with its warism and capitalism and nationalism and white supremacy and domination.
But how might one direct rage against a system? I would argue for using the rage as motivation for careful analysis and for creative energy in embracing life. We need to see that we are living within a desperate, passionately greedy empire that is destroying the world. We need better simply to understand that reality—and to have that understanding lead us to resist the propaganda and the false framing that causes to trust the messages we get from our politicians and the mainstream media (not to mention messages we get from others out of the mainstream who also traffic in violence, nationalism, and domination). We have to allow our awareness, most obviously, of the genocidal viciousness being visited on Gaza to help us see the character of the system that fuels that viciousness.
We must also embrace life even in face of the viciousness and witness to something different. The great Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn points us to a life-affirming response. In his song, “Where the death squad lives,” he follows his cry against the violence with some hopeful words: “Like some kind of never-ending Easter passion, from every agony a hero’s fashioned. Around every evil, there gathers love. Bombs aren’t the only things that fall from above.” The gathering of love does not make the evil okay. But it does give people something to gain strength from. And it does give us something to live for, something to help free us from acquiescence to the system.
Thinking Pacifism 
Thanks for the thoughtful and hopeful article here, Ted. (I hope it generates some discussion, here, as well as taken “out” to other venues.)
I have no confident sense of where the super serious problems of not only “Empire” but Empire-run-amok may be headed, and I think that future is yet open. Open in being contingent on us doing things like your recommendations and other specific postures and actions, of which I’ll here “preach” a couple.
Within that “careful analysis” of which you speak, here are points I’ve realized only after spending some serious time in conversations (mainly with one well-informed person I work closely with) and reading:
American Empire is a bipartisan problem (no big revelation here), but to go a bit deeper, we have a two-party duopoly deeply intertwined with the evils and powers of corporatocracy. Not only is each party largely controlled by such, but they conspire (maybe unconsciously for many individual politicians) to support the joint SYSTEM of a political plutocracy. This has the (im)practical effect that NO THIRD party (or set of parties) can emerge to effectively curb the power of the Rs and Ds, who supposedly are “competing” (on the surface, yes, but not truly, deeply). A “properly” run duopoly has the same basic functionality of a monopoly… not at all good!
My “good news” is something that probably way less than 1% of Americans have much awareness of. It is that there is a growing cadre of activists (among whom I count myself) who believe we see at least a good bit of the way out of and beyond the Empire-feeding plutocracy. And we are making “grassroots” efforts in many related ways that we believe will, incrementally, build a viable set of processes to ultimately dismantle the power, if not the visible outward “structure” of plutocracy. (In other words, there may still be Rs and Ds as dominant parties on at least a national level, but within a dynamic that will force them both to be actually accountable to the properly informed “collective wisdom” of their constituents.)
Now, trying to tie to your excellent call for “creative energy in embracing life”, that creative effort will take both political and non-political forms… probably much more of the latter, but the former is critical also. Let me keep this limited by now mentioning a couple or so names/processes (perhaps repetitious from earlier):
Braver Angels is rapidly expanding and is probably the largest organization (in all 50 states, at varying activity levels) building processes and actual events of “dialog across difference”, toward “depolarization”. (Just a step toward the “wiser democracy” dynamic we MUST get to for any hope of a reasonably “survivable” process of the dismantling of Empire.) They specifically, carefully balance R and D (as “red” and “blue”) teams and individual participants and run trainings for facilitators as well as small group events locally and continually. Many Christians are involved but it is purposely non-religious, focused on political dynamics from a transpartisan standpoint.
Surrounding Braver Angels is the several-hundred “member” group called “Listen First Coalition” (The co-founder and many here are also Christian). And within Braver Angels is the Braver Network which is many supporting small to fairly large orgs, not themselves running dialog or reconciliation projects.
One might say “alongside” Braver Angels is a quasi “political” party, but more of a “non-party” designed not to field party candidates but to support transpartisan ones of either major party, and to support important related efforts of electoral reform such as ranked choice voting and open primaries. This is the Forward Party, founded in 2022 by Andrew Yang (Dem, formally), Christine Todd Whitman (Rep, formally) and several other accomplished, known people. Yang’s book “Forward” is especially instructive as to BOTH diagnosis and solutions.
Their worked-toward solutions are not directly involved in dismantling Empire and its militarism but support the structural/procedural/attitudinal changes that can make that possible… tying to the vital work of people in the religious and church/mosque/synagogue/Buddhist-Eastern temple realm.
hi Howard- I just spotted your comment here. Good to “see” you again!
I’m familiar with the orgs/processes you introduce in your comment. Intriguing.
Have you been following https://anamericanunion.com/ ? I have been getting acquainted over the past year or so with Brian Winters, the person who is working on the project.
Also, do you perchance subscribe to my little project? I don’t really know how to access those who subscribe. ha! That’s my tech ineptitude. KathleenTemple.wordpress.com is the archive for “Peace Bit” prompts I generate on a daily basis. You might like to sign up, which can be done in a variety of ways. Totally trans-partisan. Inter-national too; the Peace Bits go out to a circle of over 200 peace advocates in different countries. We’d surely welcome you and of course, I’d covet your feedback and your suggestions for future Peace Bits.
Thanks for reading this note, Howard! -Kathleen
Hi Kathleen! Yes, great to connect again after so long. Ted hadn’t caught me up on what you’re doing in the peace building realm (that I recall… memory slips a bit here and there these days).
I’ve read a number of your recent “bits”. It’s a good concept and well done. I’m glad you’re getting them out regularly to a good group. I did sign up to get your emails.
And I hadn’t been aware of American Union, though my biz partner knew of it. That’s a wonderful thing about working with him, Norlyn Dimmitt. He has immersed himself deeply, for 25 years or so, in the broad “transpartisan movement”, and particularly its push for “wiser democracy”, in the form of deliberative democracy (a fairly developed model) or something similar.
I’m interested to hear whatever else you’d like to tell me about what you’re doing or are particularly excited about that others are doing (as with American Union… btw, I’ve found Brian Winters on LinkedIn, but with no connections and an undeveloped profile). That happens to be a very useful tool for Norlyn and me, and my 2500+ direct connections there can be examined and approached by him or you. (Norlyn has 15,000+.) But it appears you’re not present there, unless under a different name than Kathleen or Kathy Temple.
Back to strategy/action stuff: I continue to search and ponder on just how to best approach (for myself, with my skills and highest interests, and for others) getting the world much closer to peace everywhere. Even if that’s never 100% achievable, getting even to the elimination of all the large/intense wars and organized violence (e.g., terrorist acts) would make an incredible difference. As I’ve implied the other day (and other times on Thinking Pacifism and elsewhere), There would be numerous great effects of getting even just the US to and through major “upgrades” of democracy, such that the collective wisdom and compassion of most citizens would “govern” or at least put strong boundaries on the excesses (such as militarism) of government.
This is a simple (perhaps oversimplified) concept that has certainly been around a long time: merely redirecting some significant portion of current “defense” spending to peace building (conflict resolution, active diplomacy toward problem resolution, etc.). That could get the “ball rolling” in the right direction and allow momentum to build.
I do think that is one of the feasible outcomes, in the fairly near future potentially, of us implementing some reforms that put budgeting and key policy-making into the hands of even “ordinary citizens”… if they are properly organized and empowered to gain the appropriate knowledge on given issues and processes. That happens to be a kind of goal that, supposedly at least, both “right” and “left” folks could agree on and work together toward vs. just trying to defeat the other side. Satisfies the “anti-elitist” sentiments of the right and the “need for specialized expertise” of the left, as I conceive the approach anyway.
Tell me if you agree, please: does that not represent some of the core principles that “peace churches”, non-violent communication folks and others with similar orientations believe in and try to implement?
So, blessings on you and your family. On that family side of things, Ruth and I (“together” as in the same home for now, due to Evan’s needs, though long divorced) are about to become first-time grandparents of a baby girl via our daughter, Whitney. She is due June 2. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that to Ted, so feel free to share it.
Thanks for your comments here, Howard!
Also, **Congratulations** to you and Ruth! And to your daughter as well. I remember when Whitney was born. Hello and all the best to Ruth and to all of you.
Thanks, Kathleen. It’s going to be great. Whitney’s husband is a great guy and we know he’ll be a super dad, as Whitney will be a mom.