The Link Between War and Hunger
Submitted by Emily-
The link between war and hunger, both in the assaulted countries and the ones carrying out the assault, is just one of many kinds of ties that one can figure out without much prompting. This in mind, you’ll more readily see about where the U.S.A., formerly considered a great nation by many people across the globe, is heading and the horrors being visited upon us all by our current set up. And we were “set up”, all right — set up in the halls of power in Washington, D.C. and corporate boardrooms (i.e., Blackwater/Xe’s, General Dynamics’s, Robinson Armament Company’s, etc.). They all own the American taxpayer lock, stock and barrel for many generations to come.
- E. S.
At Dwight D. Eisenhower – Wikiquote:
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.
- Speech in Ottawa, 10 January 1946, published in Eisenhower Speaks : Dwight D. Eisenhower in His Messages and Speeches (1948) edited by Rudolph L. Treuenfels
After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing.
- Quoted in Quote magazine (4 April 1965) and The Quotable Dwight D. Eisenhower (1967) edited by Elsie Gollagher, p. 219
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 fifty miles of concrete pavement. 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 is, I repeat, 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. … Is there no other way the world may live?
A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn’t preventive war; that is war.
I don’t believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.
… It seems to me that when, by definition, a term is just ridiculous in itself, there is no use in going any further.
There are all sorts of reasons, moral and political and everything else, against this theory, but it is so completely unthinkable in today’s conditions that I thought it is no use to go any further.
No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice. … No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.
- Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors “The Chance for Peace” (1953-04-16),
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
- TV talk with Prime Minister Macmillan, August 31, 1959
- “Selected Quotations”. Eisenhower Archives. Eisenhower Library. Archived from the original on 2007-02-08. Retrieved on 2007-04-01.
If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. … Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
- Farewell address, 17 January 1961
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
- Farewell address, 17 January 1961
Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude…
- The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953–1956: A Personal Account (1963), pp. 312-313
I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.
It is my personal conviction that almost any one of the newborn states of the world would far rather embrace Communism or any other form of dictatorship than acknowledge the political domination of another government, even though that brought to each citizen a far higher standard of living.
- Cole C. Kingseed, Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956, p. 27
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In relation to Eisenhower’s last statement, consider the Taliban freedom fighters (AKA terrorists). What would you do in their shoes if your country were invaded for resources?
Afghan ‘geological reserves worth a trillion dollars’: Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, is sitting on mineral and petroleum reserves worth an estimated one trillion dollars, President Hamid Karzai said Sunday.
Alan Greenspan: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” And what a high price has been paid for it so that the oil corporations can sell it to the highest bidders (whether China or any other countries willing to pay top dollar) worldwide. Maximal profit, after all, is everything in our current economic climate.
Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz: Obama Has … … AMY GOODMAN: Joe Stiglitz, our guest, he’s the Nobel Prize-winning economist from Columbia University and co-author of ‘The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict”… www.democracynow.org/2009/2/25/stieglitz - Similar
EXCLUSIVE – The Three Trillion Dollar War: Nobel … It’s titled The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. Joseph Stiglitz was the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in …www.democracynow.org/2008/2/29/exclusive_the_t... - Similar
Explain to some grieving relatives that their dead family members were killed in a bid to plunder another nation’s bounty. The other type of costs affiliated with these resource wars:
Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In U.S. War And Occupation Of Iraq 4,693
Number Of International Occupation Force Troops Slaughtered In Afghanistan : 1,631
Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered In US War And Occupation Of Iraq “1,366,350“
… and the Americans wonder about the reason that they are largely hated and feared across the world? How would they react if they faced these scenes in their own country from an invading army?
