"Blessed are the Peacemakers"

"Blessed are the Peacemakers"

Christmas, 2021

I want to wish you the very best for the holiday season, and a Merry Christmas for all.

The United States was established explicitly as a government without a religion for a good purpose and we have always had a strong tradition of openness without the terrible struggles that tore apart Europe when religion became the determining factor in all politics.

There are parts of the Christian tradition, I believe, that have universal value, as there are of many other teachings. I want to quote today Matthew 5:8, not as a preacher, but as a president,

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.”

We certainly see terrible darkness all around us these days, a darkness that lingers in the corners of shopping malls and gymnasiums, that at first glance seem so normal and quickly covers itself up with something. 

We must be able to imagine a better society is possible and to move forward towards that better society, undiscouraged by the setbacks that we may encounter.

In that process, the process by which we create a positive cycle to replace the narcissism and competition that has torn our society apart, we will create a culture of cooperation, empathy and love. In that process the “peacemakers” will be the most critical.

We need peacemakers in every neighborhood to simply engage people in discussions about our common concerns and to create a peace in daily life rooted in truth, founded in decency.

Peace does not mean the absence of conflict. Peace is a force in itself for transformation, for harmony, for bringing together our common creative powers to weave a common fabric and to find unexpected commonalities through the use our imaginations.

Today, as we celebrate Christmas, dark forces clamor for war with Russia, with China, and with Iran. Those howls are heard even today, a day which should be quiet and peaceful.

The dogs of war bay for horrific destruction. The corrupt politicians and businessmen who have coddled them, thrown them chucks of raw meat over the years, have no idea what will happen when they are set loose.

It is almost without exception accepted that the United States is defending against the aggression of Russia and China. But everyone in Washington D.C. knows full well that the massive build up, and the rise in tensions, started here, not there. The fact China and Russia now also have military industrial complexes of their own is the sad influence of our culture on them.

The arms merchants and their agents have sought out international war in a systematic manner since the 1870s, and have grown increasingly sophisticated in how they plant the seeds of discord, pay off scholars and journalists to cook up tales of rising tensions and create conflicts where there were none before.

It has been a constant struggle to control these beasts who clothe themselves as men and speak with great authority about how the taxes of the common man must be spent to purchase weapons, and more weapons, for more and more future wars.

All that money goes into the bloated belly of the financial beast.

These evil men used the filthy tool of free trade to force us into addiction to their war profiteering. Free trade has been used to shut down all factories, all local production and local agriculture. All the decent simple businesses making furniture, tools or clothes for citizens have been ruthlessly destroyed. All this was done so that we became dependent on imported food and goods and we must spend even more money on weapons to defend brittle supply chains around the world.

More evil yet, the only real work left in many places is making weapons. The only factories left behind make guns and missiles. The only sources of local employment are military bases and prisons.

That was no accident! It was a plan to force addiction to war on the innocent citizen.

No congressman can stand up to the weapons merchants anymore because they fear that real jobs will be lost. What they will not tell you is that they aided and abetted the destruction of your local economy.

The arms merchants created the First World War for profit and it was only when millions died pointlessly that people started to understand what they had done. They did the same in the Second World War, and they planned to create a third world war in the 1950s, but were not completely successful. Instead, they had to content themselves with a cold war that kept the profits flowing to the arms manufactures and their friends among the banks.

The government of the United States, subject to constant privatization and institutional corruption that matches that of the late Roman empire now, is a shell, a stack of bones. Where once stood a majestic animal, a skeleton remains after the maggots silently devoured the muscles.

There is nothing in the government, in the Department of Defense, in the CIA , or in other organizations left to stop this deadly drive for world war.

At the same time, the stench of the horrific fraud of COVID19 cannot be covered up with the perfume of cloying speeches--When the White House sends out Christmas greetings wishing “severe illness and death'” on citizens, you know that we have hit rock bottom.

The temptation for the big players on Wall Street is to up the ante, to bring on a world war that will bury the evidence of the last two years of criminal tampering.

Washington D.C. has fallen to the wolves. You can be sure that they will be happy to whip up a world war in order to stop anyone trying to bring them to justice.

What do we need to do? We need to organize peacemakers and in every town, in every neighborhood, have an honest discussion about how the world is really run, how free trade and global finance means that all international relations are controlled by a handful of the super-rich. We have to have a discussion so that people know how the arms manufactures make up problems, promote problems, and then sell their multibillion-dollar arms systems with the support of experts and retired generals who are paid off with millions of dollars.

The fact that this entire process is a fraud, that the businessmen and bankers do not necessarily want a world war that could kill them as well, does not rule out war.

History is full of examples of those who pretended war until it became war.

Then we need to have concrete and enforceable international treaties for arms control and disarmament, as we had before.  The plans are all there, the expertise can be put together quickly. What we need is the will to rise above the confusion, the distraction, the fabricated fear and the enforced idiocy of the corporate media.

Arms control means agreements among nations to limit the development of, and the deployment of, weapons. It must include conventional weapons, nuclear weapons, and emerging weapons such as drones and robots, weaponized satellites, nano-warfare, energy weapons, bio weapons, and a host of new threats which are unknown to most, some of which remain classified even as the wolves prepare to employ them.

Disarmament means the active reduction of existing weapons. The United States must set the example and lead the world forward. We must destroy our nuclear weapons, the vast majority of our fighter planes and other weapons systems that waste the resources of our citizens. We must do so together with the nations of the world. We who are covered in sin must take the first step.

You might say that such actions are naïve and dangerous. You would saying precisely what tens billions of dollars have been spent to teach you through newspapers and television broadcasts, through reports and commissions by overpaid experts. But the truth is that the experts within the Department of Defense know that what I suggest is what must be done to save our children from perdition. It is no secret and there are plenty of scientific studies to support my position.

The military is trusted more than other branches of government because it is still functional. But it does more damage to the environment than most countries in the world put together and its deadly impact on the Earth is growing. We must turn it around now, from within and from without.

We must start now, in our neighborhood, a positive cycle for peace at this most dire moment in human history.