View from the
Chapel Window, Pizzaonian Monasteries, Pizzaonia
A Pizzaonian perspective on American wars, politics and any other stuff that comes to mind
I don’t know what we would do in Pizzaonia if we did not have the on-going side show of happenings in the United States to watch with such fascination. For one, never has any nation waged so much war to create peace.
It seems that it is impossible for the U.S. to refrain from punishing war like people and nations. Notice we now make a distinction between nations and people since without a program we can’t tell the difference from here.
Of course, punishing war like nations requires doing war like things to the transgressors.
War like things means reigning death and destruction upon the evil doers in a way that strangely resembles the war-like tendencies of those being punished - but then again, when you are doing it to keep the peace that seems to make it ok.
It is not unlike fornicating in order to promote chastity.*
Maybe it is time for the U.S. to go back to the ways of John Foster Dulles’s original concept of mutually assured destruction. What is assured in this case is that the transgressor will be mutually and any other way totally destroyed.
This is not unlike the old Roman Empire concept of removing anyone who screwed around with them by completely removing them and their villages from the face of the earth.
It sounds extreme, but one thing you can say about it is there was nothing ambivalent going on here.
And before you knock it, that philosophy did keep the peace between the United States and the old Soviet Union. Of course that only worked for a while. The so-called "industrial military complex" that was coined and labeled by Dwight Eisenhower soon realized there is little money to be made by keeping the peace.
Thus was born the notion of limited war. Limited war is fascinating. It is not unlike creating forest fires in order to keep the new fire engines coming regularly. This is great for the companies making fire engines.
Of course, it is important to start these fires in places that will not get out of control – and we all know how that goes.
Now we would be remiss if we did not mention the United Nations in our observations. This is an international, democratic organization that should work.
Unfortunately, like all democratic organizations, there are more "little guys" than "big guys" and the "little guys" usually win the majority vote every time.
This presents a serious problem for the “big guys” so they simply ignore the “little guys” when convenient to do so. After all, let us not forget they are the “big guys.”
So what do we have left? For one, a better organized world that allows things to go along the way they have from the beginning.
One thing that was good about the “cold war” at least for a while, was that neither the United States nor the then Soviet Union was about to let any "tin pot" dictator start world war three.
Oh how we yearn for the good old days!
Brother Giovanni
*Thank you Joe Dolan (KNEW – Oakland, CA 1960’s)
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