Roman tabulae, to European books, to the world wide web, his story, albeit speckled with other aspects of patrist culture, is war. Is there anything quite so compelling as the march to war? The beating of the drums, the blaring of the trumpets, the bellowing of the leaders and the bleating of the masses create a boisterous cacaphony that warps human consciousness. Just as wolves howl to form a wolfpack, history predisposes people to think that war is winnable, honorable, inevitable as they form rank and file.

There is something empowering about being part of the war - it makes a man out of you, makes mom and dad proud, awes former bullies, pays for education, dental; see the world, gals love a guy in uniform, springboard to politics. Having served is forever, semper fidelis and all that gallant folderol, the pageantry of roll call, the columns surging forth at daybreak, banners snapping in the dawn breeze, the smell of napalm in the morning, the swift victory over miserable, soulless enemies by lunch, the swelling triumph amidst adulations of the grateful populace around teatime and for dinner, comfortable retirement with all honors. It's stirring! Glorious!

What would all that be without war? Nothing but the vain posturing of preposterous martinets. Preparations for war are the organizing principal of society. War is the substrate for the economy, science, entertainment and the enforcement sector. Drawing on antediluvial archetypes of prehuman predation, modern human culture embraces war like a child's underbed boogeyman, fearing yet revering the ghastly presence out there of the Beast. The unbridled horror, the nerve shredding terror of combat provide a benchmark of behavior, than which ANYthing is better. The threat of war controls the actions of people just as the charge of a shark controls the actions of prey fish. No one wants to be in war, on the battlefield suffering losses; territorial programming means defense, and civilized people expect to extend that territory to the boundary of perception. The best way to prevent war here is to make war there, and the newly codified Pentagon policy is the succinct embodiment of that doctrine. In the context of history, unilateral, preemptive attack on potential adversaries is the most logical solution to the challenges of war, both confining the damage on enemy soil, and reducing the ability of oppponents to riposte.

War has flowed and ebbed throughout history. Whatever peace has been experienced in that period has been "won" by expanding the zone of no combat by force of arms. When that zone abuts another territory expanded by another group, a "balance" of power forms. Like gaming cocks circling, leaders scrutinize adversaries, assessing the potential gains against the potential risks of engaging, fearing consequences, but depending upon the threat for organizational purposes, reluctant to go to war, but equally reluctant to forgo war.

There are three kinds of war.

The war of attrition, exemplified by the clash between Britain and Germany in the battle of dreadnaughts, is the classic. Given the ships were approximately evenly matched, victory in a general engagement would go to the larger fleet - it being presumed that in a general engagement each side would suffer approximately equal losses. The Germans had sixteen dreadnaughts, the British twenty two. Logically speaking, a general engagement would result in the sinking of all sixteen German ships, as well as sixteen British, leaving the Germans with none, the British with six and mastery of the seas. The British could be said to have "won", even though they actually lost thousands of men and ships whose cost had beggared the kingdom, but to those surveying their newly acquired hegemony, and their cheerleaders, it was worth it.

More recently, population pressure has resulted in wars of genocide, exemplified and perfected by the United States in the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. The intent was not so much destruction of warmaking capacity and submission of conquered peoples as it was the utter annihilation of a human population. There were not going to be any more Indians, and the more Indians the government and mercenaries killed, the fewer there were left, simple as that. Habitat destruction and cultural assassination compleated the process and today's remnant Native People's "sovereignty" is no more significant to corporate culture than a child's clinging to a tattered doll. Threat over. War over.

Whoops! We're not in business to put ourselves out of business! Luckily there are still plenty of Mexicans, Spaniards, Filipinos, Germans, Russians, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Haitians, Dominicans, Japanese, Italians, Chinese, Koreans, Cubans, Vietnamese, Laoatians, Cambodians, Salvadorans, Libyans, Panamanians, Grenadans, Lebanese, Serbs, Somalis, Columbians, Afganis, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians who pose a clear and present danger to the world's greatest democracy. War isn't over, it's over there!

With mechanical firearms it's easy killing off a bunch of aboriginal savages counting coup in battle with stone age weapons. Not only that, no one cared about the Indians - they had no outside support from a competing superpower, no international outcry against the slaughter of entire communities, no legal recourse to the onslaught. They were crushed almost before the world at large knew of their existance, yet exist today in the minds of the world's billions as helpless underdogs, and therein lies the problem. The Indians may be dead and their ancestral lands now covered with asphalt, but they live on as an example to the world's oppressed of the fate that awaits those in the path of American territorial expansion. That brings us to the most modern of wars, wars of revolution.

As human population explodes exponentially and the bottom of the well of fossil resources is reached, the move by the world's greatest democracy to annex what little there is left as the only alternative to checkmate is obvious to all those who reside in the places those resources are still found. No Iraqi will ever become convinced of the rightness of Iraqi resources being expropriated by an occupying power. Instead, they resist. Any resistance will be punished mercilessly, and indiscriminately, with the stated but misguided intention of applying adequate terror to coerce the populace into submission. Only thing is, these aren't American Indians. They are people belonging to one of the largest populations of humans - Muslims. Not only that, but they have outside support from others who foresee their own resources being purloined. As resistance continues, the empire ratchets up the devastation and mayhem, but unlike in wars of attrition and genocide, every "victory" against insurgents simply makes more insurgents. For every enemy citizen killed, ten spring up to avenge, outraged at the unlawful killing and wanton rape in the name of profit. Today's assymmetrical oil war is becoming a war of attrition in the other direction, one that the United States is destined to lose because it will make more enemies than it can ever hope to kill with its limited military assets, however "superior" they may be.

It is said every president needs his war, presumably to make a man of him; finally. Patriotic Americans feel compelled to support the President in time of war, so it stands to reason that any president would want to get his started pretty much without delay. Too bad the Constitution reserves war making power to Congress. Just too bad. The government, in the person of the president, has a duty to protect America from attack (article IV, section 4), and without the threat of attack, there would be no need for government, or president at all. The U.S. was created to wage war, while other governmental duties were being aptly performed by the separate states. Since then however, the U.S. government has usurped other governmental functions of the states, such as regulating individual behavior, to the detriment of national defense. So detrimental in fact that the U.S. has failed in its mission to protect America from attack already on three occasions - 1812, 1941 and 2001. Under the popularly touted "three strikes" law, such a record of failure would be cause for conviction. Yet despite these failures, Americans pumped up by incendiary media clamor for more war, more enemies, more risk of attacks against America, more potential for failure of the defense department in its alleged purpose to prevent attacks.

In lieu of actual protection, the military industrial establishment is being tasked to more achievable objectives, such as shocking, awful retribution on defenseless civilians residing in resource rich areas reputed to be home to "terrorists". Raised on video gaming, the modern trooper sees people, homes, cities as targets to be eliminated. According to one Marine general, "Killing people is a hoot!". War becomes mundane as the target mentality comes home. Daily activities are described as war - war against dirt, war against drugs, war against pornography, war against disease. If war is against everything bad, it must be good! Right? "War" slides off the lips easily - it could have been the very first historical articulation beyond Grrr. So commonplace, so ubiquitous is war that a world without war is practically unthinkable, in English anyway.

What about peace? All who cling to romantic notions of peace that exceed a combat free sector in the Green zone are reality based dreamers, eco fascists and Green party Redskis, bleeding heart liberals, lefties, lezzies, and other out of the loop losers. Leftists have auditioned for the role of ANTI, and are in search of something, anything, to protest: the bigger the better. No wonder they hate America! Peace is about moving back, shutting down, pulling out. Not manly. Not U.S. Not gonna happen. It took twenty centuries for Christian culture to invent world war, and only twenty one more years to start numbering them. History fortells the final battle of global destruction. Democrats and peaceniks hope civilization can be steered away from that event, but they don't have history with them. History is written by the victors, and victors aren't the kind of people who flinch from a fight. History becomes prediction, prediction becomes reality. What are the three persistant icons of the Rupture? Planes flying into buildings. Check. Enormous reptiles. Check (a recent find of T. Rex soft tissue may lead to cloning). Robot soldiers. Check (Army now mounting armor, motion sensors and machine guns on bomb disposal robots). Judgement day is coming - the victors welcome it as their spiritual transformation into oneness with their blood thirsty patrist deity while the fertile planet that gave them life becomes once again a scoured, barren desert of hot winds and grinding rock, without archeological evidence of war.

Reverend Doktor C. Sarian reverenddoktor.freakwitch.net Mid Coast Sub Church of Paranoia Church of the SubGenius

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