In the United States, we have a well-oiled propaganda machines, that until recently, gave its citizens a lot of stimulation for choosing to follow its particular dedication to ideals, as these ideals gave them comfortable homes, nice cars and social status. With the crumbling of the economic base, the illusionist values of these ideals have become crushingly evident. Not having really abandoned the ideals of fine homes, nice cars and social status, they desperately scramble for a political structure that will support their continued sense of superiority based on income.

It is all based on income, actually; it’s the distribution of income that fires revolutions. The United States has not seen the starving masses nor has any real concept of their suffering, except among an idealistic few that realize the vast wealth of the exclusive companies build their fortunes off the miseries of slave labor and military force.

The masses have no witnesses in the propaganda machine. They have no identity. When you become a part of the poverty stricken masses, you are the collective swelling tide that constitutes two-thirds of the world’s population. You have no social security number. You have no cell phone for calling home. You have nothing to present to the man in uniform when he says, “papers, where’s your papers?” You are nobody and everybody. If you die, you will only be one of the disappeared. Nobody will be notified of your death.

The struggle of the masses is to gain a right to have an identification within society, to be regarded as far more than animals to be marketed, sold, driven off or slaughtered. The more you increase the volume of mass, the greater its potential. Certainly this is a formula any politician fully understands. Unfortunately, the speeches are designed for a selective mass and not the enormous volume in the background. This volume, reaching its full potential, rolls industrially forward as the natural result of the determination for survival. Those whose enterprise is war, capitalize on the situation by protecting those with the most incorporated interests against the protests of the hungry. They prolong and augment wars that should have been settled by peaceful resolution.

Certainly within the masses there are those who recognize its potential for power and use it to exercise their own self-interests, but there are also those who speak for the masses who are surprisingly idealistic. It is the character trait of idealism i find as one of the more rewarding and admirable persuasions of the human psychological make-up. This particular idealism defies the rational thoughts of striving for increased self-comforts with the same emotional response as the stubborn whimsy of love, which doesn’t give a whit what your logical mind might say.

This type of idealism is the graduation from “i could have more,” into “i could be more”, and ultimately, “we could all be more.”. We have failed to engineer our minds beyond forceful solutions or grasp the concept that compromise means concessions on all sides. Beyond a few feeble gestures, the heightened technology of the new era has only created sophisticated weaponry, communication devices, monopolistic agricultural and business enterprises with very little regard for the environment or indigenous populations and an exploding entertainment market. It could be so much more.

We could be so much more, but we must first take a realistic look at what needs to be done. In order to do this, it means ceasing all acts of war, whether privately funded or an active public resistance. It means placing all issues on the table and openly discussing them. It means coming to agreements that allow more widely distributed economic opportunity, maintaining a global environmental balance while increasing the earth’s sustainability for food and water. As long as we are in the act of war, these issues are not a priority, because these are the complaints of the increasing masses. These are the interferences in the comfort foods of social status superiority. These are the propaganda against the convenience based propaganda. When the acts of war are removed, these will be crucial problems that will have to be dealt with; otherwise our continued acts of terrorism against each other will turn this Earth into a barren planet.

I find the opposite to be true – the idealists are often the ones who are most easily manipulated by the propaganda machines of their social orders into acceting the “us vs. them” mentallity the war mongers promote. The mercs may be cold-blooded, but at least the majority of them don’t accept the delusions of “us vs. them” that the idealist is prone to: meaning that the mercs decision to fight is based on a rational cost/benefit analysis to himself, whilst the idealist actually believes the bullshit his society feeds him and thoughtlessly goes to his death for his misguided ideals.

The mercenary kills for money. The choice escalates squabbles and prolongs conflicts against a citizenry whose main desire is a roof over their heads, food and water. Bring diplomacy into the process of settling ideological differences, and though it may be long and drawn out, ultimately it will be far less disastrous than the paid profession of stifling all opposition.

When we pull all the stops on love and war, we must abandon all ideas of desired outcomes. Our would be lover sees who we are. Our comrades in arms realize our motivations. We are no longer masters of our own fate, but the judgment of those we have schemed against. Victimizing others, we become victims. Cause and effect. Consequences of actions. Time measures out its own justice system, individually and collectively. We all become both criminals and victims of war, whether we choose a side or sit passively by, as neutrality can be interpreted as tacit agreement.

Which leads me to my second point – the “rules of war” are a joke: the only reason they exist is so that the victorious party (read: Western forces) have an excuse to “legally” prosecute combatants from the vanwquished side – making an example of those who stand against their conquerors while maintaining a sense of “legitimacy” in the process. There’s a reason the saying “all’s fair in love and war” came about – war is, by necessity, the absence of “law:” thus the concept of a “war crime” is a contradiction – no such thing exists in reality, but the social establishment *pretends* such a thing does so that it’s own ends might be served in promoting the nonsensical idea.