All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg.
***
Americans who cherish our country’s legacy are horrified by our headlong rush to war. America at its best was the very motor of world progress, higher living standards and peace.
That is our true national identity. We betray “the better angels of our nature” by making military threats against those who are advancing world powers, as we once were. We commit suicide when we dishonor historic agreements that keep the world safe from nuclear annihilation.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S. promised Russian leaders that the U.S.-led military alliance known as NATO would not be extended eastward toward Russia. The transatlantic Globalist war-making faction broke this promise. NATO has moved eastward with eight new members, heavily armed and hostile to Russia. The U.S. installed a far-right anti-Russian regime in Ukraine on Russia’s border, and armed them for conflict.
China has been similarly ringed by threatening U.S. fleets and military bases.
Russia and China have made it plain they find this intolerable, and cannot permit it to go further.
The world is hurtling toward the unimaginable horror of nuclear war.
We must look soberly and deeply into U.S. history to see how our nation changed from a force for peace into an aggressive provocateur.
We were industrialized by progressive patriots. They won out against Southern slave-owners and imperial financiers who blocked American progress. The U.S. at its best boosted other nations to technological prowess.
Abraham Lincoln and his allies organized the greatest advances ever made in technology and living standards, and a long era of peace with the world. Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy sought a partnership with Russia to bring peace and a humane existence to all mankind.
America changed course after Kennedy’s murder. We gave up our industries and lost our skills. We gave power to unaccountable Globalist financiers. Their speculation and deindustrialization have bankrupted the Western world. Other powers are now rising who won’t follow Globalist rules into poverty and national suicide.
The gravest danger now comes from America abandoning its own historic mission, which is to elevate the common man. Those who know history are especially challenged to act now, to speak out, so that we may protect the civilization that America at its best did so much to advance.
Over the past half century since Kennedy’s death, the United States, guided by a transatlantic war-making faction, has launched war after war, winning nothing and bringing chaos and suffering to countless millions.
Our greatest past leaders warned that waging aggressive war would destroy our country
George Washington led our Revolution against the British Empire’s invading armies. But as President, Washington sought peace with the world. He warned,
The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred … is a slave to its animosity … which … lead[s] it astray from its duty and its interest. [This hatred] disposes each [country] more readily to offer insult and injury … and to be haughty and intractable when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur … The government … makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations has been the victim.”
(Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796)
Abraham Lincoln as a congressman exposed the lies that President James Polk used to justify aggressive war against Mexico. (Lincoln’s “Spot Resolutions,” December 22, 1847). And just before he himself ran for President, Lincoln denounced war-makers as barbarians:
From the first appearance of man upon the earth … the words “stranger” and “enemy” were … almost synonymous. Long after civilized nations had defined robbery and murder as high crimes, and had affixed severe punishments to them, when practiced … upon their own people … it was deemed no offence, but even meritorious, to rob, and murder, and enslave strangers, whether as nations or as individuals … To correct the evils … which spring from want of sympathy … among strangers … is one of the highest functions of civilization.
(Lincoln, speech to Wisconsin Agricultural Fair, September 30, 1859).
As President, leading the defense of the Union against the slave-owners’ attack, Lincoln urged peace with the world:
With malice toward none; with charity for all … let us … do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
(Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865)
President Franklin Roosevelt organized the United Nations and proposed that world peace and poverty-fighting must be centered on continuing the anti-fascist partnership of the U.S., Russia, Britain and China.
The UN Charter begins,
We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…
This is the bedrock of real human rights, not a phony cover-up for regime-change.
President John Kennedy pulled the USA and Russia away from nuclear catastrophe by a deal that removed U.S. missiles from Turkey in exchange for Russian missiles taken out of Cuba.
Kennedy asked Americans to
re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union… the American people [should] not … fall into the same trap as the Soviets, … to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, … [with] communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.
No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage….
[Our] two countries have … [a] mutual abhorrence of war…. [W]e have never been at war with each other. And no nation … ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in … the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives…. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland…
Today, should total war ever break out again … all we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours…. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace….
(Kennedy, Commencement Address at Washington University, June 10, 1963)
A pioneering international treaty partially banning nuclear weapons was soon thereafter signed by the U.S., U.S.S.R., and 100 nations.
President Kennedy fired top officials (Allen Dulles, CIA, and Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, Pentagon) who treacherously sabotaged U.S. peace policy. As he was working to prevent full-scale war in Vietnam, and seeking diplomatic ties with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Kennedy was murdered.
Martin Luther King risked increased government oppression and even the condemnation of his civil rights allies when he took upon himself leadership of the movement against the Vietnam War.
King’s 1967 New York speech reaches out to us today and calls us to action.
I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours…
Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies… they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism…
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…, we will find ourselves organizing [anti-war] committees for the next generation… [We will have war] without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy…
[The] words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” …
[The] Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries….
[We] call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation … an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind…
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation…
A time comes when silence is betrayal…
(Martin Luther King, Speech at Riverside Church, April 4, 1967)
Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy and King, who inspired America and the world, urge us not to remain silent when humanity’s existence is threatened.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Our thanks to Matthew Ehret for sending us this article.
Historian Anton Chaitkin is the author of Who We Are: America’s Fight for Universal Progress, from Franklin to Kennedy (Volume 1, 2020, Amazon).
Featured image: George Washington (Image by W Kennedy on wikimedia commons)
