Nations Should Consider Responding Non-Violently To Future U.S. Aggression

[Donnachaidh]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/sherwood-ross/34326/nations-should-consider-responding-non-violently-to-future-u-s-aggression

People the world over must find non-violent ways to oppose American military force lest they suffer the fate of the Vietnamese and the Iraqis. In response to the menace of the U.S. military-industrial complex, non-violent soul force needs to be considered in international conflicts just as it was used by Mahatma Gandhi in India and by the Reverend Martin Luther King in the U.S.

The Vietnamese lost four million civilians and the Iraqis to date have lost perhaps one million or more civilians as a result of U.S. aggression. Such losses -- mainly of unarmed women and children -- are unacceptable, as is the horrific physical destruction inflicted on those nations. Viet Nam has yet to recover from Pentagon bombing and the spread of Agent Orange. And Iraq may be centuries recovering from the ravages of U.S. radioactive ammunition, euphemistically called "depleted uranium."

To this day, some Americans believe the U.S. "lost" the Viet Nam war when the U.S. in fact emerged physically undamaged with no civilian deaths while its military lost but a fraction of the combatants lost by the Vietnamese. Still, the losses suffered by American families were devastating and those by Vietnamese families more so. In the future, a non-violent response by other nations could spare them the fate of the Viet Namese and save the lives of U.S. soldiers as well.

Ominously, the Pentagon has spent over a trillion dollars in recent years on the refinement of deadlier killing instruments and the militarization of space from which it can control the planet with even greater authority than from its 800 foreign military bases.

More at the link --

[lunatica]

1. Bush started war in Iraq with Shock and Awe

Bombs raining for days. Non violence would do diddly shit against that. And since when have women and children victims of war been anything other than non violent?

[Iterate]

2. People have been resisting US aggression non-violently for generations.

The appearance of US military power has usually been the final act of a long play that starts with so-called free markets and exploitation of labor and resources by US corporations, leading to economic distortions and corruption, a repressive client state, and an inevitable revolt. To date, only a strong democracy with socialist protections has offered even marginal protections against this predation.

What started with capitalism as a tool of US expansion is quickly turning on its head, and we can see the US becoming the muscle behind the board room, a mere tool at the service of the connected few. The wikileaks cables alone offer evidence of numerous instances. As those corporations have become global, often even with their own security forces, they threaten the idea of national sovereignty itself.

However non-violent a revolution and restoration of a democracy, unless you can assert the peoples' sovereignty over capitalism and the corporate charter, the whole process starts over. In that sense, I agree with the OP, it must be global.

[Dappleganger]

3. How do you respond non-violently to a drone?

Is there an app for that? :shrug: