Why I Am Antiwar

Sorry for the long absence. I am getting back in the grove. This is part of a great chat I had with Matthew Hoh, Marine turned State department whistleblower. He and I had a great conversation and more to discuss in the future. A recurring theme in our discussion was whether young people are able to recieve the message, or if they have to see things themselves.  I hope we can all work on finding ways to expose people early on to a culture of peace. Looking forward to giving you more segments of this talk and other guests soon Matthew's number one request was that you start reading Antiwar.com every day! (I recommend you follow him @MatthewPHoh)

Shalom! Please enjoy this episode on the evolving relationship between peace and Judaism. 

Happy Easter!

A friend Jake shares and explains the hidden history of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and their long track record of peace and justice activism Check out the Peace Testimony: https://www.fgcquaker.org/cloud/york-friends-meeting/pages/peace-testimony Check out the American Friends Service Committee: https://www.afsc.org/ Quakers and conscientious objection: https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/conscientiousobjection/co%20website/pages/HistoryNew.htm https://www.lib.uci.edu/sites/all/exhibits/warwithin/index.php?page=section_5 Thousands of Quakers forced into labor camps for refusal to violate their morals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States Quakers work to free Japanese Internees: https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1046&context=td Quaker Action Group works against nuclear arms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Quaker_Action_Group Jakes favorite Tolstoy books:  The kingdom of God is within you: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43302  What I believe: http://www.self.gutenberg.org/wplbn0002951803-what-i-believe-by-tolstoy-leo.aspx?&words=theology Check out Jakes Podcast @TastingAnarchy about wine and liberty and if you want to build a community of peace try to join him at @Chillderburg https://open.spotify.com/show/0XH7iIpbMl7oT0mgyKbTO7?si=AO4qZXDvQBaRwNw2Z52jyw

Please support Adam in his mission to help veterans and make us the last generation on earth that knows war.  https://adamvstheman.com/

Please enjoy this full episode. 

Please check out @livingdadjoke Lets find ways to teach empathy and do good in the world together! Court appointed special advocates https://nationalcasagal.org/ and  Team Rubicon:https://teamrubiconusa.org/

Operation Libertas @OpLibertas Follows you Green Beret who’s sick of the Empire and ready to fight for real liberty operationlibertas.com

Do new enlistees understand the document they swear to uphold and defend? Can they be held to an oath they did not understand? Article 1 Section 8 Mainers Check out freemainepac.org Everyone else checkout Harrisonkemp.com and Harrisons podcast Liberty Happy Hour https://www.facebook.com/LibertyHappyHour/

Tony is a Marine Veteran of Iraq 2006, after got out he put the wars behind him, but one night in 2017 watching the news he had what he called his "red pill moment" after that he saw the military industrial complex in a whole new light. Tony contacted me @antiwarpodcast to share his story.

I got a message from @boogeryooper asking to do a swap cast on his show Anarchy Explained (https://anchor.fm/yooperbooger) As we transitioned to my half of the show I learned that my 4th episode "The Car" is the reason he started to rethink war. I was taken aback and very touched that this podcast has already begun to have an effect. Please follow yoop and please contact me if any of my episodes touch you! It means the world to me.

I get the honor of talking to Scott Horton about the comedians, family friends, and teacher who made him not only question the wars, but recognize that it is his duty to spread the message.  Scott Horton is the host of Antiwar Radio at KPFK and the Scott Horton show podcast. He has conducted over 5,000 interviews, and he is the director of the Libertarian Institute and the directing editor of Antiwar.com. He is the author of Fools Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and most recently, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terror.  George Carlin "Jammin" https://odysee.com/@ComedyNight:a/Disc-10---Jammin'-in-New-York-(1992):2 Bill Hicks "Sane Man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH_tUpcCbrg Bill Hicks "Relentless" https://odysee.com/@Docuteca:5/Bill-Hicks-Relentless-(subtitulado-español):5 Richard Pryor "Here and Now" https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gnst5 Please check out the Ron Paul Institute at www.ronpaulinstitute.org

Benefits of peace: Peace is, indeed, at once the mother and the nurse of all that is good for man. War on a sudden, and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes. whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals. Peace shines upon human affairs like the vernal sun. The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom, the cattle are fed upon a thousand hills, new buildings arise, ancient edifices are repaired, riches flow, pleasures smile, laws retain their vigour, the discipline of the police prevails, religion glows with ardour, justice bears sway, humanity and charity increase, arts and manufactures feel the genial warmth of encouragement, the gains of the poor are more plentiful, the opulence of the rich displays itself with additional splendour, liberal studies flourish, the young are well educated, the old enjoy their ease, marriages are happy, good men thrive, and the bad are kept under control.  War: But no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower, than what a deluge of miseries and misfortunes seizes* inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action  The flocks are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husbandman butchered, villas and villages burnt, cities and states, that have been ages rising to their flourishing state, subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war. So much easier is the task of doing harm than of doing good, of destroying than of building up ! The earnings of honest industry, the wealth of quiet citizens are transferred to the pockets of execrable robbers and murderers. Private houses exhibit the dismal effects of fear, sorrow, and complaint; and all places resound with the voice of lamentation. The loom stands still ; the trowel, the axe, and the hammer are silent j and the poor manufacturers must either starve, or have recourse to wicked practices for daily bread. The rich either deplore the diminution and less of their property, or lie under terrible apprehension for what remains ; in both circumstances rendered by war incapable of enjoying the common comforts of life. Marriages are few, or attended with distressful and fatal consequences. -Matrons deserted by their husbands, now forced to the wars, pine at home in childless solitude. The laws are compelled to silence, charity is laughed at, justice has no dwelling-place, and religion becomes an object of scorn, till no distinction is left between the sacred and the profane. Youth is corrupted by every species of vice ; old men lament their longevity ; and their grey hairs descend with sorrow to the grave. No honour is paid to learning, sciences, arts, the elegant pursuits of liberal and honourable minds.  To these considerations add, that the advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far and wide, and reach great numbers; while in war, if any thing turns out happily, though,  O my God, what can ever deserve the appellation of happy in war ! Military industrial complex & politicians  the advantage redounds only to a few, and those unworthy of reaping it. One man's safety is owing to the destruction of another ; one man's prize derived from the plunder of another. The cause of rejoicings made by one side, is to the other a cause of mourning. Whatever is unfortunate in war, is severely so indeed; and whatever, on the contrary, is called good fortune, is a savage and a cruel good fortune, an ungenerous happiness deriving its existence from another's woe. Indeed, at the conclusion, it commonly happens, that both sides, the victorious and the vanquished, have cause to deplore.*  https://archive.org/stream/complaintofpeace00era/complaintofpeace00era_djvu.txt https://mises.org/library/erasmus-war https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN3EryUG0EA&t=2593s

The car was no IED. It was a Father and two sons. They were not combatants; they simply did not recognize that the highway they were driving down had become a combat zone. I never saw inside the car but one child was killed. The father was shot through the gut, and the living son in the arm. I can barely imagine the fear they must’ve experienced suddenly coming under a hail of machine gun fire, then being trapped in that car while we fired grenades at them. Eventually we got a corpsman and an interpreter to provide aid to them and they were taken to the hospital. I have no idea if the family were ever compensated the standard $2500 for our slaughter of their child, the destruction of their car, or their wounds. I do know they must carry the scars and pain of that event every day 15 years later, assuming they have survived the last 15 years of conflict. For years I blamed them for their carelessness, then I blamed the Marine corps for its carelessness, and now I know the only people to blame are those who started this war in the first place. These kinds of moments are everyday occurrences in war. They are predictable outcomes of turning someone’s town into a war zone. This happens in all wars, no matter how well intended or executed. There are no “good” wars. If I were religious, I would deeply fear an unforgiving god. I carry the guilt of taking a life, making a father bury his son, and nearly killing him because I was scared and in the wrong place. If there is a god, I hope I can be forgiven. This podcast is my penance and I hope all of you listening will share it and tell others it is time to end these wars and give peace to this family I destroyed but never met.

I had just turned 16, and my father had planned for years to take me on a cross-country road trip when I could drive. So we set out on an 8000-mile, 25-day trip with 10 CDs in the car. Three of them were Bob Dylan. Two were the best of and the third was “freewheeling.” Musically, I was familiar with Hendrix, the Stones, and the Animals from my father’s record collection, but I hadn’t yet listened to Bob Dylan. At first it grated on me. It was 2000, and I was a teenager and growing at least somewhat interested in the angry music that was popular at the time, like Slipknot. At first, Bob Dylan didn’t appeal to me, but then “masters of war” came on. From the first notes, the song seethed with anger in a way I had never experienced before. Bob Dylan himself said the song startled him. Often, antiwar art can be misinterpreted by its audience. As a young man, I was completely blind to the messages in movies I loved like “Full Metal Jacket” and “Platoon.” But as a critic said, it was “the bluntest condemnation in Dylan's songbook, a torrent of plain speaking pitched at a level that even the objects of its bile might understand it” I was particularly struck by the line “..for threatening my baby, unborn and unnamed..” His son Jakob was familiar to me for his own hit “one headlight” with his band The Wallflowers, and something about the connection between Bob Dylan and his concern for his unborn child struck me particularly clearly. This was one of the first times I Imagined that our military and its wars could affect us here at home, and it was one of the first moments my mind opened to the idea that one could be strong, and even angry, yet prefer peace to violence. It took me many more years and countless revisitations of this song, but each time I find it more rewarding. That song was recorded in 1963, and nearly 60 years later the song is every bit as relevant today. You’ve thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled We are in the midst of a multibillion dollar update to our nuclear arsenal, while tensions with nuclear armed powers escalate and arms treaties expire. Even more now than in the 1960s, war seems sanitized and our weapons have lost their stigma of fear, becoming normalized. When our soldiers die, they are boxed up, draped in a flag, and sent home with honors/ You fasten the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion As young people’s blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud The truth is that even if there are fewer “unknown soldiers’ buried in the mud,’ death is every bit as ghastly. And even if it is sanitized for the cameras, the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in these wars still suffer and are buried in shallow graves. We must all see through the mask again and refuse to accept the sanitized vision of modern warfare.

Welcome to Why I am antiwar, @antiwarpodcast with your host @mdvet4 This the podcast that shares experiences and stories that lead us to question war or see the value of peace. here is one of those stories As a child I loved all things military in part because I knew My father is a Vietnam veteran. He  was raised catholic and was an altar boy. He never raised us in a religion. It was not until middle school I became aware that our families atheism or agnosticism was unusual. I asked my father why we never went to church and he explained rather cryptically that immediately after returning from Vietnam he went to Mass and a fight broke out in the parking lot as people were fighting to leave. I surmised that religion ceased to have the effect it once did for him. I think on some level I knew there was more to the story and it must’ve been more related to his experiences in vietnam than he let on. Later he told me decided it was best to let his children choose their religion (or not) rather than be raised into one. The fact he was a veteran and a DOD civilian employee seemed to foster my interest in all things military and this included every war movie and TV show I could find. I particularly enjoyed M.A.S.H. It was in syndication for most of my childhood and over the course of several years I watched every episode more than once. 8th or 9th grade I struggled with creating a sense of self identity and militarism became a part of of my identity but I also “tried out” catholicism as an identity, so I found the role of Father Mulcahy in MASH to be intriguing. In spite of the very obvious antiwar messages of many of the films and tv shows, Antiwar art often has a reverse effect. The military story lines and likable characters initially only enhanced my affinity towards the military. Unfortunately These stories do not serve their purpose until the audience is ready read hear them. However the Dear sis episode of Mash was an exception that seemed to resonate with me. Most of the story centers around the chaplains search for meaning and purpose in the midst of the war. It comes to a close with a Christmas party and the key characters show their appreciation of the Catholic Chaplain by singing a round of “dona nobis pacem” a latin prayer for peace. I had seen other episodes where the characters want the war to end, or to go home. But there was something poignant in their dedication of prayer to the chaplain and something beautiful about the singing that struck me. For once, it sank in that these people truly wanted peace. I found it odd and at the time just dismissed it as the peacenik attitude of the cast. But still I held on to the moment. It was one of the first time I really considered and realized that those sent to war wish for peace. The tune of the song stuck with me and I never forgot it. It took many more years for me to change my beliefs but that one scene was always somewhere in the back of my mind. Though antiwar art does not always immediately strike the root, I think this scene planted the first seed for me to become antiwar. Hopefully it will for you or someone you share this with too. That was another story from “why I am antiwar” be sure to follow us @antiwarpodcast and follow me @mdvet4. Go to antiwarpodcast.com to find all of our podcasts and show notes For this episode. Bonus materials, such as a full interview and discussion with our guest about this episode are available for supporting listeners.

Welcome to "Why I Am Antiwar," with your host @mdvet4 This the podcast where guest will share experiences and stories that lead us to question war or see the value of peace. It could be a moment they experienced, the loss of a friend or loved one, the trials suffered by families in war, a book, movie, tv show, painting, or song. We will share that experience and explore how it affected us emotionally. We will keep these podcasts short and share them far and wide so that we can win the hearts so that minds will follow. We are hosted at anchor.fm/antiwarpodcast and will soon be available on your favorite podcatcher. Our website antiwarpodcast.com will be up and running soon. you can also find us on youtube “why I am antiwar” or twitter & Instagram @antiwarpodcast. Expect my first full episodes to be available this holiday season. If you would like to share your story please contact us through twitter, the or at “antiwarpodcast@gmail.com" Please subscribe and share this podcast and use the hashtag #whyIamantiwar to spread this message.