Meditations: War Boiled Down to Its Essence

All wars are evil, and all political leaders cast their wars as a battle between good versus evil. But “Operation Epic Fury” is simply evil against evil, which partly accounts for the moral paralysis over it.

In launching this war with his soulless mate, Trump was echoed by Netanyahu:  “We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.” That’s perversely true; these two conduits of collective darkness are trying to make AI-assisted wars the future of humanity.

They will succeed unless enough of us bring about a psychological revolution within and end the atavistic need for enemies.

The consensus is that “Donald Trump and Netanyahu share a world vision that substitutes military superiority, targeted killings and the prospect of constant war for international relations, negotiations and lasting treaties.” But that’s the least of it.

War is never good versus evil, but usually a battle between a lesser evil and a greater evil. George W. Bush changed the script by exploiting the horror and fear after 9/11 and lying about WMD so he could outdo Daddy and topple Saddam Hussein.

Trump is following the Bush-Cheney playbook, but without even trying to obtain support from the American people for waging war on Iran, or approval from Congress, much less from the United Nations.

Though there have been many wars of self-defense in human history, and Ukraine has been fighting one for four grueling years, there is no such thing as a “just war” of choice.

The leaders on both sides of this war, threatening to suck in more and more nations by the day, are acting out of pure self-interest — not their nations’ self-interest, which is bad enough, but their own.

This is war boiled down to its essence.  

It was no coincidence that the first casualties were over 150 girls, whose school was apparently targeted as a military installation and leveled as they sat at their desks in Tehran during school hours.

The knee-jerk truism that the Iranian regime is malignant, that it has supported terrorist groups, and killed thousands of its own unarmed citizens who were protesting unbearable living conditions, is leaving decent people in a moral quandary.

On one hand, people are glad the Iranian government has been struck. But on the other hand, people are appalled by the illegal, arrogant and sadistic means the US and Israel are employing in attacking the regime.  

Media personalities in the USA like Chris Hayes and Nicolle Wallace keep citing polls that show two-thirds of Americans are against this war of choice. What they utterly miss, and no poll can measure, is the absence of passion and outrage in the American people.

They refuse to look below the surface, and see that the reason the polls don’t matter is the same reason that Trump was elected the second time, after an interregnum of normalcy under Biden.

Whether Trump consciously knows it in his reptilian brain or not, nothing is stopping the self-proclaimed King of the World because of an underlying combination of apathy, self-absorption and “numbness” in the American people.

The toxic carbon emissions from this needless war are adding enormously to the climate crisis. And the billions of dollars wasted on Trump and Hegseth’s egomaniacal militarism could easily pay for increasing deficits in food, rent, electricity, education and health care at home and abroad. 

A psycho-spiritual truth is that a person has to consciously give up on life and humanity. Even under the most terrible conditions this is so, as survivors of the Nazi death camps have attested. But for whatever reason, the majority of Americans, wherever they fall on the political spectrum, have silently given up on the Republic and humanity over recent decades. 

So where is this war headed?

Americans who still have at least an auricle beating in their heart must raise their voices in opposition, and insist Congress invoke the War Powers Act and end this war. But people here and abroad need to realize that there are historical and metaphysical forces with tremendous momentum playing out.

Trump has demonstrated that we must prepare for the worst case scenario. There is nothing stopping the narcissistic nihilist from ordering the most powerful military in human history, a military that has already followed blatantly illegal and un-Constitutional orders by attacking Iran, from using a nuclear weapon when a quick and easy war spins out of control.

This hideous administration will use the same lying, circular logic that Secretary of State Rubio used for starting this war: “Iran was about to preemptively attack because Israel was going to attack, and America had to preemptively strike.”  

They will say, “We had good intelligence that Iran has armed a number of its missiles with enriched uranium to use as dirty bombs, so we had to use our nuclear weapons first to destroy them.” (After all, Trump once asked, “Why can’t we just use them?”) 

Then Iran will load what enriched uranium it has onto a few missiles and fire them toward Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Israel’s “Iron Dome” would only spread the radioactivity further by blowing up the missiles.

Just as Netanyahu and Trump’s war was a fait accompli no matter what concessions Iran made during the fake negotiations, some version of this scenario may be destined to happen. Let me be wrong.

Even if the unthinkable doesn’t occur, self-knowing human beings urgently need to ignite insight alone and together. Otherwise, there will be no new paradigm, no true foundation and no change of direction for humanity in the aftermath. Then this is what the future will look like — the war to begin all AI wars.  

The evil in human consciousness feeds on contradiction, needs continuous conflict, and plants seeds of resignation in everyone. The endgame is to make people all over the world give up on humanity.

It doesn’t have to be so. We can dispel and dissolve darkness by facing and remaining with it within us, rather than continuing to externalize it, feed the need for enemies, and thereby contribute to war.  

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