{"id":2454903,"date":"2020-02-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=321430"},"modified":"2020-02-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T07:00:00","slug":"paul-andersen-tomb-of-the-unborn-soldier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/paul-andersen-tomb-of-the-unborn-soldier\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Andersen: \u2018Tomb of the Unborn Soldier\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Russia said last week that plans by the United States to deploy weapons in space would deal an irreversible blow to the current security balance in space. According to the foreign ministry, \u201cRussia does not have plans to solve problems in space using weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Problems in space? Are astronauts at the international space station arguing over games of cribbage or who gets to spacewalk?<\/p>\n

Space sabers are rattling at the White House, setting the stage for a cosmic arms race to determine what nation dominates the lifeless void with force \u2014 as soon as enough life gets there to use force on. Nature abhors a vacuum and humanity appears to abhor peace.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump administration has begun to put a price tag on its growing arms race with Russia and China,\u201d reported The New York Times, \u201cand the early numbers indicate that strategy will cost tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, another windfall for the merchants of death, thanks to war mongering statesmen who equate security with killing power and virtue in body counts.<\/p>\n

A recent news report pointed out that for more than 18 years, the \u201cforever war,\u201d as the war on terrorism is known, has been used as the basis for an ever-expanding range of military actions, like the George Bush\/Dick Cheney-inspired invasion of Iraq that killed upward of 300,000 and ramped up the suicide rate among U.S. veterans to 22 a day.<\/p>\n

These \u201cforever wars\u201d should inspire another war memorial \u2014 Tomb of the Unborn Soldier \u2014 to honor future human sacrifices to the insatiable bloodlust of bellicose nation states whose sociopathic leaders are eager to shoot first and ask clemency later.<\/p>\n

Chiseled into one side of a black marble block will be, \u201cAND SO IT GOES \u2026,\u201d the sigh of lament Kurt Vonnegut coined in \u201cSlaughterhouse Five.\u201d Such will be the epitaph for unborn troops whose lives are already being gambled, long before the zygote stage. Upon this block, future parents may lay garlands of lilies.<\/p>\n

On the other side of the marble block, also carved into stone, will be Rodney King\u2019s rhetorical plea: \u201cCAN\u2019T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?\u201d<\/p>\n

Apparently not. Getting along would mean the end of war, and that would hurt arms sales and reduce profits for defense contractors like General Dynamics, Raytheon and other designers of death.<\/p>\n

Now that our emboldened commander in chief has scored his first public kill, he can boast of not only shooting someone with impunity on Fifth Avenue, but having the world\u2019s most powerful hitmen at his disposal for assassinations the world over.<\/p>\n

Such surgical kills and the conflicts they spawn are unnecessary and stupid, according to news analysts who point out that the interminable conflicts in which the US is embroiled have raised a stark moral question: \u201cWhether any of the wars are still justified given the tolls \u2014 psychological, physical and spiritual \u2014 they have exacted on the United States and many other nations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times opinion writer, states: \u201cWar isn\u2019t just tragic. It is increasingly dumb and pointless. War is becoming an outdated means of human conflict resolution. Let us not go again to war. Let us not go to war because we cannot afford to \u2018win\u2019 another war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most contemporary wars end with Pyrrhic victories, where the losses in no way justify the wins. Pyrrhus was a Greek leader who, by defeating the Romans in 279 B.C., sustained such heavy losses that he declared, \u201cOne more such victory and I am lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so we are all lost when war sucks up blood and treasure and spits back the psycho-emotional damage of PTSD. And soon space will be the final frontier, where armed forces will invade the black void, an infinite hole into which lives can be thrown far into the future.<\/p>\n

And so the Tomb of the Unborn Soldier will make tangible the perpetuation of war, memorializing an obsolete assault against reason, virtue and the future of humanity as a planetary species.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnytime we are fighting each other,\u201d concludes Manjoo, \u201cwe are absconding in the larger and more important fight for the habitability of the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so it goes \u2026<\/p>\n

Paul Andersen\u2019s column appears on Mondays. He may be reached at andersen@rof.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russia said last week that plans by the United States to deploy weapons in space would deal an irreversible blow to the current security balance in space. According to the foreign ministry, \u201cRussia does not have plans to solve problems in space using weapons.\u201d Problems in space? Are astronauts at the international space station arguing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2454903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 13:51:56","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2454903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2454903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2454903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2454903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}