War and Peace: The Lost Principles of Science and Value By Prof. John McMurtry

In recent months we have seen one ‘peace activist’ organization after another framing global conflicts in US war-propaganda terms.

There is no criterion of peace, no evidence base, no life ground or compass governing judgement.

The official enemy is assumed as first premise, and slogans substitute for understanding. Avaaz, Amnesty International, and Physicians for Human Rights, for example, have all called for a version of ‘humanitarian bombing’ to ‘save lives’ in Syria. The war criminal attacks on Iraq and Libya under the same pretexts are erased from view.

In this way, blame-the-enemy justifications for mass murder run free with no grounding principle to tell peace from war, or of truth from propaganda. Even the legendary Science for Peace held a conference in March this year organized as if it was the US National Endowment on Democracy in Ukraine  Yet oppositions are skeptical of  any ‘moral compass’ because it is a concept typically invoked by the very people demanding wars. So we remain adrift in a world heading for cumulative catastrophe without any principled life-value bearings.

Again and again the same pattern unfolds with another designated enemy to justify another US-led aerial bombing of another poor society with resources for the US-led corporate-money maw  – already far advanced in Ukraine without press decoding. Accusing the enemy to justify war-criminal aggression is now normalized so pervasively that progressive organizations succumb too without any principled life-value compass. Organized amnesia allows it. Indoctrinated thinking governs it. Stupefied group-egoism motivates it.  Today the new propagandists of war are dressed in peace costumes as they assume the official narratives of war as their own.

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