Let’s Create a Department of Peace in Washington D.C.
Somehow through my Facebook feed I encountered an article concerning a newly commissioned US warship (“Navy Commissions $525M Warship in San Diego”).1 I was struck by a number of things in the article that seem huge. I suspect it is because I never read “Military News” or any similar publications. Probably some other segment of our society does read this type of publications and evidently considers these things normal, or at least acceptable.
The first thing that struck me as I read the article was the term “warship” in the title. I wondered, do we have any “peace ships”. I suspect our hospital ships are the closest thing to “peace ships”. We don’t even bother calling it a “defense ship”, considering that long ago we renamed the ‘Department of War’ to the ‘Department of Defense’.
So I kept reading. The article concerns the recent commissioning by the US Navy of a “new $525 million, 785-foot warship” that will serve as “expeditionary sea base Miguel Keith” starting later this summer.
At the commissioning ceremony, Adm. Craig Faller of the US Navy said the Miguel Keith and her crew would be “on the front line of global conflict against threats to the United States — particularly China.” This really caught my attention. I know there is tension with China right now, but I was not thinking that China was an immediate threat to the USA or that we would be building up for war.
One last quote from Adm. Faller really startled me. He said “the Chinese Communist Party — with its insidious and corrupt influence — seeks global dominance and to impose its version of international order” and for that reason, he said “to continue winning this global competition we must be at the top of our game. We need to keep developing the best technology and the best ships, like you see here today.”
Well, we do (in the USA) seem to be determined to end up in a war with China but I feel the need to point out in the lead up to war (going on now) some of the things we do and say that actually bring it about. Later we will say “how could we ever have known” or “it came as a total surprise” when the facts and these types of statements support something more akin to us pushing for exactly that outcome – war.
Once you call someone across the negotiation table, or a diplomatic delegation from another country “insidious and corrupt” it seems to me there is not much room for negotiating with a sense of mutual respect. To take the admiral’s quote and just switch out the country referenced, it seems like an equally plausible statement: “the USA — with its insidious and corrupt influence — seeks global dominance and to impose its version of international order”. The statement itself is designed to bring about conflict, with no intentions toward peace whatsoever.
So the net of this I suppose is that I want to do what I can to promote peace and not war. And I don’t think the effort needs to wait for the war to begin to then object to the war. I believe we need to start now, when the efforts to create the war have begun, to work towards peace as a better option for all. I say for “all”, but I do recognize that there are a number of groups and individuals that benefit financially and otherwise from war – and we need to find ways to take away their benefits before they can take away our children.
Links:
Military News
Navy Commissions $525M Warship in San Diego
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/05/10/navy-commissions-525m-warship-san-diego.html
david geiger 
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