By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 28, 2026

When I was a kid it was fun to hang out on the U.S. National Mall by the Washington Monument, which reflected just fine in the Reflecting Pool, on the Fourth of July. The Beach Boys would jam on an outdoor stage with about 35 opening acts. We’d bounce beach balls overhead. There were no jets or tanks in sight.

Now the psychopath across the road prefers weapons parades and is planning to put gladiators in a cage on the White House lawn and have them fight for his entertainment. This bothers me because it’s disgusting and degrading on its own terms, but also because it’s not unconnected to the fact that the Elmer Fudd Emperor ordering the violent spectacle is also demanding of the U.S. and other governments unprecedented investments in wars — and waging wars that are killing, injuring, and traumatizing huge numbers of people. While he can’t actually conquer anything, he wants to put up a supersized Roman emperor’s arch to make the Lincoln Memorial look like a roach motel. If the United States could keep its cage-fight culture, mass shootings, sociopathic movies, militarized police murders, suicide epidemics, and normalization of vicious language and entertainment to itself, that would still be awful. But the United States imposes its violence on the world, which is vastly worse.

Little does the world know how far the Israelization of the United States has gone. Last Monday every single elected official in the country published a message thanking countless young men and women for supposedly having “given” their lives as a so-called “service”. This was a holiday called Memorial Day. Like many war holidays this one has a history of good intentions related to reuniting after a civil war and mourning those slaughtered in war. But the United States now has war holidays for virtually every day of the year, and they have all been shaped into pro-war propaganda.

Pretending that a tiny fraction of those killed in distant U.S. massacres are the only ones worth mourning, and pretending that by destroying and mass-murdering in some distant land those U.S. troops killed in the process have done you some sort of service, and pretending that they did so as a voluntary gift rather than because they had few decent prospects in life and had been heavily brainwashed and had then been locked into a form of slavery in which the choices were to obey or be imprisoned — these are not neutral or inevitable pretenses. And yet I’m not aware of a single U.S. Congress Member, for example, who didn’t push this propaganda on Monday. That’s what it means to live within a war culture. It’s a place in which you cannot speak of the epidemics of violence and crime created by veterans of U.S. wars because that would be disrespectful to the god of war, but lying to young men and women, sending them into hell, and then abandoning them to poverty and addiction when they struggle to transform themselves into nonviolent members of society — what they are not thanked and rewarded for having been — that’s just freedom and liberty or somehow acceptable as just the way it is.

In the United States you can conduct polls of people and find that most of them oppose a war. Some of them may oppose the senseless killing, wounding, and traumatizing of human beings. Most oppose something like the price of gas increasing. Many oppose a war because they’d prefer a different war. A great many oppose a war because the U.S. president belongs to a political party and they cheer for the other pro-war political party. A few may oppose the deadly diversion of resources or the environmental destruction or the degradation of culture and promotion of bigotry, the shredding of the rule of law, the restriction of liberties, and so forth. But those who approve of wars don’t even pretend to believe humanitarian lies anymore. And most who oppose a war love and adore the military, are eager to thank participants in the war they oppose, will stand and perform fascist rituals prior to any sports event on command, and have never heard of a peace holiday, couldn’t name a peace monument, and couldn’t tell you what the phrase “culture of peace” means. Some even support warmaking by the other side of the war. This is a pattern in various forms across the globe.

What does “a culture of peace” mean? To most who use it, this phrase unfortunately does not mean a society shaped by a worldview that honors war prevention or disarmament or the replacement of war with the rule of law, diplomacy, unarmed civilian defense, cooperation, aid, and global citizenship. Instead it means decreasing bullying in children’s schools, speaking out against racism, expanding acceptance of minority groups, denouncing all forms of bigotry, defunding police and prisons, making friends with neighbors, having amicable conversations with those we disagree with, celebrating identity politics, and so forth. There are connections between all of these things and abolishing war, just as there are connections between promoting war and a thousand other evils. But no matter how many times a day we all tell each other how much we love the wise saying that peace is more than merely the absence of war, if we can’t get the concept of peace to include in it, at the very least, the absence of war, we’re off the rails.

The culture of war flows seamlessly with music playing and flags waving from cage fights to bombings of distant elementary schools. The culture of peace needs to do the same: to flow seamlessly from GLBTQ rights and Black Lives Matter and banning guns and being kind to everyone you meet to shutting down the $1.5 trillion war machine. In fact, the focus should be on blocking the Pentagon budget in Congress. But it wouldn’t hurt to recognize the face of that budget in the bloody cage fights, white supremacy, and Las Vegasized Reflecting Swimming Pool of our red-white-and-blue death cult.

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