Shiny Happy Platitudes

Speaking of old song lyrics from the early 70s, this morning I heard a song that, for me, has to be the most trite and useless piece of faux-social-consciousness trash ever put on tape. And there is lots of competition for that particular title.

You've heard it a quadrillion times: "War" by Edwin Starr. The lyrics are here.

Ohhh, war, I despise
Because it means destruction
Of innocent lives

OK, time out. Yo, Edwin.

Heard of the Holocaust? Millions dead? That was a direct result not of war, but of an overt social policy of Jew hatred. War stopped it, but not until Hitler and evil eugenicist Nazi pals starved, gassed, and bulldozed a few million people into the hereafter.

History -- and most especially, the 20th Century, is full of such examples.

Heard of the Soviet gulags? The Ukraine famine? Armenian genocide? Mao's Cultural Revolution? Various evil regimes throughout Africa and the Middle East, murdering their own people? Any of this ringing a bell?

These were not wars between nation-states, they were wars waged against the people by their own governments. The number of people killed by such means, in the 20th Century alone, is estimated to be over 100,000,000.

And as far as Vietnam goes, as soon as America hightailed it out of there, which should have led to an outbreak of peace in your Goofy Shiny Happy People World, it instead led to a decade of death and destruction in the form of Pol Pot and the pure evil of the Khmer Rouge, who proceeded to kill two million Cambodians, for patently insane reasons such as "those wearing eyeglasses". Smart people be dangerous, you know.

So, I guess I missed the song you wrote in protest of that. Seems like the least you could have done. I'm sure it would have been a gem, in honor of those 2,000,000 people.

Oh, and one other thing you and your anti-war friends probably like to toast every May Day. When the U.S. pulled troops out in 1973, with the promise of arms to the South Vietnamese, a liberal do-gooder -- are there other kinds? -- named Sen. Ted Kennedy led the effort to cut off the funding of those arms. To save lives, theoretically, although just whose lives is an open question, since this lead directly, of course, to the capture of Saigon, the fall of the South, and the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

So, you know, nice going!