Thursday, November 20, 2025

OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #256, NOVEMBER 19, 2025.

 

 

OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #256, NOVEMBER 19, 2025.   Compiled by Dick Bennett.

 

Protesting US Warmaking: Scholars Telling the Truth, Nuns Disarming Missiles, a Novelist Exploring War’s Effects, a Newsletter Editor Studies a Government Study, a Citizen Assesses US Fascism..

 

The Trillion Dollar War Machine by William Hartung and Ben Freeman.  Bold Type Books, 2025.   For the publisher’s description see WWW #238, July 16, 2025.  “This is it: the definitive account of America’s wasteful, corrupt, and astonishingly ineffective military industrial complex.  William Hartung and Ben Freeman have done their fellow citizens a great service.   Taking their message to heart is a job for the rest of us.”  Andrew Bacevich, author or editor of a dozen books on US militarism.   I have the book now and am strengthened by its scholarship, especially: the breviloquent Introduction to the militarism that has befallen us, and how it happened, that the full book particularizes;  and Part Three, “Selling the War Machine,” the warmonger profiteers and their enablers.    --D

 

Anti-War Documentary, 43 minutes.

Conviction (the steadfast resistance to US warmaking by Catholic peacemakers 2019).   Story of 3 nuns prosecuted for illegally entering a nuclear missile base near Greeley, CO, 2019 to symbolically disarm the missiles.   Jackie Platte, Ardeth Hudson, and Carol Gilbert were charged with interfering with US national defense, sabotage, damaging government property, and vandalism.  The judge denied 30 categories of law in their defense—international law, etc.  They were sentenced July 2003.  Ardeth was sentenced to 41 mos. in prison, Carol to 33, and Jackie to 30.

 

Anti-War Novel

Dirty Work is a 1989 novel by Larry Brown about two severely wounded Vietnam veterans, Walter James (white) and Braiden Chaney (black), who are in adjacent hospital beds. Over the course of one night, they share their stories, memories, and pain, leading to a powerful and devastating exploration of the war's effects. The novel is considered one of the most powerful anti-war novels in American literature.   Wikipedia.

 

Dick is Moving…..Some Day
And along the way are many welcome reminders of how we got to 11-19-25.

     The US Congressional Budget Office published a study of Modernizing U.S. Strategic Offensive Forces: Costs, Effects, and Alternatives (Nov. 1987)  Why are we “modernizing” and treating us to a euphemism for increasing our nuclear weapons and making them more lethal?  Why are we spending such vast amounts of money for such an enterprise?  It’s the old Sovietphobia now Russophobia.  The second chapter compares the ”force levels” of the US and SU (their mirror acronyms): SU must not be allowed to outgun US.   Chapter Three grapples with “U.S. and Soviet Modernization Plans Beyond 1987.”  And Appendix D, “Soviet Strategic Forces,” summarizes the statistics of the fearsome enemy’s ballistic missiles, derived mainly from the Pentagon’s Soviet Military Power 1987.  It is time pathological liar President Trump returned the “Pentagon/DOD”  to its original name: Department of War, inadvertently telling the truth.
     In The Traveler “Letters to the Editor,” April 28, 2006, appeared a prescient warning of fascism by Abel Tomlinson, “Is America Becoming Quasifascist?”  After listing over a dozen features of fascism, he cites as an example President Bush’s quasifascist  “business-religious-political conglomeration.”  Trump has been a long-time coming.   -D

 

 

 

END OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #256, NOVEMBER 19, 2025.   Compiled by Dick Bennett.

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