The Naked Truths

Trump is bored. He doesn’t have enough of anything: money, real estate, power, countries to control. He is even bored of peace. Just last week he told CNBC reporter E. Javers he didn’t “care if (Iranian diplomacy) talks are over, honestly.” They were “starting to get very boring”. Our power hungry, imperialist president first wanted Canada. Then Greenland, Venezuela, Iran and soon Cuba. And he’ll take them by force, if necessary, he says.

Not all his plans go smoothly though so I guess he feels he needs extra special help. He invokes God now in some of his rants justifying his unpopular actions. In a Truth Social post 4/4/26 he wrote “Remember when I gave Iran ten days to make a deal….Time is running out….Glory be to God!”  And Pete Hegseth publicly frames U.S.military actions as divinely sanctioned. (political wire)

My brother, Jon V. Nickles, recently called my attention to Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer”. Twain was an anti-imperialist who strongly criticized the Spanish-American War and annexations of Hawaii and the Philippine Islands. He wrote the short story around 1902 but did not publish it because, though satirical, it was a scathing indictment of war, and particularly of blind patriotic and religious fervor as motivations for war, and he feared his family might suffer from backlash. It was eventually published, but not until after his death. Here are just a few lines: “O Lord Our God, help us to tear their soldiers to shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriotic dead….help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; to lay waste to their humble homes and to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief.”  

Read the full text of this story Twain:  The War Prayer  and I bet you’ll agree: Peace by diplomacy is boring but it’s all we need. I say our bored imperialist president and his secretary of “War” should read it too.

RESIST

Janet Jeffery – Gold Beach