The evil is so unfathomable that most people can not wrap their heads around it. In 2003 I came to the realization of what happened in 2001, that our own government did what it did so there could be war. I went through a period of grief. I shifted through what I'd learned in high school like the US never engaged in an unjust, unprovoked war. I came to the conclusion that the general public are no more than cockroaches to those in power, the deep state. Just useless eaters. You can't blantantly destroy people unless you consider them sub-human. My job is to build the muscle of love. To treat people I encounter with respect and dignity. "only love can conquer hate" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5TmORitlKk Marvin Gaye What's Going On https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOyqfQDKX7A White Buffalo Wish it Was True.
This is a beautiful and courageous post. All modern governments, whether they're called "democracies" or not, are heavily involved in indoctrinating their people to hate and fear each other and to hate and fear people from the rest of the world.
Whenever I think about the last 25 years of deception, fear mongering and senseless killing, one name rises to the top - Pat Tillman. A great athlete who walked away from what he was so brilliant at to serve and protect the country he loved - only to be killed in battle in Afghanistan. Ironically the shots that ended his life were taken by his own people, and this information was covered up just like the questionable circumstances that got us into this bloody mess to begin with.
I found the whole piece very well said, thank you Madhava. 👍 I am hopeful that more and more people will see through 9/11 and all the many other “official” lies/propaganda.
For anyone reading this who is new to propaganda studies, I can say that Sam Keen wrote a nice book called Faces of the Enemy. I read it as a teen and I’m glad I did. It takes the reader through a tour of old-timey war-mongering slogans — and the propagandistic posters — charming and horrific and the same time!
Today is a day reserved on the calendar of federal holidays for remembering our honored dead, who have served the United States of America in its military forces.
I can understand your position. I could support the idea of leaving politics and deeper questions out of our tribute to our soldiers' sacrifice. However, I would insist that for the other 364 days of the year we press our authorities for answers around this institution called war which took their lives in the first place.
Thank you for understanding. Certainly, I would agree, pursue the other issues with all vigor the other 364 days, and your sincere, decoupled, tribute will be all the more appreciated.
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Dr. Setty...Do you make a distinction between wars of necessity and wars of choice or manufacture? For example, would you consider World War II a necessary war?
It’s a good question as it leads to more questions as this thread demonstrates.
Simply stated distinctions should be made, and my present understanding is that the harder we look the harder it is to find a just war.
Of all the wars I have reexamined WWII is the one I have researched the least.
In the first half of the 20th century the American public was less interested in war than now. Mobilizing public sentiment in favor of involvement required an audacious act. The sinking of the Lusitania was a LiHOP (let it happen on purpose). I would guess that Pearl Harbor was a similar event.
The more interesting question would be if the ends justified the means.
My central point is that there is a lot more disquieting truths about war than the public understands.
How did Hitler transform a country destroyed by WWI that was also burdened by huge reparation expenses into a powerful force in two decades? Who funded the third Reich and why? I feel that these questions need to be thoroughly answered before we commit young people into any kind of combat action today. My opinion only.
Who funded the third Reich? Bank of America, Ford, Carnegie Corp, JP Morgan Chase Bank, Texas Oil, Conoco, Bush, Swiss Banking; there's a huge interconnected web, but ultimately it comes down to the Bankers.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Dr. Setty. You acknowledge that distinctions should be made between wars—but when asked directly whether WWII was necessary, you shifted to whether its ends justified the means and to broader questions about funding and manipulation. Important points, yes—but they move the goalposts.
My question was simpler: Would failing to stop Nazi Germany have been a greater moral failure than going to war?
If so, however flawed the path to engagement may have been, WWII still stands as a necessary war. If we can’t make moral distinctions even in a case like that, how can we make them anywhere? I'd be interested to hear your view on that, specifically.
"My question was simpler: Would failing to stop Nazi Germany have been a greater moral failure than going to war?"
Moral failure. It would be immoral to not intervene in a genocide. That's very reasonable.
However the question is not simple to me.
Who do you send off to war to stop Nazi Germany? Yourself? Your own children? Would you agree that some folks would want more answers before sending their kids to storm beaches and patrol U-boat infested waters?
For example, who is funding the Nazi Chancellor? I would like to know, as I asked earlier, how could he have amassed such power and built a highly industrialized nation from essentially scratch in two decades? Who is behind his rise exactly? Where is he getting the resources and fuel?
Is it possible that he is an operative for a darker agenda, one that benefits on the conscription of armies and the sale of armaments? If that were the case, wouldn't be easier to go after the puppeteers and not the puppet?
Would you condemn someone for demanding answers to these questions before taking up a weapon and blowing the head off of an 18 year old German kid who might have been forced to take up arms for a cause he didn't believe in?
Should young people be forced to risk their own lives to stop Nazi Germany because of a moral obligation? Upon what moral basis then would you enforce the incarceration of young Americans who refuse to fight because they don't agree with your moral certitude?
If this boils down to morality for you I would be interested to hear how you negotiate these questions around morality specifically.
These are powerful questions, Dr. Setty, but they don’t erase the one I asked—they just push it out of reach. You granted that not stopping genocide is immoral, but the rest of your reply seems to suggest that unless we fully understand every hidden actor, every financier, and every political manipulation, then we can't act at all—or we shouldn’t.
The problem is that evil rarely presents itself cleanly. There are always shadowy interests, opportunistic elites, and tragic foot soldiers on both sides. But acknowledging that complexity doesn’t mean we lose the ability—or responsibility—to act.
You ask: Should someone be forced to fight for a moral cause? Maybe not. But that’s a different question than: Was the cause just?
I never said war was pure. I said some wars are necessary. And if we wait for moral clarity so total that no 18-year-old German kid bleeds, then the Reich wins. That, to me, would be the greater immorality.
I would insist that a government which commits its own people to warfare owes them complete transparency. I don't think that's what happened. And this speaks volumes about the morality of government we had back then (never mind today).
I would have had high suspicion that the government which is sending my son to fight could have been behind the psychopathic leader of the army my son would be fighting. It would be akin to rescuing a hostage where the kidnappers are on the police's payroll. I think the rescuer has a right to know the details.
Under these circumstances I would be forced to acknowledge that conscripting an army would result in another moral dilemma. How to justify compulsory military service ethically? I would fully understand how some would not hesitate to fight. I would not consider them to be morally superior to others who are reluctant to fight under these particular circumstances.
Is sending someone into lethal combat against their will less immoral than executing an innocent prisoner or allowing that to happen?
Demanding transparency in this situation is not much to ask.
Dr. Setty, I don’t disagree that governments owe their citizens transparency, especially when asking them to kill or die. And yes, conscription raises real ethical problems, particularly in unjust wars. But I notice that you keep returning to process—how governments behave, how citizens are coerced—while leaving the nature of the threat unaddressed.
Whether or not the U.S. government was transparent, the Nazi regime was committing genocide and expanding militarily across Europe. That still presents a moral crisis—one that doesn’t vanish because the U.S. had dirty hands.
I’m not asking whether coercion is moral. I’m asking: Was stopping Hitler by force the lesser evil, even if flawed institutions carried it out? If you agree it was, then yes—we can (and must) debate how to do that justly. But we can’t pretend that inaction would have been somehow more moral simply because it avoids government hypocrisy.
Official narratives deserve scrutiny, but are you suggesting that the entire historical consensus around WWII is fabricated? That Hitler’s invasions, the Holocaust, the Japanese empire’s aggression… none of that can be reliably known? At what point does healthy doubt turn into epistemic nihilism?
No, I agree that those things aren't inventions. But there are all the parts we don't hear about, like 1) U.S. policy of keeping Jews out of the U.S. as much as possible, even after the ongoing genocide was widely known, 2) Strategies used by the U.S. to prolong the war as soon as possible, particularly the decision not to open a second front, because U.S. leaders wanted as much damage done to the Soviet Union as possible, 3) All kinds of ways that U.S. elites liked Hitler's rise to power, and did nothing about it, until he "went too far" in their eyes. The ruling groups all over the world think and behave pretty much the same. On the other hand, the vest majority of human beings are pretty good people. The most violent, selfish, and unprincipled rise to the top of almost every modern society, and the U.S. is certainly no exception to this.
I agree with a lot of this. There's no question the U.S. record—especially in the lead-up to and early years of WWII—is filled with moral failures: immigration restrictions, appeasement, strategic delay, even tacit support of fascist regimes. But I’d argue that none of that negates the fact that WWII, once underway, was a necessary war. It was a defensive war against genocidal imperialism. That doesn’t make the Allies virtuous—it just means the stakes weren’t morally symmetrical. And that’s really the point I was getting at: not that some wars are pure, but that some are still necessary.
When we flatten everything into “the ruling class always wins,” we lose the ability to distinguish between resisting evil and enabling it—however imperfectly.
Curious if you see a distinction between the morality of a war's origins and the morality of participating in it once it’s in motion?
By the morality of a war’s origin, I mean the reasons and justifications offered for starting a war—what provoked it, who initiated aggression, and whether force was used in defense or expansion. In contrast, the “morality of participation” asks whether it’s right to join or support a war once it’s already in motion.
For example - The Nazis invading Poland, France, and the USSR, and building death camps—that’s a moral origin: naked aggression and genocide. The Allies deciding to resist that aggression, despite propaganda or internal corruption—that’s participation. Even if elites had mixed motives, the response to that kind of atrocity was, I’d argue, morally necessary.
So when I say WWII had a morally justified origin—from the Allied side—I mean it began in response to an unambiguous evil, not because of pure motives, but because inaction would have been worse. That distinction gets lost when we focus only on who funded what or which elites benefited.
If your position is that nothing reported by any institution can be trusted, there’s no real conversation to have. That’s not skepticism—that’s fatalism. And ironically, it’s the perfect soil for tyranny, which is what WWII was fought to resist.
If your standard is “total certainty or it’s worthless,” then you've abandoned reason for cynicism. That’s not a path to truth—it's paralysis. So I'll return the question: If no institution can be trusted, how do you decide what's real? Or is everything just narrative warfare, forever?
The evil is so unfathomable that most people can not wrap their heads around it. In 2003 I came to the realization of what happened in 2001, that our own government did what it did so there could be war. I went through a period of grief. I shifted through what I'd learned in high school like the US never engaged in an unjust, unprovoked war. I came to the conclusion that the general public are no more than cockroaches to those in power, the deep state. Just useless eaters. You can't blantantly destroy people unless you consider them sub-human. My job is to build the muscle of love. To treat people I encounter with respect and dignity. "only love can conquer hate" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5TmORitlKk Marvin Gaye What's Going On https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOyqfQDKX7A White Buffalo Wish it Was True.
Thank you.
This is a beautiful and courageous post. All modern governments, whether they're called "democracies" or not, are heavily involved in indoctrinating their people to hate and fear each other and to hate and fear people from the rest of the world.
Whenever I think about the last 25 years of deception, fear mongering and senseless killing, one name rises to the top - Pat Tillman. A great athlete who walked away from what he was so brilliant at to serve and protect the country he loved - only to be killed in battle in Afghanistan. Ironically the shots that ended his life were taken by his own people, and this information was covered up just like the questionable circumstances that got us into this bloody mess to begin with.
Right! Thank you.
I found the whole piece very well said, thank you Madhava. 👍 I am hopeful that more and more people will see through 9/11 and all the many other “official” lies/propaganda.
For anyone reading this who is new to propaganda studies, I can say that Sam Keen wrote a nice book called Faces of the Enemy. I read it as a teen and I’m glad I did. It takes the reader through a tour of old-timey war-mongering slogans — and the propagandistic posters — charming and horrific and the same time!
Today is a day reserved on the calendar of federal holidays for remembering our honored dead, who have served the United States of America in its military forces.
I can understand your position. I could support the idea of leaving politics and deeper questions out of our tribute to our soldiers' sacrifice. However, I would insist that for the other 364 days of the year we press our authorities for answers around this institution called war which took their lives in the first place.
Thank you for understanding. Certainly, I would agree, pursue the other issues with all vigor the other 364 days, and your sincere, decoupled, tribute will be all the more appreciated.
They Served the interests of the Bankers.
Irrelevant
You feel these these deaths are "Irrelevant"?
no - the comment about bankers is irrelevant to honoring our dead
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket
"War is a business" of the Bankers.
Dr. Setty...Do you make a distinction between wars of necessity and wars of choice or manufacture? For example, would you consider World War II a necessary war?
It’s a good question as it leads to more questions as this thread demonstrates.
Simply stated distinctions should be made, and my present understanding is that the harder we look the harder it is to find a just war.
Of all the wars I have reexamined WWII is the one I have researched the least.
In the first half of the 20th century the American public was less interested in war than now. Mobilizing public sentiment in favor of involvement required an audacious act. The sinking of the Lusitania was a LiHOP (let it happen on purpose). I would guess that Pearl Harbor was a similar event.
The more interesting question would be if the ends justified the means.
My central point is that there is a lot more disquieting truths about war than the public understands.
How did Hitler transform a country destroyed by WWI that was also burdened by huge reparation expenses into a powerful force in two decades? Who funded the third Reich and why? I feel that these questions need to be thoroughly answered before we commit young people into any kind of combat action today. My opinion only.
Who funded the third Reich? Bank of America, Ford, Carnegie Corp, JP Morgan Chase Bank, Texas Oil, Conoco, Bush, Swiss Banking; there's a huge interconnected web, but ultimately it comes down to the Bankers.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Dr. Setty. You acknowledge that distinctions should be made between wars—but when asked directly whether WWII was necessary, you shifted to whether its ends justified the means and to broader questions about funding and manipulation. Important points, yes—but they move the goalposts.
My question was simpler: Would failing to stop Nazi Germany have been a greater moral failure than going to war?
If so, however flawed the path to engagement may have been, WWII still stands as a necessary war. If we can’t make moral distinctions even in a case like that, how can we make them anywhere? I'd be interested to hear your view on that, specifically.
"My question was simpler: Would failing to stop Nazi Germany have been a greater moral failure than going to war?"
Moral failure. It would be immoral to not intervene in a genocide. That's very reasonable.
However the question is not simple to me.
Who do you send off to war to stop Nazi Germany? Yourself? Your own children? Would you agree that some folks would want more answers before sending their kids to storm beaches and patrol U-boat infested waters?
For example, who is funding the Nazi Chancellor? I would like to know, as I asked earlier, how could he have amassed such power and built a highly industrialized nation from essentially scratch in two decades? Who is behind his rise exactly? Where is he getting the resources and fuel?
Is it possible that he is an operative for a darker agenda, one that benefits on the conscription of armies and the sale of armaments? If that were the case, wouldn't be easier to go after the puppeteers and not the puppet?
Would you condemn someone for demanding answers to these questions before taking up a weapon and blowing the head off of an 18 year old German kid who might have been forced to take up arms for a cause he didn't believe in?
Should young people be forced to risk their own lives to stop Nazi Germany because of a moral obligation? Upon what moral basis then would you enforce the incarceration of young Americans who refuse to fight because they don't agree with your moral certitude?
If this boils down to morality for you I would be interested to hear how you negotiate these questions around morality specifically.
These are powerful questions, Dr. Setty, but they don’t erase the one I asked—they just push it out of reach. You granted that not stopping genocide is immoral, but the rest of your reply seems to suggest that unless we fully understand every hidden actor, every financier, and every political manipulation, then we can't act at all—or we shouldn’t.
The problem is that evil rarely presents itself cleanly. There are always shadowy interests, opportunistic elites, and tragic foot soldiers on both sides. But acknowledging that complexity doesn’t mean we lose the ability—or responsibility—to act.
You ask: Should someone be forced to fight for a moral cause? Maybe not. But that’s a different question than: Was the cause just?
I never said war was pure. I said some wars are necessary. And if we wait for moral clarity so total that no 18-year-old German kid bleeds, then the Reich wins. That, to me, would be the greater immorality.
I would insist that a government which commits its own people to warfare owes them complete transparency. I don't think that's what happened. And this speaks volumes about the morality of government we had back then (never mind today).
I would have had high suspicion that the government which is sending my son to fight could have been behind the psychopathic leader of the army my son would be fighting. It would be akin to rescuing a hostage where the kidnappers are on the police's payroll. I think the rescuer has a right to know the details.
Under these circumstances I would be forced to acknowledge that conscripting an army would result in another moral dilemma. How to justify compulsory military service ethically? I would fully understand how some would not hesitate to fight. I would not consider them to be morally superior to others who are reluctant to fight under these particular circumstances.
Is sending someone into lethal combat against their will less immoral than executing an innocent prisoner or allowing that to happen?
Demanding transparency in this situation is not much to ask.
Dr. Setty, I don’t disagree that governments owe their citizens transparency, especially when asking them to kill or die. And yes, conscription raises real ethical problems, particularly in unjust wars. But I notice that you keep returning to process—how governments behave, how citizens are coerced—while leaving the nature of the threat unaddressed.
Whether or not the U.S. government was transparent, the Nazi regime was committing genocide and expanding militarily across Europe. That still presents a moral crisis—one that doesn’t vanish because the U.S. had dirty hands.
I’m not asking whether coercion is moral. I’m asking: Was stopping Hitler by force the lesser evil, even if flawed institutions carried it out? If you agree it was, then yes—we can (and must) debate how to do that justly. But we can’t pretend that inaction would have been somehow more moral simply because it avoids government hypocrisy.
Since they have lied about everything, how can we know the truth about WWII?
Official narratives deserve scrutiny, but are you suggesting that the entire historical consensus around WWII is fabricated? That Hitler’s invasions, the Holocaust, the Japanese empire’s aggression… none of that can be reliably known? At what point does healthy doubt turn into epistemic nihilism?
No, I agree that those things aren't inventions. But there are all the parts we don't hear about, like 1) U.S. policy of keeping Jews out of the U.S. as much as possible, even after the ongoing genocide was widely known, 2) Strategies used by the U.S. to prolong the war as soon as possible, particularly the decision not to open a second front, because U.S. leaders wanted as much damage done to the Soviet Union as possible, 3) All kinds of ways that U.S. elites liked Hitler's rise to power, and did nothing about it, until he "went too far" in their eyes. The ruling groups all over the world think and behave pretty much the same. On the other hand, the vest majority of human beings are pretty good people. The most violent, selfish, and unprincipled rise to the top of almost every modern society, and the U.S. is certainly no exception to this.
I agree with a lot of this. There's no question the U.S. record—especially in the lead-up to and early years of WWII—is filled with moral failures: immigration restrictions, appeasement, strategic delay, even tacit support of fascist regimes. But I’d argue that none of that negates the fact that WWII, once underway, was a necessary war. It was a defensive war against genocidal imperialism. That doesn’t make the Allies virtuous—it just means the stakes weren’t morally symmetrical. And that’s really the point I was getting at: not that some wars are pure, but that some are still necessary.
When we flatten everything into “the ruling class always wins,” we lose the ability to distinguish between resisting evil and enabling it—however imperfectly.
Curious if you see a distinction between the morality of a war's origins and the morality of participating in it once it’s in motion?
Ben, I left a longer response earlier in this thread. Can you please explain what you mean by "the morality of a war's origin"?
By the morality of a war’s origin, I mean the reasons and justifications offered for starting a war—what provoked it, who initiated aggression, and whether force was used in defense or expansion. In contrast, the “morality of participation” asks whether it’s right to join or support a war once it’s already in motion.
For example - The Nazis invading Poland, France, and the USSR, and building death camps—that’s a moral origin: naked aggression and genocide. The Allies deciding to resist that aggression, despite propaganda or internal corruption—that’s participation. Even if elites had mixed motives, the response to that kind of atrocity was, I’d argue, morally necessary.
So when I say WWII had a morally justified origin—from the Allied side—I mean it began in response to an unambiguous evil, not because of pure motives, but because inaction would have been worse. That distinction gets lost when we focus only on who funded what or which elites benefited.
"consensus"?!
Like the "consensus" on vaccine safety? Consensus should have a ticker symbol. It is bought and sold.
If your position is that nothing reported by any institution can be trusted, there’s no real conversation to have. That’s not skepticism—that’s fatalism. And ironically, it’s the perfect soil for tyranny, which is what WWII was fought to resist.
Which institution can you trust?
If your standard is “total certainty or it’s worthless,” then you've abandoned reason for cynicism. That’s not a path to truth—it's paralysis. So I'll return the question: If no institution can be trusted, how do you decide what's real? Or is everything just narrative warfare, forever?