About

We seek to stop war through the power of images. We believe the troubles in the world stem mostly from a lack of communication. Often this is deliberate, as in the military’s censorship; not just the U.S. military but the Taliban and all militaries. If we all were more informed of what was going on in the world things might be very different.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have gone on for over six years, costing thousands of American lives and over a million Iraqi lives, most of them innocent people, children and babies. Would the people in this country stand for such a policy if innocent Americans were the victims? No. But a bigger question is, do most Americans even know what has been going on?

For six years we’ve been supposedly “fighting” terrorists by waging a preemptive war in Iraq. Meanwhile the real architect of that terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, is yet to be found. In fact he is supposedly in Pakistan. We have been bombing innocent people in the wrong countries. Why?

There is also evidence that Al Queada stemmed from a CIA organization (see The Three Trillion Dollar War by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes). We know that Bin Laden was a CIA operative who worked with George H.W. Bush. Amazingly we can’t account for this one man’s whereabouts after initially spending $1,000,000,000,000 (that’s a trillion), 5000 American lives, approximately 1.5 million Iraqi lives, and 20,000+ innocent Afghan lives (God only knows the true numbers. We don’t bother counting them. They’re not Americans.), in a supposed war to hunt him down.

Now if we’re going to have a war we should at least be honest and upfront about it. If the cost is three to seven trillion dollars as Joseph Stiglitz says, then fess up to it. Show us the American body count every week. Tell the American people the costs of these wars, the liabilities, the increased terrorism they proliferate, and convince us it’s worth it. No one can do this. Justification for these wars are based on lies.

Iraq is America’s preemptive illegal racist genocide and continues to be so. Is America a neo-Nazi state?

The more innocent people we kill, the more we motivate their survivors to become insurgents and terrorists and retaliate (see Robert Greenwald of ReThink Afghanistan). What would you do if your town was bombed and your family killed. Would you sit back and take it? Our country was founded on the right to arms, to fight for and protect our freedom and our families. Yet we are oppressing another country, doing this very thing, and when they retaliate we call them terrorists, and retaliate with more bombs and guns, which keeps the cycle going and war profiteers profiting.

We are proliferating terrorism and endangering our freedom, not protecting it. And so our troops do not fight or die for freedom. They fight and die for Halliburton, Texaco, Shell, Lockheed-Martin, Xe (Blackwater), General Dynamics and so on. these companies are making huge profits on these wars, while our troops fight and die in vain. Many of them are vain. They are racist warmongers who live to fight and even die for the promise of glory, a false glory. But that’s just my opinion. I respect your right to differ. Many troops fight and die with great honor, because they believe they do it for their country. Yet it is still in vain. Many have returned and renounced their allegeance to the military (see the Winter Soldiers).

Look at the pictures and videos I have collected to see evidence of this. Even if they think they are fighting with honor, there’s nothing honorable about preemptive racist genocidal war.

We need to get the word and the pictures out, to expose what’s gong on. Many more veterans against war speak out and protest regularly. You can find them all over YouTube. But you will also find racist troops who mock the Muslim culture, even to their faces, and show their strong prejudice and disrespect for theirs lives, for all life.

I am a veteran of the Gulf War. I served for 11 years in the Air Force. I have always felt that war was wrong, especially the Vietnam war. It became transparent then that the US was not in that war for any worthy purpose. It also became apparent that war was a horror, as depicted by the many images published in the explicit magazines of the times.

During the Vietnam war I became of draft age, I was resolved to go to Canada if I were drafted. But instead, I received a college deferment which lasted until after the draft was ended. After college, during “peace time”, I became disillusioned with my chosen field, filmmaking, and my ideology swung to a conservative view. There was no war and the military was an adventurous appealing option. But I never really fit in. I joined the service, but more because I needed a job to live, and not for purely patriotic reasons.

Ten years later, when things heated up in the Gulf, I was convinced that the US was right to go to war to stop Sadam. But once I became part of a military going to war my views changed. I saw that service men were having a big party of it. It was their time in the sun. They didn’t see the gravity of war at all. I served out my time until the war ended and got out.

Now with the Iraq war and the governments’ abuse of power, I am convinced war must be stopped for all time. There may be a need to have a war readiness as a deterrent. But I think this can become unnecessary, and if used would only be very temporary. In seeing and hearing more about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars I’m convinced I must do all I can to appeal to people to stop wars, all wars, for all time. They are waged purely for power and greed, not to protect anyone’s freedom. Humans are above this.

I have begun work on two new projects. One is a Stop War (working title) project, which will consist of my own documentaries of anti-war protesters, combined with other materials concerning anti-war interests. If you have pictures or videos of interviews, war, or even vlogs, I am interested in hearing from you.

Visit the Stop War Project Network to contribute media to the project. – Jon

The Stop War Project Network | The Stop WarProject  Forum | YouTube | Facebook | Twitter

The Stop War Project Network | The Stop War Project Forum | the writers muse: Jons blog | Out in the Street Films

Stop War by Jon Raymond is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License