Beauty & Humanity of a helping hand...

Kenyan runner Abel Mutai was just a few feet from the finish line, but became confused with the signage and stopped, thinking he had completed the race.

A Spanish runner, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him and, realizing what was happening, started shouting at the Kenyan  to continue running.

Mutai didn't know Spanish and didn't understand. Realizing what was taking place, Fernandez pushed Mutai to victory.

A journalist asked Ivan, "Why did you do that?"

Ivan replied, "My dream is that some day we can have a kind of community life where we push and help each other to win."

The journalist insisted "But why did you let the Kenyan win?"

Ivan replied, "I didn't let him win, he was going to win. The race was his."

The journalist insisted, and again asked, "But you could have won!"

Ivan looked at him and replied, "But what would be the merit of my victory? What would be the honor in that medal? What would my Mother think of that?"

Values are passed on from generation to generation.

What values are we teaching our children?

Let us not teach our kids the wrong ways and means to WIN.

Instead, let us pass on the beauty and humanity of a helping hand.

Because honesty and ethics are WINNING!

The Man Who Designed Makkah & Madina Mosques

Amazing story of a talented & God-fearing Engineer & Architect Dr Muhammah Kamal Ismail who worked on the expansion project of Makkah Haraam Sharif project especially the marble floor in both Makkah & Madinah.

The Man Who Designed Makkah & Madina Masajid

He was an Egyptian engineer and architect who preferred to be away from  public limelights, unknown to many: Dr. Muhammad Kamal Isma'eel (1908-2008)

▪He was the youngest person in the history of Egypt to obtain high school (certificate), the youngest to get enrolled in the first Royal School of Engineering and the youngest to graduate from it, the youngest to be sent to Europe to obtain three doctorate degrees in Islamic Architecture. He was also the youngest to obtained the "Nile" scarf and the rank of "iron" from the king.

▪He was the first engineer who undertook the planning and implementation of the (Haramain) Makkah and Madina mosques expansion project.

▪He refused to recieve any payment for his engineering design and architectural supervision, despite efforts by King Fahad and Bin Laden Company. When he returned a checque of millions.

He told Bakar Bin Ladan: Why should I accept money (for my work) at the two sacred mosques, how will I face Allah (on the Day of Judgement?)

▪ He married at age of 44 years, his wife gave birth to a son, and died. And thereafter he remained single and devoted his full-time in worshiping Allah until he died. He exceeded hundred years which he spent in the service of the two holy mosques, far from the mass media limelight, fame and money.

This genius has an amazing story in regards to the marble (work) of haram (holy mosque), as he wanted to cover the floor of the haram mosque for those making ‘tawaf’. And marble in particular to absorb heat. This marble was only available in a small mountain in Greece. He travelled to Greece and signed a contract buying sufficient quantity for haram (marbling); almost half of the mountain.

He signed the deal and returned (to Makkah) and the white marble came (in stock). And indeed the placement of the marble on the floor of the holy mosque in Makkah was completed.

After 15 years, the Saudi government asked him to place similar type of marble in the holy mosque in Madinah.

Engineer Muhammad Kamal said, when the King asked him to cover the Prophet's mosque too with same marble, I got very confused, because there was only one place on the earth to get this type of marble, that was Greece, and I have already bought half of then available.

Kamal said that he went to the same company in Greece and met CEO, and asked him about the quantity that remains. CEO said that it had been sold immediately after you left 15 years ago. Kamal became very sad. Kamal left the meeting and while leaving their office, he met the Office Secretary and requested her to please share the whereabout of the person who purchased the rest of the marble quantity?

She replied that it would be hard to know from so old record. Upon Kamal’s request, she promised to search in the old record. Kamal gave her Hotel Address & number, and promised to revisit her next day.
Kamal said that while leaving Office, he thought; Why do I want to know who bought (it)? Soliloquising to myself, Allah will make something wonderful to happen..

On the next day, few hours before leaving to airport, Kamal received a phone call from the secretary saying that she had found the address of the buyer. Kamal went to their office in slow pace thinking what would I do with the address of the buyer, as many years had passed?..

Kamal reached to Office and the Secretary gave him the address of the company who bought the rest of the marble. Kamal said that his heart pulsated and pumped deeply the moment he discovered that the company which bought the marble was a Saudi company.

Kamal flew to Saudi Arabia the same day and upon arrival, he went straight to the office of the company who bought the marble and met the Director Admin, and asked him what he had done with the marble he purchased many years ago from Greece. He said, I can't remember. He contacted the stock room (of the company) and asked them about the white marble from Greece and they told him that all the quantity is available; was never used.

Kamal started crying like a baby, and further narrated the full story to the owner of the company. Kamal gave the owner a blank cheque, and asked him write the amount you want. When Owner came to know that the marble is for the mosque of the Holy Prophet, he said I will not accept even one Riyal. Allah made me to purchase this marble and to forget about it, it was meant to be used for the mosque of the Holy Prophet.

May Allah bless Kamal the Highest place in ‘Janna’’ - Ameen.

Written By: Dr. Zaglool Al-Najjar, an Earth Scientist

Statues of uncouth people & oppressors should come down...

Ex-British MP George Galloway opined that the monument-toppling cultural revolution does not absolve Britain’s imperial crimes, historical or modern. He is definitely correct. On the surface, removal of statues of various controversial figures may not signify much to ameliorate the injustice perpetrated on the blacks but it does serve as an admission of guilt and goodwill gesture to pave the way to rectify the wrongdoings of the past.

Removal of statues does not obliterate these abominable personalities from the annals of history but simply puts them in the place where they belong i.e. history books; these despicable people don't need to be glorified in public arena built at the expense of taxpayers' money. We should / can question why those statues were erected in the first place - with whose consent?

A prevailing opinion is that all statues should be removed that have been erected by the ruling class. They represent only that class and not the working class. There are however, notable exceptions that have been erected by working class solidarity such as Nelson Mandela.

In the UK, London mayor Sadiq Khan posted video on Twitter on Tuesday of officials in East London removing a statue of 18th-century merchant and slave owner Robert Milligan from its place in the city’s docklands. “It’s a sad truth that much of our wealth was derived from the slave trade but this does not have to be celebrated in our public spaces,” he wrote on Twitter. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has acknowledged that it was “a cold reality” that people of colour in Britain experienced discrimination.

Karma catching up?
At weekend protests in London, demonstrators scrawled “was a racist” on a statue of Winston Churchill. Britain’s wartime prime minister is revered as the man who led the country to victory against Nazi Germany. But he was also a staunch defender of the British Empire and expressed racist views.

A statue of Christopher Columbus has been dragged down by protesters in Minnesota, while another in Boston has been removed after being beheaded. The protesters, including Dakota and Ojibwe Indians, said they consider Columbus a symbol of genocide against Native Americans.
The protest followed a similar incident on Tuesday night in Richmond, Virginia, and another in Boston, where a statue of Columbus located in Waterfront Park in was removed after being beheaded.

The Statues of White Supremacists. Why Were They Erected in the First Place? Take Them Down? Preserve the History of Their Ugly Past?
By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, June 14, 2020

The only thing controversial about taking down statues of white supremacist US and other Western figures is why they were erected in the first place, and why it took so long for a campaign to remove them.

In Britain, over two dozen Oxford city councillors, students, and thousands more Brits called for removing the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford University’s Oriel College.

He’s one of the most odious symbols of Britain’s white supremacist, imperial, colonial past.

Founder of Rhodesia (today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe), he once called Anglo-Saxons “the first race in the world.”

He called for Britain to colonize new lands “to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines,” praising the scourge of imperialism in the pursuit of this agenda at the expense of exploited people.

In Richmond, VA on Wednesday, the confederacy’s former capital, protesters took down a statue of confederate president Jefferson Davis.

A statute of Christopher Columbus was removed in Camden, NJ, a statement by the city saying its presence “long pained residents of the (Farnham Park) community.”

Overnight Wednesday in Boston’s North End, a statue of Columbus was beheaded.

Other Columbus statues came down in Minneapolis, Richmond, VA, and reportedly elsewhere in the US.

The late historian, anti-war, anti-imperial activist Howard Zinn explained the “real Columbus” in his People’s History of the United States, other writings, and public addresses.

His arrival with a crew of brigands chosen for plunder in what’s now the Bahamas, then Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Cuba over 500 years ago was followed by the mass slaughter of around 100 million indigenous people for centuries, an unprecedented genocide ignored or glossed over by establishment Western history.

Zinn explained the following:

“Arawak men and women…swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat” they spotted.

“When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.”

They “were remarkable…for their hospitality, their belief in sharing” — polar opposite Western civilization’s ruling class.

Columbus sought gold, other riches and slaves for Spain. A second voyage followed the first. Native people were slaughtered throughout the Caribbean.

Scant gold was found, just hundreds of human beings taken captive, those surviving the journey to Spain sold like sheep or goats.

Zinn: “In return for bringing back gold and spices (to Spanish royalty, he was) promised 10 percent of the profits, governorship over newfound lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea.”

“He was a merchant’s clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor.”

Heading to Asia from Europe, “he came upon…unchartered land…the Americas.”

He didn’t discover it as US school children are taught. It was there, inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years before his arrival.

His first voyage was followed by a second one in search of gold and slaves.

There were plenty of the latter. “The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams,” Zinn explained.

Columbus first arrived in 1492. By 1650, “none of the original Arawaks or their descendants were left,” said Zinn.

An estimated eight million people perished from overwork, neglect, and other forms of cruelty as slave labor.

Knowledge of what happened came Bartoleme de Las Casas, a “priest (involved) in the conquest of Cuba (transformed into) a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty.”

The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades,” he wrote.

Indigenous people “suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help.”

“(M)ountains (were) stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times.”

“They d(ug), split rocks, move(d) stones, and carr(ied) dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash(ed) gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it br(oke) them.”

The women were “forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants,” Zinn explained.

Separated for months and worked to exhaustion led to their deaths.

From Columbus’ arrival to 1508, “over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines” — millions more in subsequent years.

“Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it,” said Las Casas.

Zinn: “What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.”

“They used the same tactics, and for the same reasons — the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call ‘the primitive accumulation of capital.’ ”

It was the beginning of how the West and most other countries were run from the time of Columbus to today.

In his book titled “Columbus: His Enterprise,” Hans Koning said the following:

    “For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer.”

    “It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars.”

    “They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.”

Zinn explained that “the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas (was the) beginning (of) conquest, slavery (and) death.”

No “heroic adventure” by Columbus occurred, just “bloodshed,” plunder, and human misery, the legacy of so-called Western civilization.

History is told “from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats (and) leaders.” No one speaks for victims.

Earlier belligerents had swords, then rifles and cannons.

Today they have WMDs and delivery systems able to end life on earth if used in enough numbers.

Humanity’s ability to kill and destroy has come a long way through the ages, scant attention paid to surviving the destructiveness of today’s super-weapons.

Nothing has been done to curb the rage of the powerful to dominate or to minimize mass slaughter, vast destruction, and human misery from their deadly pursuits.

This monument-toppling cultural revolution does not absolve Britain’s imperial crimes, historical or modern
George Galloway
RT : 13 Jun, 2020

Britain is in the grip of a revolution. Much to the relief of the country's ruling elite, it is a cultural
revolution, and not an economic or political one.

Facing an economic recession of historic dimensions and presiding over some of the grimmest Covid-19 statistics on the planet, Britain is convulsed over whether the peccadilloes of Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell were sufficiently ugly to justify his likeness taking a dip in Poole Harbour, like the slave trader Edward Colston did in Bristol Harbour.

Of course the hypocrites bewailing Colston suffering the same fate as tens of thousands of his victims tossed overboard – usually, but not always, dead – from his slave ships as “undemocratic” miss the point that hardly anybody in England even had the vote when the statue was erected.

And Baden-Powell's chief offence, cosying up to Adolf Hitler, was the norm rather than the exception amongst the ruling caste in the 1930s. His attitude to imperialist wars in Africa was par for the course in Britain in his era, too.

Cecil Rhodes, who still towers over Oxford University, is certainly an egregious example of racist venality. He wasn't just a brutal racist and imperialist; he systemised racism, paving the way to apartheid – nowhere more so than in the country which for a time bore his very name: Rhodesia.

But if anything sums up the triumph of identity politics over class politics, it is the extraordinary verve with which millions of people around the world have poured their courage and energy into the Black Lives Matter protests, while Britain CONTINUES to be up to its neck in imperialist crimes which are largely unprotested.

Lives don't seem to matter in Yemen, for example, where plague and famine of biblical proportions are exacerbated by British- and American- enabled attacks which have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Not in centuries gone by, but now.

Arab lives in Syria haven't mattered to more than a handful of people in Britain throughout nearly a decade of explicit military, political, financial and propaganda support to fanatic hordes seeking to destroy the secular Arab Republic.

When black people hung like strange fruit from Libyan trees following the UK/US/French invasion of the country and the sodomising with a bayonet of its leader, liberals like Hillary Clinton and David Cameron laughed – literally, in Clinton's case.

In Britain, where around 60,000 excess deaths were reported by the Office of National Statistics and the Financial Times over just a few months in 2020, a hugely disproportionate number of those deaths were suffered by BAME citizens. Those black lives don't seem to have mattered much. Not enough to protest about, at least.

Were disgust – entirely justified – at the crimes of British imperialism in previous centuries translated into a determination to end the default British position of interfering in every part of the world – up to and including actual invasion – that would be a good thing of course, however unlikely.

Unlikely because the British crimes of the past didn't happen because the criminals were British. They didn’t happen because the criminals were, psychologically speaking, sociopathic and often possibly psychopathic individuals – although many of them were, judging by their actions. Captain Cook didn't slice off the limbs of recalcitrant natives in the antipodes because he loved the sight of blood (though he might well have) but because he was about the business of conquest and empire. And empire is about the business of business. Britain conquered much of the world not to hand out bibles but to loot everything they could carry – including, in the form of slavery, the very people of the invaded lands themselves.

Imperialism is ineluctably a development of our capitalist model, the need for captive markets and cheap (preferably free) sources of labour, basic commodities and raw materials.

It was not the British working class who benefitted from the British Empire – not the wage-slaves of the slavers.

The colonised peoples and the slaves all had the same enemy, which fed on the blood, sweat and tears of us all. The enemy is at home. Not in the 17th century, but now.

- - -
George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator. Follow him on Twitter @georgegalloway

Report card on Trump's Foreign Policy...

Although Trump may have not directly engaged in new warfare, he has actually been more war hawkish -- having allocated more money for the US war machine. And things are not going to change for better even if Joe Biden is elected...

Trump’s Record on Foreign Policy: Lost Wars, New Conflicts and Broken Promises

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Global Research, July 02, 2020

On June 13, President Donald Trump told the graduating class at West Point, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” That is what Trump has promised since 2016, but the “endless” wars have not ended. Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles than George W. Bush or Barack Obama did in their first terms, and there are still roughly as many US bases and troops overseas as when he was elected.

Trump routinely talks up both sides of every issue, and the corporate media still judge him more by what he says (and tweets) than by his actual policies. So it isn’t surprising that he is still trying to confuse the public about his aggressive war policy. But Trump has been in office for nearly three and a half years, and he now has a record on war and peace that we can examine.

Such an examination makes one thing very clear: Trump has come closer to starting new wars with North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran than to ending any of the wars he inherited from Obama. His first-term record shows Trump to be just another warmonger in chief.

A Bloody Inheritance

First, let’s look at what Trump inherited. At the end of the Cold War, US political leaders promised Americans a “peace dividend,” and the Senate Budget Committee embraced a proposal to cut the US military budget by 50 percent over the next ten years. Ten years later, only 22 percent in savings were realized, and the George W. Bush administration used the terrorist crimes of September 11 to justify illegal wars, systematic war crimes, and an extraordinary one-sided arms race in which the United States accounted for 45 percent of global military spending from 2003 to 2011. Only half this $2 trillion spending surge (in 2010 dollars) was related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the US Navy and Air Force quietly cashed in a trillion-dollar wish list of new warships, warplanes, and high-tech weapons.

President Barack Obama entered the White House with a pledge to bring home US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to shrink the US military footprint, but his presidency was a triumph of symbolism over substance. He won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize based on a few speeches, a lot of wishful thinking, and the world’s desperate hopes for peace and progress. But by the time Obama stepped down in 2017, he had dropped more bombs and missiles on more countries than Bush did, and had spent even more than Bush on weapons and war.

The major shift in US war policy under Obama was to reduce politically sensitive US troop casualties by transitioning from large-scale military occupations to mass bombing, shelling, and covert and proxy wars. While Republicans derisively dubbed Obama’s doctrine “leading from behind,” this was a transition that was already underway in Bush’s second term, when he committed the United States to completely withdrawing its occupation troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Obama’s defenders, like Trump’s today, were always ready to absolve him of responsibility for war crimes, even as he killed thousands of civilians in air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including the gratuitous assassination of an American teenager in Yemen. Obama launched a new war to destroy Libya, and the United States’ covert role in the war in Syria was similar to its role in Nicaragua in the 1980s, for which, despite its covert nature, the International Court of Justice convicted the United States of aggression and ordered it to pay reparations.

Many senior US military and civilian officials deserve a share of the guilt for America’s systematic crimes of aggression and other war crimes since 2001, but the principle of command responsibility, recognized from the Nuremberg principles to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice, means that the commander in chief of the US armed forces, the president of the United States, bears the heaviest criminal responsibility for these crimes under US and international law.

Is Trump Different?

In January 2017, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, US forces in Iraq conducted their heaviest month of aerial bombardment since the “shock and awe” bombing during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This time, the enemy was the Islamic State (IS), a group spawned by the US invasion of Iraq and Obama’s covert support for Al Qaeda–linked groups in Syria. Iraqi forces captured East Mosul from the Islamic State on January 24, and in February, they began their assault on West Mosul, bombing and shelling it even more heavily until they captured the ruined city in July. A Kurdish Iraqi intelligence report recorded that more than forty thousand civilians were killed in the US-led destruction of Mosul.

Trump famously summed up his policy as “bomb the shit out of” the Islamic State. He appeared to give a green light to the military to murder women and children, saying, “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” Iraqi troops described explicit orders to do exactly that in Mosul. Middle East Eye (MEE) reported that Iraqi forces massacred all the survivors in Mosul’s Old City.

“We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier said. “Daesh (IS), men, women, children. We killed everyone.” An Iraqi major told MEE,

After liberation was announced, the order was given to kill anything or anyone that moved . . . It was not the right thing to do . . . They gave themselves up and we just killed them . . . There is no law here now. Every day, I see that we are doing the same thing as Daesh. People went down to the river to get water because they were dying of thirst and we killed them.

By October 2017, Raqqa in Syria was even more totally destroyed than Mosul in Iraq. Under Obama and Trump, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 118,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in their campaign against the Islamic State, while US HIMARS rockets and US, French, and Iraqi heavy artillery killed even more indiscriminately.

The wholesale destruction of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and other major cities in Iraq and Syria cannot be legally justified under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, any more than the destruction of entire cities in past wars, like Hiroshima or Dresden. Despite the total lack of accountability, it is clear that American bombs, rockets, and shells killed thousands of civilians in each city and town captured. Obama and Trump share responsibility for these terrible crimes, but they are an escalation of the systematic war crimes the United States has committed since 2001 under three presidents.

In Afghanistan, as the Taliban gradually takes control of more of the country, Trump has resisted the temptation to send in tens of thousands more US troops, as Obama did, but he instead approved a major escalation in US bombing that made 2018 and 2019 the heaviest and deadliest years of US bombing in Afghanistan since 2001.

Trump has shrouded his war-making in even greater secrecy than Obama. The US military has not published a monthly Airpower Summary since February 2020, nor official troop deployment numbers for Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria for nearly three years. But the United States has dropped at least twenty thousand bombs on Afghanistan since Trump came to power, and there is no evidence of a reduction in bombing under the peace agreement the administration signed with the Taliban in February. Some US troops have been withdrawn under that agreement, but the remaining 8,600 are still being replaced as their tours end, keeping US troop strength at about the same level as when Obama left office.

Trump made a great show of repositioning US troops in Syria in October 2019, leaving the United States’ Kurdish allies in Rojava to confront the Turkish invasion alone. But there are still at least 500 US troops in Syria, and Trump deployed 14,000 more US troops to the Middle East in 2019, including to a new base in Saudi Arabia.

Trump has vetoed every bill passed by Congress to disengage US forces from the Saudi war in Yemen and to halt the sales of US-made warplanes and bombs, which the Saudis use to systematically kill Yemeni civilians. He created a new conflict with Iran by pulling out of the nuclear deal, and in January 2020, he capriciously flirted with a full-scale war on Iran by ordering the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi military commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Iraq.

Trump’s bizarre decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to a plot of land that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized borders — and partly on Palestinian territory that Israel is illegally occupying — quite literally took US international relations into uncharted territory. Then Trump unveiled a so-called peace plan based on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambition to annex the rest of Palestine into a “Greater Israel” with vastly expanded — but still unrecognized and illegal — international borders.

Trump has also backed a coup in Bolivia, staged several failed ones in Venezuela, and targeted even the United States’ closest allies with sanctions to try to prevent them from trading with US enemies. Trump’s brutal sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba are not a peaceful alternative to war, but a form of economic warfare just as deadly as bombs, especially during a pandemic and its accompanying economic meltdown.

A Boon to the Merchants of Death

Once the large-scale US military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan ended under Obama, the US military budget fell to $621 billion by 2015. But since then, military spending for procurement, research and development (R&D), and base construction has risen by 39 percent. This has been a huge windfall for the Big Five US weapons makers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — whose arms sales revenues rose 30 percent between 2015 and 2019.

The 49 percent increase to more than $100 billion for R&D on new weapons systems in 2020, part of the enormous $718 billion Pentagon budget, is a down payment on trillions of dollars in future revenue for the merchants of death unless these programs are stopped.

The pretext for Trump’s huge investment in big-ticket, high-tech weapons, including a new Space Force with a $15 billion price tag for 2021, is the New Cold War with Russia and China that he officially unveiled in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Obama was already trying to shift away from the United States’ lost counterinsurgency wars in the greater Middle East through his “Pivot to Asia,” the US-backed coup in Ukraine, and the expansion of US land and naval forces encircling Russia and China.

But Trump has the same problem as Obama as he tries to wriggle out of the “forever wars”: how to bring US troops home without making it obvious to the whole world that this chronically weak imperial power and its extravagant multitrillion-dollar war machine has been defeated everywhere. Even the most expensive weapons still only kill people and break things. Establishing peace and stability require other kinds of power and legitimacy, which the United States does not possess and which cannot be bought.

Before President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961, he remarked, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” Trump is obviously as dazzled by chests full of medals and whizz-bang technology as every other president since Eisenhower, so he will keep giving the Pentagon everything it wants to keep spreading violence and chaos around the world.

Just as Obama co-opted and muted liberal opposition to Bush’s wars and record arms spending, Trump has co-opted and muted conservative opposition to Obama’s wars. Now, with the outpouring of protests against domestic police repression and calls for defunding the police, there is a growing chorus to also defund the military. That is certainly not a call Trump would listen to, but would Joe Biden be more receptive to public calls for peace and disarmament than Obama and Trump?

Probably not, based on his long record in the Senate, his roles in authorizing war on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, his close ties to Israel, and his failure to rein in US war-making as vice president, despite personally opposing Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan. Biden is also trying to outdo Trump in his opposition to China. Like Obama and Trump, Biden would be mainly a new manager and salesman in chief to sell the military-industrial complex’s latest strategy for war and global military occupation to the corporate media and the American public.

We will not rescue our country from the iron grip of the military-industrial complex by picking the lesser evil and hoping for the best. That has not worked for sixty years, since Eisenhower defined the problem so clearly in his farewell address.

On the other hand, a civil society coalition, led by the Poor People’s Campaign and including CODEPINK, is calling for a $350 billion cut in the military budget to fund human needs and public services, and representatives Barbara Lee, Pramila Jayapal, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a resolution in Congress to do just that.

At the margins, this campaign could have more impact on Biden than on Trump, but not if people sweep up the bunting on election night and think their job is done, as liberals did with Obama and anti-war conservatives did with Trump. Unless and until the American public applies overwhelming pressure to dismantle the US war machine and its futile bid for “full spectrum” global dominance, the US military will keep losing wars on its own terms, bleeding us dry (metaphorically), and bleeding our neighbors overseas dry (literally), until it loses a major war with mass US casualties or destroys us all in a nuclear war.

The US peace movement has always had huge passive public support, but it will take mass collective action, not just passive support, to secure a peaceful future for our children and grandchildren. Public outrage and activism are starting to take away the license to kill black and brown people with impunity from the militarized RoboCops on our streets. The same kind of collective political action can defund and disarm the US military and take away its license to kill black and brown people everywhere.

Building a new anti-war movement that is connected to the domestic anti-police struggle is the only thing that can rein in US militarism. Because reelecting a president with as much blood on his hands as Trump — or simply transferring the command of the war machine to Joe Biden — certainly won’t.

*

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq