The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,

“What are those?”

“Soldiers.”

“What are soldiers?”

“They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill as many of the other side as he can.”

The girl held still and studied.

“Do you know … I know something?”

“Yes, what is it you know?”

“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”

~ Carl Sandburg

The neocons are winning. The neocons are grinning.

Trump has made a 180-degree policy shift on Syria, evidenced by last week’s cruise missile strike against the Assad government in response to what was almost certainly a false flag in the Idlib chemical weapons attack. And now that this concession has been made to the neocons’ insatiable bloodlust, of course, they are now saying that Russia was responsible for that attack.

The corporate media, which has never met a war it didn’t love, has been bandying about an unverifiable claim from an anonymous source the Associated Press refers to only as “a senior US official” that the Russians knew about the Syrian government’s still completely unproven sarin gas attack on noncombatants in advance. This unverifiable anonymous claim is being contradicted by other unverifiable claims by other anonymous “US officials”, because that’s how we do journalism now, apparently.

Arizona’s undead Senator John McCain, who was positively giddy with joy over Trump’s Tomahawk missile strike, is repeating this unsubstantiated claim as fact and taking it a step further to say that Russia and Syria “cooperated” with each other in their evil scheme to kill noncombatants with chemical weapons, as well as telling the press in Belgrade that Russians “should be banned from taking off from the areas from which these attacks were carried out.”

The Dracula of Arizona doesn’t bother explaining how a sovereign nation’s air force can be “banned” from doing anything, but of course what he means is that Russia should be threatened to keep its planes out of those areas on pain of military retaliation. A month ago I would’ve taken McCain’s insistence that the United States move half a click away from direct military conflict with a nuclear superpower a lot less seriously, but seeing how he’s been getting his way in Syria more and more lately, we should probably be paying attention. Meanwhile McCain’s senatorial mini-me Lindsey Graham is calling for thousands more US troops on the ground in Syria, ostensibly to fight ISIS but it’s probably not a coincidence that the neocons are trying to fill Syria with US troops at the same time they’re moving their other chess pieces into place for regime change.

The neocon agenda is clear, and Trump certainly seems to be falling into line with it and distancing himself from his anti-regime change base in the alt-right. Breitbart writers are saying they’ve been forbidden from discussing the power struggle between the anti-establishment Steve Bannon, who opposes regime change, and Jared Kushner, whose agenda they’re much more suspicious of. Even Trump’s biggest cheerleader Alex Jones has been seriously freaked out by his hero, claiming his sources in the Pentagon have all been ordered to stop talking to him and urging his listeners to “pray for Donald Trump” to rescue him from the “deception” and “enemies” he’s surrounded by.

So there’s a lot of movement happening, and it seems to be moving in a direction that could lead to a head-on military confrontation with a nuclear superpower, something David Brock’s shill army is actually starting to advocate, which means the rest of the vagina hat-wearing McResistance keyboard warriors probably aren’t far behind.

But what if we refused?

In February of 2015, long before any of this drama started, my husband made an interesting post on Facebook saying that in a few years false flags would be used to manufacture consent for a third World War, adding in the comments that “this time we’ll be fighting Russia.” Neither of us can remember what prompted this post, but what caused me to remember the post itself was the vision he offered after his prediction:

This will look very scary, but it will actually be a huge opportunity for our whole entire species. We can at that time all agree to shrug off the powers that be and say a collective “Nah, no thanks” to business as usual. The U.S. dollar has been kept on top solely due to military force for a long time now, so it will mean some changes, but if we all come together instead of letting corrupt voices divide us we’ll all be okay. And then we can start working on turning this thing around, shrugging off the systems of oppressive inequality and beginning to reverse the horrors the status quo has inflicted upon our environment. So just keep this in mind, okay? When the time comes this can be a golden opportunity for us to all come together if we manage to keep our heads. They really could have a war that nobody comes to.

Crazy? Maybe. Maybe not. Yoko Ono’s husband said “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

What if that did happen, though? A Military Times poll last year found that America’s armed forces overwhelmingly oppose further nation-building operations on the part of their government, stating in the accompanying editorial that military personnel feel “ground down by 15 years of combat” and would prefer the US focus on homeland defense. US troops online are decrying the looming possibility that they may wind up being forced to fight on the same side as ISIS and al-Qaeda against the Syrian government for fake reasons toward a pernicious agenda.

What if everyone — the military, the public, everyone — just refused? What if the plutocrats who dominate our civilization decided to cast our entire planet into war over some idiotic power grab, and we all said, “Nah”? In trying to make World War 3 happen, they’d actually be opening the door for us to toss them out on their asses. If we could just see through the false flags, the lies and manipulations, we’d see a bunch of sociopaths pushing us toward something literally nobody wants but them.

And then we could change things. All it would take is one resounding “NO!” to existing power structures for us to shrug them off in their entirety. And then we could begin focusing on dedicating our immense collective brainpower to collaborating instead of killing. To lifting one another up instead of keeping everyone but ourselves down. To resolving the impending climate crisis, for God’s sake.

It could happen. Our species has never had the ability to network and share information across the globe like it has right now. 2016 saw America’s ruling political establishment completely lose control of the narrative for a hot second. We could do that again. We could do a lot more. When they try to make us all kill each other, we could instead set ourselves free.

This post will likely be inundated with naysayers, pessimists and scoffers, but I don’t care. What I’m sharing here is a real possibility, and it is worth keeping open.

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