As an anti-war voter, I refuse to support either Trump or Harris

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I have been a Democrat all my life. Growing up, the Democrats were the anti-war party — the party of peace. I marched in the 1960s with Gene McCarthy, Ben Spock, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Martin Luther King, George McGovern, and Robert Kennedy. These were my heroes.

But since the 1960s, the powers in the Democratic Party have increasingly joined with Republicans in a series of aggressive worldwide empire-building policies.

We need a president who knows how to keep the peace.

America has had a succession of war-time presidents who have formed a uniparty coalition of sorts — a neoconservative-liberal interventionist alliance that has waged endless wars undeclared by Congress for the last 60 years. Sometimes, the wars have not directly involved American soldiers, but they have been wars all the same, waged with proxies and American arms, drones and rockets.

There is no sugarcoating this: our war policies have been responsible for tens of thousands of lost American lives as well as millions of innocent foreign civilians. More often than not, these wars have backfired and made America less safe.

In 1973, I saw this up close and personal. I was in Chile, the country of my birth, with a young Robert Kennedy Jr. when Henry Kissinger unleashed the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. Augusto Pinochet’s thugs shot at Kennedy, who was 19, and at me. Under the direction of the CIA, they were toting American machine guns, shooting American bullets paid for by American taxpayers. Fortunately, we were not hit. But tens of thousands of Chilean civilians were slaughtered for no reason.

Allende was no threat to the security of the U.S. Henry Kissinger just wanted to teach Chile a lesson. This incident exemplifies the aggressive war policy — cold wars, secret wars, drone wars, and proxy wars — that the U.S. has carried on relentlessly for six decades.

These decades of non-stop fighting included two major hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, a proxy CIA invasion of Cuba, and regime change aggressions in our hemisphere that have included Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela and Panama. America allied with the Afghan Mujahideen to wage a proxy war against Russia for 10 years, from 1979 to 1989, a war which resulted in the deaths of 3 million Afghans, while millions more fled the country.

Despite the end of the Cold War in 1990, we have had three decades of non-stop fighting: Somalia 1992, Haiti 1994, Bosnia and Herzegovina 1995, Serbia-Kosovo 1999, Afghanistan again in 2001, and Iraq. Since 2003, America has launched drone wars in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Syria. America has more than 750 military bases around the world.

The U.S. has framed these wars as exclusively humanitarian under the pretext of democratic nation-building. But the world at large has not been fooled.

The American people have been duped into supporting even the most foolish of these wars because they were portrayed as a tool of good to be deployed against evil. The question is: Have these six decades of war added to America’s security or the well-being of its citizens?

America has been the most secure world power ever. It is surrounded by two deep oceans, on the east and west, bordered by friendly neighbors in the north and south.

America’s military spending is bigger than that of the next nine countries combined, and its weaponry is far and away the most technologically advanced. It has nothing to fear. It is mostly impervious to attack.

But the fearmongers in Washington continue to whip up a public frenzy over the most trivial events. One example is when an errant Chinese weather balloon flew over U.S. territory. The military and the president incited anti-China hysteria for five days, when they knew from the beginning that the balloon was harmless.

The fact that Washington almost always fights overseas proves that U.S. policy is usually offensive — little of what America does militarily has to do with its own security.

These mostly useless conflicts of choice have cost tens of trillions of dollars. It has been impossible to combine this massive expenditure with funding social programs like Social Security, health care, infrastructure and education. This largely accounts for our $34 billion inflation-causing debt. With American missiles streaming into Russia, American bombs landing in Iran, and American jets flying provocatively inside Chinese waters, we are too close to World War III to take any chances. The situation now is especially dire. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to global catastrophe ever. They assert that our avoidance of nuclear war has to do more with sheer luck than with a successful strategy. The priority of the Democrats and Kamala Harris has proven to be the continued escalation of global wars. She ended her convention speech with an aggressive war-mongering promise, “I will always ensure America has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” This is the dilemma anti-war voters face. Donald Trump is sometimes seen as the anti-interventionist/war candidate, but his threat to use nuclear weapons is scary, as well as his obnoxious bully boy attitude to every problem. I have little faith and much fear of what he could possibly do.

I will vote for Jill Stein, even though my vote will not make a difference in my blue state.

Blake Fleetwood was a reporter for The New York Times and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Village Voice, Atlantic and the Washington Monthly on a number of issues.

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As an anti-war voter, I refuse to support either Trump or Harris

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