We can’t go on; we must go on.

This isn’t an original thought. I’ve cribbed it from Samuel Beckett and twisted it for our purposes. The line comes from Beckett’s inscrutable novella The Unnamable. It’s spoken by someone curled in a fetal position, confined to a giant jar. He’s immobile. He can’t move. But he knows he must if he’s going to survive.

Beckett’s story was unspeakably strange to me when I first read it in 1979. It seems very familiar to me now. Nothing seems to happen. Or perhaps everything that’s happening has already happened before. He’s stuck in a history that keeps repeating itself like a needle stuck in a lethal groove. If history won’t move, he must. This is our challenge, too, isn’t it? But not only must we move, but we need to move others along with us.

CounterPunch went online in 1998, just in time for Clinton’s war on Serbia. Now we’re at war in Europe again. No one asked us if we wanted another war. It was imposed on us by powers that don’t ask for consent, as if we are voiceless figures stuck in a jar.

You could say CounterPunch was born in wartime and we’ve spent the last 25 years covering bloody conflicts, even when we desperately want to write about something else.

I don’t consider myself a war correspondent by any measure. That harrowing calling was taken up by writers like Robert Fisk, John Ross, Kathy Kelly, Franklin Lamb, Uri Avnery, Saul Landau, Mark Levy, Matthew Hoh, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn. Journalists who have been under literal fire. Writers you’ve all read here on CounterPunch.

Still, I have been writing about wars for nearly three decades now, even when I’d rather be writing about cerulean warblers or the geology of the Snake River canyon. New wars keep coming, regardless of who controls Congress or the White House, and the old ones don’t end. Not really: Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Serbia, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Niger, Ecuador, and now the entire Caribbean basin.

History keeps getting recycled, only more gruesomely.

We can’t move on; we must move on.

Obama bombed more people than any Nobel Laureate this side of Henry Kissinger. Who was there to call him out? Not the New York Times or Washington Post. The wars of the last 30 years have been enabled by the very journalistic institutions that were meant to challenge them. Journalism failed when it was needed most. Worse than failed. In many ways, it was complicit. We refused to be complicit. Our critiques of Obama’s wars were just as unflinching as the ones we had leveled at Bush or Trump. War is war no matter who is programming the drone strikes

Not everyone saw it that way. We lost readers. We lost donors. People complained we didn’t give Obama a chance to prove himself. This is where we were forced to flip Beckett on his head. We must move on, we can’t move on. If we move on to a more comforting form of journalism, as so many other publications have done, who will be left to put the constraints on a military machine that is running rampant over our lives, our democracy, and the future of our planet?

The proof about Obama was right there in the escalating body count: the Afghan surge, Asian pivot, droning of American citizens, a genocidal war on Yemen, a CIA coup in Honduras, the jailing of people who blew the whistle on his wars. By the time cruise missiles were hitting Sirte and Benghazi, previously disaffected readers started returning. Damn, you were right! Believe me, we took no pleasure in it.

@CP A message from Jeffrey St. Clair