April 30, 2023
The war
industry, a state within a state, disembowels the nation, stumbles from one
military fiasco to the next, strips us of civil liberties and pushes us towards
suicidal wars with Russia and China.
America is a
stratocracy, a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic
among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war.
The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in
waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central
Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical
amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licenses the
war machine to economically disembowel the country and drive the Empire into
one self-defeating conflict after another. The militarists win every election.
They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a
Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”
Since the end of
the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax
dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest
single sustaining activity of the government. Military systems are sold before
they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered.
Foreign aid is contingent on buying U.S. weapons. Egypt, which receives some
$1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying
and maintaining U.S. weapons systems. Israel has received $158 billion in
bilateral assistance from the U.S. since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in
the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from
U.S. weapons manufacturers. The American public funds the research, development
and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on
behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.
Between October
2021 and September 2022, the U.S. spent $877 billion on the military, that’s
more than the next 10 countries, including China, Russia, Germany, France and
the United Kingdom combined. These huge military expenditures, along with the
rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. national
debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire Gross
Domestic Product (GDP). This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the
dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the U.S.
spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.
The public,
bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation. It revels in
the despicable beauty of our military prowess. It speaks in the
thought-terminating clichés spewed out by mass culture and mass media. It
imbibes the illusion of omnipotence and wallows in self-adulation.
The intoxication
of war is a plague. It imparts an emotional high that is impervious to logic,
reason or fact. No nation is immune. The gravest mistake made by European
socialists on the eve of the First World War was the belief that the working
classes of France, Germany, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and
Great Britain would not be divided into antagonistic tribes because of disputes
between imperialist governments. They would not, the socialists assured
themselves, sign on for the suicidal slaughter of millions of working men in
the trenches. Instead, nearly every socialist leader walked away from their
anti-war platform to back their nation’s entry into the war. The handful who
did not, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were sent to prison.
A society
dominated by militarists distorts its social, cultural, economic and political
institutions to serve the interests of the war industry. The essence of the
military is masked with subterfuges — using the military to carry out
humanitarian relief missions, evacuating civilians in danger, as we see in the
Sudan, defining military aggression as “humanitarian intervention” or a way to
protect democracy and liberty, or lauding the military as carrying out a vital
civic function by teaching leadership, responsibility, ethics and skills to
young recruits. The true face of the military — industrial slaughter — is
hidden.
The mantra of
the militarized state is national security. If every discussion begins with a
question of national security, every answer includes force or the threat of
force. The preoccupation with internal and external threats divides the world
into friend and foe, good and evil. Militarized societies are fertile ground
for demagogues. Militarists, like demagogues, see other nations and cultures in
their own image – threatening and aggressive. They seek only domination.
It was not in
our national interest to wage war for two decades across the Middle East. It is
not in our national interest to go to war with Russia or China. But militarists
need war the way a vampire needs blood.
After the
collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev and later Vladimir Putin
lobbied to be integrated into western economic and military alliances. An
alliance that included Russia would have nullified the calls to expand NATO —
which the U.S. had promised it would not do beyond the borders of a unified
Germany — and have made it impossible to convince countries in eastern and
central Europe to spend billions on U.S. military hardware. Moscow’s requests
were rebuffed. Russia was made the enemy, whether it wanted to be or not. None
of this made us more secure. Washington’s decision to interfere in Ukraine’s
domestic affairs by backing a coup in 2014 triggered a civil war and Russia’s
subsequent invasion.
But for those
who profit from war, antagonizing Russia, like antagonizing China, is a good business
model. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin saw their stock prices increase by
40 percent and 37 percent respectively as a result of the Ukraine conflict.
A war with
China, now an industrial giant, would disrupt the global supply chain with
devastating effects on the U.S. and global economy. Apple produces 90 percent
of its products in China. U.S. trade with China was $690.6 billion last year.
In 2004, U.S. manufacturing output was more than twice China’s. China’s output
is now nearly double that of the United States. China produces the largest
number of ships, steel and smartphones in the world. It dominates the global
production of chemicals, metals, heavy industrial equipment and electronics. It
is the world’s largest rare earth mineral exporter, its greatest reserve holder
and is responsible for 80 percent of its refining worldwide. Rare earth
minerals are essential to the manufacture of computer chips, smartphones,
television screens, medical equipment, fluorescent light bulbs, cars, wind turbines,
smart bombs, fighter jets and satellite communications.
War with China
would result in massive shortages of a variety of goods and resources, some
vital to the war industry, paralyzing U.S. businesses. Inflation and
unemployment would rocket upwards. Rationing would be implemented. The global
stock exchanges, at least in the short term, would be shut down. It would
trigger a global depression. If the U.S. Navy was able to block oil shipments
to China and disrupt its sea lanes, the conflict could potentially become
nuclear.
In “NATO 2030:
Unified for a New Era,” the military alliance sees the future as a battle for
hegemony with rival states, especially China. It calls for the preparation of
prolonged global conflict. In October 2022, Air Force General Mike Minihan,
head of Air Mobility Command, presented his “Mobility Manifesto” to a packed
military conference. During this unhinged fearmongering diatribe, Minihan
argued that if the U.S. does not dramatically escalate its preparations for a
war with China, America’s children will find themselves “subservient to a rules
based order that benefits only one country [China].”
According to the
New York Times, the Marine Corps is training units for beach assaults, where
the Pentagon believes the first battles with China may occur, across “the first
island chain” that includes, “Okinawa and Taiwan down to Malaysia as well as
the South China Sea and disputed islands in the Spratlys and the Paracels.”.
Militarists
drain funds from social and infrastructure programs. They pour money into
research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy
technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools
decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. The public is impoverished. The harsh
forms of control the militarists test and perfect abroad migrate back to the
homeland. Militarized Police. Militarized drones. Surveillance. Vast prison
complexes. Suspension of basic civil liberties. Censorship.
Those such as
Julian Assange, who challenge the stratocracy, who expose its crimes and
suicidal folly, are ruthlessly persecuted. But the war state harbors within it
the seeds of its own destruction. It will cannibalize the nation until it collapses.
Before then, it will lash out, like a blinded cyclops, seeking to restore its
diminishing power through indiscriminate violence. The tragedy is not that the
U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so
many innocents with us.
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