America is fighting wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, sending drones to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and striving to revive the Cold War with Russia. These conflicts are good for no one but the military industrial complex that has had its hands on the throat of American government for decades. This institution is a cultural cancer that spreads across the world, threatening civilisation and our species. If there are future generations, they will look back with the same degree of horror at manufactured war as we do at the history of slavery or Nazi death-camps.
Let’s face it. Those running our governments knew damn well that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They do not give a damn about the people of Libya or Afghanistan, or whether they enjoy democracy. They support the jihadist rebels intent upon turning a formerly stable and secular Syria into an unholy mess ripe to be made holy in the mold of Islamic State. Iran is next in their sights, already under attack by severe economic sanction. Western nations are allied to far worse characters than those whose regimes they so righteously strive to change.
The rulers of today’s America need war. From their angle, as long as weapons are expended and fear generated it matters not whether they win or lose their wars. Nobody is going to invade the USA and neither soldiers nor generals will end up in prisoner of war camps. Military careers are made in war, not in peace. If their violent actions create more conflict or even bring it to Western shores that’s just more business for the security, killing and fear management industries.
This is an industry that seeks to create conflicts that will result in the death of hundreds of thousands and the dislocation of millions. I can assure you that these dead and dislocated are people very like you and me. They have, or had, children they raised and love, parents and grandparents they revere, businesses they built, homes they made home, gardens and farms they treasure.
You and I, with our taxes, fund the military industrial complex. It is a cancer that is metastasising and devouring us. Far from ‘defense’ industries protecting global citizens from danger they pose a more real and present risk to our life and liberty than global warming or a coronal mass ejection from the Sun. There is nobody out there from whom America needs defending, yet its ‘defense’ expenditure surpasses that of the next seven nations combined.
We do not want to believe that those who rule us, or those who quietly rule them, could be so cruel and heartless. They tell us they have nothing but our best interests in mind. Yet history is riddled with rulers who thought nothing of human life, rulers who slaughtered and raped all manner of innocents for all manner of reasons, including the pleasure of it.
There is no reason to assume that because we have some new-fangled way of determining who our next set of rulers will be that we thereby exclude the likes of a Nero, Genghis Khan, Hitler or Stalin from assuming power. One has only to look at the current American election to realize that we cannot rely upon the so-called democratic process to prevent dangerous criminals and demagogues from running a militaristic empire on a par with that of the Romans.
As long as we buy into the notion that top-down rulers are the best way to maintain order in our community we accept a system that disconnects the feedback loops needed to direct its evolution. With feedback loops our communications evolved from undersea telegraph cables going dot-dash to the smartphone connecting us all; our transport went from canals and bicycles to jet planes. Without feedback loops our security services have evolved from police, judges and prisons to more powerful and expensive police, judges and prisons, all of them thriving on crime. If crime rates were to halve they’d be out of work, or need to criminalise a raft of victimless crimes to compensate. The vast majority of US prison inmates today have been incarcerated for victimless crimes, and are used as virtual slave labour on production lines.
Instead of giving war-faring states the credit for our positive progress as humanity, we should applaud our own heroic ability to evolve despite their history of destructive and obstructive influence. In the freedom of the Internet major online retailers develop and improve low-cost means to control and compensate for crime without handcuffs, courtrooms and prisoners. This should give us cause for optimism. Perhaps it is possible for humanity to live together in peace without having to slaughter each other in its pursuit.
When we have top-down government determining policies with coercively enforced rules it follows that those making and applying the rules are the rulers. How those rulers arrive at their positions is not, ultimately, the point. The system arose long ago as a means for the few to live off the labours of the many, self-financing themselves with taxes demanded by force. There have been many variations on this theme in the past 4500 years or so, but wherever you have a state with the power to make and enforce rules, there is likely to be a despotic elite striving to get their hands on the controls. Sometimes they succeed.
We must recognize that just such an elite has succeeded in the US. Uncle Sam has been incarcerating his own subjects at unprecedented levels while exporting war and armed conflict across the world. This is a shocking unthinkable thought to most, but one that both presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy warned Americans of in the 1960’s. They were not paranoid conspiracy theorists and their fears have become reality.
What can we possibly do about this? The first step, undoubtedly, is to stop being in denial and to open our eyes to the truth. Stop swallowing the propaganda. Let go of the fear and recognize there is no existential need for this so-called “necessary evil.” We are stronger and more powerful than we know. Our collective belief is at the foundation of state power, more important than all its trappings and uniformed inforcers. Whoever moves into the White House next will make little difference. We can.
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I write this in a world awash with nuclear weapons as two frightening characters fight over the reins of the most militarised nation in history. So-called democracy has come down to letting Americans pick which of two candidates they don’t want least. Amusing, to someone from another planet. The book that I wrote goes well beyond the “who did what to whom” approach, looking at the power of freedom and the perils of suppressing it by governmental decree. It is titled The State Is Out Of Date – We Can Do It Better. It will give you hope for the future.