Showing posts with label endless wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label endless wars. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Our History is a Story of Endless Wars

Our History is a Story of Endless Wars

by Steve Beckow

Posted on January 14, 2024


Our history is a story of endless wars. Who remembers the Battle of Fleurus, 1794?


If anyone says they’ve studied human history, they often find that what they’ve studied is nothing more than wars and treaties and alliances.

Moreover, as a male, a lot of male rituals revolve around pecking orders and competition and, well, war.

Unsurprisingly, I grew up reading Classics Illustrated (which were all about wars) and Landmark Classics (the same), and watching Winslow of the Navy, etc., etc. Later in life I was gripped by the question, what could cause a world war to happen.

It’s that question that I’ve addressed in the past and would like to address again here. (1)

One thing I’ve noticed about wars is that they’re usually the result of, and become about, the forcible projection of one person’s “personality” upon the rest of the group and then upon other groups.  Jesus described it here:

“Your ego is a part of you that appears to be split off, separate, and which runs with its own fear-filled and self-centered agenda, thinking that it can destroy the opposition and rule the world. Most humans discover its limitations during childhood and learn to negotiate with other egos to form alliances, easing the terror of separation or loneliness.

“But a few will not negotiate or compromise and are either quickly defeated or rise to become dictators of one sort or another as their egos take complete control of them – gurus, father figures, industrial bosses, politicians, church leaders – and spend their Earth lives sowing seeds of distrust and betrayal as they attempt to achieve positions of power that they think will make them invincible.

“Of course they cannot succeed, but they frequently convince others that safety can only be achieved by holding positions of authority backed up by the force of arms.” (2)

Hitler projected his personality on the German people. He fought a war where he ignored his blind spots and areas of ignorance and staked everything on his skills as an orator, what little military knowledge he had, and moments of inspiration.

But none of these had him equip his troops for a Russian winter campaign. He knew nothing of logistics and overstretched his supply lines.

He refused to allow his men to tactically retreat or surrender when things became hopeless. It wasn’t in his personality. The troops collapsed instead.

All of it was a projection of himself – his moods, his hunches, his determinations, his shortcomings, etc. – onto the nation. Mussolini the same. Certainly Stalin.

One wouldn’t describe any of them as selfless.

One wouldn’t say they were desireless or had great self-control.

For them, “I want” was the only law others had to satisfy and obey.

***

Dictatorial leaders emerge at times when people are in dire straits, like a Depression or incessant civil war, and are looking for a strong leader to lead them out of it.

Usually the press plays a role, misinforming and misdirecting the public, well, just as it does now.

They project their personality out onto the world, requiring it to behave in certain ways in exchange for the leader’s promises of prosperity, safety, etc. They require obedience, unswerving loyalty, and so on, in return.

The formula for the leader is limited by the leader’s own range of response-ability. I think it safe to say that none of them knows what real love is and the prosperity they promise is usually purchased at someone else’s expense.

What so often determines a dictator’s success is the lengths they go to; witness Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives and Stalin’s purges. Some will stop at nothing – even trying to exterminate whole peoples – to be victorious.

This is the basic model of the rise of a dictatorial leader, as far as I can make it out.

The Divine Mother told us their fate:

Divine Mother: 
It is painful for a being that seeks power for themselves or power over another, whether it is a parent over a child, a husband over a wife, a man over an army. It matters not. The yearning [for], the exercise of control never gives joy. The pain simply grows. And so the actions become more grotesque, larger, until the breakdown is and has [been] and will be occurring. (3)

Matthew reassures us that “the day of dictators is over and so is the day of supporting those dictators for self-serving reasons.”

“The day of exploiting Earth’s resources without regard for environmental destruction is over, as is the day of the wealth of the world in the hands of a few. Everything based in darkness is swiftly coming to an end.” (4)

I’m overjoyed that it’s coming to an end. But it’s taking a large dose of realism, good self-defense, and more than a few lives lost to bring it to that end.

Footnotes

(1) See “The Fate of the Dictator,” 

(2) Jesus through John Smallman, Jan. 25, 2013.

(3) ”Transcript ~ The Divine Mother: Take Up Your Divine Authority, AHWAA, February 23, 2017,”  February 28, 2017, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2017/02/28/transcript-divine-mother-take-divine-authority-ahwaa-february-23-2017/.

(4) Matthew’s Message, March 25, 2011.

Steve Beckow 

 

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Pimps Of War

Pimps Of War

By Chris Hedges

Posted on 07/11/2023


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The U.S. public has been conned, once again, into pouring billions into another endless war.

The playbook the pimps of war use to lure us into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change. Freedom and democracy are threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with a “rules based international order” is at stake. Victory is assured.

The results are also the same. The justifications and narratives are exposed as lies. The cheery prognosis is false. Those on whose behalf we are supposedly fighting are as venal as those we are fighting against.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war crime, although one that was provoked by NATO expansion and by the United States backing of the 2014 “Maidan” coup which ousted the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych wanted economic integration with the European Union, but not at the expense of economic and political ties with Russia. The war will only be solved through negotiations that allow ethnic Russians in Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s protection, as well as Ukrainian neutrality, which means the country cannot join NATO. The longer these negotiations are delayed the more Ukrainians will suffer and die. Their cities and infrastructure will continue to be pounded into rubble.

But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to serve U.S. interests. It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is irrelevant.

“First, equipping our friends on the front lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way — in both dollars and American lives — to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States,” admitted Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

“Second, Ukraine’s effective defense of its territory is teaching us lessons about how to improve the defenses of partners who are threatened by China. It is no surprise that senior officials from Taiwan are so supportive of efforts to help Ukraine defeat Russia. Third, most of the money that’s been appropriated for Ukraine security assistance doesn’t actually go to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense manufacturing. It funds new weapons and munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace the older material we have provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this assistance means more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American servicemembers.”

Once the truth about these endless wars seeps into public consciousness, the media, which slavishly promotes these conflicts, drastically reduces coverage. The military debacles, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, continue largely out of view. By the time the U.S. concedes defeat, most barely remember that these wars are being fought.

The pimps of war who orchestrate these military fiascos migrate from administration to administration. Between posts they are ensconced in think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, The Atlantic Council and The Brookings Institution — funded by corporations and the war industry. Once the Ukraine war comes to its inevitable conclusion, these Dr. Strangeloves will seek to ignite a war with China. The U.S. Navy and military are already menacing and encircling China. God help us if we don’t stop them.

These pimps of war con us into one conflict after another with flattering narratives that paint us as the world’s saviors. They don’t even have to be innovative. The rhetoric is lifted from the old playbook. We naively swallow the bait and embrace the flag — this time blue and yellow — to become unwitting agents in our self-immolation.

Since the end of the Second World War, the government has spent between 45 to 90 percent of the federal budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest sustained activity of the U.S. government. It has stopped mattering — at least to the pimps of war — whether these wars are rational or prudent. The war industry metastasizes within the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from the inside. The U.S. is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an impoverished working class and is burdened with a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy social services.

Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale, poor generalship, outdated weapons, desertions, a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fight with shovels, and severe supply shortages — supposed to collapse months ago? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed to plunge the ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is it that inflation rates in Europe and the United States are higher than in Russia despite these attacks on the Russian economy?

Wasn’t the nearly $150 billion in sophisticated military hardware, financial and humanitarian assistance pledged by the U.S., EU and 11 other countries supposed to have turned the tide of the war? How is it that perhaps a third of the tanks Germany and the U.S. provided were swiftly turned by Russian mines, artillery, anti-tank weapons, air strikes and missiles into charred hunks of metal at the start of the vaunted counter-offensive? Wasn’t this latest Ukrainian counter-offensive, which was originally known as the “spring offensive,” supposed to punch through Russia’s heavily fortified front lines and regain huge swathes of territory? How can we explain the tens of thousands of Ukrainian military casualties and the forced conscription by Ukraine’s military? Even our retired generals and former CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security officials, who serve as analysts on networks such as CNN and MSNBC, can’t say the offensive has succeeded.

And what of the Ukrainian democracy we are fighting to protect? Why did the Ukrainian parliament revoke the official use of minority languages, including Russian, three days after the 2014 coup? How do we rationalize the eight years of warfare against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region before the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022? How do we explain the killing of over 14,200 people and the 1.5 million people who were displaced, before Russia’s invasion took place last year?

How do we defend the decision by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ban eleven opposition parties, including The Opposition Platform for Life, which had 10 percent of the seats in the Supreme Council, Ukraine’s unicameral parliament, along with the Shariy Party, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, State, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists Party and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc? How can we accept the banning of these opposition parties — many of which are on the left — while Zelenskyy allows fascists from the Svoboda and Right Sector parties, as well as the Banderite Azov Battalion and other extremist militias, to flourish?

How do we deal with the anti-Russian purges and arrests of supposed “fifth columnists” sweeping through Ukraine, given that 30 percent of Ukraine’s inhabitants are Russian speakers? How do we respond to the neo-Nazi groups supported by Zelenskyy’s government that harass and attack the LGBT community, the Roma population, anti-fascist protests and threaten city council members, media outlets, artists and foreign students? How can we countenance the decision by the U.S and its Western allies to block negotiations with Russia to end the war, despite Kyiv and Moscow apparently being on the verge of negotiating a peace treaty?

I reported from Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 during the breakup of the Soviet Union. NATO, we assumed, had become obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed security and economic agreements with Washington and Europe. Secretary of State James Baker in Ronald Reagan’s administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured Gorbachev that NATO would not be extended beyond the borders of a unified Germany. We naively thought the end of the Cold War meant that Russia, Europe and the U.S., would no longer have to divert massive resources to their militaries.

The so-called “peace dividend,” however, was a chimera.

If Russia did not want to be the enemy, Russia would be forced to become the enemy. The pimps of war recruited former Soviet republics into NATO by painting Russia as a threat. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, reconfigured their militaries, often through tens of millions in western loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware. This made the weapons manufacturers billions in profits.

It was universally understood in Eastern and Central Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union that NATO expansion was unnecessary and a dangerous provocation. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War is a business.

In a classified diplomatic cable — obtained and released by WikiLeaks — dated Feb. 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . .”

“Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . .” the cable read. “Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if the western alliance had honored its promises not to expand NATO beyond Germany’s borders and Ukraine had remained neutral. The pimps of war knew the potential consequences of NATO expansion. War, however, is their single minded vocation, even if it leads to a nuclear holocaust with Russia or China.

The war industry, not Putin, is our most dangerous enemy.

Chris Hedges

Source



Wednesday, July 5, 2023

The Cancer of the National-Security State (Afterword Update)

The Cancer of the National-Security State (Afterword Update)

By Jacob Hornberger

Posted on 07/05/2023




Suppose that after you visit your doctor for a physical examination, he informs you that you are suffering from the following ailments:
  • A stiff knee, which requires six months of physical therapy.
  • Being overweight, which requires a big change in diet.
  • Kidney problems, which require you to give up drinking.
  • A growing malignant tumor on your stomach that can be removed by surgery.
The doctor recommends that you give priority to ailment 4, but you instead decide to give priority to the first three ailments.

At the end of six months, you have resolved your knee problem, you have brought your weight down to an acceptable level, and you have totally given up drinking. At your six-month review, your doctor commends you on your accomplishments.

There is just one big problem, however. Your malignant tumor has grown so large that it can no longer be removed. Worse, the cancer has spread throughout your body. Your doctor advises you to get your affairs in order because you only have three months to live.

That’s the situation that the American people face with respect to the society in which we live. There are multiple problems facing our nation. But the biggest one is the national-security state form of governmental structure under which we have been living for some 75 years. It is this governmental structure that is a malignant tumor on the American body politic. This political cancer is taking us down from within. That’s why it is imperative that Americans make its removal their top priority.

Consisting of the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, the enormous empire of domestic and foreign military bases, the CIA, and the NSA, along with its foreign policy of interventionism, the national-security establishment is the root cause of the perpetual wars in which the United States has been embroiled since 1947, when the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state.

The Cold War. The Korean War. The Vietnam War. The Persian Gulf War. The war on terrorism. The war on Islam. The War on Afghanistan. The War on Iraq. The war on Syria. The war on Yemen. The war on China. The war on Iran. Multiple military incursions. Multiple coups and state-sponsored assassinations. And now the renewed Cold War on Russia, which has gotten us perilously close to all-out, life-destroying nuclear war, just like it did back in October 1962.

Of course, there is lots of focus on ending America’s “endless wars.” But that’s akin to focusing on our knee problem rather than on our cancer problem. Ending one forever war accomplishes nothing from a longterm perspective because always around the corner is another forever war. That’s because the national-security state apparatus is the root cause of each forever war in which they embroil America.

A national-security state necessarily depends on forever wars or, at the very least, crises, dangers, and threats from official enemies, adversaries, opponents, and competitors in order to justify its existence and its ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess. The wars, crises, dangers, and threats keep people agitated and afraid. They become convinced that without the national-security establishment keeping them safe, the nation would inevitably be conquered by the Reds, the terrorists, the Muslims, the illegal immigrants, the drug dealers, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, or some other scary bogeyman.

There is, of course, the out-of-control federal spending, debt, and monetary debauchery that comes with all this to consider. It’s not just the welfare state (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, etc.) that is taking us down from within. It’s also the warfare state, which is costing American taxpayers close to a trillion dollars a year.

There is also the omnipotent, totalitarian-like, dark-side powers that come with a national-security state, such as assassination, kidnapping, torture, and indefinite detention. Such powers are able to be exercised against both foreigners and American citizens.

For many years, I have been recommending a book titled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who is a professor of law at Tufts University and served as counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.

Glennon’s thesis is a simple but extremely ominous one. He persuasively makes the case that it is the national-security branch of the government — that is, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — that is actually running the federal government, especially in foreign affairs. The other three branches — the executive, legislative, and judicial — are permitted to maintain the veneer of power. But that’s all it is — an appearance. The real power, Glennon argues, lies with the national-security establishment.

That means that it is the Pentagon, not the deferential executive or legislative branches, that is calling the shots and running the show in Ukraine. Given the extreme anti-Russia hostility that drove the national-security establishment and its willingness to risk nuclear war during the Cold War, Glennon’s thesis does not bode well for the longterm future and well-being of the American people.

The national-security state is a malignant tumor on the American body politic. Although our nation faces lots of problems, the priority should be given to the removal of this cancer and to the restoration of our founding governmental system of a limited-government republic, before it is too late.


This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

HORNBERGER IS SO RIGHT in this observation, and in being so, he underscores the irony and the shame of his inability or unwillingness to study and come to recognize the truth about the income tax which is the sole solution to the problem he so nicely identifies. As do so many other pundits, Hornberger does a great job at raising consciousness, but trails off into silence, in the apparent hope that a consciousness-raised populace will effect change through the political process.


Unfortunately, the record makes clear that the political process is no longer a viable instrument by which even a consciousness-raised American public can effect change in national policy — and even if that consciousness-raised public amounts to a large-enough portion of the electorate to do so were the democratic process still functioning. When, after all, have we seen in recent years effective popular control over US policy in opposition to the agenda of the deep state, or even just the cronies and clients of the overt mammoth warfare and welfare state?

These days even if the democratic processes by which the majority is meant to exercise its will (within Constitutional limits) were allowed to function, the “engineering of consent” by the state apparatus is so mature and sophisticated that no amount of consciousness-raising effort could bring about change unwelcome by those doing that engineering.

Only individual action by those whose consciousness has been successfully raised, making use of the structure and limitations of the federal taxing power hard-wired into the Constitution, offers a solution. Each American can thereby cease his or her enabling of the Leviathan state. In doing so, each such actor arises as an irresistible lure to others, even those who know or care nothing about the perils of the national-security state, but who don’t want to relinquish wealth to anyone with which they need not be parting.

That is, individual self-interest — the most powerful political force in the universe — is inexorably invoked by the liberating truth about the income tax, and that invocation will yield the beneficial outcome hoped for by Jacob Hornberger and all others who decry the national-security state cancer where nothing else will manage to do so.

All that is needed to make it all happen is for a big enough core group of consciousness-raised Americans to act and be vocal– a spark which would be enormously and importantly hurried into action if Jacob Hornberger and others with bully-pulpits much bigger than my very suppressed one were to begin spreading the word.

YOU can help make that happen.

If you have access to any pundits, share this article.

Further, independent commentaries, comments to these newsletter articles, and especially videos should be flying out from this community all the time! Remember, people, those defending the evil status quo are legion, and relentless. Those wanting them defeated, and their evil scheme and its evil progeny wiped away, need to be just as much so.

At a minimum, everyone in this community should be diligently sharing, with suitable exhortations and persuasions to the recipient, the special materials I have written for this purpose. For instance, clicking on the image of Dorothy and Glinda, below, will yield a short .pdf by which anyone not welded to a government teat will quickly be inspired and equipped to lend their strength to climbing out of our suicidal dive, if shared around with at least a subject line encouraging its perusal.

Others can be found here and here and here and here.

Seriously, people. It’s time to stop whistling past the graveyard and start curing the cancer.

Jacob Hornberger