https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/30/chris-hedges-the-enemy-from-within/
The Enemy From Within
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.
Comment to article:
" This is a great summary of our sad situation. The neocons and neoliberals have succeeded in destroying the middle class, our educational system and diverted funds which were desperately needed to provide basic services to the people to the military. In the process these foolish thieves have managed to disenfranchise us via a corrupt Supreme Court which dishonestly put into law our present legal bribery electoral/political system. We the people no longer have any input into policy and no means of preventing the continuing decline into madness which Hedges describes so well in this article – other than shutting down the system completely by means of a general strike. However, so few people are even aware of the source of their misery, that possibility does not seem likely. Perhaps when the misery reaches the level of even more people living under bridges – which is on an upward trend – they will wake up and come to understand that their problems are not caused by immigrants, the other tribe or other source being falsely portrayed by the corrupt political parties, but by the thieves who run the show, beginning with the despicable military contractors, the thieving pharmaceutical companies, etc. We need to shut down this Country and stop cooperating with these thieves. Otherwise, we are doomed. "
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/05/01/the-single-dumbest-thing-the-empire-asks-us-to-believe/
The Single Dumbest Thing The Empire Asks Us To Believe
We’re asked to believe many extremely stupid narratives by the manipulators who rule over us, but I really think this one might take the cake. The idea that the US militarily encircling Russia and China is an act of defense rather than aggression is so in-your-face transparently idiotic that anyone who thinks critically enough about it will immediately dismiss it for the foam-brained nonsense that it is, yet it’s the mainstream narrative in the western world, and millions of people accept it as true. Because that’s the power of US propaganda.
It gets more and more absurd the more you think about it. Their argument is basically, “No no you don’t understand, the US has been hurriedly surrounding its primary geopolitical competitors with war machinery because it wants to prevent them from doing something aggressive.” They’re like, “We can’t just have nations exerting military aggression willy nilly, that’s why we needed to move all this war machinery to the other side of the planet onto the borders of our primary strategic rivals.”
Can you think of anything more insane than that? Than all of the most powerful and influential figures in politics, government and media simultaneously claiming that a nation amassing heavily-armed proxy forces on the borders of their enemies is something that should be regarded as an action designed to prevent aggression, rather than an incendiary act of extreme aggression in and of itself?
I recently had someone tell me that the US has every right to expand its immense military presence near China, and to illustrate their point they said that if China set up a base in Mexico the US would have no business telling them not to. But that argument actually illustrates my point, not theirs: only the most propaganda-addled of minds would believe that the US would allow China to set up a military base in Mexico for even one second. There’d be kinetic warfare long before the foundations were even poured.
What this undeniably means is that the US is the aggressor in these conflicts. It was the aggressor when it expanded NATO and began turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO member, and it is the aggressor as it accelerates its encirclement of China and prepares to open the floodgates of weapons into Taiwan. If it is doing things on the borders of its geopolitical rivals that it would never permit those rivals to do to it, then it is the aggressor, and anything its rivals do is a defensive response to those aggressions.
This is how the US-centralized empire always acts. It continually attacks, starves and menaces nations which disobey the decrees it issues in its self-appointed role as the leader of the so-called “rules-based international order”, then as soon as its aggressions receive the slightest bit of pushback its spinmeisters feign Bambi-eyed innocence and pretend they’re just passive witnesses to unprovoked aggression by the disobedient nations.
But the empire is not passive, it is not innocent, and it is primarily responsible for the extremely dangerous current and emerging conflicts we are seeing on the world stage. The US empire is imperiling us all with its last-ditch frantic scramble to secure unipolar planetary hegemony before multipolarity takes over, engaging in freakishly aggressive actions on the borders of the nuclear-armed nations who challenge its power.
And I just think that’s worth reiterating from time to time. If we don’t keep reminding ourselves what’s true, these bastards will drive us all nuts.
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