{"id":401,"date":"2020-11-30T09:10:09","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T09:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=129023"},"modified":"2020-11-30T09:10:09","modified_gmt":"2020-11-30T09:10:09","slug":"the-planet-cannot-heal-until-we-rip-the-mask-off-the-wests-war-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/11\/30\/the-planet-cannot-heal-until-we-rip-the-mask-off-the-wests-war-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Planet Cannot Heal Until We Rip the Mask Off the West\u2019s War Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.<\/p>\n

In a recent post<\/a>, I wrote about \u201cexternalities\u201d \u2013 the ability of companies to offset the true costs inherent in the production process. The burden of these costs are covertly shifted on to wider society: that is, on to you and me. Or on to those far from view, in foreign lands. Or on to future generations. Externalising costs means that profits can be maximised for the wealth elite in the here and now.<\/p>\n

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My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism’s perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis \u2013 to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https:\/\/t.co\/S4Aby314FX<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 25, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Our own societies must deal with the externalised costs of industries ranging from tobacco and alcohol to chemicals and vehicles. Societies abroad must deal with the costs of the bombs dropped by our \u201cdefence\u201d industries. And future generations will have to deal with the lethal costs incurred by corporations that for decades have been allowed to pump out their waste products into every corner of the globe.<\/p>\n

Divine right to rule<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the past, the job of the corporate media was to shield those externalities from public view. More recently, as the costs have become impossible to ignore, especially with the climate crisis looming, the media\u2019s role has changed. Its central task now is to obscure corporate responsibility for these externalities. That is hardly surprising. After all, the corporate media\u2019s profits depend on externalising costs too, as well as hiding the externalised costs of their parent companies, their billionaire owners and their advertisers.<\/p>\n

Once, monarchs rewarded the clerical class for persuading, through the doctrine of divine right, their subjects to passively submit to exploitation. Today, \u201cmainstream\u201d media are there to persuade us that capitalism, the profit motive, the accumulation of ever greater wealth by elites, and externalities destroying the planet are the natural order of things, that this is the best economic model imaginable.<\/p>\n

Most of us are now so propagandised by the media that we can barely imagine a functioning world without capitalism. Our minds are primed to imagine, in the absence of capitalism, an immediate lurch back to Soviet-style bread queues or an evolutionary reversal to cave-dwelling. Those thoughts paralyse us, making us unable to contemplate what might be wrong or inherently unsustainable about how we live right now, or to imagine the suicidal future we are hurtling towards.<\/p>\n

Lifeblood of empire<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a reason that, as we rush lemming-like towards the cliff-edge, urged on by a capitalism that cannot operate at the level of sustainability or even of sanity, the push towards intensified war grows. Wars are the lifeblood of the corporate empire headquartered in the United States.<\/p>\n

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My latest: The new documentary on Greta Thunberg \u2013 I Am Greta \u2013 isn\u2019t about climate change. It\u2019s about something even more important: the elusiveness of sanity in an insane world https:\/\/t.co\/uU2G6i821I<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 17, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

US imperialism is no different from earlier imperialisms in its aims or methods. But in late-stage capitalism, wealth and power are hugely concentrated. Technologies have reached a pinnacle of advancement. Disinformation and propaganda are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree. Surveillance is intrusive and aggressive, if well concealed. Capitalism\u2019s destructive potential is unlimited. But even so, war\u2019s appeal is not diminished.<\/p>\n

As ever, wars allow for the capture and control of resources. Fossil fuels promise future growth, even if of the short-term, unsustainable kind.<\/p>\n

Wars require the state to invest its money in the horrendously expensive and destructive products of the \u201cdefence\u201d industries, from fighter planes to bombs, justifying the transfer of yet more public resources into private hands.<\/p>\n

The lobbies associated with these \u201cdefence\u201d industries have every incentive to push for aggressive foreign (and domestic) policies to justify more investment, greater expansion of \u201cdefensive\u201d capabilities, and the use of weapons on the battlefield so that they need replenishing.<\/p>\n

Whether public or covert, wars provide an opportunity to remake poorly defended, resistant societies \u2013 such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria \u2013 in ways that allow for resources to be seized, markets to be expanded and the reach of the corporate elite to be extended.<\/p>\n

War is the ultimate growth industry, limited only by our ability to be persuaded of new enemies and new threats.<\/p>\n

Fog of war<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the political class, the benefits of war are not simply economic. In a time of environmental collapse, war offers a temporary \u201cGet out of jail\u201d card. During wars, the public is encouraged to assent to new, ever greater sacrifices that allow public wealth to be transferred to the elite. War is the corporate world\u2019s ultimate Ponzi scheme.<\/p>\n

The \u201cfog of war\u201d does not just describe the difficulty of knowing what is happening in the immediate heat of battle. It is also the fear, generated by claims of an existential threat, that sets aside normal thinking, normal caution, normal scepticism. It is the invoking of a phantasmagorical enemy towards which public resentments can be directed, shielding from view the real culprits \u2013 the corporations and their political cronies at home.<\/p>\n

The \u201cfog of war\u201d engineers the disruption of established systems of control and protocol to cope with the national emergency, shrouding and rationalising the accumulation by corporations of more wealth and power and the further capture of organs of the state. It is the licence provided for \u201cexceptional\u201d changes to the rules that quickly become normalised. It is the disinformation that passes for national responsibility and patriotism.<\/p>\n

 <\/strong>Permanent austerity<\/strong><\/p>\n

All of which explains why Boris Johnson, Britain\u2019s prime minister, has just pledged<\/a> an extra \u00a316.5 billion in \u201cdefence\u201d spending at a time when the UK is struggling to control a pandemic and when, faced by disease, Brexit and a new round of winter floods, the British economy is facing \u201csystemic crisis\u201d, according to a new Cabinet Office report. Figures released last week show<\/a> the biggest economic contraction in the UK in three centuries.<\/p>\n

If the British public is to stomach yet more cuts, to surrender to permanent austerity as the economy tanks, Johnson, ever the populist, knows he needs a good cover story. And that will involve further embellishment of existing, fearmongering narratives about Russia, Iran and China.<\/p>\n

To make those narratives plausible, Johnson has to act as if the threats are real, which means massive spending on \u201cdefence\u201d. Such expenditure, wholly counter-productive when the current challenge is sustainability, will line the pockets of the very corporations that help Johnson and his pals stay in power, not least by cheerleading him via their media arms.<\/p>\n

New salesman needed<\/strong><\/p>\n

The cynical way this works was underscored in a classified 2010 CIA memorandum, known as \u201cRed Cell\u201d, leaked to Wikileaks, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald reminded us last week. The CIA memo addressed<\/a> the fear in Washington that European publics were demonstrating little appetite for the US-led \u201cwar on terror\u201d that followed 9\/11. That, in turn, risked limiting the ability of European allies to support the US as it exercised its divine right to wage war.<\/p>\n

The memo notes that European support for US wars after 9\/11 had chiefly relied on \u201cpublic apathy\u201d \u2013 the fact that Europeans were kept largely ignorant by their own media of what those wars entailed. But with a rising tide of anti-war sentiment, the concern was that this might change. There was an urgent need to futher manipulate public opinion more decisively in favour of war.<\/p>\n

The US intelligence agency decided its wars needed a facelift. George W Bush, with his Texan, cowboy swagger, had proved a poor salesman. So the CIA turned to identity politics and faux \u201chumanitarianism\u201d, which they believed would play better with European publics.<\/p>\n

Part of the solution was to accentuate the suffering of Afghan women to justify war. But the other part was to use President Barack Obama as the face of a new, \u201ccaring\u201d approach to war. He had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize \u2013 even though he had done nothing for peace, and would go on to expand US wars \u2013 very possibly as part of this same effort to reinvent the \u201cwar on terror\u201d. Polls showed support for existing wars increased markedly among Europeans when they were reminded that Obama backed these wars.<\/p>\n

As Greenwald observes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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\u201cObama\u2019s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the U.S. and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric U.S. wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people \u2014 the pretext used to justify every war by every country in history.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Obama-style facelift<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once the state is understood as a vehicle for entrenching elite power \u2013 and war its most trusted tool for concentrating power \u2013 the world becomes far more intelligible. Western economies never stopped being colonial economies, but they were given an Obama-style facelift. War and plunder \u2013 even when they masquerade as \u201cdefence\u201d, or peace \u2013 are still the core western mission.<\/p>\n

That is why Britons, believing days of empire are long behind them, might have been shocked to learn last week that the UK still operates 145 military bases in 42 countries around the globe, meaning it runs the second largest network of such bases after the US.<\/p>\n

Such information is not made available in the UK \u201cmainstream\u201d media, of course. It has to be provided by an \u201calternative\u201d investigative site, Declassified UK. In that way the vast majority of the British public are left clueless about how their taxes are being used at a time when they are told further belt-tightening is essential.<\/p>\n

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REVEALED \u2014 The UK military\u2019s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42 countries.<\/p>\n

The results of a months-long investigation by @pmillerinfo<\/a> https:\/\/t.co\/oaffNnJlZc<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) November 24, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The UK\u2019s network of bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to the world\u2019s largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason the UK \u2013 whoever is prime minister \u2013 is never going to say \u201cno\u201d to a demand that Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in attacking Iraq in 2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen. The UK is not only a satellite of the US empire, it is a lynchpin of the western imperial war economy.<\/p>\n

 <\/strong>Ideological alchemy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once that point is appreciated, the need for external enemies \u2013 for our own Eurasias and Eastasias<\/a> \u2013 becomes clearer.<\/p>\n

Some of those enemies, the minor ones, come and go, as demand dictates. Iraq dominated western attention for two decades. Now it has served its purpose, its killing fields and \u201cterrorist\u201d recruiting grounds have reverted to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise, the Libyan bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news pages until he was bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is today\u2019s chaotic Libya, a corridor for arms-running and people-trafficking, can be safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely unexceptional Arab dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to the status of a new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role for as long as it suits the needs of the western war economy.<\/p>\n

Notably, Israel, another lynchpin of the US empire and one that serves as a kind of offshored weapons testing laboratory for the military-industrial complex, has played a vital role in rationalising these wars. Just as saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy makes killing Afghans \u2013 men, women and children \u2013 more palatable to Europeans, so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian gesture if at the same time it crushes Israel\u2019s enemies, and by extension, through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies of all Jews.<\/p>\n

Quite how opportunistic \u2013 and divorced from reality \u2013 the western discourse about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the moment the relentless concerns about Syria\u2019s Assad are weighed against the casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi Arabia, who for decades have been financing terror groups across the Middle East, including the jihadists in Syria.<\/p>\n

During that time, Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, because all of them are safely ensconced within the US war machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely sidelined diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel and the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a pair of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a secret meeting<\/a> between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s likely reward is contained in a new bill<\/a> in Congress for even more military aid than the record $3.8 billion Israel currently receives annually from the US \u2013 at a time when the US economy, like the UK one, is in dire straits.<\/p>\n

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My latest: Pompeo\u2019s declaration that criticism of Israel and the peaceful movement urging a boycott of its settlements are \u2018antisemitic\u2019 marks the logical endpoint of a foreign policy consensus rapidly taking shape in the US and Europe https:\/\/t.co\/0fLC8TKnzm<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 24, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The west also needs bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies than Iraq or Syria. Helpfully one kind \u2013 nebulous \u201cterrorism\u201d \u2013 is the inevitable reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we kill, the more brown people we can justify killing because they carry out, or support, \u201cterrorism\u201d against us. Their hatred for our bombs is an irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more bombs.<\/p>\n

But concrete, identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and China give superficial credence to the war machine\u2019s presentation of itself as a \u201cdefence\u201d industry. The UK\u2019s bases around the globe and Boris Johnson\u2019s \u00a316.5 billion rise in spending on the UK\u2019s war industries only make sense if Britain is under a constant, existential threat. Not just someone with a suspicious backpack on the London Tube, but a sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens to invade our lands, to steal resources to which we claim exclusive rights, to destroy our way of life through its masterful manipulation of the internet.<\/p>\n

 <\/strong>Crushed or tamed<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anyone of significance who questions these narratives that rationalise and perpetuate war is the enemy too. Current political and legal dramas in the US and UK reflect the perceived threat such actors pose to the war machine. They must either be crushed or tamed into subservience.<\/p>\n

Trump was initially just such a figure that needed breaking in. The CIA and other intelligence agencies assisted in the organised opposition to Trump \u2013 helping to fuel the evidence-free Russiagate \u201cscandal\u201d \u2013 not because he was an awful human being or had authoritarian tendencies, but for two more specific reasons.<\/p>\n

First, Trump\u2019s political impulses, expressed in the early stages of his presidential campaign, were to withdraw from the very wars the US empire depends on. Despite open disdain for him from most of the media, he was criticised more often for failing to<\/em> prosecute wars enthusiastically enough rather than for being too hawkish. And second, even as his isolationist impulses were largely subdued after the 2016 election by the permanent bureaucracy and his own officials, Trump proved to be an even more disastrous salesman for war than George W Bush. Trump made war look and sound exactly as it is, rather than packaging it as \u201cintervention\u201d intended to help women and people of colour.<\/p>\n

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