http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Global_Media_Lightning_Headlines/message/3441
PERPETUAL WAR, PERPETUAL TERROR
By Manuel Valenzuela 121603 (ICH)
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an
alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge
industrial and military machinery of defense with our
peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper
together."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
In the United States last year there were over 11,000 deaths by firearms. No
other nation comes even close to matching this appetite for death. That is
eight thousand more than died on 9/11, but about the same number as those
innocent Iraqi civilians that perished by our actions in Gulf War II. And the
costs to society from injuries and death due to firearms you ask? More than $60
billion. Those who produce instruments of death in this country are not
ignorant, however; they know the statistics, they simply brush them aside.
Profit, after all, is much more important than stopping Americans from arming
themselves to the teeth and killing each other.
What else explains the gun lobby's attempts to go against common sense? The
Second Amendment must be honored and preserved, they
say, even if the Found ing Fathers lived in times of
muskets, Indians, English threats and manifest dest iny, never imagining the killing power of today's firearms.
It is no coincidence, then, that the same nation that allows so many of its
citizens to die at the hands of loaded weapons would naturally export its
appetite for human death abroad. Today, the U.S. is responsible for 40% of all
worldwide weapons sales. Tanks, fighter jets, artillery, helicopters, missiles,
landmines, machine
guns, mortars, bullets, grenades, guns, you name it, GunsRU.S.
has it.
Our nation supplies the world in instruments of death.
The United States Military Industrial Complex (MIC) makes a killing from death,
suffering and destruction. It exists only if people die. Its signature is
everywhere; in the millions of landmines buried worldwide and the millions of
amputee victims, many of them children. It can be seen in civil wars that rav age the developing world, from Africa to Asia to Latin
America. From sea to s hining sea, our weapons we can
see, from the exponentially growing threat of WMDs
many of which were distributed at one time by our own government to the
military hardware of tyrants and dictators, war criminals and warlords.
The MIC's front for assuring continual human violence is the US government, the
Pentagon in particular. President Bush has just granted the Pentagon a military
budget of $400 billion dollars for the next fiscal year. That's
$400,000,000,000.00. This, of course, does not include our little warmongering
expedition to the Fertile Crescent, which by last estimates had already cost an
additional $160 billion more.
With so much of our money going to the Department of War one has to wonder
where our priorities are. Certainly not in education, healthcare or in the
creation of jobs. The Pentagon and the Military Industrial Complex are one and
the same, having morphed over time to form the most lethal killing institution
the world has ever seen. Through a sliding and revolving door that turns
citizen soldiers into armament industry executives and company officers into
military policy makers, the MIC has embedded itself into the military branch of
the US government, there by assuring itself of unlimited contracts, access,
information and profit.
Military industry executives and lobbyists have also slithered deep into top
administration positions, occupying vitally important posts that decide
national and for eign policy. Ex top government officials now sit on boards of
today's biggest suppliers of military might.
One need only look to the Carlyle Group to find the marriage between government
and MIC. George Bush the First had until recently sat on the board of this
powerful yet clandestine group. This intertwined dancing tango of cronyism is
exactly what Eisenhower warned about. Like a virus MIC has spread itself
throughout the hallways of the Pentagon, penetrating from top to bottom through
the disease called greed. Now one and the same, the Pentagon and MIC have a
common interest, motive and ability to shape how funds are used and wars are
waged. The Pent agon is the Department of War, not Defense. It is in business to kill, kill, and kill some
more. Without war, violence and weapons there is no Pentagon.
And so to survive, to remain a player, wars must be created, weapons must be
allocated, profits must be made and the Military Industrial Complex must
continue exporting and manufacturing violence and conflict throughout the
globe. And, as always, in the great tradition of the United States, enemies
must exist. Indians, English, Mexicans, Spanish, Nazis, Koreans, Communists and
now the everambiguous Terrorists. The Cold War came
to an end and so too the great profits of the MIC. Reductions in the Pentagon
budget threatened the lifeblood of the industry; a new enemy had to be
unearthed. There is no war hence no profit without evildoers, without
terrorists lurching at every corner, waiting patiently for the moment to
strike, instilling fear into our lives, absorbing our attention.
We are told our nation is in imminent danger, that we are a mushroom cloud wait
ing to happen. And so we fear, transforming our mass
uneasiness into nationalistic and patriotic fervor,
wrapping ourselves up in the flag and the Military Industrial Complex. We have
fallen into the mouse trap, becoming the subservient slaves of an engine run by
greed, interested not in peace but constant war, constant killing and constant
sacrifice to the almighty dollar. Brainwashed to believe that War is Peace we
sound the drums of war, marching our sons and daughters to a battle that cannot
be won either by sword or gun.
We are programmed to see the world as a conflict between "Us" versus
"Them", "Good" versus "Evil," that we must
inflict death on those who are not with us and on those against us. The MIC
prays on our human emotions and psychology, exploiting human nature and our
still fragile memories of the horrors of 9/11, manipulating us to believe that
what they say and do is right for us all. We unite behind one common enemy,
fearing for our lives, complacent and obedient, blindly descending like a
plague of locusts onto foreign land, devastating, usurping, conquering and
devouring those who have been deemed enemies of the state, those who harbor and live among them, "evilones,"
"evildoers" and "haters of freedom," all for the sake of
profit and pillage, ideology and empire.
Power unfettered and unleashed, our freedoms die and are released
The socalled "War on Terror" is but a
charade, a fearengendering escapade, designed to last
into perpetuity, helping guarantee that the Military Industrial Complex will
grow exponentially in power. It is a replacement for a Cold War long ago since
retired and unable to deliver a massive increase in defense
spending. Terrorists and the countries that harbor
them have replaced the
Rumblings of bringing back the draft are growing louder, and if you think your
children and grandchildren will escape it, think again. In a war without end,
in battles that do not cease, the MIC will need human flesh from which to
recycle those who perish and fall wounded. Empire building needs bodies and
drones to go with military might, instruments of death need trigger fingers and
human brains, and, with so many expendable young men and women being
conditioned in this socalled "war on
terror," MIC will continue its reprogramming of citizen soldiers from
peaceful civilians to warmongering killing machines. After all, "War is
Peace."
Yet the Department of War, ever steadfast to use its weaponry, fails to real ize that no amount of money will win this war if the root
causes of terrorism are not confronted as priority number one. If you get to
the roots, you pull out the weed. If not, it grows back again and again. But
perhaps a perpetual war is what MIC has sought all along. A lifetime of combat,
a lifetime of profit, a lifetime of power. Assembly lines of missiles, bombs,
tanks and aircraft operate without pause, helping expand a sluggish economy and
the interests of the Pax Americana. Pro fit over people, violence before peace,
the American killing machine continues on its path to human extinction, and it
is the hands and minds of our best and bright est
building and creating these products of decimation.
While we look over our shoulders for terrorists and evildoers, the world
ominously looks directly at us with both eyes intently focused on the armies of
the "Great Satan" and the "Evil Empire," not knowing which
nation will be attacked or on whom the storm of satelliteguidedmissiles
will rain down on next. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In
becoming preemptive warmongers, we are also becoming
victims of our own making, helping assure a swelling wrath of revenge,
resentment and retaliation against us. If we kill we will be killed, if we
destroy we will be destroyed. The MIC is leading us down a steep canyon of
fury, making us a pariah, a rogue country in the eyes of the world. We are
becoming that which we fear most, a terrorist state.
As political scientist and ex marine C. Douglas Lummis
has said, "Air bombard ment is state terrorism,
the terrorism of the rich. It has burned up and blasted apart more innocents in
the past six decades than have all the antistate
terrorists who have ever lived. Something has benumbed our consciousness
against this reality." Today we are seen, along with Israel, as the
greatest threats to world peace. When hundreds of thousands throughout the
planet call Bush "the world's number one terrorist," that less than
admirable distinction is automatically imputed onto the nation as a whole and
the citizens in particular.
This can be seen in the world's perception and treatment of us today.
When the day comes, not too far in the future, when one of our metropolitan
cities goes up in a mushroom cloud or in a vapor of
suffocation or when tens of thousands of citizens die of biological or chemical
demons, we must dive deep into our national psyche and question why we allowed
those in power to guide us down the road of cause and effect, action and
reaction. And, in the end, we must realize that those same WMDs
we once so gleefully created and exported have come back to our shores, haunting
us and our children for the suffering we have helped spread onto the world
through our idleness, impotence to act and automatonlike
acquiescence.
Can you imagine spending $400 billion dollars to alleviate poverty in the
Middle East, helping to educate millions who now get instructed by hatespewing madrassas? Can you
imagine spending $400 billion dollars to fight terror at its roots rather than
at its extensions, helping to improve the lives of millions who today have
nothing to live for, except martyrdom? Wouldn't $400 billion dollars go furt her than perpetual bloodshed in the insidious war on
terror if we alleviated the suffering, ignorance and poverty of the world'
poor, the roots of terrorism by helping to provide jobs, education and
medicines which would in turn spawn a sense of goodwill towards the U.S.?
Could it be remotely possible that our foreign policy, our support for puppet
dictators and monarchs, our quest for empire and resources and our unyielding
military, financial and political support of the dehumanization of the
Palestinian people by Israel all leads to the subjugation, injustice,
humiliation and misery of hundreds of millions of people? Could this be why we
are so hated throughout a world where billions have nothing while we bathe in
the spoils of abundance?
As long as MIC acts in our name, as long as it plunders humanity we will be
hated. Ghandi once said that "an eye for an eye only leads to more
blindness." If that is so, then our nation is on a collision course with
an ominous black hole whose darkness we shall not escape and whose exit we will
never again see.
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See also:
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