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Billy Bragg, "North Sea Bubble"
from No Pop No Style Strictly Roots
(and with thanks to Barrett Strong)
Well, here's a term you don't hear much anymore. A useful one, nevertheless, for describing the oft-encountered congruence of interests -- and therefore of social control -- between these entities.
If you want guns, the person who makes them is your friend. And if you make guns, the person who wants them is yours.
There's actually a good deal of debate about the correct translation of this --
I'll put some more links here as I find them.
For now, a link to the fine "Clausewitz Homepage"
-- A page on this site on / Government and the Political Sector /
Well, that's straighforward, isn't it?
In an introductory discussion of the concept of "continuum of force", and referencing
MCO 5500.6_, Arming of Security and LawEnforcement [LE] Personnel and the Use of Force
-- I don't have access to a copy of this right now and don't know if it's actually relevant.
The Purpose of a Military is to Kill People and Break Things
by Bob Wilson
The Ethical Spectacle, FEB 1998
" 'Why, of course, the people don't want war', Goering shrugged. 'Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.'
'There is one difference', I pointed out. 'In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.'
'Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
"War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war.... The air of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft..."
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace, Book 10, Chapter 25, pp 486-7
Quoted here
George W. Bush
President Bush Discusses Economy, Small Business in Wisconsin
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 03 OCT 2003
("Even a stopped clock is right twice a day department.")
- The article Defense contractor on Wikipedia
"On military in general, the USA spends more than the rest of the G7 countries combined -- approximately $265 Billion, annually."
"nearly eighteen times as large as the combined spending of the seven countries often identified by the Pentagon as our most likely adversaries (North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan and Cuba). "
"The nature of how life will change was hinted by a House vote approving a $355.4 billion defense bill that passed on the same day as the war authorization.
The expenditures in this bill amount to one-sixth of the entire federal budget and are larger than the total defense budgets of the next 25 largest nations combined."
"The president of the World Bank condemned the amount developed countries spend on defense yesterday, saying it was "madness" compared with the sums committed to aid projects.Which, simply enough, is because it's a lot easier to make big profits with "defense" contracts than with aid.
James Wolfensohn told an audience in Australia: 'We are spending 20 times the amount on military expenditure than what we are spending on trying to give hope to people' (aid and development spending).
He added: 'If a Martian came to earth and read the [UN's] millennium development goals, and then looked at what we're doing, you'd think we were mad. We are spending a trillion dollars a year on defense'. ...
'The world is spending less now that it was spending 40 years ago, percentage wise, in terms of development. We have got it tremendously wrong in the way in which we are addressing the questions of poverty, development and its importance'. "
"Grim-faced defense officials refused to speculate on any quick military response to the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor,-- The USA has spent an astronomical amount of money on its "very large hammer". Unfortunately many situations call for a pen or a soup ladle.
but stressed the culprits of Tuesday's coordinated strikes would be punished.
'We have a very large hammer that can be brought to bear in a number of ways at any time', one of the officials told Reuters on Wednesday.
'That's not a threat, it's a fact'."
"Now it has been running longer than the First World War and the Second World War combined, the war in Afghanistan has descended into a blood-splattered edition of Beadle's About. ("a British television programme hosted by the late Jeremy Beadle, where members of the public became victims of practical jokes behind hidden cameras.")
For the entire autumn of 2010, the US and British governments were negotiating with a man called Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour. They identified him as one of the leaders of the Taliban, so they opened negotiations in the Presidential palace with him by offering fistfuls of cash. He haggled with President Hamid Karzai over how to end the war, poring over maps and plans. It was only months later that they finally realized: Mansour was in fact just a Pakistani grocer with no more links to the Taliban than your local shop-owner. He made it all up.
("Afghans Blame British for Taliban Imposter", CBC News, 26 NOV 2010. One always has to wonder who's scamming who in these situations.)
Our policy in Afghanistan consists of a series of insults to the troops we have sent there. Perhaps the most startling is that “our side” is in fact funding the Taliban, who then use the money to shoot back at the troops. The US journalist Aram Roston exposed in the magazine The Nation that the American forces are currently paying the Taliban and other insurgents hundreds of millions of dollars to let their supply trucks pass through key areas without being blown up. It's one of the Taliban's major sources of income, and they have obviously made the calculation that it's worth it to let these vehicles pass because they can plant more and deadlier bombs with the cash elsewhere. After all this time, the war is riddled with these moral contortions. ...
Our governments say al Qaeda attacks are planned and prepared in training camps, so we need to physically deprive them of the space to put up their tents, anywhere in the world. It sounds plausible at first. But look more closely. The jihadi massacres in the West were planned in Hamburg, Florida, and Yorkshire – and nobody who did it was an Afghan. They learned their skills from google and from legal flying schools. Many intelligence experts say physical training camps are irrelevant, and anyway, if you send an army crashing in, the tents can easily be packed up relocated to Somalia, or Yemen, or the Philippines, or any other fraying state.
Are we going to drop bombs on every suspect cave and hill-top in the world? ...
Why is Bin Laden so keen on this endless war? Because he knows that every time a Western country barges in to a country it doesn’t understand with bombs, it kills innocent people – and so swells his army of recruits. For every one suspected jihadi killed in Afghanistan, we have killed fifty innocent people. (And our negotiations with a fake Taliban leader give you some idea of how good we’ll be at picking targets to kill.) If a foreign power was occupying us and killing our families in this way, we too would fight back. As Howard Hart, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan, says: 'The very presence of our troops is the problem. The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition.' And these killings are watched closely by young Muslims across the world – just as they watched our atrocities in Muslim countries before 9/11 – and some of whom will become crazed and hate-filled enough to blow up the London Underground, or Times Square."
"The other day in Fallujah American soldiers opened fire on a truck carrying chickens, believing it was a truck filled with metal pipes that had eluded a checkpoint. Four Iraqi men and a ten-year old boy were killed. Ziad Abud Abadi, manager of a gift shop, witnessed the mistake. He said, 'The Americans shot all over the place. They just shot like they were crazy'. He didn’t say they shot like they were arrogant, or evil or infidels. They shot like they were crazy. ...
Honor, courage, distinction – all of that sounds good from a podium -- but in the end and on the ground the appearance and perhaps the reality of being crazy is what has the best chance of keeping one alive. ...
Can either the soldiers or the citizens for whom they are fighting keep a grasp of the glorious future while trigger fingers are understandably and constantly on the verge of spasm?
... the perpetrators (in the higher ranks of government and the military)are usually at the top and they talk the way Ziad Abud Abadi described the way the Americans were shooting -- like they’re crazy."
"The U.S. military serves to maintain U.S. control over the world's raw materials...
This money would be better spent on a national health care system, on rebuilding our crumbling industrial infrastructure, and on reducing our taxes."
"Mr. CHOMSKY:. You're supposed to love the flag, but you're supposed to hate the government.
You're supposed to lovethe symbols, you're supposed -- You have to be a jingoist, otherwise you're not going to accept things like Pentagon spending.So, it's a complicated operation, but, you know, not that complicated. You're sitting in a PR office, you can figure it out. Get people to be patriotic, subordinate, silent, hate government, blamegovernment for everything that goes wrong, think governments can do nothing right, not notice that more and more power isbeing turned over to private hands, which are completely unaccountable and are totally --
Mr. SHORR: And those private hands are?
Mr. CHOMSKY: Corporations, which is a totalitarian institution.
People are unhappy. A lot of things are going wrong withtheir lives. Real income is going down, working hours are going up, families are falling apart, a lot of bad things. And you've been taught for 50 years that it's the government's fault, so you bomb a -- you don't bomb the GE headquarters, you don'tread the Fortune 500 and find out who's got all the money, you don't notice that they've just celebrated their fourth straightyear of double digit profit growth. That stuff is for special people. What you're supposed to know is, 'yeah, those bad government guys, they're doing it.' And government is bad because it'spotentially influenceable. You could take part in it an change it. So, hate them. And that creates the mood of anti-politics, andthat's part of the -- you know, that's part of the propaganda.
Well, where does the military fit into all this? Well, if you can keep the population frightened -- This is a very frightenedcountry. People are more frightened in the United States than I think anywhere in the world.... If you can keep people cowering in terror, then they will support this huge military system which is defending them fromsomebody -- Martians, aliens, who knows who. And that means you got plenty of money pouring into the pockets of NewtGingrich's rich constituents through this industrial policy system. And indeed, if you have to control somebody out there, you got the force to do it.
Mr. SHORR: Now that's why they're saying that the threat is from the unknown. They'll actually use the unknown orinstability, much more general --
Mr. CHOMSKY: Yes, just to keep people frightened. I mean, people have to be kept frightened, atomized. They have tohave their attention diverted away from true power. Of course, any good propaganda system understands that. You don't wantto see real power and the government's a good target, especially the federal government...."
" 'Why, of course, the people don't want war', Goering shrugged. 'Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.'
'There is one difference', I pointed out. 'In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.'
'Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
"There are four main groups within the MIC:
1. professional soldiers,
2. managers and owners of industries deeply engaged in military supply,
3. high government officials whose careers, prestige, and interests are tied to military expenditure, and
4. legislators whose districts benefit from defense activities."
"... to listen to the neoconservatives and their various allies now embedded in the top ranks of the Bush administration (or in well-connected think tanks and front groups scattered inside Washington DC's Beltway), we are in fact enmeshed in nothing less than "World War IV" today. ...Emphasis is mine.
It's become a commonplace trope of the imperial right. They even have full-scale World War IV conferences (happily attended by Paul Wolfowitz among others) and arguments over the term's exact nature abound. (Former director of the CIA R. James) Woolsey, who seems to be making a profession of roaming the country, preaching World War IV to the unconverted, is already dubbing it "the longest war of the 21st century,"
or as Steve Clemons, President of the New American Foundation, puts it, the new "Hundred Years' War." (!!!) ...
Back in November 2001, introducing the term World War IV -- he now says "tongue-in-cheek" -- Eliot Cohen wrote: 'Political people often dislike calling things by their names. Truth, particularly in wartime, is so unpleasant that we drape it in a veil of evasions, and the right naming of things is far from a simple task'. "
"The first to point out the importance of what we call this conflict was Eliot Cohen ... Comparing the current struggle to the Cold War -- which he dubbed World War III -- he said that World War IV shared key elements with its predecessor. Those included its global and protracted character, its mix of violent and nonviolent means, its mobilization of human resources (not all military), and its roots in an ideological conflict."
"The hidden underside of U.S. military attacks is that the military-industrial complex sees them as advertisements for itsweapons systems.
No wonder there's no money for social programs. The military-industrial complex is stealing it all."
"Chomsky argues that themilitary system of subsidies for business was chosen over the social spending system, even though the social spending systemcould potentially create a greater number of jobs and be crafted in a more cost effective way, because the military systemchannels profits into the hands of a relatively few rich investors, while the social spending system would more widely distributethe cash. The military system was also deemed more acceptable because while few people tend to have strong opinions onwhat sort of tank to build, many do have opinions on how local schools and hospitals should be built and improved; in otherwords, social spending could have a democratizing effect that those with the power to make the decision viewed as negative.Open funding of high-tech industry on the local level would be difficult because people's opinions would get in the way ofprivate profit; the high-tech products would get made, but making sure that a limited number of people highly profited fromthem would be somewhat difficult. A much more efficient way of transferring public money to corporate investors is through a federal military system, because the only convincing that needs to be done is that people are being threatened by the Russians,the Cubans, the Iraqis, the Iranians, whoever."
"Why shouldn't we supply arms? If we don't, others will. So the argument goes. But it only reveals the extent towhich the market has become an absolute, determining for us what is good and defining appropriate activity.
Of course, it is unwelcome that others will sell arms and we need to press for global limits on the arms trade. But tosuggest we should meet the needs of a market simply because that market exists, regardless of any ethicalconstraints, reveals the extent to which the market has become an end in itself. It is no longer a mechanismserving the needs of the community by efficiently allocating resources - vital for a successful economy. Instead it iswe who now serve the market.
The market begins to take on the features of an idol. If we meet its needs and pay it homage, then it will bebenevolent towards us. All the time, it claims the 'bodies and souls of men' (Revelation 18:13). The argument is nodifferent from that of the drug-pusher who says that if I do not exploit the misery of drug-users then others will."
"Over two thirds of British arms sales are to regimes that violate human rights."
"In a report released today, Small arms, Wrong hands: a case for Government control of the small arms trade, Oxfamresearch shows that the UK has exported small arms to over 100 countries since 1995. The report also reveals for the firsttime that at least 120 UK companies are involved in the small arms trade.
The human costs of this lethal commerce are awesome. In modern conflicts over 80 percent of all casualties are civilians and90 percent of civilian causalities are caused by small arms."
"A few lines in a million-plus-line computer program were flawed. Usually, that didn't matter. Each Patriot battery was only supposed to work for fourteen hours at a stretch, after which time the cumulative error was still insignificant.But there was a war on. And people under stress are forgetful."
"Consider, for example, the explanation offered by Sir Robert Thompson, the British counter-insurgency expert who hasbeen for many years a close adviser of the American army in South Vietnam -- a man who is, incidentally, much admiredby American social scientists who like to consider themselves ‘tough minded, hard-nosed realists’, no doubt (sic) because of his utter contempt for democracy and his relatively pure colonialist attitudes. In the Guardian of 19 May 1969, his viewsare explained as follows:
He also condemns the bombing of the North. The US Air Force in 1965 was having great budgetary problems, because the army was the only one that had a war on its hands and was thus getting all the money. ‘So the Air Force had to get in, and you had the bombing of North Vietnam ... the budgetary problems of the Air Force were then solved.’ "
"The pamphlet was written during the Vietnam War and became one of Workers World's most popular titles. ...
In the end, it all comes down to profits. "Expanding Empire" explains how the capitalists' insatiable greed for increased profit inevitably produces war."
(Once again, I don't consider myself a Marxist. This pamphlet lays it on a little thick for me. But I do think it's worth a look.)
"I know you will agree that as a country we are obscenely wasting billions of dollars every week in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration is hard-pressed to explain why.
A few weeks ago, journalist Chris Hellman, writing for Tomdispatch, calculated that the real annual military budget is $1.2 trillion -- an astounding number. This is an amount that would solve virtually every fiscal problem we have -- state budget shortfalls, health care, education, environmental protection and retirement for many, if we ever found the will to emphasize human priorities, instead of making war and dominating the globe.
We at AlterNet think this is the highest priority work we can do, and of course it affects all other issues and challenges.
Will you help us by donating to support our work?"
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Talking About People :
A Guide to Fair and Accurate Language
by Rosalie Maggio
page124
( Number who were Board members of Fortune 500 companies : Zero )
"No joke, the ways weapons dealers buy influence in our government is just one example of the way the whole system is screwed up by this insane campaign-financing problem. The people we elect and we pay to represent our interests are, in fact, bought and paid for by special interests who then siphon off our tax money to make higher profits."
"We're Pointing the Gun at Ourselves"
by Molly Ivins
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 1 Aug 1996
included in the book You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You
The Shield of Achilles
by W. H. Auden
online here
Friends, tell the Enemy "Non serviam" and go plant a tree or something.