Losses to which we are accustomed affect us less deeply.
—JUVENAL
Boys and girls are conditioned from a very young age and throughout their lives to make themselves useful to the establishment. The making of babies and the making of war are the chief pursuits of the established governmental order. They are a self-perpetuating cycle of sex and violence. Any deviations from this paradigm are considered unproductive, even counterproductive. It is said that “every generation has its war.” The matured crop of children are sent away to kill and die and another is grown to replace them. The military specifically targets males at their biological peak of testosterone during the ages of 18 to 25 when aggression and irrationality are at their highest. So too does society target females during their most hormonal period for the actual propagation of the next crop of soldiers: Motherhood.
If this were not intended, would not there be a single generation to point to without their war? Sex and violence is all we know: Television is our teacher. When a neoconservative described Americans as a “War-like people,” I baulked. But now, years later, I find myself realizing that this paradigm is not only accurate, when it should not be, but contrived to be so, by negligence or intent, by the very society that simultaneously claims the love of both war and peace in an absurdly paradoxical feat of Orwellian doublethink.
The Conditioning -
Boys:
Superhero fantasy (Good/Evil fighting)
Toy guns (Reinforcing the instinct)
Violent video games (Honing the drive)
Sports (Practice makes perfect)
Military-worship society (The recruitment)
Girls:
Princess fantasy (Finding Mr. Right)
Baby dolls (Reinforcing the instinct)
Babysitting (Honing the drive)
Cheerleading (Practice makes perfect)
Sex-permeated culture (The recruitment)
In a 1996 c-span interview Noam Chomsky noted the establishments approximated uses of the fledgling internet, sports and shopping. The dumbing down of one of the greatest tools ever invented. And he was right, look at what has come of it. Mock warfare and nesting; the pursuits left to the adult crop not engaged directly in the prescribed soldier farming. Our culture is predisposed toward one end; war. The “productive” urges must have an outlet and the mock warfare of sports and the post-child rearing nesting of middle life is that outlet. The western powers wage wars of aggression in, and spread depleted uranium across, foreign lands while their populations stew largely unaware in their own self-indulgent, hyper-complacent lives.
Regime Change, noun
government overthrow: the forcible overthrow of another nation's government by outside intervention, especially when the targeted nation is regarded as politically unstable (used euphemistically) [Emphasis in original]
Wherever terms have a shifting meaning, independent sets of considerations are liable to become complicated together, and reasonings and results are frequently falsified. … the symbols of operation are frequently also the symbols of the results of operations.
—Ada Augusta, Sketch of The Analytical Engine
The subtlety of this modern empire building puts the Roman centurions, the Spanish conquistadors, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonial powers to shame. We [Economic Hit Men] are crafty; we learned from history. Today we do not carry swords. We do not wear armor or clothes that set us apart. In countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, and Indonesia, we dress like local schoolteachers and shop owners. In Washington and Paris, we look like government bureaucrats and bankers. We appear humble, normal. We visit project sites and stroll through impoverished villages. We profess altruism, talk with local papers about the wonderful humanitarian things we are doing. We cover the conference tables of government committees with our spreadsheets and financial projections, and we lecture at the Harvard Business School about the miracles of macroeconomics. We are on the record, in the open. Or so we portray ourselves and so are we accepted. It is how the system works. We seldom resort to anything illegal because the system itself is built on subterfuge, and the system is by definition legitimate.
However—and this is a very large caveat—if we fail, an even more sinister breed steps in, ones we [Economic Hit Men] refer to as the jackals, men who trace their heritage directly to those earlier empires. The jackals are always there, lurking in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown or die in violent “accidents.” And if by chance the jackals fail, as they failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, then the old models resurface. When the jackals fail, young Americans are sent in to kill and to die. [Emphasis Added]
—John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
We engage in coup d'états and call it regime change, for their freedom, but really it is for the proposes of economic warfare, market penetration and territorial denial to rival superpowers. We install puppet governments of exiles to forge client-states and call them transitional governments and transitional councils or enslave whole nations in massive debt. The mandating of manufactured democracy from imperial motivations are not the founding principles upon which a free society can grow; strongmen thrive and inequality festers. The wars fought today hearken back to the era of the Gilded Age and the League of Nations and “mandated powers” enforcing colonial rule at the end of the first world war that established global colonialism. Imperialism and adventurism does not a democracy make.
About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, "Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you’re too busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, "We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?" He said, "I don’t know." He said, "I guess they don’t know what else to do." So I said, "Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?" He said, "No, no." He says, "There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." He said, "I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments." And he said, "I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail."
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it’s worse than that." He said—he reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper, and he said, "I just got this down from upstairs," meaning the secretary of defense’s office, "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Well, don’t show it to me." And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, "You remember that?" He said, "Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!"
[Emphasis Added]
—General Wesley Clark to Amy Goodman, 2007
There is another prevailing mantra, particularly in the academic professions, claiming that governments seek to protect national security. Anyone who has studied international relations theory has heard that. That's mostly mythology. The governments seek to extend power and domination and to benefit their primary domestic constituencies - in the U.S., primarily the corporate sector. The consequence is that security does not have a high priority.
Noam Chomsky, The US Behaves Nothing Like A Democracy
Propaganda tells us that we are fighting for our freedom or for their freedom, but what we, western powers, are doing is imposing our will on someone else’s lands for fun and profit. Our freedom is not actually at stake in the wars we fight today. The pre-programmed words and utterances are from another time, a time when defeat was within the realm of possibility. Short of apocalyptic calamity, we are here to stay. Pay no mind to the scare tactic paper tigers of terrorism, invasion and monetary collapse. The Soviet Union “collapsed,” but look at Russia today. All that occurred was the loss of their overextended sphere of influence and their borderlands. Oh no, a reduction in empire. Empires grow and shrink but their homelands do not disappear. The massive economic strife was caused by power-grabbing capitalistic machinations, not collapse. The billionaires rose not from innovations, but from blatant theft and systemic corruption. Still yet, their people did not fall into an anarchic Mad Maxian lifestyles of Thunder domes and Master Blasters, nor do they resort to cannibalism and infanticide.
All the while, another crop is sprouting roots into the same lands that bred this death on the grandest of scales for entire generations. We kill at ratios of a thousand-to-one and the majority of us don’t bat an eye. We strike from the militarized skies of nations with whom we are not at war with near-automatons. We operate black-site secret prisons of indefinite detention and continue to oversee the very same torture methods that Japanese officers were executed for after World War II while claiming it isn’t the same; because we are the ones doing it (through contractors).
Our children’s lives usurped for the “grand chessboard” while claiming the moral high ground with dirty hands. For aggressor nations, there is no moral high ground, only the high ground. They do not truly care about those who fight and die or they would stop sending so many of them to their deaths. Do they care about a tank once it has been destroyed? What is a few thousand of their own dead countrymen for the kind of people who slaughter foreigners by the hundreds of thousands?
Why would they care about humans… when they can just grow more?
Shock and Awed
Cowen Thorne