by Steve Cook
Things can be made to look awfully complex, usually by people with a vested interest in keeping the rest of us confused. Confused people are easier to bamboozle.
But here is a simplicity for you. Certain corporations and certain money-lending cartels make a lot of money from the manufacture and sale of weaponry and other things necessary for war and from lending money to governments in order to buy them.
Such people and organisations therefore have a very profound vested interest in us being in a perpetual state of war or preparedness for war. From their perspective, the worst thing that could happen is peace breaking out. When peace breaks out, nobody wants to buy their stuff or take out bank loans in order to buy their stuff. They can’t make money and might even go out of business!
From their perspective, then, as soon as the world threatens to settle down and get along, it is necessary to create, promote and generate a conflict.
This inevitably requires a great deal of lying. As Sun Tzu pointed out in The Art of War: “There is nothing new in a government lying to their people to start a war. Indeed, as most people prefer living in peace to bloody and horrific death in war, any government that desires to initiate a war usually lies to their people in order to create the illusion that support for the war is the only possible choice they can make. All war is based on deception.”
A classic example of this is the effort of two war criminals, George Bush and Tony Blair, to get going a war with Iraq, a country that was no threat, for which, without the lying and propaganda effort to convince us otherwise, few people saw the need. Well, who stood to gain by getting two tame loons to start the conflict?
For those of us old enough to remember, the old Communist Bloc provided a handy enemy with which to scare the bejeesus out of everybody and convince us to invest vast chunks of national wealth in enriching the arms manufacturers, money lenders and so forth. The Communist Bloc turned out not to have been the monster it was made out to be in that it crumpled like a house of cards. This threatened to derail the gravy train for those who made money out of the military spending so new enemies had to be presented. Thus we had terrorism, Islam, Iraq etc etc in endless procession and, now, Russia.
So we see a determined effort to start a war with Russia. A war with Russia would be catastrophic in every way imaginable. Nobody wants it. So we see the propaganda machine mobilise to work on our heads through a tame media and political hacks very much entangled with the same vested interests, to convince us of a threat and that we have “no choice” but to go along with the efforts of the military industrial complex to get a highly profitable conflict going.
The exposure of Tony Blair’s war crimes begs some vital questions: do we really think that Blair is just an isolated case? How can we trust anything we are being told by some political or journalistic hack promoting war?
How many times have we been lied to in the past in order to bamboozle us into supporting the mass suicide of nations, the death of our sons and daughters, the racking up of the national debt and the rest of the inevitable disruption and misery? How much are we being lied to now? How much will we be lied to in the future?
And how much longer are we going to put up with death, mayhem and carnage so some criminal banking cartels and military-industrial nut jobs, these merchants of chaos, can make a buck?
Leave a Reply