MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘War Industry’

The System Is Rigged For Endless War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix – by Caitlin Johnstone – Caitlin’s Newsletter

Posted by M. C. on August 26, 2021

I still can’t find words to describe how insane it is that all the “experts” who spent twenty years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-system-is-rigged-for-endless

Caitlin Johnstone

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I still can’t find words to describe how insane it is that all the “experts” who spent twenty years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks.

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Nobody gets “credit” for ending the Afghanistan occupation. Everyone involved in keeping it going for twenty years gets blame. That’s it. You don’t get a trophy for not murdering more people.

But it’s not surprising that the Afghanistan war took twenty years to end. If anything, the way the deck is stacked in favor of perpetual war, it’s surprising it happened that fast. 

Military members who support imperialism get promoted. Those who get to the top go on to work for war profiteers. The war profiteers fund think tanks which promote more wars. The mass media report “news” stories citing those think tanks. These stories manufacture consent for more wars.

The war industry reinforces itself. Those who get to the top of the war machine move on to the private sector and spend their time lobbying for more wars which create more eventual Pentagon officials who go on to lobby for more wars. Peace should be easy. This is why it’s not.

It’s horrifying when you realize how much of the behavior of the most powerful military in history is driven by the simple fact that weapons manufacturers don’t make money if those weapons aren’t being used. The most powerful government on earth is stuck in a self-exacerbating feedback loop where the behaviors of the war machine are dictated by the war industry, and people wonder why it’s so hard to end wars. With a cycle this vicious, you can only end the wars by ending the empire.

This is what you get when mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit. As long as war is profitable, you guarantee that more wars will happen. As long as ecocide is profitable, more ecocide will happen. As long as corruption is profitable, more corruption will happen. Meanwhile, peace is not profitable. Demilitarization is not profitable. Nuclear disarmament is not profitable. Getting plastic out of the oceans is not profitable. Leaving trees standing is not profitable. Leaving oil in the ground is not profitable. Freedom is not profitable.

The religion of profit drives all human behavior. And it’s a death cult that will end us all if we don’t end it first.

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Some people seem to think it’s only justifiable to end a military occupation if you can continue to control everything that happens in that nation after your military occupation ends. This is the same as believing it’s never okay to end a military occupation under any circumstances.

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The mainstream media always cheerlead a US president’s foreign policy when it involves mass murder on an unthinkable scale and always criticize a US president when he tries to stop doing this. That’s all you really need to know about the trustworthiness of the mainstream media.

❖Nick is a Fred Hampton Leftist 🥋 @SocialistMMASupport for withdrawing from Afghanistan has dropped 20 points since April Goddamn corporate media propaganda is powerful afAugust 19th 2021306 Retweets2,142 Likes

Corporate media is mind control at mass scale. People who identify as smart, independent thinkers have their minds altered by it every day, and they believe they came to those opinions on their own. Until this problem is addressed, none of our other major problems are going away.

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“How are we supposed to get everyone vaccinated if we don’t make it mandatory?”

Uhh, you don’t? You don’t begin with the assumption that the existence of a nasty coronavirus justifies forcing or coercing everyone to inject themselves with a brand new drug they don’t trust?

I mean, compelling people to take an injection that they are actually afraid of is a huge deal. Can we not at least agree on that? Can we not at least agree that forcing someone to receive an injection they fear would be so serious that you’d better have an amazingly bulletproof argument for doing it? I think so. And I don’t think such an argument exists at this time.

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It’s important to follow and be followed by people you disagree with. You’ll see a lot of crap, but you’ll also keep yourself from falling into a self-validating echo chamber and eventually finding yourself saying something like unvaccinated people should be denied medical care.

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Expecting a communism-oriented country to look like a utopia in the midst of a global imperialist war against communism is like expecting a family to look like a Norman Rockwell painting while they are being chased by wolves. 

Saying communism doesn’t work because nations who try to espouse it don’t look like thriving utopias while they’re being relentlessly assaulted is like saying a new invention doesn’t work because a band of armed thugs kept shooting and stomping on it during the demonstration.

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Poverty is the result of an abusive system and telling the poor to “Get a job” or “Get a better job” has always enabled that abuse. Now that small businesses are being killed by that same abusive system, many who used to enable its abuses by saying this are becoming its victims.

Blaming poverty on the poor in a system that’s literally built on the premise of a permanent underclass has always been insane, but if you’re making good money and lack empathy it’s easy to think they’re just lazy. Only when such people are screwed by the same system do they see.

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The US War Industry – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on March 10, 2021

Chapter 4, “The Tricks of the Trade”:

In order to keep the military budget elevated, sustain industry, and confine D.C. to a violent foreign policy, the public must be fed a constant stream of fear-inducing pretexts. Such pretexts, which must be carefully crafted and promoted, effectively serve as advertising to sell the public on the need for war-related production (p. 134).

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/03/laurence-m-vance/the-u-s-war-industry/

By Laurence M. Vance

Review of Christian Sorensen, Understanding the War Industry (Clarity Press, 2020), xxvii + 415 pgs.

I had never heard of Christian Sorensen, author of Understanding the War Industry, before I was sent his new book for review. However, when I saw on the back cover that he was termed “the Seymour Melman of the 21st century,” I was intrigued. I first learned of Melman from Mises Institute senior fellow Tom Woods, who has written this description of him:

Seymour Melman (1917–2004). Melman was a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. In a scholarly career that yielded a great many books and articles, he focused much of his energy on the economics of the warfare and military-oriented state. In large part, Melman’s work amounted to an extended analysis, in light of Bastiat’s insight, of the costs, not only of modern American wars, but also of the defense establishment itself.

Sorensen mentions Melman’s 1970 book Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War on the first page of his preface, and describes it thusly: “In that book, Melman analyzed how the headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces coordinated and administered the businesses that make weapons of war” (p. ix). Sorsenson contends that “in the fifty years since Pentagon Capitalism hit the press, the playing field has changed” (p. ix). The military industrial complex (MIC) mentioned by President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address—which Sorensen views as “an insulated war-promoting configuration comprised of the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces; industry, the corporations that develop and sell goods and services to the U.S. and allied government; and the U.S. Congress, which implements policies and authorizes the funding for the Pentagon”(p. x)—“has demonstrably further penetrated the institutions of U.S. government” (pp. ix-x). Sorensen sees the change from Melman’s time as this: “War corporations—the industrial part of the MIC—now hold the most power in the trifecta. The Pentagon no longer controls the U.S. war industry. Industry runs the show. Industry employs expansive, sometimes pernicious, operations in order to dominate political processes and military functions” (p. x). Sorensen goes on to quote Melman several times in the book.

All I know about Sorensen is what is stated on the book’s back cover: “Christian Sorensen is a researcher and author focused on the U.S. war industry. His academic background is in translation and international relations. A military veteran, he contributes frequently to independent media outlets.”

Like Melman, Sorensen is a man of the left, and what he considers to be capitalism is anything but. But as Woods said of Melman: “Although Melman was associated with the left, a fact that may account for libertarian neglect of his thought, his analysis of the warfare state is not only compatible with, but at times is absolutely identical to, the libertarian view, and deserves wider dissemination.” Consequently, although anything that Sorensen says about the Green New Deal or increased government intervention should be dismissed, his assault on the U.S. war industry should be embraced wholeheartedly.

Understanding the War Industry contains twelve chapters, each of which are divided into sections and concluded with scores of endnotes, many of them very detailed and informative. All of the chapter sections are indicated in the comprehensive table of contents. (The “Acronyms & Initialisms” promised in the table of contents at the end of the book is not there.) The book also contains an index, although its page number is missing in the table of contents.

See the rest here

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom; War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism; War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy; King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, and many other books. His newest books are Free Trade or Protectionism? and The Free Society.

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