Before I finish this Sub-Chapter I’d like you to ponder on the real interests of the military industrial complex, which is not a new phenomenon in the world! It has been there since the dawn of time and in all cultures but rapidly accelerated during the latter half of the 19th Century.
There have always been powerful people willing to send poorer people to their deaths by starting wars to increase wealth and protect their interests.
Wars were (and still are) waged by colonial countries to increase the wealth and influence of smaller numbers of elite individuals within them and maintain unfair trading practices, exploitation, or ethnically cleanse those who they deem to be a threat to them.
Other wars, of course, are reactive. Such wars are liberation wars waged by people who have been exploited, displaced, evicted, sometimes starved, and who have no hope of freedom other than to engage in activities that hurt the people that are hurting them.
There are also many examples of less organised wars, such as slaves [1] rising up in violence to overthrow cruel and harsh overlords. This has been happening as long as history has been written.
But whether or not war is proactive or reactive it always involves terror, fear, horror, long term tragedy, pain and trauma for all directly affected – and weapons industries profit hugely.
The people who wage war have managed to come up with the term war crime. Continuous use of this term plants the thought in our heads that war itself is not a crime. It is used so that ordinary people think that war is a kind of gentlemanly affair where there is one way of killing people that is okay, or acceptable, and another way that is not – i.e. that is criminal.
As I mentioned in a previous post, a sad reality of the world is that if you are small you’ll be bullied, economically and politically, unless you toe the line. The voracious corporate world demands that politicians succumb to their agenda and if they don’t they’ll punish them severely [2].
But this is normal, not criminal!
[1]. In all European countries of the 1700’s and before, very wealthy land-owners virtually owned their workers. They thought themselves superior to the workers – and while they did not exactly buy and sell them like slaves, it was not too far removed from that. The more benign ones took care of their tenants but the tenants did not have any rights as such. It was a fairly short hop from there to slavery.
[2]. I mentioned the recent recession in a previous post also – which is an example of such economic and political punishment.