When seeking to understand war in ours or any society, there is one and only one point worth considering. Not its tactical purpose, and in virtually every example not its strategic goals either. No hurdy-gurdy of propaganda spun by mercenary prophets extolling the virtues of glory or, even more ridiculous, of national safety. After all, who goes forth into combat in order to be safe? Nor is it worthwhile to consider the phantom motivation of patriotism, which is merely jingoistic nationalism disguised as good intentions and community effort.
There is only one consideration, and that is who benefits and who suffers from the war. What is the true promise of victory, and what are the risks of failure…for that matter, what are the risks of success? Quite simply, who pays and who reaps reward? Sadly there is only one answer which has held true for nearly every conflict that has ever stained the earth with blood since before the unveiling of civilization: Those who benefit are the wealthy few, without exception connected directly to the political power base and in nearly every case also to the clergy, which in many societies has been and continues to be a far more powerful political force than the bureaucrats and custodians of law. It is the citizens who pay, starting with tax increases biting into their meager paychecks: money is snatched to fund tanks and bombs, manage the incredibly complex logistical support and grease foreign political machinery (because of course the moneyed elite who start the wars and earn billions from them certainly aren’t going to pay for the equipment and logistics to maintain it). To the people who own the corporations that build the tanks, feed the soldiers and find the fuel to fly the planes. The same people who created the war in the first place. Imagine if firefighters got paid a bonus for each fire they extinguished, and so decided to go out and surreptitiously set houses on fire in order to get paid? There is no morality, no religion, no conscience, only greed. The desire for money and it comes from us, who cannot afford it, and into their pockets, who do not need it.The citizens will be cajoled, deluded, intimidated and outright bullied into supporting an invented cause because the sleeping leviathan of corporate greed has once again awakened and wishes to feed. This beast is never denied.
It is so very simple that if ever the citizens of the earth were truly educated and permitted to understand it, there would be no more wars, because no one would go to fight. Every act of aggression in every civilization since the beginning of our sad episode on this earth has fallen into one of two categories: either the acts of a genuinely oppressed people fighting to regain their basic human rights and resorting to the last, most desperate act, or the much larger number of wars begun by small groups of people for their own gain. Sending millions of ‘common’ people off to useless deaths while their treasuries grew to bursting. You will be told, if you repeat such sentiments, that it is childish and naïve to believe that war is unnecessary for survival. You will be told by some of the innate predilection of the human animal to go forth in search of battle and conquest, and violence for its own sake. The instinctual needs of the wild, not yet wholly erased by the civilizing influence, drive us to slaughter and war, they say, spouting ‘evidence’ from scores of books written by under qualified theoreticians with thinly-veiled agendas. You will be admonished for your foolish tree-hugging notions, their belligerent proclamations again shored up with any number of quotations culled from all the way back to the ancient romans, “If you want peace prepare for war”, etc., etc. Of course, one is not told that whoever’s eloquence we are remembering was themselves invariably part of that tiny elite who profit in one way or another from war, not suffer from it. From then to now, it is not them nor their children doing the dying, being slaughtered or maimed for life on foreign lands, subjecting entire peoples under terrible threats and oppression, while murdering and stealing on an apocalyptic scale. They use their private powers to subvert the law which binds the citizens to act regardless of their wishes, in order to protect their own. Sometimes you will hear things, when scandals hit, about the scion of a powerful family helping his son evade service by saying “I decided my son was far more useful to our country serving in office”, etc. Few are ever prosecuted for this criminal behavior. If the apparatus were in place to effectively punish such \ lawbreakers, then it would be sufficient to stop them from breaking them in the first place. But it is not there, and so the chicanery continues.
It is, as I said, terribly simple: you die, they get rich. There are no wars without financial motivation, period. It doesn’t happen. The one and only point of going to war is the spoils, which do not get shared with the soldier or their family, only with those who bankrolled the violence. It is not always purely money, at the first level, it might be a bid for political power, but again, the political power is desired for an environment in which to earn untold amounts of money, and to a lesser extent, to satisfy the megalomania that so many of the privileged few inflict upon the world.
There is no defensible argument for the ‘average citizen’ to go to war, none whatsoever, especially when considering the risk involved. They are persuaded to leave their jobs, their homes and their families to risk death or worse in a foreign land, to kill people they’ve never met and have no argument with except the ignorant xenophobia created for them by a subservient press. Are they doing so with any promise, even a remote one, of enriching their families or truly protecting their futures? Short of an enemy army landing on your shores and literally coming to storm and burn your town, there is no excuse for sending millions to their deaths, depleting the treasuries and hurling the immeasurable tax burden back upon the survivors (not, it is important to note, upon those who are getting rich directly from the slaughter), which is always the shape of war.
The elite have an absurdly simple and wildly effective formula: invent a cause, any cause will do, in order to achieve the tacit acceptance of the people (for that is all that is required) to enter into another war. Then an incident is created, an enemy chosen, a people properly demonized, to spark the event itself. At this point the money is already pouring into their coffers: Defense contractors, arms manufacturers, insurance companies, allied foreign investments, and the many other corporations that feed off the exceedingly profitable business of war…all of these are paid with government funds and captured wealth in the theatre of combat and from the assets of the invaded ciruclating in the world’s banks. No-bid contracts are given to reward the wealthy citizens whose have joined the war investment, and the money starts to flow in every direction in an orgy of profit and re-investment, and yet more profit. But this is only the beginning. By now the actual combat has begun, and the coffins are coming home, as are the stories, as is always the case with war and military occupation, of atrocities against the indigenous population. The press does its best to tailor the war to to fit the image chosen by their masters, yet some truths will accidentally slip through, accidents of truth. And for a brief, crucial moment, the veil is torn away and the horror, murder and unimaginable disgust is revealed, in microcosm. This is the only time they are vulnerable, but it is a narrow window, and closes fast. Quickly the machinery swoops in, and the moment is lost. But instead of ending the war and admitting that it has turned into a larger monster than the politicians imagined (of course it isn’t, there is an actual encouragement of chaos), more patriotism is called for, and more tax dollars to send more troops and drop more tons of explosive on the enemy. Sacrifice is called for from the people, we must all band together to support our troops, meanwhile the moneyed elite enjoy tax breaks and donate little of anything to the effort, and show their support of the troops by deliberately putting them in harm’s way to gain profits that are literally calculated to the last penny.
At last, when the tactical missions are complete, and the slow pullout of troops begins (leaving intact a puppet state propped up with our own military and intelligence machinery to perpetuate a systematic robbery of the country’s resources), and the coup de grace is released: contracts are rewarded for the “rebuilding” of the country we have just devastated. Same corporations, same small group of people who own them. They build the bombs and the planes first, and with a few minor alterations then then lay the new roads, build the new inner-city tenements and repair the infrastructure we just finished obliterating with billions of dollars worth of ordnance. This is the evidence of the sheer grotesque genius of the formula: The reason to go to war is negligent, it doesn’t matter, all that matters are the enormous profits to be made, so we go to war and fight and kill and defoliate and spend and waste and destroy, and die, and the few people who created the war profit from it, and the soldiers come home in wheelchairs, or body bags, and go back to their jobs at Wendy’s, or that window factory down the street. They take up their small sales positions or secretarial jobs again, left to deal with the post-traumatic disorders, crippling ailments and missing limbs on criminal wages and thoroughly inadequate insurance, or in many cases they have no job to come back to, so devastated is the economy by the war that manufacturing and office jobs are being cut back by the same corporations who just earned billions in the war. There is, perhaps, a rubber-stamped letter from the President, or a cheap medal in a velour-lined box to prop over the mantelpiece to show everyone your pride in having survived being duped into fighting and dying for another man’s profits.
