Saturday, October 11, 2014

War is for Control



Not oil, not military-industrial profits, not the bankers; war is for the purpose of control.  Control of the most valuable, renewable resource on the planet – people.  Control through the toolkit of regulatory democracy if possible, authoritarian rule where the population is not as easily fooled.

The elite of the Anglo west pursue this objective; since the Great Rapprochement between Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century the primary tool for western control of the world’s population has been the United States government.

Justin Raimondo is out with a post entitled “Why This War?”  In it, he describes Progressivism as the motor behind this push – progressivism rooted in early twentieth century America just at the time when the elite purposely moved their primary tool from Britain to the United States:

America’s ruling elite has been "progressive" since the dawn of modernity, right before the first world war.

Raimondo then cites Rothbard, writing of this period and movement; from Rothbard:

In his editorial in the magazine’s first issue in November 1914, Herbert Croly cheerily prophesied that the war would stimulate America’s spirit of nationalism and therefore bring it closer to democracy…. True, European war collectivism was a bit grim and autocratic, but never fear, America could use the selfsame means for ‘democratic’ goals…. As America prepared to enter the war, the New Republic eagerly looked forward to imminent collectivization, sure that it would bring “immense gains in national efficiency and happiness.” After war was declared, the magazine urged that the war be used as “an aggressive tool of democracy.”

Somewhere in the back of my mind I recall that when many use the term “democracy” (and here I refer to Croly, not Rothbard), they do not mean Switzerland; they mean something akin to communism.

Raimondo points out that it was usually the democrats – the liberals – that led the effort or push for war and for global-reaching institutions.  Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ.  Bush II could be considered an exception to this rule.

This ideology has a name: we call it "progressivism." It has a long history, starting with Teddy Roosevelt and his intellectual publicists, continuing through the Great War and the run-up to World War II – when it was the left that was screaming for US intervention in the European conflict – and its aftermath.

There was no US interest in the great wars of the first half of the twentieth century, not if by “US interest” one means of interest or benefit to the vast majority of people living within the geographic boundaries of the United States.  There was certainly a necessity for the US to involve itself in these wars if it was to fulfill its calling as the replacement tool for global government. 

This is why our foreign policy consists of "endless war," as Greenwald puts it: because if your goal is world domination, then the war to establish a global authority – with Washington as its capital – must be necessarily open-ended. That’s because there will always be resistance to such a project: once a rebellion is put down in the Middle East, for example, another one is more than likely to pop up in Africa, or eastern Europe, or someplace else.

It is the intent toward global control and the rebellion to it that is the answer to “why the wars.”  People rebel – not oil, not gas pipelines.  People.

It is the people that are to be brought under control.  Globally.

The empire builders will, in the end, fail; we are living through the transition – it may be a long one.

11 comments:

  1. Yes, war is for control. My opinion is the ultimate aim of the financier elite is to use the power of the USA to achieve a one-world-government with total dominance of the world population.

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  2. Why bother belly-aching about war as opposed to some romantic view of humanity's past? Never in history are fewer people going to die from war nor likely to end up on the front lines. If there's one thing about modern war over ancient war is that the ratio to non-combatant soldier to active soldier has never been higher.

    World War One was a horrific blight on humanity while the Spanish Flu was business as usual and barely registers a blip in the history books? It times like these that people have to remember that more people are killed by cows than sharks.

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  3. As the US empire declines there will be another to take its place. Personally, I don't see that as the end of the empire but rather it morphing into a new version of itself. The goal is world domination and I don't think the elites pulling the strings care if it's a western empire or an eastern one or whatever as long as they're in control. They'll probably have to have a global empire that's split into two sides so they can keep the dialectic going and have an enemy to exploit and to keep people in fear.

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    1. It seems to me that Anglo elite won't have the same control over China as they do over the US.

      In any case and in the meantime, we will go through some meaningful decentralization.

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    2. Well, I didn't say Anglo elites, just elites. That being said, they may not but from our perspective will that matter much? There will still be an empire, it'll just have a new face.

      It seems like the Chinese and the Russians are being set up as the emerging "good guys" to the US's "bad guy" in order to move everyone into more control.

      I could go for some decentralization, but I don't see that as some sort of magic pill that will cure people of the deadly mind virus known as Statism. Without real education, without understanding that there is no authority in man then chances are most people will be re-centralized and the few who don't want that will be exterminated. Seems like that's the elite's MO.

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    3. All fair points.

      My only point about decentralization - and I do believe it will come on many levels - is that it will lead to more options for the masses. I don't see it as ushering in a libertarian utopia, but more options isn't all bad.

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  4. I agree that the purpose of war is control over people, but I'd argue that simply killing people should be included as part of that control.

    To understand war, I think we need to understand something that I'll call "power dynamics". "Social dominance", a term favored by many anthropologists and other researches, may be more accurate - I'm not sure. Power dynamics is essentially about who is more powerful than whom. If "power" is defined as simply "the ability to do something", then that makes power dynamics essentially about who has more/greater abilities to do things than whom.

    I think people have an instinctive desire to dominate others - to "be top dog", to "rule the roost", etc. In other words, people want to be more powerful than those around them. I think this instinctive desire is come by honestly, in the sense that it's inherited from our non-human primate ancestors. This desire can be seen any time a person wants to do more to someone than that someone did to him. In my opinion, war is a large-scale expression of this. That means war is fundamentally about which groups of people are more powerful than which.

    As I mentioned at first, I think killing people should be included as part of the control over people that is the general purpose of war. Control can really only be asserted over people by physical force, and there's no greater control that can be asserted over someone than by killing him. Kill a person and you'll never have to worry about him possibly attacking you ever again. (The same doesn't go for the friends and/or family that he leaves behind, however.) This reasoning seems to be just as applicable to groups of people as it is to individuals.

    War, then, is ultimately about control over people, but not in an exploitative sense (as you alluded to when you referred to people as "the most valuable, renewable resource on the planet"). It's simply about dominating people, up to and including killing them "if necessary". One might argue that exterminating people isn't necessarily very profitable, and I would agree - in a materialistic sense. But all human action is ultimately about what Mises called psychic profit, which has no necessary connection to materialism.

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    1. This seems to describe someone like Stalin quite well. I am not sure it describes the elite (at least not the way I view the topic).

      But I do agree fully that the power over life and death is the ultimate expression of power.

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  5. Regarding the involvement of the US government in the two world wars:

    I think the publicly stated reasons for that involvement ("spreading democracy", "stopping tyranny", etc.) were just for public consumption. The apparent fact is that the US government got involved in the two world wars to bail out the British. Why would the US government want to bail out the British? Because, by that time, there were lots of (big) business connections between the US and Britain - connections that would've been damaged or destroyed should Britain lose the wars.

    Of course, if the US government had been upfront about this to the public, then the public wouldn't have supported getting involved in the wars. Instead, the public would've wondered why it has to sacrifice itself so that a relative few people can continue enjoying the levels of profit that they're used to.

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    1. I lean more toward the possibility that the US involved itself in these wars in order to take the place of Great Britain as the primary tool through which the elite exercise their vision of globalization.

      This was a purposeful plan put in place by those same elite; see Stead.

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  6. Justin Raimondo explains that America's foreign policy is intended to subjugate the entire world.

    http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/11/04/do-we-have-a-foreign-policy/

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