The Evil of a Permanent War Economy

BY EVE OTTENBERG

 MARCH 15, 2024
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There is no daylight between presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the permanent war economy. Both tout the weapons industry as a source of jobs, jobs, jobs for Americans, never mentioning that the billions of government dollars flushed through the military-industrial complex could go for other things. Think universal health care, free higher education or maybe just the green economy – if money spent on what Politico called Bombenomics went to producing solar panels and wind turbines, we’d have jobs AND a planet not heating up at warp speed. Sadly, our two presidential contenders never met a weapon system they didn’t like. And as recent history repeats – if you spend all your cash building tanks, guns and bombs, they’re gonna get used.

Even worse, the U.S. MIC compels other countries to beef up their militaries. Take Russia. Before invading Ukraine, Moscow’s weapons industry puttered along, as did military conscription, but as soon as the Kremlin realized that it had no peace partners in the west or in Ukraine – a revelation that dawned on Moscow when then British prime minister Boris Johnson sabotaged peace talks between the two opponents in spring 2022 – things changed. Russia put itself on a war footing, so that now its industrial military base hums along, churning out tanks, hypersonic missiles (which the West lacks), rockets, guns and don’t forget nuclear bombs. Russia also placed tactical nukes in Belarus.

China, too, threatened by the U.S. over Beijing’s long-standing and very public intention peacefully to absorb Taiwan, has beefed up every aspect of its war machine. As military expert Will Schryver recently tweeted: “The U.S. is currently incapable of putting to sea more than four carriers at any given time – and no more than ~60 warships of all types. China currently has 3 carriers, almost 800 vessels and mountains of missiles.”

Meanwhile, there’s Iran – now using the Chinese satellite navigation system Beidou, which means, to quote the Sirius Report, “Iranian missiles are able to use a positioning system that the U.S. has no control over.” And Tehran could soon have nukes, thanks to Trump trashing the West’s nuclear pact with Iran and Biden inexplicably refusing to fix that bubblehead move. In other words, all these fiascos could have been avoided, seriatim, had Washington controlled its aggression and exerted its stupendous influence to promote peace. Even more critically, a worsening situation can still be avoided, if Beltway insiders pivot from sanctions, expanding foreign military bases to surround perceived enemies, fomenting color revolutions and generally behaving ruthlessly. Instead, the Empire might try the good neighbor approach, though after so many decades of violence, it might take the non-Western world a while to believe such a sea change.

And then there’s the blatant immorality of a war economy, one that depends for its health on bloodshed. Yet weapons production is one of the few manufacturing industries in the U.S. that hasn’t been entirely off-shored. This is a bad look. “What does your country make? Oh, guns, tanks and bombs, not much else.” That sends a message to the world, and it’s one, apparently, with which our rulers are not dissatisfied. After all, monomaniacal Washington’s chief carrot, (which is also its chief stick) over many decades, for recalcitrant foreign governments, has been, to rephrase renowned economist Michael Hudson: “Do what we want and we won’t bomb and obliterate you.” The fact that a principal U.S. industrial product is weaponry, helps concentrate the rest of the world’s mind on that threat.

Indeed, Biden “is supersizing the defense industry,” reports Responsible Statecraft February 23. This new National Defense Industrial Strategy would “catalyze generational change” of the U.S. defense industry. No surprise there, at a time when we recently learned that since 2014, during Biden’s stint as vice president with the Ukraine portfolio, the CIA beefed up its operations in Ukraine so that that nation essentially became the biggest CIA project in the agency’s history, bristling with agency bases and bunkers. That news appeared boastfully in the New York Times, right about the moment when it became clear that the west’s whole military project in Ukraine had flopped. (Right after the Times bragged about all these CIA bases on the Russia/Ukraine frontier, Russia used its artillery to liquidate one, thereby killing who knows how many Americans. Nothing like a fawning press so eager to flaunt intelligence “achievements” that it sends some of those achievers to their graves.)

And there’s no reason to suppose this new defense industry push won’t flop as well. The Biden gang “is proposing a generation of investment to expand an arms industry that, overall, fails to meet cost, schedule and performance standards,” Responsible Statecraft reports. In other words, President Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex are being worse than ignored. Biden breathes new life into the MIC’s evils, and so, could truly be said to be Ike’s nemesis.

Arms makers are a powerful lobby in Washington, who “have solidified their economic influence to stave off the political potential for future national security cuts, regardless of their performance or the geopolitical environment.” They can produce lemons or systems so finicky they need constant attention – Exhibit A is the F-35 – and still sell them abroad for billions. That’s because contractors carefully situate their plants in multiple states, so they can play the jobs card with Congress. The end result is an economy that demands war and more war, to keep a huge and deathly vigorous industry purring along. Meanwhile, Responsible Statecraft asks, “What is the military really getting from more and more national security spending? Less for more. Fewer weapons than it asked for, usually late and over budget, and much of the time dysfunctional.”

That’s actually not so bad. Weapons that don’t work could mean lives saved, but they also mean other things don’t get built. Instead of a massive EV base, an expanding textile industry or a big boost to solar panel manufacturing or shoe production or assembling any of the thousands of items stamped “made in China,” we get Patriot missiles and Abrams tanks, both, by the way, not all they’re cracked up to be, judging on reports from the Ukraine War.

Biden’s all in on the twisted notion that showering dollars on armaments benefits the economy, gushing about “equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for the air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country – in Pennsylvania, Ohio Texas…” According to Truthout February 26, Arizona and Pennsylvania “are swing states crucial to his re-election bid, while the other two are red states with Republican senators he’s been trying to win over to vote for another round of military aid to Ukraine.”

More ghoulishly, “lobbyists for the administration even handed out a map, purporting to show how much money such assistance to Ukraine would distribute to each of the 50 states.” What a profitably blood-soaked investment our Ukraine proxy war is! Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men get to die fighting for the U.S., which doesn’t have to risk any soldiers, while back home armaments makers fatten on the carnage, and the politicians promoting this gory fiasco have the nerve to try to get re-elected! For the U.S., the Ukraine War has truly been a win/win business enterprise. Which has something to do with Washington never facing reality and admitting defeat. When the going gets rough, Washington gets going, like it did from Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and so forth. The trick is never fighting a peer competitor directly, but to bomb indiscriminately around the world, while keeping the cult of death flush with money. Eisenhower must be spinning in his grave.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard People. She can be reached at her website.

Corporatism

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini

Corporatism is a form of class collaboration put forward as an alternative to class conflict, and was first proposed in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which influenced Catholic trade unions that organised in the early twentieth century to counter the influence of trade unions founded on a socialist ideology. Theoretical underpinnings came from the medieval traditions of guilds and craft-based economics; and later, syndicalism. Corporatism was encouraged by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno.

Gabriele D'Annunzio and anarcho-syndicalist Alceste de Ambris incorporated principles of corporative philosophy in their Charter of Carnaro.

One early and important theorist of corporatism was Adam Müller, an advisor to Prince Metternich in what is now eastern Germany and Austria. Müller propounded his views as an antidote to the twin "dangers" of the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith. In Germany and elsewhere there was a distinct aversion among rulers to allow unrestricted capitalism^{[citation needed]}, owing to the feudalist and aristocratic tradition of giving state privileges to the wealthy and powerful^{[citation needed]}.

Under fascism in Italy, business owners, employees, trades-people, professionals, and other economic classes were organized into 22 guilds, or associations, known as "corporations" according to their industries, and these groups were given representation in a legislative body known as the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni. See Mussolini's essay discussing the corporatist state, Doctrine of Fascism.

Similar ideas were also ventilated in other European countries at the time. For instance, Austria under the Dollfuß dictatorship had a constitution modelled on that of Italy; but there were also conservative philosophers and/or economists advocating the corporate state, for example Othmar Spann. In Portugal, a similar ideal, but based on bottom-up individual moral renewal, inspired Salazar to work towards corporatism. He wrote the Portuguese Constitution of 1933, which is credited as the first corporatist constitution in the world.

When you get rid of the paramilitary uniforms, the swaggering macho bravado, fascism is merely corporatism. And like its economic predecessor Distributism it shares a Catholic origin, a fetish for private property, and being a Third Way between Capitalism and Socialism. After WWI Corporatism, Distributism, and Social Credit, evolved as economic ideologies opposed to Communism and Capitalism.

Corporatism is sometimes identified as State Capitalism which it is a form of. However State Capitalism is a historic epoch in Capitalism that developed as a response to the Workers rebellions world wide between 1905-1921, in particular the Bolshevik Revolution. The epoch of State Capitalism begins with Keynes rescue of capitalism by using the State to prime the pump and to provide social reforms in response to the revolutionary workers movement.

Key features of the theory of state-capitalism.

1. A new stage of world capitalism
Dunayevskaya wrote that: “Each generation of Marxists must restate Marxism for itself, and the proof of its Marxism lies not so much in its “originality” as in its “actuality”; that is, whether it meets the challenge of the new times” The theory of state-capitalism met the challenge of the day in its universality, it was not narrowed to a response to the transformation of the Russian Revolution into its opposite, but of a new stage of world capitalism. She argued that: “Because the law of value dominates not only on the home front of class exploitation, but also in the world market where big capital of the most technologically advanced land rules, the theory of state-capitalism was not confined to the Russian Question, as was the case when the nomenclature was used by others.”

Whilst later theoreticians such as Tony Cliff, turned to the writings of Bukharin on imperialism and state-capitalism, adopting his linear analysis of the continuous development from competitive capitalism to state capitalism, Dunayevskaya explicitly rejected such an approach:

“The State-capitalism at issue is not the one theoretically envisaged by Karl Marx in 1867-1883 as the logical conclusion to the development of English competitive capitalism. It is true that “the law of motion” of capitalist society was discerned and profoundly analysed by Marx. Of necessity, however, the actual results of the projected ultimate development of concentration and centralization of capital differed sweepingly from the abstract concept of the centralization of capital “in the hands of a single capitalist or in those of one single corporation”. Where Marx’s own study cannot substitute for an analysis of existing state-capitalism, the debates around the question by his adherents can hardly do so, even where these have been updated to the end of the 1920’s”

Dunayevskaya went so far as to argue that to turn to these disputes other than for “methodological purposes” was altogether futile; and it is with regard to the dialectical method that Dunayevskaya stands apart from other approaches to this question. The state-capitalism in question is not just a continuous development of capitalism but the development of capitalism through the transformation into opposite. In the Marxian concept of history as that of class struggles, there is no greater clash of opposites than “the presence of the working class and the capitalist class within the same modern society”. This society of free competition had developed into the monopoly capitalism and imperialism analysed by Lenin in 1915, simultaneously transforming a section of the working class itself and calling forth new forces of revolt, making the Russian Revolution a reality. The state-capitalism Dunayevskaya faced emerged as the counter-revolution, which grew from within that revolution, gained pace. With the onset of the Great Depression following the 1929 crash, argued Dunayevskaya the “whole world of private capitalism had collapsed”:

“The Depression had so undermined the foundations of “private enterprise”, thrown so many millions into the unemployed army, that workers, employed and unemployed, threatened the very existence of capitalism. Capitalism, as it had existed – anarchic, competitive, exploitative, and a failure – had to give way to state planning to save itself from proletarian revolution”.

This state ownership and state planning was not a “war measure”, but rapidly emerged across the industrially advanced and the underdeveloped countries. State intervention characterised both Hitler’s Germany, with its Three Year Plans, as a prelude to a war to centralize all European capital, and the USA where Roosevelt launched his ‘New Deal’. This tendency did not decline after the war but accelerated such as under the Labour Government in Britain. Dunayevskaya argued that the “true index of the present stage of capitalism is the role of the State in the economy. War or peace, the State does not diminish monopolies and trusts, nor does it diminish its own interference. Rather, it develops, hothouse fashion, that characteristic mode of behaviour of capitalism: centralization of capital, on the one hand, and socialization of labour on the other.”

This was a world-wide phenomenon and whilst it was true that Russian state-capitalism, “wasn’t like the American, and the American New Deal wasn’t like the British Labour Party type of capital, nor the British like the German Nazi autarchic structure”. It found expression not only in the countries subjugated by Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe and in Communist China but also in the newly independent states following the anti-colonial revolutions.

Despite the varied extent of state control over sectors of these economies taken as whole all revealed we had entered a new epoch in history, differing from the period of Lenin’s analyses, as his was from that of Marx’s own lifetime. What Marx had posed in theory of the centralization of capital “into the hands of a single capitalist or a single capitalist corporation” had become the concrete of the new epoch.

While references to State Capitalism began in an attempt to define the post revolution Russia, and later in response to the rise of Fascism and the American New Deal, what was overlooked by traditional political Marxists was that State Capitalism was not just a feature of a particular kind of Capitalism but was a historic shift in capitalism. It was a shift that Left Wing Communists identified as the period of decline of capitalism, rather than its ascendency. A period of capitalist decadence. During the boom times of the fifties, sixties this seemed to be an outrageous assumption. Capitalism was booming, wages were increasing, a consumer society was being created that the world had never seen before. And yet by 1968 that was all to fall apart as the world under went a revolution not seen since 1919. And while that revolution failed to challenge capitalism it showed that it was rotten to the core.

The Seventies and on saw capitalism lurch from crisis to crisis, starting with the Oil Crisis of 1974. Massive inflation, wage and price controls, the decline of the world economy ending in the Wall Street crash of 1984. Truly those who said that capitalism was in a period of decadance were now having the last laugh.

State capitalism

On the economic level this tendency towards state capitalism, though never fully realised, is expressed by the state taking over the key points of the productive apparatus. This does not mean the disappearance of the law of value, or competition, or the anarchy of production, which are the fundamental characteristics of the capitalist economy. These characteristics continue to apply on a world scale where the laws of the market still reign and still determine the conditions of production within each national economy however statified it may be. If the laws of value and of competition seem to be ‘violated’, it is only so that they may have a more powerful effect on a global scale. If the anarchy of production seems to subside in the face of state planning, it reappears more brutally on a world scale, particularly during the acute crises of the system which state capitalism is incapable of preventing. Far from representing a ‘rationalisation’ of capitalism, state capitalism is nothing but an expression of its decay.

The statification of capital takes place either in a gradual manner through the fusion of ‘private’ and state capital as is generally the case in the most developed countries, or through sudden leaps in the form of massive and total nationalisations, in general in places where private capital is at its weakest.

In practice, although the tendency towards state capitalism manifests itself in all countries in the world, it is more rapid and more obvious when and where the effects of decadence make themselves felt in the most brutal manner; historically during periods of open crisis or of war, geographically in the weakest economies. But state capitalism is not a specific phenomenon of backward countries. On the contrary, although the degree of formal state control is often higher in the backward capitals, the state’s real control over economic life is generally much more effective in the more developed countries owing to the high level of capital concentration in these nations.

On the political and social level, whether in its most extreme totalitarian forms such as fascism or Stalinism or in forms which hide behind the mask of democracy, the tendency towards state capitalism expresses itself in the increasingly powerful, omnipresent, and systematic control over the whole of social life exerted by the state apparatus, and in particular the executive. On a much greater scale than in the decadence of Rome or feudalism, the state under decadent capitalism has become a monstrous, cold, impersonal machine which has devoured the very substance of civil society.

The epoch of State Capitalism as the historical reflection of the decline of capitalsim, its decadence, continues to this day. Called many things, globalization, post-fordism, post-modernism, it is all the same, the decline of capitalism. Global warming, the gap between rich and poor, nations and peoples, shows that capitalisms rapid post war expansion has reached its apogee and is now desperately scrambling to run on the spot.

Despite the so called neo-liberal restoration of the Reagan,Thatcher era. They simply reveresed the Keynesian model, by using the state not to prime the pump through social programs or public services but through tax cuts and increasing militarization/military spending. In fact one of the often overlooked aspects of the success of post WWII Keynesianism was what Michael Kidron called the Permanent War Economy.

Corporatism is the capitalist economy of the U.S. Empire, as seen in its continual permanent war economy that has existed since the end of WWII and continued with wars and occupations to enforce its Imperial hegemony across the globe. America is Friendly Fascism.

The Explosion of Debt and Speculation

Government spending on physical and human infrastructure, as Keynes pointed out can also fuel the economy: the interstate highway system, for instance, bolstered the economy directly by creating jobs and indirectly by making production and sales more efficient. However, spending on the military has a special stimulating effect. As Harry Magdoff put it,

A sustainable expanding market economy needs active investment as well as plenty of consumer demand. Now the beauty part of militarism for the vested interests is that it stimulates and supports investment in capital goods as well as research and development of products to create new industries. Military orders made significant and sometimes decisive difference in the shipbuilding, machine tools and other machinery industries, communication equipment, and much more....The explosion of war material orders gave aid and comfort to the investment goods industries. (As late as 1985, the military bought 66 percent of aircraft manufactures, 93 percent of shipbuilding, and 50 percent of communication equipment.) Spending for the Korean War was a major lever in the rise of Germany and Japan from the rubble. Further boosts to their economies came from U.S. spending abroad for the Vietnamese War. (“A Letter to a Contributor: The Same Old State,” Monthly Review, January, 1998)

The rise of the silicon-based industries and the Internet are two relatively recent examples of how military projects “create new industries.” Additionally, actual warfare such as the U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan (and the supplying of Israel to carry out its most recent war in Lebanon) stimulates the economy by requiring the replacement of equipment that wears out rapidly under battle conditions as well as the spent missiles, bullets, bombs, etc.

To get an idea of how important military expenditures are to the United States economy, let’s look at how they stack up against expenditures for investment purposes. The category gross private investment includes all investment in business structures (factories, stores, power stations, etc.), business equipment and software, and home/apartment construction. This investment creates both current and future growth in the economy as structures and machinery can be used for many years. Also stimulating the economy: people purchasing or renting new residences frequently purchase new appliances and furniture.

During five years just prior to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (through 2000), military expenditures relative to investment were at their lowest point in the last quarter century, but were still equal to approximately one-quarter of gross private investment and one-third of business investment (calculated from National Income and Product Accounts, table 1.1.5). During the last five years, with the wars in full force, there was a significant growth in the military expenditures. The housing boom during the same period meant that official military expenditures for 2001–05 averaged 28 percent of gross private investment—not that different from the previous period. However, when residential construction is omitted, official military expenditures during the last five years were equivalent to 42 percent of gross non-residential private investment.*

The rate of annual increases in consumer expenditures fall somewhat with recessions and rise as the economy recovers—but still increases from year to year. However, the swings in private investment are what drive the business cycle—periods of relatively high growth alternating with periods of very slow or negative growth. In the absence of the enormous military budget, a huge increase in private investment would be needed to keep the economy from falling into a deep recession. Even with the recent sharp increases in the military spending and the growth of private housing construction, the lack of rapid growth in business investment has led to a sluggish economy.

See

State Capitalism




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The Racist Underpinnings of the American Way of War

The deadly interplay of racism, genocide, and denial at the heart of American white society has been reproduced in the country’s wars.

by

Walden Bello 

Tuesday, July 07, 2020 

Foreign Policy In Focus

The military is an institution of American society, and as such its origins and development have been centrally influenced by the political economy of U.S. capitalism. (Photo: Shutterstock)

The U.S. military command’s pushback against President Donald Trump’s attempt to use the military against people demanding racial justice has received a lot of good press.

But let’s not overdo the praise. For most of their existence, the U.S. Armed Forces were racially segregated. It was only in the 1950s that the slow process of integration began, with racial discrimination still a major problem in the ranks today.

While race has been widely discussed with respect to the composition and organization of the military, much less attention has been paid to the way racism has been a central feature of how the United States has waged its wars.

The military is an institution of American society, and as such its origins and development have been centrally influenced by the political economy of U.S. capitalism.

The political economy of the U.S. is built on two “original sins.” One was the genocide of Native Americans, the main function of which was to clear the ground for the implantation and spread of capitalist relations of production. The second was the central role played by the slave labor of African Americans in the genesis and consolidation of U.S. capitalism.

These original sins have had such a foundational role that the reproduction and expansion of U.S. capitalism over time have consistently reproduced its racial structures.

So powerful were its racial impulses that providing the legitimacy necessary for capitalist democracy to function necessitated the radical ideological denial of its racial structures. This radical denial was first inscribed in the Declaration of Independence’s message of radical equality “among men” that was drafted by the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson. Later it appeared in the ideology that the mission of U.S. imperial expansion was to universalize that equality among the non-European, non-white societies.

Why do we focus on war-making? First, because war is an inevitable event in the political economy of capitalism. Second, because it has been said that the way a nation wages war reveals its soul, what it’s all about, or to use that much derided term, its “essence.”

The deadly interplay of racism, genocide, and radical denial at the heart of American white society has been reproduced in that society’s military, and it has been especially evident in America’s Asian wars.

War in the Philippines: A Genocidal Mentality

Racialized warfare was practiced in the Philippines, which was invaded and brutally colonized by the United States from 1899 to 1906.

In charge of the enterprise were so-called “Indian fighters” like Generals Arthur MacArthur and Henry Lawton, who fought against the Apache fighter Geronimo, who brought to the archipelago the genocidal mentality that accompanied their warfare against Native Americans in the American West.

Filipinos were branded “n—ers” by U.S. troops, though another racist epithet, “gugus,” was also widely used for them. When Filipinos resorted to guerrilla warfare, they were dehumanized as barbarians practicing uncivilized warfare in order to legitimize all sorts of atrocities against them. The war of subjugation was carried out without restraints, with General Jacob Smith famously ordering his troops to convert Samar into a “howling wilderness” by killing any male over 10 years old.

But at the same time that it was waging a barbaric war that took the lives of some 500,000 Filipinos, Washington was justifying its colonization of the archipelago as a mission to extend the benefits of democracy to them. Rudyard Kipling’s “Take Up the White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 to glorify the American conquest of the archipelago, resonated throughout white America.

World War II in the Pacific: Racism Unbound

The war in Europe waged by the U.S. during the Second World War was promoted among the American public as a war to save democracy. This was not the case in the Pacific theater, where all the racist impulses of American society were explicitly harnessed to render the Japanese subhuman.

This racial side to the Pacific War gave it an intense exterminationist quality. To be sure, this was a face-off between two racist militaries. Both sides painted the other as barbarians and people of inferior culture, in order to license atrocities of all kinds. Violation of the rules of the Geneva Convention was the norm, with neither side preferring to take prisoners. When prisoners were taken, they were subjected to systematic brutality.

Even as the U.S. waged war against Japan, it waged a domestic war against Americans of Japanese descent, declaring them outside the pale of the Constitution and incarcerating the whole population, something that was unthinkable when it came to Americans of German or Italian descent, though Germany and Italy were also enemy states.

But perhaps the most radical expression of the racial exterminationist streak of the American war against Japan was the nuclear incineration of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945, an act that would never have been entertained when it came to fellows of the white race like the Germans.

War in Korea: “Everything Is Destroyed.”

The Korean War of 1950-1953 also saw the dialectic of racism, genocide, and denial come into play. The war was justified as one of saving Koreans from communism, but it came close to exterminating them.

General Douglas MacArthur, who was supreme commander, advocated the use of nuclear weapons. His plan was to use atomic bombs against the Chinese and North Koreans while retreating and then spreading a belt of radioactive cobalt across the Korean peninsula to deter them from crossing into South Korea. This was disapproved by Washington in favor of unlimited aerial bombing using both conventional blockbusters and the new terrifying napalm bombs.

The result was the same. The U.S. dropped more tons of bombs in Korea in 1950-1953 than in the Pacific during the whole of World War II. The result was described this way by U.S. General Emmett O’Donnell, head of the U.S. Air Force Bomber Command: “Everything is destroyed. There is nothing left standing worthy of the name.”

Before Congress, General MacArthur unwittingly admitted the exterminationist quality of the war he waged. “The war in Korea has almost destroyed that nation of 20 million people,” he said. “I have never seen such devastation.”

It was in Korea that the marriage of racism to advanced technology to produce the overwhelming devastation that is a central characteristic of the American Way of War was perfected. Precious white American lives had to be expended as little as possible, while taking as many cheap Asian lives as possible, through technology-intensive unlimited aerial warfare.

Vietnam: “Bomb Them Back to the Stone Age”

The streak of racial exterminationism emerged again during the Vietnam War.

Labeling the Vietnamese “gooks” — a term derived from the term for Filipinos, ”gugus,” in an earlier colonial war — dehumanized them and made all Vietnamese, combatant and non-combatant, fair game.

As in the Philippines at the turn of the century, Vietnamese guerrilla tactics frustrated the Americans — and the racist underpinnings of the American military mind allowed Washington to wage a war without restraint in a desperate effort to win it, one that ignored all the principles of the Geneva Convention. As in Korea, the U.S. waged in Vietnam a “limited war” in the sense of confining it geographically so that it would not escalate into global war, but it waged this limited war with unlimited means.

The racial dehumanization of the Vietnamese found its classic expression in the words of General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, who said that America’s aim must be to “bomb the Vietnamese back to the stone age.” And Washington tried to do just that: From 1965 to 1969, the U.S. military dropped 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of North and South Vietnam — or 500 pounds for each man, woman, and child.

At the same time that they were killing them indiscriminately, Washington was insisting that its mission was to save the Vietnamese from communism and bring American-style democracy, just as it had brought it to the Philippines, Japan, and Korea, and that it would not take no for an answer.

Again, U.S. political and military strategy cannot be understood without reference to the subliminal racial assumptions that guided it. The costs exacted by a war marked by a racist and exterminationist streak were devastating: some 3.5 million Vietnamese killed in less than a decade.

The American Way of War

In sum, what we might call the “American Way of War” has emerged from a convoluted historical and ideological process.

This war-making cannot be divorced from the racism that is fundamentally inscribed in the capitalist political economy of the United States and is structurally reproduced in its growth and expansion.

This structural inscription stems from two original sins: the genocide of Native Americans to clear the social and natural path for the rise and consolidation of capitalism, and the slave labor of African Americans that played an essential role in laying the foundations for industrial capitalism.

Owing to the foundational role of genocide and racism, the ideological legitimation necessary to make the system function has involved a radical denial in the form of a declaration of equality “among men,” and the claim that the aim of U.S. imperial expansion is to extend this equality throughout the world.

This tortuous dialectic of genocide, racism, and radical denial gave America’s imperial wars in Asia an exterminationist streak.

Finally, the American Way of War is marked by the marriage of advanced technology and racism that is intended to limit the expenditure of lives on one’s side while inflicting massive devastation on the other side — under the guiding assumption that white lives are precious and colored lives are cheap.

Walden Bello is the co-founder and current senior analyst of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South and the International Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  He received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, in 2003, and was named Outstanding Public Scholar of the International Studies Association in 2008.

SEE PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PERMANENT+ARMS+ECONOMY

Matt Duss, Christopher Hitchens and the lies of the pro-imperialist “left”

Eric London@EricLondonSEP
WSWS.ORG


In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, mass demonstrations involving tens of millions of people took place in the United States and across the world. A section of the middle class “left” took part in these demonstrations, which brought together a broad cross-section of the population, including many young people and workers, in opposition to a war that would last nearly two decades and kill over 1 million people. At the time, individuals and political tendencies associated with groups like the Green Party and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) participated in the demonstrations and presented themselves as anti-war.

Twenty years later, groups like the DSA and Greens not only support imperialist war, in some cases their political representatives are leading it. The DSA’s four elected members of Congress voted unanimously for the Biden administration’s $40 billion in military spending to fight Russia in Ukraine. The German Green Party is part of the coalition government carrying out the rearmament of German imperialism. Pabloite and Morenoite groups like the International Socialist League urge the imperialist powers to send more weapons to neo-Nazi Ukrainian militias.

A June 1 article by Matt Duss in The New Republic entitled “Why Ukraine Matters for the Left” is a milestone in the exposure of the pseudo-left’s pro-imperialist political essence.

Duss is a top foreign policy adviser for Bernie Sanders who typifies the social layer that has now become a main constituency of the Biden administration’s war against Russia. According to a profile in The Nation, Duss “first became involved in politics via anti-globalization activism and Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign.” A February 2020 Foreign Policy article noted that “Music, not foreign policy, was one of Duss’s biggest life passions—until the 9/11 attacks galvanized in him a sense of wanting to do more on US politics and policy toward the Middle East.” He developed a career as a critic of the war in Iraq, telling The Nation, “I was just uncomfortable with America sending troops around the world.”

It is significant, then, that Duss has written an article denouncing left-wing opponents of imperialist war and adopting the argument made by Christopher Hitchens in his December 2001 article attacking left-wing opponents of the US “War on Terror.”

Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens [Photo by Andrew Rusk / CC BY 4.0]

The first sentence of Duss’ article reads, “Weeks after the September 11 attacks, Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece in The Atlantic castigating an American left he saw as unwilling to recognize the enemy that had just attacked the United States or support appropriate measures to confront it.”

Duss says Hitchens was wrong to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Duss then states:


There is, however, a line from Hitchens that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as I consider the Biden administration’s response to Russia’s war on Ukraine and the debate within the U.S. left about it. All the left’s objections, Hitchens wrote, “boil down to this: Nothing will make us fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the same corner as our own government.”

At the time of its publication, Hitchens’ article, “Stranger in a strange land: The dismay of an honorable man of the left,” attracted significant attention and generated a wave of disgust over Hitchens’ naked prostration before the war hysteria promoted by the Bush administration.

In the article, Hitchens, who had been a prominent left cultural critic, argued that September 11 meant “the left” must forget its criticisms of US imperialism and support the War on Terror. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, “Hitchens’ recent comments on the September 11 World Trade Center attack indicate that he has irretrievably passed over to the extreme right. His permanent and final political identity, which was always the essential one, has now solidified.”

Duss’ article adopts the heart of Hitchens’ argument and launches an attack on those on “the left” who oppose or even express hesitancy over the Biden administration’s reckless provocations against Russia in Ukraine.

Duss attacks two groups. He defines his primary target as those who engage in “pernicious authoritarian agitprop” justifying the actions of the “Russian imperium.” This group includes not only open supporters of the reactionary Putin government, but those who oppose the Russian invasion (as does the WSWS) and question the veracity of US imperialist claims of Russian atrocities. Duss calls such groups and individuals “atrocity-denying grifters and click-baiting provocateurs.” Their aim, he says, is “to divide the left” by making opposition to imperialist war a fundamental issue of political principle. He urges what he calls the “genuine anti-war” left to place such opponents of war beyond the pale, and to “not waste time” with them.

Duss’s second target is sections of the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America who have supported the war against Russia with insufficient bellicosity. “Solidarity” with the Ukrainian military, he writes, “has been hard to find in some of the statements from the Democratic Socialists of America.”

The fact that the DSA’s entire congressional slate supported the war is not enough. Duss attacks the DSA for publishing statements that also raise criticism of NATO expansion in Eastern Europe.

He writes, “Hard questions need to be asked, especially now, about the goals and interests NATO actually serves. But we also need to ask hard questions about how our struggle against militarism works alongside our commitment to colleagues around the world who require more than just a call to stop the war” (emphasis added). Duss does not explain how a struggle “against militarism” is compatible with sending weapons from the world’s dominant imperialist power to Ukraine, nor does he say how arming neo-Nazi militias in the Ukrainian military is an act of socialist “solidarity.” For an anti-war movement to be “genuine,” Duss concludes, it must support imperialist war.

Like Hitchens, Duss argues that “the left” must suppress its criticism of US imperialism and support its war aims. For all its faults, Duss writes, supporting American imperialism is the only way to uphold the “values of social justice, human security and equality, and democracy.”

“Our political class advocates military violence with a regularly and ease that is psychopathic,” Duss writes. “We should not, however, let all of this absurdity blind us to the instances when provision of military aid can advance a more just and humanitarian global order. Assisting Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion is such an instance.”

The article is structured with a series of similar “buts” and “howevers.”

“The endless military interventions of the last 20 years have engendered a hard won-skepticism” to imperialist war, Duss writes, “But we should also recognize that the Biden administration is not the Bush administration.” Yes, the Biden administration “has failed to uphold progressive principles,” Duss says, “But Ukraine is an area where I think the administration is getting it mostly right.” The US has been involved in a permanent serious of wars, Duss acknowledges. “I get that sentiment. But I think we should interrogate it.”

He goes on: the US government has engaged in nonstop “hypocrisy” and the “US and its allies have undermined the order they themselves built … But preventing powerful countries from invading and obliterating weaker ones should be a core principle of any such order, and past hypocrisy shouldn’t serve as an excuse for failing to say that clearly, and act on it.” And “yes, it is maddening to see calls for accountability for Putin’s atrocities from the same people who endorsed, defended and continue to oppose any meaningful accountability” for the war in Iraq, “But suggesting that Bush’s impunity is a reason not to hold Putin accountable is asking Ukrainians to join Iraqis in footing the bill for our corruption.”

Duss cannot explain how it is that American imperialism, dripping with blood from decades of permanent war for plunder, in which it carried out horrific war crimes with impunity, is capable of advancing the “values of social justice, human security and equality, and democracy,” especially when its shock troops in Ukraine consist of fascist forces who idolize Nazis and the Holocaust. To Duss, it is as though the actions of American imperialism over the last 30 years (let alone the last 125 years) have no bearing on the essential character of the US wars and no connection to its aims in Ukraine.

Duss’s claim that the US war against Russia in Ukraine is for “social justice” and “equality” is lying war propaganda. Every imperialist war the US has ever waged has been justified by the claim it is fought for “democracy” and “freedom.” After all, the Bush administration justified the criminal invasion of Iraq on the same grounds that Duss now seeks to justify “left” support for a war that poses the risk of nuclear catastrophe.

Duss’ endorsement of Christopher Hitchens’ pro-war screed is a landmark in the right-wing transformation not only of an individual, but of the affluent pseudo-socialist layer for whom he speaks.

Social being determines social consciousness, and over the course of the past two decades, the growth of social inequality and the financialization of the world economy have driven the affluent upper-middle class to the political right. The social layer from which groups like the Greens, DSA and other pro-war, pseudo-left tendencies draw support have a vested financial interest in the success of American imperialism.

In the 20 years since the Bush administration launched the War on Terror, the share of national wealth possessed by the “next 9” percentile (i.e., those below the top 1 percent but still in the top 10 percent) has risen from 34.8 percent to 38.6 percent. This section of the population possesses a total of $53.3 trillion in wealth, up from $14.7 trillion in 2000. An individual in the 10th richest income percentile now makes 12.5 times more than an individual in the 90th percentile, up from 10.6 times in 2000. The wealth and income of the top 10 percent is more closely intertwined with the health of the stock markets than ever before. The richest 10 percent now own 89 percent of all stocks, up from 77 percent in 2000.

It is no wonder that the individuals and political tendencies rooted in this social layer advocate giving imperialist war a chance.

Open Letter to Young People on World War III

By Boaventura de Sousa Santos

June 26, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.



I am addressing young people as someone who, because of his age, is not going to fight in the next world war (World War III) and may not even witness its beginning. I just wanted to share with you the following ideas, which I believe to be well-founded: I am convinced that a Third World War is approaching; unlike previous ones, the battlefield will be the entire planet and, for the first time, it will include US territory; no matter how sophisticated the military technology and the Artificial Intelligence that supports it, soldiers will be needed on the ground who will die by the millions, along with innocent civilian populations. More than in any previous war; these soldiers will be young people and not the warlords, be they politicians (who will never put the decision to wage war to a referendum) or businessmen and shareholders in the companies of the military-industrial complex; the only certainty we have about war is that we know when it starts, but not when it ends; the specificity of the Third World War is that, when it ends (all wars end), not only the survival of the human species, but the non-human life of the planet will be at risk for the first time. It’s a dystopian prediction, but realistic enough for religions centered on the idea of the apocalypse to proliferate today. Unlike theirs, my message is Spinosian, that is, it is based on the dialectic of fear and hope. I know that most young people, when they look to the future, have a lot of fear and little hope. If they want to have more hope, they need to be prepared to instill fear in the powerful of this world who, apparently, are no longer afraid of their enemies and live in an orgy of hope. Before I go any further, I want to say to the young people that, although I was born in Europe, I speak from the global South through the lens of the epistemologies of the South. And for this reason, what I have said above is only half-true. Seen from the global South, World War III has already begun (just keep Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria in mind). When I talk about the future Third World War, I only mean that the scale of the existing war will increase exponentially and that it will also reach the countries of the global North, the sine-qua-non condition for something to become global, be it a war or a pandemic.

The interest in promoting war

In every war, there is a country or empire that is particularly interested in promoting the war. In the First World War, the most aggressive was the German empire; in the Second World War, Hitler’s Germany. No one in the global South believes that Russia or China are interested in promoting war. Rising empires prefer positive-sum relationships to zero-sum ones (such as war). Their rise and increase in influence are based on providing real advantages to new allies, even if they are subject to conditions of subordination. That’s why they favor diplomacy and multilateralism. It may seem strange to say that Russia is not interested in war, when it was Russia that invaded Ukraine in 2022. All peace activists, including myself, condemned that invasion, even though they said from the start (which was later confirmed) that the invasion was provoked by the US with preparations dating back to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The aim from the outset was to weaken Russia and provoke its dismemberment. In 1997, Polish-born US politician Zbigniew Brzezinski proposed dividing Russia into three large units. It was the same logic of weakening through dismemberment that led to the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia (or Serbia), Russia’s ally, making it possible to install a huge US-NATO military base in Kosovo. In strategic circles, there has been much discussion of the so-called Afghan trap, i.e. the means used by the US (again, in the Brzezinski era) to induce an invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in December 1979 with the aim of weakening it. The details don’t matter for this text, but based on them it is possible to suspect that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a new version of the Afghan trap, the Ukraine trap, with the same purposes, although the outcome may be very different. The Ukrainian trap began to be built soon after the end of the Soviet Union, with the permanence of NATO after the end of the Warsaw Pact and the project to include Ukraine in NATO, alongside other countries that would serve as a shield against Russia’s naval base in Crimea. In addition to Turkey, which had been a NATO member since 1952, Romania and Bulgaria joined the alliance (2004), and Georgia is still missing, which will first have to go through the regime change strategy (the same one that was used in Ukraine in 2014).

Those who promote war don’t want real peace negotiations, but stage successive shows of peace proposals without the participation of one of the warring parties, so that the burden of continuing the war falls on the latter and thus feeds the propaganda war. This is how the US prevented the only genuine peace negotiation between Russia and Ukraine, which took place two months after the start of the war. For this purpose, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, whose imperial unconscious must still be haunted by the Crimean War against Russia (1853-56), was easily mobilized. In contrast to this attitude, since 2008 Russia has presented five serious peace and security proposals for the region, all of which have been rejected by the US.

We now know that the US’s great rival is not Russia, but China. The three main theaters of war in which the US is currently involved, Ukraine, Palestine (and the Middle East in general) and the China Sea, are all aimed at the same goal: isolating China and preventing China’s access to Europe and US areas of influence. War is always the last resort, often preceded by regime change destabilization, i.e. active interference in the internal life of target countries to bring about political changes that make it possible to create distance and hostility towards China. If we bear in mind that China is today the dominant country in international alliances that seek some margin of independence from US imperialism (BRICS+, Shanghai Cooperation Organization), it is to be expected that the democracies that are part of these alliances will be targets of political destabilization, especially Brazil. Regime change is a strategy developed since the Cold War and well documented in Lindsey O’Rourke’s book: Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Cornell, 2018). In fact, regime change is just one of the strategies used by the empire to interfere in the internal life of subject states, as so well illustrated by the book by former Financial Times journalist Matt Kennard, The Racket, A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire (new edition, Bloombury, 2024) .

The signs of preparation for war.

In 1931, few people believed that there could be a new war fifteen years after the previous one had ended. But fascism and Nazism were growing in the countries and consciousness of Europeans, and with them the logic of war as a radical solution to conflicts. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began and at the end of it (1939), with the triumph of Franco’s fascism, a wider war seemed inevitable. The same can be said of the Second Sino-Japanese War, fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan from 1937 to 1945.

The preparation for war begins in the minds of the citizens. Suddenly, leading politicians from the “international community” (i.e. the USA and the European Union) begin to suggest the idea that war is inevitable in order to defend the values of Western civilization. There is no question about what these values are or what the threat consists of, but the solemnity of the speeches suggests that the threat is serious and that swift action is needed. A German minister recently said that within a few years Europe would be at war again. All this is said with a tone of normality that trivializes the 78 million dead in the last two world wars and the many millions who have died in all the wars that have followed one another in different parts of the world, and always with the active intervention of the US and its allies: Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Central America, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Palestine. It is also surprising that the nuclear threat, which for decades was the great deterrent to war because of the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the immense catastrophe it would mean, is now beginning to be seen as a realistic possibility in military circles. Annie Jacobsen (the same journalist who revealed Operation Paperclip, the secret service program that brought Nazi scientists to the US) has just published a book that is very revealing of what I have just written: Nuclear War: A Scenario (Dutton, 2024).

The escalation of war is in full swing and that’s what leads me to warn young people that World War III is just around the corner. Two indicators justify my warning. On the one hand, the green light has just been given for the use of missiles and other weaponry, much of it supplied by NATO countries, to hit targets on Russian territory. This means turning the war into a war between Russia and NATO, in other words, a war between nuclear powers. On the other hand, the then NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, said in June that NATO had 500,000 troops available in high readiness for the war in Ukraine. In addition, several countries, including the US, are taking steps to make military service compulsory or to make it easier for young people to decide to join the armed forces.

Rhetoric to promote war.

The rhetoric to promote war goes through several stages. Warlords always start by promoting war in the name of preserving peace. They aggravate conflict situations, justifying them as measures to stop them spreading. They take offensive measures while claiming they are defensive. This rhetoric serves to numb the consciences of peace activists. When this objective is largely achieved, a new phase begins: the demonization and persecution of those who remain steadfast in the struggle for peace. Suddenly they are discredited as being in the service of the enemy, financed by the enemy, traitors to the patriotic cause of the noble war effort to preserve peace and Western civilization. Discredit is followed by active persecution. On the other hand, the exponential profits of arms companies are now hailed as a sign of the strength of the economy, whereas before they were pejoratively considered “the merchants of death” or “war profiteers”.

In the case of the US, the country that since the Second World War has most insisted on making its power reside in military power, rather than preparation for war, we are witnessing a policy of limited but permanent war sustained by four pillars: successive defeats in the wars in which they have intervened (Southwest Asia, and the Middle East) are transformed into victories through a massive propaganda war; the priority of the well-being of populations is gradually replaced by the priority of national security, which, incidentally, has both an external and an internal dimension (the US has 25% of the world’s prisoners despite only having 5% of the global population); military budgets grow exponentially and their growth is never questioned; finally, electoral processes are manipulated so that the promoters of militarism always win elections.

The interests in promoting war.

War is at the service of capitalism and colonialism in many forms. Among the main ones, we can distinguish the war arms production companies (the US military industry controls 45% of the global arms trade and its profits have risen exponentially with the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza); financial capital (Ukraine is currently the third largest debtor to the IMF); access to natural resources (around 30% of the 33 million hectares of Ukraine’s rich arable land, considered the breadbasket of Europe, is already owned by ten large foreign agro-industrial companies). While denouncing the genocide in Gaza, we must not forget the Ben Gurion Canal project, proposed in the 1960s and once again on the agenda of the warlords, an alternative canal to the Suez Canal and managed by Israel and its allies. This canal would link the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Longer, but with more capacity than the Suez Canal and also outside Egyptian control (which in the past has repeatedly blocked the passage of ships to or from Israel), this canal could be an alternative to China’s new Silk Road. Initially planned to end in the Mediterranean at a port north of the Gaza Strip, there has been recent speculation that the ongoing ethnic cleansing could, among other “advantages” for Israel, clear the land and shorten the length of the canal, crossing what is now the Gaza Strip.

I’m addressing young people because they will be the cannon fodder of the Third World War, no matter how sophisticated the high technology, the use of robot dogs and Artificial Intelligence. Reading Curzio Malaparte’s war diary, Kaputt, on the East and North German front in the Second World War, one of the things that struck me most was the description of the exuberant banquets of Hitler’s allied generals and politicians, with the most exotic delicacies, the finest wines and the most elegant women, while at the front young Germans and their enemies were dying in their thousands, deserting or going mad, wandering through the forests with no destination or future or just waiting for a merciful bullet.

To prevent the outbreak of World War III and give hope to those who are afraid of it, it is necessary to instill fear in those who are promoting it. The peace movement, now renewed by the fight against the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, is a sign of hope, but it is not enough. War is always the result of a massive manipulation of fear and the creation of conditions of vulnerability, deprivation, precariousness and the erosion of social rights that affect ever larger populations. Above all, it results from the fragmentation of the struggles that resist all this. The greater the fragmentation, the more invisible power and domination become and the greater the risk that victims will rise up against other victims who are even more victimized, that those condemned from the land will fight other groups who are even more condemned from the land. The articulation of social struggles against the three main modern dominations – capitalism, colonialism and hetero-patriarchy – is therefore the necessary condition for the reconstruction of peace alternatives, peace that this time is demanded by both human beings and nature. The sufficient condition is to re-found knowledge and education policies so that they reveal what I call the sociology of absences, the set of anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-patriarchal alternatives that are proliferating in the world.

We don’t need alternatives, we need alternative thinking about alternatives.


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Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.