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from
ChrisFloyd Website � �
The moral insanity of
the
Terror War continues to spawn more violence, more extremism, more
repression, more injustice, and the total subversion of the "Western
values," all of which it is ostensibly designed to defend. � It's worth reading in full, but here is an excerpt: � The Syrian war has turned into a Syrian version of the Thirty Years War in Germany four centuries ago. � Too many conflicts and too many players have become involved for any peace terms to be acceptable to all� It has become increasingly obvious over the past year that al-Qa'ida type movements, notably Isis, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, have come to dominate or can operate freely in a great swathe of territory across northern Iraq and northern Syria. �
This gives Isis a vast hinterland in which it
can maneuver and fight on both sides of what is a largely nominal
Syrian-Iraqi border� � US and European politicians do not want to explain why, 13 years after 9/11, when the "war on terror" was supposedly launched, thousands of al-Qa'ida militants have been able to carve out enclaves so close to Europe. � US and European politicians won't explain it because any honest explanation would expose the emptiness at the core of all their proffered reasons for the Terror War. � They can't explain it because the Terror War system - including the increasing militarization and repression in their own countries - has now become organizing principle of Western society. � Or rather, it is the latest incarnation of what has been the guiding principle of Western society since World War II:
For government and big business, the immense power and profit and control they inevitably accrued from conducting total war on a global basis was far too enticing to give up once the war was over. �
The full mobilization of society's resources for
war simply carried on; indeed, was expanded and amplified. �
This spirit is evoked with remarkable power in a
new book,
Harry's Last Stand, by Harry Leslie
Smith, a 91-year-old WII veteran enraged to see the neoliberal
extremists that have held sway in the US and Britain for more than 30 years
sweeping away the progress toward a more just society that his generation
tried to build on the ruins of the war (some of Smith's writing can be found
here and
here.) � Thus for a a brief period - scarcely more than two generations - there was an attempt to balance two opposing organizing principles at once: war and human betterment. The presidency of Lyndon Johnson was perhaps the apex - and tragic denouement - of this conflict. � Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty programs, and his muscling through of the Civil Rights Act, were profoundly transformative for millions of people, and even with their limitations and compromises could have laid the groundwork for a continual refinement and recalibration of society in the general direction of justice, opportunity and social peace. � But Johnson was also a product - and propagator - of the war system:
The Vietnam War destroyed his presidency,
crippled the momentum of his social programs, and accelerated the triumph of
the war principle. � There are now generations well into adulthood who have never known anything but the war principle and the neoliberal ascendancy as "normality," the natural state of things. � Indeed, in a very few years, we'll see the first generation of adults who will have lived their entire lives under the reign of the Terror War. � The relentless assault of the elites who have thrived under the war principle, increasing the unequal proportion of their wealth and power to unimaginable levels, have left these new generations very little to build upon. �
On so many fronts, so many levels, they will
essentially have to start from scratch, re-discover old skills and insights
that have been lost, re-fight old battles,� and of course, create new ways
of trying to go forward (like the Occupy movement). � No leader can "explain" what is happening because none of them can admit the truth: that the world they are making - the world that has made them powerful, has lifted them up on a finely-meshed web of interlocking elite interests and will sustain them, and their families, among the elite for the rest of their lives - is organized around violence and loot. �
Not security, not prosperity, not liberty, not
democracy, not justice, not peace. These are not the aims of the system,
these are not the products of the system. � � |
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