Category: ESSENTIAL - The Greanville Post

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Paul Edwards

Sailors assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 2 recover a high-altitude surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Feb. 5, 2023. Photo: U.S. Navy. (The official caption is a lie: the "spy balloon" was a metereological object, widely used by many countries, including the US, and the Chinese foreign ministry had so advised, although that part of the story was simply ignored and buried by the media, politicos, and State Dept. officials. Incidentally, the cynical warmongering is fully bipartisan.)

Can an empire sink itself through self-generated ridicule? Will America’s floating a daffy, brainless notion so shallow and infantile that its only intention seems to have been the wish to humiliate itself have consequences? One wonders, since even the Noise Makers of the Ministry of Information and our Federal Confederacy of Dunces have backed this moronic pratfall.

The Empire has managed to continue intact to date, dispensing sleazy, transparent lies and howling fabrications to its sadly hoodwinked, floundering, irascible people, without dissolving in its corrosive bile. This affirms that selling lies and deceptions is effective as national policy but we may be excused for wondering if it can sell rank absurdities quite as easily.

The facts are simple. A weather balloon, admittedly Chinese, drifted over us, with no effort made to conceal it. The reaction by the media, government and military has been so preposterously out of scale, so panty-wadded hysterical, as to defy belief.

It was instantly anathematized as a “spy balloon”—a category not seriously cited in annals of espionage since the Franco-Prussian War—and an anguished convulsion of moral outrage seized the body politic. There was suspicion, then conviction, that this flaccid, ungainly, drifting entity was nefariously engaged in probing into our deepest national security secrets.

Our dysfunctional, half-assed, puerile shambles of a government, driven like a spavined donkey by the War Machine that owns it, is so pathetically determined to provoke animosity with China that it attacked the slow, soft gas bag with jets to shoot down it down. TDY Seals are presumably bobbing for latex even now though their likely finds will be not be hygrometers and pressure censors but Things That Have To Be Kept Secret for national security’s sake, like all that stuff stacked in Trump’s and Biden’s garages.

Do we Americans have an unplumbed tolerance for abuse? Is there really no limit to the shit we’ll eat when dispensed by dirty old Aunt Sam? Those who run us, and our yoyo, yahoo “Democracy", believe there isn’t, and with good reason.

As a people we have been lied to, conned, deceived, and interred in bullshit by the Capitalist financial oligarchy that has owned this country and run it like a slave plantation or concentration camp from our earliest beginnings. Since the first, last, and only time this country was ever attacked, in 1941, our War Machine has taken us to war so often on the basis of flagrantly transparent lies that this predictable practice has become a hallowed tradition.

War, once substantially based on political rivalry, has become the final phase of American Capitalism. In the long experiment in the exploitation of earth and Man that has refined it, war has proven to be far and away the economic enterprise with the least true cost and the hugest profit margin to the system. It has replaced all other sources of buccaneering larceny as Capitalism’s favorite, superior even to recently favored bank fraud and insider bailouts.

It has its ancillary downside, yes. Masses of humans and their countries have to be destroyed, even in small wars, but those are in the nature of externalities which can be safely ignored and need not trouble the system.

Yet another piece of naivete is the idea that the American people have any right to benefit from the War Machine’s efforts. They don’t. They work for it. They don’t own it, and only owners are entitled to benefits. Workers don’t get profits. They get to have freedom, instead. You know… freedom… which, well, we all know what Janis sang about it.

There is a caveat in this, though. Wars, in order to maximize the profit from them, need to stay small. That is, they must not become so large as to be uncontrollable. This is easy to manage with small, poor countries with no defenses, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Afghanistan where you destroy them and leave, but it becomes problematic with countries that can defend themselves.

The Ukraine war, to the extent that it is a war, has been a work of genius for the War Machine in that it offers the best opportunity in decades for the endless supply of very costly equipment which is then rapidly destroyed and must be replaced. It does so while avoiding the death and maiming of American grunts, substituting Ukrainians themselves for that unpleasant function.

There is some concern that Russia, on whose border this nifty little warlet is being conducted by our dear friends and allies, the Ukies, will grow weary of conducting their half of the game, and do something rash, such as blitzing our proxy team and reducing their ruined home to a sort of open-air gulag, but no one in power in The Empire gives that a serious thought. Of course, when preparing for a war with China, why would they?

If all goes well—and when hasn’t it?—there is good hope we may be able to draw China into a similar mini-warlet, like Ukraine. If the Taiwanese will just do the dying for us, we can pester the Chinese to madness while the War Machine continues to make untold reams of money. We may be already launched on this quest. After all, what fiercer act of aggression can one country commit toward another than to shoot down its weather balloon?

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

The Jimmy Dore Show

The Jimmy Dore Show

Feb 7, 2023 #TheJimmyDoreShow

MSNBC editor and political columnist Zeeshan Aleem recently penned the latest in the virtual cavalcade of pieces we’ve seen of late from Democratic Party apologists warning that “populist” left figures like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Jimmy Dore have been “flirting” with the populist right. Such a movement could funnel leftists into the arms of authoritarians, Aleem argues, as if the Democratic Party today isn’t authoritarian to its core. Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss the very real dangers this kind of “flirtation” can lead to.

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Eric Zuesse

Joe Biden (TGPcezanne HQ, 4k)

The U.S. Government is ratcheting up its attempt to control Russia and China and to impose America’s undefined “rules-based international order” to replace the U.N.’s existing, and far more clearly defined, international laws (which are produced not by any one nation, but instead by all member-nations of the U.N. and in accord with the structure and procedures set forth within the U.N.’s Constitution, the U.N. Charter).

America’s 900 foreign military bases and of whatever consent which that imperial Government can obtain from its ‘allies’ or vassal-nations or colonies (over which the U.S. Government holds considerable sway by virtue of its dollar being the international reserve currency and its control over the IMF and World Bank and by other international agencies that likewise are effectively under the control of the U.S. Government).

By contrast: Russia, China, Iran, and many other countries, are fully committed to build upon and strengthen the U.N.’s international democracy, and would need to be militarily defeated by the U.S. and its ‘allies’ in order for them to yield to the dictatorship that the U.S. Government demands.

There is no way, other than via a World War Three (which would destroy the entire world), that the dictates by the U.S. Government and its ‘allies’ will be complied with, by them — the countries that insist upon preserving their own sovereignty over their own land.

America’s international sanctions that haven't received the approval of the U.N. are the cause of most international conflicts in today’s world, and are examples of U.S. laws which the U.S. Government demands that the world’s other Governments must comply with in order for those other Governments and their citizens to avoid being punished by “secondary sanctions” that those American laws authorize for the American Government to apply against any nation or person that refuses to comply with America’s primary-sanction laws, which primary sanctions are directed against the Governments that the U.S. Government most wants to control (i.e., to add to the U.S. Government’s existing empire), such as Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba.

900 military bases in foreign lands.

The U.S. Government is now expanding its NATO military alliance against Russia so as to make NATO become also a military alliance against China, effectively to globalize its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and turn it into the entire world’s militarized police force coercing all non-U.S. Governments, and thus becoming the dictator to the entire world.

“China Aids Russia’s War in Ukraine, Trade Data Shows: Despite sanctions, Moscow equips its jet fighters, submarines and soldiers with help of Chinese companies”, and opened:

the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine despite an international cordon of sanctions and export controls, according to a Wall Street Journal review of Russian customs data.

The customs records show Chinese state-owned defense companies shipping navigation equipment, jamming technology and jet-fighter parts to sanctioned Russian government-owned defense companies.

C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit that specializes in identifying national-security threats.

zero-sum game. Victory should always go to the strongest. Might makes right. That’s basically the source the WSJ is citing as its authority here. This doesn’t mean the source (C4ADS) is necessarily lying, but that it is arguing for the U.S. to control Russia. Its argument favors continuation of the control over Ukraine on Russia’s border, that the U.S. Government had won in February 2014 in a coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected Government. This might-makes-right view is popular in America. Polls (such as this one published on 6 February 2023) show that the American public overwhelmingly favor the result of that coup, which started the war in Ukraine, but don’t know that it had been a coup at all (far less one that was run by U.S. President Obama’s people), which was called by one American expert “the most blatant coup in history.” That it was a coup was hidden from the American public by the U.S.-and-allied news-media, just like the fact in 2002 had been hidden from them that there no longer were any WMD in Iraq — America and its ‘allies’ invaded there only on the basis of lies. (And, even to this day, Americans don’t know that fact.)

The WSJ article continues:

has moved to halt some financial and business ties.

Notice the WSJ’s sly clause there, “whose governments are accused by Western officials of flouting the sanctions and controls,” implanting in the reader the false idea that those “sanctions and controls” were by international law instead of by imperialistic dictat, and were also implanting the false idea that “Western officials” there represented international law instead of their own U.S.-and-allied international tyranny.

America is now blatantly demanding other nations to comply with laws that the U.S. Government imposes that have no international validity under existing U.N.-authorized international law.

the IMF and other U.N.-authorized organizations, so as to turn them all against the U.N. itself.

including — since February 2014 — Ukraine), and is at war against all other nations — its economic “competitors” — all of which it equates (in its implicitly zero-sum way) with being its diplomatic and military ‘enemies’.

If a person defines “evil” as the adjective that refers to any person who prefers zero-sum games to positive-sum games — prefers coercion to cooperation — then is the U.S. Government the most evil force in the world today? That is the question which should be debated and discussed the most, nowadays. Because: a person’s answer to it affects that person’s entire outlook and behavior toward society. The ramifications of this issue are immense.

For example: perhaps America is the world’s most competitive (zero-sum) nation and China is the most cooperative (positive-sum) nation, and perhaps this is the main reason why America especially craves to defeat China. Is that just a difference in ideology, or is it also a difference in ethics: a contest between evil and good?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

APPENDIX

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Ukraine Crisis -
What You're Not Being Told

EDITOR'S NOTE: YouTube (Google), which is a Big Tech imperialist tool, tries hard to censor all opinions or stories debunking Washington's (or NATO's) lies. They do this by algorithm. When not outright deleting accounts that insist on telling the truth, Google shadowbans the account, thereby severely restricting its reach, or sets up phony advisories like this (they're doing this for our own good". Yea.)

"This video is age-restricted and only available on YouTube. Learn more"

impeding the wider distribution of these materials by blocking the republication of said videos on third-party sites. This forces people to use alternate platforms, such as Rumble.com, or Rofkin, Odysee.com, etc.

The RUMBLE version of the above video, for reasons already explained:

!function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src="https://rumble.com/embedJS/uukz21"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+"/?url="+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&args="+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, "script", "Rumble");

Rumble("play", {"video":"v263a0e","div":"rumble_v263a0e"});

Preview YouTube video Nuland-Pyatt leaked phone conversation—
COMPLETE with SUBTITLES

Below, the RUMBLE version of this video, because it is being restricted by YouTube (Google).
!function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src="https://rumble.com/embedJS/uukz21"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+"/?url="+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&args="+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, "script", "Rumble");

Rumble("play", {"video":"v263cyw","div":"rumble_v263cyw"});

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Jacques Pauwels

The Great War: The first truly industrial war. Observe this image closely.

Around the turn of the [20th] century, it had become apparent that the aristocratic-bourgeois elite had achieved considerable success with its anti-democratic strategy. The symptoms of this success were visible everywhere: plenty of “little” people, particularly peasants and members of the lower-middle class, had embraced nationalism, anti-Semitism, militarism, and imperialism, and voted not for the socialists, but for conservative parties, such as Germany’s Catholic Zentrum. In any event, in most countries, the franchise was still a privilege of the “better” classes, and an enormous amount of state power remained concentrated in unelected institutions such as the parliaments’ upper chambers, the bureaucracy, and the army, institutions in which the elite had solidly retrenched itself. The church still enjoyed a lot of influence, mostly among the peasants in the countryside, and worked hard to regain lost loyalty in the camp of the working class, which, under socialist influence, had abandoned Christianity en masse during the 19th century.

The Catholic counter-offensive in this respect culminated in the 1891 proclamation of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII condemned socialism as a “plague” and ordered the creation of Christian political parties and trade unions. During the “severe pontificate” of Leo XIII, the elite could also increasingly count on the church to “glorify the throne, the sword, the flag, and the established social order” and, conversely, to condemn socialism and (non-Christian) trade union activism. Nevertheless, the spectre of revolution – not only social, but also national revolution – continued to haunt Europe. Agitation and tension also affected distant parts of the world such as South America and China. The elite feared not only the possibility of a sudden and violent revolution, but also the prospect of a gradual and pacific evolution towards democracy, loathed as the rule of the presumably ignorant and vicious populace.

During the “severe pontificate” of Leo XIII, the elite could also increasingly count on the church to “glorify the throne, the sword, the flag, and the established social order” and, conversely, to condemn socialism and (non-Christian) trade union activism. Nevertheless, the spectre of revolution – not only social, but also national revolution – continued to haunt Europe.

Democracy was indeed something for which both the haute bourgeoisie and the nobility, from the most powerful monarch to the lowliest village squire, had nothing but contempt. The reason for this should be obvious: democracy, power exercised by and for the people, spelled the end of a system in which power was exercised by, and indeed for, a small part of the people, namely the tiny demographic minority that the combination of nobility and upper-middle class happened to be. Genuine democracy, that is, not only the political but also the social-economic emancipation of the lower orders, was not in the interest of the elite. Emperor William II publicly denounced democracy, equating it with anarchy. But at the time democracy was also a dirty word in Great Britain, because it stood for the power of the popular masses and not the supposedly normal, natural, or “God-given” power of the “better” classes, that is the propertied classes - or as they used to say in French, the power of the gens de rien, the “people of nothing,” instead of the gens de bien, the “people of substance.”

British tank in a ditch. Their entry into the battlefront was less than spectacular.

Early tanks were feared by the troops, but countermeasures were soon fielded.

If the masses came to power via elections, that too would constitute a catastrophe from the perspective of the elite. It was firmly believed that in this case, the scenario of the Paris Commune would repeat itself, but on a much larger scale, with enormous effusions of blood and, as outcome, nothing less than the end of civilization, or at least of aristocratic-bourgeois civilization, and the birth of a monster: a socialist or, as they already said at the time, a “communist” society.

The fear of the disagreeable consequences of the process of democratisation and of the apparently irresistible rise of the masses that was linked to it loomed even worse when one considered the problem within a worldwide instead of merely national or even European context. Did democratisation not similarly threaten to produce an equally irresistible rise of the masses of coloured folks in the colonies, to bloody “Communes” over there, and ultimately to the hegemony of the white man giving way, not only in the colonies but all over the world, to the rule of the inferior brown, black, and yellow masses?

"The ancient French race and a new social group, formed by a heterogeneous, motley crew, including outcasts of the old race as well as recent newcomers, not yet assimilated and…inassimilable, the extraordinary coalition of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons, socialists, and aliens [métèques]."

One can easily understand that this vulgar way of thinking managed to become “the dominant world-view of Europe’s ruling and governing.” Concepts such as “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” fit marvelously into the liberal theory that preached that competition separates the wheat from the chaff, so that the victors in the social and economic competition, that is, the prosperous businessmen and the elite in general, are manifestly the best and the fittest and thus merit being the “victors.” And was it not evident that, in a race with countless competitors, there could only be a few winners? Consequently, the wealth and the power of a small number (the elite), as well as the poverty and powerlessness of the great number (the masses) were deserved and justified. The former did not have to be ashamed, and the latter did not have the right to complain, but had to shut up. The inequality of individuals and groups of people, such as classes, was the natural state of things (or, for the believers, the God-given and therefore immutable order of things). Any attempt to change that order, as the socialists and the nationalist champions of ethnic minorities proposed to do, was not only doomed to fail, but was in fact a senseless and even criminal undertaking.

Social Darwinism was equally useful for the purpose of affirming and justifying the power of the white man in the colonies. All-too-easy conquests in Africa, the American “Wild West,” and elsewhere convinced the Europeans and Americans that their own white “race,” then still generally known as “Aryan,” though numerically insignificant in number, was qualitatively far superior to the huge masses of brown, black, and yellow folks. But a hierarchy likewise prevailed within the “Aryan” family, even if it was not entirely clear who occupied its summit. The “Anglo-Saxons” was the answer given to that question in London, but in Berlin they were convinced that on top were the Teutons, a “race” to which belonged not only the Germans, but also other “Germanic” tribes such as the “Anglo-Saxons,” the Scandinavians, the Dutch, and the Flemish denizens of Belgium. In Paris and Rome, it was firmly believed that superiority had been bestowed on the French, Italians, and other “Latin” nations by virtue of their imperial Roman pedigree. In the United States, finally, the palm was handed not just to the presumably superior “Anglo-Saxons,” but to “Nordic” people in general, preferably those embracing a Protestant version of Christianity. The anthropological nec plus ultra there would long remain the “WASP,” that is, the American who was not only white, but also Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Italians and other folks with slightly darker skin, people of the so-called “Mediterranean” type, generally shorter of stature, dark-haired, and Catholic, and of course the “Celtic” Irish, also Catholics, were perceived to inhabit a no-man’s-land that separated the “Nordic” wheat from the chaff of blacks and Indians or “redskins.” For the latter, a special term – with a Nietzschean ring to it – would be coined, namely “under-men,” by the American “scientic racist” Lothrop Stoddard. He first used this term in a book published in 1920 entitled The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. This opus was immediately translated into German and impressed and inspired Hitler, who co-opted the term in its infamous German version, Untermensch.

From a Social Darwinist perspective, all the members of the superior “Aryan” family had ample reason to be satisfied and happy. In their community, social or economic problems could not exist, and if somehow they did appear, it was the fault of members of inferior “races” who, like a kind of dangerous germ, had penetrated the healthy body of the “Aryan” community to contaminate it and make it sick. Revolutionary socialism was such a disease, a potentially deadly disease, and the germs that had engendered it were the Jews who had infiltrated the “Aryan” community. It was taken as given that the Jews, like all other “inferiors”, were envious of the superior “Aryans” and dreamed of bringing them down from their lofty pedestal, using socialism as an instrument to achieve that evil objective. Thus we can understand why anti-Semitism was widespread at the time in conservative, anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and counter-revolutionary circles.

Henry Ford being decorated by the Nazis, an honor he proudly accepted. (Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle on his 75th birthday, 30 July 1938.)

Explaining social problems by pointing the finger at foreigners, not necessarily but preferably the Jews – in other words, making the Jew a scapegoat – already had a long tradition. Luther had blamed the Jews for the peasant revolts, and according to theorists of counter-revolutionary conservatism such as de Maistre, de Bonald, and Burke, it was the Jews – and the Freemasons – who had unleashed the French Revolution. Later, the Jews would similarly be accused of planning the Russian Revolution by people like Oswald Spengler, a German historian and philosopher who today no longer enjoys a good reputation, but also by personalities that many continue to admire, for example, the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford and the most famous of all British statesmen, Winston Churchill.

Indian troops (Sikhs), in the service of the British crown, marching in Paris' grand boulevards. Many people thought they looked awfully smart, and their battlefield deeds proved their military mettle.

The Social Darwinists believed that outside of Europe too, inferior peoples, green with jealousy, would try in one way or another to put an end to the legitimate worldwide hegemony of the “Aryans.” For example, in Africa and the United States, or at least in the Southern states, blacks – who were only recently slaves – were presumed to always be looking for opportunities to rape white women, in the hope that they would thus pollute and ultimately destroy the “Aryan race.” (In contemporary Europe, still extremely repressed on the sexual level, it was the Jews who were suspected of lusting after “Aryan” females.) Yet another menace lurked in the shape of the immense human masses of Chinese, simultaneously loathed and feared by whites as the “yellow peril.” (The less numerous Japanese did not yet inspire such fear.) And the Chinese nationalists’ Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 in Beijing was ruthlessly crushed by the combined armed forces of no less than eight imperialist powers, fraternally united for the occasion. In 1914, when these same powers rather unfraternally went to war against one another, the Germans, who had looked forward to a military contest among fellow “Aryans,” were shocked that the French mobilized Senegalese and Moroccan troops against them and that the British called up Indians to fight on their side. Noblesse oblige and, confronted with the menace of inferior peoples, the “Aryans,” no matter how divided they may have been among themselves, should maintain a common front, so the Germans believed. On the other hand, in the African theatre of operations, for example in East Africa, the Germans themselves did not hesitate to use black soldiers against the British and Belgian forces, which also consisted mostly of black recruits.

Victims of a gas attack.

What had gone wrong, and what could be done about it? To find answers to these questions, the European and American elites sat down at the feet of the great German philosopher of the end of the century, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche has been described by Arno Mayer as "the chief minstrel of this battle [of the elite against all forms of equality],…[a man whose] thought was coherently and consistently antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antisocialist…He reviled his own age for permitting the masses to shackle the will to power of the ‘highest specimens’…[so that] herd animals made themselves masters."

With the Enlightenment and liberalism, Europeans had gone astray, explained Nietzsche. Liberty, equality, and progress for all had been an impossible and dangerous ideal in a healthy society. An elite of superior beings must dominate and the masses must be dominated. To allow the inferior masses to come to power was not merely a mistake, but a crime. And, according to Nietzsche, the criminals who incited the people and fomented revolutions were the Jews, whom he called the “spiteful people par excellence.”

Nietsche: Preaching a form of uber individualism and social darwinism, his philosophy fit perfectly the visions of exclusivity entertained by the aristocrats in the capitalist and ancien regime precincts.

The elite can and must exercise power, said Nietzsche, and could find inspiration for that in the brilliant example of Ancient Greece, where a superior social layer of capable, wise, and courageous people ruled with an iron fist over a crowd of hilotes, aliens, and slaves, the inferior oi polloi, “the multitude.”

But Great Britain also boasted a tradition of glorification of war. In The Crown of Wild Olive, published in 1866, the great Victorian author John Ruskin, who remained very popular and influential until 1914, lauded war as follows:

In the British monthly The Nineteenth Century and After, there appeared in 1911 an article entitled “God’s Test by War,” written by a certain H. F. Wyatt. “The biological law of competition,” one could read there, “still rules the biological destiny of nations as of individual men.” And to the question whether a country like Britain could still play a role in the competition, the answer was: “How shall we know? By the test. What test? That which God has given for the trial of peoples – the test of war.”

An almost identical tribute to war was featured in the catalogue of the Universal Exposition of Paris in 1900, more specifically in a comment about the military section:

"War [is] ‘natural to humanity…a school of the highest qualities of man…Peace fructifies the arts, trade, and industry, [but] also develops those states of mind called selfishness, pessimism, nihilism, egoism’…[war can] restore the lofty virtues that seem to be fading, raise their spirit, and give them new heart."

“Never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men,” complained the Polish-English writer Joseph Conrad in 1905, “and reigned with less disputed sway in their minds.” It was not the “little” people, however, but the elite who excitedly guzzled the soup of Nietzschean ideology and pseudo-scientific Social Darwinism. “The cult of war was an elite, not a plebeian, affair,” insists Arno Mayer, “[because] there was no spontaneous clamor for war among the presumably aggressive and bloodthirsty masses.” And he added:

Darwinian and Nietzschean thought…became immensely meaningful and valuable to the elites engaged in reaffirming their dominance…Indeed, they became a central component not only of the Weltanschauung but also of the persuasive belief system of the ruling and governing classes.

The Belgian historian Sophie de Schaepdrijver also recognizes that Nietzschean belligerence “had not only infected Germany, [but] the Belle Époque elites of all of Europe.” The young Winston Churchill was typical of the British elite. He was “really fascinated by war” which he considered “the normal occupation of man…war – with gardening”! In 1914, when the Great War broke out, Churchill would be ecstatic and declared that war was “glorious and delicious.” In any event, it was not the working class and the rest of the lower orders, supposedly the classes dangereuses, but the openly belligerent ruling elite that revealed itself to be “Europe’s most formidable classe dangereuse,” as Arno Mayer has put it.

"Over the top"—Perhaps the most dangerous moment in trench warfare.

According to the German admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, militarism and war were necessary as antidotes to “the propagation of Marxism and political radicalism among the popular masses.” He viewed Mars as the perfect ally against Marx! The European (and American) elite, which felt increasingly threatened by the rise of the labour movement and of socialism, believed that it could use war as a kind of life vest that would allow it to survive the democratic deluge. In this sense, it is true that war was “a profoundly conservative activity,” directed “against the Idea of Progress,” as the American historian (and World War II veteran) Paul Fussell has written.

As far as the elite was concerned, war could and would be a cure for the great ailment that affected not only the socialists, but the workers and the lower orders in general. With their demands for higher wages and other benefits, the labouring masses had presumably revealed themselves overly materialistic, egoistic, even hedonistic. War, inevitably accompanied by privations and hardship, would purge them of this materialism and infuse them with asceticism. War would teach the socialists and workers in general to be satisfied with less and to accept their lot in life instead of making all sorts of extravagant demands. Military service and war were also considered – for example by the many French army commanders who had perused the book by Le Bon – as a means to transform the popular crowd (foule), supposedly undisciplined and therefore untrustworthy and dangerous, into disciplined, malleable, and servile “troops” (troupe).

“had caused many to long for a more heroic existence…The elites of the Belle Époque in all of Europe experienced an urge for ruthless action of any kind, for a merciless battle that would put an end to this boring bourgeois existence full of conventions and compromises.”

This viewpoint was shared by the great German general and field marshal (as well as count) Helmuth von Moltke, for thirty years the chief of staff of the Prussian army, known as “Moltke the Elder” to avoid confusion with his nephew Helmuth von Moltke, “Moltke the Younger,” who was to be commander in chief of the German Army in 1914. In 1880, Moltke senior wrote the following in a letter:

Perpetual peace is a dream – and not even a beautiful dream – and war is an integral part of God’s ordering of the universe. In war, man’s noblest virtues come into play: courage and renunciation, fidelity to duty and a readiness for sacrifice that does not stop at giving up life itself. Without war, the world would be swamped in materialism.

War, it was said, not only amounted to an edifying spiritual experience but was also a kind of sport and therefore quite enjoyable. In a book published in 1903, based on his experiences during colonial wars, entitled Modern Warfare, or How Our Soldiers Fight, Brigade General Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg wrote the following:

"An army…tries to work together in a battle…in much the same way as a football team plays together in a match…The army fights for the good of its country as the team plays for the honour of the school…Exceptionally gallant charges and heroic defences correspond to brilliant runs and fine tackling."

Perhaps it was these lines that inspired a British officer, Wilfred Nevill, of the Eight East Surrey Regiment, on July 1, 1916, to give the signal for attack by kicking a football towards the German lines. The Daily Mail would celebrate this exploit with this poem:

On through the hail of slaughter,

Where gallant comrades fall,

Where blood is poured like water,

They drive the trickling ball.

The fear of death before them,

True to the the land that bore them,

The Surreys played the game .

War, then, was supposedly good for everyone, and therefore desirable. War was expected to function as a catharsis: it would cause a wind of fresh air to blow through the musty old dwelling that Europe had become. Of war, one expected “deliverance from vulgarity, constraint, and convention.” War was associated with “liberation and freedom.” It could not come too soon. “How I long for the Great War,” wrote the English conservative Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, “it will sweep Europe like a broom.” The German writers known as pre-Expressionists similarly imagined that war would bring deliverance from the prison of a sick society and a sad and boring era. One of them, Georg Heym, openly longed for the occurrence of some thrilling event that would put an end to “this idle, greasy, and sticky peace.” The year 1914 would finally bring the hoped-for relief from this taedium vitae, associated with all sorts of illusions about war.

The association of war with liberation also appeared in the work of an Italian intellectual, Giovanni Gentile, who would later describe himself as “the philosopher of [Italian] fascism.” He glorified war as “the suffering through which the human soul is purified and responds to the call of its destiny.” Other transalpine admirers of war and violence were the painters and other members of a cultural movement that became known as Futurism. This movement was supposedly “avant-garde,” but it was definitely not progressive in the political or social sense of the term. Arno Mayer has described the Futurists as “allied with conservative forces,” who distanced themselves from socialists and workers, the political vanguard of political progress. Instead, they trusted in extreme Italian nationalism, imperialism, and war to clear the ground for the machine age and culture, regardless of the human, social, and political cost. Inspired by Nietzsche…the Futurists denied equality, opposed the leveling of society, and believed in an aristocracy of the spirit and the arts.”

WWI: French machine gun nest.

One might think that Mayer exaggerates somewhat, but in the Manifesto of the Futurists, published in 1909, the author, the famous writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, shouted from the rooftops that,

we [the Futurists] want to glorify war, the world’s only hygiene, as well as militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.

In 1914, the wishes of the Nietzscheans were to be granted. Countless young men would go to war voluntarily, convinced that by “undergoing [their] baptism [of war]” they would achieve “manhood,” as a German soldier, a member of the Danish minority in the region of Schleswig-Holstein, put it in 1914. One of his comrades, another German of Danish origin, confided to his journal in typically Nietzschean terms that he went to war “to strengthen [his] character, to strengthen it in power and will, in habits, custom and earnestness.”

A major advantage that war was expected to bring was undoubtedly the fact that in wartime the rules of the game of democracy – and of the allegedly inefficient parliamentary system that was associated with it – were deemed to be useless, and would therefore have to be abandoned in favour of the authoritarian power relations and strict discipline featured in armies. Was it not evident that in wartime, commanders had to give orders and subordinates had to obey unconditionally? Of discussion and of input from below, of criticism, in other words, of democracy of any kind, there could no longer be any question. And it went without saying that the commanders would be the traditional, natural or God-appointed leaders of society, in other words, the existing elite – the aristoi, to use Nietzschean terminology – held to have emerged “organically”.

For the elite, war would also be an occasion to realize its own supposedly innate potential for leadership, to demonstrate excellence as political and military leaders, and to display heroism. It was hoped that the authoritarianism and discipline associated with war would similary transform the undisciplined, restless, and dangerous masses of workers and other proletarians into a multitude of servile and agreeable underlings. War would function as the “school of the nation” in general, but above all it would restore tranquillity and discipline among the lower orders. The proletarians needed to be cured of their democratic and revolutionary illness, caused by “judeo-socialist” propaganda and intrigue according to elitist types such as the infamous German nationalist Heinrich Class, and for this illness war happened to be the ultimate remedy. War was to function as a “wake-up call” for “all the good elements of the people” and would thus inaugurate a national renaissance.

The elite, then, viewed war as an instrument for the control of the popular masses. This is precisely what was implied in Churchill’s aforementioned remarks comparing war to gardening. In both cases, the aim was to control, to tame. Gardening was about the control of luxuriant plants, the taming of nature. War was about the control of society, about the taming of people in general and of the undisciplined, unruly – and dangerous – working class in particular.

In the case of gardening, one must sometimes be prepared to prune, and to prune deeply, thus improving quality at the expense of quantity. The Nietzschean elite, which also worshipped older, but still influential intellectual idols such as Malthus, was convinced that waging war would involve an analogous kind of pruning. The inevitably high losses war causes among the rank and file constituted not only an inevitable and even necessary Malthusian “positive check” on the population, but could also be justified as a quantitative cut that improved the quality. The popular masses were simply too plentiful. It was a crowd that, for the good of society as a whole, needed to be culled from time to time. Was it not a fact that culling made it possible to improve the quality of a breed of cows, deer, etc.? It was not a coincidence that during the Great War, hundreds of thousands of ordinary soldiers, consisting overwhelmingly of peasants and workers, would be sent headlong into certain death by their own generals. Virtually without exception, the latter were members of the Nietzschean and Social Darwinist pre-war elite, steeped in bellicism and contempt of death.

Contempt of death means not fearing death, and indeed, the elite did not fear the death of proletarians they loathed, over whom they exercised total power, and whose lives they would waste so lightheartedly during the Great War, as the German historian Hermann Glaser has observed. With respect to this culling of their ranks, certain proletarians were in fact convinced that these seemingly senseless massacres reflected a desire on the part of their generals to reduce the ranks of the workers and thus to make the fearsome masses less “massive” and less frightful. During one of the many strikes Paris witnessed in June 1919, a striker, reflecting on the Great War, declared that,

This war was wanted by the bourgeoisie, the industrial capitalists, and the leaders of all the countries [involved in the war]. They observed the swelling of the ranks of the proletarian organisations and they feared for their coffers. And so they found a solution: eliminating workers by means of war.

The elite expected the war not only to function as a cure for the distemper of the masses, associated with socialism, but also to give birth to a new form of solidarity, a non-socialist and even anti-socialist solidarity. War was supposed to spawn a “war socialism,” that is, a spiritual instead of materialist socialism, a national instead of an international socialism, a German, French, or British socialism instead of a Marxist and therefore “Jewish” socialism. Mars, the god of war, was expected to become the patron saint of a new kind of society, a society without class antagonisms. It was in this sense that – even if it ended in defeat –war would be “great and wonderful,” as the renowned German sociologist Max Weber believed. His conviction was shared by the writer Thomas Mann who, in a famous book, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, published in 1918, would sing the praises of what he called the “warrior ideology.” This was the conservative concept of a new community, a product of the war, different as day and night from socialist and liberal societal notions. War was expected to be the instrument that would make it possible to integrate the masses into the existing society, and thus to put an end to the social problems and the class struggle.

War was supposed to unite the entire people and integrate all classes into the established order, to the advantage of the elite. Conversely, war would divide the “proletarians of all countries”, who had been uniting under the auspices of socialism to the disadvantage of the elite. In the struggle against socialist internationalism, war was considered to be the ultimate weapon, the most effective instrument in the strategy of “divide and conquer.”

WW I, The Great Class War 1914-1918, published by James Lorimer in Toronto in 2016.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

Jacques R. Pauwels is a people's historian. In the tradition pioneered by Marx and Engels, and continued by Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm, Leo Huberman, and others of similar merit, he writes history that is not only firmly grounded in truth but is aimed at liberating the mind from the claptrap of existing ruling class mythology. Pauwels has taught European history at the University of Toronto, York University, and the University of Waterloo. His books include Big Business and Hitler, The Great Class War 1914-1918, and The Myth of the Good War.

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

By Frank Scott

Joe Biden's mean-spirited face, his long career as a crooked, cynical warmongering politician, and his appalling mediocrity, now accentuated by advancing dementia, are emblematic of the fraudulent system of "capitalist democracy" he incarnates. (TGPcezanneai)

As the imperial system of global capitalism suffers an ever more dangerous breakdown at its crumbling headquarters in the USA the once near insanity of its leadership class edges closer to stark raving lunacy.

While a new administration presides over what many hoped would be a return to normal after the even more blatant and open worship of wealth, war and Israel of the Trump regime, what’s missed is that what passes for normal is what needs radical change. As long as market normalcy in the USA means hundreds of thousands are homeless, millions are living in poverty and millions more than that are so much deeper in debt than ever before in our history that the World Bank warns of the possibility of social collapse.

Our (?) government presently needs trillions of dollars more of debt creation to pay off a minority of national and international loan sharks and is presently debating how much more we should borrow to create even more death and destruction than we have already caused. Calling or considering this a situation that passes for normal is not just highly judgmental but criminally immoral and a danger to all of humanity.

This time some trillions in government domestic spending are proposed when tens of trillions are needed but will never be found under the market forces of private profit “normalcy” which spends hundreds of billions on imperial war. We need a radical restructuring of the economic, political and value system that treats all of nature, earth, air, water and human beings as commodities to be bought, sold, rented in pursuit of enormous private profit for an ever-shrinking number while increasing the hundreds of millions who sink lower economically while bearing the public loss that is the outcome of all private profit.

While a hopeful program for domestic progress is proposed by some, the old deal of the murderous warfare state is even more dangerous than ever, with the crackpots of the Trump regime replaced by even more experienced creators of mass murder policies and practices to preserve the alleged chosen people status of America’s ruling capital and its servant class of often sincere worshippers of the idea of democracy who make it impossible by their service to the most anti-social, viciously anti-democratic political economic system that has reached a point of threatening not only America but the entire world.

The old cold war against communism is no more, but the new one against capitalist Russia and China has introduced greater spending on warfare than ever before and the sheer mind-numbing idiocy of a daily barrage of mis— and dis— information coming from the bowels of corporate mass media and naturally extending to most of their small-time imitators at what is often called social media though it usually operates as anti-social as the system dictates. All of us are endangered by the potential of a nuclear confrontation provoked by the fanatic war cult serving the alleged interest of democracy, peace and freedom the way pimps serve the interest of love, marriage and family.

Naturally, this is treated as massive terror threats from outside enemies and desperately needing trillions spent on what is called defense, which adequately protects the Americans militarily ringing the Russian border and sailing the South China seas, having hundreds of military bases thousands of miles from America’s shores and conducting insurrections in foreign nations while gullible Americans are led to believe a large demonstration at the capital in which less humans suffered than in an average hour of automobile traffic was a threat to our sacred democracy which has as much material substance as Santa Claus. This is sold to a mentally imprisoned population as a defense of America rationalized by a bi-partisan leadership of republicrats and demublicans collectively dumb enough to pick their noses and call it self lobotomy while offering absolutely no help at all to more than 25 million Americans without health care and more than half a million without shelter.

Despite the unrelenting intellectual and moral garbage being force fed to consumers of what is called by some our sacred democracy, newer generations contain more critical numbers than ever speaking out and showing signs of no more tolerance for this mass murdering drivel. Current mind mashing daily bulletins about Putin’s being a murderous imperialist and Chinese performing genocide on Islamic people are part of the daily diet of intellectual sewage that passes for reporting in the news marketplace, where more minds are being destroyed while more wealth is created by the media servants of capital.

Daily bulletins inform (?) us that Russia and China are brutalizing their people while we slaughter thousands, destroy nations and reduce millions to poverty, defining all that as freedom and democracy. If there were a judgmental and vindictive deity such as the one created in the more sadistic episodes of Old Testament mythology that had one destroy the planet because of false worship or a bad migraine, there might be a cataclysmic explosion, earthquake, holocaust and plague every fifteen minutes until our nation was obliterated.

Luckily, we only have to deal with the largest population of earth dwellers growing fed up with a material reality forced on them by allegedly higher forms of humans practicing a form of political economics that might create a Department of Rape and call it a Ministry of Love.

The rest of the world is retaliating by offering lessons in humanity to western social degeneracy by describing how it is possible to end poverty by investing in people rather than murdering them. This revolutionary idea is the main reason for China and Russia being treated as enemies of private profit and public loss, even as both their economies still live according to augmented global rules of capital. Until humanity and not just one or another nation face the reality in which we all live and return to our roots in communal cooperation, the divisions of our race into separate but unequal minorities instead of a unified organism which is what we are and should act like we will be assured an extremely dim future, beginning with a nuclear holocaust which can be the outcome of present national madness especially centered in the western world minority that passes for leadership. The time to create global democracy was never more present nor possible nor necessary than the present moment and those of the ruling minority must be replaced before the majority pays the most awful price.

The word democracy is far more revered than the practice and while the right to vote is a necessary part of the process what we vote for is absolutely more important than simply accepting as we do in America two sides of the same capitalist coin and calling it democracy. In Germany democracy put Hitler and the Nazi party in power and in America we are seeing a collapse in all aspects of our system and while it is especially obvious in the economics reducing the standard and cost of everyday life, the political structure of war and profit worship goes hand in hand. We must create real democracy and it must ultimately extend globally to all our people so that the action needed for social transformation can be up to and include all and not just some. We need to speed up that process which is well underway but not yet apparent to far too many of us. We need to stop watching the news and start making it. Fast.

email: fpscott@gmail.com

BALLOONACY

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Paul Edwards

Paul Edwards

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

NBC’s Hit Piece On Jimmy Dore/Taibbi/Greenwald Is Dumbest Yet

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

The Jimmy Dore Show

The Jimmy Dore Show

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

The U.S. Government’s Attempt to Control Russia and China, Replace U.N.

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Eric Zuesse

Eric Zuesse

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Ode to War

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Jacques Pauwels

Jacques Pauwels

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

We Need Democracy Which Is Far More Than Voting

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

By Frank Scott

By Frank Scott

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

BALLOONACY

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • Paul Edwards

Paul Edwards

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

NBC’s Hit Piece On Jimmy Dore/Taibbi/Greenwald Is Dumbest Yet

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • The Jimmy Dore Show

The Jimmy Dore Show

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

The U.S. Government’s Attempt to Control Russia and China, Replace U.N.

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • Eric Zuesse

Eric Zuesse

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Ode to War

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • Jacques Pauwels

Jacques Pauwels

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

We Need Democracy Which Is Far More Than Voting

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • By Frank Scott

By Frank Scott

NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Paul Edwards

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

The Jimmy Dore Show

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Eric Zuesse

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Jacques Pauwels

DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

By Frank Scott