Eric Zuesse
Bigotries Originate from the Billionaires, Not from the Public
ABSTRACT
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here does not currently exist within the social sciences a theory to explain, or to assert what causes, bigotry. There does exist within the field of psychology (the field that bridges between the biological and the social sciences) a sound factorial-analytical literature that empirically grounds within that field an appropriate definition of “bigotry,” which in that field is called “prejudice.” But no field of science yet discusses what causes bigotries to form and to spread within a society. The first-ever empirically grounded theory of what causes bigotry is presented here, and its evidence comes from the social science which provides all of the evidence within the field of scientific political theory: history. This will therefore be a contribution to scientific political theory. The relationship between wars and bigotries will be documented by specific historical examples, in which billionaires, the aristocracy or politically controlling elite within many nations, have promulgated by their media and other means a dehumanization of residents in lands that have been designated by the government that the aristocracy controls, to constitute (either via economic sanctions or otherwise) ’the enemy’ or the “them” against the “us.” Throughout history this has been an important means for a nation’s aristocracy to achieve in their nation’s fighting forces the requisite intensity of motivation among the public to invade, bomb, and otherwise lay waste to, the targeted ‘enemy’ land.
Key Words: Bigotry • Prejudice • War • Inequality • Methodology • Politics • International
INTRODUCTION
The subject here is to answer the question: “What causes bigotry?”
Bigotry itself is being defined as prejudice, and that is understood specifically as prejudice against persons, and not, for example, against certain foods or other products.
A theory of the origin of bigotries will be presented here, and it complements Jim Sidanius’s Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) approach (as presented in his works linked-to here) to defining such prejudice in an empirical way. But our purpose is not to define, but instead to explain, bigotry — how and why it is created and spreads within a society. However, nothing can be explained that is not first adequately defined. Sidanius’s approach to defining “prejudice” is a major contribution to personality psychology and social psychology, and is well-documented as such, empirically within that field. Subsequently, however, in 2010, his SDO factor was found, by Kubler, Cooper, and Nosek, to be comprised of two separate sub-factors, in their report titled “Group-Based Dominance and Opposition to Equality Correspond to Different Psychological Motives”, and an individual’s support for Group-Based Dominance or GBD was found there to have an even stronger correlation with bigotry or “prejudice” than does merely Opposition to Equality or OEQ. (In more-common parlance, bigotry is psychologically even more tribalistic than hierarchical — even more strongly racist than it is supremacist.) However that is only a personality type, SDO (which includes bigotry among its chief features, as is best represented by GBD). Bigotry (or “prejudice”) is viewed there as being within an individual’s personality, but not as being a consequence of the body-politic, or of any other social-sciences concerns, so that social factors are being viewed as consequences of individual factors, and the prevalence — or not — of bigotry within a given society or population is not being viewed as resulting from anything from within the society-at-large — such as from a given nation’s polity and economy, and from both international and intranational wars (which will be the theory advanced here).
Our focus, consequently, isn’t on defining bigotry, but on explaining the origin of bigotry — what causes it. No theory in the social sciences yet explains that. This will be the first.
This article had been submitted to a certain journal, which has one of highest Impact Factors in the academic field of political science, but it was summarily rejected by the journal’s three intake-editors (they said that it would not be sent out for peer-review), because:
The manuscript does not meet the scholarly expectations for consideration in an top-tier journal in political science. … These expectations include having a research question that is solidly anchored in the scholarship, articulating an argument that is also solidly anchored in the scholarship, having a research design that meet the expectations of the discipline, elaborating a discussion of the findings, and a conclusion that comes back to the main findings and situate them towards the state of knowledge on the topic.
The manuscript does not meet these expectation (sic), we can thus not consider it for publication.
I replied, to the three editors:
How can one do even a single part of that if the existing social-sciences (not just the existing poli-sci) scholarship on what causes bigotry to arise amongst a given population is zero?
None of the three ever replied. In other words: a journal, which supposed experts in political science respect, was entirely uninterested in the question of what causes bigotry to arise amongst a given population. How can such a field, as that, be authentically a field of “science”? It can’t, because even a core topic in its field is excluded if that topic is not already a topic of active scientific investigation and theory within that field, such as this important topic happens to be excluded there. Practitioners in such a field aren’t practicing an authentic field of science. No scientific field is willing to leave devoid of empirical and theoretical investigation, within itself, a topic which is within its own field (especially not an important one, such as what causes bigotries). Consequently, adhering to the existing norms in this field is no objective here. Only authentic science is the objective. And the norms in political ‘science’ need to change, drastically, before that field can possibly becomea scientific field. This much is already clear, even before our topic is discussed.
Furthermore: political science isn’t the only fake ‘science’ that is called a social ‘science’ and that yet ignores bigotries — refuses to consider bigotry’s causes, its social causes (because it is ineluctably a societal problem, and not merely a psychological one). This author’s web-search
"impact factor" racism journals
further confirmed this impression of the fakery of the existing social ‘sciences’. It drew only psychology-journals, as if bigotry were only an individual’s problem, not at all society’s problem. The question thus arises as to why all of the social ‘sciences’ are at such a pre-scientific stage of development as to be producing this ridiculous result even as late as within our own era. Clearly, such sciences don’t yet actually exist, when such a basic problem in all of the social ‘sciences’ as “What causes bigotry?” is being simply ignored. Everybody talks about bigotry, but nobody in the social ‘sciences’ wants to understand its causes. That’s clear. It is damning. Actually, it nullifies a great deal of political ‘science’, just to start with, but also virtually the entirety of the scholarly field of international relations. They are mainly fakers. I tried journals in each of the social-sciences fields, and until I came to the present one, all turned down this article because it doesn’t discuss (as another of them put it) “what has been done before on similar topics and how the present study fills this gap,” because “papers are expected to be ‘in conversation’ with a literature” that already exists. Whenever I asked for just a single example of what that ‘literature’ is, none replied any further. Another journal declined to consider it because “we … require our manuscripts to rest on a foundation of peer reviewed publications,” as if those even exist, on this topic. We might as well be in the 1800s, as far as the ‘social’ ‘sciences’ have progressed toward becoming actual sciences. They have lots of false theories, but they don’t have even false theories on this basic social-sciences topic — and they don’t want any theory, at all, on this topic, because it would be the first. No scientific field functions in such a manner.
This article presents the first-ever social-scientific theory of what creates bigotries, and it documents, by historical examples, that the aristocracy, or the very wealthiest in a given nation, its billionaires (in today’s parlance), create bigotries within their nation’s public, in order to enable those billionaires (via the local national government that they and their corporations control) to become enabled successfully to motivate their nation’s public with sufficient hatred against the billionaires’ chosen target-nation, so as to become (at the public’s expense, via taxes and corpses, instead of via their own personal expenses) enabled to conquer the residents of that target-country, which the imperialistic nation’s aristocracy intend to conquer, and which they exploit by means of their international corporations, such as Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil.
The documentation for this theory is not empirical factorial-analytical studies of personality (such as in social psychology’s definition of “bigotry”) but instead is historical examples cited from post-WW II (i.e., post-1945) U.S. international aggressions. We focus on that period in order to maximize the contemporary relevance of our findings. However, examples from this period will be selected which strongly reflect relatively timeless patterns, going all the way back to ancient history. Any theory, of what causes bigotry, must explain it with sufficient fundamentality so as to fit all societies, in all time-frames. That concern factored into the selection of empirical, historical, examples, on the basis of which, this theory will be set forth and defended here.
ONE EXAMPLE
A typical recent U.S. international aggression, which displays how this works, was America’s (and its allies France’s and UK’s) 14 April 2018 firing of over a hundred missiles against Syria, on the fabricated accusation that Syria’s Government had perpetrated against its own civilian population in the town of Douma on April 7th a chemical-weapons bombing of them. This invasion occurred almost exactly a year after the U.S., on 7 April 2017, had earlier launched 59 missiles against Syria on the basis of never-verified and likely fabricated ‘evidence’ of the Government’s allegedly having perpetrated a sarin attack in its town of Khan Shakhoun three days prior to that U.S.-and-allied invasion. Furthermore, this happened within the broader context of the U.S. Government’s having, ever since at least 2012, been using — and protecting — Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch in order for those jihadists to lead and train America’s proxy-fighters on the ground in Syria (various other jihadist groups) to overthrow and replace Syria’s existing secular and non-sectarian Government. Syrians — who never, ever, invaded nor even threatened, the U.S. — were now an ‘enemy’ of the United States. U.S. Government lies against Syria were the means to build anti-Syrian sentiment in the United States in order for Americans to support “regime change” there. The ‘evil’ that was charged was supposedly by ‘Assad’ (the head-of-state) but was actually against Syria’s only legitimate Government, which even Western polling has consistently shown to be supported by the majority of Syria’s residents. So: the U.S. Government’s hate-campaign was actually against Syria and Syrians, but has consistently been covered-over by lies alleging that it was instead ‘humanitarian’ etc., and against ‘the dictator’ there.
A typical example of such lies was that on 1 November 2015 the Clarion Project headlined “13 Percent of Syrian Refugees Support ISIS: Poll” and reported that, “A poll published in November 2014 by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies [ http://web.archive.org/web/20160217171453/https://english.dohainstitute.org/file/Get/40ebdf12-8960-4d18-8088-7c8a077e522e ] found that 13% of Syrian refugees have positive feelings towards the Islamic State terrorist group.” On 3 February 2016, the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs received the testimony of David B. Harris, Director, International Intelligence Program INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc Ottawa, Canada. His testimony headlined “Canada’s Fast-Track Refugee Plan: Unanswered Questions and Implications for U.S. National Security”. As part of his warning Americans against receiving refugees from Syria, he said:
Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies polls determined that thirteen percent of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey – source countries for Canada’s Syrian migrants – had positive views of IS.4 How many more might favour al Qaeda, al Nusra, Hezbollah, Assad militias and other nonIS threat-groups?
That footnote 4 was to the Clarion Project’s 1 November 2015 article. However, that Clarion Project article was fraudulent. The cited “poll published in November 2014 by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies [otherwise called the Doha Institute]” didn’t report any such thing. The Clarion Project’s assertion, that it did, was a complete fabrication. Residents of 7 Arabic countries — plus of 900 “Syrian refugees” in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey — were asked “In general, do you have a positive or negative view of ISIL?” Among all 8 categories, only 4% of respondents had a “Positive” impression of ISIL (ISIS). That was also the figure among “Syrian refugees.” 72% of all respondents had a “Negative” impression. 73% of Syrian refugees did. The highest “Positive” impression of ISIL was among Tunisians: 7%. So: nowhere — not even in Tunisia — was the figure anywhere near as high as 13%. The aim of this propaganda was to deceive readers into believing that Syrian refugees are more favorable toward ISIS than the residents of other Arab countries (most of which are U.S. allies) are. It was hate against Syrians. This was while the U.S. was trying to conquer Syria (overthrow and replace its government).
Wikipedia’s article, “Clarion Project”, says:
The project's advisory board included Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, and Walid Phares of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. … Funders include the Donors Capital Fund, a nonprofit donor-advised fund, which gave the organization a donation of $17.7 million in 2008,[6][7] and casino owner Sheldon Adelson.[7][8]
Both the Center for Security Policy and the Middle East Forum are fronts for oil companies that want the U.S. to invade whatever Middle Eastern countries the U.S. Government doesn’t already have as allies (vassal states). Foundation for the Defense of Democracies is an Israeli-American version of the same — a front for U.S. invasions of Middle Eastern countries that the U.S. doesn’t already have as allies. Donors Capital Fund is a front for the pro-global-warming far-right oil billionaires, Koch brothers, and their friends. Sheldon Adelson was the largest individual donor to the Republican Party in 2016.
Furthermore, the false reporting about Syria has been pervasive not only in mainstream ‘news’media but also in most of the ‘alternative news’ media, which are likewise funded mainly by billionaires. And when that false reporting is — as it rarely is — pointed out, reader-comments are usually hostile toward whomever has done that, because the readers have been inculcated into hating the given target-nation, and because the overriding and most pervasive propaganda is the idea that to criticize one’s own nation’s foreign policies is unpatriotic, maybe even traitorous. For most people, truth is a minor consideration, if any at all, as compared to ‘being patriotic’. So, publics tend to be very easy to manipulate.
The billionaires and their government play the public for suckers in order to ‘justify’ their aggressions (such as against Syria 2012-, Iraq 2003-, Libya, 2011- …). All of these invasions are alleged to be for ‘humanitarian’ purposes (as well as for American self-defense, against countries that had never attacked nor threatened to attack the United States) but the invasion actually destroyed the attacked country (and did nothing for American self-defense). All were based upon lies.
A serious question is consequently to be raised as to whether similar systemic deceits, by government, in service to its billionaires, so as to prep its population to invade a foreign country — or else to continue such an invasion — have been and are instrumental as causing a bigotry to exist within that country, against the residents in the targeted foreign one. Which country is actually the aggressor in such instances? It’s certainly not Syria (etc.). But bigotries (and bigots) are blind to reason, and are therefore easily manipulable by the super-rich few, who actually control this system, for their personal financial benefit.
Three historical types of such aggressions are included in our proposed theory: economic blockades (sanctions) as a preliminary stage in which ‘the enemy’ is often originally defined; coups; and military invasions. For example: “Syria’s Government” is presented by the U.S. and its allies as being an ‘enemy’ and became subjected to sanctions and invasions on that fraudulent basis, but actually the invaders are against the residents in Syria — not against their Government — since Syria’s Government is the only government that in international law represents those residents, and since the existing government of Syria is and has been supported by clear majorities of the Syrian residents, and since the U.S. Government and its allies have lied constantly against Syria’s Government in order to ‘justify’ their aggressions against it. So: first come the lies, then the sanctions, then the attempted coup, and if none of that works, last come the military actions.
ADDITIONAL CORE CONCEPTS DEFINED
A “conquest” can sometimes be achieved solely by means of one of these three stages of aggression (or else, as the U.S. regime achieved it in Brazil, by subversion — and that’s why the three stages of war weren’t applied there as they were and still are being applied to Brazil’s adjoining nation of Venezuela), but in some instances, conquest has resulted from all three being attempted in that precise sequence, of sanctions (identifying ‘the enemy’), then coup, and finally military invasion. But all three types of aggressions are greatly enhanced, in effectiveness, to the extent that the domestic U.S. population, and especially its armed fighters, dehumanize the residents within the land that the U.S. Government is trying to take control over, such as Syria, which the U.S. Government was trying to place under the control of the Sauds — an aristocracy strongly allied with America’s aristocracy — who own Saudi Arabia.
When subversion succeeds without even sanctions having been imposed, there has been a peaceful take-over of that government; and therefore no need developed for the U.S. aristocracy to create bigotry against the residents (‘the regime’) of that target-country. Bigotries are created only for wars — bigotries aren’t needed, unless the take-over is to be violent. When the take-over is by subversion, the enormous up-front costs of conquest (such as economic strangulation and/or immense destruction via a military invasion) are avoided, but the long-term costs to the citizenry of the target-country can still turn out to be enormous, because plunder is the purpose, even if war is avoided.
In other words: supremacism (a psychological construct that’s essential to all factors in SDO) is to be presented here as being not only an individual psychological phenomenon, but also a key component in the U.S. Government’s ‘justification’ of its aggressions, especially in the third and final type of aggression: military invasion. (Whereas bigotry might be even more GBD than it is OEQ, the present paper won’t be making any assumption about that, but is consistent with all of SDO — both of the SDO sub-factors — as defining “bigotry”.)
The psychological studies relating to bigotry do not address the question as to what causes bigotry, but instead are scientific analyses of how bigotry is to be described, what are the features of bigotry, and what are the correlations between those features and other attributes of human personality. In other words: the psychological studies are definitional, not causal — they are “What is bigotry?” not “What causes bigotry?“ And since psychology studies the individual and not the society (not the culture, nor any other aspect of society or of interpersonal interactions), it isn’t one of the social sciences. Psychology instead bridges between the biological sciences and the social sciences; it isn’t within either of those two major subject-area fields.
METHODOLOGY
The evidence upon which this first-ever scientific theory of what causes bigotry will be documented is entirely historical examples — it is entirely documented narrative historical qualitative evidence such as what is suitable to produce convictions in courts, and it is also the type of basis for any scientific theory in political science and in international relations. Any theory of politics or of international relations which isn’t based upon history is trash. This theory, being based upon history, entails, and relies only upon, categories, not at all upon counts, or numbers, of any given category; so, it is a non-mathematical theory; it is a qualitatively based theory. However, the absence of mathematics in it does not necessarily mean that it’s not conceptually rigorous, nor that it’s not precise, nor that it is unscientific (or that it is less scientific than, say, an established theory in physics is). All evidence in the social sciences comes from history. Any social ‘science’ otherwise is only fake.
This first-ever theory of the causation of bigotry is being presented here not because it is the first, but only because it is scientifically documented — it is historically true. It was not sparked because no one in the social subject-areas had presented a theory about bigotry’s cause; it was instead sparked only because I was able to find a scientific theory of what causes bigotries to form and to spread. The sole criterion in science is not novelty (or, in the present instance, lack thereof — the requirement not to be novel); it is instead truth. That’s the truth about real science, as opposed to fake ‘science’ (such as political ‘science’).
Obviously, not all historical examples that document this theory will be presented here. That would be impossible to do. Consequently, as was earlier noted, I have selected historical examples from post-WW II (i.e., post-1945) U.S. international aggressions, because they are especially relevant in our current time. And a theory which is based upon historical examples can be (if it is false) disconfirmed by historical examples that contradict the theory. In a legal case, doing that would be analogous to one side’s discrediting the opposite side’s theory of the case, by presenting a stronger case for an alternative historical narrative (theory of the case) that fits not only the evidence that has been presented by the opposed side, but also fits additional evidence, which the opposed side did not mention (perhaps because this evidence does contradict their theory of the case). No theory in science is presumed to be final — it is only the best explanation that exists, as of that given moment when it is presented. While I am not aware of any historical examples that are inconsistent with the theory that is to be presented here, such example(s) might exist.
THE CASE
The following case will thus be presented and documented here:
Wars result from bigotries within and between the national publics, but those bigotries originate always amongst the very wealthiest, who own the international corporations and the news-media that inform the public about other countries, other cultures, other religions, and other ethnic groups, both within their own country and in foreign lands. Without group-hatreds, the passions that are necessary in order for their people to pull the triggers and drop the bombs, etc., are either totally lacking or else too tepid to motivate the murder and especially the mass-murders and the massive destructions of property that are essential in order to win wars — to achieve conquests. Both sides do it (one the invader and the other the invaded), but they both need to do it, because the people who participate in controlling politics are precisely the very few who are the biggest political and media donors, and these few extraordinarily wealthy individuals need their masses to believe wholeheartedly that what the billionaires and their corporations are doing (imposing coups in some lands and invasions in others, but conquests in either case) is right. The public has to be made to believe that what they are doing, in order to advance the international corporatist empire that these billionaires are obsessed to grow even further, is actually the right thing for the public to do, and that otherwise the ‘enemy’s side, the ‘aliens’ — the “they” instead of the “us” — will win, and therefore the ‘we’ will lose.
In other words: the public must be made to self-identify with the billionaires instead of with the public. If this doesn’t happen, then the public will know that the billionaires are their actual enemies; they’ll know that it’s not really the ‘aliens’ (the Mexicans, or the Russians, or the Chinese, or those foreign governments) who are a threat to the national security of America, and who harm Americans’ welfare, and who therefore must be conquered — be brought under the domestic public’s control internally (by laws and regulations), not abroad (by conquests over people — such as Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Iranians, Venezuelans, etc. — who actually pose no threat to this country). It’s fake ‘national security’, which is based entirely on lies and manipulating the domestic public by lies. If the public know that the individuals who are reducing their freedoms and sending them to invasions are actually internal and are the billionaires, instead of external and the ‘aliens’, then what motivation will the public have to “take up arms” against ‘the enemy’ or “alien”? They might even, instead, be more motivated toward revolution against the billionaires who control their own country. That’s the exact opposite motivation from what any billionaire wants. Billionaires want their public to be passionate in only supportive ways — supportive fools. This is the sole way that their regime can continue to remain in control over the nation. Bigotry is important: it deflects blame away from the actual enemy, which is internal. It scapegoats other publics, ‘aliens’. This is even more important to billionaires than is foreign conquest itself, because it protects billionaires, by its scapegoating an alien public, a ‘them’.
Brian Cloughley at Strategic Culture Foundation headlined on 4 June 2019 “Britain Is out of Control” and presented a rather casual but credible case that the UK is controlled by billionaires instead of by its citizenry (i.e., that it isn’t authentically a democracy). America isn’t necessarily the only fraudulent ‘democracy’. But it is one.
Here, then (by reference to other examples), is historical documentation for the first-ever proposed social-scientific theory of bigotry:
THE PASSION FACTOR
Sometimes, a “passion” factor determines which side wins, and which loses. A Buddhist monk in Vietnam was so highly motivated against the American imperialists’ war against his country (and against U.S. imposition of a Christian ruler there*) that he set fire to himself in protest. It was a turning-point toward the ultimate defeat, ten years later, of the U.S.-stooge regime. (*That ruler, Ngo din Diem, was the son of a devout Catholic who “worked for the commander of the French armed forces as an interpreter and took part in campaigns against anti-colonial rebels in the mountains of Tonkin during 1880,” and became “a counselor to Emperor Thành Thái under the French colonial regime.” The son followed in his footsteps, and “In 1945, after the coup against French colonial rule, the Japanese offered Diệm the post of prime minister in the Empire of Vietnam,” so, America’s fascist enemy in WW II Asia, Japan, wanted him to rule Vietnam, but then America defeated Japan, and Diệm ultimately became instead America’s stooge in South Vietnam. That monk’s public self-immolation actually ignited the immolation of the U.S. regime’s war against Vietnam. LBJ refused to recognize this key fact: he arrogantly chose to continue the regime’s war.)
The passion which that monk displayed was anti-imperialist instead of pro-communist, but America’s billionaires’ news-media didn’t present it that way, but instead as part of an ‘ideological’ Cold War ‘against communism’ instead of for those billionaires’ firms expanding. His passion helped the Vietnamese people win their freedom from the U.S.-imposed dictatorship (which the U.S. regime called “capitalism” — an actual insult to capitalism — but was really imperialism though hidden as being that). This is an example showing why each side in any war wants the best-motivated and best-trained people, and not merely the best weapons — all in order to be the best so that they can kill and destroy the most and therefore win the war against ‘the enemy’ (the “alien”) and thereby spread ‘capitalism’. Vietnam won that war because it had the more-motivated people in it, though not the best weapons. (That monk was also the best-trained, because he was a Buddhist monk, which held special moral authority for that population.)
The Vietnamese were not racist against Americans but Americans were racist against them, and the reason for this racism was that in order to increase Americans’ motivation to kill and ravage Southeast Asians, calling them “gooks” became common for America’s troops. “Commies” (the billionaires’ ideological insult) wasn’t enough in order to achieve this very personal, racist, emotional intensity among the invaders. This was so not because those troops were Americans, but because those troops needed more motivation to kill the people that America’s leaders ordered and paid them to kill.
Vietnamese didn’t need any additional motivation. Patriotism (support of the nation’s sovereignty, and opposition against any foreign-imposed rulers) was sufficient, on their side. It actually won the war for them.
PATRIOTISM v. NATIONALISM
America’s billionaires are terrified of authentic patriotism (because it gets in the way of their impositions of empire upon those foreign lands), but they are entirely comfortable with nationalism, which supports empire but only by the given nationalistic nation’s own aristocracy, against others — nationalism fits the imperialistic aristocracy’s agenda, perfectly. And they therefore don’t mind at all if Americans are nationalistic. In fact, they like that: nationalism is what any empire’s aristocracy prefers(while they loathe and fear patriotism).
So, there is plenty of nationalistic propaganda in America, and little to no patriotism — at least not in any of the nation’s mainstream media, all of which propagandize for new conquests against demonized leaders abroad: “regime-change” abroad (such as in Libya, Syria, and Venezuela), instead of regime-change at home (which is actually needed by the public in any nation that either heads an empire or is a vassal-nation within one).
A core lesson of history, which all politically active aristocrats or billionaires have learned, is that the emotions love and hate, worship and contempt, are the strongest motives in order for a mass of people to perpetrate (and even to serve as martyrs of) organized mass-murder — war. Ever since World War II ended, the U.S. regime has constantly been doing this, and the propaganda for it never stops.
The opposite side is being demonized in advance, in order to maximize motivation to kill them, but actually both sides need to become demons in a war, so as to have likelihood of winning. This is true both for the victimizer-nation and for the victim-nation. The passion-competition can be at least as important as is the weapons-competition. It certainly was in Vietnam.
The chickens in a cock-fight or the gladiators in an arena are defending themselves against a demonic foe, but the actual perpetrator of the entire event is its sponsor (its administrator), and behind that sponsor, there stands the sponsor’s patrons — the ultimate patrons of invasions and of coups and of sanctions (economic blockades, which are the first stage of a war, the stage that originally identifies to the public whom the ‘enemy’ is).
The ultimate patrons of any war are the people who planned the war even before the public expected any war. These planners were the main venture-capitalists in it. Those few people had planned the sanctions, and then the coup, and if the coup fails, then the invasion starts, which makes the war undeniably real and become “the war” as the public knows of it. It’s simply a business-plan in search of investors, and the public don’t yet know about it at such an early stage. But the public’s roles in it are parts in each of the three possible stages: sanctions, then coup, then (if there still is no conquest) invasion. Bigotry assists each stage.
WARS NEED PATRONS & SPONSORS, NOT MERELY FIGHTERS
Writ large, this is how and why wars — civil and also international wars — actually happen. Wars have sponsors (public officials who administer them), and patrons (their financial backers); they don’t have only physical perpetrators, such as soldiers and/or mercenaries. Armies don’t create wars — they merely kill and die in wars. And the sponsors of a war serve the patrons who expect to gain from the economic sanctions, and from the coups, and from the outright invasions — gain from conquests.
Wars can produce enormous profits, for ‘the right people’. You have to be well-connected in order to be, or to know, ‘the right people’, because there never are many of them, and those few are doing business with one-another all the time, and don’t have much time or inclination for the public, other than as being their consumers, or else their employees (including employees of the government that those same few people actually control, by their political donations and by their hiring of people from government, and government hiring people back from them — the “revolving door” of corruption — all of which serves the international corporations and benefits their controlling owners, the billionaires).
Iraq too was an example. When the United States and its allies invaded and destroyed Iraq in 2003 on the basis of lies, it didn’t happen because Iraq had ever invaded — much less destroyed — or even threatened to invade, America (or any of America’s participating allies) — it was all and only done on the basis of lies, and these lies came from, and were orchestrated from, the very top, the government and its news-media, so as to give passion and conviction to the masses who actually carried out these atrocities, the bombings and other routine activities of war. The physical perpetrators of those activities are not to blame for what they did, but the people at the very top — in that case, the ‘public’ officials, G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, and the lackeys of all of them, and the patrons of them all — are. And, the financial backers (the patrons) of those leaders’ careers were the ultimate perpetrators of America’s destruction of Iraq. These political and financial leaders are — though far more slowly — destroying America, too, for almost everyone but themselves; and they constitute, consequently, the severest of all national-security threats to the American public, to the American nation. It is they that have been the actual enemy of America. America’s Founders had won their democratic revolution against Britain’s imperialistic aristocracy, and did all they could to prevent their new country from ever developing its own aristocracy, but today’s America is its Founders’ defeat.
Whereas the front-people are the politicians, the back-room people who finance the careers of the front-people are the billionaires, especially (but not necessarily only) the most politically active ones: the mega-donors (such as here in 2016).
Each billionaire has the financial means to publicize what psychopathic liars the billionaire-financed propagandists for a war actually are, but none ever does that (which would be a great public service to do). Why not? Is it because they all are psychopaths (regardless of the pretty words they might speak) as has been indicated in several and diverse studies? Is there an alternative explanation? The clear fact is: they — and only they — can profit from an invasion, though not only the ‘enemy’s public but even their own domestic population will lose from it (pay taxes, and some pay with their very lives, for it). Billionaires don’t care about their domestic population (except as their consumers and employees). History demonstrates this. Conquests are just good business, which expands their markets, abroad. This is how one achieves and maintains and increases such extreme wealth. All of them want to do that unceasingly, whatever kindly words they may say in order to be liked by the masses. Enough is actually never enough to satisfy them. There are always lands they have not yet conquered, which they still crave to conquer. So: their masses must hate an ‘enemy’.
This is the way the ultimate controllers are. It’s why there is no peace. Has there been peace after the Cold War ended in 1991? No — because it had actually ended only on one side, but not on the other. It secretly continued on the other, because the billionaires still crave to have additional conquests.
Today’s Ukraine is another and more-recent example of how this system has functioned:
In a moment of extraordinary candor, George Friedman, the founder and CEO of the ‘private CIA’ consulting firm Stratfor, once called the overthrow of the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, which occurred in February 2014, “the most blatant coup in history”, and this was because it was the first coup ever to have been captured live on cellphone videos and uploaded to the internet as it happened, and afterward documented by interviewing some of the participants, in detailed accounts which fit perfectly with similar confessions from other participants (such as this, from one who didn’t even know about those other participants, but they all were carrying out the same plan, which they didn’t know about and which came from above — the U.S. regime — they all were only following the orders that they had been given by agents of the U.S.). These realities were able to be reported outside the United States but not inside the United States. The top EU officials didn’t become so much as even aware that it had been a coup instead of an authentic revolution, until it was already finished, on 26 February 2014. By our time, there is no longer any reasonable doubt that it had been led by the U.S. regime, and that Barack Obama’s Administration started planning the operation by no later than 2011, and the implementation-phase started by no later than 1 March 2013 inside the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine — well before the fairy-tale ‘explanation’ of the coup (‘the Maidan Revolution’) started on 21 November 2013. Famously, after that ‘democratic revolution’ (which was instead a fascist coup that was hidden behind popular anti-corruption demonstrations), came the breakaway of Crimea (which had voted over 75% for Yanukovych) and of Donbass (which had voted over 90% for him). And then came the Obama-installed regime’s ethnic cleansing ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ to eliminate as many of the voters in Donbass as possible, because if they stayed in Ukraine, then the newly installed regime in Kiev would soon be elected out-of-office. Hatred was needed in order for that ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ or ‘ATO’ (the ethnic-cleansing operation) to be able to achieve its purpose.
But the Obama-installed regime, now under Poroshenko’s rule, finally might have gotten elected out-of-office on 21 April 2019 and replaced by the new President Volodmyr Zelenskiy, despite the billions of dollars that the U.S. regime had spent on this operation. Zelenskiy won by the largest margin of any Ukrainian President ever, and the reason for this is that his opponent, Poroshenko, had spectacularly failed to fulfill his electoral promises — he couldn’t follow through on everything that Obama had wanted him to do, and because so much of Obama’s agenda conflicted with what the Ukrainian public wanted him to do (especially they wanted the war to end), Poroshenko was leaving office as being extremely unpopular.
Whether or not Zelenskiy decides to be yet another U.S. stooge isn’t yet clear, but maybe he’ll be able to lift the American yoke from his country, a yoke which destroyed Ukraine’s economy. In 2013, Ukraine’s average annual household income was $2,601.40, and then it fell off a cliff and became $1,109.63 by 2015 and has stabilized at around that level since. Also, in 2013, Ukraine’s GDP was $183.31 billion, and by 2015 that had become $91.03 billion and stabilized at that level. More information about the decline in Ukraine’s economic rankings can be seen here. Ukraine was avoiding bankruptcy only because the U.S.-controlled IMF kept lending it money so as to continue the war.
However, despite Zelenskiy’s promise to end the war against Donbass by means of negotiations and of building the trust of Donbass residents, Ollie Richardson posted to youtube on 31 May 2019 (11 days after Zelenskiy’s inauguration) “Ukraine continues to shell the LPR despite Zelensky's promises of peace”, and clearly this military attack against Donbass showed that Zelenskiy was continuing the Obama-started Ukrainian regime (unless Zelenskiy publicly condemned that attack, which he did not). This attack “on May 29th carried out by the UAF [Ukrainian Air Force] on the settlement of Golubovsky, which is a part of front-line Kirovsk,” produced no public response from President Zelenskiy — no condemnation, no replacement of any official, nothing at all. It was thus making less possible each and every day, Donbassers’ support for any negotiations with his regime.
The U.S. regime has been toxic to the Ukrainian people, no matter how one looks at the matter. Whether and how Ukraine can ever recover isn’t yet clear. U.S. corporations (and agents such as the IMF) have by now moved into Ukraine so deeply that maybe Zelenskiy will either fulfill Obama’s plan or else be assassinated for resisting it. On 24 May 2019, the Irish independent investigative journalist Danielle Ryan had headlined at RT “West-backed think tanks threaten new Ukrainian president with disturbing list of ‘RED LINES’”, and apparently the U.S. regime was having its way, yet again. All of this success is achieved by selecting only billionaire-approved candidates as the final contenders in ‘elections’ (actually mere selections), and all of them deceive the public in order to become (s)'elected' by billionaires and then by the public. The U.S. regime is relentless. Zelenskiy is apparently trapped by it. And Trump is just another Obama, who is just another Bush, etc.
The ultimate objective of this particular plan is to make Ukraine a NATO member in order to place U.S. missiles only five-minutes flight-time away from Moscow. But in order to achieve that, America’s IMF must continue lending Ukraine’s Government more and more money and thereby drive it deeper and deeper into debt, so that when Ukraine goes bankrupt, the Ukrainian people will be stripped of everything, and America’s international corporations will get most of what they did have.
THE ESSENTIAL ROLE OF BIGOTRY IN PATRONIZING, SPONSORING, & WAGING WARS
At the lower levels of such operations, lots of hatred is usually needed. For people at the top, it’s merely part of the business-plan. It’s a very effective business-plan, but a very toxic political plan. Actually, it’s toxic to publics everywhere — not just externally, but also internally. It is toxic to everyone but the empire’s billionaires. They become further-enriched by it. This is the most rewarding path for them to follow. Downside risks, for them, are non-existent. It’s just sales-promotion, at everybody else’s expense.
If a government wishes to reduce a bigotry within its public, that too can be done. Blouin and Mukand actually documented this in a small case, reported on 8 May 2019 in the Journal of Political Economy. Headlining “Erasing Ethnicity? Propaganda, Nation Building, and Identity in Rwanda” they “provide some of the first quantitative evidence that the salience of ethnic identity can be manipulated by governments,” and in postgenocide Rwanda, it was manipulated downward. It can be done. But the U.S. regime demands constant aggression, to expand its control.
RELEVANT EXPERIMENTAL FINDINGS IN INTERPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
On 24 January 2017, the team of Mifune, Simonovic, and Yamagishi headlined in Frontiers in Psychology, “Intergroup Biases in Fear-induced Aggression” and reported (and experimentally demonstrated) that:
The evolutionary model of intergroup aggression, or the parochial altruism model, posits that intragroup cooperation and intergroup aggression have co-evolved, and thus it predicts both intragroup cooperation and intergroup aggression to emerge even in a minimal group devoid of a history of intergroup relationships. The finding that only intragroup cooperation but not intergroup aggression emerged in the minimal group experiments strongly suggests that intergroup aggression involves a psychological mechanism that is independent from that of intragroup cooperation. We further discuss the implications of these findings on real-world politics and military strategy.
Though they did not explore any economic motivations on the part of behind-the-scenes or top-level political instigators, their findings exemplify from the psychological sciences some of the interpersonal relationships among lower-level perpetrators that could reasonably explain the manipulability of the masses so as to motivate them to carry out those business-plans of the higher-level operators.
Frank Mols and Jolanda Jetten in 2017 issued their The Wealth Paradox: Economic Prosperity and the Hardening of Attitudes, which noted that theorizing about the cause of bigotries is itself highly prejudiced against the poor and in favor of the rich. However, the entire existing approach within the academic social sciences is similarly prejudiced and unscientific favoring the donors and thereby disfavoring the public, and such a situation tends to block consideration of any theory which targets for blame the donors, the investors, the rich. The entire model of the social sciences needs to change, before the word “science” can reasonably apply there.
THE APPLICABILITY OF THIS TO INTRA-NATIONAL CONFLICTS
This functions in domestic politics just as it does in international matters. Typical, for example, is the following exchange in reader-comments at the strongly pro-Democratic-Party (i.e., liberal) site “Political Wire” in which a 3 June 2019 subject-article was “It’s Biden and Everyone Else”, and the overwhelming preponderance of comments to it were obsessed with hatred of Republicans (this at a time when the real issue, and supposed focus of the article, was which Democrat ought to be nominated by that liberal Party — an intra-Democratic choice, instead of the final Democratic-Republican general-election choice), and they also were obsessed with hatred of Russia and of every nation, and of every person (such as I) who is not hostile toward Russia (which likewise weren’t relevant to the question-at-hand in that article, but the commenters were obsessed with such irrelevancies). These hatreds were the common obsessions there, and the question of whether Biden should become the Party’s nominee was ignored. Here was the exchange, and it’s what actually inspired me to write the present article. (I was “cettel” in it — and I am a patriotic American and haven’t even been to Russia, much less having ever had that country as my “homeland,” such as one of the commenters assumed):
cettel glo's EclecticElectric hyena
So, you voted for Hillary because she rabidly hated Russia and saw everything as win-lose instead of win-win in international relations? And so you chose the weaker of the two Democratic Party candidates. Here are the hypothetical matchups in May 2016:
https://washingtonsblog.com/2016/05/56779.html
and here they were at the end of the contest:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html
So blame your stupidity (and that of millions of other Democrats) for having Trump as our President now.
glo's EclecticElectric hyena cettel
No I voted for Hillary because she’s sane. Being tough with that authoritarian, oligarchic, criminal cesspool that is your fleabag, quasi-third world shithole homeland is a bonus, Sergei. Geezus you morons are so easy to spot.
chelsea530 glo's EclecticElectric hyena
As someone said recently in reference to findings in the Mueller Report, Russia isn’t a country, it’s a criminal enterprise, and Trump is one of its lackeys.
glo's EclecticElectric hyena chelsea530
Cettel’s post is basically, “Come America. You take that democracy and rule of law thing too seriously. There is money to be made! Join us Comrades as we make the monies! Then we’ll dance, drink the vodka, and kill anyone who gets in our way. Da!”
The difference between their bigotries and Republicans’ bigotries is the difference between the two Parties’ billionaires. But the difference between a nation that’s an aristocracy (or called an “oligarchy” if it’s a vassal-state within an empire), versus a nation that’s a democracy, is no such thing as an intra-billionaires’ matter. It’s instead the difference between rule by the billionaires, versus rule by the public. And, apparently, a majority of Americans don’t even know this. They can’t choose democracy, because they have false ideas about what that is. If they don’t know this, then, of course, they cannot possibly overthrow the dictators in their own country and restore even the limited democracy that our Founders fought and worked so hard to establish here (improved, of course, by the subsequent Amendments). Such people are their billionaires’ subjects, not any democracy’s citizens. And this is today’s America’s basic political problem.
The anti-Russian bigotry that’s displayed by the readers at that overwhelmingly Democratic Party site is also a reflection of another crucially important function that the fueling of that particular (anti-Russian) bigotry serves for the Democratic Party’s billionaires — for the few enormously wealthy billionaires who had basically funded Hillary Clinton’s and the Democratic billionaires’ losses to Donald Trump’s and the Republican billionaires’ wins. Hillary Clinton ran an astoundingly incompetent campaign, and that is unquestionably the reason why she lost, but the Democratic billionaires’ DNC has blown Russia’s involvement (to the extent that it was actually involved at all in the outcome) spectacularly out of proportion, in order to cause their millions of Democratic fools to hate Russians instead of to hate these billionaires themselves. Redirection of Democrats’ anger, away from the billionaire sponsors and away from those sponsors’ chosen stooge Hillary Clinton, greatly reduces the likelihood of a second American revolution, which, this time around, would be (if it were to happen) against America’s domestic aristocracy, not against foreign imperialists (King George III and his aristocracy). Whereas Democratic Party billionaires crave, above all, to conquer Russia, Republican Party billionaires crave, above all, to conquer Iran. Democratic voters consequently tend especially to demonize Russians, but Republican voters tend especially to demonize Iranians. That way, virtually no one will demonize America’s billionaires. Practically speaking, those 585 persons will be ignored, and so their control over the country will continue unimpeded, and those 585 persons will continue to determine which countries the U.S. regime will next target with its sanctions, and its coups, and its military invasions. The basic business plans will continue, as before.
When I encountered those bigoted (anti-Russian) responses at that liberal website — responses there that seem to contradict some social-psychological constructs, such as the three main measures or “scales” for “conservatism” (SDO, RWA, and Wilson and Patterson) and the popular idea that “conservative” is the opposite of “liberal” (instead of being actually more of a mid-point between “progressive” and “conservative,” as is actually the case) — I became convinced that dealing with the problem of bigotry as if only psychologists are needed in order to understand what causes it, is simply ridiculous, and that a social-sciences perspective is and always has been essential. It starts from the individual’s society, not from the lone individual. I decided then that a social-sciences perspective on the origins of bigotry is essential; and so began this article.
Then, on 7 June 2019, the need for this seemed even clearer to me after RT headlined on that date “Glenn Greenwald rips liberals who ‘beg for censorship’” and the difference between liberalism versus progressivism was presented as liberals’ acceptance of censorship so long as it’s their type of censorship, versus a progressive’s rejection of any censorship. A scientist — an adherent to the meta-methodology (or “epistemology”) that constitutes the meaning of “science” — won’t accept any censorship. Greenwald there was representing the scientific position, and that’s the progressive position, because progressivism is simply the political theory that scientific research indicates to be true — whatever that may turn out to be. Science doesn’t censor anything, not even lies and bigotries, but instead disproves them. Science doesn’t ignore lies (such as “Global warming isn’t threatening the livability of our planet” or other nostrums that are pumped by the aristocracy and especially by the most conservative aristocrats) but instead faces lies head-on, by proving them to be false, and by documenting what is true. Science is not responsible for there being large majorities of people who aren’t scientific. Bigotries aren’t scientific; they are based upon lies, which billionaires promote in order to control the public. All that a scientist can do is to expose those lies. Hiding from the public those lies is not the way of science. Science is confrontational and cannot be anything but confrontational. Censorship is antithetical to the very essence of science. And censorship is no way to reduce bigotries, but instead only increases the types of divisiveness that fit the ancient “Divide-and-conquer” strategy, which aristocracies in all ages and nations have pursued in order to conquer the public everywhere.
In order to defeat bigotries, the cause of bigotries, and the reasons for their selected group-targets, need to be truthfully known. Censorship harms that objective. Greenwald was correct — his was the position of science. Science rejects censorship (even if many ‘scientists’ do not). Any purported attempt to overcome bigotries by hiding them is idiotic. It is also counter-productive. Likewise, removing the thermometers, or the ability to see them, would be counter-productive toward solving the problem of global warming.
However, existing social sciences, at least thus far, refuse to consider what causes bigotries. For example, until the present journal responded with an acceptance of this article, there had been only a single instance where the submission was not rejected by the submitted-to journal’s own editors – not even sent out by them for external review – and the external reviewer in that single case rejected it because:
My assessment is that fundamentally, this paper is not the kind of social science research that is appropriate for a general interest political science journal. It does not engage with or speak to an existing body of work. Nor does it identify questions, puzzles, or vacuums of knowledge. There is no existing research cited at any point in the manuscript. There is no statement of the methodology employed, no clear theoretical claim or statement, and no systematic empirical work. The consequence is that this work is more of an opinion piece than scholarly research. You might find a more appropriate outlet for this piece in a publication designed for such writing.
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches by historian Eric Zuesse
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. 
