WAR IS NOT A GAME

The clamour among the neo-conservatives and their fellow Atlanticists for a conflagration with Russia is growing like never before. Do they not realise the consequences of such stupidity?

 

By Sidney Hey

Although war is embedded in human civilisation, for many centuries it remained a matter of conflicts between great lords, kingdoms and later nation states. But after the turbulent twentieth century and the current millennium of global paradigm shifts, war has ceased to be an exclusively state activity and has been capitalised by political groups linked to private business and corporate interests.

At the beginning of this century we witnessed how the private sector and the US federal government joined forces to realise an extensive and ambitious geopolitical-economic project outlined by neo-conservatives and Zionists a decade earlier in the so-called Project for the New American Century (PNAC), culminating in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which, beyond the humanitarian calamity they both represented, were fabulous business deals for the Western arms industry.

Today war is big business. In fact, it always has been, and the era that provides us with the most references to this is undoubtedly the last century. Unlike then, today the variety of sources and the speed of communications have made it impossible to hide it from the public eye and make them aware of how their property, security and lives are being gambled with.

The main parties involved in creating the conditions for these businesses to flourish have undoubtedly been the US and its allies.

Once again, the Anglo-Saxon West is at the forefront of promoting international insecurity. Interventions and invasions under demonstrably false pretexts have resulted in millions of lives ruined and, worst of all, minimised in their human value because they are not Western. The democracy, freedoms and values with which all the White House administrations have continually shielded themselves are not at all consistent with aggression, the fomenting of subversion against the authorities of other nations and much less with war

If history could be erased with a magic eraser, no doubt US politicians and in particular the neo-conservatives would do it, but that is not possible. Iraq is just one of the most infamous chapters in the contemporary history of what amounted to the bloody violation of all international laws in order (among other things) to make fabulous arms deals. In spite of this, the media (big political supports) continue to elaborate narratives with decontextualised facts that have been adapted to fit in with Washington's already twisted foreign policy.

But the past is unforgiving. The big deals that the Cold War with the USSR represented for the military arms industry and political sectors of the system revealed the great corruption of the supposedly “great democracy” and leader of the “free world”, which we see again today with obscene hypocrisy in both Ukraine and Palestine.

Death is a business and Anglo-American politicians have made it the norm of this. It does not take the declassification of secret documents or the testimony of former officials to back this up. If everything we saw in the massacres in Baghdad, the systematic torture in “Abu-Graib”, “Camp Bucca” and many others during the occupation, the intervention in Libya (with Al Qaeda jihadists and the incipient ISIS) and the brutalities in Guantánamo, what do you think can be hidden in those kilometres of digitised US government archives?

The citizen has ceased to be passive and is no longer fooled by these “analysts” or the “analyses” of the publishing houses in the service of the Think Tanks. Much less do they swallow the information of media that are subordinated to large conglomerates such as VIACOM or Disney. Today, their critical and acute sense is the protagonist and is in turn the decisive factor in stopping the warmongering madness that has driven Washington from 2001 to the present.

With the fall of the USSR in 1991, its military apparatus known as the "Warsaw Pact" was dismantled and NATO should have followed suit, but what happened?  It was simply a matter of maintaining the business that this organisation represented for the geopolitical interests of Washington, its most obsequious European allies and, of course, for the millions of government budgets earmarked not only for arms contracts, but also for maintaining thousands of administrative jobs that were not needed at the time.

Just look at what is brewing in the Asia-Pacific. Even if Brussels denies that NATO has strategic interests in the region, we all know that there are actors (such as Singapore and Australia) that are to some extent the gateway in the wet dreams of neo-conservative psychopaths to face a longed-for conflagration against China and North Korea. The Australian government, or rather politicians subservient to US ideology, are part of this game, which is why Canberra has committed several budgets over the next decade to fund arms contracts for the navy. And who do they think the contractors are?

It is clear that every step our governments take is backwards and for the worse, and will end up leading us into an abyss.

Why do you think NATO continues to exist? It is clearly not for global security as Brussels and Washington have been trying to argue. It is the tool with which politicians with the fervent support of the military in the Pentagon can continue to create the conditions for them to be indispensable. Do you have problems of insecurity, terrorism or insurgency? That's where we are! But what if there are no such problems? If Washington sees an interest in the existence of such conditions in a given country, don't worry, they will soon appear.

The war in Ukraine grew out of this sinister logic, but these same interests -accustomed to getting their own way- have stumbled over an impossible stone and that stone is Russia and a growing awareness in public opinion, especially in Europeans who are informed and aware of what the war has brought to their own lives and what it will bring to their existence if the US continues to insist on provoking a nuclear holocaust.