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.
