talkpolitics | Not war; just business

War is an extension of politics, but with different means, Gen, Carl von Clausewitz once said. Today, however, the situation is a bit different. Today, war is an extension of economics, but with different means.

War has become cynical. It has no political legitimacy any more. It lacks a historical meaning. Now we don't conquer territory, we don't conquer peoples, we don't make Crusades. All we do is pursue profit. Everything boils down to this arrogant economic objective of the "free market", profit. Every bomb, every explosion must generate profit. War is a huge investment that is supposed to bring revenue, economic results, including the blood and death of some people that stand in the way of profit.

So who's to blame for this? Sure, those picking up poppy seeds in Afghanistan and producing dangerous substances must be to blame, right? Let's shell them with our civilized, expensive, smart and preemptive bombs then. That'll solve things, I guess.

We're also being told some obscure Bedouins are to blame, guys with towels on their heads living in the 19th century, but sitting on a sea of oil. They're dangerous because they use slings to throw stones at us - they must be angry at us for some reason. Well, the sling is produced in the West. Of course, we respond in kind: we bomb the shit out of them, using our latest technologies. We provide them with new slings so we could have an excuse to keep attacking them with our latest military investments.

We're perfectly aware, of course, that those guys are evil fundamentalists. They're not democratic. So they should be democratized with bombs. We should keep democratizing the shit out of them until no stone remains standing and the thick wallets of our financial and military elite living in their luxurious ghettos around the world swell even more. That's the only thing that matters. Bringing democracy with bombs is the modern motivation for profit. A struggle for democracy and peace that leaves nothing living behind.

There was Iraq, and then there was Afghanistan, and Libya. Now we've come to Syria, a relatively prosperous, relatively secular, relatively functioning state that had the bad luck of being ruled by an authoritarian leader (but then, most of they are). That was enough reason for the Great Powers to blow it to smithereens, along with the entire surrounding region.

Of course, the Western world, this luxurious ghetto of the world, can't be to blame. Have we become too juvenile? We've forgotten that war has its logic: the strongest one controls the resources and generates the wars. Weapons are produced to kill. Armies exist to wage war. Who creates the biggest and strongest armies? Who are the top 5 global bullies? You guessed right.

We've forgotten the lessons of colonialism, and all the chaos it created in those parts of the world that we arrogantly call the Third World. We've forgotten that those Mujahideen are actually our former friends, now turned foes. We arm them and train them while that suits us, and once we've lost control of them, we drop bombs on them. That's good investment.

Under the applause of the "good folks" and the servile media, our insane rulers press some buttons on their luxurious desks, safely located thousands of miles away from the place of impact. It almost looks like a videogame, no matter if the desk is at a NATO headquarters or in the Kremlin. The bomb doesn't discriminate. It kills both man, child and woman alike. But profit has no moral inhibitions.

That's no secret for those on the tops; it's just business. For the "locals", where real life is being lived, this business translates into blood, death, tragedy, misery, and desperation.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

halialkers

Legitimate meaning is a product of hindsight and the wars fading into history and their consequences likewise. Crusades were wars for territory, profit, and conquest as much as holy wars, much like Jihads and all other equivalents.

'Relatively functioning' is a vast overstatement of Syrian reality given Hafez Al-Assad provided a peace of the graveyard that was going to blow up with or without the Arab Spring and that the father being cruelly smart and ruthless has never guaranteed his children inherit his skills or ruthlessness.

One state waging futile wars of imperial misadventure is an empire and the consequences, as Iraq and Libya show, are horrifying enough. Two doing it, with the other having entirely rational calculuses to deploy force and losing the old mutual fear that kept the Cold War from dying in mushroom clouds of canned sunshine is a much more dangerous scenario.

The thing that keeps me up at night and gives me nightmares is that this smacks very strongly of the chain of crises and small wars from 1905 onward that culminated in 1914, because all the constant background of potential apocalypses and smaller wars meant nobody took a damn big one seriously enough. Unlike 1914 a true big war will be the shortest and the bloodiest war in all of history and the living will envy the dead.

The USA's wars are bad enough, a state that adopts the same 'shoot first, ask questions of the dead' approach and has literally no reason whatsoever to fear anyone who might restrain it is how civilization doesn't last long enough for the cumulative apocalypses to do us all in.

asthfghl

And of course, us small nations will get caught in the middle of it all, while you smartheads from across the Big Water are debating who's evil-er than the other around the Internet forums.

Such has it ever been, so ever shall it be. Unfortunately.

Geopolitics and the means of maintaining empires are ugly, ugly things.

(reply from suspended user)

mahnmut

Sheesh dude, care to apply to the Socialist International?

Because, as we've learned now, anyone who criticizes the West is a Russian pawn, er, I mean socialist.

If we're not stupid and naive, then how come we always end up taking the bait from the button-pushing? Maybe we're not as exceptionally smart and gifted as we like to believe we are.

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/aug/01/hama-syria-massacre-1982-archive

^Right. Well, I'm sure once Hafez Al-Assad slaughtered everyone in the country raising a gun against him things at least appeared peaceful enough. Ukraine was peaceful too when enough Kulaks starved or were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia for Stalin to have quasi-peaceful conditions there.

Syria literally had a putsch a year before the rise of the Assads, and the father's savagery in suppressing a revolt tampered down any revolt against the son for eleven years until people started wondering if he'd be so efficient a murderer as his father was.

Empires don't bother understanding the subject peoples they rule, because we always adopt 'Oderint dum metuant' as the rule until it turns out that they can hate us just as well without fearing us.

BTW, Lebanon looked like a marvelous place between the 1950s and 1970s, that doesn't mean it wasn't a time bomb falling apart for those decades with the PLO simply giving it the final push a few years faster than otherwise. Sure, he might not have seen the graveyards Hafez Al-Assad left behind him, but those graveyards were there and so was the bitterness and hatred they left behind, all of which culminated in the current civil war.

Lebanon in particular was mistaken for a wonderful peaceful place with a marvelous tradition of tolerance built on a rotten foundation of a 1930s census deliberately not taken again out of well-honed fear of what new results would reveal, and where the Muslims, Shia and Sunni alike weren't happy being third-class citizens relative to the Maronites. When the explosion came only those people who forgot the 1880s and 1950s (or Americans to whom the whole region might as well have been the far side of Uranus) were shocked that the explosion was as total and destructive as it was.

That example if anything fits perfectly with what happened under Bashir Al-Assad given his father, at least, was a murderer terrifying enough that nobody tried the 1982 stunt again for his lifetime and 11 years into his son's rule.