Is There Anything Important Enough To Go To War Over?

Good Day GoGreenTips!

Thank you for the question: Is there anything important enough to go to war over?

That is an interesting question to ponder. Usually when we pose it, we do so without probing into the historical origins of the situation we are wondering if we should go to war over, if you follow me. Also, in the United States in particular, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out for decades, discussions about (to go to war or not to go to war) tend to lack ethical content, as convened among the think tank and media intelligentsia, and unfortunately by extension, then, the rest of the public, I'm sorry to say.

What you get is the liberal/progressive/center-left spectrum, the 'doves' who generally don't want to go to war because they imagine the cost in 'blood and treasure' to be too high (for our side incidentally, the U.S., little or no mention is ever made about the potential loss of 'blood and treasure'). They have concerns about the practical feasibility of this or that 'adventure.'

Their concerns are strategic and practical. They are not sure thus and such enterprise is in 'the long-term interests of the United States.' They tend to express more confidence in the efficacy of 'multilateral' measures such as operating through the United Nations, building coalitions, implementing diplomatic and economic sanctions.

If 'push comes to shove,' as it were, this liberal internationalist coalition still insists that whatever international emergency there's supposed to be, it can be dealt with in paramilitary, more covert means as opposed to all-out military invasion. I think this has been American political history, in this regard, since the Kennedy administration on. But there's no moral content to this argument, no suggestion that it might be morally wrong to militarily invade an independent, sovereign nation that has not threatened us. Oh well...

In any event, since 1980 we slid into a period they use to call low-intensity conflict. Wars are regionalized, localized, take place in far away Third World or 'developing' countries, as they are called these days -- which the United States and its allies engage with for different reasons and in different ways.

It seems to me that this is a generally satisfactory state of affairs, from the perspective of the ruling classes (American, European, perhaps increasingly global). After all, one can easily imagine that they are not interested in getting involved in anymore planetary-scale conflagrations such as World War One, Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, which portend actual global annihilation. In fact, in my series on the Kennedy assassinations I theorized the 'real' reason the President was murdered was much more straightforward than is usually proposed by 'conspiracy theorists.' Wink, wink.

I imagine that the ruling class [and by the way, ruling class is a specific sociological term; it means something very precise; it is not the conjured up specter of looney left-wing 'conspiracy nuts'] engineered the assassination of John F. Kennedy because of his moves which had brought about the Cuban Missile Crisis. America came within a hairsbreath of going to nuclear war against the Soviet Union!

However deftly Kennedy may have handled the situation, bringing it to a peaceful resolution, still, critical historians -- as far as I'm aware -- are generally agreed that it had been Kennedy's bellicosity and repeated provocation toward the Castro regime in Cuba which had brought about the emergency in the first place (Chafe, pp.198-205). The historian William H. Chafe wrote: "First, Kennedy was disingenous in his claim that placement of the missiles in Cuba was unprovoked. In fact, ever since the Bay of Pigs, the United States had continued to pose a significant threat to Castro's regime. Previously classified documents have revealed that the United States had moved ammunition and aircraft into position to attack Cuba before missile launching sites were discovered. 'It is perfectly clear now,' Robert McNamara said in 1987, 'that Cuban and Soviet leaders at that time believed the U.S. was intending to invade Cuba,' and that therefore, deployment of missiles could be construed as an effort to protect Castro against attack rather than as an attempt to alter the balance of power in the world" (ibid, p.204). And so on and so forth.

I think this was precisely the judgment the ruling class had come to almost immediately in 1963; and this is why I think they moved against him. Now its not that they would have had any dovish concern for the welfare of Fidel Castro, you understand. No, its just that the ruling class want to rule the Earth, not destroy it. You cannot rule a burnt out cinder.

You see, its one thing to construct a critical part of the economy, since the end of World War Two, around arms production and worldwide sales and Pentagon subsidy of the high-tech sector. Its one thing to keep the American population mildly on edge, drilling school children to duck under their wooden desks in the event of a nuclear bomb being dropped on them. Its one thing to tell the population on T.V., radio, and in newspapers and magazines to BUY YOUR BOMB SHELTER TODAY!

Its one thing to engage in these various activities of hysteria-marketing. It is quite another thing to actually bring about a situation in which people would ACTUALLY have to use those bomb shelters. So, I believe the ruling class engineered John F. Kennedy's murder because he had almost killed them.... as well as every man, woman, child, plant, animal, fish, etc., on this planet. I think they therefore judged Kennedy to be 'too dangerous.'

I believe the ruling class engineered the assassination of Kennedy's brother, Robert, because they judged him to be 'cut from the same cloth,' as it were, 'too dangerous,' which is to say imprudent.

So, as I said, we're in a period of 'low-intensity conflict.' The Cuban situation of the 1960s has an interesting parallel symmetry with the U.S.-Israel diplomatic/international public relations struggle against Iran. The issue is that the United States and Israel do not want Iran to acquire or gain the ability to build nuclear weapons.

The Iranian authorities say that they are only developing nuclear power for private and commercial purposes, which is supposedly their right. As an ordinary citizen I have no way of knowing whether or not Iran is developing nuclear weapons, in violation of a non-proliferation treaty Iran's leaders signed a while back. But we can all observe the exchange of heated rhetoric: skeptical/insinuatingly accusatory on one side (U.S.-Israel) and defiantly defensive on the other hand (Iranian authorities).

I gather that the concern is: once a society learns how to control nuclear power -- for whatever purpose -- it is a very small step to being able to weaponize nuclear power. I gather that the U.S.-Israeli authorities do not have the access to information about the Iranian nuclear program that they would like. It seems like it would be extremely difficult to determine when Iranian scientists and engineers make the breakthrough, when the switch is flipped, as it were, and they see how to turn nuclear power into a weapon, in addition to whatever other uses they have in mind for it.

The Israeli military has, from time to time, attacked Iranian facilities.

Question: Would the prevention of Iran acquiring or developing a nuclear weapon be 'important' enough to go to war over?

Clearly there is a broad swath of elite opinion, in the United States, that thinks so. You'll notice that every time our authorities speak of Iran in this regard, there is a phrase that inevitably comes out of their mouths. They speak of 'leaving all options on the table.'

What does that mean? Well, again, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out (and as far as I know Professor Chomsky has been the only one to make this subtle but crucial point) the concept of 'leaving all options on the table' has embedded within it the threat of military action -- along with other punitive threats, such as sanctions, are embedded in there.

So, when President Obama, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and the rest of them, speak of 'leaving all options on the table,' they are threatening to militarily invade Iran if they don't abandon their supposed nuclear ambitions, over and above commercial use for nuclear power. To threaten military force in the conduct of international affairs, as Chomsky has pointed out, is ILLEGAL according to the U.N. charter. It's in Chapter One, the fourth clause in Article Two.

http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml

But despite this our authorities obviously think that going to war against Iran is important enough to prevent what many informed observers believe is the inevitability of Iran gaining nuclear weapons capacity. What makes this matter important enough to go to war over, we are told by our authorities, is Iran's supposed eternal enmity toward the very idea of the Israeli state and the Shiite government's supposed connection to Islamic extremist terrorism.

Well, again, as an ordinary civilian I have no idea about these things. Is Iran trying to acquire or develop nuclear weapons? Does the Shiite government have any connections to Islamic extremism and/or terrorism? How should I know?

But again, we can note an interesting symmetry, for lack of better word.

The run-up to the 2003 American and British invasion of Iraq

Weapons of Mass Destruction

You will recall that between the American and British authorities, we heard something about Iraq's armaments, something like this: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was either in possession of/in active pursuit of/or on the cusp of acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

You may remember that then Secretary of State, General Colin Powell -- a vrtual black 'George Washington' -- gave a presentation at the United Nations, with then CIA director George 'slam dunk' Tenent siting right behind him, about the threat to the freedom of all humanity a theoretically weaponized Iraq posed.

The highpoint of the presentation were satellite photographs of what were supposed to be RV mobile chemical/biological weapons labs. Remember that? The Bush administration never said anything explicitly about nuclear weapons, but I distinctly remember both the President and then National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice saying something about not wanting the ultimate proof to come in the 'form of a mushroom cloud.'

As the determination of the U.S. authorities to go to war became incontrovertible, the British authorities got on board, and even advanced the claim that Iraq could launch a chemical/biological attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the order was given.

http://mediamatters.org/press/releases/200603170010

The authorities said things about 'aluminum tubes' and made claims about Iraqi agents buying enriched weapons-grade Uranium from Nigeria. All of these claims were openly and embarassingly (from the point of view of the White House) refuted by former U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson. Many commentators believe, that for this, elements in the White House, let's say, took revenge upon Wilson by 'outing' his wife, former CIA officer, Valerie Plame.

But suppose, in an alternate universe, all of the claims made against Iraq in 2003 had been one hundred percent true, including Husseins supposed ties to Al Quaeda and other Islamo-fascist terrorist groups. In this instance, then, would Iraq's disarmament have been 'important' enough to go to war over?

Well.... its hard to give a straightforward answer to that question without first remembering that the U.S. had supported Hussein's regime throughout the1980s with regular infusions of military aid (Parenti p.99, Chomsky, p.127). The United States, at this time, had backed Iraq against Iran (Chomsky, p.127). And, as it turns out, if those claims about Iraq's weaponization in 2003 had been true, it would have been, in no small part, due to the good offices of the United States. Nuclear weapons specialist, Gary Milhollin, testified to Congress in 1992: "[I]f you look at the nuclear weapon program, you can see that if Saddam Hussein had not invaded Kuwait [in August 1990], Iraq would be very close to making a bomb today with American machine tools, American instruments for controlling the quality of nuclear weapon material, American computers for nuclear design, and Iraqi scientists trained in America in the techniques of nuclear detonation [in 1989 well after the end of the Iraq-Iran war]. Also the UN found American equipment at chemical and ballistic missile site. The UN early this year sent the U.S. State Department a confidential list of American equipment that had turned up in chemical and ballistic missile programs" (Chomsky, pp.127-128).

As I told you, armaments sales as an important part of the economy has been a fact of life since the end of World War Two in 1945.

Let's ask the question again: If every word about the supposed weaponization of Iraq in 2003, along with Saddam Hussein's alleged connections to Islamic extremist terrorist groups, had been true, would this have been IMPORTANT enough to go to war over?

Well, we can't actually give a direct answer to that question. What response we can give is, of course, only partial. That partial response is: U.S. authorities CREATED that IMPORTANCE in the first place a decade and a half prior.

You see the circularity? The Reagan and then-Bush 41 adminstrations created a situation that MIGHT have, if true, required Bush 43 (the son of Bush 41) to address... heroically, of course, just like a proper Commander-in-Chief. I'll come back to this.

Now, either there was confusion or defiance on the part of Saddam Hussein about his patron's wishes (Chomsky, p.128) or he was expressly told that the United States would remain neutral in his dispute with Kuwait (Parenti, p.99) who had been slant-drilling Iraq's oil reserves (Parenti, p.102).

Well, the George H.W. Bush administration did not remain neutral, as you know, and they gave us 'Desert Storm' and all that went with it. Iraq was then subjected to 'genocidal' sanctions (Chomsky, p.129) by the U.S. and its allies. In 1993 CNN reported that about 300,000 Iraqi children were suffering from malnutrition. The sanctions denied Iraq the technological resources to rebuild its food production, medical services, and sanitation. The death rate was 125,000 ABOVE the usual mostly affecting "the poor, their infants, children, chronically ill, elderly," according to the Los Angeles Times in Feburary of 1994 (Parenti, p.103).

Then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Madeline Albright, had certainly thought it 'important' to wage the economic war against Iraq after the first military one. She said that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children due to the sanctions had been worth it (Chomsky, p.128).

Since the 1990s humanitarian intervention has been a fashionable pretext for U.S. imperial practice. The idea is to stand up for human rights. One of the uses U.S. power must be put to, therefore, is to stop or prevent ethnic cleansing.

This was the order of the day with the former Yugoslavia. When Nato started bombing Belgrade in 1999 the official reason was to stop the atrocities supposedly being committed by Slobodan Milosevic. But another, less idealistic reason came out in a book written by a former employee of the U.S. State Department, called John Norris. "As nations throughout the region sought to reform their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction. It is small wonder NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision course. It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform -- not the plight of the Kosovar Albanians -- that best explains NATO's war." The resistance to the 'broader trends of political and economic reform' Norris refers to was Yugoslavia's reluctance to join the 'Washington Consensus' (just so you know where it came from) (Klein, p.328).

But this is not enough. This mere hypcocrisy which is typical of imperialism is not enough. This story, as it stands, does not get into the circularity of ruling class behavior I've been discussing.

The political economist, Dr. Michael Parenti, whom I have already cited, wrote another book (among many) called The War on Yugoslavia. He talks about how the circularity of the policy put in place by the George H.W. Bush (41) administration in 1990, which made socialist, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia ungovernable, led directly to its violent fragmentation, thereby creating an emergency, or importance, if you like which required Bill Clinton's administration to address.

President Bush got the Congress to pass the Foreign Operations Appropriations Law. This law cut off all U.S. aid to Yugoslavia. If any of the six republics comprising Yugoslavia, wanted aid to resume they would have to split off from Yugoslavia and declare its independence.

You know what this reminds me of? This situation reminds me of an old-time mystery story I heard on a radio classics program. I forget the name of the show or the episode right now, but the plot went like this: There was a rich, mean, bitter old man who had several children. His will designated that all of his money would go to... THE LAST SURVIVING HEIR!!

Get the idea? What do you think happened? That's right, an orgy of murder as each heir tried to position himself or herself as the survivor and inheritor of all the money. In effect, the provisions of the old man's will snapped whatever bonds of fidelity there had been among the siblings.

You have the same deal with Yugoslavia.

I haven't gotten my hands on Michael Parenti's book yet, but here's a video clip of him talking about it.

And here's a link to an article talking about the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act.

http://www.iacenter.org/bosnia/origins.htm

So, was the plight of the Kosovar Albanians 'important' enough for the Clinton administration and NATO to go to war over? Well, if (and that's a big IF) the humanitarian situation was as our mainstream media depicted it, instead of being a civil war, which seems more likely.

But, here, again, even if the answer was in the affirmative, we can't get around the fact that the IMPORTANCE had been created by prior U.S. authorities. If you look at history after 1945, but especially after 1980, we find case after case after case of this kind of thing! U.S. authorities mess up a part of the world, for whatever geostrategic justification they may have, thereby creating chaos and instability which successive generations of U.S. authorities are required to come along and heroically sort out later.

What about the 'War on Terror'? (I know we don't call it that anymore)

Is confronting and defeating 'Islamic extremist terrorism' IMPORTANT enough to go to war over (and in fifty to sixty countries by the way)?

Well, aside from the fact that you can't wage war on a tactic, I suppose if (and that's a big IF) there really was legions and legions and legions of vile, cruel, merciless, and relentless Islamic extremist 'Terminator' (I'll be back) cold-blooded warriors intent on imposing Sharia law over the entire planet, the way the media used to depict it, then I suppose I would tentatively support such an armed struggle for freedom.

But the history shows us, what? It shows us that this IMPORTANCE had been created by prior U.S. authorities. Breaking with Nixon's policy of more or less going along and getting along with the Soviet Union, Reagan comes into office intent on rolling back and if possible, destroying the U.S.S.R.

'Al Quaeda,' which means 'The base,' turns out to be the name, given by the Central Intelligence Agency to a kind of hodgepodge of Islamic warrior jihadists, from different countries in the Middle East, who had been intent not on imposing 'Sharia Law' on the entire the planet, but on creating Islamic republics in their own countries of origin. The leaders of those countries basically emptied their jails. These were hardcore, committed guys, and some of those who went to Afghanistan had bee those, in Egypt, who had not been executed for the assassination of Egypt's President Anwar Sadat, but had been implicated in it. They went because of a felt obligation to free a Muslim land from invasion and occupation from an infidel power, the Soviet Union. My understanding is that the U.S. authorities (perhaps in cooperation with Pakistani ISI, whom the CIA set up) did moves which 'lured' the Soviets into the country militarily. And so on and so forth.

The U.S. authorities led by Reagan's administration were intent on rolling back and/or defeating the Soviet Union, and they decided that AFGHANISTAN was the place to do it. We're talking about almost thirty years ago, back in the big hair era of the 1980s!

Anyhow, Reagan's CIA director William Casey sent a CIA officer to Afghanistan with one billion dollars and several 'Stinger' missiles to train the Afghan and Arab Muslim fighters (as well as provide logistical support, etc). So, with U.S. help the Muslims were able to repel the Soviet Union, and so on and so forth. You may remember that a number of American 'neoconservative' true believers have credited that episode as the turning point, the nail in the coffin, if you will, of the Soviet Union (they also claimed that Reagan's exorbitant military budgets had, in part, also been a clever tactic to make the Soviet deplete their inferior economic resources.. blah, blah, blah).

But my point is, once again: Even if you want to say that it is 'important' that the United States and its allies fight a 'War on Terror,' you have to deal with the fact that prior U.S. authorities CREATED that 'importance' in the first place. There is some indication that U.S. authorities last worked with Al Quaeda as late as the mid-1990s in the Balkans.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7718

There is a brilliant documentary film which discusses all of these matters in detail. You can watch it on YouTube. The documentary is called "The Power of Nightmares," produced by Adam Curtis for the BBC.

This circularity led me, elsewhere, to theorize that the ruling class have what I have called a Munchausen by Proxy approach to foreign affairs. I mean this term, Munchausen by Proxy, exactly the way it is used clincally. I'm talking about the condition in which usually a mother or female caregiver feels a psychological compulsion to injure her child in some way (i.e., put Chlorox in his oatmeal or something) so that the child will get sick or fall into some kind of health emergency which she can heroically attend to.

I speculated that the ruling class's effective syndrome has its origins in their origins in the social and economic elite of our society. Generations are extremely important to these people, in terms of how they see themselves, how they come to understand their destiny, if you like, and how they come to understand what is expected of them. They, by and large, come from rich powerful families with the portraits of the family ancestors hanging on the walls.

The next generations of the future power elite are, no doubt, told stories about how thus and such ancestor founded the family fortune and power. No doubt a great deal of mythology is mixed in with the facts!

I believe that the young men (men mostly even today, but some women) are duly awed and start wondering if they could have done such marvels in the same position. This feeling is the manifestation of what I have previously called ancestor veneration, on their part. I think they then begin to wonder if they could have done such magnificent things yesteryear.

I believe that these feelings of awe and wonder become metatasized, if you will, into the desire, the need, the overwhelming compulsive drive to try to repeat those feats in modern times. I believe this dynamic informs much of the character of American imperial practice since perhaps the 1950s. Of course the United States has always been an imperial state (since at least 1898 but you could argue for a much, much earlier date) but the 1950s marks a transition (does it not?), a 'passing of the torch,' if you like, from what journalist Tom Brokaw called 'The Greatest Generation' (he wrote a book by this title, speaking of the WWII generation) to the 'Baby Boomers.'

It is my belief that the psychological dynamic of ancestor veneration serves as the backbone of the right-wing ideologies known as neoconservatism (hardcore, geo-political, geo-strategic practice based on the need for national and global order and security, committed to hitting against any perceived 'threats to freedom') and neoliberalism (seemingly hardcore, free-market 'no state interference' economics, an important anchor of which is a doctrine called the 'Efficient Market Hypothesis' -- though, this is NOT to be confused with actual economic LIBERTARIANISM).

Both of these 'neo' philosophies, which have moved both the Democratic and Republican parties to the Right over the past thirty years, got their start at the University of Chicago, in the 1950s and 1970s. Neoconservatism started with the ideas of a political philosopher, there, called Leo Strauss (the documentary movie "The Power of Nightmares," I've already mentioned, discusses this in detail) in the 1950s, 'Truman's America.' Neoliberalism got its start at the same institution in the 1970s. Milton Friedman and an Austrian called Friederick Hayek were crucial figures in this sphere.

Neoconservatism and neoliberalism , because of the way power is concentrated in our society, are upper class/ruling class (these are not necessarily the same but there is substantial overlap) ideologies. The society of the United States works in such a way that upper class/ruling class interests become harmonized with what are considered best practices in both the corporate and governmental spheres.

For instance, there used to be a saying about neoconservatives: A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reaity.

If you are liberal, no matter what your class origin, and you have been 'mugged' by reality, in that you have become overwhelmed by the chaos and anarchic disorder of the world, and you have become convinced that there really are substantial threats to freedom and civilizaion out there -- and that such an unruly planet really needs 'American power' to regulate the situation..... well, this would lead you to assign an expanded role for the military (in addition to the various techniques of 'soft' power, and so forth). And this naturally leads to a more expansive market for the armaments manufacturers. As a Democrat, therefore, you find yourself advocating a foreign geo-strategic policy that is well to the Right of Republicans like Eisenhower, who warned us to beware the 'military-industrial complex.'

Neoliberal economics works this way as well. You could have been a liberal Democrat, 'mugged' by the 'reality' of a the slowdown of American industrial capitalism in the 1970s, as the United States -- for the first time in thirty years -- faced foreign competition from Western Europe and Japan, whose economies had, by then, recovered from the devastation of World War Two. You're a patriotic American and you become distraught because you believe that America should be Number One.

You're a liberal Democrat in the 1970s and you have all of the pro-labor credentials. However, the relatively progressive accomodation for labor had been constructed in the context of the promise of a dynamic, ever-expanding economy, ever-rising corporate profits, in other words. Things had gone so well from 1945 to 1975, when American industry had no competition. You came to believe that 'a rising tide lifts all boats.'

Then the world turns upside down in the late 1970s and early 1980s. You find yourself getting involved in debates about this or that country's 'unfair trading practices,' or 'artificially undervalued currency.' Because of the legacy of the consensus politics of the New Deal period, you, the liberal Democrat, still believe that 'a rising tide lifts all boats.'

Let us be clear. The 'rising tide' is corporate profits! Therefore you come to see the role of the state to do everything it can to help American business maintain its position. You never say so in so many words, but you come to see the primary role of the state to help increase corporate profits. This is because, to your way of thinking (as a liberal Democrat), the only way labor and the poor will be able to enjoy a better standard of living is the insure the success of corporate America.

For this reason what used to be called trickle-down economics or supply-side economics (which George H.W. Bush called 'Voodoo Economics' in 1980) was never a particularly Republican or Reaganite policy. These were simply terms applied to indicate a new consensus that had been reached by Democrats and Republicans. In the 1990s this shared understanding came to be known formally as the Washington Consensus.

In the 1990s a new political creature hit the scene in the United States, the so-called 'New Democrat.' What we got, then, was Democrat Bill Clinton (with NAFTA, 'welfare reform,' the Telecommunications Act, and Financial Services Modernization Act) actually governing to the Right of Republican Richard Nixon, in economic policy.

As an indication of just how far Rightward the Democratic Party drifted, know that the 1972 REPUBLICAN Presidential Campaign platform actually criticized multinational corporations for building plants overseas to take advantage of cheaper, more easily exploited labor (Phillips, p.viii).

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The reason I made a glancing reference to U.S. political history, concerning economics, is because there has always been a close association, in U.S and European history, of monopolized corporate power needing expansion and Western imperial practice, starting in the late nineteenth century (Kinzer p.34, Harvey p.97, Harman p.396, Zinn pp.297-299).

In a speech in 1907 Woodrow Wilson said: "Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed to him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused" (Parenti, pp.39-40).

So then the question arises: Are business interests 'important' enough to go to war over?

Going back to the year 1800, I can only think of one war (from an American perspective) that was worth it, whose underlying issues were 'important'enough to engage in armed conflict over. That one war is the American Civil War or 'War Between the States' of 1861-1865 concerning the issue of slavery.

You might say: 'But what about World War Two, stopping that monster Hitler and defeating fascism?

Of course, viewed in isolation, in and of itself, yes, it had been necessary for Russia and the rest of the Western Allies to defeat Nazi Germany. But recall the idea of circularity, we've been discussing, and the vexing way the ruling class has of creating 'importance' in a way I have termed 'Munchausen by Proxy.'

There would not have been a World War Two if there had not been World War One, for which Germany was assigned sole blame according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 (the German delegation had suggested a historical inquiry as to the causes of the war). What had the First World War been about?

World War One had been touched off with a series of events that had been set in motion with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, capital of the Austrian-run province of Bosnia, by a nationalist who wanted to drive the Austrians out and integrate the province into neighboring Serbia (Harman, pp.403-404).

But what sustained the war and made it probably the most destructive war ever, what made 'The war to end all wars,' so desperate and bitter was inter-capitalist competition between the countries of Europe. "The rival imperialism which had emerged as each capitalism tried to solve its own problems by expanding across state boundaries now collided right across the world. Economic competition had turned into competition for territories, and the outcome depended on armed might. No state could afford to back down once the chain of confrontations had been set off by the Sarajevo assassination, because no state could risk a weakening of its global strength" (Harman, p.404).

What this meant was that nations had to acquire territory to increase the economic resources at their disposal. For Germany this meant annexing the iron ore producing regions of French Lorraine, establishing German control over Belgium, Central Europe and Romania, as well as building a German sphere of influence in Turkey and the Middle East around the Berlin-Baghdad railway (ibid, p.409).

For France this meant reconquering Alsace-Lorraine and establishing some kind of control over the Rhineland region of Germany. For Russia of the tsars this meant annexing Istanbul (promised in a secret treaty by Britain). "Just as individual capitalists looked to expand their capital through economic competition, groups of capitalists tied together by national states looked to expand their capital through military competition and warfare. Imperialism was no longer just about colonies, although they remained important. It was now a total system in which no one capitalism could survive without trying to expand at the expense of others -- a system whose logic was total militarisation and total war, regardless of the social dislocation this caused" (Harman, p.409).

The victors of the First World War resolved it in such a way that planted the seeds for World War Two! Germany was defeated, stripped of its empire, disarmed, officially assigned all the blame for the the war, and required to pay repatriations; and this resulted in the total national humiliation of Germany. Add to that the worldwide economic slump that hit in 1930, which caused inflation in Germany to spiral out of control!

On top of this is the way that each capitalist country tried to get out of the Depression at the expense of anyone or everyone else. "[T]here were successive devaluations of national currencies as the capitalists of each country tried to undercut the prices of rivals. Country after country imposed tariffs and quotas, taxing and restricting imports. Even Britain, the bastion of free trade since 1846, opted for such methods. World trade fell to a third of the 1928 figure. But despite the myths spread by some politicians and economists since, it was not the controls on trade which created the slump -- which was well underway before they were introduced -- but the slump which led to the controls" (Harman, p.470).

Out of this pressure cooker, Hitler and the Nazis emerged in Germany and Mussolini and the fascists in Italy.

What is more monstrous, the monster or the forces that created that monster?

What about the Korean War or the Vietnam War? Didn't they concern issues 'important' enough to go to war over? These were theaters in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Wasn't that struggle 'important' enough to get involved with?

It depends on whether or not you think the following equations are true: capitalism = democracy (and freedom). Communism = tyranny (and repression). Democracy (and freedom) = capitalism. Tyranny (and repression) = communism

Let me return, now, to the ruling class doctrines of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. I said before that I believe that these ideologies inform the particular character of U.S. imperialism, and has done since the 1950s. I mentioned that I believe that a certain amount of ancestor veneration and a duplicative compulsion is operative in the way the ruling class carries out foreign policy. I also mentioned that, to my way of thinking, if you take all of these strands together, they amount to what I think of as an effective Munchausen by Proxy approach to foreign policy.

Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are philosophies that have a component of nostalgia about them. They express a desire that the United States should get back to the kind of character that supposedly made us great. They linked a romanticized past with a daydreamed future. In other words: 'We were great once. We can be great again if 'we' do x, y, z.'

Noam Chomsky always points out that 'neoliberalism' is not 'new' and certainly not 'liberal' in anyway that would be recognizable to eighteenth century political-economic philosophers like Adam Smith and others. Neoliberalism can be thought of, simply, as a return to pre-New Deal capitalism. And if you think about it, 'neoconservatism' can be thought of as a return to McCarthyite rabid anti-communism.

These 'neo' philosophies actually advocate a return to a mode of political and economic existence that has brought about the most violence in the world since 1898 -- remember, again, that year and the late nineteenth century in general (with monopolized corporate power needing expansion) brought about the age of empire.

There's more I could say... but this hub has already gone on way too long.

Thank you very much for reading.

References

1. Chafe, William H. The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II. Oxford University Press. 1995. pp.198-205

2. Chomsky, Noam. Hopes and Prospects. Haymarket Books. 2010. pp.127-129.

3. Parenti, Michael. Against Empire. City Lights Books, 1995. pp.39-40, 99, 102-103.

4. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books, 2007. p.328.

5. Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Broadway Books, 2002. p.viii.

6. Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq. Henry Holt & Company, 2006. p.34.

7. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 2003. p.97.

8. Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2003. pp.297-299.

9. Harman, Chris. A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. Verso, 2008. pp.396, 403-404, 409, 470.

Let's blow this popsicle stand with this.....