Step Two is to brainwash history's millions of Myrmidons. The goal is to dehumanize The Dreaded Other into mere animals, or better yet, insects to be eradicated or exterminated. The targeted group is of course those who occupy the land or have the human and natural resources that the Princes of Power want to exploit for their own enrichment and aggrandizement, and at the expense of everything and everyone else. While there are variants to this well-worn playbook, the modus operandi and raison d'Ã ªtre of war, and, by extension, genocide and ethnic cleansing, are as predictable as the motions of the planets, the Sun, and the Moon. Banally so...
Westerners celebrate their glorious wars on Veterans/Armistice Day, which were and are still mostly economic policy in support of colonialism and empire. The Princes of Power, philistines all, piously honor their millions of 99% Myrmidons, whose souls grace countless cemeteries and memorials around the world. They also pay self-satisfied tribute to the brave survivors, most who return home psychologically fractured and socially handicapped, But the Dreaded Other have their own versions of history to recount, no matter how contrary to the Washington/London/Paris consensus. To wit,
1. This was known as the Boxer Rebellion. The enemy was Chinese citizens who were sick and tired of being exploited like dogs by the United States and seven other countries -- Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and Russia. These colonial powers all had what were euphemistically called interests in China, i.e., corporations, banks, and insurance companies, which were helping to keep one-fourth of the country's people addicted to British-imported opium and hauling out billions in exploited resources, human and natural. The West's colonialists thrive on euphemisms, calling this racket their open-door policy and China as a sphere of influence, later to be lost to Mao Zedong and the Communists. It was not the first time the US military was dispatched to the four corners of the planet to play the role of taxpayer-funded Pinkerton goons for the 1%. Sadly, Sergeant Sutton was one of the first US soldiers in the 20th century to die for their profits. He was just following orders, one of the few, the proud, who believed he was defending America's freedoms 10,000 km away from home, halfway around the world, with honor, valor, and faith in the righteousness of his government, its leaders, and its mythical ideals. His death was only the beginning of what would turn out to be tens of millions who joined the swollen roles of maimed and killed last century, for the benefit of Western capital.
The day after Sgt. Sutton's death, during the same American invasion, Lieutenant Smedley Butler was heroically injured and also received a Medal of Honor. He would later climb the ranks to Marine major general and become the most decorated soldier in US history, retiring in 1931. But a funny thing happened. Thereafter, with the wisdom of hindsight and a moral conscious that brought clarity and compassion to his perceptions, he had an epiphany. In a little known, historically important 1933 speech, he said,
"War is a racket. It always has been.
"It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
"A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
Butler's War Is a Racket speech would later be printed up in a short book and has become an antiwar classic.2 But that very same year, the general's former Wall Street paymasters, and its fascist front, the American Liberty League (ALL), headed by Prescott Bush (H.W.'s daddy and W's grandpappy), enlisted Butler to march 500,000 veterans on the White House, to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and the hated New Deal, to, according to the BBC, "Adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the Great Depression."3 In order to find out who was behind this fascist putsch, Butler, who was to be the stooge Caesar taking corporate orders, played along with Wall Street's finest. ALL included families who owned DuPont, J.P. Morgan, Heinz, Colgate, Birds Eye, and General Motors, among others, as well as, amazingly, Democratic Presidential candidates Al Smith and John W. Davis. A true patriot, Butler went to the House Committee on Un-American Activities with the list of names. None of these traitors from Bush on down were ever questioned and Smedley's testimony was stricken from the record. When you can buy an army of a half a million, it's just as easy to purchase a House and Senate full of slavish satraps to keep things clean. It's so much more profitable for the Committee on Un-American Activities to hunt down and destroy Communists and socialists, instead of fascists, especially one percenters paying for their reelections and buying their votes cash on the barrel-head.
Fascism by definition is the marriage and mutual support of government and corporate interests. American shadow fascists have their roots and origins in the very corrupt 19th-century Gilded Industrial Age, where they coalesced into a force in the 1880s. This American shadow government has been the behind-the-scenes puppeteer ever since, quietly filling up cubicles and seats of power in the corporate world and government. They were attracted to Truman's CIA like bugs to light, then into the alphabet soup of America's military-industry-government/security apparatus. Starting in 1980, they effortlessly began moving directly into the bright lights of day-to-day statecraft and as corporate CEOs and board members. No need to be discreet anymore, they began to flaunt and flex their power to the American public. We know all too painfully what's happened since then and it's not very pretty.
2. As Barbara Tuchman so splendidly and pithily detailed in her Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Guns of August (1962), there was nothing honorable or noble about World War I. It was in fact one of our species' greatest examples of how stunted and antediluvian our brains have socially and psychologically evolved, juxtaposed next to our breathtaking technological prowess in creating more and more lethal ways to destroy each other. With all due respect to the 16 million people who perished and the 20 million who were injured during The War to End All Wars (talk about a PR fail of galactic proportions), it was essentially an extremely deadly slaughter between feuding colonial powers out to control as much of the world's dark-skinned peoples' natural and human resources as possible. Germany lost its colonial territories in Africa to Britain and France.
In spite of a public largely against external intervention, in spite of an official election platform of neutrality and the campaign slogan of He kept us out of war, no sooner was Woodrow Wilson reelected in 1916 that he performed one of American history's greatest political deceptions. Bowing to the hubris of the human condition and satisfying the money lust of American capitalists, who were panting like dogs in heat to crank up their factories of war profit, he plunged the United States into its second big imperial war, after the 1898 Spanish-American version. Sad to say, but Gunnery Sergeant Charles F. Hoffman, along with his 116,000 Americans killed and 204,000 wounded, it was a tragic and senseless waste for the United States. A whole generation of affected families and communities suffered tremendous losses, all in the name of vainglory and profit. G/Sgt. Hoffman's Hill 142 was there to be conquered again in World War II, as it surely has been countless times before, in the bloody annals of European geopolitical history. We can also thank World War I for the millions of veterans returning home infected with deadly influenza, spreading it all over the country and killing 675,000 Americans, more than World War I, World War II, the Korean and Southeast Asian Wars combined. Wordsmiths are wont to call something like this unintended consequences.
3. As amply described and explained in #1 above, every American incursion, invasion, occupation, and perpetrated coup in Latin America has been and continues to be in service to the 1% and their corporations, who continue to exploit this region's dark-skinned peoples and their rightful resources. In addition to Nicaragua, before the Cold War, the United States militarily invaded Argentina, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, and Puerto Rico, and postwar, added Bolivia, Chile, Grenada, Uruguay, and Venezuela - all for the Princes of Power, banksters, and FIREmen (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate).4 Gee, did we leave anybody out? Sorry Corporal Truesdale, and with all due respect to his brave military brethren, but those bandits you killed and their hundreds of thousands of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, who were slaughtered, were and are defending their rights for independence, freedom from exploitation, and the rape of their natural resources. Thus, all the American soldiers in Latin America, from Smedley Butler on down, were taxpayer-funded thugs for Wall Street, pure and simple. No protecting the home front, no maintaining Americans' freedoms, and no making the world a safer place for democracy. Sad, but true.
4. For a brief time, it gets better. Out of all of America's post-independence wars, there is a reason that Studs Turkel called World War II The Good War (1984). It is the only war that the United States has participated in the last nearly 200 years (not counting the Civil War's internecine fratricide) that could conceivably be regarded as a noble cause. The United States liberated the Pacific Basin from the military and strategic overreach of Imperial Japan, island by island. It is unfortunate that because of America's ever-increasing hubris and naked fear of International Communism exposing Capitalism's screw job of the 99%, Hiroshima and Nagasaki got the nuclear-annihilation treatment as a show of force to Stalin and the Soviets.
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