Make no mistake. The third World War is right here. Now. It has been here for longer than you would believe.
The world is at war. Unrelenting, genocidal war. Another war that is a racket, but with a different face and a different racket. A war that kills millions, as is usually the case. There are two sides to this war, but it is not the East against the West. It's not even the South against the North. It is not a geographical war. It's a class war. It is the Poor against the Rich on all five continents. And right now the Rich are winning.
A brief look back
The much touted Founding Fathers wanted nothing more praiseworthy than an oligarchy, a country ruled by an elite where Blacks and women were not citizens with equal rights, not even the right to vote. Women only gained the right to vote through the passage of the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution in 1920.
In spite of the half-heartedness and hesitations by President Roosevelt and some egregious mistakes that had serious consequences, the end of this era still came out as far more people-friendly than anything the country had seen before. Labor unions experienced tremendous gains during the thirties and Social Security was created in 1935.
Fast forward to Lyndon B. Johnson and his signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, obviously a big step in the direction of democracy. U.S. citizens were now convinced that their country was not just the most prosperous in the world, but also the most moral, the most free and the most civilized. And the most powerful.
The social contract that stemmed from the last Great Depression has been torn apart bit by bit in the decades that followed. The second-rate movie actor Ronald Reagan took the first big steps towards corporatism, intrinsically accompanied by total contempt for the people. This glamorous president who was playing Hollywood with the country seriously set about undermining the social safety net, a gradual thawing of programs focused on the welfare of the citizens.
The war has become globalized
Things are changing however. The sudden collapse of the TwinTowers and the screams of dying people made it possible. Civil rights have been dramatically stifled through the Patriot Act, furtively steered through a Congress in shock and almost total ignorance in October of 2001. The country has since then been in a state of permanent war.
We are living the war. It just has a different face. I am not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan. I am not talking about the renewal of the Cold War, as the U.S. Empire is staking its last pennies on establishing influence in republics of the former Soviet Union, desperately trying to outdo Russia in countries where the main or the second language is Russian. In these countries dependence on Russian oil and gas is of such primary importance that even Ukraine has had to listen to the loud voices of the people and move over to the Russian sphere, for economic and certainly also for cultural reasons. The U.S.-supported orange revolution is over. Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko is history.
This current war has no borders. War is globalized, like everything else steered by the obscene organization that rules the world of today. The hugely powerful multinationals in collusion with the governing bodies of the world have orchestrated a way of running the world which seems to them to be a given winner. It is not even Whites against the brown peoples who by far dominate the world population. The White upper-class people are of course scared out of their wits knowing well that one day soon they will be outnumbered even in their own home countries, which is most of the West. Racism, in each individual country and globally, is very clearly part of this ugly war.
However, globalization is the ruling principle of today's war. If the Chinese want to take a part in this upper class war on the poor, they are welcome to the country club. If the Indian political leaders are willing to make a deal with the multinationals, they are also taken into the club as full members. But at the origin of the scheming by the Neocon cavemen, the Multinational Money Men alone are the Ãbermenschen; the secondary collaborators get a fair share only because, for financial reasons, their weight is impossible to ignore.
The U.S. leaders may finally have realized that there is no way they can win a geographical war in the Middle East, in Central Asia, in Africa or anywhere else. They are now having a hard time extracting themselves from the senseless wars that are going on full speed in Afghanistan and now also Pakistan, turning both these countries into a maelstrom of ubiquitous local wars. Iraq is a ruined country but the U.S. will probably manage one day fairly soon to withdraw most of its military, declaring victory.
The reasons for this unending war (and possibly the solution to it) is the major equation we have to solve in order to understand the world we live in. It is not the United States alone that is in this war. It is not a war of one country against another country. It is the multinational corporations that are sucking up the entire wealth of the world, leaving the crumbs to the people so that they can survive as the slaves of the powerful leaders.
The center of gravity has changed in this new world of robots and money makers. Washington is no more the unilateral leader. The U.S. government has turned into a group of yes-sayers to the Big Corporations that are spread all over the planet. The world economy is in free fall, but you are soon about to see the top Money Men come out of the squeeze with all their billions intact, if not multiplied.
Poverty kills



