So that’s how it’s going to go? Endless supplies of human life being disposed of to maintain a hierarchy that will continue into the far future? There’s something deeply wrong here, and you don’t need to disbelieve the Russia narrative to sense that from watching Reiner’s clip. We’re being told these things about how “we are at war” as an encompassing effort goes on to make us forget the past times we’ve heard them. The new Ken Burns film about the Vietnam War buries the lies the government told to have us commit that unprovoked act of genocide. The last war in Korea, where America dropped more bombs than it did in the Pacific Theater in World War II and nearly three million were killed, is blacked out from the mainstream discussions about North Korea. War criminals like Hillary Clinton, who’s violated international laws of war by helping in the barbaric 2011 Libya invasion, are able to spend their retirements going on talk shows and writing memoirs.
Our history gets taken away, because if it weren’t, the populous would revolt in outrage. For most people there’s instead a dim sense of resentment toward the state of the world, to be distracted from with constant orders to fight some all-threatening enemy abroad. To save this history, and with it the people’s will to revolt, we’ll need to expose it.
A vital part of exposing it is illustrating the nature of modern warfare. Imperialism and false flag attacks have always been part of civilization, but it wasn’t till the nineteenth century that war as Americans now know it emerged. This was a dynamic where wars are fought not to be won but to be controlled dramas, whose outcomes are worried about only by citizens told to see them as battles between the patriots and the enemies. The function of these wars has rarely been to expand territories, as the U.S. already dominates the globe, but to enrich those profiting from oil and weapon production while destroying resources that could be used for educating the populous.
This warfare model has dominated society since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1937, which U.S. officials are revealed to have known about beforehand and had every reason not to have tried to stop. Militarism exploded after that, and was articulated into a plot for global domination when business leaders met with government officials in 1940. From there these leaders planned an area of control that would reach into the British Empire, the Far East, and the Western Hemisphere.
This correlated with a rise of authoritarianism that had manifested in every major political movement by the 1930’s, which was defined by a renewed support for many undemocratic and inhumane practices that had been outmoded before then. These strains allowed for the new war empire to form a cult around itself, demonstrated most viciously in the 1950’s effort to detain all dissenters of it as Russian agents. Until the recent reintroduction of that effort, this impulse to call dissidents traitors has persisted in American culture.
Throughout this post-World War II period the U.S. has attempted nearly sixty regime change missions around the world, nearly all the successful ones resulting in periods like that of the U.S.-installed Pinochet dictatorship. Starting with the fabricated testimony about opened incubators in 1990, more than four million Muslims have died in mideastern American wars since that year. The CIA, a benevolent agency when it was started seventy years ago, has created a crack-cocaine epidemic and provided the false intelligence for most of those military efforts. The abuses have gotten far worse in the last decade as, under Obama, the U.S. has rained depleted uranium onto the Middle East that’s hideously deformed newborn babies and started a drone warfare program that’s been used every week to assassinate people without trial.
These regime change operations and the efforts to glorify war have grown more blatant in recent decades. This was made possible by the corporate takeover of government and media, rise in psy ops and surveillance, establishment of corporate-run public schools and payment-requiring universities, and cultural deification of weaponry and violence that’s happened in the last half century.
Then there’s the new wave in authoritarian sentiments that’s risen amid the destitution and tribal rage that neoliberalism has caused. This wave is shown in the disdain for constitutional liberties and the Geneva conventions that’s emerged since 9/11; in the nationalistic outrage toward whistleblowers like Edward Snowden; in the new enthusiasm for an all-encompassing security state and practices like torture; in the explosion of hostility toward higher education, the arts, and people of different ethnicities or beliefs; in the surveys that show more people than in recent memory do not believe in democracy, a free press, or open debate. This has been a global phenomenon, and monsters like Donald Trump are here to enact its demands.
Yet in recent years, disruptions have appeared in the system. People have used their vast new social networking powers for exposing the state’s deceptions. Progressive institutions have grown massively, putting many towns and cities under new leadership and enacting policies like living wages and tuition-free college in those places. Fractures have come up in the U.S. empire as well: Russia has blocked the plans for redrawing the Middle East, and public pressure on the Trump administration to stop war Syria and Russia has solidified that; the U.S. has been outmaneuvered by North Korea and lost its control there; forebodings of a collapse in American power are showing up, supported by the projections of some scholars that this empire will be over by 2030.
The Deep State’s reaction has been extreme to the point of seeming self-endangerment. Washington is determined to have war in North Korea; this has shown in its keeping troops on the Korean Peninsula since the last war there, its refusal to sit down with North Korean leaders while rejecting their peace offers, and its spreading misinformation about Kim Jong Un being an unprovoked madman. So the neocons have supported Trump’s psychotic ultimatum to attack North Korea with nukes, with John McCain now advocating North Korean “extinction.”
Similar tactics are present around the world. The U.S. has encircled Russia and China with nuclear missiles while the American Pacific fleet commander said in July that he will nuke China if ordered to. Using the by now thoroughly debunked lie about Russians having hacked the DNC as a cover, America is using NATO to get nations like Britain and France supportive of their new Cold War against Russia. In recent years, NATO has been positioning troops along Russia’s borders, a fact that’s never mentioned by the western media outlets that always report on Russia’s war games. Three years ago the U.S. installed an aggressive neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine, and has continued to support it since, with the clear intent of threatening Russia.
The goal here, as neocon senator Eric Swalwell has revealed in an interview, is regime change in Russia, with the planned fate for North Korea no doubt being the same. Meanwhile Iran is being brought into this operation as the government liesabout it not complying with the nuclear deal, and war with it is seemingly being prepared for as $600 billion have been added to the military budget this month. Regime change is being worked on in Venezuela as its leader is falsely portrayed as an illegitimately elected dictator. Most strains of the Deep State remain set on regime change in Syria, despite their claims of Assad perpetrating gas attacks in 2013, 2014, and this year having all been debunked. These add onto how Trump has already dropped almost as many bombs as Obama did in 2016, with the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen being expanded.
And the brandishing of nuclear weapons has to mean something even more ominous. Luxury shelters from doomsday scenarios are being built for the super rich in rural land and the ocean. And the ways things have collapsed so far, such as with climate change and the financial crisis, have allowed for massive expansions in the security state and the power of the big banks. If nuclear weapons are used, they’ll likely be arranged to go off in a limited proportion that lets the elites safely take control of a destabilized global society. The Deep State isn’t endangering itself, it’s readying to move to a new role.
What can we dissidents do about this as people who are guaranteed to be shut out of powerful positions? Obviously we can build new systems to be influential with, as the independent media contributors, local democratized business creators, and local-scale political revolutionaries have been doing. But amid my participation in those efforts, I’ve known some people who revolt by working to improve themselves intellectually and emotionally, or by creating paintings and music.
Revolt may not be the right term for what these people are doing though, as they’re simply attuning to the fact that nothing in the universe is permanent-and that this oligarchy, like everything else we know, will eventually be replaced with something else. The oligarchs have tried to crush art and enlightenment because these things lead to the overthrow of fascists, and on a long enough time scale, we all know that overthrow will happen.
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