Wars are Manipulated

This means, of course, that people are manipulated. Take the current Gaza conflict. The ceasefire came neatly before Obama’s inauguration, conveniently getting the new president off the hook for a spell, until a resumption of hostilities could be finessed on terms to fit the new administration. Now we’re on the brink of those new hostilities. How have they been finessed? They were precipitated by a roadside bomb that killed an Israeli soldier patrolling outside Gaza, breaking the ceasefire. The finesse? Hamas denied responsibility for the bomb. Israel and the West (including Hamas) know that the world outside Gaza does not take note of niceties like a denial of responsibility for a bomb attack, so Israel can now launch attacks on Gaza as it sees fit. These attacks will not appear the all out massacre that Operation Cast Lead did, giving Obama wiggle room to say that Israel has the right to defend itself. Note: this delicate controlling of history involves complicity from ALL sides, including Hamas, which is now in a position to fire rockets at will.

There is ample precedent in the middle-east for manipulation of wars. During the Lebanese civil war, soldiers from various factions were paid salaries from the same government agency, and hostilities were halted on payroll days. But such manipulation is apparent in all hostilities in the modern world. During the cold war I used to walk over to the UCLA library and read Pravda in English. What I discovered was that for any incident involving conflict between Russia and the West, there were two accounts: one for the Russians and one for the West. The most blatant discrepancies appeared in accounts of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Russian version would detail the deaths of Afghani “militants,” while the Western told of slain Afghani “shepherds.”

Note the similar treatment of the current drone missile attacks in north-western Pakistan. The American public has been trained, with the tacit approval of our new President, to see Waziristan as the origin of 9/11. This takes care of any questions that might arise concerning the focus of the world’s mightiest, most technologically advanced and most expensive military on a remote strip of primeval herdsman. U.S. unmanned drone aircraft have been firing lethal missiles into villages in Waziristan for months. The most high profile attack came just before the Democratic convention that nominated Obama. For the spin you could pick your national press. Our press was honest enough to report the claim that up to 40 men, women and children attending a bridal procession were killed, but it was not honest enough to follow up on the story, or to note Obama’s silence on the matter, which has continued into the first two weeks of his presidency. You can imagine the press accounts in the “rogue county” and “terrorist” press: “Forty men, women and children in wedding party killed by U.S. missile. No militants involved. U.S President says nothing. General American public not interested.” In this case, the Western press does not have to write a special versions of the story that leaves out the wedding procession deaths, replacing “women and children” with “terrorists.” Why not? Because the events are folded into the weave of world news in such a way that the public forgets the details. This is easy enough to prove. Go up to one hundred adults in a public place in any American city, and ask them to tell you what they think of our policy of firing missiles at Waziristan. You’ll be lucky to get 5 people who can even describe it, let alone get into the element of civilian deaths. Of those 5 people, up to 5 will say that the people in Waziristan are planning the next 9/11. In defense of our citizenry, they are too busy wondering how they’ll be making a living in six months to follow the nuances of a far away war. This public distraction is carefully monitored, and policy is based on it.

The point of the Western attacks on “militants,” and of their attacks on us, is to engender hatred of “the other.” But what’s it for? Why would governments want to create hatred in this duplicitous fashion? George Orwell summed it up eloquently in “1984,” where the world’s large industrial states prop each other up like “sheaves of wheat” with unending, controlled conflict, including tactics like launching missile attacks against one’s own country, secretly using one’s own ships offshore, then blaming “the enemy” for the “unprovoked attack.” The purpose of the ongoing conflict in Orwell’s world is to distract people from the utter bankruptcy of their societies, the unemployment, the banality of life, the limited freedom of movement, the lack of vision and purpose.

Orwell’s “Big Brother” sought a dismal status quo. But one might add a far more frightful purpose for luring people into conflict: the desire for an actual war, with actual death and devastation. What would be the point? Control. Population reduction. Creation of new systems, both biological and economic. What a great science fiction novel this would make. But Henry Kissinger has already written the seeds into non-fiction, in “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” written in the 50’s in his relatively more candid Harvard days. After detailing the potential horrors implicit in the most powerful atomic weapons, Kissinger concludes that there need to be “options less cataclysmic than a thermonuclear holocaust.” His solution? Elimination of nuclear weapons? Not quite. He proposes the doctrine of “limited nuclear war” as a way of avoiding the “impotence of atomic stalemate.” Yes, he proposes that we have nuclear war, controlled through international agreements so that only pre-designated areas and, presumably, pre-designated populations would be blasted to smithereens. Kissinger’s book was said to have excited Nixon, who proclaimed after reading it that, “Kissinger is the man!” The book also earned Kissinger a parody in Stanley Kubrick’s character Dr. Strangelove in the eponymous movie.

Speaking for myself, I’d rather have a controlled nuclear war than an uncontrolled one. On the other hand, wouldn’t we be better off without any sort of nuclear war? I think, unless you’re in Dr. Strangeloves’s government shelter deep beneath the Rockies, where females, “selected for their beauty,” are stocked for production of the future uber-race, you’d likely opt for no kind of war at all.

How can people avoid such nefarious scenarios as outlined here? A little communication would help in this regard. And a little chutzpah. The future world should have at least a few communities that come to birth outside the parameters of a science-fiction/horror novel come true.