Ngành
công nghiệp chiến tranh, một quốc gia trong một quốc gia, phá hoại quốc
gia, vấp phải thất bại quân sự này đến thất bại quân sự tiếp theo, tước
bỏ các quyền tự do dân sự của chúng ta và đẩy chúng ta đến các cuộc
chiến tự sát với Nga và Trung Quốc.
Mỹ là một chế độ quân chủ , một hình thức chính phủ do quân đội thống trị. Một tiên đề giữa hai đảng cầm quyền là phải thường xuyên chuẩn bị cho chiến tranh. Ngân sách khổng lồ của cỗ máy chiến tranh là bất khả xâm phạm. Hàng tỷ đô la lãng phí và gian lận của nó bị bỏ qua. Những
thất bại quân sự của nó ở Đông Nam Á, Trung Á và Trung Đông đã biến mất
vào hang động rộng lớn của chứng mất trí nhớ lịch sử. Chứng
mất trí nhớ này, có nghĩa là không bao giờ có trách nhiệm giải trình,
cho phép cỗ máy chiến tranh mổ xẻ đất nước về mặt kinh tế và đẩy Đế chế
vào hết cuộc xung đột tự đánh bại mình đến cuộc xung đột tự đánh bại
mình. Các nhà quân phiệt giành chiến thắng trong mọi cuộc bầu cử. Họ không thể thua. Không thể bỏ phiếu chống lại họ. Tình trạng chiến tranh là một Götterdämmerung, như Dwight Macdonald viết, “không có các vị thần”.
Bi kịch không phải là trạng thái chiến tranh của Hoa Kỳ sẽ tự hủy diệt. Bi kịch là chúng ta sẽ hạ gục rất nhiều người vô tội cùng với chúng ta.
The Enemy From Within. Chris Hedges
The war industry, a state within a state,
disembowels the nation, stumbles from one military fiasco to the next,
strips us of civil liberties and pushes us towards suicidal wars with
Russia and China.
America is a stratocracy,
a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among
the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for
war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of
dollars in waste and fraud are
ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the
Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia.
This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licenses the
war machine to economically disembowel the country and drive the Empire
into one self-defeating conflict after another. The militarists win
every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them.
The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes,
“without the gods.”
Since
the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more
than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military
operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the
government. Military systems are sold before they are produced with
guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered. Foreign aid is
contingent on buying U.S. weapons. Egypt, which receives some $1.3
billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems. Israel has received $158
billion in bilateral assistance from the U.S. since 1949, almost all of
it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going
towards arms purchases from U.S. weapons manufacturers. The American
public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems
and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign
governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.
Between October 2021 and September 2022, the U.S. spent $877
billion on the military, that’s more than the next 10 countries,
including China, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom
combined. These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs
of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5
trillion more than the U.S.’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This
imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the U.S. spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.
The
public, bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation.
It revels in the despicable beauty of our military prowess. It speaks
in the thought-terminating clichés spewed out by mass culture and mass
media. It imbibes the illusion of omnipotence and wallows in
self-adulation.
The
intoxication of war is a plague. It imparts an emotional high that is
impervious to logic, reason or fact. No nation is immune. The gravest
mistake made by European socialists on the eve of the First World War
was the belief that the working classes of France, Germany, Italy, the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and Great Britain would not be divided
into antagonistic tribes because of disputes between imperialist
governments. They would not, the socialists assured themselves, sign on
for the suicidal slaughter of millions of working men in the trenches.
Instead, nearly every socialist leader walked away from their anti-war
platform to back their nation’s entry into the war. The handful who did
not, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were sent to prison.
A
society dominated by militarists distorts its social, cultural,
economic and political institutions to serve the interests of the war
industry. The essence of the military is masked with subterfuges — using the military to carry out humanitarian relief missions, evacuating civilians in danger, as we see in
the Sudan, defining military aggression as “humanitarian intervention”
or a way to protect democracy and liberty, or lauding the military as
carrying out a vital civic function by teaching leadership,
responsibility, ethics and skills to young recruits. The true face of
the military — industrial slaughter — is hidden.
The
mantra of the militarized state is national security. If every
discussion begins with a question of national security, every answer
includes force or the threat of force. The preoccupation with internal
and external threats divides the world into friend and foe, good and
evil. Militarized societies are fertile ground for demagogues.
Militarists, like demagogues, see other nations and cultures in their
own image – threatening and aggressive. They seek only domination.
It
was not in our national interest to wage war for two decades across the
Middle East. It is not in our national interest to go to war with
Russia or China. But militarists need war the way a vampire needs blood.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev and later Vladimir Putin lobbied to
be integrated into western economic and military alliances. An alliance
that included Russia would have nullified the calls to expand NATO —
which the U.S. had promised it
would not do beyond the borders of a unified Germany — and have made it
impossible to convince countries in eastern and central Europe to spend
billions on U.S. military hardware. Moscow’s requests were rebuffed.
Russia was made the enemy, whether it wanted to be or not. None of this
made us more secure. Washington’s decision to interfere in Ukraine’s domestic affairs by backing a coup in 2014 triggered a civil war and Russia’s subsequent invasion.
But
for those who profit from war, antagonizing Russia, like antagonizing
China, is a good business model. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin
saw their stock prices increase by 40 percent and 37 percent respectively as a result of the Ukraine conflict.
A war with China, now an industrial giant, would disrupt the global supply chain with devastating effects on the U.S. and global economy. Apple produces 90 percent of its products in China. U.S. trade with China was $690.6 billion last year. In 2004, U.S. manufacturing output was more than twice China’s. China’s output is now nearly double that of the United States. China produces the largest number of ships, steel and smartphones in
the world. It dominates the global production of chemicals, metals,
heavy industrial equipment and electronics. It is the world’s largest
rare earth mineral exporter, its greatest reserve holder and is responsible for 80 percent of its refining worldwide. Rare earth minerals are essential to
the manufacture of computer chips, smartphones, television screens,
medical equipment, fluorescent light bulbs, cars, wind turbines, smart
bombs, fighter jets and satellite communications.
War
with China would result in massive shortages of a variety of goods and
resources, some vital to the war industry, paralyzing U.S. businesses.
Inflation and unemployment would rocket upwards. Rationing would be
implemented. The global stock exchanges, at least in the short term,
would be shut down. It would trigger a global depression. If the U.S.
Navy was able to block oil shipments to China and disrupt its sea lanes,
the conflict could potentially become nuclear.
In “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,”
the military alliance sees the future as a battle for hegemony with
rival states, especially China. It calls for the preparation of
prolonged global conflict. In October 2022, Air Force General Mike
Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, presented his
“Mobility Manifesto” to a packed military conference. During this
unhinged fearmongering diatribe, Minihan argued that if the U.S. does
not dramatically escalate its preparations for a war with China,
America’s children will find themselves “subservient to a rules based
order that benefits only one country [China].”
According to the
New York Times, the Marine Corps is training units for beach assaults,
where the Pentagon believes the first battles with China may occur,
across “the first island chain” that includes, “Okinawa and Taiwan down
to Malaysia as well as the South China Sea and disputed islands in the
Spratlys and the Paracels.”.
Militarists
drain funds from social and infrastructure programs. They pour money
into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable
energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees
collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. The public is
impoverished. The harsh forms of control the militarists test and
perfect abroad migrate back to the homeland. Militarized Police.
Militarized drones. Surveillance. Vast prison complexes. Suspension of
basic civil liberties. Censorship.
Those such as Julian Assange,
who challenge the stratocracy, who expose its crimes and suicidal
folly, are ruthlessly persecuted. But the war state harbors within it
the seeds of its own destruction. It will cannibalize the nation until
it collapses. Before then, it will lash out, like a blinded cyclops,
seeking to restore its diminishing power through indiscriminate
violence. The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct.
The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.
*
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Chris Hedges
is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent
for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle
East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously
worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science
Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.