The Opposite of Peace Is — War?

Been reading a lot about World War II lately. My father fought in that war. He lost the hearing on one side thanks to shrapnel that perforated his eardrum. He lost many of his friends. He nearly lost his life.

But my reason for reading is both greater and lesser than a desire to know a little piece of my father's history: I am writing a novel set in that period.

And today, I came across something that encapsulates very nicely the malaise that the reading of the past several weeks has engendered in me. FTA:

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.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, War Is A Racket

While Japanese farmers, office workers, and civilians were restricted to the grayest of lives by the sumptuary laws enforced before and during WW II, while Japanese intellectuals trembled under the heavy hand of the thought police and suffered torture by the Kempeitai, while Chinese peasants starved and their children were forcibly inducted into the military to fight against superior armies and lose their lives for a pittance, the wealthy crooks who engineered these wars became wealthier still. Come rain or shine, they continued to find ways to profit from the vast human suffering.

George W. Bush paid for the war in Iraq by borrowing billions of dollars from the Chinese. Now your grandchildren will have to repay that debt. I hear some people say Obama is creating a huge debt by borrowing additional monies to stimulate the economy. Unfortunately, the hole that Bush left has to be patched before everything else leaks out of it. And the only way to patch that hole is to stimulate the economy into spending.

People forget that the U.S. economy runs on consumer spending. Before George Dumbya left office, the Iraq war had already cost us three TRILLION dollars. We are bringing our troops back now, but that costs money too. Then there's the issue of reintegrating them into the smashed civilian economy. All the while, the war profiteers like Dick "Dick" Cheney sit back on their seats and bwa-ha-haaa themselves into something like an orgasm. I wish it were an organism. Something intestinal and painful and lengthy.

How many kids have lost their parents in this war? Iraqi kids? Somewhere between one and five million? American kids? Somewhere between three and ten thousand? Nobody really knows. In 2004, when the total casualty figures were around 2,000, Scripps stated that 900 American children had lost a parent to the war. However, the casualty toll has doubled since then, and most of the soldiers in this war have been professional military and reservists, which means they tend to be older, married, and have more children.

How many kids are getting back parents who are not the people they used to be? Broken in body or mind or both? How many kids have to grow up really fast, to become caretakers to their parents instead of being children any more? Smedley Butler was right. War IS a racket.

Blackwater mercenaries made two to three times the salaries of military men for the same work. No-bid government contracts made a lot of people very rich. The wholesale plunder of Iraqi oil made other people (or sometimes the same people) very rich. To us, the taxpayers, is left the broken mess, the debris, the tortured, the cripple, the lame, the halt, the blind, the miserable, people who are still fighting the war in their heads, crying themselves to sleep or drinking or drugging to forget. And they are living among us as are their suffering parents and spouses and children.

The dividends of peace are happy human lives. However, these do not represent adequate profits to those whose greed drives them to profit above all else. And to achieve those profits they will willingly sacrifice every last man, woman, and child of us upon an altar of blood.

Crossposted over at The Peace Tree.

La Casa de Los Gatos apologizes for the dearth of recent posts. A bout of illness laid us low, and having had our first meal today in nearly a week, we can safely say we now have energy to start blogging again. To think that a little food can make so much difference ...

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New Orleans: Disaster Apartheid and Blackwater

Blackwater Mercenaries in Downtown New Orleans
(Photo from Google Images; original source unknown.)

I am afflicted.

My affliction? Curiosity. It's brutal. I read things and listen to things that no mortal being should have to hear.

I don't like to put my head in the sand and fart in the wind. Okay. I do like farting in the wind. Making wind in the wind. My own stink bomb.

[Get to the point, Ms. Manitoba!!!]

Todays' outrageous news [to me] ... just watched a video on pbs website. It's Bill Moyers interviewing Jeremy Scahill who's just written Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

In part of the interview, Scahill talks about Blackwater being called into New Orleans immediately after Katrina hit ... even before FEMA had set up operations. [What am I saying ... every goddam person who went to New Orleans after the hurricane got there before FEMA.]

Here's an excerpt:

JEREMY SCAHILL:Well, I mean, I was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And I think we saw a real window into the possible future. You know, I was standing on a street corner in the French quarter on Bourbon Street. And I was talking to two New York City police officer who had come down to help. And this is just a couple of days after the hurricane had hit. And this car speeds up next to us. No license plates on it, a compact car. And three massive guys get out of it. And they have M-4 assault rifles, bullet proof vests, wearing khakis, wrap around sunglasses, baseball caps on. And they come up and they say to the cops, "Where are the rest of the Blackwater guys?" And my head sort of started, you know, I didn't even hear the answer. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Where are the rest of the Blackwater guys? So, they get back in their vehicle and they speed off. And I said to this cop, Blackwater? You mean the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan? They said, oh, yeah. They're all over the place down here. And so, I said, well, I'd like to talk to them. Where are they? And they said, you can go either way on the street, implying that they're everywhere. So, I walked a little bit deeper into the French quarter. And sure enough, I encountered some Blackwater guys. And when I talked to them, they said that they were down there to confront criminals and stop looters.

BILL MOYERS: Who called them in?

JEREMY SCAHILL:And-- well, this is an interesting story. Erik Prince sent them in there with no contract initially. About 180 Blackwater guys were sent into the Gulf. They got there before FEMA. I don't even know if FEMA's there yet. But they got there before FEMA, before there was any kind of a serious operation in the city at all.

BILL MOYERS: On Prince's own decision?

JEREMY SCAHILL:Well, so Prince sends them in. Within a week, Blackwater was given a contract from the Department of Homeland Security Federal Protective Service to engage in security operations inside of New Orleans. At one point, Blackwater had six hundred men deployed down there stretching from Mississippi through-- from Texas through Mississippi and the Gulf. They were pulling in $240,000 a day. Some of these guys though had just been in Iraq two weeks earlier guarding the US ambassador. Now, they're in New Orleans. They say, oh, we do this sort of as a vacation. One was complaining to me that there wasn't enough action down here. And when I talked to them, they told me they were getting paid 350 dollars a day, plus a per diem.

BILL MOYERS: By homeland security?

JEREMY SCAHILL:Well, they were being paid by Blackwater. When I got Blackwater's contract with the Department of Homeland Security, it turns out that Blackwater billed US taxpayers 950 dollars per man per day in the hurricane zone.

BILL MOYERS: A profit margin of 600 dollars.

JEREMY SCAHILL:Well, I mean, the math on this stuff is always complicated. And Erik Prince and his men are very good at drawing up charts and sort of, you know, just saying, well, there's this detail and this detail. The Department of Homeland Security then did an internal review and they determined that it was the best value to the taxpayer, at a time when the poor residents of New Orleans were being chastised for how they used their two thousand dollar debit cards that often didn't work, the ones provided by FEMA. But what was even scarier than seeing the Blackwater operatives on the streets of New Orleans was, I encountered two Israeli commandos who had been brought in by a wealthy businessman in New Orleans and set up an armed checkpoint outside of his gated community. And they were from a company called Instinctive Shooting International. ISI, which is an Israeli company. I mean, and I went up and I talked to them. And they tapped on their automatic weapons and said, you know, over in our country, when the Palestinians see this, they're not so afraid because they're used to it. But you people, you see it, and you're very afraid. They were almost proud of the fact that I was sort of in awe seeing Israeli commandos patrolling a US street, operating in fact an armed check point.

Chilling.

From Naomi Klein: Unless something changes soon, New Orleans will prove to be a glimpse of a dystopic future, a future of disaster apartheid in which the wealthy are saved and everyone else is left behind.

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