C. Wright Mills: The Causes of War

 

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts

War is hugely profitable.  It creates so much money because it's so easy to spend money very fast.  There are huge fortunes to be made.  So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are 'others' whom we can legitimately make war upon.

Roger Waters, Concept Tour, Rolling Stone, 23 February 2017

An expensive arms race, under cover of the military metaphysic, and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business. To many utopian capitalists, it has become the Business Way of Life.

In crackpot realism, a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands.  The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; it also confronts them with many new problems.

Yet these, the problems of war, often seem easier to handle.  They are out in the open: to produce more, to plan how to kill more of the enemy, to move materials thousands of miles.  So instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe.

They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines.  Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out—except war—which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be.  For they still believe that 'winning' means something, although they never tell us what.

The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.

Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle.  But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its 'inevitability,' want it in order to shift the locus of their problems.

C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, 1960

Memorial Day

 

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865

"The selling of the Iraq War to the American public was an exploitation of mass gullibility. Current circumstances give little or no hope that the public response would be much different to the selling of some future untoward war."

Paul Pillar, Selling the Iraq War: Gullibility and Mass Hysteria, March 15, 2023

"The present war crisis is something we have made entirely for and by ourselves.  There is in reality not the slightest logical reason for war, and yet the whole world is plunging headlong into frightful destruction, and doing so with the purpose of avoiding war and preserving peace!  This is a true war-madness, an illness of the mind and the spirit that is spreading with a furious and subtle contagion all over the world."

Thomas Merton, The Root of War, The Catholic Worker, October 1961

"In all these instances the large multinational bankers were actively supporting both sides. It is a shocking fact that both British and American banks continued to do business with the Nazis even after the War was well underway, even as Germany was invading Europe and bombing London."

BBC, Banking with Hitler, 1998

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1999

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - To Find One Another Again

 

"If at the start this cancerous growth in the nation was not particularly noticeable, it was only because there were still enough forces at work that operated for the good, so that it was kept under control.  As it grew larger, however, and finally in an ultimate spurt of growth attained ruling power, the tumor broke open, as it were, and infected the whole body.  Now the end is at hand. Now it is our task to find one another again."

The White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich, March 1942

"They defended him, verbally and physically, every time he committed one of his criminal acts. They went blithely on past the suffering of all the bombing victims, the prisoners in the concentration camps, and the religious persecutors, because a different regime would have meant the end of their power."

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, 1947

"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery?  Or the Jim Crow South?  Or apartheid?  What would I do if my country was committing genocide?'  The answer is, you're doing it.   Right now."

Aaron Bushnell

"For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children,
       unwilling to listen to the commandments of the Lord.
They say to their seers,‘Do not see!’
      and to the prophets,‘Say nothing of what is right!
Tell us only things that please us, prophesy illusions."

Isaiah 30:8-10

"Such unsustainable social arrangements are backed by force and fraud.  And as the fraud loses its power over time, force must increase, until there is an end in genuine reform, or a terrible self-destruction."

Jesse, Credibility Trap, 24 August 2012

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.  The former heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.  I saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, God’s dwelling is with us.  He will dwell with them, and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them.  He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old ways have passed away.'

Then the one who sat on the throne said, 'Behold, I make all things new.'”

Revelation 25:1-5 

It was a generally quiet today in the markets, with a few adults showing up, and leaving early to join the rest on their three day Memorial weekend vacation.

Gold and silver caught a little bounce.

There will be a Comex precious metals futures option expiration on Tuesday.

VIX is wallowing.

In honor of Memorial Day, let us remember the basic freedoms for which so many of our people have given their service, their suffering, and in too many cases their lives.

We seem to have lost our way in this madness and hysteria.  

Let us hope that we can find our way, and one another, again.

Have a pleasant weekend.