By: Chris Hedges
The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls–the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads–personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.

“War,” Randolph Bourne commented acidly, “is the health of the state.”

In “Pentagon Capitalism” Seymour Melman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule. Our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.

Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war–who have corrupted Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution–must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that 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. The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junkyards where they are left to rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Melman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation’s infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Melman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Melman found that 92 were imported and only eight were made in the United States.

The late Sen. J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine.” Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.

Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.

The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote “Notes From the Underground” to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in “Notes From the Underground” carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.

“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”

We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems–economic, social, environmental and political–that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.

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   Columnist – John Sammon
I think I can pry open the mind of a conservative so we can all look inside, at what makes ‘em tick, by using myself, and confessing on this website, why it was that for at least 20 years, I was a Republican.

I can tell you because I was one. I now wonder what I must have been thinking to be a member of a party that I currently loathe. All I can say is, I was blind, but also, the party is so much worse today than it was back when I thought I believed in it.

After all, who would have thought, Americans, any Americans, would ever advocate the torture of prisoners and the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions?

The main driving engine behind the thinking of a conservative is fear. Fear that generates anger. Fear of change. Fear of people who look different. Fear of not feeling superior.

A feeling of inferiority is what motivates many ultra-conservatives. The way to not feel inferior, is to feel superior by scapegoating, coming up with people you hate, people with whom you disagree, someone you can blame for all the country’s troubles. This is what allows Republicans to ignore the past eight disastrous years of their own rule, and to blame Obama when he’s only been in office a few months.

At the root of conservatism is its inherent racism against blacks. They’ll deny it. But to them, blacks are simple-minded savages with bones in their noses living in mud huts like they often used to appear in movies and television.

Where would someone get a notion like that?

I learned it early. My father was a rock-ribbed Republican. My situation was different than being the son of a card-carrying, sheet-donning member of the Ku Klux Klan. My father was a reasonable man, at times, but he had the average ingrained racism of his day, of white suburbia, that he in turn had learned as a boy, like millions of others.

This is the kind of benevolent reasonable racism millions of Americans still have.

Back in 1962, my father said that Martin Luther King was “stirring ‘em up” (meaning blacks). He (King) was causing trouble talking about equality under the law.

Another time, Dad, who was a decorated World War Two veteran, was making fun of a black truck driver by recalling that the driver had taken the wrong road and blundered into a front line combat zone in France.

I vividly remember him imitating the black’s childish ignorant way of talking. Quaking with fear supposedly, eyes wide like the stereotypical frightened darkie, the black soldier told my father over and over “dis be not a combat truck, ‘dis not a combat truck.”

In other words, my father was not only mocking his ignorance, but his cowardice as well.

Even if we ignore the fact that millions of black Americans served in World War Two with distinction and were decorated, and many of them killed. They have served in every war. I still wish I had had the courage to look up at my father as a boy and honestly say, “Why should a man risk his life for a country that makes him sit on the back of a bus, or eat at a separate lunch counter?”

I would have faced his scorn and contempt if I had said it. But I didn’t. I laughed with him instead like it (his black imitation) was funny. I thought my father was always right.

That’s how I became a Republican.

But there were societal reasons too.

I went to a school where there were no blacks. Before blacks started causing trouble (according to my father) in the mid 1960s, I might have thought they didn’t even exist. They didn’t on TV, unless they were a butler. All the heroes were white.

The blacks. They kept to their side of town, the bad side.

I absorbed this attitude, which is that blacks by protesting were causing trouble. I will say that I think the late Malcolm X was right, that in the 1960s it was only the protests and confrontations that forced white Americans practicing passive racism to finally take notice of the inequities.

If blacks had been quiet, respectful, a credit to their race as racists used to like to say, nothing would have changed. The wrongs would still exist. After all, Republicans have never sponsored Civil Rights legislation.

Most ultra-conservatives today wish they could turn back the clock.

I remember one conservative recently describing liberals, including blacks and women and what he considered faggots as, “the forces of chaos.”

“Chaos” is important psychologically, because it’s a kind of Freudian slip. Central to the conservative is the feeling that the past, where white men used to run everything, was an ordered, peaceful world, the proverbial good old days that continue as a fantasy myth to live on in memory. This was an ideal world where women were always in the kitchen baking pies, where blacks knew their subservient place and were picking cotton or shining shoes, and where greaser Mexicans were where they belonged, in backward, ignorant, chaotic Mexico.

It is this fantasy vision of small town America in the Norman Rockwell mold, where there are no blacks, no crime, with idealized immaculate two-story houses and neatly trimmed gardens, with a Main Street shaded by stately elms, where everyone devoutly attends the same church on Sunday (some Republicans are sexual perverts), where women know their proper subservient roles, that propels today’s conservatives.

To people who like the status quo past, being on top means resisting change, any change, even if it’s for the better.

Conservatives like to view the world in simple terms. They are almost childlike in their concept of good and evil.

So, how did I fall out of the Republican ranks? It’s my wife’s fault. A liberal, she helped pry open my mind. Because I loved and respected her, I listened to her opinions. Ronald Reagan, whom I had voted for, cheated and shocked me in the Iran Contra scandal. Bush Junior launched a war in Iraq by making up the lie that it had weapons of mass destruction. I knew he was lying. The disappointments continued.

Honesty became important to me.

I also suffered the abuse and scorn of relatives who basically threw me out because of my anti-Iraq stance (I was foolish enough to state my opinion in their presence). Conservatives are not tolerant or open-minded people. They do not respect the rights of others.

I considered this a betrayal. Their treatment of me.

But I learned.

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Writes: Ruben Navarrette Jr.

   Luis Ramirez in his death bead [Enlarge Pic]
A 25-year-old undocumented immigrant, Luis Ramirez, from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania suffered head injuries after he was viciously beaten July 12 by a pack of at least six teenagers. Ramirez was left in convulsions and foaming at the mouth. His attackers stomped him so hard that an imprint of the Jesus medallion he wore was embedded on his chest.

Authorities now allege that the thugs who beat Luis shouted racial and ethnic epithets. They’ve charged 16-year-old Brandon J. Piekarsky and 17-year-old Colin J. Walsh as adults with homicide and 18-year-old Derrick M. Donchak with aggravated assault. All three were charged with ethnic intimidation. Another juvenile, whom police haven’t named, was charged with assault, and police are continuing to investigate……..[MORE >>]

REFERENCES:

SANCTIONED IMMIGRANT HATE — VIA CABLE NEWS

Hillary Clinton and surrogates are always quick to assert that she has been vetted fully, and that Barack Obama has not, and that the right-wing Republican Nut-Jobs will inflict withering attacks on him in the general election that he will not survive.

Wrong!

Because all they have is Jeremiah Wright and a handful of crooked freak show attacks — with which to stroke racist fears among whites.

The Clinton’s on the other hand are a ready-made ’smear manufacturing factory’ — bedecked with years of association with more and worse unsavory personal associations?

Here are some supporting documents:

1. What Obama wishes he could say
2. The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’s Dossier on Hillary Clinton — Why Hillary Should Never Be President
3. Bitter and Angry in Rural Pennsylvania: Obama’s Reality vs. Hillary’s Fantasy — QUOTE: “Prejudice, racism and fear do run rampant in areas like this. People are poor. They are in bad health, overweight from a deep-fried diet, and toothless from the lack of dental care. They are unemployed. They are uneducated. They do cling to their hunting rifles and to their religious beliefs. For many, it is about all that they have. The towns around here are full of decaying, boarded up buildings. People live in rundown old trailers with abandoned cars in the front yard. I have seen people using an old car as a stable, with their goat tied to and living in it. I could drive you by a least three old houses that have Conderate flags in the windows.”
4. Fair Play for False Prophets — Do white right-wing preachers have it easier than black left-wing preachers? Is there a double standard?

Editorial Reviews

Book Description: Here’s your one-stop guide to everything Hillary and her staff don’t want you to know. Written in the style and format of Regnery Publishing’s New York Times bestsellers The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and Politically Incorrect GuidesT, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Dossier on Hillary Rodham Clinton is full of fresh reporting, devastating quotes, scandalous stories, funny sidebars, and forgotten but telling incidents from Hillary’s past.

From the Inside Flap: Your one-stop guide to everything Hillary and her handlers don’t want you to know

They adore her in Manhattan. They worship her in Hollywood. They idolize her in the liberal media. But out in the real world are those of us see through her lies about her husband, reject her socialist economics, and despise her radical social agenda. We are the members of what Hillary Clinton described as a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”-and here at VRWC headquarters, we’ve been keeping a file on her. If you’re one of us, The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’s Dossier on Hillary Clinton will give you all the ammunition to help end Hillary’s White House dreams once and for all.

It’s all here: the dirty deals, unsavory incidents, insane proposals, revealing comments, and outright flip-flops in Hillary’s past. You’ll also find the complete record of her activities since leaving the White House, and the machinery she already has in place to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The VRWC’s Dossier also reveals:

* Hillary’s constantly shifting (and consistently self-serving) stance on the Iraq war

* Her unsavory fundraising activities (including her taste for campaign contributions from foreign sources)

* How she used 9/11 as an opportunity to win large federal grants for her well-heeled corporate campaign donors

* Hillary’s relentless efforts to control the flow of information about her-including her calls to slap speech controls on the Internet

* “There’s no such thing as other people’s children”: Hillary’s relentless and unyielding desire for collectivism and government control

* How Hillary has wasted your money on outrageous New York porkbarrel projects

* Solid evidence that she will revive her plan for nationwide socialist healthcare

* Her plan for the economy: not lower taxes, but more government

* President Hillary would be an unmitigated catastrophe for the United States-one from which our nation might never recover. Stop her now: with The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’s Dossier on Hillary Clinton.

* How she has consistently supported policies to facilitate amnesty for illegal immigrants
[On this issue I agree with Hillary 100%] — The racist and xenophobic handling of the immigration reform process by the Republicans, calls for a strong stand in opposition by the eventual Democratic nominee.

More Reviews