Murder Incorporated - America's Favorite Pastime: Book Two
504
Murder Incorporated - America's Favorite Pastime: Book Two
504eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780998960081 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prison Radio |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2019 |
| Series: | Empire, Genocide, and Manifest Destiny |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 504 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Great Meat Grinder
"What's so noble about being dead?"
— Joe Bonham from Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun
Throughout the 20 century, historians proudly called it "The Great War." But this so-called "great war" was nothing more than another gruesome human spectacle — a monstrous meat grinder. In the years leading up to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the technology of war grew in leaps and bounds. Killing was made significantly easier thanks to the advent of the machine gun, as well as the effectiveness of gas and chemical weaponry. Rapid-fire artillery and tank warfare were lethal beyond anything ever seen before, making hamburger meat out of once living and breathing human beings. And then there was the ghastly reality of trench warfare with the iconic barbed-wire emplacements, where thousands upon thousands would die within hours for the mere advancement of a few yards. This display of futility — which created a grinding battlefield stalemate — was almost comical if not for the horrifying bloodshed. As an example, the vast majority of the British Army was killed in just the first three months of the war. In order to quickly replenish the ranks with new raw meat, the British government loosened their restrictions on volunteer requirements. Had he still been alive, even Joseph (aka John) Merrick (the Elephant Man) would have fit nicely into their ranks.
"Ten million were to die on the battlefield," Howard Zinn reminds us in A People's History of the United States. Add to the ten million another twenty million souls who died from war-related disease and starvation. "And no one since that day has been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life," Zinn writes, "The rhetoric of the socialists, that it was an 'imperialist war,' now seems moderate and hardly arguable."
The War To End All Wars: A Primer
Triggered by the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June of 1914, war erupted across Europe. Unprecedented in its slaughter, this international clash was groundbreaking in that it was being fought by industrial nations mass-producing weapons and drafting armies from entire populations. The war raged until 1918 and set Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey against France, Britain, Italy, Russia, Japan, and finally in 1917, the United States. Although fought early in the 20th century, World War I proved to be a defining and watershed moment in the political landscape of a world gone wrong: the inferno greatly destabilized Europe and set in motion the necessary puzzle pieces that would soon launch World War II.
The European theatres of war included the Eastern Front (which extended from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and cut deep into Central Europe) and the Western Front (which ran for more than 400 miles from the Swiss border to the Belgian coast).
Not to be left out were the oil riches of Mesopotamia. The West already had their sights set on the jackpot: massive amounts of black gold sitting just beneath desert sands. Great Britain occupied Basra — the Turkish port at the entrance of the Persian Gulf — and their goal was to shelter southern oil wells and defend the giant Abadan refinery in Iran. In fact, the British advanced north along the Tigris River toward Baghdad but were beaten back and finally surrendered to the Turks. As you can no doubt see a century later, the same battle continues to rage over control of that black gold.
The so-called "Great War" (like most wars) was being fought for the acquisition of treasure; in this case we find the industrialized countries of Europe scheming and slaughtering for greater control over their colonies and the associated big time booty sitting at the end of rainbows that touched down in the Balkans, in Alsace-Lorraine, throughout Mesopotamia, and deep into Africa. As Helen Keller wrote during her steadfast stance against World War I:
Every modern war has had its roots in exploitation. The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines. The South African War decided that the British should exploit the diamond mines. The Russo-Japanese War decided that Japan should exploit Korea. The present war is to decide who shall exploit the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, Egypt, India, China, Africa. And we are whetting our sword to scare the victors into sharing the spoils with us.
In May of 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a prescient essay entitled "The African Roots of War." This in-depth piece defined the struggle between the Allied Forces and the Germans as nothing more than an imperial battle for empire: "... in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause for this terrible overturning of civilization." Du Bois then reminded his readers why the bodies were piling up in frightening numbers: it was all about the endgame of seizing the ivory and rubber and cocoa and palm oil throughout the motherland, and of course the gold and diamonds buried in South Africa.
Journalist John Silas "Jack" Reed reported from Europe on the war. In an article entitled "The Traders' War" for The Masses magazine, Reed writes:
The Austro-Serbian conflict is a mere bagatelle — as if Hoboken should declare war on Coney Island — but all the Civilization of Europe is drawn in. The real War, of which this sudden outburst of death and destruction is only an incident, began long ago. It has been raging for tens of years, but its battles have been so little advertised that they have been hardly noted. It is a clash of Traders.
It was Reed, in the midst of the Bolshevik Revolution, who wrote the historic journal of revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World. It was Reed who Warren Beatty immortalized in his epic film Reds. And it was Reed who passionately attempted to warn his readers — like I.F. Stone after him and John Pilger and Jeremy Scahill more recently — that governments lie and they lie most about war. "The Great War" was no exception; it was no preposterous "Struggle for Existence" as was advertised to win hearts and minds. Later in "The Traders' War," Reed writes:
The situation in short is this. German capitalists want more profits. English and French capitalists want it all. This War of Commerce has gone on for years, and Germany has felt herself worsted. Every year she has suffered some new setback. The commercial "smothering" of Germany is a fact of current history.
This effort to crowd out Germany is frankly admitted by the economic writers of England and France. It comes out in a petty and childish way in the popular attempts to boycott things "Made in Germany" [flash forward to "Freedom Fries"]. On a larger scale it is embodied in 'ententes' and secret treaties. Those who treat of the subject in philosophical phraseology justify it by referring to the much abused "Struggle for Existence." [Emphasis added]
Reed then emphatically cautioned: "But we must not be duped by this editorial buncombe about Liberalism going forth to Holy War against Tyranny." Buncombe indeed. Utter nonsense. Just like "weapons of mass destruction," imaginary "Tonkin Gulfs," and all the other lies the masters of war invent and construct on their way to kingdom come.
If there was an official "birth" of aggressive modern-day American imperialism with war as the locomotive, one that stepped out from behind continental colonialism and its co-dependent genocide of America's original inhabitants, it was the so-called Spanish-American War of 1898. These belligerent incursions "marked the entrance of the United States into the worldwide scramble for colonies among advanced powers," writes political author Lance Selfa. Laying the foundation that Reed and Keller would dramatically echo, the great feminist and radical warrior Emma Goldman wrote of America's imperial adventures and ensuing plunder throughout Latin America and Asia, including its colonial conquests in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines:
[W]hen we sobered up from our patriotic spree — it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American War was the consideration of the price of sugar; or, to be more explicit, that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of American capitalists.
This grand muscle-pumping foray by Washington into other lands emboldened America's embryonic dreams of empire and was religiously carried forward by Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft during the first decade of the 20 century, but as Lance Selfa explains:
No Democrat put a presidential stamp on U.S. empire until Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913; Wilson ordered military interventions in more countries and stationed more troops for longer periods than either Roosevelt or Roosevelt's Republican successor, William Howard Taft. In particular, Wilson turned the Caribbean Sea into an American lake.
The Patron Saint of American Liberalism
Woodrow Wilson threw the U.S. Marines on the back of his intrusive foreign policy and ordered invasions throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, followed by an all-out occupation of Haiti that lasted until 1934 — the consequences of which have reverberated into the 21 century and continue to hammer the Haitian people to this day. Woodrow Wilson — a man lionized by mainstream historians and presidential scholars as the patron saint of American liberalism and a great humanitarian — has a clear-cut record of violent and unadulterated imperial ventures. In fact, beyond these imperial "skirmishes," mythical "Wilsonian idealism" also included hurling America into World War I to allegedly "make the world safe for democracy." The son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, Wilson naively expected this "Great War" to be the war that would somehow end all wars. In his book The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy, political historian William Pfaff underscores Wilson's magical trip to the moon:
The American intervention in the First World War was an event of lasting consequence because of the meaning assigned to it by Woodrow Wilson ... convinced that the American nation, and he personally, were bearers of a divine commission to reform civilization by abolishing war and extending to the globe the benevolent principles of American democracy and religion.
He believed that the world "will turn to America for those moral aspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom ... and that her flag is the flag not only of America, but of humanity." He reinterpreted the world war as an ideological war ... [It] would be the war "that would end war," producing permanent peace. "[America's world role has come] by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way ... It was of this that we dreamed at our birth."
Pfaff then extended Wilson's foundation straight through the 20th century:
With Woodrow Wilson the Manifest Destiny of the United States ceased to be continental expansion and national power and progress, and was reimagined as a divinely ordained mission to humanity, as American statesmen have interpreted all the nation's subsequent wars. The idea became essential to the American national myth.
"Wilsonian idealism" also included his grandiose plan known as "The League of Nations"— what author Justin Raimondo refers to as "Wilson's stillborn brainchild." William Pfaff describes Wilson's chilling vision:
Wilson offered a plan for postwar security which would rest upon new international institutions based on American conceptions and values, so as to end what eight decades later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, echoing his 1916 rhetoric, would call "the destructive pattern of great power rivalry."
Wilson proposed the creation of a League of Nations, that (as he privately acknowledged) would eventually become an American-dominated world government.
"We are all God's children ... This is God's vision ... Our country has borne a special burden in global affairs ... Our cause is just, our resolve unwavering." Woodrow Wilson? Teddy Roosevelt? Nope — enter Barack Hussein Obama. "In Cairo, at West Point, at Oslo," writes author and filmmaker Tariq Ali, "Obama has treated the world to one uplifting homily after another, each address larded with every euphemism that White House speechwriters can muster to describe America's glowing mission in the world." As discussed in a previous chapter, every president and ruling CEO of the American Empire née republic channels the spirit of John Winthrop and his "City upon a Hill" to underscore American exceptionalism. Ali draws the rock-solid connection between Obama and one of his predecessors:
Historically, the model for this variant of imperial presidency is Woodrow Wilson, no less pious a Christian, whose every second word was peace, democracy or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti and attacked Russia, and his treaties handed one colony after another to his partners in war. Obama is a hand-me-down version of the same, without even Fourteen Points to betray. But cant still goes a long way to satisfy those who yearn for it, as the award to Obama of what Garcia Márquez once called the Nobel Prize for War has graphically shown.
But long before Wilson visualized himself as Captain America, chosen by God to hand-deliver American liberty to all corners of the planet, he professed his firm belief in the almighty dollar ruling the roost. "Writing as a Princeton political scientist more than a decade before he was elected president," writes Lance Selfa, "he concluded that the 'flag followed commerce.'" Wilson wrote these telling words from behind the walls of his privileged and safe ivy-covered Princeton confines:
Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.
Holy shit. The patron saint of American liberalism had unknown demons living beneath his flesh, fiendish imps that resembled Attila the Hun on a bad hair day. In fact, Wilson's thoughts on economic control resembled those of Vito Corleone, proprietor of the Genco Pura Olive Oil Company, who ascribed to the same philosophy when discussing plunder with his associates, only he said it with fewer words and was much more to the point: "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."
The US would never have gone into World War I had it not been for Wilson. He was a compulsive interventionist. Prior to the world war, he sent troops to Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. An unreconstructed southerner, he made Jim Crow law in Washington.
— Gore Vidal
Wilson earned much of his so-called liberal reputation early in his presidency: he helped create progressive income taxes, lobbied for decent working conditions for railroad workers and merchant seamen, fought to limit child labor abuses, and he attempted to (somewhat) restrict corporate power. He even advocated public ownership of the giant American railroad business. But then, of course, the demons emerged: Wilson was raised in the Deep South and Jim Crow was a dear friend of his. In his essay, "Race and Nation in the Thoughts and Politics of Woodrow Wilson," Gary Gerstle concludes that Wilson was ultimately "deeply racist in his thoughts and politics, and apparently he was comfortable with being so."
His actions as president bear this out; in fact, Wilson "did not object when two of his cabinet appointees re-segregated their departments," reports Michael Kazin of The New Republic. It wasn't long before Wilson's racist foundation influenced his aggressive foreign policy, particularly belligerent on brown people. It was an all too familiar policy that embraced the white man's burden of American exceptionalism. Kazin continues: "A crusading Presbyterian, he vowed to 'teach the Latin American republics to elect good men' and dispatched troops to Mexico and Haiti when they didn't follow his advice."
In 1916, Wilson ran for reelection as a candidate ostensibly opposed to American entry into the First World War. William Pfaff characterizes Wilson during this period as a "splendid isolationist." In fact his infamous campaign slogan was "HE KEPT US OUT OF WAR." But, lo and behold, just months after his reelection, Wilson launched the United States (and of course its expendable flesh and blood) into the great meat grinder. The ex-president of Princeton University and ex-Governor of New Jersey used the significant American antiwar sentiment to ensure his second term, while at the same time paving the economic highway that would eventually ensure America's involvement in the war — something American big business was euphoric about as it waited anxiously in the wings.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Murder Incorporated: Empire, Genocide and Manifest Destiny"
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Table of Contents
FOREWORD — S. Brian Willson,
PROLOGUE,
1. THE GREAT MEAT GRINDER,
2. THE WAR AFTER THE WAR TO END ALL WARS,
3. INTERVENTIONS "R" US Building Empire One Dirty Covert Action at a Time,
4. THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Or Empire's Wet Dream,
5. THE BIG MUDDY,
6. EAST TIMOR: EMPIRE'S PLAYGROUND Or Kissinger Strikes Again,
7. CANNON FODDER FOR CAPITALISM,
8. NO,
• Victor Jara,
• Ramona Africa,
AFTERWORD — David Swanson,
ENDNOTES,