Since it has become increasingly obvious over the course of the Ukraine War that some politicians have learned absolutely nothing from two world wars, it is high time to reflect on the warning words of Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell speech in January 1961 and make it clear to these militarists that any further escalation is completely irresponsible. This requires understanding the larger political context of the conflict; because what is presented to citizens as a determined defense of freedom is actually the path to its unerring destruction.
- Freedom is not granted for free
According to the title of George Orwell's prophetic novel - 1984 - the liberal democracy founded in the USA in 1776 could have been displaced already 40 years ago by a dictatorial empire - a state that uses sophisticated surveillance technology and an army of obedient agents to bring its citizens into a status of disenfranchisement, oppression and dependence. This would have stabilized its power by personally spying on the attitudes of their individual subjects in order to either discriminate them or include them in the ranks of their officials, depending on the result. Criticism of the system would have been suppressed with this personnel policy and through a propaganda apparatus.
Since the beginning of civilization with the emergence of the first cities, autocracy has characterized most of human history, while freedom and democracy have been limited to episodes (one of the longest during the period of the Roman Republic). The simple reason is that freedom is not given for free, but must be fought for, guarded and defended against the never-ending claims to power of authoritarian people. However, this necessity has not been sufficiently anchored in the consciousness of the citizens of Western countries for well over a century - too long to have remained without serious consequences.
Thomas Jefferson, one of the co-founders of the democratic social model in the USA, recognized that a sovereign, great power has the role of a peaceful example and not that of a world policeman who has to enforce his ideas of order through military means: “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be." This quote implicitly conveys the spirit of understanding, generosity and fairness (not of coward appeasement!) that characterize the politics of an authentic democratic great power, which is characterized by idealistic, freedom-minded people. The concept is based on the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome. Once it had risen to become a sovereign, superior power with the corresponding authority, the expansion of the Roman Empire was carried out primarily according to the model principle, with marginal peoples adapting to the Romans by adopting advanced technology, lifestyle and language.
Under the conditions of modern transport and communication technology, the entire world would have been open to the USA after its rapid rise in the 19th century - to unite the majority of peoples and nations in a prosperous community of values on this non-violent path to this day. But because the necessary critical vigilance was lacking, people who sought power managed to undermine the hard-fought principle of mutual respect for civil liberties and legal equality in a democracy and to establish a privileged power of money. The (also ideological) roots of this undemocratic group of people lie in Great Britain, where intertwined feudal and moneyed nobility has significantly influenced the course of politics for over 400 years. The crown colonies of the British Empire formed the huge experimental field of the ultra-rich, where their trading companies - protected from competitors ‘thanks’ to royal privileges - were able to make gigantic extra profits against the rules of the fair market. Since much money corrupts the character, it was no wonder that plunder, disenfranchisement, slave transport and drug trafficking (in China also the forced import of drugs) were part of the business model.
2. Autocracy is the mother of militarism
Since said privileges also included sovereign rights, the EIC, the East India Company, alone could maintain a military force larger than that of the British state. It is certainly no coincidence*) that in his vision of the future “1984” Orwell highlighted opaque militarism as one of the characteristics of ‘his’ totalitarian regime “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” *) He served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, part of British India, from 1922 to 1927.
The fact that militarism has its roots in democratically uncontrolled, autocratic rule should actually be known to Western citizens from the chilling examples of feudal aristocratic rule. Back then, princes and kings sacrificed their citizens and especially their soldiers in wars that were not intended to defend the population, but rather to maintain and expand their personal power. However, since this important connection remained outside the consciousness of citizens, Dwight D. Eisenhower's urgent words could not be clearly classified when he warned his American compatriots about the MIC in his farewell speech after 8 years of presidency in 1961 and in the middle of the Vietnam War. This Military-Industrial Complex made up of high-ranking representatives of the secret services, the military, the arms industry and politics is leading the USA and the Western world on a suicidal militaristic path. “MIC” should actually be called MIFC, where the F stands for Financial and emphasizes that the financial establishment is the main force behind militarism. Reference https://laroucheorganization.com/article/2023/12/22/zepp-larouches-christmas-message-turn-swords-plowshares.
3. Sponsored military actions against free civilization
The fact, that militarism is absolute counter-productive for the spread of freedom and democracy, should have been recognized as early as the Spanish-American War of 1898-1899. In particular, the absurd military activism in the Philippines has caused the greatest damage to the American nation and its liberal-democratic ideals. When the US military oppressed the local civilian population with brutality bordering on genocide, the American public was shielded from this truth by censorship, so that criticism remained too weak to put an end to such military actions and the anti-principle of censorship for all future purposes. Reference https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/geschichte/guerrillakrieg- Amerikas-suendenfall/1467292.html
At the beginning of the 20th century, the direct interference of American bankers in the politics of other countries further damaged the democratic concept. At that time, large sections of the Japanese society were already strongly inclined towards progressive influences from Europe and the USA, so that a peaceful community of values was emerging across ethnic and cultural boundaries. Such integrative tendencies, however, would have contradicted the autocrats' old strategy of keeping their rivals at odds with each other. The ‘solution’ came with loans from the financial establishment to Japanese militarists, which enabled them to wage war against Russia in 1904-1905.
In China, Western financial oligarchs have exerted an even greater influence on the course of history, again to the detriment of the democratic model. After the end of the backward imperial rule, the USA admirer Dr. Sun Yat-Sen was elected as the first president. But 'thanks' to the intervention of the financial oligarchy, he and the republic were replaced just a few months later by a dictatorship of the primitive militarist Yuan Shikai. This 'successful' intervention was followed by decades of civil war until Taiwan's secession in 1949.
The list of examples of destructive influence by the moneyed elite to the immeasurable damage to the ideals of freedom, democracy and the reputation of the United States also includes the financing of Lenin and Hitler.
4. The information war
Now, at the beginning of 2024, we would not be faced with this shambles of Western security policy and the prospect of a suicidal Third World War if rational lessons had been learned from the history of past wars and civil wars. But citizens and politicians have not been given a fair chance to do this. For example, how could people learn from the dozens of interventions in Latin America (often by replacing democratically elected governments and moderate forces with dictators using militant insurgents) when the comments on television and print media created understanding for each of these gross violations of self-proclaimed principles and presented cheap excuses as valid justifications? Reference https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger.
The information war launched during the Spanish-American War continues to this day. Only now, after decades of paralyzed critical vigilance, the number of citizens, journalists and politicians who perceive this war by manipulative means as just what it is, is growing since the Corona pandemic. If the grotesque interference with freedom of information 125 years ago during the Spanish-American War had been countered decisively in its early stages, the original simple filtering of unpleasant information could not have been developed into such a complex propaganda system. Thus, especially in times of war like now, a fair assessment of the situation is extremely difficult.
The establishment of the Creel Committee during World War I and the Office of War Information during World War II clearly demonstrated the disingenuous intent and polarizing effect of biasing opinion towards war readiness. Today, this immoral 'task' is partly taken over by the CIA, as can be seen from the fact that the secret service spends around 1/3 of its gigantic budget on the public presentation of its demonstrably not always correct information. Reference Victor Machetti, in The Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1989 (Vol. 9, No. 3), pages 305-320.
This propaganda-like presentation regularly amounts to a whitewash of Western military actions, which are consequently accepted by citizens, while the disastrous consequences have been kept out of peoples' minds for over a century. The distraction worked 'well' for so long because the propaganda apparatus (with the oligopolistic big news agencies being part of it) has billions in budgets and the latest technology at its disposal. Also, in Western countries the structures and political representatives of the democratic state are still given a head start in trust. In this atmosphere, citizens, journalists, governments and parliamentarians reinforce each other's illusion that their own policies, especially those of the USA, always represent morally correct principles. Generally, mutual trust is a key element for the stability of a society. But after decades of the MIFC having done very little to justify the trust placed in it by Western citizens, the situation is up to become dangerous in foreign and domestic policy without restoring critical vigilance. In addition to the countries currently involved in the war, EU Europe, Iran, China, Taiwan and the USA are threatened, the latter above all by an emerging civil war.
The following explanations are intended to help people mentally arm against being incited to adopt military 'solutions'. In this context, criticism of US policy is not criticism of the USA, but on the contrary of its actual rivals, who are gradually undermining the liberal democracy and fair market economy of this great nation founded in 1776 to this day. As soon as citizens break away from the comfortable consumption of the monotonous news offered by the mainstream and inform themselves independently, they come across two gaping gaps - on the one hand, the one between a dizzying amount of effort (which ruins state-budgets) and the 'success' of Western military policy, which often has to be looked for with a magnifying glass. Secondly, there is the gap between the ideological-moral demands and the actual results. If you consider, for example, the enormously diverse and complex activities of Western secret services in developing highly effective interrogation methods, forms of biogenetic manipulation, unobtrusive ways of eliminating people as well as perfecting surveillance systems, methods of psychological warfare and cyber war techniques, then on the results page you should have an effective fight against crime, in particular a paralysis of the international drug trade and a massive reduction in corruption. Military operations should be the rare exception and be completed within a short period of time with lasting success, so that people are not uprooted and traumatized in endless civil wars (like in Somalia, Syria and Libya), but actually liberated and given over to their right to self-determination.
5. Misguided development policy has created dependencies and destroyed balances
As influential forces of the MIFC have undermined the original concept of the peaceful diffusion of progressive models of life based on the Roman concept and replaced it with an empathy-free militarism, the leading nations of civilization have steered themselves into the current existential danger. Instead of serving our security, this fundamentally wrong policy, which ignores simplest psychology, has dangerously undermined the international security structure despite of an unprecedented effort (over 40 countries have been involved in the 'coalition of the willing' against Iraq).
At the same time, the backward regions have been led on a disharmonious course in which the free development of individual people has been restricted and the ecological balance with their environment has gotten out of control. Meanwhile, Africa is growing by over 100,000 inhabitants every day. The demographic distortions in relation to the low-birth-rate free civilization threaten the latter primarily through migration flows, the extent of which exceeds any chances for integration.
The development aid that began soon after World War II arose from the constructive idea of accelerating the non-violent spread of democratic civilization. But the control sovereignty over the projects shifted unnoticed from the hands of the Western donor countries to those of a growing number of supposedly charitable NGOs and NPOs, the UN and its sub-organizations, the World Bank and the IMF (=IMF). This development was not only worrying because it made large international corporations the real winners of the big money redistribution mill instead of people striving for freedom. The erroneous fragments of principles and ideology that determined the course of development policy under this management proved to be even more destructive.
The functioning of the fully automatic (self-financing) model of the spread of ideas through undisturbed trade, through copycat effects and through migration from the civilized centers to the more backward peripheral areas would have required nothing more than the continuation of the truly free and fair market economy that existed during the founding decades of the USA. Instead, large parts of government development aid flowed into the coffers of already (also tax-) privileged corporations by commissioning them with development projects or aid programs. Small companies that could have taken on an important role model function for the backward countries have largely been pushed aside, among other things, through bureaucratic obstacles such as corporate-friendly customs regulations. Practices of the banking system also contribute to the anti-SME environment, for example by setting surreal hurdles when opening accounts and transferring funds. The underlying money laundering laws, have not brought the drug trade under control, but only weakened the middle class. If you read the programs and future visions of the NGOs and other organizations that dominate development aid, you will notice that it is rarely about promoting self-employment or setting up small businesses but more often about large investments. Of course, these can only be provided by said organizations, corporations or wealthy investors. As a result, democracies become just as dependent as autocratically ruled countries. That’s because they all have to position themselves in an investor and corporate-friendly way - to not be left out of the money redistribution carousel. In this development model dominated by the financial establishment, an essential basic rule is violated - namely that sustainable help must ALWAYS be help for self-help. Any other approach leads to dependencies – which is in the interest of all autocrats who want to have control over everything and therefore want dependent, docile subjects.
6. The Revival of Critical Vigilance
Given the imminent danger of a third world war, now, at the beginning of 2024, it is time to become aware of the horribly neglected vigilance against autocratic ambitious forces. It's about overcoming a naivety that is particularly attributed to the Germans, but which is hardly less common among other peoples and nations in the European-American cultural area. It is largely due to this immune deficiency against manipulative influence that they are now on the verge of being sent into a gigantic war against each other for the fourth time - because WW I was preceded by the Crimean War (1853-1856). In this case, Great Britain and France intervened in a dispute between Russia and the Ottoman Empire - against the priority of European solidarity on the side of the Turks. The manageable regional dispute was expanded into a major war with around 1 million deaths. In the historical context, this war marked a move in the wrong direction. While the young USA had exemplified the excellent functioning of the peaceful integration of free people from all parts of Europe, the united British financial and feudal nobility not only thwarted such a process in Europe, but turned it into its opposite, by excluding the largest European nation, the Russians.
The Ukraine War and the Fifth Middle East War are just the beginning of a longer, long-since foreseeable chain of wars and civil wars, the deeper causes of which can hardly be traced back to Russian militarism, the unforgiveness of Hamas or to Israel's harsh counter-attack. Rather, these deeper roots are found in the West, more precisely in the money-controlled NGOs, in the sleepy media, in the lack of democratic control of the MIC militarists and in politicians whose complacency makes it extremely difficult for them to recognize the hypocrisy of their political perception in the mirror. The best way to break away from this is to follow the rule that Martin Luther King recognized as essential for survival, according to which one must (learn to) understand one's opponents and enemies.