Troubled times: A Conceptual Approach to Understanding Barbarism

ON CONCEPTS. A concept is a mental representation of a class of objects in the world. It is the "glue that holds our mental world together", according to Gregory L. Murphy.  It is part of the air we breath.  Murphy continues, "When we walk into a room, try a new restaurant, go to the Supermarket to buy groceries, meet a doctor, or read a story, we must rely on our concepts of the world to help us understand what is happening". Concepts are also that "glue" that ties, Murphy continues, "past experiences to our present interactions with the world, and because the concepts themselves are connected to our larger knowledge structures (see Murphy's A Big Book Of Concepts). Our problem, as concerned citizens, is that very often the best known news media sound and read as if they lacked concepts, that is, as if they were disconnected from "our larger knowledge structures".  They mostly sound and read rather as simple extensions of the White House office that indefatigably churns out the administration's propaganda disguised as information.

"When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change", explained Wittgenstein in his posthumously published notes titled, On Certainty.  Long before the George W. or the Clinton administrations, before even 1984, what we mostly hear and read in the news media are expressions of Newspeak, the official language spoken by high government officials and all politicians of Republican or Democratic obedience.  In Newspeak, attachment to facts and truth, all commitment to a free and objective discussion of events, is banned.  So is the use of reason, logic, and verification. News is "entertainment", a "product" made to order, custom-made by propaganda bureaus to be sold every minute in "different" shapes to make it look "new", "fresh", "exciting". In Newspeak the meanings of words change and the concepts do too.This has murderous consequence--for millions and millions of people. The world over.

NEWSPEAK IN ACTION.  Destruction is called "construction", oppression is termed "freedom", starvation is "humanitarian feeding", illegal weapons of mass destruction are "means of liberation". Every day, every hour tons and tons of bombs are dropped by American military aircraft on cities and towns and villages in Iraq.  President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are leading the destruction and the invasion of this country, with full blessings offered by Congress and the Democratic and Republican parties. People: women, men, children--are being murdered today after many years of deprivation and even starvation under the American designed and imposed UN embargo.

This criminal activity has--of course--a Newspeak name; it is called "Operation Iraqi Freedom".

George W. says: "We have no ambition in Iraq, except the liberation of its people".  With the help of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Bush administration is bringing freedom to the Iraqis by battering them with bombs and the most "sophisticated" means of destruction the British and US armies possess.  They are destroying Iraq systematically, relentlessly, in their mission to save it.  They are destroying Iraq's civilian infrastructures, demolishing its cities, Baghdad in particular, to reconstruct them.

For this purpose, all means of destruction are good: missiles and bombs and planes and ships and tanks.  And, of course, depleted uranium shells (DU).  Yes, the munitions that the United Nations classifies as illegal weapons of mass destruction and which usage "is equivalent to a war crime", "a crime against humanity".  On March 30, 2003, Neil Mackay, investigations editor for Scotland's Sunday Herald, relayed the following: "In 1991, the Allies fired 944, 000 DU rounds or some 2,700 tons of DU tipped bombs. [. . .] The Pentagon has admitted that 320 metric tons of DU were left on the battlefield after the first Gulf war, although Russian military experts say 1000 metric tons is a more accurate figure."  The use of DU is cited as the most likely cause of the increased number of birth deformities--babies born without eyes or without the crowns of their skulls, for instance--and cancer in Iraq after 1991.  DU has been blamed also for the effects of Gulf war syndrome--typified by chronic muscle and joint pain, fatigue and memory loss--among 200,000 US soldiers.  Worse still: "A study of Gulf war veterans showed that 67% had children with severe illnesses, missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems and fused fingers".

The official "justification" for the bombing and invasion of Iraq is that Saddam has "illegal weapons of mass destruction" and that the war on Iraq is a "preemptive" action to forestall the possible usage of those weapons.Today, the only country using weapons of mass destruction, the only country using weapons that cause immediate and hereditary harm to persons, the only country using munitions "which leave a toxic wasteland behind them and kill indiscriminately" is the United States!

WHY THE WAR ON IRAQ?  We find a clear answer already in September 29, 2002.  Jay Bookman wrote and published a piece in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, showing how the policy followed by the Bush administration is closely based on a report prepared in 2000 by 27 "contributors", notably the following six who later were appointed to key positions: Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary, John Bolton, undersecretary of state, Stephen Cambone, head of the Pentagon's Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation, Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross, members of the Defense Policy Board, I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and Dov Zakheim, comptroller for the Defense Department.  The document, entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses," was drafted by Wolfowitz, who at the time was defense undersecretary for policy, and when Richard Cheney was defense secretary.  Bookman specifies in a very clear way the policy that the United States should apply to achieve an unrestricted global domination is by a systematic recourse to its military might. Moreover, it is only by invading Iraq that the U.S. can "create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran".

The Bush administration's National Security Strategy report released in Sept. 20, 2002, contains all the important elements of the policy advocated in the 2000 Rebuilding America's Defenses document.  By "embracing pre-emptive attack against perceived enemies", "ignoring international opinion if that suits U.S. interests", "convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities", the Bush administration's report, in Bookman's words, "lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern.  And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence".  As that report specifies, "The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops."  Bookman explains in detail:

Because they were still just private citizens in 2000, the authors of the project report could be more frank and less diplomatic that they were in drafting the National Security Strategy.  Back in 2000, they clearly identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as primary short-term targets, well before President Bush tagged them as the Axis of Evil.  In their report, they criticize the fact that in war planning against North Korea and Iraq, past Pentagon wargames have given little or no consideration to the force requirements necessary not only to defeat an attack but to remove these regimes from power.  To preserve the Pax Americana, the report says U.S. forces will be required to perform "constabulary duties"--the United States acting as policeman of the world--and says that such actions demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations. To meet those responsibilities, and to ensure that no country dares to challenge the United States, the report advocates a much larger military presence spread over more of the globe, in addition to the roughly 130 nations in which U.S. troops are already deployed.  More specifically, they argue that we need permanent military bases in the Middle East, in Southeast Europe, in Latin America and in Southeast Asia, where no such bases now exist.  That helps to explain [why] the Bush administration rushed to install U.S. troops in Georgia and the Philippines, as well as our eagerness to send military advisers to assist in the civil  war in Colombia. (http://www.ajc.com).Of course, one must not forget the oil. As Michael Klare has put it, "Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather oil as fuel.  Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It's having our hand on the spigot." (http://www.motherjones.com, March/April 2003)

CORPORATIONS RULE.   The executive, legislative, and judicial bodies comply.

This is the reality behind the term "globalization".  This is the political economy of present day capitalists.  Carol Brouillet writes, "The heart of the global economy remains a 'war economy' which is the most lucrative business on the planet; it is in the economic interests of all the major powers to have a war going on.  Enemies, particularly 'terrorists' justify the 'police state' and the construction of more weapons and 'defense systems.' Despite the horrific loss of life during all the conflicts in the twentieth century, more people were killed by their own governments than by any wars between nation states.  More and more, war itself is being 'privatized', outsourced to mercenaries [and corporations, see below].  The giant oil companies depend upon the military or private armies to aid in the construction and defense of their operations.  Cheney's Halliburton serves the oil industry and the military providing 'support services', living off of US wars and 'counter-insurgency' operations in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Burma, Croatia, Haiti, Kuwait, Nigeria, Russia, Rwanda, and Somalia and elsewhere.  Just recently its offshoot, Brown and Root, won the lucrative supply contract for the operations in Afghanistan, hardly a surprise in the revolving door between the government and the major military ontractors. (www.rense.com)

The consequences are both international and national.  In his treatise "On War" General Carl von Clausewitz (1827) defines war as "an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will".  Transnational corporations have as opponents not only foreign peoples but their national working populations too.  They seek every mean possible to compel the workers and the general population to fulfill their ever profit-hungry will.   Somewhat technical explanations are in order here.As Paul Mattick, a distinguished economist, rites in 1972:  It is not production and productivity as such which propel capitalism, but the production of profits as the accumulation of capital.  For instance, it is not a physical inability to produce which leads to a decline of production in a crisis situation, but the inability to produce profitably. The commodity glut on the market indicates the difference between production and capitalist production.  It is, then, not the technical power to produce 'abundance' which determines the state of the capitalist economy, but erely the power--or lack of it--to produce an abundance of profit.  A technology of actual or potential 'abundance' does not imply a real abundance capable of satisfying existing social needs. Paul Mattick, Critique of Marcuse (New York, Herder and Herder, 1972.)

The motor and the fuel of capitalism is always, invariably, profit--not the satisfaction of actual needs of people.  Profit is the sine qua non, the essential condition for the very existence of capitalism.  And profit must be obtained and increased unceasingly at all cost--no matter how and to what extent this brings about damage or destruction for the working people and the environment.  Each corporation produces for the market and materializes its profits through the sale of their commodities. There is a perpetual competition among corporations and thus a perpetual pressure to reduce production costs, which, for each capitalist enterprise, means mainly labor costs.  The pressure is relieved to a certain extent through technological innovations, which allow the same, or a smaller, amount of labor to produce more commodities than before.

But this only puts the problem back for a short while.  New markets have to be found constantly for the increased number of commodities.  And the search for profits through the increase of production and the expansion of markets through more and more competitive prices encounters limits that cannot be surpassed during more or less prolonged periods.  While profits have to be in continuous expansion for capitalist businesses to survive, the pressure to reduce labor costs constantly not only creates conflicts between the owning class and the workforce they command but also poverty among the workers.

Production in the framework of capitalism encounters other difficulties and even more fundamental and unavoidable contradictions. But in our society those problems appear as marketing problems, as a lack of effective demand (in the sense of a lack of buying-power, that social situation in which there are enormous needs to satisfy in terms of medical services, food, lodging, education, clothing, transportation, etc., but not enough money to satisfy them, particularly among the working population), which leads to reduced production and unemployment, and finally to recession and depression.  So, the continuous search for profit, the absolutely unavoidable need to obtain and expand profits is also the perpetual antagonism of economic interests between the private owners of the means of production and the majority of the population living on their wages and salaries, because their sole renewable and marketable possession is their skills and a capacity to produce.  We are naming here the unofficially but quite effectively proscribed term: the class-struggle".A struggle that takes place both within each country and in the international sphere.  And a struggle that can turn into a war.  For, as Clausewitz further remarks, "war is a mere continuation of policy by other means."  To explain this, he shows in his treatise why "war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political  commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means".  This applies clearly today.  In the international domain, the war has become a direct source for corporate profit.

THE PRIVATIZATION OF WAR.  Indeed, war, is being outsourced in many different ways to corporations.  Among them Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, who has thousands of employees working alongside US troops in Kuwait and Turkey under a package deal worth close to a billion dollars.  Through its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root Halliburton has secured a 10-year contract with the Pentagon to run military operations anywhere in the world for a profit.  Halliburton has a long term contract with the Pentagon in the Balkans, and is also present in Afghanistan.  Cheney served as chief executive of Halliburton until he stepped down to become George W.'s running mate in the 2000 presidential race.  But this in no way means that he has cut all economic ties with this corporation.  It would appear from Cheney's 2001 financial disclosure statement that Halliburton is paying him every year, over a five-year period, a --deferred compensation' of up to $1 million following his resignation in 2000. (http://www.washingtonpost.com, March 29, and http://www.corpwatch.org, March 20.) Until this link became a media scandal in the last days of March, Halliburton was one of the five US corporations invited to bid for contracts "in what may turn out to be the biggest reconstruction project since the Second World War". Among the four other short-listed companies there is the Bechtel Group Inc, once headed by former secretary of state George P. Schulz.

The amount of money involved in such contracts is not "peanuts":  the government is proposing to spend $2.4 billion on "humanitarian aid" and "reconstruction" once it has finished its mission of maiming and starving and injuring people and destroying hospitals, apartment buildings, houses and all kinds of infrastructure in Iraq.

The Center for Public Integrity published very recently a special report giving some interesting information. For instance, Richard Perle, one of the most vocal advocates of the war on Iran, chaired the administration's Defense Policy Board until March 27, when he was forced to resign because of the wave of indignation that rapidly developed upon the widespread disclosure of his ties to companies with significant contracts from the Pentagon.  He resigned the chairmanship but he remains a member of the board.  And he is in good company.  "Of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board, the government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon, at least nine have ties to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002", says the special report.   This board works in total secrecy and is not accountable to the public, of course.  Its "members are selected by and report to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy--currently Douglas Feith, a former Reagan administration official.  All members are approved by the Secretary of Defense [currently Donald Rumsfeld, who held the job also in 1975-77 under President Ford and was Middle East Representative under President Reagan; he was chairman and CEO of General Instrument Corp. and served on the boards of several national and transnational corporations. (http://www.opensecrets.org).  The board's quarterly meetings--normally held over a two-day period--are classified, and each session's proceedings are summarized for the Defense Secretary.  The board, whose list of members reads like a who's who of former high-level government and military officials, focuses on long-term policy issues such as the strategic implications of defense policies and tactical considerations, including what types of weapons the military should develop.

In February 2003, the topics discussed on the first day included North Korea, Iran and Total Information Awareness, the controversial Pentagon research program that aims to gather and analyze a vast array of information on Americans.  Research for this program is being conducted by private contractors. (http://www.publicintegrity.org).

WAR AGAINST THE WORKING POPULATION IN THE U.S.  To quote Clausewitz once again, "Violence, that is to say, physical force (for there is no moral force without the conception of States and Law), is therefore the means; the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the ultimate object."  It is along these same lines that Carol Brouillet is probably thinking when she writes: The Patriot Act, the Anti-Terrorist Act, the Homeland Security Act are direct assaults upon the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Democracy.

Worse, these pieces of legislation are being mirrored worldwide to criminalize and discourage dissent everywhere.  The War on Communism was replaced by  the War on Drugs, and now by the War on Terrorism--broadly defined as any opposition to official power.  No matter if the U.S. is the only country to be convicted of terrorism by the World Court, or that our behavior as a nation is blatantly illegal and evokes the world's anger; this will not be mentioned by a subservient press.  We've lost so much, regressing to before the Magna Carta, to the time of the Inquisition, the times of torture, secret evidence, and secret executions.  The heart of the Magna Carta is that no man--even the king--is above the law. (see http://www.rense.com)

All this and more has been supported and advocated by both the Republican and the Democratic parties. The war against Iraq received bipartisan approval in Congress, and by the same token Congressional authorization was given to the Bush administration to wage   war against constitutionally protected rights at home. As always, the two-party political front was and remains united in all essential attacks against the working population, here and abroad.

The case of Medicaid shows this clearly. While members of Congress pledged quick approval of President Bush's $74.7 billion request for war spending (already described by a Senator as being "just a down payment on the occupation of Iraq"), and while the rich will get a $350 billion tax cut, most states are being forced to rise taxes and cut drastically in the areas of education, public safety and health benefits for those who manage to keep their Medicaid coverage.  Medicare's mission is to provide care for poor and disabled Americans who cannot afford health insurance.  Now, in March, news was released that "more than 1.7 million low-income Americans have lost or might lose government-subsidized health care" coverage if the U.S. government does not provide general grants for states with the largest shortfalls. In California, Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, has already said that he "wants to cut 543,000 of 6.5 million residents receiving Medicaid".  Five other states have already announced too the number of people they are going to deprive of Medicare.  In addition to cutting people from Medicaid rolls, some states are eliminating certain types of care from coverage or are limiting their use in several ways.  According to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured (an institute that analyzes health care coverage for the poor), 45 states are limiting prescriptions, charging new or higher co-payments, requiring use of generic drugs, and requiring that Medicaid approve a drug before a physician prescribes it.  37 states are freezing or reducing rates paid to hospitals, nursing homes and doctors. 27 states are toughening eligibility rules to increase the number of people excluded from the system. 25 states are reducing benefits, including coverage for dental work and hospitalization.  17 states are increasing co-payments for emergency room visits, ambulances and doctor visits. The impact of all these measures is a frontal attack on the working population. Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, told USA Today: "The result of these cuts is going to be a skyrocketing number of uninsured.  We talk about the nation's 'safety net' having holes.  Well, it's being completely tattered." (http://www.usatoday.com).

"AFTER THE FINAL NO THERE COMES A YES AND ON THAT YES THE FUTURE WORLD DEPENDS", wrote Wallace Stevens. And I think he was right.  Before and during the war on Iraq people all over the world have participated by the millions in the largest political demonstrations ever seen in history, to condemn the U.S.-British military aggression against this country.  The demonstrations and the myriad of forms of expression of opposition to the war have continued and will certainly persist until the war stops.  The war on Iraq is part of the more general war against all working people, their families, the youth of each country.  It is perhaps necessary to give a more organized expression in each country and internationally to the resistance and opposition of all peoples to the criminal and barbarian political economy of capitalists.  I, personally, am not an activist. I was born in Mexico and grew up within a working-class (mostly South Asian), North East London community.  I am trained as a professor of U.S. ethnic and South Asian literature. However, a person close and dear to me tells me that among the most consistent and lucid activists he knows in the United States are those working for the building of the union-based Labor Party in this country.  He also mentions in particular among those activist the ones that are members of Socialist Organizer, the U.S. fraternal section of the Fourth International.  As such, they are committed to "helping advance the struggle for independent political action by the working class and all the oppressed--at home and abroad".  In their stated purposes, they say also that they "seek to help root the Labor Party in the struggles of the working class and aim to chart a path for this new party that spells out a clean and decisive break with the twin parties of the bosses, the Democrats and the Republicans". (ilcinfo@earthlink.net)  With respect to the activities they deploy in the international framework, these activists, in close connection with the Fourth International, "are active builders of the campaigns and activities of the International Liaison Committee for a Worker's International", which also focuses in "the defense of the independent organizations of the worker's movement throughout the world, particularly trade unions", and is "committed to the fight to build mass worker's parties and a Workers' International independent of all currents committed to the preservation of the status quo."