by Kalliste
The Military Industrial Complex (MIC), a vast array of American companies dominated by Lockhead Martin, RTX (Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Boeing, but with dozens of other research and development companies who work with governments, to shape weapons procurement and foreign policies to ensure that NATO, AUKUS, AESEAN can continue to project US power across the world.
The US spends about $1 trillion a year on ‘defence’-related purposes, including personnel and weapons, about 50% of the world’s total defence spending, in order to make war on dozens of countries that resist US hegemony, or are simply in the way of their “grand chess game”. They bomb from a safe distance, killing more civilians than enemy soldiers, and destroy infrastructure from dams to hospitals, bridges to schools, all in the name of “world peace”.
Before they bomb however, they sanction. The US uses its petro-dollar hegemony to prevent countries from freely trading their own resources on the world market, stop them from buying the resources they need, often restricting medical equipment, vaccines, food and energy, fertilizers and building equipment, in order to punish the people for the refusal of their governments to enter into unfair and unequal contracts with US and Western companies. These actions, like the sieges of old, strangle economies, cause untold misery and suffering and increase poverty and ill-health. Many more die of starvation, dehydration and easily treatable disease than the bombs, mines and bullets.
Alongside that, the CIA, in collaboration with other secret services, especially MI6 and Mossad, sponsor terrorist groups, use the SBU and other agencies to carry out assassinations of officials, scientists and popular generals, diplomats and religious leaders to disrupt any resistance to regime change. They also stage “false flag” events, crimes against humanity that are blamed on other countries, or their own government, in order to manipulate public opinion at home or abroad, from ‘Russiagate’, to use of chemical weapons attacks, while quietly cyber-hacking nuclear power stations and using depleted uranium weapons themselves, as NATO does, while claiming they don’t cause ecocide and birth defects, as has been found from Serbia to Iraq.
Hand in hand with the NED and NGOs, Foreign Aid and certain “charities in name only” comes the World Bank and International Money Fund, who loan countries money at exorbitant rate to rebuild their countries, or persuade corrupt and ‘regime changed’ political leaders to build vanity projects (because those loans allow money to be diverted into personal pockets), choose the most expensive contracts and leave the people saddled with massive debts that continue long after the projects have been finished (if they are not abandoned because they are unfit for purpose).
Wall Street and the City of London control both the banking and financial industries, from setting the price of metals to the cost of insurance of shipping, from mortgages and bank rates to credit ratings, dictating who can borrow money and how much, to what prices they will buy and sell, controlling where money is invested or withdrawn. They manipulate the cost of those loans to impose austerity measures that leave the people destitute, but increase profits for those financial institutions.
The sanctions now cover more than 60 countries, from Cuba to Syria, the wars are endless, with the US/NATO bombing at least one country and its civilians every year since WW2 despite claiming to “keep the world safe”, and overall poverty increases as wealth is funnelled upwards to an increasingly small number of people; now 1% of the world population control 50% of the world’s total wealth.
Just as all this inequality and social injustice has happened through deliberate organisation, none of this has happened without resistance. When the UN recognised the inception of Israel and White South Africa in 1948 they didn’t necessarily recognise that “righting some wrong” by one ideology would result in the atrocious imposition of another, i.e. apartheid and the construction of ethno-fascist states would ensue. Resistance to occupation and injustice is a human right, but increasingly it has been weaponised against us by labelling it “terrorism” while real terrorists are used for ‘regime change’ and to suppress genuine resistance. South Africa was freed of political apartheid in 1994, but Israel has continued its policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide protected by the US and Western governments, despite universal condemnation of its crimes against humanity in the rest of the world. However, Gaza is not the only place where genocide is used by the West to further its political agenda. It has been used by Imperialist and Colonial powers for centuries, then whitewashed from our history.
The West is an Empire of Lies, where we are lied to about what is really happening to us, and to the rest of the world, and why. Its media is controlled centrally by monopoly companies to promote propaganda and dumb-down the population, distracting them with trivia and sports/betting. The entertainment industry promotes violence and dehumanisation of minorities and decadence. While Western countries have been de-industrialised as multinational corporations out-sourced industry to other parts of the world, so the workers in the west are relegated to low-paying service and caring jobs and reliance on imports while being manipulated into hating those who continue to be self-sufficient or produce the necessities that so many can no longer afford.
Ordinary people are encouraged to identify with the ruling class and believe the fantasy that their obscene wealth is all because of superiority or “manifest destiny” – that they are deserving of their success, rewarded for their greater “work ethic”. Their media encourages us to ignore the grim realities of inequality and injustice inflicted on the majority. Instead, we are supposed to believe that when austerity measures are imposed to maintain exorbitant profits it is because we are the “victims” of other countries’ over-production or trade restrictions, not the sanctions and tariffs of our own governments pursuing profits for the few at the expense of the many.
The media – their media, the bosses’ media, is censored and misinforms us about the activities, agenda and true goals of military and financial institutions, imperialist governments, UK, EU, NATO and the US. This is why the Empire of the West has earned the disgust of the rest of the world for the crimes these governments commit in our name.
When we protest about the genocide in Gaza we must also protest about the genocide in Yemen, the genocide in Syria, and the genocide in Donbas, and who is funding it, facilitating it, and doing it – using the proxies of the West, Israel and Ukraine.
It is not enough to call for a ceasefire, or a just peace. That is just kicking the can down the road. We must dismantle imperialist capitalism itself, including its military industrial complex which is only good for endless war, genocide and ecocide, and the financial institutions that serve the ruling class against the workers. We need the working class to rule society.
