The Power of Nightmares

This is Adam Curtis again. I have to tell you, I've learned so much from this man, and I have a PhD, after all, and I read. It's startling, all in all. You should look at his material--which was good enough for the BBC. You will learn a great deal.



Go Nuts! Cuz It's All Done, Unless We Mobilize!

America is (nearly) no more.


The Power of Nightmares

The Threat of Jihad

With the collapse of the Soviet Union (and that itself is an interesting story) the US found itself without an enemy. This ought to have been a occasion of great rejoicing--and with some, it was. It presented a problem. The demise of the superpower which had justified our massive military spending in the past meant that, now, it should become unnecessary. An examination of the information at the folllowing web site will show, however, that the change in actual spending was really quite small.

www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0904490.html

From 1997 to 1998, spending fell from 305.3 billion dollar a year to 296.7, or 8.6 billion dollars. By 1999, we were up to 298.4 and by 2000 we were spending 311.7. Barely a blip here. Still, without something to confront, such expenditure would be difficult to justify, and 300 billion a year is a hell of a lot of money. As the worlds largest arms dealer, a peaceful world would be bad for business. In all honesty, a peaceful world was and is unlikely, but something would be needed to justify spending this kind of money on military preparedness when Americans were chafing at the collapse of school music programs, lunch programs, educational quality and massive heath care costs that left the US at the top of the heap in terms of per capita expenditure on health care, but well down the list on common health care metrics, the most worrisome of which was the number of folks without health care coverage at all. Three hundred million a year would cover a lot of social programs--but those with power in the US don't want social programs.

The US, after 1980, came under the increasing influence of people we now call "neo-cons". These I remember as the pathetic little bastards who populated things like the "Young Americans for Freedom" back in my college days. People like Karl Rove (formerly "Carl", a typo which 'anonymous'--my proof reader--was kind enough to catch for me), Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz come to mind. The neocons had a vision. It required that the US consolidate it's position as the only superpower, and crush any opponent as soon as it seemed a potential threat. This would involve more military spending, and would call for a new sort of military--one that was nimble and mobile and carried massive fire power to crush opponents quickly. The idea would be to maintain American hegemony, and, interestingly, to spread democracy around the world--by force if needed. The neocons recognized that these changes in policy would be controversial and might take a fair amount of time unless there were some Pearl Harbor like episode to galvanize public opinion.

The rest is history. More to come.

Some useful sources.

The War on Truth :

www.amazon.com/War-Truth-Disinformation-Anatomy-Terrorism/dp/1566565960


An amazing book. Get it from the library, if you can. It's pretty reasonable in paperback on Amazon.com.

www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

I'm an economist. The things here were a revalation to me. More on this later.

For those interested in pursuing the threat of jihad, and it's emergence here, there are more links on other posts in this blog.

The Good War

The local paper's editorial for December 18 2007 is entitled "Is Americalosing 'the good war"? How is the war in Afghanistan "good"? The justification for attacking Afghanistan was, initially, that Osama bin Ladin lived there--an element which the paper now characterizes as "a sidelight". We attacked an entire nation because one man lived there--a man we worked with and empowered. There was also the Taliban. It's hard to like the Taliban with their intolerance and repression, but it appears plenty of Afghans agreed with them. The people of Afghanistan did not fly planes on 9/11. There is nothing "good" about attacking a nation and butchering its citizens when that nation and people have done virtually nothing against us. One important lesson in all this (and in the Iraq fiasco as well) is that it you are opposed by terrorists, a massive military engagement is not a useful or appropriate response.