Blood Money

War is okay if it makes enough money. Even if countless innocent people are killed. Even when the reasons given for going to war are complete fabrications, which they almost always are. Money trumps peace, and much of the money made is literal blood money. This is the ugly truth and we all know it.

We hold such blind faith in capitalism's blessings that we're completely willing to kill, on large scales, in its name. Yes, I said "willing" because we let it happen when we're supposed to live in a democratic society, which means we cannot completely blame our governments; we elect them time after time; we get the government we deserve.

I'm always amazed that so many people go along with the government lies that blame Muslim terrorists for their blind fanaticism. They blame a religion, Islam, for providing its followers hate for The West, an idea promoted by western governments with phrases like "they hate us for our freedoms", while remaining blind to their own faith in capitalism, which has them prioritize profits over everything else, even human lives. I guess that's why they so eagerly swallow the hate-mongering against the inhabitants of the planet's richest depository of natural minerals and sources of fossil fuels.

"We will bring democracy to the Middle East", or "we will free those people from their dictatorial rulers", sounds so much better than "we will kill large amounts of innocent people to get their oil, natural gas and rare metals". Make no mistake: war is a money making business, any type of large scale destruction does wonders for certain parties in the economy. Haliburton, KBR, Boeing, General Motors, General Electric, Exxon, Shell are but a few of the true winners of the Iraq war. The rest are losers, including the Iraqi and American peoples.

The literal words "money trumps peace" were spoken by George W. Bush. during a 2007 Q&A session:

Journalist: "A lot of our allies in Europe do a lot of business with Iran, so I wonder what your thoughts are about how you further tighten the financial pressure on Iran, in particular if it also means economic pain for a lot of our allies."

Bush: "That's an interesting question. One of the problems, not specifically on this issue but just in general that... that... eehmm... Let me put it this way: money trumps ... ehm ... peace sometimes. Now as commercial interests are very powerful interests, throughout the world, and part of the issue in convincing people to put sanctions on a specific country, is to convince them that it's in the world's interest that they forego their own financial interests."

Yes, that Bush was a goldmine for comedians, but at least you can see he made an effort to somewhat hide the true, purely profit- and power-based motivations for economic or other warfare. War is a racket in which banks and large multinationals make money on both sides. The book War is a Racket by Major General Smedley Butler should be mandatory reading, but here's some of chapter one:

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
_{source: War is a Racket}

Bush was Republican, and was followed by "yes we can" Obama, from the "other side". That one managed to collect a Nobel Peace prize while waging war in seven countries, and increasing drone-bombings to an all-time high at the time. Surely we've learned our lesson? Nope, we've made it worse; the next president of the worlds largest military force openly admitted that the Oil in Iraq belongs to America, as should all "spoils of war".

It's easy to lose sight of some simple facts when entertained by these political fairy-tales, the most important of which is that the war for the oil in the Middle east is going on for more than a century now. For more than 100 years, without pause, foreign western forces have waged war in the Middle East. The first shots in the Great War were fired near Basra by British troops, because the greatest western navy was transitioning from coal-powered steamboats to oil powered diesel-motor ships. That was more than a century ago and we haven't stopped since; America is still actively involved in wars in Syria, Somalia and Yemen, and only in 2021 stopped the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe that's why they hate the west, instead of the old "they hate us for our freedoms" nonsense...

And it's going to get worse. In capitalism's unstoppable drive to privatize and commodify everything, police forces and the military are increasingly privatized. More and more ground operations on battlefields are delegated to private mercenary forces, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "to kill for money", and giving governments to downplay casualties as these private armies are not counted in the official statistics. It's a mess people. A bloody mess...

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