The Business of War is the Cause of War

By Ethan Indigo Smith and Sergey Baranov

Contributing writers for Wake Up World

If you objectively and consistently observe the mainstream media and its interpretation of global events, its omissive and deceptive character soon becomes abundantly clear. This could hardly be called incompetence. The coverage, which is popularly called “news”, is in fact nothing but a propaganda mechanism, designed to persistently shape public opinion in favor of war.

Although most prefer to believe government propaganda is a thing of the past, history shows us that it is an inherent part of any wartime society, obscuring facts and motivations in favor of those who initiate — and benefit from — war.

Who benefits from war?

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Certainly not the people on the warring sides. People always suffer in war; their futures ruined and their lives destroyed. In fear, they look to their government to protect them, the very same government that is invested in war. War is a dirty business that profits from death and destruction while generating blood money for the profiteers. The people are told to look the other way, outside of their country – where the ‘enemy’ supposedly resides.

But what if the real enemy is inside the country, and wears expensive suits, not turbans? What if he speaks your language while living in luxury and sending his children to study at Princeton, Yale and Harvard, while your kids are sent off to fight in fraudulent wars for corporate interests masquerading as ‘patriotism’?

This is in fact jingoism – a nationalized furvor of aggression, based on the notion of supremacy, and usually founded in a lust for power and riches. This mindset, of course, isn’t new and is no different from Adolf Hitler’s extreme nationalism, or fascism.

Today we are living under the rule of oligarchical elites that continuously consolidate power in order to control and confine humanity while methodically stripping us of the power to govern ourselves. One of the best ways to achieve this is to keep the people in constant fear of wars and threats of terrorism that, in reality, governments themselves typically create or sponsor. For example, we can look at the current threat of ISIS which is in fact a remodel of Al Qaida, a group the CIA created in the 1970’s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.

Constant mainstream promotion of ISIS with videos of beheadings and other types of inhuman cruelty is used to scare the American people into the further submission, and ever-greater losses of rights and personal freedoms. The growing surveillance and domestic police state, and the passage of laws including the recent renewal of the Patriot Act, wouldn’t be possible without always frightening the general public. Governmental policies of perpetual war ensure the constant funding of the military industrial complex, which has taken control over the government, as Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States had foreseen and warned the U.S. public about in 1961.

How can we stop the war machine?

Well, certainly not by fighting against it using its means. That’s what the machine is designed for, and an armed resistance will only be playing into its hands. After all, they’ve got the nukes and they will use them as they have already done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are no survivors under mushroom clouds – everybody dies. There is no defense in the case of a nuclear war being unleashed – unless you were to commit yourself to living underground in a bunker for the rest of your life, without ever again seeing and feeling the sunshine. It is a death by a thousand cuts if you remain on the surface.

There is no technology to clean up radiation and take it out of the air, water and land. The half-life of nuclear radiation is millions of years. That means that during this time, the radioactive particles will remain as deadly as they are today. This could be the end of all of us if nuclear war were to be released on a massive scale – a probability that is as high today as it has ever been, and growing proportionally with the insanity of global politics. The cold war between the Soviet Union and USA never ended, only slowly heated up. And even though the nuclear arms race developed through paranoia, the threat of nuclear war today, is in fact a very present and real one.

War defeats the rights of individuals and empowers institutions. Wars do not happen naturally. They are orchestrated for political and economic advantage by corporate and government entities to which human life is only a means to a greater profit and power. The United States of America is not the only country in which the military industrial complex has taken over. The same can be seen in many other modern nations.”War is good for the economy” is a slogan often heard on the news in Israel. But for which economy? For the economy of peace, or for the economy of war? Is it good for the people? Or is it good for those who are in the business of bullets and bombs?

Traveling the world and observing ordinary people, one will inevitably come to the conclusion that no one actually wants war. Regardless of the geographical location, nationality, skin color, social status etc., people want peace, and to see their children grow. Wars, although they may appear that way, are not fought between people. They are fought between military industrial factions and alliances warring for domination and control. But, while the average person either side of an orchestrated conflict wants to be left alone to live his or her life in peace, governments, corporations and institutions drag us into conflict time and again. The world has become a place where corporate interests, backed by corrupt governments, all funded by evil banks, violate human rights, freedom and dignity beyond measure. This poses an existential threat to the survival of our species that will not abate as long as the military industrial complex maintains its grip on our society and our culture.

Banks financing the governments of warring sides are even more heavily involved than the war materials industries. They fund the entire game by lending money to the governments, further sinking nations in debt, while they use this money to kill each other off. Federal spending surges as the military is mobilized. Outlays for troops, weapons and munitions increases as conflicts escalate. The fraudulent and never-ending war in Iraq has already cost over 3 trillion dollars and counting – a steady flow of income for all those who are employed and benefiting from war.

Furthermore, war is not only fought so as to engage the outsiders and force political will abroad, but also to keep the revolutionaries within our domestic borders bound and controlled. Believing in the benefits of war and accepting of the domestic controls imposed during wartime, they become stuck in the mind-state of war, a psychological trap of service to institutional leviathans rather than living beings.

So, what is the way to a global peace? Certainly it isn’t paved with war… how absurd! Nor is it paved with threats and rhetoric of war. There must be another way to shut down this engine of death.

Realizing that war is an instrument to have us kill and be killed on behalf of corporate and imperialist interests, we should be refusing the very notion of war, no matter how much we are lied to and instigated to do otherwise. We must understand the nature of war, refuse to engage in war, and peacefully confront those institutions that promote and precipitate war. And we all need to wake up and get involved before it happens.

What we need is genuine diplomacy, not more rhetoric of war. It is only through understanding the bigger picture that we will surpass the greedy leviathans of war; by understanding that war is not actually perpetuated for the reasons we think, and are told. We need to open our hearts and minds to individuals and close them to institutions, understanding that anyone fighting and threatening war using the rhetoric of war for political gains is on one side — the side of the institutions, not the people they claims to represent.

There are always only two sides to every war, those who kill their brothers and those who do not. Choose peace.

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About the authors:

Activist, author and Tai Chi teacher Ethan Indigo Smith was born on a farm in Maine and lived in Manhattan for a number of years before migrating west to Mendocino, California. Guided by a keen sense of integrity and humanity, Ethan’s work is both deeply connected and extremely insightful, blending philosophy, politics, activism, spirituality, meditation and a unique sense of humour.

Ethan’s publications include:

The Complete Patriot’s Guide to Oligarchical Collectivism, an insightful exploration of history, philosophy and contemporary politics.
The Little Green Book of Revolution an inspirational book based on ideas of peaceful revolution, historical activism and caring for the Earth like Native Americans.
The Matrix of Four, The Philosophy of the Duality of Polarity on the subject of the development of individual consciousness.
The controversial book, Terra-ist Letters, a work that humorously contrasts the very serious issues of global nuclear experimentation promotion and global marijuana prohibition.

For more, visit Ethan on Facebook and check out Ethan’s author page on Amazon.

Born in 1976 in the Soviet Union, Sergey Baranov lived in different countries before moving to his present home in Peru.

Sergey is an author and a political observer who contributes his time to exposing injustice, corporate greed and government corruption seen rampant these days worldwide. He is convinced that by raising awareness over important issues such as destruction of the planet and loss of personal freedom, true change can be brought into the world. He also believes that through the connection with Nature humanity is capable of waking up to its humanness and defend the right to exist and enjoy a healthy social and natural environment, the birthright of each human being.

Sergey’s involvement in politics has come out of necessity not desire. He would much rather spend his time writing about the nature of reality, spirituality and other subjects dear to his heart. However, realizing the interconnectedness of the whole life on Earth, he thinks it would be irresponsible to ignore these issues and sees Wake Up World as an avenue to express his political views which have now become a part of his life.

You can learn more about Sergey in his book “Path”, available here on Amazon, or follow Sergey at Facebook.com/Sergey.Baranov.921.

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