Part XII: The Story of War -it has to be sold

In “Capital”, Volume I, Part I, Chapter I, Karl Marx describes the commodity which is the core component of capitalism as follows:

“At first sight a commodity presented itself to be a complex of two things -use-value and exchange-value. Later, we saw also that labor, too, possesses the same two-fold nature; for, so far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to a creator of use-value.”

Marx notes that:

”...nothing can have value [i.e. exchange-value] without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labor contained in it; the labor does not count as labor, and therefore creates no value.”

The same principle could be applied to war -it has to be “sold” to society, has to have a use, apart from generating wages. America was once the great imperialist pretender -its record prior to the beginning of the 20th century is proof of this, when it began its imperial adventure wresting control of the Spanish colonies through the popular movements of the time and by standing for the liberty of the peoples from foreign oppression⁹⁹, and its approach to world events always seems to have involved this pretence. Indeed, it does not differ essentially in this regard from other imperialist powers, except in its audacity, an audacity bred on an abundance of capital far exceeding that of other States.

Wars involve people and as we live in a society riven by classes, appeals have to be made that people of all kinds will accept, war has to be sold to society, and it therefore has to be given a purpose. In World War I, Lloyd George called on his people to fight in speeches of the following kind:

“The British Empire is finding its purpose in the great design of Providence and upon earth, finding it in this great war for liberty and for right. This is a holy war, not a war of conquest. As the Lord liveth, we seek not a yard of German colonies. We are in this war with motives of purest chivalry¹⁰⁰.”

The story was orchestrated by the British Government, when the War Propaganda Bureau (WPB), headed by Charles Masterman invited 25 leading British authors to Wellington House, to discuss ways of best promoting Britain’s interests during the war. Among those who attended the meeting were William Archer, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, Sir Henry Newbolt, Gilbert Parker, G. M. Trevelyan and H. G. Wells.

In September, 1914, Thomas Hardy, better known for his 19th century novels about unrequited love (such as “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”) wrote his poem “Men Who March Away”, in which the following lines appear:

Press we to the field ungrieving,
In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just.

In the introduction to a book of British First World War poetry, “Up the Line to Death: The War Poets, 1914-1918”, the compiler, Brian Gardner, notes the shift in attitude from 1914, when British soldier-poets were still inspired by “Rupert Brooke’s fervent patriotism and mystique of Youth” (“If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England”) until the Battle of the Somme in the second half of 1916 -by November of that year, there were over a million casualties from all nations. After that, the shift in feeling among the soldiers produced such lines as “the wind blowing over London from Flanders has a bitter taste¹⁰¹.”

The development of British poetry in World War I reflects a growing consciousness about the realities of the time, even among the young officers -e.g. Osbert and Sachaverell Sitwell. It indicates a breaking away from the feelings handed down through the War Propaganda Bureau, and hence a loss of political control over the hearts and minds of British imperialism’s human “instruments of war”.

But, as we have seen, this was a successful war for American capital. And American capital’s mercenary attitude towards war went back beyond 1914. Du Pont, for example, which had been making money out of wars since at least 1812, sent the head of the company’s son, Lammot, aged 25, through a British blockade off Chesapeake Bay to supply Russia with gunpowder during the Crimean War¹⁰².

This is not to say that the story of war is a simple one, but a reflection of society’s complex class nature. Where does propaganda end and commitment begin? And even propaganda may contain parts of the commitment made by those who manage the wars -their commitment to plunder and annexation, the defeat of rival exploiters.

Since a thief would be a fool to tell people he intended to rearrange things to make it easier to rob them, a story has to be devised that turns war into a use-value. Moreover, if the Bush Government’s story justifying their bombardment of Iraq had really been true and the Americans had actually found weapons of mass destruction there, would we even have been told -if those WMDs had “Made in America” stamped all over them?

The story for World War II was surely better than the ones we are getting today, indeed it is probably the best war story of the 20th century until now. The Nazis and fascists were a real force visibly threatening world domination with intended human slavery. This was the main story of the Allied war, but it was a true story. Capital made a lot of money out of it, not just during the course of the War but during the peace it produced immediately afterwards. Had Britain’s earlier approach been followed through, and it had joined Hitler in an onslaught against the Soviet Union, capital’s success-rate (measured by profits) might well have collapsed as social unrest was unleashed throughout the world.

The stories for the Korean and Vietnamese wars came nowhere near the World War II story. They were local wars, spurred on ultimately by overbearing anti-communist U.S. generals. Indeed, America’s most astute politicians realized the dangers of attempting anything more than part of America’s “containment” policy, linked to the so-called “Cold War” announced soon after WW2 had ended¹⁰³. And the Korean and, especially, the Vietnam Wars proved short-lived in capital’s profit barometer. The anti-communist mission proved to be insufficiently credible and the Vietnam war met with opposition right from the start. Nevertheless, this did not stop it from going on for 8 years.

The 1st and 2nd World Wars had their dysfunctional aspects – as a result of the 1st World War, the Russia Revolution broke out and divided the world, with other states joining it later. In the 2nd World War, China, Albania and others also took that route. They proved not so durable, but they did create a more complex situation for capital.

The attacks of September 11th 2001 look like a blown-up version of outrages the U.S. State has used for over a century, not always very successfully, whipping up popular hysteria to carry out ambitious plans which conflict with the principles of the American Constitution. A résumé of these events makes this clear.

Lest it be thought that such a conspiratorial approach is something new in America, it is worth looking at a series of events that occurred in the United States during 1919 -the so-called “Red Scare”. On June 2, 1919: simultaneous explosions occurred in 8 different cities in the United States. The Press stated: “Emissaries of the Bolshevik leader Lenin were responsible for the explosions.” The perpetrators were never apprehended, nor was any evidence collected to establish their identity. Algernon Lee, director of the Rand School and a member of the U.S. Socialist party, told a New York Times reporter on June 4, 1919: “I am convinced that it is a frame-up … because of its calculated effect upon the State Commission for the Investigation of Bolshevism and upon Congress in the matter of legislation designed to curb radical movements¹⁰⁴.”

On September 16, 1919, a large bomb explosion took place in Wall Street directly opposite JP Morgan & Co. building -30 people (one report says 33) were killed and hundreds injured (one report says 400). No culprits were ever apprehended. Following this, the so-called Palmer Raids took place which were used to attack the left generally, deporting several people, among whom was the anarchist Emma Goldman.

This method had been repeated over and over again. It is worth noting F.D. Roosevelt’s utilization of attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7th, 1941) to get America into World War II. It is now clear that the attack was known of in advance and might have been avoided, but FDR needed a pretext to get America into the War¹⁰⁵.

During the period leading up to the Vietnam War, U.S. generals had prepared several plans for a war against Cuba. The most famous of these was the so-called “Northwoods Plan” which involved creating a pretext for war that would have involved people posing as Cubans deliberately killing American citizens, including terrorist-style attacks on U.S. territory. This was being recommended in the early 1960s, i.e. in 1962, while John F. Kennedy was president¹⁰⁶.

These plans were thrown out by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. However, plans to attack Vietnam went back some while (the French finally made a truce and the US stepped in during the 1950s/early 1960s) and a pretext was used finally to step up the attacks under LBJ, leading to full-scale war. This was the so-called Tonkin Incident, in which the U.S. asserted that North Vietnamese forces had attacked a U.S. naval frigate in international waters (the Gulf of Tonkin). The supposed incident was successfully used to push through Congress a Bill giving President Johnson a free hand to take armed actions against North Vietnam.

Note, too, a certain parallelism in the U.S. Executive’s decision to go to war in 1964 and in 2003. In 1964, a pretext was used to go to war with North Vietnam, after various other pretexts had been turned down by the Executive which would have led directly to a war (a massacre, no doubt) against Cuba. The Wolfowitz plan to attack Iraq in 1992 was dropped, but taken up 9 years later (i.e. in 2001) by the very people who had dropped it.

America’s new enemy

In fact, the new enemy (identified as Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism) was being sought back in the 1970s by America’s intelligence and military elite. U.S. Capital had realized that its most organized, most consistent rival, the Soviet Union, would no longer pose the threat it had previously. It sought out other potential threats to the system. The most potent of these, it decided, was terrorism:

[Many] defense analysts believe that the greatest danger to the United States in the closing years of the [20th] century will come from poorer, less industrialized nations, and most likely in the form of terrorism, rather than conventional warfare. “Between now and the year 2000, I think there is a major opportunity for a shift from East-West confrontation”, an Air Force strategist says. We’ve already seen the first evidence of this -in plane hijackings, kidnappings, and mail bombs¹⁰⁷

And:

Revolutionaries from abroad, attracted by soft targets, may strike at what they see as the soft center of the imperialist-capitalist-racist conspiracy¹⁰⁸.

Thus, years before Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the so-called “clash of civilizations” was published, America’s generals had invented their new enemy. Today, we are seeing the results of these findings.

What happened on September 11th 2001? Did we even see what happened? The entire episode has been put into question. Did the Norad national air defense system melt down, or was it stood down¹⁰⁹? Did a plane hit the Pentagon, or was it a missile¹¹⁰? Why and how did the twin towers collapse as they did¹¹¹? Who was really controlling the planes¹¹²? Where is the evidence placing “terrorist hijackers” in the targeted airports on that morning? What really happened to the plane in Pennsylvania – was it shot down¹¹³? And so on. Naturally, this questioning has involved the entire range of political opinion, from the Establishment (the official enquiry) to the Esoteric (were flying saucers involved).

Of the main possible explanations for the failure of the Norad national air defence system -either a monumental systems meltdown or a deliberate military stand down -the absence for the former of anything remotely resembling what might reasonably be considered a coherent explanation, tends to point all the more firmly toward the latter being the more likely explanation.

On the face of it, a monumental systems meltdown would normally be relatively easy to establish, given that it will have originated from within a formerly functional apparatus, as either a human or a mechanical component failure. On the other hand, a deliberate military stand-down amounts to a high level criminal conspiracy -a conspiracy that is bound to contain elements of deliberate concealment and disinformation.

***

As Marx pointed out, commodities can be produced but if they are not sold, they realize no values. They are still-born. With war, the plot’s the thing. Unless the plot is swallowed, it fails.

The present war situation has this built-in flaw. It depends upon a level of imbecility that does not exist, and despite five decades of dumbing-down not even in America–associated with the growth of marginal (usually ethnic minority immigrant) population which sees the armed forces as a means of escaping poverty, almost like a religious order. Certainly, the level of imbecility is high enough for the U.S. military-industrial elite and their colleagues to get these wars going, but they surely perceive that there is too much opposition, opposition that reaches up into their own eeries, into their own homes. This would have been a problem had the United States still been on a “containment” trajectory, but it appears to have left that trajectory behind some time ago. Meanwhile, the armed forces have become increasingly capital-intensive, and although war provides a means to rid a State of its own “superfluous population”, this is a separate issue.

N.B. This is a continuing project. We welcome comments, corrections, suggestions, criticisms from readers.

NOTES

⁹⁹ See Scott Nearing, ibid. This can be traced back to the appropriation of the states of Texas, New Mexico and California from Mexico in 1848, following the U.S. war against its southern neighbor, in which the capital, Mexico City, was actually occupied by U.S. troops in 1847.

¹⁰⁰ David Lloyd George, Non-Conformist, radical, reformer and Liberal politician, who threatened to resign from the British Government weeks before war was declared in August, 1914, was Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908 to 1915 and Prime Minister from December 1916-October 1922. The statement is from J.R. Clynes’ “Memoirs”, 1937, and was made soon after World War I broke out.

¹⁰¹ From Richard Aldington’s poem “Sunsets”.

¹⁰² See William H.A. Carr: “The du Ponts of Delaware”, 1965, page 142.

¹⁰³ Indeed, General MacArthur was relieved in 1951 during the Korean War for insisting that the United States should pursue the enemy into Communist China.

¹⁰⁴ Quoted in Albert E. Kahn: “High Treason”, 1950.

¹⁰⁵ See, for example: Gore Vidal’s book, “The Golden Age” and “Pearl Harbor, Mother of all Conspiracies”. (It should be noted that the thesis has been used by the ultra right to “prove” that FDR was a communist.)

¹⁰⁶ James Bamford appears to be the source of this hitherto secret information.

¹⁰⁷ From “America Tomorrow”, Wall Street Journal, Ed. Donald Moffitt, 1977.

¹⁰⁸ Brian Jenkins, RAND Corporation, Policy Study No. 17, The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington DC and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University (September 1975).

¹⁰⁹ See: Michael Meacher, “This war on terrorism is bogus – The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination”, The Guardian, Saturday September 6, 2003:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1036571,00.html

See also: “The 911 USAF Stand Down”, What Really Happened:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/911stand.html,

¹¹⁰ See: “The Missing Wings”, Physics911 Public Site (Pentagon physics):
http://www.physics911.net/missingwings.htm,

See also: “September 11, 2001 Revisited”, Newsletter 68E, April 12, 2005, The Center for an Informed America:
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr68e.html

¹¹¹ See: “Eyewitnesses’ and experts’ WTC testimonies consistent with allegations of deliberate demolitions”, GNN:
http://www.gnn.tv/users/user.php?bid=4172

See also: “Eyewitness Reports Of Explosions Before WTC Collapses”, What Really Happened:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/eyewitness.html,

¹¹² See: “Operation Pearl” by A. K. Dewdney August 1/05:
http://physics911.net/pearl.htm

See also: “9/11 Aircraft: Remote Control Technology”
http://www.newsgateway.ca/9_11_aircraft_remote_control_.htm, NewsGateway.

¹¹³ See: “United Flight 93 Crash Theory Home Page”
http://web.archive.org/web/20011116231719/www.flight93crash.com/

See also: “Flight 93 Crash Neighbors Believe Plane Was Shot Down” by William Bunch:
http://archive.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=7999