Chris Hedges: Permanent war and the merchants of death
'The moral hypocrisy of the United States is staggering...'
Putin played into the hands of the war
industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest
fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon.
Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate
crisis will accelerate. China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor
will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate
refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the
tired tropes of glory, honor, and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die.
The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists,
courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The
merchants of death rule like Olympian gods. And we, cowed by fear,
intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own
annihilation....
Waltzing Toward Armageddon with the Merchants of Death
The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the CIA, the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism.
That is why they have
resurrected it.
The decision to spurn
the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War
is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century.
The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger
and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the
most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
This provocation, a
violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified
Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro,
and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance. This betrayal
was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of US
troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington
with Moscow. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps a cynical goal of the
Western alliance, has now solidified an expanding and resurgent NATO and a
rampant, uncontrollable militarism. The masters of war may be ecstatic, but the
potential consequences, including a global conflagration, are terrifying.
Peace has been
sacrificed for US global hegemony….
https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/14/hedges-waltzing-toward-armageddon-with-the-merchants-of-death/
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