I recently had lunch with an old friend who described how a fellow army officer had, back in April 2008, attended a mandatory all hands meeting at the National Defense University in Washington. The purpose of the meeting, which was held in the university’s largest auditorium, was to promote a book written by noted neocon Doug Feith called War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. Feith, a clever Ivy League lawyer who claims to read Edmund Burke for fun, dutifully performed for the audience, explaining how he had helped shape policy at the Pentagon that had resulted in the successful invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He described one crucial meeting at the Pentagon where he had been a key player, able to convince the Defense Department brass to take his advice which had produced success on the battlefield.
Now think back to early 2008. Iraq was really a mess, with tens of thousands of civilians dead, Fallujah in ruins, hundreds of thousands displaced, and most of the Iraqi people experiencing lower living standards and worse health than had been the norm under Saddam. The country was politically on the verge of falling apart and security was breaking down in many areas. The “surge” of additional American troops, which ran from the spring of 2007 through the summer of 2008, was still surging and was given credit in the US media for stabilizing the situation. But the American public was not aware that the decline in violence had largely come about after a decision by the leading Shia militia not to oppose the increased American presence coupled with the process of buying off the Sunnis by giving them weapons and money. Nevertheless, the lowering of the intensity of the internal conflict enabled the usual crowd of neocons in Washington and the media to boast that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had been a success. This view was contradicted by the 61% of Iraqis who believed that the presence of foreign troops was actually making the situation worse, but no one was talking to the Iraqis.
Since that time it has become clear that Doug Feith was indeed one of the key enablers of the invasion of Iraq, which, using the Nuremberg standard, was a war of aggression and therefore a war crime. Feith was the Undersecretary for Policy, the third highest Pentagon position. He had created the secretive Office of Special Plans to find and evaluate information that was not being considered by the existing intelligence organizations. Much of the information he collected had in fact not been taken seriously by CIA analysts because it was false or misleading, intended only to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein was a threat. Rather than subject the phony intelligence to the scrutiny of genuine professional analysts Feith’s team instead picked out the best bits, referred to as “cherry picking,” and sent them directly to Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney in the White House, a process referred to as “stovepiping.” So lies shaped policy which led to a war that has been described as America’s greatest foreign policy disaster of all time.
In any event, in 2008 Doug Feith was still regarded by many as a hero when the Army officer in the audience stood up and challenged his narrative, explaining that he had been tasked with taking notes at the meeting that Feith was referring to and it was his recollection that the Pentagon’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy was not even present, let alone playing a leading role. Feith reportedly turned red and was unable to continue.
The Feith story reminded me of how much lying goes on in government. The recent big lie by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper comes to mind immediately, telling Congress and the public that the National Security Agency (NSA) does not routinely “wittingly” spy on American citizens while knowing that it was doing exactly that. His explanation, when he was exposed, was that his had been the “least untruthful” response that he felt he could give, and, curiously enough, he still has his job. And then there is the big lie about the effectiveness of the NSA program itself, when General Keith Alexander claimed that the information obtained had been critical to the thwarting of 54 terrorist plots in a number of countries. It turned out that the correct number is actually zero, that there has been no disruption of terrorist activity attributable to the vast ocean of information that the NSA was collecting on innocent Americans and foreign citizens.
And consider the intermittent cheating scandals at the service academies or the recent revelations from the United States Air Force describing how a drug related investigation has detailed how ninety-two officers in the strategic missile force have been punished for colluding on their monthly proficiency reports. The officers involved are not running post exchanges in Okinawa, they are the folks with their fingers on the nuclear trigger and the reports relate to their knowledge of under what circumstances they would fire their missiles, so the allegation of fraud is remarkable and also suggests that there is far too much covering up and going with the flow in the federal bureaucracy. The Secretary of the Air Force provided her own fudge in explaining the kerfuffle, saying “I want you to know this was a failure of some of our airmen. It was not a failure of the nuclear mission.” Whatever that is supposed to mean.
Proficiency and fitness assessments are key components for promotion within the military system, so it is inevitable that some officers would try to game the system while the raters themselves would avoid creating problems by expressing too much candor if someone were considered a marginal performer. I can personally recall from my time in military intelligence in Berlin in the late 1960s how the unit operations officer, a major, would routinely have the box on his annual proficiency form checked indicating that he was in excellent physical condition. In reality, he weighed 300 pounds, had trouble walking up a flight of stairs, had hemorrhoids that were so painful that he would work at his desk standing up, and his eyes were so bad that he had trouble reading.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) too had more than its share of liars and the lies grew much bigger as one moved up the ladder because more appeared to be at stake. A Chief of Station (COS) in Ankara who spoke no Turkish would go to his weekly meeting with his Turkish counterparts accompanied by his reports officer who did speak the language. He would return to the office and dictate to her what had been said at the meeting. First time around she objected, noting that it was not what had taken place, but the chief sent her a clear message by telling her that he would decide what was important. It seems that the chief was promoting himself at headquarters as someone who would fix the liaison relationship with the Turks after some years of tension over Cyprus, so on paper that was what he was doing even though it was to a certain extent a self-serving lie.
Over in Istanbul I was finding Turkish intelligence surveillance all over me every time I went out and dutifully reported the same to Ankara, which refused to report the incidents to counter-intelligence staff at headquarters because it would challenge the narrative of how everything was rosy in Turkey. On one occasion while walking to lunch with a British diplomat the Turkish surveillance lost me temporarily and, when they started running to find me again, they actually crashed into the two of us headlong, knocking us to the ground. The COS told me later that what I experienced could not possibly have taken place. So Washington was fundamentally misled on what was going on in Turkey for three years but the chief did get his promotion.
CIA promoted its overseas officers based on recruitments of sources, which meant that numbers fraud replaced any sense of whether the assets were actually needed or if they even knew that they were working for CIA. When moving to a new post, it was routine to question the value of any recruitments made in the last six months of the predecessor’s tour because it was automatically assumed that they would be phony. The need to appear active also trickled down into the Station reporting on developing cases. A lunch with a fellow diplomat in which absolutely nothing occurred might be written up as demonstrating interesting vulnerabilities and promising to become an important developmental. The perception that the station had a number of promising cases would work its way up through the system with smiles and handshakes all around. One officer in Rome made his career by claiming that he had recruited everyone he played tennis with at the Foreign Ministry Club while two officers I knew in Turkey would write reports on alleged contacts without actually meeting anyone.
And now we have an Undersecretary of the Navy resigning over a contracting scandal, with his boss explaining in govspeak how Robert Martinage was forced to step down “following a loss of confidence in his abilities to effectively perform his duties.” I am citing these examples of government lying to make the point that lots of people dissimulate or cheat when they think they can get away with it. There are probably more liars in government because people there believe that they are protecting either confidentiality or a preferred agenda by lying and they are also operating under the conviction that their lies will never be exposed because of government secrecy. They never think of themselves as liars but rather as “perception managers.” The lesson learned from all of this might well be that one should never believe what anyone in the government is saying unless it can be independently verified by numerous credible witnesses. Back several weeks ago when I first started pulling together this article President Barack Obama was promising to stop retaining information on Americans even though he will allow the NSA to continue to collect it. So why would he collect it in the first place? Sure sounds like a lie to me, a real whopper.
Wow, silly me, I believed that the essence of The Big Lie, as told to us all in government schools, was communism. Why did it take me most of my life to find out it was just one of them?
Mendacity is a form of attempted mind control of others. Sadly, when I became an IT executive for the San Jose Mercury News, the flagship paper for the now-defunct Knight Ridder Fortune 500 media empire, I discovered that a culture of truth-telling that one would expect for an entity charged with telling the truth to the public, didn’t extend very far past the newsroom, if even there.
Phil Giraldi reveals the level of self-serving deceit by those in the government he worked in, both in terms of serving individual careerism and advancing overall policies neither of which could survive if the facts were known. Since facts are actually essential for the practical success of any organization’s aims, it’s no wonder the culture of lies results in such disasters for the public whose interests were supposed to be served.
The same bad end came to Knight Ridder, because its executives no longer served the ostensible aims of the enterprise, but rather their own individual careerist interests, while serving up deceit to shareholders, employees and the public. Fortunately for them, after the Silicon Valley Internet bubble that masked the rot of financial chicanery and embezzlement crashed, leaving them exposed by financial losses and mismanagement, they were able to cash out before public scandal hit and the valuable assets were broken off and sold off.
Unfortunately the sad state of our national dishonesty isn’t just a government become untethered from both an ability to perceive the truth, let alone speak it, but the actual supplanting of it by a fourth branch that’s actually based on deception and surveillance of the population as its essence, completely out of the effective control of democratic accountability and law. The corporations which collude in this are no better as they partner with it, as neither are they entities that favor public responsibility against their own private power.
The main remedy for citizens to all the government wrongdoing and the official lying and secrecy that support it is the essential function of a free press that independently verifies government’s statements. Sadly for democratic accountability, the press is in a somewhat “clapped-out” state of subservience to corporate and government power.
Most media is in the self-same hands of the same self-serving corporate double-dealers who buy up government and thus are two-faced double-speakers. Thus those caught with their pants on fire by the few independent journalists not being paid to shill are then characterizing the truth-tellers exposing them who have proof of their dishonesty as “thieves” “fencing” “stolen” “secrets.”
This illogical legerdemaine is yet more manipulative truth-twisting, because nothing has been stolen, in the sense they are comparing the lid being blown off of their secret wrongdoing by whistleblowers, to jewelry being heisted by criminals then secretly sold to fences. This is rather a salutary revelation to a thoroughly deceived public of how public trust has been severely abused that damages their credibility. It’s not an actual loss, just public exposure, since they still have physical possession of all documents that prove their wrongdoing on a massive scale. They just didn’t want their crimes against the rest of us exposed.
In a system that has been essentially captured by donorism, where a million guys with one buck have no chance against the one guy with a million bucks who seeks to subvert democratic accountability, it seems we are reduced to hoping and praying for an opposing largesse funding independent watchdog journalism, which has deep enough pockets and is willing to spend it in order to defend the very legality of public truth telling.
Now that is a very tall order, against a Very Big Lie.
“The Secretary of the Air Force provided her own fudge in explaining the kerfuffle, saying ‘I want you to know this was a failure of some of our airmen. It was not a failure of the nuclear mission.’” Reminds me of Dr. Strangelove: “You don’t want to condemn an entire program over one screw up…”
Birds of a feather:
The sycophant—who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy—was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois. ‘The laws of commerce are the laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” (E. Burke…) No wonder that, true to the laws of God and Nature, he always sold himself in the best market.
Karl Marx
Veracity in Government http://t.co/qjPGV4AzPr #tlot
I refused induction during the Vietnam War. Showed up at the induction station, but refused to step forward. Didn’t avoid arrest. Went to court without an attorney. Came within a whisker of being shipped off to a federal prison for 5 years when the old judge tried to trick me into signing a wavier of my right to counsel. The judge’s young law clerk, a US Army Reserve JAG officer, didn’t much like the way he had tried to ship a young man with no criminal record off to prison for 5 years. Fortunately, the task of appointing a lawyer to represent me fell to the clerk, and he appointed a friend of his, another fine young lawyer.
I had requested Conscientious Objector status and, on the basis of a 90-second interview, the draft board had denied my request. That was after I talked with a USMC recruiting sergeant who falsely informed me that I could serve as a medic without training with a weapon. I didn’t find out that I would be required to train with a weapon until I went for a physical in Houston. There, I mentioned to a couple of orderlies my desire to serve as a combat medic. They quickly disabused me of the notion that I wouldn’t have to train with a weapon.
I had a friend who was three years older than me, Denny Roberts. Denny, whose mother was the secretary to the director of the city Parks and Recreation Department, was wiser in the ways of the world than I was at that point in my life. Denny had more political savvy than I did. When Denny found out that I had been arrested, been to court, and was going to trial, he said to me, There’s somebody you need to meet. Come over to my place tomorrow at noon. I want to introduce you to someone. Denny and his wife lived downtown, a short walk from the Federal Building. They had an apartment next door to his mother-in-law in an old hotel that had been renovated and turned into apartments. I showed up, and Denny was in a jovial mood. He was enjoying himself. The two apartments had a connecting door in their kitchens. Denny says to me, Come with me, and he opens the door and steps into his mother-in-law’s kitchen. I followed him. His wife’s mother was standing at the stove, and there was a middle-aged guy sitting at the kitchen table eating his lunch. Because I was looking down at the floor, I noticed that the man was not wearing his shoes. He was wearing those ribbed nylon socks. Brown socks. His suit coat was on the back of his chair. Denny introduced me to the Chief Federal Probation Officer for the Eastern District, who was having lunch at his mistress’s table. It was awkward. He was embarrassed; I was embarrassed. His nephew had been a high school classmate of mine. Denny and I did not stay long. I’m pretty sure the PO could hear Denny’s guffaws after he closed the door. I wasn’t laughing. I wasn’t sure what had just happened. I never mentioned the incident to anyone. (Well, not while the PO was in government, and he didn’t go willingly. They had to force him out when he was in his 60s, in the 1980s. He passed some years ago.) The court-appointed lawyer explained to me that the Probation Office would be investigating me and writing a report that would be presented to the judge.
So, I was 18. I knew what my grandmother thought of her distant Texas Hill Country third- or fouth-cousin Lyndon and his war. I had been there when she returned home after consoling her neighbor whose son, Leonard St. Clair, had come home from Vietnam in a box. I knew what everybody else in Texas knew about Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with George Brown of Brown and Root Construction Co. I’d found out what the draft board thought of my principles. I’d talked with the USMC recruiting sergeant who looked me in the eye and lied to me. I’d seen a federal judge try to ship me off to prison for 5 years for the crime of not being willing to shoulder the government’s weapon to kill total strangers in a highly-questionable war on the other side of the world. And I’d met the government’s man who was going to investigate me and advise the judge with regard to my future. I guess you could say that, to the extent that at the ripe old age of 18 I was able to process and understand that information, I was not favorably impressed by my government or its war.
Two close friends came back from Vietnam with severe PTSD and other service related illnesses that blighted the remainder of their lives. Another, Philip Reeder, died in combat at Binh Dinh. Philip was 19 years old when he died, on September 27, 1968. Panel 42W – Line 32.
Veracity in government? What is that? They spell the names correctly on the Wall?
So farth and his bosses will not be held to account for the murder of 1 million Iraqis and the destruction of their country that was bombed into the stone age.
The once great nation is no more. It has been corrupted from within by a foreign presence. Leave while you can from what has become an abomination for a great tribulation approaches the outcome of which will determine everything. And it was foreseen.
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. … corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” (Abraham Lincoln, Nov 21, 1864)
“The Feith story reminded me of how much lying goes on in government.”
Yeah. “perception management.” And the military generals are just politicians with fruit salad on their chest (e.g. see johntreed.com military articles such as “Is Military Integrity a Contradiction in Terms?”).
I’ve documented Gen. McChrystal’s lack of candor in my Dec 2012 post “Never Shall I Fail My Comrades” at the Feral Firefighter blog.
And, as Fran Macadam pointed out in her column above, “Sadly for democratic accountability, the press is in a somewhat “clapped-out” state of subservience to corporate and government power.”
Back in May 2009, I had a personal encounter illustrating that with the NYT’s Pentagon reporter Thom Shanker who whitewashed Gen. McChrystal’s command of the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan. See my June 2013 post, “More Lies Borne Out by Facts, If Not the Truth”.
Never believe anything until it is officially denied.
People lie-it is their nature. The more at stake, the higher the likelihood of lying, particularly if consequences of telling the truth would be negative. I am not sure why the shock when it is determined the lying within the government is widespread-it is widespread and it threatens the legitimacy of the government but it is unlikely to change. Look at our “political class.” It is a very rate day when any politico tells the truth-unfortunate, but it is what it is and they are part of our government. I believe in the adage: “Trust no one.”
One small nitpick: I believe Robert Martinage was asked to resign because he was shagging women working for him or as the NY Daily News delicately puts it:
“Robert Martinage, who had been working at the acting undersecretary, stepped down Tuesday following allegations he engaged in inappropriate conduct with women working under him.”
I very much respect Philip Giraldi-he nails the hypocracy and lies in the government.
The underlying problem with people working in large organizations (and government is the largest) is that the incentives are not related to the effects of their actions on the entire organization (in the case of government it would be the wellbeing of its citizenry).
Their individual success, measured in income and upward mobility, is a matter of perception by his/her superiors and thus promotes those who are best in manipulating the facts so that they look good. S
ince the founding of the republic, organizations, public and private, have become larger and larger and now the majority of people work under the above conditions. The individual farmer, tradesman, and small government employee assuming personal responsibility for the result of his decisions has been replaced by a large middle layer of people who have learned that following orders and making their superior look good is most important for their personal success, so if lying is needed to advance, it must be good.
Biggest whopper lies of all times were after Sept 12 2001. Politicians and main stream media took all the All Bull Lying Prize trophies :^(
Like Americans in general, bureaucrats in Washington now embrace the philosophy espoused by the Socratic Society, which states that: “there’s no such thing as absolute truth, because all truths are a matter of opinion”. Interestingly enough, the same philosophy is often used to justify the awarding of trophies to each member of a class, regardless of individual accomplishment. http://socraticsociety.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/there-are-no-absolute-truths/
Yes (@ George) the whoppers were flowing eleven years ago right now in the run up to the Iraq War. Clearly, the Bush administration was lying–in the political nuance of the time (emerging from Blair’s government and its cooperation with the Bush) “the facts were being fixed around the policy” despite resistance from UN inspectors.
“All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god. There is no one who is good, not even one.” No exceptions for government, civilian outfits or your favorite politicians and journalists.
Didn’t Giraldi know that joining the CIA was joinng the Mafia?
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P2/5. Lies and deception to manipulate the public is not new however such behaviour can have far more serious implications when employed against foreign states.
‘Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin blames the West for resorting to deceitful political measures’
“At time of the withdrawal from East Europe, the NATO secretary general promised the USSR it could be confident that NATO would not expand over its current boundaries,” said Putin. (Putin slams deceitful US missile deal, Aug 30, 2010).
Certain U.S. and NATO officials have also recently claimed that “relations with Russia are a priority” and that Russia should not deploy strategic missile systems to counter expanding NATO missile architecture. Despite disingenuous rhetoric aimed at lowering Russia’s guard, conciliatory rhetoric is however betrayed by ongoing NATO expansion (in violation of previous assurances), the deployment of multi-layered/multi-phase land and sea based missile architecture/ radar infrastructure/operational forces (intended to achieve nuclear primacy of survivable first strike capabilities/ability to intercept retaliatory missiles in the event of conflict), the build-up/global expansion of military forces/assets/military alliances, the enhancement of interoperable capabilities and military exercises that indicate preparations for potential military conflict with numerous states (including Russia). When actions are inconsistent with rhetoric, it is clear deceit is being employed but this is to be expected as deceit is a tool of war. Furthermore, the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’ is also being misused to pursue broader strategic objectives.
“If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim/ There is value in being clear on the order of magnitude of the necessary change.” [Donald Rumsfeld] (New Documents Detail America’s Strategic Response to 9/11, Rumsfeld’s War Aim: “Significantly Change the World’s Political Map”, NSARCHIVE Digest no 2011-25)
Destabilisation, partition and /or regime change operations (to establish pro-western client states) are also being employed against Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Sudan, Egypt, N Korea, Russia, Cuba and other states. These operations involve the support of assets within opposition groups, NGOs, media, academic institutions, the military and/or dissident/separatist groups. The agitation for civil unrest, protests, uprisings, etc. are not only hostile actions and violate international law but some of these operations arguably constitute acts of war. But for every action there is a reaction.
P3/5. The U.S. is implementing policy that includes: the expansion of the military blocs around Russia and China; the encirclement of Russia and China with land/sea based missile architecture; covert destabilisation/partition/regime change operations through the support of assets in opposition groups/NGOs/media and/or dissident/separatist groups; efforts to sabotage Russian pipeline projects and Chinese energy agreements; preparations for possible war against Russia (‘WikiLeaks cable exposes NATO war plan against Russia’, December 9, 2010) and China (‘Pentagon officials are seeking ways to adapt a concept known as AirSea Battle specifically for China’, The Pentagon’s new China war plan, Aug 13, 2011), etc..
Successive wars against foreign states, globally expanding militarism, collective punishment of populations through economic warfare/strangulation, support of dictatorships and long term debt bondage to private financial institutions are interesting forms of ‘freedom’. Similarly despite rhetoric of ‘democracy’, a different situation is becoming a reality in the U.S.. Militarism, economic warfare/strangulation/the collective punishment of populations, surveillance/police state structures, media propaganda, beliefs of exceptionalism/superiority, etc, these are aspects of another military power in recent history.
Official rhetoric and ideological beliefs are also often inconsistent with actions. This is evident through the U.S. support of dictatorships, regime change operations against non-aligned elected governments (undemocratic actions), the support of terrorist groups (such as Operation Cyclone and current operations in Syria), renditions, torture (including through proxies), the abomination of Guantanamo Bay (prolonged inhumane treatment/torture of detainees), assassinations through missile strikes (that often kill unidentified ‘suspects’, many of whom are civilians with incidents including missile attacks on weddings, children collecting firewood, etc.)…….. But evil is often blind to its nature.
The U.S. is also effectively insolvent (as are various other nations) and its economy is currently maintained by the extension of unserviceable debt. It is likely to increasingly resort to militarism in an effort to maintain power and leverage. However, both mathematically and in practice, structural failure of this economic system is almost unavoidable recognising the increasing imbalances and the staggering level of toxic assets/ derivatives/ fraudulent debt structures that have contaminated the financial system.
P4/5. Our economic system is dependent on perpetual growth/debt expansion (to compensate for an accumulating interest component) but perpetual growth is unsustainable in our biosphere. Furthermore, debt is now overwhelming economies and many states are effectively insolvent with their economies merely maintained through the extension of unserviceable debt. Much of this debt has also been created through fraudulent debt structures/the employment of corrupt financial instruments (mortgage backed securities, collateralised debt obligations, credit default swaps, options, forwards, futures,…. derivatives trading)
“One of the biggest risks to the world’s financial health is the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market…… its notional value is 20 times the size of the world economy ” [Big Risk: $1.2 Quadrillion Derivatives Market Dwarfs World GDP, By Peter Cohan, Daily Finance, 09/06/2012]
“The reality is that when this [derivatives] bubble pops there won’t be enough money in the entire world to fix it… we should have never allowed world financial markets to become a giant casino. But we did. Soon enough we will all pay the price” [The Horrific Derivatives Bubble That Could One Day Destroy The Entire World Financial System]
“The derivatives casino itself is just a last-ditch attempt to prop up a private pyramid scheme in fractional-reserve money creation ……… The private creation of money at interest is the granddaddy of all pyramid schemes; and like all such schemes, it must eventually collapse, despite a quadrillion dollar derivatives edifice propping it up.” (Wall Street’s Protection Racket of Covert Derivatives: JPMorgan Derivatives Prop Up U.S. Debt, Why the Senate Won’t Touch Jamie Dimon, by Ellen Brown, Global Research / Web of Debt, June 20, 2012)
P5/5. Money was created to facilitate more efficient trading of services and goods. Fiat currency is now a representation of debt that is no longer a representation of anything of intrinsic value such as a physical commodity like gold. This is the basis of fractional-reserve banking whereby banks literally create money as part of a debt contract. But now many financial institutions employ instruments that facilitate fraudulent practices (the manufacture of vast fraudulent debt). These fraudulent debts (such as derivatives) dwarf the world economy. Men have become fools and are blind to logical consequences due to greed. Historically, the practice of usury was forbidden for a reason. There was recognition that it was not only immoral but unsustainable (requiring perpetual growth/debt expansion).
The core of the problem is usury and the exploitation of the public by private banks (involving long term debt bondage). The ‘perpetual growth’ paradigm (necessary to maintain an economic system based on servicing an accumulating interest component) is fundamentally flawed as it is unsustainable in our biosphere. But this will soon be the least of our problems as other events are likely to render this issue mute.
Unfortunately, many do not understand what is occurring but in time all will. History is largely repeating only now these events are occurring in a nuclear era. Only fools would employ aggressive and globally expanding militarism in a nuclear era (and repeat policies of the past that ended in horror) but such it seems is the nature of man. Although wars are often planned, wars can occur when they are not. Just as no nation wanted the first world war or the second world war, similarly, the third world war will likely be unplanned.
Many conflicts of lower intensity are globally expanding however this is a relative calm before a coming storm. Far larger conflagrations are approaching. In time the many wars shall be recognised as one.
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” [A. Einstein].
Unfortunately, man has also forgotten the value of fear that serves to moderate human behaviour but when the coming horror occurs, he will again understand fear.
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