Machiavelli and Marx Debate Iraq

  Notice

Philadelphia: Saturday, January 24th, 2009. 

Most readers are probably aware there was a four-month interruption in the debate following Machiavelli’s first rebuttal, for the simple reason both men were taking far more than their alloted times, and, it was getting very late.  Baruch S. Blumberg, MD, President of the American Philosophical Society, jokingly remarked he doubted whether Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine or Elihu Root, all known for  lengthy speeches, would have been  quite so long-winded. 

After consulting with Machiavelli and Marx, Dr. Blumberg announced the debate would resume in January, assuming that proved convenient for the debaters. Because Dr. Marx would have several months to prepare for his initial rebuttal, it was agreed that Mr. Machiavelli would be given an additional half-hour for his second rebuttal. 

 

                      Marx’s First Rebuttal 

                        Chronicled by Theosophus 

    To give life a meaning: that has been the grand endeavor of all who have preached ‘truth’; for unless life is given a meaning it has none.  At this level, truth is not something that can be proved or disproved: it is something which you determine upon, which, in the language of the old psychology, you will.  It is not something waiting to be discovered, something to which you submit or at which you halt: it is something you create, it is the expression of a particular kind of life and being which has, in you, ventured to assert itself.                                                                                                                                                                                                    R.J. Hollingdale

  Theories are instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.  We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. . . . Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.

Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist . . . We carve out stars in the heavens and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so. . . . We name the constellations diversely . . . In all of these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition.  All the additions “agree” with reality.  No one of them is false.  Which may be treated as the “more true” depends altogether on the human use of it.                                               William James                                       

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. . . .  Feuerbach does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. . . . The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.  Man must prove the truth—the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.  The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Karl Marx

 

 

Friedrich Nietzsche once suggested that where politics and philosophy are concerned one should love enemies more than friends. Reaffirming what one already believes, he reasoned, friends don’t help one grow. Enemies do. One must either accept their compelling arguments, or, try to counter them by building a better defense of his own position, profiting either way.

Marx seems to embody Nietzsche’s recommendation. Even his bitterest enemies never quite succeed in portraying him as malevolent or mean.  While he’s capable of great anger, his anger is directed at arguments, rather than the individuals who make them. He can be dismissive of silly propositions. But one has the impression it’s the silly propositions, not their defenders, who are being casually dismissed. 

Where Machiavelli appeared tense amd agitated as he approached the lectern for his first rebuttal, Marx looked as relaxed as his worn tweed jacket. Resting his hands on the edges of the podium, he gave Machiavelli a warm, avuncular smile, then turned to address the audience.

 

Marx: Mr. Machiavelli did me a favor by focusing on what he called my ‘peculiar theory’ of truth.” 

 ”From the 19^th century Hegelians I railed against, to 21^st century American democrats, liberals have pragmatically found the question ‘What is truth?’ abstract, irrelevant, boring.”

”But applying my theory to today’s troubled events—the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia, Montenegro, India and Sudan, the in-process collapse of the global economy, and the United States’ lurch toward fascism—convinces me that wrangling about the nature of truth may, for a time, become a universal preoccupation.” 

“Perhaps by ‘peculiar’ Machiavelli meant he’s having difficulty understanding my theory. His review of it certainly suggests he has faint comprehension.”

“Twice, he accused me of proposing truth doesn’t even exist.”

“He couldn’t be more wrong!”  

“At another point, apparently deciding I do believe in truth after all, he exhorted: ‘For a scientist, truth is discovered.   For Marx, it’s not discovered, it’s created.’”

“And with that observation he became half right.” 

“Let me begin, then, by stating my position clearly.” 

“I believe in truth!”

“Furthermore, being a materialist, I believe EVERY truth is at once a product of discovery AND creation.” 

“To illustrate:” 

“I consider the 7-year-old boy who declares a 100-lb weight ‘really heavy,’ to be objectively correct.”

“But when an Olympic weight lifter proposes the same weight is ‘remarkably light,’ I regard his contrary description as no less objectively true.” 

“For most people it’s an objective truth that peanuts are a healthy food and penicillin’s a life-saving drug.”

“For large minorities, the objective truth is both are deadly poisons.” 

“Most of you would describe the leaves on the oak trees outside this Center as green, though you’re aware millions of people would observe them as gray.” 

“If, like Mr. Machiavelli, you metamorphose into an absolutist when judging that color blind minority, you will argue they fail to see ’the truth’.” 

”On the other hand, if you remain a materialist, you’ll reason they see what ‘the truth’ is for people with their visualizing equipment; a truth no less objective than your own.” 

“Scientists observe (and Machiavelli keeps insisting his approach is scientific), that just as no two people have the same fingerprints and no two snowflakes are exactly alike, so no two of the 6.7 billion humans on earth have identical eye structures, or identical neurons to transmit visual images, or identical areas of the brain to organize and interpret what their eyes are seeing.” 

“As a consequence, if all 6.7 billion stood before me now, the indisputable material reality is no two of them would have precisely the same image of Karl Marx.”

“According to Machiavelli’s absolutist metaphysics, all objects and events have finite dimensions which a genuinely objective individual may discover.  Therefore, to ask: ‘Which of the 6.7 billion people comes closest to seeing the real Marx?’ is, for him, a perfectly logical question.” 

“But it’s a fatuous question for me!” 

“Being an empiricist, I regard every truth as a product of an ‘out-there’ viewed, the ‘in-here’ of a particular viewer, and the unique relationship between them, concluding each of  the 6.7 billion would have his/her equally objective personal view of my appearance.”  

“As I said in an 1842 debate with Prussian censors: ‘The essence of the mind is always the truth itself.’” 

“Physicist P.W. Bridgman made this simple point when he asked: ‘If measurements vary right along with variations in our measuring instruments, and, if the human brain is but the measuring instrument par excellence, does it not follow that what is true for one brain is, for another brain differently coded, false, and, that both brains are correct?’” 

“Now, I would agree with liberals that discussions about the meaning of truth are ‘abstract, irrelevant and boring,’ IF our concern was limited to things like weights, peanuts, penicillin and the color of leaves; things with respect to which the majority of people have common experiences, and, as a consequence,  share common definitions and truths.” 

“It obviously isn’t!” 

“We are all intimately involved with, affected by, and therefore deeply concerned about, momentous issues: wars and revolutions, the building, maintainence, dismantling and replacement of productive-distributive orders, the very evolution of human history. And with respect to such vital matters, individuals and communities often have different, at times mutually exclusive, experiences and interests, making the question ‘What is truth?’ of paramount importance for anyone who seeks to understand how we got here, and where it is that we are headed.” 

“Mr. Machiavelli was right when he said I agree with Hegel that consciousness and experience—knowing and doing, theory and practice—are ‘a unity’ for everyone.”

“He was right that where Hegel reasoned communities formulate new philosophies which then lead them to carry out fundamental material changes, I contend it’s always injurious material changes communities suffer which prompt them to defensively transform their assumptions about what truth is, where it comes from, and how it gets passed around; i.e, which induce a community to create and internalize a new Spiritual Quintessence.” 

“In short: ‘I found Hegel standing on his head and put him on his feet!’  ‘Life is not determined by consciousness,’ I argued, ‘but consciousness by life.’” 

“How does my inverted Hegelian logic enable us to acquire a scientific understanding of history?”

“Stay with me!  It’s not really hard to understand.” 

“If consciousness and experience are a unity, it logically follows that whenever you declare something is a ‘fact’ (an idea of superior value) you implicitly declare the superior value of the experience which produced it; and, assuming you aren’t psychotic, you reveal your intention to act in ways consistent with, ergo protective of, that experience right along with the fact it yields.” 

“It also follows that for anyone who will be hurt by a continuation of your experience—i.e., for someone who’s being injured by what you’re doing—your simple statement of ‘fact’ is a menacing expression of intent; not a disclosure of ‘fact’ at all, but a declaration of your pernicious values and objectives.” 

“Sociologist Lewis Wirth put it succinctly, when he wrote: ’Since every assertion of a “fact” about the social world touches the interests of some individual or group, one cannot even call attention to the existence of certain “facts” without courting the objections of those whose very raison d’etre in society rests upon a divergent interpretation of the “factual” situation.’” 

“Material examples of the socio-economic-political truth discovery-creation process are all around us:”

“Respecting U.S. and British media depictions of Israel’s practice vis-a-vis Palestinians, a Palestinian businessman recently observed:”

”’Occupied Palestinian territories are called “disputed”  . . . Illegal settlements built on demolished Palestinian lives, homes, confiscated lands and farms, are called “neighborhoods”, the occupiers are called “settlers” in the tradition of the European immigration to the US and Australia. . . . Gaza has been turned into one of the biggest prisons in the world, /but/ the resistance to Israel’s occupation is labelled “terrorism”.” 

“In an April 4^th, 2004 news briefing, General Richard Myers and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described Iraqis fighting against American forces as ‘terrorists,’ and ‘thugs.’” 

“On the same day, Aljazeera referred to them as ‘resistance fighters defending Iraq against a U.S. occupation,’ and the Iraqnet Information Network called dead Iraqi fighters not ‘terrorists,’ but ‘martyrs.’”

“Which of these diverse characterizations are correct? For a materialist, all are equally objective!”

“Each of the combatants is fighting to preserve their social existence in a situation which does not permit all of them to succeed, and their definitional disagreements merely express their underlying material conflicts with words.”    

“According to the materialist perspective, all our truths represent our experience, and, since no one either is, or could possibly become, an indifferent observer of his experience, that means all our truths bespeak our interests.” 

“Philosopher Leszek Kolakowski was making this point when he inquired: ’What justifies our belief that the visual world of a fly, made up of light and dark spots of neutral colors, is less “authentic” or less “true” than ours, except the fact that ours is better adapted to our needs?,’ ’In all the universe,’ Kolakowski concluded, ‘man cannot find a well so deep that, leaning over it, he does not discover at the bottom his own face.’” 

“As I reminded Prussia’s censors: ‘One and the same object appears differently to different individuals and expresses its various sides in as many various intellects.’  Like the Prussian censors, Mr. Machiavelli ‘conceive/s/ the truth abstractly and turn/s/ the mind into an inquisitor who dryly records the proceedings.’” 

“Intent on discovering ‘absolute truths’ he believes exist independently of the interests of individuals and communities who accept or reject them—truths passively waiting to be discovered—Machiavelli is unable to say anything meaningful regarding the material basis of human history’s unfolding.” 

“Employing his absolutist metaphysics and epistemology, leads Mr. Machiavelli to depict as static objects and events which are inevitably dynamic.” 

“He speaks a language of  that ‘is’ and this ‘is,’ in a universe of ceaseless ’process and becoming.’” 

“In the world of our material experience, acorns are in-the-process-of-becoming-saplings, saplings in-the-process-of-becoming-oak-trees, oak trees are in-the-process-of-becoming-dead-trees, if utilized by humans, in-the-process-of-becoming-firewood, tables or chairs.”

“Fertilized human eggs are in-the-process-of becoming-embryos, embryos in-the-process-of-becoming-fetuses, fetuses in-the-process-of-becoming-babies, babies in-the-process-of-becoming-children, children in-the-process-of-becoming-adults, etc.” 

“So it is, too, with our orders of production and distribution.” 

“When you look back, is it not indisputable that hunting and gathering tribes were in-the-process-of-becoming-nomadic-slave communities, nomadic slave communities were in-the-process-of-becoming-feudal-societies, and feudal societies were in-the-process-of-becoming-capitalist-states?”

“Yet to the question ‘How did this happen?,’ Mr. Machiavelli’s absolutistist paradigm provides no empirical, i.e., no scientific answers.” 

”When the creative component of truth is acknowledged everything suddenly starts to make material sense.”

“Our paleolithic hunting and gathering ancestors were animists who believed the forests that furnished them game, the rivers which offered fish, the meadows that provided berries, all possessed spirits which could be propitiated with the proper ceremonies and iconic symbols.”  

“The Spiritual Quintessence of those tribal communities wasn’t written by a minority with an elite social existence to protect.  It was born of, and directly expressed, experiences and interests shared by every community member. It was, in that regard, an egalitarian logic. (You’ll note Mr. Machiavelli misunderstood my argument on this issue).  

“Obviously, none of the hierarchically structured communities which followed the hunters and gatherers could have functioned if they had attempted to employ the self-understanding/Spiritual Qunitessence of the hunting and gathering world.” 

“Needing to increase their populations during their early stages of development, as well as the populations of animals being domesticated, nomadic slave communities defensively originated fertility gods to appease, many of which were believed to have animal forms.”

“Since maintaining social existence sometimes required them to fight other nomadic-slave tribes, they  created/prayed to both gods of war and gods of peace. The fact that they were often most effortlessly sustained by working with, rather than battling, the other nomadic communities—which had somewhat different experiences/interests, and, therefore, somewhat different gods—was an additional material reason for all of them to practice polytheism.  Not until settled communities began to be established in the fertile Nile Valley did monotheistic faiths become pragmatic logics.”

“Like their hunting and gathering and nomadic-slave predecessors, Europe’s feudal communities also required a distinctive Spiritual Quintessence to exist. Being hierarchically structured but stationary, they created a philosophy which proposed God determined everyone’s position in life, one that dictated serfs must be submissive to royalty, royalty and serfs submissive to the Roman Emperor, and to the Pope, Bishops, Cardinals and priests who wrote and directed the application of Religious Absolutism, the Spiritual Quintessence of settled land-owning-agricultural-elite orders of production and distribution; a logic which, in appropriately modified form, is presently the Spiritual Quintessence of Asian, African and Middle Eastern raw material-elite communities.”  

“As I also explained in my opening remarks, via the same defensive/conservative process, feudal systems were, in turn, succeeded by hierarchically structured financial-industrial-elite (capitalist) orders, which created, and continue to employ, their own unique Spiritual Quintessence for their perpetuation.”

“Which brings us to what is for you a vital question:” 

“If Religious Absolutism was feudalism’s Spiritual Quintessence, what, then, is the Spiritual Quintessence of the capitalist productive-distributive order, i.e., what is the internalized understanding with which capitalist communities reflexively justify and direct that order’s minute-by-minute, day-by-day, year-by-year preservation?” 

“Why, it’s Scientific Absolutism, of course! The very philosophical paradigm Mr. Machiavelli so enthusiastically promotes!”

“Based on the proposition all truth comes from God, is found through prayer and revelation, then disseminated by religious authorities, the feudal order’s metaphysics and epistemology, was wholly inadequate for building and maintaining a capitalist order of production and distribution.”

“Capitalist elites would have to personally oversee the construction of factories, and the design, operation and repair of machinery, along with intricate financial transactions; all tasks which required them to take control of their lives, rather than appealing to God through church figures and feudal aristocrats.” 

“Nietzsche remarked of the profound metamorphosis in consciousness that accompanied the birth of capitalism: “God is dead, and we have killed him!” 

“The capitalists needed banks to service their commercial operations. But, Europe’s feudal-elites proscribed the creation of national banks, even as they sowed the seeds of their order’s destruction by enriching the bankers of Venice and Genoa with deposits of stolen wealth—in Spain and Portugal’s case—wealth gleaned from the people through indulgences in the case of the clergy.”  

“Capitalist communities would need secular laws in place of feudalism’s restrictive regal edicts, binding legal agreements in lieu of vague expressions of loyalty and personal commitment. The secular laws were urgent for giving the capitalists’ agreements legitimacy, as were secular courts to make the laws enforceable, and secular police to do the enforcing, and to make the capitalists’ lives and fortunes secure.”

“In sum, to perpetuate their social existence it was necessary for the capitalists to create and internalize a secular Spiritual Quintessence, one which rationalized and directed a revolutionary dismantling of the feudal productive-distributive system with its landed aristocracy, and the building/maintenance of a hierarchically structured financial-industrial-elite order in its stead.” 

“Now, if you’re a materialist who focuses on what people DO, not on what they SAY, it’s evident that for industrial-elite communities around the world, scientific Absolutism has been that Spiritual Quintessence.”

 “As feudal societies became capitalist, the church was replaced by the university everywhere, the priest by the professor; a change often sudden and striking.” 

“Prior to the U.S. Civil War, the president of nearly every major college and university was a theologian who looked out upon the world through the prism of Religious Absolutism. Only a decade after the war, the heads of most major institutions of higher learning were scientists or businessmen with Scientific Absolutist perspectives.” 

“In 1917 the Russian Revolution brought the same dramatic paradigm transformation to the U.S.S.R.. Theologians were swept from philosophy and social science departments almost overnight, their places taken by Leninist ‘Marxists’ who, as Machiavelli correctly noted, employed a Scientific Absolutist interpretation of my theory.” 

“But capitalist communities were not going to be equalitarian, with workers and the poor deciding what was true for themselves. Like the feudal church and its theologians before them, capitalist universities and professors would ‘deliver truth’ to the masses.  Unlike the priests, however, the professors would find their capitalism-sustaining truths through what they sincerely believed was ‘impartial and objective investigation,’ rather than through prayer.” 

“Western capitalist nations, and the academicians who create-discover the ideas needed to justify and defend their hierarchically structured productive-distributive orders, have reasoned Marxist propositions will inhibit, if not prevent, the discernment of socio-economic-political ’reality’.  Their Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, et. al counterparts, on the other hand, have insisted absolutistic Marxism alone can lead one to ‘the truth’.”

“Since their disagreements have been about techniques/methods/- procedures, not about metaphysics and epistemology (i.e., not about what truth IS and how it’s determined) they are able to adopt one another’s positions with the same ease that Methodists become Catholics or Presbyterians become Baptists; no  paradigmatic transformation/change of Spiritual Quintessence  is involved.”

“Moreover, as Frederich Nietzsche, William James, F.C.S. Schiller, John Dewey, Leszek Kolakowski and other materialists discovered, capitalist country academics East and West have defended Scientific Absolutism against Relativism with an aggressivity equal to that of the 18^th century European priests who protected the feudal logic.”    

“Having given you a scientific-materialist explanation for absolutistic interpretations/applications of my theory, I’ll take up what is for you the critical issue of where the U.S. and world community are currently at, and, where I believe they are headed.”

“Declaring our species inherently evil, Mr. Machiavelli concluded his rebuttal by throwing up his hands and announcing he supports the U.S. global strategy, which, to cite him, he considers: ‘a strategy that’s both an imperative, and, the lesser evil.’”

“Let me begin my more sanguine perspective with an assertion I made at the close of my opening statement:” 

“The U.S. economy, (along with much of the global economy), is being held together by  increasingly destructive U.S. military-industrial expenditures and operations.”

“Granted, it used to be true that the defense industry, however injurious or fatal for hundreds of  millions of  the Third World poor, helped sustain the United States’ economic viability.”

“Following World War II, the rapidly growing populations and deepening poverty of non-industrialized Asian, African and Latin American nations began leading many children of their middle classes and elites to the conclusion they needed to dismantle their countries’ agricultural/raw-material systems of production, carry out land reform, and industialize.”

“Unfortunately, from the U.S. perspective, their only sources of money for industrializing were U.S., and to a lesser extent, British and French, agricultural, raw-material, communications and banking industries.”

“So, they started confronting large American interests with expropriation.” 

“Cuba’s seizure of U.S. sugar, tobacco, gambling and other industries; Chile’s take over of Kennicott and Anaconda Copper, I.T.T. and U.S. banking corporations; Nicaragua’s confiscation of U.S. owned or controlled banana, sugar, coffee, beef and tobacco operations, and the growing threat posed by Indonesian pro-industrial forces during Sukarno’s presidency are prime examples.”

“The United State’s response?” 

“Learning from the failure to retain its profitable Cuban interests, the U.S. aggressively employed financial and economic pressures. More importantly, it used, and got threatened Third World agricultural and raw-material elites to use, military force, driving Allende, Ortega and the Sandinista National Liberation Front from power. It advised, subsidized and provided CIA assistance and military equipment for overthrowing Sukarno and slaughtering 800,000 pro-industrial Indonesians. It killed 3,000,000 Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians, successfully stopping the drive toward threatening industrial development in that region.”

“That accomplished, the U.S. began loaning/granting vast sums of money to all the Third World countries in which it had large investments, and/or from which it profitably obtained agricultural and raw-material products, or which provided land access and waterways vital for defending American interests: Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, etc., enabling them to purchase huge quantities of U.S. weaponry to keep their increasingly restive populations in check. It also sold, in Israel’s case donated, billions-of-dollars worth of arms to allied industrial nations that helped protect its Third World interests, or, which shared the benefits of its oppressive foreign policy.”  

“For everyone (everyone except the Third World peoples being subjugated or killed), that policy worked well for over half a century. U.S. investments in Third World countries were protected, as were the wealth and hegemonic existences of those countries’ raw-material and agricultural elites. At the same time, U.S. arms-manufacturers, producing everything from F-15s, F-16s, and F-22s, bombers, nuclear bombs, smart bombs, cluster bombs and bunker-busters, hand grenades, fueling tankers, unmanned aerial vehicles, Blackhawk helicopters, Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, jeeps, Paladin Howitzers, automatic rifles, M-40 sniper rifles, uniforms, armored vests, helmets, battlefield kitchens, and, memorial gear for the servicemen who didn’t survive, reaped billions-of-dollars in profit yearly.” 

“Gradually, however, with its non-defense manufacturing being exported to Mexico, Taiwan, China and India, the huge cost of arms production associated with its ’hold the restive bastards down’ foreign policy became so embarrassingly enormous that today Americans no longer admit its dimensions even to themselves.” 

“Chalmers Johnson has noted: ‘In an attempt to disguise the true size of the U.S. military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example $23.4 billion for the Department of Energy goes toward developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3 billion in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt and Pakistan). Another $1.03 billion outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and re-enlistment incentives for the overstretched U.S. military, up from a mere $174 million in 2003, when the war in Iraq began.  The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7 billion, 50 percent of it for the long-term care of the most seriously injured among the 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and 1,708 in Afghanistan. . . . Another $46.4 billion goes to the Department of Homeland Security.’”

“’By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83 percent of the value of all plants and equipment in U.S. manufacturing.  From 1947 to 1990, the combined U.S. military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion.  Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, U.S. reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment.’”

“Robert Higgs, ‘a senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute,’ suggests: ‘A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon’s basic budget and double it.’ ‘Some 30-40 percent of the defense budget is ‘black.’ ‘Meaning, Johnson adds, ‘that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include, or whether their total amounts are accurate.’”

“’The Pentagon’s 2009 budget doesn’t even include money for actual wars,’ Tom Engelhardt observes. ‘/Those/ wars are all paid for by ‘supplemental’ bills like the $162 billion one Congress /recently passed/.’‘The Pentagon not only produces stealth planes, it is, in budgetary terms, a stealth operation.  If honestly accounted, the actual Pentagon yearly budget, including all the ‘military related’ funds salted away elsewhere, is probably now more than $1 trillion.’”

“The producer and vender of more than half the world’s weaponry, the U.S. has over 730 overseas bases; and ‘more than 50 percent of income tax dollars goes to the Pentagon.’”

“Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing rank 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd on the list of global arms producers, and all three are Fortune 500 corporations.  Boeing and Lockheed Martin each have weapons contracts with a yearly value in excess of $19 billion, Northrop Grumman, approximately $16 billion. CorpWatch estimated Lockheed Martin received $105 from every U.S. taxpayer in 2007.”

“With ‘annual revenues of $20 billion,’ relates Michael Dickinson, ‘Raytheon, manufacturer of the 100 bunker buster bombs kindly flown by America to Israel at the height of their bombardment of Lebanon, and supplier of electronic equipment for the apartheid wall built on Palestinina land . . . /is/ the world’s largest producer of guided missiles, and fifth largest defense contractor in the world, provider of aircraft radar systems, weapons sights and targeting systems, communication and battle-management systems, and satellite components.’” 

“American academic institutions are profiting greatly. ‘Since 2000,’ writes Bryan Farrell: ‘universities have seen defense-related research contracts increase 900 percent, from $4.4 billion in 2000 to $46.7 billion in 2006. . . . Penn State pulled in $1.6 billion in endowment funds last year, a 20 percent increase over the previous year . . . Not surprisingly, such corporate gifts come from defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Exxon Mobil, which, in exchange, get the privilege of recruiting students to work for the war machine . . . Since Penn State is home to one of the U.S. Navy’s top civilian research facilities, . . . science and engineering students are a prized commodity to the ever-expanding defense industry.’” 

“Senators and members of Congress have become heavily dependent upon defense industries for the money needed to run for office.  Matt Taibbi points to the ‘influx of cash from would-be military contractors’ in the 2008 election, observing: ‘John Lehman, a former secretary of the Navy whose firm builds the Superferry transport vessel, not only donated $28,500 of his own money, but bundled at least $250,000 for McCain from other donors. Donald Bollinger, who is a contractor on the controversial Littoral Combat Ship, gave $27,300 and bundled a whopping $500,000.’”

“The legislators are also reliant on voters who either work for, or, whose counties, cities and states are dependent upon military bases and/or defense corporations.’With bases, factories or other components of the military-scientific complex in almost every congressional district,’ Saul Landau laments, ‘it is unlikely to see a groundswell to drastically reduce the military budget. Indeed, some corporations that service the military, with weapons or science, exert serious pressure to not withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq and dismantle bases that have become beyond obsolete.’”

“Many legislators own stock in defense corporations, Associated Press writer Anne Flaherty reports: ‘Members of Congress have as much as $196 million collectively invested in companies doing business with the Defense Department, earning millions since the onset of the Iraq War . . . Overall, 151 members hold investments worth $78.7 million to $195.5 million in companies that receive defense contracts . . . These investments earned them anywhere between $15.8 million and $62 million between 2004 and 2006.’” 

“Dividing the high figure of $62 million by the 151 members of congress with defense company investments gives one an average per-member profit of $410,596. If the lowest total profit estimate of $15.8 million is used, the average is $104,600.  Not a bad take from a killing machine venture either way.” 

“Defense spending has become so lucrative, and so vital for keeping the U.S. economy afloat, that immense waste expenditures are blithely ignored.  ‘According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO),’ relates Taibbi: ‘The Department of Defense has already “marked for disposal’ hundreds of millions of dollars worth of spare parts—and not old spare parts, but new ones that are still on order!  In fact, the GAO report claims that over half of the spare parts currently on order for the Air Force—some $235 million worth, or about the same amount that /Senator Bernie/ Sanders unsuccessfully tried to get for the community health program last year—are already marked for disposal!  Our government is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Defense Department crap just to throw it away! “They’re planning on throwing this stuff away and it hasn’t even come in yet,” says Sanders.’”

“Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney recieved a small amount of attention but no answers to her question: ‘What happened to the $2.3 trillion dollars’ the Pentagon ‘quietly’ disclosed was ‘missing’ from its funds on the day before 9/11?”

“Predictably, the Pentagon officers, defense industry executives and legislators who make hay together, often play together. ‘Pentagon elites and high government officials are teeing off at taxpayer expense at hundreds of courses all over the planet,’ notes Nick Turse.  Many of the golf courses are on U.S. military bases.”

“Now the crucial question about consciousness: How did the U.S. rationalize its all-out militarization of the globe?”

“From the late 1940s, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, Americans told themselves they were battling ‘socialist-communist’ enemies inspired by me, aided/abetted by socialist-communist Russia and China.  That was the vaporous and unexamined logic initially used to build its awesome military-industrial complex, and to manufacture, distribute and employ its terrible wares in defense of Third World interests.  It was America’s ‘operative foreign policy truth.’”

“What material evidence did the U.S. have to support that ‘operative truth’”? 

“About the same amount Spanish Inquisitionists had when they put Jews on the rack in the name of Christ, or the Taliban has to justify disfiguring women’s faces with acid for the pleasure of Allah.”

“Anyone who has bothered to read my writing knows that what the Soviet Union, China and Third World revolutionaries were/are saying and doing has had nothing whatsoever to do with my concept of socialist revolution or socialism-communism in practice.”

“It was a fundamental axiom of my theory that after a socialist revolution everyone would receive the same wage, enabling each working person to acquire an equal share of the nation’s production of  goods and services: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.’  Following the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871 I modified this prediction, but only slightly.  For a brief period I suggested, the highest paid might receive twice the income of the lowest.”  

“However, to quote from my Critique of the Gotha Program, there would be residual inequality in a socialist organization of society because: ‘one man is superior to another physically or mentally; one worker is married, another not; one has more children and so on.  Thus with an equal output, and an equal share in the social consumption, one will in fact receive more than another.’”

“Although initially ‘inevitable,’ this problem would resolve itself, I concluded. As the socialist order of production and distribution matured it would become communist, wherein the operative principle would be: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’”

“Clearly, at no point has any of this described the Soviet Union or China, where new, albeit progressive, anti-feudal, pro-industrial elites were already forming while their revolutions were in progress; elites who were, and are, as socio-economically removed from their nations’ poor as any found in the industrialized West.”

“I argued that because everyone seeks, gains and utilizes political power in defense of their social existence, so long as one segment of society (class), enjoys an elite existence, its members will automatically acquire greater political authority to protect it, and a political state will continue to exist under their control.” 

“Since a socialist revolution would bring the end of inequality, I reasoned (and continue to believe), no one would any longer need political power.  Ergo, no one would pursue it, and politics, along with the political state, would die a natural death. Only an administrative structure for the equitable distribution of community goods and services, would remain. Furthermore, as in the Paris Commune, the socialist administrators would all be subject to immediate recall by the people.”

“Would any of you seriously suggest this has described  post-revolutionary Russia, China, Cuba or Vietnam in any way, at any stage?” 

“Then, there’s the matter of personal freedom.”

“Whatever you may think of my theory, I insist my reasoning is at least syllogistic. Only the political authorities of a state have the power to control freedom of speech, press, and assembly I noted: ‘Censorship is criticism as government monopoly’. Since political authorities would no longer exist under socialism, I concluded freedom of speech, press and assembly would be unrestricted. People would henceforth decide for themselves who was right and who was wrong, what was true, and what was false.’”

“‘Freedom of the press proceeds on the presumption of anticipating world history,’  I wrote, ‘sensing in advance the voice of the people which alone has hitherto judged which writer was “competent,” which “incompetent.”  ’Freedom is so very much the essence of man that even its opponents realize it, in that they fight its reality. They want to appropriate that most costly jewel, which they will not consider the jewel of human nature. No man fights against freedom; at most he fights against the freedom of others . . . the free press is the omnipresent open eye of the spirit of the people, the embodied confidence of a people in itself . . . It is the ruthless confession of a people to itself  . . . The free press is the intellectual mirror in which a people sees itself, and self-viewing is the first condition of wisdom.”

“To those who argued freedom of the press would bring hurtful changes to society, I replied: ‘Freedom of the press causes “changeable conditions” as little as the astronomers’ telescope causes the perpetual motion of the planetary system.  Wicked astronomy!’”

“Could I have stated my view on this subject any more clearly?”

“As for the materially indefensible proposition that Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, or any other self-proclaimed socialist-communist country has ever acted upon that view—Please!”

“Insisting orders of production and distribution are razed only if and when they have lost the ability to maintain the social existence of those who tear them down, I argued a dismantled order could no more be resurrected than a dead tree or dead animal can be brought back to life.  People living in feudal communities would not be able to restore a hunting and gathering or nomadic slave way of life; citizens of a capitalist society would find it impossible to reconstitute a feudal structure; and members of a socialist community would be unable to reestablish a  capitalist-world existence.”

“The Soviet Union/Russia, China et al. past or present?”

“Then, there’s the issue of state ownership-of/control-over property and the means of production.  Soviet and Chinese leaders have often described that as a distinguishing feature of socialism, and most U.S. politicians have opportunistically agreed. I, on the other hand, argued that the unification of property, corporations and the state, occurs during the advanced stages of capitalist production. However, unlike socialism, I noted, state-capitalism defends the hegemonic social existences of a financial-industrial elite first, rather than serving all members of the community equally.”

“In making that argument, I reasoned as follows:”

“During the early period of capitalist production factories were small and manufacturers were able to obtain sufficient money (which I call ”surplus value”), from workers to build and repair their factories and machines. But, as the number of individuals and nations forced to adopt capitalist production to survive increased, so, too, did the aggressivity of their competition. In time it became impossible for capitalists to extract enough surplus value from workers to construct the large factories, and install the costly equipment, which competing required.”

“At that point, I observed, it became necessary for capitalists to obtain the requisite funds by selling stocks and bonds; which I described as ‘seeds of socialism,’ since it meant the capitalists were relinquishing a modicum of control over their corporations.  Eventually, I argued, with more and more capitalist nations coming into existence, factories becoming ever-larger, machines more sophisticated and expensive, even the sale of stocks and bonds no longer provided sufficient money, and it now became necessary to glean surplus value from everyone via the state.”

“But, as I’ve indicated, with the benefits of production accruing mainly to a financial-industrial elite, state-capitalism was/is no less capitalistic; a point my colleague Friedrich Engels emphasized in his essay ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,’ writing:”  

“’/T/he transformation, either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces.  In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious.  And the modern state, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers-proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. . . . State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.’”  

“As you’re undoubtedly aware, the U.S. government has long provided American agriculture about $4 billion dollars yearly, most of that money going to the biggest producers, along with tens-of-billions-of-dollars to pharmaceutical corporations and other capitalist industries in the form of grants, and hundred-of-billions in tax write offs.” 

“Today, with large banks and mortgage institutions being rescued with enormous sums of government dollars—$50 billion to AIG, $350 billion to Citi Group and other banks, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s debts taken over and Big-3 auto industry executives waiting in line, while at the same time the government resists pressures to save desperate middle class homeowners from losing their homes—surely my argument respecting the marriage of industry and the state under capitalism requires no further defense.”

“Ironically, my theory does provide a material explanation for what transpired in the U.S.S.R. China and other self-styled ‘socialist-communist’ nations, a point Machiavelli managed to miss.”

“Because the primary objective of everyone’s political consciousness and practice is to secure their own social existence, if some members of a revolutionary contingent have privileged social existences they automatically take control of the revolution in order to defend them.  As a result, when an established order has been razed and its elites have been expropriated, discovering that to move any further in the direction of equality will mean expropriating themselves, the revolutionaries promptly cease their revolutionary practice.  To quote myself here: ‘As the main thing is not to be deprived of the fruits of civilization, of the acquired productive forces, the traditional forms in which they were produced must be smashed.  From this moment the revolutionary class becomes conservative.’”   

“In ‘The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System,’ Milovan Djilas convincingly documented that my theory, and Engels’ description of state-capitalism, aptly describe the origin and operation of Russian-Soviet and East European systems.“    

“To be sure, Soviet and Chinese leaders pragmatically believed they represented socialist-communist construction; much as Spain’s inquisitionists believed they were doing the work of God; or the Nazis believed they were building a 1,000 year humanitarian utopia; or Israel believes it’s carrying out God’s will when it expropriates, ethnically cleanses, oppresses, maims and kills Palestinians; or (staring hard at O’Reilly and Hannity), FOX News pundits believe FOX’s programming to be ‘fair and balanced.’” 

“But, anyone who holds that people and nations, like things, are defined by what they do, not by what they think or say, will dismiss all such presumptuous, self-serving declarations.” 

“Prior to the Russian Revolution its leaders—Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike—accepted the part of my theory (a part Thomas Jefferson would have understood), which describes all revolutions and all revolutionaries as conservative, in that they dismantle inadequate systems of production and distribution and build more beneficient ones, in order to be socio-economically sustained.” 

“Recognizing Russia’s feudal system could no longer maintain the country’s growing population, the Russian revolutionaries argued Russia, like France, England, Japan and Germany before it, needed to undergo a capitalist revolution. After Russia lost a war with Japan in 1905 Lenin, Trotsky, et al., urged the country’s financiers and manufacturers to lead one. When they failed to do so, consistent with my logic, the revolutionaries decided they would have to oversee Russia’s capitalist revolution themselves. Arrested and tried for promoting a capitalist revolution in 1905, Trotsky addressed the court: ‘Gentlemen of the judges. You fail to understand that, in the context of the time, we revolutionaries are the true conservatives.’”

“The Mensheviks and Bolsheviks predicted Russia’s capitalist revolution would break the country’s economic ties with Western Europe, throwing the latter deeply into crisis. Since West European states were already capitalist, the revolutionaries reasoned that to survive the crisis they would be forced to undergo socialist revolutions. In turn, they concluded, European socialist revolutions would throw Russia back into a crisis it could resolve only by having a socialist revolution of its own.”

“In sum, a capitalist revolution in Russia would ’spark’ socialist revolutions in Western Europe, which would then ’spark’ a socialist revolution in Russia. The Bolsheviks even named their newspaper  ‘Iskra’ (‘The Spark’).”

“When Russia had its anti-feudal revolution and West Europeans were not ’sparked’ into carrying out socialist revolutions, Russian anarchists began demanding that the Bolsheviks proceed with establishing a classless-egalitarian society in the Soviet Union anyway.”

“Lenin was adamantly opposed.  He argued, (plausibly, I believe), that in order to industrialize the Soviet Union would need the expertise of its businessmen, engineers, metalurgists, chemists, biologists and other professionals, all of whom enjoyed a socio-economic status well above that of the average Soviet citizen. Many of those professionals had already gone into exile in Western Europe or the United States. If the elite existence of those who remained was not protected Lenin insisted, they, too, would leave; making industrialization impossible, and socio-economic-political chaos a certainty.  Therefore, the U.S.S.R. must concentrate on building a capitalist structure, as originally planned.” 

“Furthermore, Lenin reasoned, because England, France and the U.S. had no serious competitors when they established their capitalist systems, they were able to start with small firms and gradually proceed to ones which were large. The U.S.S.R. on the other hand, was going to industrialize in a world already dominated by huge corporations which operated internationally. To compete in that world would require starting with firms of grand scale; and that would necessitate tapping the energies of everyone via the state, just as Japan and Germany had done before it for the same reason.  For now, Lenin concluded, the U.S.S.R. needed to focus on becoming state capitalist.” 

“In a famous speech given in June 1921,  Lenin exhorted:”

“’The alternative (and this is the last ‘possible’ and the only sensible policy) is not to try to prohibit or put the lock on the development of capitalism, but to try to direct it into the channels of “state capitalism.” This is economically possible, for state capitalism—in one form or another, to some degree or other—exists wherever the elements of free trade and capitalism in general exist.  Can the Soviet state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, be combined, united with state capitalism?  Are they compatible?  Of course they are.  This is exactly what I argued in May 1918.  I hope I proved it in May 1918.  Nor is that all.  I then proved that state capitalism is a step forward compared with the small proprietor (both small-patriarchal and petty-bourgeois) element.  Those who juxtapose or compare state capitalism only with socialism commit a host of mistakes, for in the present political and economic circumstances it is essential to compare state capitalism with petty-bourgeois production.’”

“Which brings us to a consequential question for you inhabitants of the present/builders of the future:”

“If there was not a whit of material evidence the Soviet Union, and subsequently China, were socialist; if, to the contrary, all the material evidence described them as state-capitalist nations; if their only links to socialism were abstract claims made by political representatives of neuveau financial-industrial elites (at the time of Lenin’s speech, Trotsky remarked that Lenin alone would dare to make such an honest public statement), how did the U.S. ever come up with such a preposterous narrative?” 

“Who were its authors? Who its most vigorous promoters? What did they mean by “communism? And, why did Americans, one-and-all, act out an acceptance of their fairytale; not merely workers, but academicians, movie moguls, scientists, almost everyone?” 

“Who it was that authored, then aggressively promoted, the U.S. anti-communist crusade against a mythical communist threat is hardly a mystery.”

“It was the political representatives of defense industries and corporations with menaced Third World, particularly Latin American, investments; other people joining in as they found that doing so was vital for protecting, often enhancing, their own interests as well.”

“Years before the formation of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, defense company executives and their legislative representatives were already engaged in suppressing union leaders whose ‘communist’ efforts to increase defense company workers’ wages were found to be a threat.”  

“Similarly, the Communist Control Act of 1954, passed by both houses of Congress, specifically prohibited Communist Party members, who were trying to improve the lot of workers, from holding official positions in labor unions.” 

“The government used this and other acts ‘to investigate and harass’ any organization which demonstrated ‘communist leanings’ by taking the side of workers in  their conflicts with corporations, or Third World countries in their struggles against U.S. companies, or blacks in their battles against whites.”  

“Furthermore, how the elite interests involved defined ‘communism’ was clear:  ‘That which threatens my economic interests is ‘communist,’ and the more it threatens, the more ‘communist’ it becomes.”

“But why did Americans, one-and-all, act out an acceptance of the elite’s fairytale, the majority enthusiastically, a  minority with reluctance, a few kicking and screaming in protest while, like the others, they continued their daily routine of work, school and paying taxes, in other words, went along?”

“Would you offer a liberal-absolutist explanation that they did it because they were ignorant of their own ‘true’ interests and needed to be enlightened?”

“Or—as my theory argues—was it another instance of people internalizing, then, acting upon, an understanding necessary for protecting the social existence of the nation’s elites because doing so was the least disruptive way to maintain their own less favored interests; including that of liberals, most of whom, however reluctantly, also marched in step?”

“During the Vietnam War, I was amused to note that the majority of American war protestors seemed able to convince themselves they ‘really were’ what they thought, wrote, read and said, rather than what they did; as, like everyone else, they participated in the mass killing of Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and subsequently, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans. and others.”

“Hundreds of academicians were writing and speaking against the war, while acting-out the same acceptance and support as the war’s capitalist proponents.”

“Ironically, since the latter were often adept at avoiding taxes, it’s probable some protesters did more than many pro-war capitalists when it came to assisting that project; a project which was destroying the lives of the very people with whom the protesters claimed to identify, and for whom they claimed to care.”  

 Was this yet another instance of mass ignorance?  Or, was it one of people conveniently believing that which most effortlessly sustained them?”

“That minority of American protesters who did accept culpability had little difficulty justifying their cooperation with the on-going exploitation, oppression and slaughter of Third World poor.”

“They (correctly?) told themselves there was really no effective way to stop.”

“Move to England, Germany or France?  Those countries not only supported the U.S. effort, they were carrying out their own Third World suppressions.”

“Take up exile in the U.S.S.R.? Although the Soviet Union’s state-capitalists were self-interestedly providing a moderate amount of assistance to Third World liberation movements in regions dominated by the U.S., they were equally energetic when it came to protecting their own hegemonic existences by stepping on the poor at home and in Eastern Europe. During the Great Depression Russia’s state-capitalists had demonstrated there were no limits to the depravity they would be willing to manifest in defense of their favored socio-economic situations.”  

“Let me return, now, to the matter of America’s deeply troubled immediate situation.”

“As I noted in my opening statement, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and ending of the Cold War, U.S. defense budgets fell throughout the 1990s and employment in the defense industry went down with them; more than 2 millions defense industry jobs were lost between 1992 and 2001.” 

“In The End of America, Naomi Wolf observes: ‘the U.S. defense industry was staring into the face of a falling market share.  To grow it would have to find a new enemy.  It would also help if it expanded its product line from building fighter jets to the newfangled demand for applications involving surveillance.’”

“With the United States’ economy depressed, with much of its manufacturing base exported, and the largest, most profitable, remaining industries military-industrial in nature, representatives of the U.S. elite whose social existences were most in jeopardy predictably discovered/created that requisite enemy, one whose defeat would require the country to spend from hundreds of billions, to incalculable trillions of dollars on military hardware and military conquest: namely, Islamic and assorted other ‘terrorists,’ meaning anyone who stands up against the United States’ increasingly injurious practices in their countries.”

“First on the list of Islamic terrorist threats was oil rich Iraq.” 

“As I also observed in my opening remarks, for many major U.S. corporations, the financial benefits coming from the invasion of that country were immediate.”

“To briefly recall some of those benefits:” 

“In March 2004 the San Francisco Chronicle reported:” 

“’. . . the invasion provided a multibillion-dollar boost to the United States’ largest construction and engineering firms. Although Bechtel Corp. and Halliburton have received the most public scrutiny, the billions of tax dollars pouring into Iraq’s reconstruction also flow through such competitors as Parsons Corp., Fluor Corp. and Washington Group International.  For sheer size of contracts, none of the reconstruction firms can rival Halliburton . . . . The company, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, holds contracts potentially worth between $12.6 billion and $16.8 billion.  Bechtel won $2.83 billion in contracts for repairing electrical plants, water systems, airports and railways.’”

“As for U.S. weapons manufacturers: ‘Since September 12, 2001’, writes Robert Dreyfuss, ‘defense spending has exploded.  For 2008, the Bush Administration /has/ request/ed/ a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001 . . . U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.’”

“Between 9/11, 2001 and June 2007, President Bush also requested, and Congress granted, $44 billion for biological warfare research. BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly Corp, Monsanto and Pfizer are among the many companies reputed to be involved.” 

“Declaring that its ‘core mission’ is ‘to enhance the ability of state, local and tribal governments to prepare, prevent, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks and other disasters,’ by 2003 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the chief instrument for persuading Americans to enlist in, and benefit from, the new crusade, had already provided states and counties $9 billion.” 

“What constitutes ‘countering terrorism’ has, of course, been left conveniently vague.”

“Huntsville, Alabama was given $70,000 to turn an abandoned mineshaft into a nuclear fallout shelter, just in case muslim terrorists get their hands on a nuclear weapon. In 2006 Worcester, Massachussets purchased a $514,000 ‘Mobile Command Center’ truck with ‘a 40-foot-high panoramic camera and multiple communications devices.’ Martha’s Vineyard was granted $900,000 to ‘upgrade one of its harbors with fencing and video cameras.  And five North Dakota fire departments were recently granted $581,000 to ‘help boost their ability to respond to emergencies in their communities.’”

“The volunteer fire department of Cheshire, Massachussetts, a town of 3,500 people, was given a Homeland Security Grant of $665,962; though it was told it could not use the funds to purchase the new fire truck it badly needed.” 

“With the U.S. now in a deepening recession, Washington Post reporter Spencer Hsu writes the DHS has announced it will give ‘state and local agencies . . . $3 billion in counter-terrorism grants in 2009, with fewer strings attached than in past years.’  It will also permit more of the distributed money to trickle down, ‘allow/ing/ recipients to spend up to 50 percent of homeland security grants for personnel expenses, up from 25 percent . . . a concession to sharply tightening budgets at all levels of government.’”

“Unfortunately for Americans of conscience and humanity the new crusade has  particularly ominous features.” 

“While moderately helpful where propping up many state and local economies is concerned,  the U.S. anti-terrorist crusade,  merged with a Homeland Security program reminiscent of Nazi Germany, is not only devastating Third World peoples, it poses a growing threat to the freedom of Americans, to many, a threat to their lives.”  

“Consider the inherent weaknesses of this new crusade, relative to its anti-communist predecessor:”

“Leaders of the anti-communist jihad were able to empirically define their enemies; namely, anyone (or anything) which threatened them with expropriation.” 

“They could point to those enemies: specific Third World countries, Chile under Allende, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, Castro’s Cuba, North Vietnam, Sukarno’s Indonesia.” 

“They could identify specific enemy organizations: political parties, revolutionary groups and trade unions, as well as specific individuals: liberation movement leaders, left-leaning Third World artists, professors and priests.” 

“Finally, they could identify specific countries—the U.S.S.R. and China—which sympathized with, at times supported, the mythical Third World ‘socialist-communist’ movements.” 

“Today’s anti-terrorist crusaders are almost overwhelmed by problems in all of these respects.”

“To start with, they have found it impossible to clearly identify their enemies, or, to determine who their leaders are. They initially described the principal enemy as ‘al Quaida,’ calling it a tight-knit organization directed by the wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Laden; though they’ve had some difficulty deciding how their enemies’ names are spelled: ‘bin Laden’ or ‘bin Ladin,’ ‘al Quaida’ or ‘al Quaeda;’ not a very propitious beginning for a national campaign.”

“Having declared al Quaida the leading terrorist enemy, the anti-terrorist crusaders have had great difficulty deciding who is and who isn’t, a member of, allied with, or supportive of, that organization.”

“Under the crusaders’ direction, the U.S. initially argued Saddam’s Sunni tribesmen were associated with al Quaida.  Later, needing the Sunni’s assistance to counter Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, it changed its mind and began paying large salaries to Sunnis who backed Iraq’s Shia-dominated government.”

“No less problematic for the anti-terrorist jihadists, while industrial nation arms dealers may sell the ’terrorists’ weapons, not a single industrialized country has openly defended them or any of their terrorist acts.  In addition, although the U.S. has accused Iran of fomenting Islamic terrorism in Iraq, most of the material evidence counters that proposition. Iran is actually supportive of the Iraqi government put in power by the U.S., convinced it’s interests are thereby best protected.” 

“From week to week, the U.S. has vacillated about whether, and to what degree, Pakistan is behind, or against, its anti-terrorist crusade, which Afghani organizations, tribes and individuals are enemies, which of them are friends.”  

“Then, there are the crusaders’ ‘demonstration terrorists’ captured and imprisoned at Guantanamo, Cuba. Wolf relates a Seton Hall University investigation found ‘most of the Guantanamo prisoners are innocent, and were swept up by Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan simply because the United States had offered bounties of up to $5,000 per prisoner, a major sum for that area.’”  

“To compound the difficulties confronting the anti-terrorist crusaders, 12 of the 19 terrorists who were said to have carried out the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon which generated the crusade, were later determined to still be alive.” 

“Worse still, polls reveal approximately half of the U.S. population reject the government’s account of 9/11, believing members of the Bush Administration were either complicit, or, at least aware the attacks were going to happen.” 

“The leading ’9/11conspiracy theorists,’ who are demanding a new, more thorough investigation of that event, include 547 architects and engineers, many of national repute; hundreds of scholars; more than 64 pilots, including test pilots, pilots of the latest fighter jets, and pilots with 30-plus years of experience flying large commercial airlines; scientists who not only argue the World Center buildings were brought down by controlled demolition but have presented compelling physical evidence to that effect; and firefighters, some of whom were on the scene when the WTC towers fell.” 

“Conversely, only a few scientists, and virtually no experienced pilots or firefighters have attempted to defend the anti-terrorist jihadists’ telling of 9/11; and the conspiracy theorists have adroitly revealed their arguments to be implausible, duplicitous or silly.”  

“Yet, the major problems facing the U.S. anti-terrorist crusaders notwithstanding, their campaign is continuing unabated. In late July, 2008, the defense department released a ‘strategy paper’ which placed ‘the “long war” against extremism above potential conventional challenges from China and Russia as the top priority of the U.S. military in coming years. . . . For the forseeable future, winning the Long War against violent extremist movements will be the central objective of the U.S.,’ the strategy paper continued. And ‘U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates defended the new strategy, saying it is an attempt to incorporate the lessons learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.’” 

“Now, when the leaders of a crusade necessary for securing their hegemonic social existences are unable to clearly identify their enemies, their enemies’ leaders, or their enemies’ allies; when they aren’t even sure how to the spell their enemies’ names; when their accounts of enemy operations are continually refuted by material evidence and logical argument, often by simple common sense, it’s clear they are going to have difficulty unifying the nation behind their cause;  and that difficulty will become insurmountable insofar as their crusade loses its ability to secure the social existence of the general population.”

“Throughout history, whenever the consciousness/truth necessary for protecting a nation’s elite began turning into error for a large minority (an understanding which could not their maintain their social existence) the elite has reflexively turned to the ultimate instrument of national unification: force!”

“Is the U.S. elite moving in that direction?  With alacrity!”

“’By October 2001,’ Naomi Wolf relates, ‘the USA Patriot Act, /which/ topped 400 pages, was rushed through Congress. Lawmakers passed it overwhelmingly, though many said that they had scarcely read it.’”  

“’In July 2002, the Bush Administration rolled out Operation TIPS, the Terrorist Information and Prevention System, which sought to recruit ‘a million letter carriers, meter readers, cable technicians, and other workers with access to private homes as informants to report to the Justice Department any activities they think suspicious. . . . Though Congress prohibited the administration from funding TIPS, according to the ACLU, a version of the program was simply shifted to the Pentagon’s ‘black budget.’ . . . /In addition/,  a Defense Department program called Talon created a database of ‘anti-terror’ information about peaceful U.S. citizens and activists.’”

“’Within days of the 9/11 attacks,’ Wolf observes, ‘security companies were lobbying airport and government officials to invest in new technologies of surveillance.  Six years later, the surveillance industry is huge. . . . In 2003, business writers estimated that this burgeoning industry was worth $115 billion a year.’  ‘A 2003 study found that 569 companies had registered Homeland Security lobbyists after 9/11’.  The New York Times reported that ‘the major defense contractors want to move into the homeland security arena in a big way.’  ‘Dr. William Haseltine, who sits on the boards of many of the organizations that analyze this industry, . . . says that the ‘security-industry complex’ rivals the ”military-industrial complex” in influencing policy.’” 

“Unfortunately, not only for Americans, but for the world, the ‘security-industry complex’ and the ‘military-industrial complex’ are merely different features of the same crusade.” 

“The Military Commissions Act, passed in October 2006, ‘gives the president the authority to establish a separate justice system for trying unlawful enemy combatants.’” 

“How are ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ defined?   The Bush government’s declared position is that the president has the authority to designate anyone, including any U.S. citizen, an ‘enemy combatant.’ Furthermore, notes Columbia University Law Professor Michael Ratner, he can ‘detain them for whatever reason he wants. . . . /T/here are no charges and prisoners have no lawyers, no family visits, no court reviews, no rights to anything, and no right to release until the mythical end to the ‘war on terror.’”  

“With a mere ‘signing statement,’ ‘Bush struck down Posse Comitatus, which has prevented, with a penalty of two years in prison, U.S. leaders since after the Civil War from sending military forces into our streets.’  In September 2008, the Army Times reported that ‘for the first time an active /U.S. Army/ unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.’  ‘That brigade,’ notes Salon.com, is ‘the 1^st Brigade Combat Team of the Army’s 3^rd Infantry Division. /It/ has spent most of the last four years fighting a war in Iraq, and will now be assigned on a permanent basis to engage in numerous domestic functions—including, as the Army Times article put it, ‘to help with civil unrest and crowd control.’”

“Among the many additional signs of approaching despotism:”

* ‘Security corporations,’ identified by sinister flags and other dark icons, and employing private armies of grim-faced mercenaries, are now carrying out American foreign policy in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia: Blackwater U.S.A., Custer Battles LLC, Wolverine Solutions, Global Risk Strategies, and Steele Foundation.”

* “Airlines use ’no fly’ and ‘watch lists’ furnished by the federal government to prevent a small number of individuals from flying and harrass a million others.  Beginning in 2009, under a new program called ‘Secure Flight’, the Department of Homeland Security will oversee airport screening.  Airports have also begun using terahertz radiation scanning machines which look through clothing to give airport security agents an invasive (and pornographic), image of passengers bodies.” 

* “The National Security Agency (NSA) ‘Domestic Wiretapping Program,’ under which AT&T wiretaps phone conversations in secure locations set up for just that purpose. AT&T and other  telecommunications companies which engage in domestic surveillence have also been granted immunity from prosecution.” 

* “American cities with populations of 50,000 or more now have SWAT teams of heavily armed, black-clothed and black-helmeted officers who, without judicial warrants, and disregarding the 4^th Amendment guarantee ‘against unreasonable search and seizure,’ break into the homes of suspected drug dealers and other ‘criminals’.”

* “Small town Post Offices across the U.S. no longer deliver local mail directly. Under federal orders, the local mail is taken to a city which has equipment to examine it for explosives, anthrax and other biological weapons, then routed back for delivery.”

* “Computer repair shops download the files of ‘politically suspicious’ individuals to new hard disks, then forward the original disks to a government agency.” 

* “In 2006, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR was granted $385 million to construct ‘detention centers’ capable of housing 400,000 ‘aliens’ and ‘potential terrorists.’”

“Fascism has been coming to America!, Wolf asserts, and she’s unquestionably correct.” 

“However, the problem with Wolf’s analysis, for those who seek a free and humane future for coming generations, is that it suddenly floats free of the physical world.” 

“Having recognized that leading members of the military-industrial complex created/discovered their anti-terrorist crusade in order to perpetuate themselves, Wolf abandons her material analysis of what’s occurring and enters the world of abstraction.” 

“To reverse what she calls a ‘fascist shift,’ Wolf naively urges freedom loving Americans to join hands and ‘roll back the laws that are associated with the opening of the door into darkness.’ ’We still have the choice to stop going down this road,’” Wolf asserts. ‘We can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.’”

“If only it were that easy to determine history’s course.” 

“Wolf is right, of course, where each of you is individually concerned:  Nothing and noone can make you go along with fascism, whatever others may elect to do.”

“But, getting enough Americans to join hands and reverse the process requires a far more serious exploration of the material reasons for the sharp turn toward fascism than Wolf has offered, a turn occurring not only here in the U.S. but in England and Australia, and, to a lesser extent, in Germany, Italy and France.”

“Let’s try, then, to bring the discussion back to the world of our shared material reality.” 

“Robert Jensen identified the heart of the problem, though, having done so, he stopped.”

“We live in a system that, taken as a whole, is unsustainable,’ Jensen argued, ‘the nation-state and capitalism are at the core of this unsustainable system.’”

“The implicit question which needs to be asked and answered is Why? What is it about the capitalist productive-distributive order and the nation-state that’s making them ‘unsustainable?

 “I discussed capialism’s mounting destruction of the environment and world health, in my opening remarks.” 

“Now, I’ll focus on its inherent economic contradiction, the contradiction I have always insisted would eventually bring this remarkable system down.” 

“Stated succinctly, capitalism’s inherent contradiction is that in order to compete capitalists must make production ever more cooperative/socialized, while consumption, on the other hand, remains essentially non-cooperative/non-socialized, with the inevitable result that periodic crises of over-production and under-consumption occur: too few people receiving enough money to purchase all the goods the vibrant system churns out.” 

“To date, that problem has been painfully remedied through a mass destruction of consumers and consumables in war. World wars One and Two resolved crippling global economic depressions that way. The leading capitalist countries made instruments of war, then used them to kills tens-of-millions of each others consumers, along with billions of dollars worth of weaponry and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of basic necessities, including factories and homes.  The wars also gave the winning capitalist nations access to new sources of raw materials, and new markets for their finished products. Even the financial-industrial elites of countries which lost such inter-capitalist wars have usually profited greatly.”

“However, as Japan and Germany demonstrated following WWII, factories destroyed in war are inevitably rebuilt to be yet more productive, aggravating the inherent problem over time.”

“While Engels and I identified capitalism’s inherent contradiction 167 years ago and predicted its ultimate resolution, neither of us ever imagined the desperate situation 21^st century capitalist nations have managed to create.” 

“Cybernated and automated machines are now doing more and more of the production, creating a vast and rapidly-growing international army of workers, ’white collar’ as well as ‘blue collar’, who are completely extraneous. Nuclear weapons have rendered full-scale war between industrialized nations impossible. And national economies have become so thoroughly integrated and inter-dependent that for a capitalist nation to try alleviating its problem of over-production and under-consumption by devastating a major Third World country or two would be to devastate itself, along with other First and Third World nations.”

“Recognizing that the preservation of their favored social existences required that the mass of people must be able to purchase the goods their increasingly cornucopean, but environmentally destructive, systems of production were turning out, but intent on making that possible without any forfeiture of social existence on their parts, the capitalists of Western industrial nations—the U.S. and England in the lead—created an immense credit bubble using money borrowed from China, Japan and the Middle East.”

“Now that credit bubble has (predictably) burst, and the American capitalists whose hegemonic social existences derive from arms production, oil and oilfield technology, have joined forces with representatives of global engineering and construction firms to make a ‘last stand defense’ of the capitalist order of production and distribution with an anti-terrorist jihad.”

“When their last stand begins to suffer the fate of George Armstong Custer’s at Little Bighorn, as it inevitably must, since there’s no way on earth the capitalist system will be able to maintain the social existence of most Americans over the next decade, the anti-terrorist crusaders’ only remaining option will be to identify a large segment of the U.S. population as terrorist enemies, then proceed to plow them under.”

“Grasping what’s happening, Naomi Wolf has called for a revolution to turn the country around.  But, as with every revolution, turning the U.S. around will require that Americans take a cold-eyed look-in-the-mirror and honestly tell what they see.” 

“Since my first-rebuttal time is nearly up” (actually Karl, it was up over half an hour ago), “I’ll only very briefly describe what I think the cold-eyed look will reveal.” 

“To begin with, it won’t be necessary to move beyond the nation-state, since, practically speaking, it no longer exists!  All of the social, economic and political characteristics which identified nations have already been erased. It will only be necessary to recognize that universally shared material fact.”

“Moreover, most of the nation-states defining characteristics have been erased by capitalists, busily engaged in defending their hegemonic social existence.” 

“Several tens-of-millions of Mexicans, South Americans, Chinese and other Asians, have entered the U.S. ‘illegally,’ and the minority who have sufficient funds for paying the requisite bribes go in and out with ease.   Why have they been permitted to enter?  Because the poverty in their home countries makes them willing to work for low wages, thereby benefiting American, German, French, and English capitalists by keeping their own nations’ wage-scales low; the profitability of many large industries, poultry, beef, pork, clothing manufacturing, has become directly dependent upon the employment of illegal low-wage workers.”

“It’s no longer possible to purchase a ‘foreign’ car.  All the leading U.S., Japanese, German, Korean and British car manufacturers now manufacture their cars and trucks in each other’s countries, including Volkswagen, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Kia, and Hundai.  Furthermore, in most cases the states and large cities in which ‘foreign’ auto plants are located paid the firms tens-of-millions of American tax dollars to move there.”

“While General Motors, Ford and Chrysler executives are pleading for bailouts to keep their U.S. production going, all three are heavily invested abroad.  GM’s Buick is the biggest selling car in China, where its Hummer is also doing remarkably well.  Both cars are made in that country.  Ford Rangers, a big seller in China and Malaysia, are likewise manufactured and/or assembled in those countries.”

“GM is presently constructing a $350,000,000 plant in Russia, to build cars that will be sold there.  Given the growing profitability of GM and Ford’s overseas operations and their loss of profitability in the U.S., a cynic might wonder if their not-so-long-run intention is to close down American production, using bailout money to pay for the process.”  

“Americans, like their European, Asian and Latin American counterparts, have acquired global food tastes, enjoying tacos, burritoes, couscous falafel, sushi, Thai curry, wonton soup, fried noodles, sweet and sour pork, pita bread, dolmathes, brie, roquefort and camembert cheese, and wines from France, Chile, Australia, Germany, and a couple dozen other countries.” 

“Europeans commonly speak English and at least one other language besides their own. Chinese Malaysians are generally fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Malay as well as one or two local dialects.”

“That dwindling minority of Americans, French, Chinese, British, etc. who are not at all inter-nationalized are by and large less educated inhabitants of small towns and remote country regions.”

“In short, little remains of nation states except for flags, national anthyms, and memorial celebrations.”

“With capitalists leading the way, we’ve created a world in which national icons have become as out of place and atavistic as the face paint and feathers of hunters and gatherers, the fertility statues and identifying tents of nomadic slave communities’, or the coats of arms and painted saints of feudal Europe.”

“The ultimate irony, of course, is that the singing of national anthyms and the waving of national flags is being most energetically promoted by the very capitalists who’ve had to make those icons irrelevant in order to preserve their favored social existence.”

“Howard Zinn summed our situation in an article entitled ‘Put Away the Flags’, saying: ‘We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.’” 

“What, exactly, would ‘asserting allegiance to the human race’ entail? 

“To begin with, it would entail admitting the species nature of the brutal things we people  collectively do.  The Sunni terrorist bomber, the U.S. infantryman killing Iraqis, the West Bank Palestinian who shoots Israelis, the Israeli pilot strafing Palestinians and the drug dealer in a Los Angeles ghetto who shoots members of a rival gang, are all engaged in the same operation: trying to kill people who threaten their social existence.  Either all of them are to be equally condemned or none of them are.”   

“‘To put it a little differently, ‘asserting allegiance to the human race’ will entail ceasing to identify people as ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ ‘enemies’ or ‘allies’. It will mean comprehending all people have the same basic objective and that a way mut be found to enable everyone to reach it.”

“Where the poor of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines and other poverty ridden Third World countries is concerned, that would mean informing them the U.S. is going to stop  destroying their lives by dumping cheap industrial manufacture, and by occupying their territory to procure oil and other raw materials; that henceforth the U.S. will work with them as they enter the modern world.”

“Respecting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, asserting allegiance to the human race would involve acknowledging and condemning Israel’s fascistic and oppressive practices vis-a-vis Palestinians, cutting off all assistance, both military and financial, now being given to that country.” 

“On the emotional level, it would entail being enraged at the injustice and inhumanity of the evening news encouraging Americans to shed tears because ‘terrorists’ killed 200 people in Mumbai, but to feel nothing about the 650,000 to 1,500,000 Iraqis slaughtered by, or because of, the U.S. invasion of their country.”

“To end on an optimistic note, while believing the capitalist productive-distributive system is on its death bed, I also continue to believe that:”    

“‘No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.’” 

“A hundred-and-one solutions for the problems capitalism has caused, but is unable to resolve, are already being proposed, and the creativity that will be released when all the members of the human community consider themselves to be working as a team, is sure to produce myriad others.”

“As for where the money will come from to pay for the massive programs needed to assist Third World peoples, repair our badly polluted planet, construct rapid transit systems, provide everyone with adequate medical care, etc., an equalitarian society will immediately confront the question: Do we really want to bother with money when there are so many other equally efficient or more efficient ways to regulate and record our interchanges.”

“No one has ever accused me of being naive, and I expect the trilogy of capitalists behind the anti-terrorism jihad will become violent when masses of people begin acting upon the demand that capitalism metamorphose into socialism.” 

“However, they will quickly discover the deck is stacked against them. Their fellow capitalists, those who have exported their manufacturing operations, will follow their investments and banked money abroad, rather than stay in the U.S. to aid in a counter-revolutionary struggle. In addition, the tactics available to 21 century revolutionaries, blocking bridges and tunnels with abandoned rented vehicles, hacking CIA, FBI, military, police and energy-grid computers to bring society to a halt will prove impossible to counter.”  

“I have a lot more to say on these and related topics, but I may have already gone over my alloted time.”

Wearing a resigned expression, and with a regretful shrug of his shoulders, Marx returned to his chair.

 

 

     MACHIAVELLI’S FIRST REBUTTAL                                                                                                   Chronicled by Theosophus                                                                                                

We /conservatives/ believe that America is a superior society not because Americans are superior human beings, but because our culture was founded on a recognition of our God-given natural rights—the “unalienable rights” referred to in the Declaration of Independence.  From that awareness flows a basic, shared respect for humanity, individual liberty, limited government, and the rule of law.                                                                                                                                                            Sean Hannity      

History has demonstrated time and time again that disciplined, just societies prevail, while weak, utopian systems crash and burn. . . . The world is, and always has been, a struggle between good and evil.                                                                                                                                                                 Bill O’Reilly                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   The fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is: Conservatives believe man was created in God’s image; liberals believe they are God.                                                                                                                                                                   Ann Coulter

 

Machiavelli bent awkwardly forward in his chair while Marx spoke.  His face still wore Dick Cheney’ condescending sneer.  But, unlike Cheney, whose demeanor is perpetually languid, Machiavelli was clearly agitated.  Every now and then his right leg pumped nervously.  Springing to his feet the moment Marx finished, he rushed to the podium and began speaking before Marx got back to his seat.

 

Machiavelli: “Velo!” 

“Dr. Marx insists he’s a scientific materialist.”

”But he has given us ample material proof that he’s not!”     

“A scientific materialist deals with reality/with ‘truth’!

“Not Herr Marx!”

 “In Marx’s bizarre world ‘truth’ is whatever individuals and communities acting in defense of their interests say it is.” 

 “In his world the questions: ‘What would it benefit me to believe?’ and ‘What is objectively true?’ are the same.”

For a scientist, truth is ‘discovered!’  For Marx, it’s not discovered, it’s ‘created.’”

“It is this wondrous proposition that truth doesn’t exist which holds all the pieces of Dr. Marx’s elaborate theory together.”

“Yet, he hasn’t offered us one scintilla of empirical evidence in its support.”

“He simply posited that the earliest hunting and gathering communities understood truth and practical solution to be one, then conjured his way to the idealistic conclusion that their relativistic consciousness will be universal in a post-capitalist world his too-fertile imagination describes.”

 (Giving Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto, a meaningful ‘we’re-all-in-this- together’ look, Machiavelli continued . . . ).  

“Like the great majority of people, no doubt like most of you, I place Marx’s amazing hypothesis about the non-existence of truth in the same category as a belief the moon’s inhabited, or, that Planet Earth is flat.”

“Science, he forgets, is based upon the conviction objective truths exist—independently of what anyone might want—and, that it’s a scientist’s obligation to determine what they are.”

 “Unlike Dr. Marx, I am a scientist!”

“To repeat Paul Mattick’s apt characterization of my position: ‘A true Machiavellian separates scientific questions concerning the truth about society from moral disputes over what type of society is most desirable.’”

“Adopting Marx’s peculiar theory would not only mean abandoning science, it would mean discarding its universally spoken language as well.”

“Science defines ‘truth’ as ‘synonymous with observer-independent facts’, i.e., with ‘reality.’”

“’Those are only fictions,’ Marx protests.”

“Scientists speak of views which are ‘biased’ or ‘distorted;’ meaning they are biased away from/distortions of, ‘the truth.’”

“’More fantasy’, says Marx.  No observer-independent ‘objective truths’ exist which one’s personal views might be ’biased away from’ or ‘distort’.”  

“Scientists caution against ‘false prophets:’ people (like Dr. Marx?), who present deceptively appealing arguments that misrepresent reality/distort ‘the truth.’”

”Science honors ‘geniuses:’ individuals who discover fundamentally important features of reality.”

“‘False prophets?’  ‘Geniuses?’ ‘Objective’ and ‘impartial’ understandings’?”

“They’re all mythical conceptions, according to Marx’s abstract logic; leaving those of us committed to science not simply puzzled, but stunned; since, according to the dictionary: ‘myths are distinguished by their failure to be based on fact or scientific study.’”

“One is left wondering what Marx intends when he speaks of ‘fantasies’ and ‘myths’.  What does he suppose an idea which isn’t ‘fantasy’ or ‘myth’ is, if it’s not an idea that’s objectively true?” 

“He agrees leaders often lie.  But what is there to lie about, other than ‘the truth?’”

“Dr. Marx calls himself a ’dialectical’ materialist.”

“But central to the belief that reality and our consciousness of it are dialectic is the proposition that knowing what things are involves knowing what they are not: i.e., being able to identify their opposites.  Hot is the opposite of cold; east, the opposite of west; up, the opposite of down; big, the opposite of small; good, the opposite of evil.  And error?  What can that be, pray tell, if it isn’t the opposite of truth?  

“’All truths are relative!’, Marx insists; though he apparently believes that particular assertion alone to be ‘absolutely true?’”

 “Dr. Marx’s paradigm literally makes my head spin, and I suspect your head may be spinning too.” 

“Let me try to bring the debate back to reality with a genuinely materialist consideration of socio-economic-political truth.”

“To begin with, lacking any empirical evidence how the first homo sapien communities thought, we can only speculate. However, I find it reasonable to suppose that, like hunters and gatherers today, they had voodooists, shamans and medicine-men, whose principal function was to discover ’the truth’; however convinced you and I may be that they often failed at the endeavor.”

“As for subsequent nomadic-slave and feudal communities, we have several thousand years of material evidence that one-and-all of them were absolutist where truth was concerned.”

“They were religious communities, and a belief in objective truth has always been a pivotal feature of every religion.”

“According to Christianity’s Holy Bible, God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat fruit from ’the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,’ revealing he had not granted humans the authority to decide for themselves what was truly good and what was truly evil.” 

“Genesis describes merely presuming to have such omniscience as diabolic.”

“When Satan told Adam and Eve if they ignored God’s proscription and ate the forbidden fruit they would ‘be as gods, knowing good and evil,’ he wasn’t proposing they’d acquire the ability to differentiate between good and evil. That’s a faculty Christianity, like other faiths, grants to everyone. Choosing good over evil is considered critical for Christians if they would enter into the kingdom of heaven.”     

“No, the Bible describes Satan’s appeal as, well, downright Satanic.”

“By eating the forbidden fruit, he urged, Adam and Eve would gain that ultimate power religions grant only to their gods: the power to dictate the very nature of good, and evil.”   

“Capitalist country scientists generally distinguish their industrial-world metaphysics from those of nomadic slave and feudal states by proposing values are indeed relative, while facts are not.”

“However, unlike Dr. Marx, they do not dispute that values, too, have observer-independent, objective dimensions.”

 “Common sense tells us if they didn’t we would not be able to identify them, or give them names, or, point to instances of their application.”  

 “It is because values have an objective existence, that people with different values always dispute the facts which they claim support their own.”

 “This is everyone’s material reality, and there are no exceptions!”

 “Marx and I are agreed, then, that both the values and the interpretations-of-fact of communities with clashing economic, social and political interests will also be in conflict.”

 “Where we disagree is that Marx proposes all fact-value understandings are equally valid and cannot be given an authoritative justification.”

 ”Being a scientist who believes in objective truth, I hold that the facts and values of  individuals and communities can be dispassionately identified, then, defended or opposed.” 

 “As I emphasized in my opening remarks, an objective look at the world reveals the primary value of a leader is the preservation of his state, upon which the lives and well-being of his people depend.”

 “An objective look also reveals that while there may be times when preserving his state requires a leader to employ authoritarian methods, over the long run, he will not be able to do it unless he has the voluntary/democratic support of his people.” 

 “Which is why I endorse the current U.S. foreign policy.”

 “No other country has so faithfully defended the democratic values spelled out in the American Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, religion and assembly, freedom from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures,’ the right to bear arms, and the right to a speedy trial by a jury of one’s peers when accused of a crime.”      

 “Now, let’s take an objective look at Dr. Marx’s fanciful theory of history:”

 “Understand! While I believe it to be wrong, I recognize his reasoning is logically consistent; just as I recognize Ptolemy’s reasoning about the physical universe was logically consistent, but wrong.”   

“Google ‘Copernicus’ and you’ll discover there are still Ptolemaists; as, remarkably, there are still a few people who believe Earth is flat.”

“However, scientists understand that the Ptolemaic system, like the flat Earth theory, is not a materialist explanation. It does not objectively describe our solar system, let alone the universe.”

“Consider, then. a few of the empirically indefensible conclusions Marx syllogistically drew from his bizarre metaphysics.” 

“Having convinced himself all socio-economic-political consciousness is defensively created, accepted, modified or rejected, it followed that ‘classes’ are but communities of people who find maintaining their social existence requires them to join forces and deny other communities of individuals the opportunity to do the same.” 

“In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx said of the peasantry: ‘Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes and put them into hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class.’”

“Similarly, in The German Ideology he and Engels wrote of the bourgeoisie: ‘The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors.’”

“According to Dr. Marx’s relativistic metaphysics, if you tell a peasant, a worker or a capitalist he’s a member of a class and he rejects your designation, it is you, not he, who are wrong.  His very rejection tells you that, under existing circumstances, for him to battle as a member of a peasantry, a working, or a capitalist class, is not the least disruptive way to preserve his social existence.”  

“In writing and in speeches Marx, quite logically, directed his most aggressive attacks not against feudal lords or capitalists, but against Proudhon, Feuerbach, Left Hegelians and other absolutist liberals who, treating ideas and reality as independent of one another, proposed to rescue the masses by bringing them objective truth; something Herr Marx argues does not exist.”

“Marx was often scathing in his denunciations, writing:”

“’Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact, all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men . . . the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illustions of the consciousness.  Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their limitations, are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. . . . They forget . . . that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they  merely combat the phrases of this world. . . . All forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,” “spectres,” “fancies,” etc., but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; . . . not criticism, but revolution, is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory.’”

“Marx insisted the masses would acquire an egalitarian consciousness only when defending their social existence made it imperative for them to do so.”

“On the other hand, being a utopian idealist, he deemed that magical situation was at hand.”

“The capitalist order of production and distribution was nearly drained of viability Dr. Marx reasoned, and workers would soon find themselves in the desperate circumstances which would turn them into a class: the proletariat.” 

“To quote his wildly exaggerated description of the mid-19^th century workers’ situation:”

“’Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too, grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.’”

“After becoming a unified proletariat, Marx enthused, the workers were going to raze the capitalist productive-distributive system; then, they would build an egalitarian order in its place.”

“And they would do these things not because someone won them over to a revolutionary consciousness by bringing them ‘the truth’.  They would do them because they had to in order to survive.”

“’Things have now come to such a pass,’ Marx wrote, ‘that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence.’”

“’/I/t becomes evident’ he, again very logically, but  also very mistakenly concluded, ‘that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law.  It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery’.”

“I suppose if you’re a diehard supporter of Dr. Marx’s distorted logic you might protest it was nevertheless found indispensible, therefore ‘true,’ during and after the Russian and Chinese revolutions.’” 

“If so, you would be wrong!”

“Consider the fate of Marx’s linchpin proposition respecting the nonexistence of truth.”

“In the late 1800s, Alexander Bogdanov, a philosopher, a physician, and a prominent member of the Bolshevik Party, began promoting that epistemological nonsense in Russia.”

“Bogdanov argued his relativistic-Machian interpretation of Marx’s theory—he called it  ‘Emperiomonism’—was correct, writing three volumes on the subject.  By the early 1900s Bogdanov’s popularity among Bolshevik leaders had become second only to Lenin’s.”

“Whereupon Lenin penned his famous rebuttal, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism; scornfully, but on this occasion, I would add, correctly observing:

“’The “naive realism” of any healthy person who has not been an inmate of a lunatic asylum or a pupil of the idealist philosophers consists in the view that things, the environment, the world, exist independently of our sensation, of our consciousness, of our self, and of man in general . . . . /O/utside us, and independently of us, there exist objects, things, bodies, and . . . our perceptions are images of the external world.’”

“Which epistemological construction of Marx’s theory won the day?  Which was said to empirically represent the Russian experience? “

“Vladimir Lenin’s, hands down! “

“Bogdanov the relativist was expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1909, and played no role in the Russian Revolution.”

“In brief, in order to give Dr. Marx’s theory relevance, Lenin had to turn it back into the very kind of objectivist logic Marx himself had railed against.”

“The proletariat would not ‘create’ its own way forward, the Leninists decided. The  ‘way forward’ would have to be discovered by leaders, and the workers would have to be led.”

“In 1903, fourteen years before the Russian Revolution, Lenin wrote:”

“’The history of all countries bears witness that by its own resources alone the working-class is in a position to generate only a trade-union consciousness . . . The teaching of socialism has grown out of philosophical, historical and economic theories worked out by educated representatives of the possessing classes, of the intelligentsia.  The founders of contemporary socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged themselves by their social origin to the bourgeois intelligentsia.  Similarly in Russia the theoretical teaching of social-democracy has arisen altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the workers’ movement, has arisen as the natural and inevitable result of the development of thought among the revolutionary-socialist intelligentsia.’”

“Post-1917, Lenin’s objectivist-Marxism became, to use Marx’s own terminology, the ‘Spiritual Quintessence’ of the Soviet Union’s self-understanding.  Reality possessed an observer-independent form, Soviet leaders thereafter contended; a form which, using their absolutist interpretation of Marx’s arguments, their ideas would reflect.”

“’Marxism,’ the Russian theorist V. Afanasyev reiterated in 1967: ‘is a science dealing with the ways and means of destroying capitalism, with the laws governing the creation of the new communist society . . . it is a science dealing with the conscious, purposeful, direction of social processes in the interests of man.’”

“During and after China’s revolution, Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese Communist Party leaders embraced the same objectivist , dare I say ‘deformation’?, of Dr. Marx’s theory.”

“’Facts’ are all the things that exist objectively.’ Mao instructed. ‘Truth’ means their internal relations, that is, the laws governing them’. ‘We should proceed from the actual conditions inside and outside the country, . . . and derive from them, as our guide to action, laws that are inherent in them and not imaginary, that is, we should find the internal relations of the events occurring around us.  And in order to do that we must rely not on subjective imagination . . . but on facts that exist objectively’.  ‘We are Marxists, and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions, and that we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts.’”

“Of course, I vigorously disagree with most Leninist and Maoist depictions of socio-economic-political reality. But at least Russian and Chinese leaders have had the intelligence to recognize reality exists!”

“What, then, has been the fate of Dr. Marx’s theory in the West?”

“With very few exceptions, Western Marxists have given their high priest’s ideas the same absolutist construction it received in the East.”

“The British Marxist-philosopher Maurice Cornforth stipulated that by ‘truth’ he meant a ‘correspondence between ideas and objective reality.’”

“George Novack, a popular American Trotskyist, wrote an entire book distinguishing his ‘Marxist’ conviction truths are ‘demonstrably anchored in objective reality’ from pragmatist-philosopher John Dewey’s view that they are merely utilitarian constructs.”

“Respecting Dr. Marx’s most passionate anti-objectivist arguments, Western Marxists often felt it was important to explain he hadn’t really intended them to be interpreted that way.”

“Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli theorist, observed Marx’s ‘historicist attitude did not . . . lead Marx to mere relativism.’ Similarly, Melvin Rader, a leftist University of Washington philosopher stressed: “It would be a mistake to classify Marx as no more than a relativist.’”

“Louis Althusser, a French philosopher who from the late 1960s to the early 1980s spoke for much of the Left in France and Italy, carried the objectivist understanding of Marxism further.”

“Perhaps finding it difficult to reconcile the relativism manifest in Dr. Marx’s writing with his own absolutist perspective, Althusser decided most of Marx’s theory remained to be formulated.” 

“’Marxist philosophy,’ said Althusser: ‘founded by Marx in the very act of founding his theory of history, has still largely to be to be constituted, since, as Lenin said, only the cornerstones have been laid down. . . . The Marxist theoretical practice of epistemology, of the history of science, of the history of ideology, of the history of philosophy, of the history of art, has yet in large part to be constituted.’”

“’/W/e so miss the Dialectics which Marx did not need and which he refused us,’ Althusser continued, ‘even though we know perfectly well that we have it, and where it is: in Marx’s theoretical works, in Capital, etc., yes, and of course this is the main thing, we can find it there, but not in a theoretical state!’”

“Even more problematic, Althusser proposed, Marx himself often failed to think like a Marxist.”

“After agreeing with Hegel that experience and consciousness are ‘a unity,’ Marx made his famous observation that he’d found Hegel standing on his head and righted him.”

“Hegel reasoned history moves because communities of people come up with new ideas which prompt them to alter their behavior: consciousness leads experience.”

“’He had the process upside down,’ Marx insisted. History moves because communities of people discover they must formulate, then act upon, new strategies in order to maintain their social existence: consciousness, including revolutionary consciousness, never leads, it follows.”

“’The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class!’, Marx quite consistently exhorted.”

“Althusser described this particular argument as ‘ambiguous’, saying: ‘A man on his head is the same man when he is finally walking on his feet, and a philosophy inverted in this way cannot be regarded as anything more than the philosophy reversed, except in theoretical metaphor.’”

“Recognizing Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts do represent an inverted Hegelian dialectic, Althusser concluded: ‘That is why the rigor of this rigorous text is not Marxist;’ suggesting the inversion makes more than just a metaphorical difference after all.”

“Regarding the humanistic/anti-objectivist passages in Capital, Althusser said he was able to determine they ‘had no theoretical significance.’”

“As for Marx’s eloquent relativistic observations in his Theses on Feuerbach, Althusser affirmed: ‘One day we will have to show that these eleven deceptively transparent theses are really riddles.’”

“Althusser also took a swipe at two prominent European philosophers who were viewing Marx’s arguments through a relativistic prism writing:”

“”Theses like those defended by John Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre prevent the development of existing scientific knowledge. These things are an obstacle to the development of knowledge. Instead of helping it to progress, they hold it back. More precisely, they drag knowledge back to the state it was in before the scientific discoveries made by Marx and Lenin.  They take us back to a pre-scientific philosophy of history.’”

“Marxist scientists, Althusser counselled, must concentrate on identifying the objectively ‘essential’ and ‘inessential’ components of the historical process, then isolate the latter in order to understand the former more fully.”

“Since Marx had not provided adequate instructions for accomplishing this critical task, Althusser advised Marxists they would need to ‘listen to his silences’ in carrying out their investigations.”

 “To sum: it’s objectively obvious that, with few exceptions, Marxist political leaders and political theorists East and West have ignored the very essence of Dr. Marx’s theory; that relativistic epistemological glue which holds all his axioms together.”  

“Marx, they determined, did not describe the real historical process. “

“Now I’d like you to answer a simple question: If a self-styled meteorologist never got the weather right, or a chemist was never able to predict the results of his experiments, would you consider him a ‘scientist’ nevertheless, his efforts ‘scientific?’”       

“If not, why, then, should anyone listen to Marx?”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      “Dr. Marx made that most rudimentary of mistakes, the one we scientists continually warn against: He allowed his personal values to distort his reading of the world.”

“More than 160 years have passed since Herr Marx made his failed predictions. Unfortunately, idealists seem to be unruffled when the world doesn’t conform with their analyses, and Marx has said nothing this evening which suggests he’s having second thoughts.” 

“He still proposes reality’s form is creative, that political theories become true insofar as they constitute the least painful and disruptive strategies for maintaining the social existence of the individuals and communities who call them that.”

“Since the U.S. war in Iraq is the main subject of this debate, I’d now like to direct your attention to the present objective situation respecting the war. Then, I’ll explain why it is that objective situation exists.”

“As you know, for the past several months the number of U.S. troops being killed in Iraq has been plummeting, prompting Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for president of your country, to declare: The war is being ‘won’!”

“Polls show the majority of Americans agree with McCain’s blithe appraisal. That is, they agree to talk of ‘winning,’ despite the empirical fact that Iraq’s infrastructure and economy have been destroyed, over a million Iraqis have been killed, 6 million have been severely wounded, and 4 million more have been driven from their homes.”

“Let me place these figures, and the references to ‘victory,’ in a dispassionately objective context for you.”

“Imagine that a war occurred here in the United States in which Americans suffered a proportionate loss:The nation’s infrastructure—highways, hospitals power plants, bridges and waste disposal systems—would be destroyed; streams, lakes and rivers would be badly polluted; eleven million Americans would be dead, 66 million gravely injured.  In addition, 44 million Americans would have been driven from their homes, 22 million of them exiled from the country.”

“Now suppose the invaders were heard to speak of ‘winning.’”

“What would any objective observer conclude about the aggressors in particular, and, humanity in general?

“I submit they would reach the conclusion stated in my Discourses on Levy.”

“’ . . . all men are bad, and  they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity . . . the same desires and passions exist in all cities and people, and  always have existed.’”

 “Is it not obvious to you no people has ever declared:”

“This is the maximum number of children our consciences will permit us to slaughter; this, the upper-most number of women and old people we would ever terrorize, maim or kill; this, the greatest number of innocent people’s homes we could justify destroying; this, the largest number of their hospitals we would bomb; this, the greatest number of their lakes, rivers and streams we would pollute.  Beyond these stated limits we will never go!”

“Is it not objectively apparent there are no limits?”  

“During the last century: the Japanese celebrated the slaughter of more than a million Chinese; the Germans cheered butchering 4 to 6 million Jews, along with 5 million Poles and Romanians, and 20 million Soviets; Americans applauded the slaying of between 1 and 2 million Japanese, and, with Britain, they toasted the killing of more than 5 million Gerrmans; under Stalin, the Soviet majority approved murdering over 10 million of their own countrymen, and the Chinese did the same under Mao; during the administrations of presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, Americans tolerated, many of them praised, the massacre of 3 million Vietnamese, Laotians and other South East Asians.”

“Today, Americans, British, Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis and others are doing it all over again in the Middle East.”

“Open your eyes and confront the reality of our species!”

“We are evil by nature!”

“Moreover, thousands of years of human history objectively prove it’s as impossible to change our nature  as to change the nature of a hippopotomus, a pine tree or a stone.”

“Stalinist Russia and Maoist China gave brutal demonstrations that movements which attempt to do it cause more suffering, not less.”

“Let me make myself clear!”

“I’m not suggesting leaders shouldn’t strive to be good, and to make their people good.”

“As I argued in The Prince, both with his people, and in his dealings with other nations, a leader ‘should if possible, be merciful, faithful, humane, upright and religious.’”

 “’He should not diverge from the good if he can avoid doing so!’”

“But, it is critical for him to understand that in the endless struggle between good and evil, he will never confront a clear and unqualified choice between the two.”

“He will always be forced to choose between actions which are ‘better’ or ‘worse.’”

 “As I observed in my opening remarks, ‘sometimes nations must make war, and in war all people do things which are evil.’”

“When he is ‘compelled’ to protect his state and his people by doing evil, it is therefore critical for a leader to ‘know how to go about it.’”

“’You must know there are two ways of contesting,’ I wrote in The Prince. ‘The one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second.  Therefore it is necessary for a leader to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.’”

 “Defending his state, particularly during a time of war, makes it imperative that a leader keep his people unified and supportive of his policies.”

“Whenever possible, he should do this by using ‘the method proper to men’: laws.”

“Unfortunately, as I noted in Discourses, while the laws required will be ‘very well understood by prudent men, they do not contain evident reasons capable of persuading others.’”

“‘Wise men who want to remove this difficulty therefore have recourse to God.’”

For a leader to secure his people’s obedience to the law through fear of him is difficult, and will not work for an extended period of time. For that reason, it is vitally important that he keep them obedient through religion and a fear of God.”

“’As the observance of divine institutions is the cause of the greatness of Republics, so the contempt of it is the cause of their ruin, for where the fear of God is lacking it will happen that the kingdom will be ruined.’”

 (Chancing to glance at Ann Coulter, I was startled to see her face had the beatific  expression of a Jehovah’s witness, a Scientologist, or a Moonie).

“’Princes of Republics, /leaders of nations/, ought, therefore, to maintain their Republics’ religions well and united.’”

“‘They ought in all things which arise to foster it, and even if they should judge them false, to favor and encourage it: and the more they understand natural things, so much more they ought to do this.  Because this practice has been observed by wise men, there has arisen the belief in miracles that are celebrated in Religion, however false; for the prudent leaders have increased their importance from whatever origin they may have derived, and their authority gives them credence with the people’.”

(Ann’s beatific expression just as suddenly changed to one of puzzlement when Machiavelli referred to a leader fostering religion and a belief in miracles ”even if he believes them to be false”).

“I’ve already explained why I believe it to be the path of ’least evil’ for the Cheney-Bush government to take firm control of the Middle East’s oil, and, what it must do to realize that objective.”

“Today, I propose Senator McCain is right.  The U.S. is winning.”

“As I argued was necessary for seizing control of Iraq’s oil, its economy has been destroyed; the Sunni elite and middle class have been killed or driven into exile;  and maleable, corruptible individuals have been permitted to assume power over religious and tribal communities whose members are sufficiently poor that their ways of life can be sustained with a minimal amount of oil money and a use of the velvet glove.’”

“In my opening remarks I also explained that all people resist seeing themselves as evil, regardless of how deeply evil they become; that to avoid seeing themselves as evil they will avidly seek to be deceived; and, for this reason, particularly in a time of war, a leader must be adept at deception.”

“When it’s necessary to ‘avail himself of the beast,’ ‘he must know how to disguise this characteristic, how to be a great pretender and dissembler.’”

“By the end of this debate you will have formed an opinion about which of us, Dr. Marx or myself, most objectively describes the world.”

“To help you decide, I’m going to close this first rebuttal with a citation from an article by Paul Craig Roberts.”

“Once a conservative, Dr. Roberts is now a leading voice of the American Left. You’ll recall that Marx quoted him in his opening statement.”

“My reason for citing Roberts is simple.  For 500 years I’ve had to tolerate being described as reactionary, rather than realistic, and quoting someone on the Right would do nothing to dispel that misconception.”

“Each of you will be able to judge for yourself how well my theory of politics accords with the events Dr. Roberts describes; events he disparages, but which I understand and respect.” 

“Roberts’ begins by discussing Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida, who the Department of Justice charged with ‘conspiracy to assist the cause of Islamic Jihad’.”

“I’ll let Dr. Roberts take it from here:

“’The charges against Al-Arian were rejected by a jury, but the Bush Regime could not accept the obvious defeat.  If Al-Arian was not a terrorist, then other of the Bush Regime’s fabricated cases might fall apart, too . . . . The Justice Department itself knows that it is persecuting a totally innocent person for reasons of a political agenda—the need to convince gullible Americans of an ongoing terrorist threat . . . . The Al-Arian case proves that terrorists are in short supply and that the Bush Regime has had to create them out of total innocents. The “war on terror” is a hoax used to justify war crimes and the overthrow of America’s civil liberties. . . . The anthrax scare is one more example of the Bush Regime’s use of disinformation to advance an undeclared political agenda. . . .The Bush Regime stands against the truth. . . . We now know for a fact that the “terrorist anthrax attack” had nothing whatsoever to do with Muslim terrorists. . . . Many Americans lack the mental and emotional strength to confront the facts.  The facts are too unsettling and many are relieved when the “mainstream media” spins the facts away.  Many Americans find it too appalling that any part of “their” government, even a rogue operation, could possibly have been involved in any way in the anthrax attacks. No evidence—not even full confessions—could convince them otherwise.  Many Americans have welcomed their brainwashing by the neoconservatives: Åmerica is pure; her shining virtue causes evil men to attack her; they hate us because we are good and they are evil.’”

“I contend Roberts is correct, albeit naive. Through a selective use of duplicity and persecution the Cheney-Bush government is successfully molifying/unifying Americans behind its global strategy; a strategy I believe is at once both an imperative, and, the lesser evil.”

“With that, for the moment, I rest my case.”

(Having remained animated throughout this first rebuttal, Machiavelli looked visibly tired as he returned to his seat.)

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

             

                                            MARX’S OPENING STATEMENT

                                                 In Reply to Machiavelli

                                              Chronicled by Theosophus

 

The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus, these ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.”

“Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force.” 

Karl Marx

   

Judging by his facial expressions, Marx’s mood changed dramatically during Machiavelli’s opening argument: from bemused, to bewildered,  to irritated, to angry, and finally, to fierce determination.  Watching him, I recalled the remark of a Communist League friend who knew him well.  “In everyday conversation,” the friend observed, “Marx often rambles. But whenever the smallest part of his theory is questioned, his mind immediately acquires the clarity of a dagger.” 

Walking purposefully to the lectern, Marx took rumpled sheets of paper from the right pocket of his jacket.  Smoothing them out, he placed them, along with dog-eared copies of Grundrisse, The German Ideology, The Holy Family and The Poverty of Philosophy, next to a lined pad on which he had been scribbling notes. Throughout his presentation Marx referenced the notes and books with the seeming ease of a Horowitz using the keys of a piano.    

Clearing his throat, he began speaking.

Marx: “Good evening. Like my opponent, I want to thank everyone involved in bringing this debate about; as well as all of you in the audience, for your open-minded interest and civility.”

“I also want to thank my adversary.”

“Mr. Machiavelli presented a truncated materialist logic, one diluted with non-material assumptions and assertions. But, given the plethora of idealist theories which describe human history as a product of ‘lofty aspirations,’ ‘intelligent choices,’ ‘errors’ and ‘misunderstandings,’ rather than people acting upon their hard-and-fast socio-economic interests, I found it refreshing.”

“Machiavelli called himself a scientist.  So, I’ll start by reminding him what science has established concerning our species’ history.”

“We homo sapiens have been around between 200,000-250,000 years, and for all but the last 10,000 we lived in hunting and gathering tribes with 20 to 100 members, depending upon the available food.”

“It was only a short 10 millenia ago that we finally began to progress: from hunting and gathering to horticulture—planting various crops together; then, to agriculture–sowing and harvesting larger tracts of specific grains.”

“Over the course of that critical 10,000 years the populations of our communities grew continually larger. Hunting and gathering tribes had 20-100 members. Their semi-nomadic, horticultural/agricultural replacements had hundreds; and the latter, in turn, were succeeded by stationary feudal societies whose populations sometimes numbered in the millions.  Today’s capitalist communities are bigger still, the U.S. presently having three hundred million people.” 

“For what portion of humanity’s 200,000 year historical journey does Mr. Machiavelli offer a materialist explanation? Approximately 0.3 percent: the last few hundred years, characterized by the existence of principalities and nation-states.”

“It would be hard to formulate a theory of our species’ social, economic and political evolution more truncated than that.”

“Mr. Machiavelli’s materialist logic is also badly diluted with idealist propositions.”

“Describing himself as an ’objective scientist,’ he declared: ‘I limit my analyses to explaining what’s happening and the material reasons why.’”

“However, immediately thereafter he informed us he would have supported the United States during World War II, saying the U.S. was ‘more democratic than Germany or Japan.’”

 “Is this, one wonders, what Mr. Machiavelli means by scientific observation?”

“If you’ve read The Prince and the Discourses, you’re aware he depicts leaders as ‘democratic’ insofar as they enjoy the backing of their people. That definition, to his misfortune, objectively renders his conclusion about Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan pure nonsense.”

“Anyone who’s studied World War II knows that until 1943 Hitler was more wildly popular with Germans than either Roosevelt or Churchill was with their respective populations.  That is, Germany was objectively more, not less, democratic.”

“As for Japan, historians have also documented its peoples’ enthusiasm–from a western perspective, a manic enthusiasm–for Prime Minister Tojo and Emperor Hirohito.”    

“When confronted with these material realities, American sociologists often conclude the Germans and Japanese were ‘duped’ or ‘deluded’ into giving their leaders such unquestioning support. But those are idealist, not materialist propositions.” 

“A genuinely scientific Machiavelli would have limited his inquiry to disclosing the Natural Necessity of WWII and the Natural Necessity of the roles played by each of the combatant nations, refusing to take sides in a conflict that entailed the slaughter of over 70 million people.”

Abandoning materialist inquiry altogether, Machiavelli then went on to defend the United States’ destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and its grotesque killing of countless thousands of Iraqis as ‘necessary for the preservation of Western Culture.’”

“Now, to anyone who’s the least bit objective, it’s obvious that the positive and negative cultural contributions of our species have never been preponderantly Eastern or Western, or the exclusive offerings of particular states.”

“The German culture which graced the world with Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Aachen Cathedral and the Altes Museum, is the same German culture that cursed it with Adolph Hitler and Hermann Goering, the Holocaust, the extermination of homosexuals and gypsies, and the slave labor of millions of East Europeans in National Socialist factories.”

“The French culture that contributed Descarte, Voltaire, Renoir, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Couer and Notre Dame, is the same French culture which massacred 50,000 Huguenots in a six-weeks orgy of blood in 1572.  It’s the French culture that killed Arabs indiscriminately during Algeria’s 8-year battle for independence, torturing children in front of parents and parents in front of their children.”

“The Italian culture of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, is the Italian culture which produced Pope Gregory XIII, who congratulated Catherine de Medici for exterminating the 50,000 Calvinist Huguenots, ordered celebratory bonfires lighted and a gold medalion minted with the inscription: ‘Slaughter of the Huguenots.’ It’s the Italian culture that gave us both the brilliant Galileo and the Inquisition authorities who forced him to recant his heliocentric vision, then put him under house arrest for the remainder of his life.”

“Spain’s cultural offerings include Goya, Velasquez, Dali, Picasso, Miguel de Cervantes, the Iglesia de Montserrat and Botanical Gardens, along with the Inquisition’s torture racks and the cruelly oppressive 40-year regime of General Francisco Franco.”

“Russian culture donated Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Dostoevsky, Anton Chekov, St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel.  It also furnished Ivan the Terrible; and Joseph Stalin, who rationalized and directed the killing of millions.”

“In addition to Confucius, Lao Tsu, the compass, paper, printing, gun powder, the Potala Palace, the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, China’s cultural contributions to humanity include General Chiang Kai-shek, who, in ‘Summing Up at Seventy,’ observed that while reconquering the mainland would mean death for many millions, it would be well worth the effort. Today, Chinese culture includes the use of brute force to suppress the rights of Tibetans as well as millions of its own people.”

“Then there was Ancient Greece. Called ‘The Fountainhead of Western Culture’ because it emphasized the use of reason and introduced our species to democracy, Ancient Greece also waged centuries of bloody war over the control of land; and its democracy, which lived less than a hundred years, was never available to women or slaves (and almost every free family had slaves) or even to freedmen.”

“As for hapless Iraq, in addition to Saddam and Chemical Ali, its cultural offerings go all the way back that momentous 10,000 years, to the dawn of modern civilization. ‘The first cities, the first written language, and the first legal system all began there.’”

“Let’s have the courage to be honest!”

”The United States wanted Iraq’s oil! But it was destroying, not preserving our species’ cultural heritage when it brought about the burning of Baghdad’s National Library and National Archives; the sacking of its museum; the destruction of Mosul’s rare book and manuscript collection, and Basra University’s museum. And the U.S. carried out this wrack-and-ruin with remarkable indifference.  Asked how he felt about the devastation, former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, a leading neocon custodian-of-anti-culture, blithely responded: ‘You can’t make an omlet without breaking eggs.’”

“On this occasion, Rumsfeld was at least being sincere. As Mr. Machiavelli documented, making an omlet of Iraq was what the U.S. was about.”

“Where determining the role the neocons and the U.S. are playing in the Mid East is concerned, Machiavelli did start with a materialist observation. ‘Only by joining in national communities which they give allegiance and fight to protect,’ he argued, ‘are people able to acquire physical, emotional and psychological security, find employment, build homes, feed and clothe their children, and raise them to share the values they hold dear.’”

 “But a scientific-materialist observer would not have been so provincial.”

“Common sense, as well as all the available evidence, indicates our ancestors also paid fealty and fought to defend their various pre-national communities.

 “Besides being equally objective, the much simpler proposition that: ’The easiest way for people to reproduce their social existences is to join in communities which they give allegiance and fight to protect’, has a universal reference.”

“It accurately describes the practices of ancestral tribes and other pre-national communities, as well as those of the feudal and capitalist states with which my opponent seems so exclusively concerned.”

“Constructing a materialist  theory of humanity’s social practice requires that we give the same species-applicable rephrasing to Machiavelli’s deduction about leaders.”

“‘It follows, he reasoned, ‘that the foremost objective of a nation’s leader, whether president, prime minister or prince, must be the preservation of the state upon which the lives and the well-being of his people depend.’”

“If we make the rational, and, again, the materially obvious, assumption leaders are as interested in perpetuating their hegemonic social existences as followers are in protecting less enviable conditions, we can rephrase Machiavelli’s conclusion to state:”

“The foremost objective of a leader who wishes to maintain his favored status must be the preservation of the community upon which a reproduction of his people’s social existences depends.”

“Common sense, and the historical record, make it clear any leader who fails to accomplish that feat will be in serious trouble.”

“Having reworded Mr. Machiavelli’s central axioms to make them representative of human behavior, not just the behavior of people joined in national communities, I’ll give you a scientific-materialist explanation of our species’ socio-economic-political evolution: where we’re at, how we got here, and, by logical implication, where we are going.”

 (Pausing to retrieve additional sheets of wrinkled paper, this time from his jacket’s left pocket, Marx examined them briefly, then continued.)

 “Those of you unfamiliar with my theory may be surprised to hear I begin by agreeing with my conservative predecessor Adam Smith that we humans are driven by self-interest.”

“It is natural necessity and interest that hold the members of civil society together,’ Engels and I emphasized in The Holy Family.”

“We repeated this keystone tenet in The German Ideology, saying: ‘Individuals seek only their particular interest.’”

“What is this ‘self-interest’ which unifies communities of people around the employment of particular methods of production and distribution?”

“It’s here that Adam Smith’s thinking and my own diverge sharply.”

“Smith described the populations of capitalist communities as engaged in trying to better their socio-economic conditions/enhance their material situations, while an ‘Unseen Hand’ binds them together.”

“For me, however, the preservation of their ‘social existences;’ by which I mean a reproduction of the socio-economic conditions they already enjoy, is far more important than improving it for the members of every community.”

“And it is the things which people cooperatively do to achieve that paramount objective, not some mythical ‘Unseen Hand,’ which unifies them around any given system of production.”

”’Production,’  as I stated in Grundrisse: ‘aims at the reproduction of the producer and his objective conditions of existence.’”

”Don’t misunderstand me. I am not denying given members of a community will strive to improve their socio-economic situations. My point is more fundamental.”

“In the immediate present, that is, in-the-here-and-now, every community’s production of goods and services has a fixed dimension; which is what enables economists to assign the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of nations a specific monetary figure.” 

“It therefore follows that insofar as some individuals acquire more of the productive pie in-the-here-and-now, other members of the community must receive less; and that will be creative of tension/conflict/enmity, rather than amity, between them.”

“Which is why politicians always attempt to make pies bigger, rather than give more to one social segment by taking from another. It’s also why conservative legislators (correctly) accuse liberal colleagues who dare to suggest policies expropriative of the wealthy of engaging in ‘class warfare.’”  

“In other words, in-the-here-and-now, the acquisitive efforts of particular individuals will be destructive, not creative, of community. Since to speak of a community’s existence presupposes its members are somehow bound together in-the-here-and-now, it’s obvious they are not being bound by the attempts of some to gain.”  

“Smith theorized they’re held together by an ‘Unseen Hand.’  I contend that for a materialist the nature of the hand is clear.  It is nothing other than the shared desire of every community member to reproduce his/her social existence; i.e, to keep what they already possess.  And, as I will demonstrate, it is the members of a community acting upon this shared material objective, an objective assumed and unspoken, which has driven our species forth.” 

“When hunting and gathering tribes became too large to obtain adequate food in a given territory they initially did what bees and ants do. Intent on reproducing their primitive social existence, some members of the tribe simply swarmed to a new location.“

“Population growth and the desire to maintain social existence gradually led our earliest ancestors to inhabit remote regions of the earth, adapting to different climates and different food sources as they moved.”

“Eventually, however, with tribal populations continuing to increase and the amount of new habitable territory declining, fighting began over the control of specific lands.  Judging from the practices of tribes who presently inhabit tropical regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, our warring tribal ancestors used a variety of symbols–tattoos, feathers, paints and animistic deities—to identify themselves and their causes and to strengthen their resolve.”

“At various times, in various locations, reproducing social existence required tribes to turn their enemies into a source of protein. Their cannibalism was similarly justified/made rational with elaborate beliefs, ceremonies and incantations.”

“After hunting and gathering for 190,000-plus years our ancestors approached a critical juncture: There were too many people for the earth to feed, house and clothe if they continued using that order of production and distribution.”

“As I remarked in Grundrisse:”  

 “‘The overpopulation among hunting peoples, which shows itself in the warfare between the tribes, proves not that the earth could not support their small numbers, but rather, that the condition of their reproduction required a great amount of territory for few people.’”

“To succinctly describe the oxymoronic situation our hunting and gathering predecessors now faced: their quest for a constancy of social existence would force them to radically change.”

“As war ceased to be the easiest way for hunters and gatherers to reproduce their social existence, they began making slaves of enemies rather than killing them, establishing nomadic-slave communities, domesticating animals, and practicing rudimentary agriculture.”

“Whereupon, a territory which had provided for 20-100 hunters and gatherers could now  sustain several times that number; and, do it at a significantly higher socio-economic level, providing better food, clothing and shelter. The problem of overpopulation and consequent violent struggle was momentarily relieved, and, our species social evolution  at long last began.”

“Und dort haben Sie es! The Dialectical Materialist nature of humanity’s historical progress!  Fundamental socio-economic-political changes have been the result of an assumed desire for no change, under material circumstances which were themselves undergoing transformation; principally, though not exclusively, because of an increase in population.”

“From hunting and gathering, to nomadic slave, to feudal, and, I believe, to capitalist, each succeeding order of production and distribution has been able to sustain a given number of people at a given socio-economic level.” 

“Each has ‘sowed the seeds of its own destruction’ by creating problems it could not solve, including the formation of a growing sub-community whose members social existences it lacked the capacity to sustain.”

“Fortunately, at the same time each has spawned, then nurtured into adolesence, a more cornucopian and flexible system which was able to socio-economically maintain the community, and, to heal the wounds its parent order had inflicted.”

“In Grundrisse, I recounted the Dialectical Materialist development of colonialist and slave-holding practices in ancient Rome, explaining:”

“’After the City of Rome had been built and the surrounding countryside cultivated by its citizens, the conditions of the community were different from what they had been before.  The aim of all these communities is survival; i.e., reproduction of the individuals who compose it as proprietors, i.e. in the same objective mode of existence as forms the relation among the members and at the same time therefore the commune itself.  This reproduction, however, is at the same time necessarily new production and destruction of the old form. For example, where each of the individuals is supposed to possess a given number of acres of land, the advance of population is already underway.  If this is to be corrected, then colonization, and that in turn requires wars of conquest.  With that, slaves, etc.  Also, e.g., enlargement of the ager publicus, and therewith the patricians who represent the community etc. Thus the preservation of the old community includes the destruction of the conditions on which it rests, turns into its opposite.’” 

“Throughout much of temperate Western Europe our ancestors’ defensive formation of feudal productive orders was brought about by the equally defensive predations of Scandinavian Vikings in the 8^th century.”

“Natives of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the Vikings were farmers with large families who could no longer feed, house and clothe their increasing numbers in their climatically less hospitable homelands.”

“They initially raided Europe’s coastal regions in search of silver, gold and slaves. But Central Europe’s fertile land and warmer weather soon led them to establish villages and settle down, further destabilizing the lives of those whose territories they invaded.”

“British historian William Stubbs noted that for indigenous Central Europeans the: ‘chronic absense of any effective central government and the threat of war and famine contributed to the general awareness of the need for security and protection. It was in this atmosphere of collapsing central authority, civil war, invasion and overall economic stagnation that the institution known as feudalism appeared.’”

“Within Europe’s nascent feudal communities everyone’s life practices became rigidly, but protectively, defined. Control of the land was of prime importance. Serfs worked it. With the king’s sanction, lords owned it, but were above doing any physical work. The lords were warriors, whose principal function was to defend everyone, including the monarch and the serfs, against invasion.” 

“In addition, the lords were sworn to furnish adequate land, firewood and housing materials for their serfs.  On their parts, the serfs’ tasks included animal husbandry, crop raising, building and maintaining the monarch’s and lords’ dwellings, carrying their water, making their clothing, currying their horses; and, as the feudal productive order matured, following the lords into battle.”

“All relationships between lords, peasants, religious authorities and kings were justified and sustained not by monetary exchanges or legal agreements, but by ‘personal loyalty and service’ enforced by each individual’s sense of obligation.  Barter (this-for-that trade), rather than currency, controlled nearly every other movement of goods.”

“Money-lending for interest was considered usury and sinful on the part of borrowers as well as lenders.  Behind it all stood the Roman Catholic Church, unified with the State, formulating and propagating the appropriate philosophical rationales (feudalism’s manifestation in ideas), and pressuring recalcitrants to abide by their obligations lest they suffer punishment at the hand of God.” 

“Europe’s progressive feudal communities then grew and prospered.”

“But, like hunting and gathering and nomadic slave communities before them, in time they started having difficulty maintaining the social existence of their increasing populations. For a few hundred years, again, like their predecessors, feudal principalities/states eased the problem by warring with one another.”

“Gradually, however, taking another progressive step and establishing the more cornucopian capitalist order of production became a Natural Necessity.”

“While it’s possible that by reducing Western Europe’s population by one-quarter to one-half the bubonic plague (“Black Death”) of 1347-50 may have delayed exhaustion of the feudal productive system, in some ways it appears to have accelerated the process.” 

“Historian Fernand Braudel argues the plague aggravated an economic recession which had started 50 years before.  With hundreds of small villages depopulated, surviving peasants were driven into cities to endure.  In turn, the growth of cities made it increasingly difficult for landholders to simply barter agricultural products for things they needed.  Money began to be an imperative.”

“Recession was also making Europe’s battles, hence its armies, grandscale.  That entailed using hired soldiers, cast-iron cannon, and swords in ever-larger quantities, all of which likewise had to be paid for with money. Finally, the recession prompted many lords to expand their landholdings in an effort to hang on.  That, too, required the use of legal tender.”

“In order to obtain the necessary funds, lords had no alternative to borrowing from the inchoate financiers located in cities, which meant usury would have to begin losing its feudal, church-dictated, stigma.  Land-holding nobles further undermined their feudal productive orders by sending sons who were unable to acquire personal estates to the rapidly growing cities where they became financiers and merchants, as well as engaging in handicraft and rudimentary industrial production: makers and sellers of the swords, cannon and uniforms the feudal elites so desperately needed.”

“Confronting Europeans with the material reality that religious devotion could no longer offer them protection, economic recession and plague had also begun eroding the Catholic Church’s unquestioned authority. ‘The Black Death led to cynicism toward religious officials who could not keep their frequent promises of curing plague victims and banishing the disease.’”

“Purporting to be Jesus’ earthly intermediary, the feudal Church had traditionally absolved individuals of their sins for confession, and/or good deeds, such as aiding the poor.”

“But by the late 13th century, feudalism’s growing inability to sustain Europe’s population was squeezing the clergy, whose numbers were also increasing, along with everyone else, prompting the Church to begin selling forgiveness in the form of ‘indulgences.’”  

“Theologian Richard Hooker related the indulgences: ‘subsituted good works of the Catholic clergy for the good works required of the individual believer. Proof of this substitution was in the indulgence itself, which was a piece of paper . . . that certified good works of the clergy had paid off “the good works debt” of the individual believer.  Inspired by the need to raise money,’ Hooker argued, ‘indulgences reproduced the very logic of money.’”  

“Like the nobility, the clergy were actively engaged in ‘sowing the seeds’ of their feudal productive order’s destruction.” 

“The first perceptible signs of capitalism’s fetal development within the feudal  structure appeared in Spain.”

“Machiavelli described how a lack of rain and fertile land led the Spanish to conquer New World territories in order to ‘defend their state.’  I’d like you to read his  ‘defend their state’ as ‘maintain their people’s social existences.’”

“But there was another, equally important, process at work in Spain. Financiers, work-shop manufacturers and merchants, with Jews in the forefront, were effecting changes which threatened the country’s feudal structure.”

“With rare exception, Jews had not been allowed to become members of Europe’s land-owning elite. As a consequence, they maintained social existence by adopting the indicated industrial-world occupations, making them urban-dwelling leaders of the revolutionary capitalist transformation.”

“By the mid-15^th century the anti-feudal roles which socio-economic survival was requiring Jews to play began bringing them into open conflict with Spain’s landed nobility, as the country’s feudal system became daily more inadequate.”

“Conservatively, predictably, the landholding elite initially responded to the mounting threat with a cautious antisemitism, demanding Jews either leave the country or convert to the elite’s feudal understanding of Christianity.”

“While hundreds-of-thousands of Jews took the second course, of necessity, their everyday practices continued to have the same capitalist-order impact as before.”

“In 1478, acquiescing to pressure being exerted by the landed nobility through King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Pope Sixtus IV authored the brutal Spanish Inquisition. The principal targets of the Inquisition would be the Jewish converts, who, it was argued, correctly in most cases, were not sincere about their conversion. According to the King’s decree, ’Ecclesiastical Tribunals’ were formally established and instructed: ‘to judge heretical depravity, to search out and punish converts from Judiasm who have transgressed against Christianity by secretly adhering to Jewish beliefs and performing Jewish rites.’”

“Fourteen years later the King and Queen ordered that Jews be expelled from the country.”

“But, although the feudal-elite could not foresee it, Spain would soon relieve its developing productive order crisis by exporting excess population to, while acquiring huge quantities of gold, silver and other mineral riches from, the New World.”

 “Christopher Columbus wrote in his diary: ‘In the same month in which Their Majesties issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies.’”

“Portugal’s situation was similar to that of Spain: insufficient arable land, infertile soil and inadequate rainfall; and, like Spain, it relieved its feudal-order crisis by exporting people and importing New World pelf.”

“Spain and Portugal’s New World successes were rapid, ruthless, and astoundingly profitable. During one period of only a few weeks Columbus: ‘shipped to Spain nearly two tons of gold.’” 

“Francisco Pizzaro had a similar experience when he entered Peru.  After slaughtering 7,000 of Atahuallpa’s warriors in a single night, Pizzaro agreed to give the Inca king freedom in exchange for silver and gold.  Atahuallpa provided him with two and a half tons of gold and five tons of silver as his part of the bargain.  Pizzaro then had him strangled to better secure control of the country.” 

“Portugal, too, reaped and raped remarkable profit during this period.”

“Neither the resistance of native populations, nor their disappearance through European diseases to which they had no natural defense, proved to be obstacles of great significance.  Flagrant brutality and extermination solved the first, the importation of millions of African slaves the second.”

“By the latter part of the 16^th century, comfortably ensconced in the New World, Spain had founded universities in two of its conquered territories: the University of Mexico in 1553, and the University of San Marcos at Lima, Peru in 1572.”

“With large numbers of their people moving to the New World and establishing the grand fiefdoms no longer available at home, their economies infused by stolen New World treasure, for the next three hundred years Spain and Portugal’s feudal systems again became secure.”

“But where colonialism and the theft of Latin American wealth–also African wealth in Portugal’s case–would enable the Spanish and Portuguese land-holding elites to preserve their pre-capitalist orders, such efforts did not work nearly so well for France and England.”

“Because their feudal systems of production began experiencing structural crisis a little later than those of Spain and Portugal, England and France trailed those two countries where attempting to vent excess population in the New World and seize its riches were concerned.”

“Not that the late comers failed to try. Without exception, all of England and France’s New World incursions during the 17^th century were expressly aimed at acquiring wealth in the form of  gold, silver and precious stones.”

“Yet, however much they prayed, God seemed unsympathetic. There were no vast stores of mineral wealth waiting to be seized in the unconquered regions of North America.  In addition, the northern territories had a far less hospitable climate, and were inhabited by Indians who, not living in large, easily destroyed cities, were able to fight back when their own social existences were threatened.”

“The first shipload of England’s Jamestown settlers arrived in May 1607.  Eight months later, weakened from hunger and infected by disease, ‘only 38 of the 104 colonists were still alive—barely.’  George Percy, Jamestown’s president, recorded that by 1610 they were reduced to eating ‘dogs, cats, rats, and mice.’”  

“Additional hundreds of colonists reached Jamestown over the next couple decades. Yet, where energizing England’s feudal economy was concerned, the Jamestown settlement continued to have little value, and the colonists were soon at war with natives.”

“In 1622, 347 of what were by then approximately 1,400 settlers were murdered by Algonquians enraged at being driven from traditional lands by the colonizers’ tobacco farming. Writer Karen Lange notes that ‘three out of four who came to Jamestown between 1607 and 1624 died from disease, hunger and conflict with the Indians.’”  In 1644, a second attack by the Algonquians, whose own population was now in radical decline, killed another 400 colonists.

“Under the circumstances, very few English were interested in moving to the New World, and France’s New World ventures proved even less rewarding.”

“Both countries then tried to ease their feudal order crises with piracy.  If they could not compete with Spain and Portugal in stealing New World wealth, they could at least profit by robbing the robbers.”

But, though highly remunerative, and ample justification for getting Francis Drake knighted, the piracy would not solve their problem of having inadequate productive systems either; which, in England’s case, was already changing from chronic to acute.”

“The number of French and English who were finding it necessary to take up capitalist-world occupations to survive had long been growing.  The construction of ships needed to export colonists and raid Spanish and Portuguese vessels, the manufacturing of axes, plows, hammers, nails, guns, clothing, etc., for provisioning their own, as well as, ironically, Spanish and Portuguese settlers, only accelerated that transformation.”

“Having no less painful and disruptive alternative left for maintaining the majority of its people’s social existence, in the mid-17^th century England underwent the capitalist revolution, followed by France a hundred years later.”

“With their capitalist revolutions, political power was wrenched from the increasingly decrepit hands of landowners and given to the financiers, merchants and industrialists whose hour of authority had arrived.”

“In a letter to P.V. Annenkov I described the Dialectical Materialist overthrow of  England’s feudal order of production, writing:” 

“’The privileges, the institutions of guilds and corporations, the regulatory regime of the Middle Ages, were social relations that alone corresponded to the acquired productive forces and to the social condition which had previously existed and from which these institutions had arisen.  Under the protection of the regime of corporations and regulations, capital was accumulated, overseas trade was developed, colonies were founded.  But the fruits of this men would have forfeited if they had tried to retain the forms under whose shelter these fruits had ripened.  Hence burst two thunderclaps—the Revolutions of 1640 and 1688.  All the old economic forms, the social relations corresponding to them, the political conditions which were the official expression of the old civil society, were destroyed in England.’” 

“I reiterated my central thesis in the Annenkov letter, observing: ‘Men never relinquish what they have won, but this does not mean that they never relinquish the social form in which they have acquired certain productive forces.  On the contrary, in order that they may not be deprived of the result attained, and forfeit the fruits of civilization, they are obliged, from the moment when the form of their commerce no longer corresponds to the productive forces acquired, to change all their traditional social forms.’”

“The Natural Necessity of each successive order of production and distribution, and the material reason it had a much shorter life-span than its predecessor, should be evident.”

“By producing a drastic improvement in people’s security, clothing, housing, food quality, and, therefore, their health and longevity, each generated a more explosive increase in population than its forerunner, leading, in turn, to its own more rapid exhaustion and demise.”

“Hunters and gatherers lived about 17 years, rarely more than 20. The average life span of many capitalist country populations is over 75.”  

“Demographers estimate that when Columbus set sail the total world population was about 400 million. At present, only a few hundred years after capitalist systems of production began to be erected, it’s over 6.6 billion and rapidly growing.” 

“It’s also obvious why the changes in productive-distributive orders have all been unidirectional.”

“If the United States decided to return to a feudal existence, at least 60 percent of Americans would either have to be exiled or killed.  An estimated 2 percent of the population currently produces over 90 percent of the country’s foodstuffs, using sophisticated irrigation systems, tractors, plows and combines that only a highly advanced industrial economy can provide. The foodstuffs are then distributed via trains, planes and semis, which likewise require a complex industrial order for their manufacture. So, too, with everything else Americans enjoy, including housing, clothing, medical care, entertainment and travel.”

“Similarly, maintaining the social existences of the French or English during the 16^th century would have been impossible if they had decided to raze their feudal productive orders and revert to using nomadic-slave or hunting and gathering systems of production.”

“A materialist explanation for the origin of social classes, politics and ideology is also inherent in what I‘ve said about our species’ social evolution.”

“The transition from hunting and gathering to the nomadic-slave mode of production introduced an important new ingredient: a division of labor. Specific tasks began to be performed by specific individuals. As the slave order achieved viability, it started turning out goods and services in excess of the amount required to reproduce everyone’s social existence.”

“Due to the division of labor, some individuals—the slave masters—found themselves in control of that excess.  So long as the slaves’ social existence was being maintained, they would exert little or no pressure for a share of the surplus, making the formation of an elite social class a Natural and Necessary result.”

“Having a hegemonic status to be preserved, the elites then needed special protective devices. Politics and the political state were the practical weapons reflexively born of that need. In the same way, and for the same reason, abstract philosophies and religions were spontaneously created to provide the requisite blueprints and justifications.”

“Individuals calling themselves ‘Marxists’ sometimes portray elites as duplicitous where the creation and employment of philosophy/religion and political institutions are concerned.”

“Their idealist reasoning has nothing whatsoever to do with my own materialist logic.” 

“To the contrary, I’ve argued elites instinctively and sincerely formulate those religio-philosophical ideas, create those political institutions, engage in those practices which most effectively/least disruptively enable them to secure their favored social existences.”

“For the same reason, middle classes and the poor just as spontaneously adopt the elites’ philosophical-religious ideas, embrace their political institutions, and adhere to the associated political practice.”

“If non-elite members of a community were to reject the elite’s philosophical vision, refuse to act upon it, they would have to confront the elite physically, and neither of them would be socio-economically sustained.”

“Therefore, as long as productive orders have been able to perpetuate (reproduce) their social existences, non-elites have reflexively internalized and acted upon the elites’ perspectives, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes under protest, depending upon how well they were being sustained.”

“Engels and I emphasized this point in The German Ideology, writing:”

“‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. . . . The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.’”

“Mr. Machiavelli described the fundamental logics leaders promote as ’lies told  to preserve their states.’” 

“On this matter, our disagreement could not be more complete.”

“The American elites who defended their favored interests with the argument that settlers of Western territories were fighting ‘bloodthirsty indian savages’ believed it to be true.  So, too, did the settlers. Respecting that issue, no deception whatsoever was involved.”

“Stalin and the Soviet bureaucrats who protected their more prosperous social existences and that of the country’s state-capitalist elite with the claim they were imprisoning or killing tens-of-millions of pro-capitalist traitors during the Great Depression were thoroughly convinced that was what they were doing.”

“So, too, with the Nazis’ proposition Germany was involved in a fateful struggle against a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to dominate the world. Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Speer and other National Socialist leaders were more than willing to lie in the service of what they considered true.  But, the idea of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy was, for them, among the most essential of realities.”

“Finally, American leaders were not lying when they described a ‘communist’ threat to  U.S. investments in Latin America, Asia and Africa from the 1960s to the late 80s. The utilitarian meaning of ‘communist/communism’ which those with menaced investments employed was: ‘anyone or anything which threatens our interests.’  Hence, for them, raping, torturing and killing–into submission or out of existence—individuals who posed the threats, was seen as a painful but imperative endeavor; a ‘removal of cancer in order to save the patient,’ they often intoned.”

(With a wry smile, Marx then added)

“If any of you still believe this country’s leaders were insincere about their anti-communist crusade I suggest  you discuss it with Anne Coulter.”

(Staring intently, first at Coulter, who had visibly paled and was squeezing the arms of her chair as though trying to break them, then at Bill O’Reilly, whose red face and bulging eyes threatened an explosion, Marx finished making his point.)    

“During the same period, the Soviet Union’s elite employed their own unique interest-protective definitions.  Threats to their favored socio-economic status which came from the right were repressed as ‘capitalist.’ Threats from the left were labelled ‘leftist adventurism’ and crushed with equal vigor.”

“In each of these cases, elites and their political representatives spontaneously defined the world in defense of hegemonic social realities.  In each case, the non-elites whose social existences were being sustained reflexively followed.”

“’Are we homo sapiens really so conservative?,’ I can hear some of you asking.”

“Have you never noticed that no one, whether politically Left, Right or Liberal,  knowingly calls ‘true’ ideas which, when they act upon them as valid, result in their own socio-economic expropriation?”

“Now, we must either regard this as a miracle of walking-on-water and raising the dead proportions, or, consider it irrefutable empirical evidence that, before anything else, people’s political truths are blueprints and justifications for defending their personal social existences.”

“’But,’ you may protest, ‘there are individual exceptions to the above rule; Christ, for example, and Che Guevara.’”

“Granted.  However, history is made by people acting in community, and there are clearly no community exceptions.”

“Moreover, we know very well how people communally rationalize not following the individual egalitarian exceptions. Proclaiming Christ ‘the Son of God,’ Christians excuse their own failure to share as the action of mere mortals; driving expensive cars to church, and drawing comfort from the biblical assurance Christ died to atone for their sins.”

“Similarly, the people of self-described socialist/communist nations have rationalized not imitating Che by calling him ‘the socialist man alive today;’ an elevated status they concede they have not yet personally attained.”

“In both instances the exceptions are idolized, and, as all of human history attests, when people idolize they never emulate.”

“If tomorrow everyone began behaving as Christ prescribed, common sense argues it would mean the end of Christianity. People might thereafter love Christ. But is it rational to think they would continue worshipping someone no better than themselves?”

“The men who joined Che in the Bolivian mountains probably loved him.  But it’s illogical to suppose they idolized him for doing the same thing they were doing.”

“Do you still question our species inherent conservatism?”

“Then, let me give you another example.”

“It’s the reality of our universally shared experience that insofar as groups/communities of people have the same socio-economic existences to defend the question whether they should permit one another complete freedom of speech, press and assembly never arises.”

“Here in the United States, conservatives like William Bennett, Ramesh Ponnuru and Richard Mellon Scaife don’t debate granting each other such license.”

“Neither do their liberal counterparts. It would never occur to Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and Ted Kennedy to argue the propriety of allowing one another unfettered rights to organize, publish and speak.”

“Nor, again, do individuals on the Left: Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Howard Zinn, for instance.” 

“It’s the reality of our shared experience that insofar as communities of individuals do not have the same socio-economic existences to protect, but, for one to keep does not require that the others fail to do so, with a great show of magnanimity, they concede one another the indicated liberties.”

“However, it’s also the (less admirable) reality of our shared experience that whenever members of one community have found they could no longer preserve their socio-economic existences if those in another community were permitted to do so, they have readily taken each others’ lives; and, with a lot less hesitation, they’ve denied one another freedom of press, speech and assembly.”

“At such moments, stifling any democratic impulses they might have, people have begun to oppress, and to kill.”

“U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes defended the principle involved when he argued no one should be allowed to ‘yell fire in a crowded theater.’”

“The vital questions, of course, are ‘What constitutes a political yell of fire?’, and ‘When should the theater be said to be crowded?’”

“If you examine the Court’s application of the Holmes proposition you will find that political ideas labelled ‘yells of fire’ were invariably ones which, if acted upon by the public to whom they were addressed, would have been expropriative of the socio-economic existences of the people who called them that.  And, the theater was said to be crowded insofar as it appeared likely the broader public might act.”

“I noted that while a community’s productive order remains viable, being conservative, non-elites act out support for the state and the elite’s vision.” 

“Besides protecting the elite’s hegemonic interests, the state of a viable productive system serves everyone by defending from threats, both foreign and domestic, the order which enables a reproduction of their socio-economic conditions.” 

“As Engels and I affirmed in The German Ideology, at such times ‘the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomized.’”

“I said it again in Grundrisse, writing: ‘Protection of acquisitions, etc. When these trivialities are reduced to their real content, they tell more than their preachers know. Namely, that every form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government, etc..’”

“As I indicated in my letter to Annenkov: ‘assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organization of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society.’”

“For the same reason, when an exhausted order of production has been razed, as its successor begins to acquire viability its self-understanding, i.e., its philosophy, ‘becomes philosophy generally, in presence of the world.  It becomes the philosophy of the world of the present.’”

“’The formal features which attest a philosophy has achieved that importance, that it is the living soul of the culture, . . . were the same in all times,’ I observed in an article written for the Reinische Zeitung, calling the operative philosophy of a productive order its ‘Spiritual Quintessence.’”

“In other words, every community-self-consciousness (philosophy/religion) is the product of a desire on the part of the people who hold it to preserve their particular web of social existences, in their particular circumstances, at their particular time.”

“It follows that whether a community’s philosophy/religion is perpetuated, undergoes modification, or, is discarded entirely in favor of another, will be determined by the kind and degree of material change occurring in the situations of those who embrace it.”

“Engels and I spelled out the implicit Natural and Necessary conclusion in The German Ideology, writing:”

“‘Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of  independence. They have no history, no development, but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.’”

“Are we humans really so inherently conservative?”

“If we judge our species by what we do, and not by what we say, our answer to that rhetorical question must be YES!” 

“If you’ve followed my materialist logic, you’ll understand my dismissal of the idealistic reasoning of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and other contemporary Hegelians, who put ideas in the lead and blame the world’s suffering on religion.”

“Declaring the search for ‘scientific truth’ urgently important, these lightheaded philosophers give ’truth’ the same nonobjective and hyper-orthodox meaning as the Muslims, Jews, evangelical Christians and Pagans they so roundly condemn.”

“Remarkably, having asserted ‘We live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle’, Sam Harris shows us how it’s done.”

“If by ‘obvious’ he means ‘the logic of experience’ (that philosophical stance I call ‘materialism,’ and William James dubbed ‘radical empiricism’), Harris quite obviously confronts a dilemma:”

“Without exception, the members of feudal communities East and West are known to have believed God dictated how society should be organized, and, that God’s directives arrived on earth via the elites and the high religious authorities who shared their favored status and authored its ideological defense: the ’Divine Right of Kings’ in feudal Europe, the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ in feudal China and Japan.”

“Like me, most of you will undoubtledly agree with Harris that the feudalists were ‘wrong.’”

“However, we also know, because both common sense and our experience demand it, that if today the people of Japan, France, or any other industrial nation, decided to restore the feudal order they’d immediately find it necessary to adopt its system-sustaining web of beliefs.”

“For a week or two everyone might simply ‘play along,’ with those who elected to be peasants bowing to the dictates of priests and bishops, lords and ladies, kings and queens, just for the fun of it all.  But if the resurrected feudal system was going to have any permanence, it would be imperative that everyone internalize its logic, sincerely believing God had determined their respective stations, who they were, what they thought, and how they behaved toward one another.” 

“In short, acknowledging the ‘materially obvious’ in this instance means recognizing that Religious Absolutism was the mental expression (representation in the form of ideas), of the feudal world; a metaphysics and epistemology, which continues to exist in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other pre-industrial regions of Asia and the Middle East today.”

“Hence, to call it ‘wrong’ in the abstract is like labelling the blueprint for a building we don’t like to be ‘in error.’”

“If, when confronted with this predicament, Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. still insist on maintaining their idealist stance, it goes from being implausible to being absurd.”

“Since what these psuedo-scientists hold to be the ‘errors’ of hunters and gatherers, nomadic slave holders, feudalists, contemporary Muslims, Pagans, Evangelical Christians and Zionist Jews, have obviously had a far greater creative impact on history than the ideas they personally consider ‘truth,’ they must now explain why anyone should ever bother looking for the latter.”    

“We materialists are criticized for referring to historical processes as ‘inevitable,’ ‘Natural Necessity,’ and ‘dialectic.’  Hopefully, you now understand what we mean by those terms.”

 “We’re not suggesting the transition from hunting and gathering tribes, to nomadic-slave communities, to feudal and capitalist nations, was pre-determined by an inflexible universe or a manipulative god.”

“What made the journey ‘inevitable’ was us: i.e., our ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ insistence on reproducing our personal social existences in the least painful and disruptive way possible, whatever the cost to others; and the ceaseless changes in community theory and  practice/knowing and doing which realizing that objective has entailed.”

“This always seemed so self-evident to me that in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle I once (naively) enthused: ‘Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. . . . teleology in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained.’”

“A ‘mortal blow to teleology’ indeed!”

“While our species has reaped ever-more-wondrous benefits from the last ten millenia of its 200,000 year trip, for equally clear material reasons, hundreds-of-millions of us have also suffered terrible pain.“

“Whenever the assumed truths of an exhausted productive-distributive order have become injurious errors for members of a progressive sub-community, and the latter have started formulating and acting upon a system-transforming logic, the elites whose interests were threatened have declared the order and its justifying philosophy (its deities, rituals and shrines, its icons and incantations) sacrosanct and gone on the attack. Predictably, they’ve been assisted in that effort by the members of other classes whose social existences were also being sustained.”

“At the apex of such tragic moments, describing challenges to their interests as a conflict between good and evil, elites have decided individuals who rejected the established order and its rationales would have to be silenced; if necessary, they would have to be killed; thereby causing transitions from one productive-distributive system to another to be experienced as dialectic.”

(Marx’s expression suddenly softened as he added) 

“Being an inveterate optimist, I’ll remind you that while frenzied assaults by defenders of expended orders have proven fatal for countless representatives of nascent systems, they have also affirmed every new system’s propriety.”

“As I observed in a Koinische Zeitung article, the self-consciousness/philosophy of every new order of production and distribution: ‘is introduced into the world by the clamour of its enemies who betray their internal infection by their desperate appeals for help against the blaze of ideas.  These cries of its enemies mean as much for the philosophy as the first cry of a child for the anxious ear of the mother.  They are the cry of life of the ideas which have burst open the orderly hieroglyphic husk of the system and become citizens of the world.’”

“As France’s feudal system became drained of viability, the landed aristocracy, for whom preserving feudalism was vital if their socio-economic conditions were going to be maintained, went on the offensive against upstart pro-capitalist-order protestants, whose rejection of the Catholic Church’s authority the feudalists considered downright ‘satanic.’” 

“’In 1521 the Parliament of Paris, with the approval of the king, forbade publication of Lutherian tracts coming from Germany . . . The theological faculty of Paris formulated a plan for preventing the spread of such errors. The/ir/ plan dictated that heretical books should be forbidden, and that bishops should be exhorted to seek out such works in their dioceses and have them destroyed.’”

“A decade later, Frenchmen who openly challenged the feudal Church, whether in speech or in writing, were being put to death. Twenty-four Parisian ‘heretics’ were burned at the stake in 1534 alone.”

“The bloodiest struggles attending the exhaustion of European feudalism took place in Germany. Limited and insecure access to the Atlantic Ocean, and none to the Mediterranean Sea, had restricted trade between Prussia and other countries/regions, including Africa and the New World. As a result, the creation of a subcommunity of capitalist financiers, craft-producers and merchants had not proceeded as far as it had in France.”

“As Germany’s feudal order lost viability in the 13^th century, hundreds-of-thousands of  Germans reproduced their social existence by migrating eastward, settling less populated regions of Hungary, Austria, Croatia, Poland and, eventually, Russia.”

“By the 16^th century that door was closing, making the expropriation of Church property the easiest, for many young nobles, the only remaining option.”

“As a consequence, from 1618-48, Prussians battled over who would exercise feudal control of the land. When the Thirty Years War ended, more than 9 million Germans, 20-30 percent of the population, had been killed.  But the strain on the region’s feudal socio-economic-political organization had been momentarily relieved.”  

“Not until the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismark in 1871 were capitalist financiers and industrialists finally brought into the ascendant.”

“In his celebrated book, The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler acknowledged the violence which accompanied the capitalists’ accession to power in the United States, saying:

“’The Civil War was not fought exclusively, as it seemed to many, over the moral issue of slavery or such narrow economic issues as tariffs.  It was fought over a much larger question: would the rich new continent be ruled by farmers or industrializers’”.

“The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the three-year Civil War which followed ended  feudalism in that country, transferring control to state-capitalist financiers, industrialists, and their political representatives, ironically, in the name of socialism and communism.  Twenty million lives were lost in that struggle; a metamorphosis Toffler called  ‘Russia’s version of the American Civil War.’ ‘/F/ought not primarily, as it seemed, over communism, but once again over the issue of industrialization.’”

“China underwent the same revolution in the 1930s and 40s, suffering an even greater loss of life. There, too, the building of an increasingly vibrant, though environmentally devastating, state-capitalist productive-distributive order has been the result.”

“Mr. Machiavelli observed China has 10 billionaires. According to the latest Financial Times, that number has now grown to 106, ninety percent of them children of the country’s top 2,900 political authorities.”  

(Marx paused briefly before posing another rhetorical question).  

“What does our species 200,000 year socio-economic-political evolution have to do with the neocons’ strategy for seizing control of Iraq’s oil and making the United States’ imperial leader of the world?”

“’Everything!’”

“Today, Americans need to ask themselves five fundamental questions:” 

“* Has capitalism, like hunting and gathering, nomadic-slave and feudal productive-distributive systems before it, been drained of viability; has it, as I will argue, reached its terminal stage?” 

“* Is capitalism ‘sowing the seeds of its own destruction,’ creating ever-larger communities of people whose social existences it cannot sustain, and momentous  problems it’s unable to resolve?”

“* Is capitalism simultaneously forging its own successor; i.e., is a new, problem-solving, order coming into being within capitalist countries, a new way of relating people to one another, and to the production and distribution of goods?” 

“* If so, are representatives of that nascent order beginning to threaten the elites who benefit most from the moribund capitalist system of production and distribution.

“And the most urgent question:”

“* Are those whose interests are challenged moving toward an oppressive good-versus-evil, defense of their troubled order?”

 (Marx paused once more, this time for several moments. When he resumed speaking he had riveted his gaze on Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Brit Hume, John Gibson and Neil Cavuto as though addressing them alone).

“Proposing the United States has been defensively exporting its manufacturing base to low-wage nations, Mr. Machiavelli then added: ‘Dr. Marx and his disciples would have us believe capitalists are driven by an insatiable lust for increased profit.’”

“He, very conveniently, misrepresented my position.”

“I’ve consistently argued what every successful businessman will affirm: For capitalists, there can be no treading water.” 

“With more and more countries having to construct capitalist systems to maintain their growing populations, with the U.S. population and that of other established capitalist states increasing, the choice for each individual entrepreneur is  clear: Go forward or go down!” 

“To compete, not merely with each other, but with South Korean, Chinese and Indian neo-capitalist producers entering the global market, U.S., Japanese, French, German, British et al., manufacturers must sell ever greater quantities of shirts, shoes, suits, plates, pots and pans, hand tools, refrigerators and blenders, TVs, cars and motorcycles, etc.”  

“Selling that greater quantity of goods forces capitalists to engage in a never-ending expansion and sophistication of production; which, in turn, requires a  constant growth in profit.”

“I described this process in Das Kapital, writing: ‘The development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.’”

“The problem for many Third World states today is that when capitalist countries buy their labor-non-intensive mineral/agricultural products and pour in ever-larger quantities of shoes, shirts, pots and pans, they cut the throats of millions of poor Saudis, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Afghanis, Indonesians, Algerians, Moroccans, Egyptians and Filipinos who survive by hand-making shoes and sandals, shirts, turbans and other items of native attire, or by hammering out pots and pans, or, by forming and firing pottery and plates.”  

“And it’s not only the poor whose lives are being ravaged.” 

“Capitalism’s aggressive economic penetration of nonindustrialized countries with TVs, CDs, DVDs and movies, is also devastating middle-class artists and actors, replacing their nations’ traditional tastes with those of Japan and the industrial West, while  providing them, like the poor, with nothing in the way of alternative occupations.”  

“Even highly educated children of Mid Eastern elites, doctors, dentists, architects, chemists and engineers, are finding the virulent capitalist invasion leaves no place for them.”

“The poor can’t afford doctors and dentists. There aren’t enough people in the middle class to pay for their professional services. And the elites fly to New York, London or Paris for their own medical/dental procedures.”

“When Mid Eastern oil Sheikhs have palaces and shopping malls constructed in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, when they build airports, seaports, luxury hotels, theaters, fantasy playlands and skyscrapers in Dubai, or a massive water pipeline in the United Arab Emirates, they contract with global corporations like Haliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons, Kajima and Taisei.”

“Those companies have their own architects and engineers. They don’t hire local professionals. They also bring in low-paid, semi-slave workers from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, who toil 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, doing the menial labor.”

“With no less painful option left for maintaining their social existences, or that of their nations’ middle class and poor, some educated sons and daughters of Mid Eastern and Asian feudal elites begin formulating plans for expropriating Western interests, along with their countries’ Western-oriented elites, and establishing new structures which can sustain them all; structures which, as in post-Khomeini Iran, are in some ways terribly reactionary, in others, progressive.”

“Ergo, the material origins of the ‘muslim terrorist’ challenge now confronting capitalist states.”  

“It’s not mere chance that Osama bin Laden, whose father was the billionaire owner of a construction company, studied Business Administration and Engineering; that Ayman al-Zawahiri was a pediatric surgeon, his father a pharmacologist; or that Abu Hafisa, the Moroccan who directed the 2004 Madrid train bombing, is a psychiatrist.” 

“Nor is it chance that Mohamed Atta’s university degree was in architecture, while ‘terrorist’ Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s was in mechanical engineering.” 

“So, too, with ‘terrorist’ Palestinian leaders whose peoples’ lives Israel is currently destroying. Fathi Abd Al-Aziz, the founder of Islamic Jihad, was a physician.  Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas, is a surgeon, as was the late Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi.” 

“Moreover, it’s not just capitalist manufacturers and financiers whose activities are  devastating Third World peoples.  The agribusinesses of advanced capitalist nations are equally aggressive in eliminating their jobs. They are also destroying their environments, and impairing their health.”

“Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for the past 13 years Mexico’s corn and bean farmers have suffered a relentless assault by U.S. agricultural corporations, driving an estimated 6 million of them from the land.” 

“According to investigative reporter John Ross, ‘New Years 2008 may prove to be /their/ doomsday.’”

“On that day, in accordance with the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) ‘all tariffs on corn and beans will be abolished.’ The ’Zero tariffs,’ ‘are expected to trigger a tsunami of corn imports, much of it genetically modified,’ Ross predicts, forcing additional millions of Mexico’s small producers from their farms.” 

“The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) has documented that the U.S. agribusiness Cargill  uses ‘massive government subsidies’ to dump huge quantities ‘of grains in poorer countries,’ ‘undermining small farmers, destroying local food production systems, and making rural economies dependent.’”

“Greenpeace charges the U.S. agribusiness corporations, Cargill, Archer-Daniels-Midland, and Bunge, with ‘Eating up the Amazon,’ financing ‘unscrupulous’ Brazilian farmers who ‘seize and clear’ ‘publicly owned rainforest land for the production of soybeans.’”

“Ten thousand square miles of Amazon rainforest were cleared in 2006 alone, the burning of tree stumps and branches spewing 370 million tons of hydrocarbons into the air.” 

“Cargill, Brazil’s largest exporter of soybeans and sugar, provides few jobs, nearly all of them extremely low-paid.  Many Brazilian farmers under contract with Cargill have been found to use slave labor.” 

“Monsanto, Cargill, and other U.S. agribusinesses are also destroying the infrastructure of rural India. By bribing Indian officials, they’ve succeeded in promoting cotton and rice seeds genetically engineered to produce sterile plants, forcing the country’s small farmers to buy new seeds yearly at prices few of them can afford.” 

“Nor can Indian farmers rely on traditional seeds, since their plants cross-pollinate with those of Monsanto and Cargill, producing seeds which are also sterile.” 

“Adding insult to injury, when an agribusiness corporation is able to demonstrate that a farmer’s seeds contain a gene of its engineered plants, it takes him to court and forces him to pay for using his own seeds.”

“If, despite the formidible hurdles U.S. agribusinesses place in his path, an Indian farmer has a good crop, it must then compete with cotton the same corporations produce in the U.S., using a $4 billion government subsidy they receive each year to keep the international price of cotton low.” 

“India’s farmers once produced all of the country’s edible oils from mustard seed, sesame seed, linseed and coconut. Then, in 1998, Physicist Vandana Shiva relates, ‘Monsanto and Cargill obtained a ‘ban on indigenous oils.’ Today, 70 percent of India’s edible oils are soya and palm, ‘dumped on’ the country by U.S. global corporations.” 

“During the past decade, the activities of Cargill, Monsanto, Unilever, ADM and other agribusiness corporations, have led more than 165,000 of India’s small farmers to commit suicide; many of them (the cruelest of ironies), by drinking Monsanto’s glyphosphate pesticide, RoundUp.” 

“Where Cargill’s soybean production is destroying the Amazon rainforest, the purchase of massive and growing quantities of palm oil by U.S., Japanese and European capitalist corporations is doing the same thing to the rainforests of Borneo.” 

“Since 1990, Indonesia has razed 61 million acres of its South Borneo rainforests, planting palm oil trees in their stead; and, it plans to level and palm-tree-plant another 61 million acres by 2030.” 

“Replaced with palm oil tree plantations, Malaysia’s immense North Borneo rainforests have almost disappeared, along with the orangutan and exotic birds which lived in them.”  

“Finally, the U.S., and other capitalist states whose productive orders are approaching the terminal stage, are not only eliminating employment in the Third World, they are doing it at home as well.”

“The off-shoring of U.S. manufacture was Step-One of a process now impacting nearly every occupation.” 

“If you have a problem with your computer (probably made in China) and phone the  manufacturer, you’ll speak with a technician living in India.” 

“Call your hospital to challenge an expense and you may discuss it with someone in Ireland employed by the firm that does the hospital’s billing.” 

“Doctors and dentists have begun to feel the effect of this Natural and Necessary phenomenon.” 

“Google ‘medical tours,’ and you will receive over 500 ‘hits’ promoting plastic surgery, kidney transplant, heart-bypass, knee, hip and shoulder-joint replacement at hospitals located in Mexico, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, even Iran.”

“You’re assured the physicians have received the latest training—very likely in the West—and, that they use the most up-to-date diagnostic and medical equipment, sold to them by Japanese or Western capitalist corporations.” 

“Besides a round-trip flight, surgery and hospitalization, the tour agency will arrange for your recovery in a luxury hotel, fed according to your personal tastes, and visited regularly by a physician; all for a fraction of what you would pay for these services at home.”

“Google “dental tours,” and you’ll get only a few less ‘hits;’ with Costa Rico, Turkey and Croatia included among the countries where you could have transmacular joint surgery or tooth implantation performed.”      

“Then, there’s information technology (IT).”

“According to the conventional wisdom of large corporations which obtain H1 and L1 visas for foreign (principally Indian) IT employees, there’s a dire shortage of Americans trained in that field.”

“Economist Paul Craig Roberts has countered that proposition, citing numerous correspondents who are unable to find IT jobs despite having impressive credentials.”

“One, a resident of Dayton, Ohio, wrote Roberts: ‘I feel like an alien in my own country—as if Dayton had been colonized by India.  NCR and other local employers have either offshored most of their IT work or rely heavily on Indian guest workers.  The IT department of National City Bank across the street from LexisNexis is entirely Indian.  The nearby apartment complexes house large numbers of Indian guest workers filling the engineering needs of many area businesses.’” 

“Today, Roberts adds, ‘the jobs of Indian guest workers may /themselves/ be on the verge of being offshored’.  ‘The relentless drive for cheap labor now threatens the foreign guest workers who displaced America’s own engineers.’” 

“‘Princeton University economist Alan Blinder estimates 30 to 40 million American high end service jobs ultimately face offshoring.’” 

“’In the developed world, Asia Times /recently reported/, particularly in the United States, the scope of jobs disappearing overseas is widening beyond all imagining, to professions that almost nobody expected to be hit, and with far higher incomes than anybody thought possible . . . From engineering to equity research and financial management, to knowledge management, to revenue-cycle management – a whole panorama of high-income employment are inexorably going. . . .  McKinsey & Co, the international consulting firm, projects that the flight of jobs offshore to developing countries will grow by 30-40 percent a year over the next five years.’” 

“Regarding the lower-end service jobs of middle-class Americans, it’s fairly obvious who’s helping capitalism do them in: They are! ”

“From food chains, to Walmart, to Home Depot and Lowe’s, large retail stores have  installed do-it-yourself checkout stands, significantly reducing the number of employees required for given dollar amounts of sales.” 

“Provided helpful instructions by Home Depot and other hardware outlets, millions of  Americans are doing their own plumbing, painting, electrical work and remodeling.”

“Using Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), and internet on-line  banking, in little more than a decade Americans have produced a 50 percent decline in the number of cashiers and tellers banks need.” 

“What kinds of low-tech jobs is capitalism providing to replace those which disappear?  Drug pusher, prostitute, police officer, prison guard, security guard and border guard are among the more important.”

“Over 260 privately operated prisons have sprung into existence, offering investment opportunities and modestly paid ‘careers’ to Americans who are able to justify defining fellow citizens as ‘criminals’ for using or selling, often small amounts, of marijuana or cocaine.” 

“The U.S. now has 2.2 million people in jail: 737 per 100,000, as compared with its closest capitalist-country rivals (England 148 per 100,000, Japan 62, and France 85.)” 

“Fifty-five percent of federal prison inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses, only 11 percent for violent crimes.” 

“Selected American universities have been designated ‘Homeland Security Management  Institutes,’ and offer a wide variety of courses on law enforcement.” 

“The Department of Labor predicts that by 2012 there will be a 22.4 percent increase in detectives and criminal investigators, a 24 percent increase in patrol officers, Correctional officers and ‘first line managers of police and detectives,’ and, a 31.8 percent increase in security guards.” 

“But the most expedient instrument being used to keep the U.S. capitalist economy afloat is the Military-Industrial complex.”

“Professor Joan Roelofs detailed its operation in a CounterPunch essay.” 

“’Spread throughout the country,’ Roelofs wrote: war industries are crucial in providing employment in . . . the rust belt of the Midwest, the shoe belt of New England, the cotton belt of the South.’” 

“’The MI corporations and their employees are major consumers in their communities, purchasing real estate., furniture, clothing, food, medical services, entertainment, tap dancing lessons, etc.’” 

“’/T/he military is deeply involved with disaster relief, which brings many more good people into its orbit: Red Cross volunteers, state and local government officials and staff, Vista Workers, etc. . . . Northrop is very generous to career services’ officers in higher education.  Programs preparing disadvantaged students for college do well.’” 

“’Military contractors are attentive to every kind of minority organization: Asians Against Domestic Abuse, and the Vietnamese American Community (Halliburton); the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, and the National Society of Black Engineers (Northrop Grumman); the Holocaust Museum and the Chinese Community Center (GE).  Boeing has funded the Congressional Black Caucus and the Urban League. Lockheed even contributes to the Sons of Norway. . . . Children are nurtured: Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCAs, YWCAs, Little Leagues, UNICEF, Children’s Defense Fund, etc., receive substantial grants.’” 

“In the ‘go forward or go down’ world of capitalism, preventing its economy from imploding now requires the U.S. to sell ever-increasing quantities of guns, planes and bombs.  That, Roberts observes, makes Hezbollah and Iran ‘terrorists’ ipso facto, for the simple reason ‘they don’t receive billions in U.S. military aid and cannot put armies in the field with tanks.’” 

“Machiavelli tacitly acknowledged the connection between the United States’ military-industrial complex and its foreign policy when he remarked that defending the country’s Third World interests from expropriation after WWII led it to drastically increase the production and sale of weapons.” 

“However, he offered no explanation for the growing challenge to U.S. investments in the underdeveloped world.” 

“From the 1960s to the 90s U.S. corporations with threatened Latin American interests had their own novel theory.” 

“A ‘Revolution of Rising Expectations’ was taking place, they reasoned. Life for Central and South Americans was improving.  But, made aware of First World luxuries by the media, many young people were impatiently, and unjustly, proposing violence to acquire them.”

“The U.S. government promoted this idealist nonsense, ignoring the mountain of material evidence presented by social scientists and investigative journalists that, except for the region’s elites, conditions were rapidly worsening for most Latin Americans.” 

“As in the Middle East today, many of the elites’ sons and daughters were unable to find employment which could socio-economically sustain them; while, particularly in Peru, Northeastern Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Uruguay and El Salvador, poor indian communities were experiencing a suffering they hadn’t known since the 1930s.”

“As in the Middle East today, the socio-economic injury which children of South America’s elites were experiencing prompted the more humane among them to discover/empathize with the far greater distress of the poor.” 

“Embracing that part of my theory which describes exhausted feudal orders of production being replaced by capitalist systems, like the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries before them, they proposed seizing large foreign businesses and using the profit which operating them yielded to industrialize their countries, erecting state-capitalist systems that would provide employment for their middle class and poor, as well as for themselves.” 

“I’m sure you know the rest of the story, so I won’t waste time on elaborate detail.”

“The Latin American rebels were menacing major U.S. corporations, and that was sufficient for the U.S. to identify them as ‘communists’ and go on the attack.” 

“”Make the economy scream!’, Nixon ordered when Chile’s President Salvador Allende seized I.T.T. and the U.S. copper multinationals, offering to pay what the expropriated corporations claimed their properties were worth when paying taxes.”

“With indispensable U.S. assistance, Allende was overthrown on September 11^th, 1973, and General Augusto Pinochet, a fascist dictator who sincerely believed he was purifying his country of evil, seized power.” 

“That corporate victory was followed by ’Operation Condor,’ beginning in 1975.”

“Right-wing generals and admirals took control in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay, joining with Pinochet to identify and assassinate the hot-headed youths leading the struggle for change; simultaneously suppressing worker/peasants movements.”

“At least 30,000 humanistic young men and women lost their lives in Operation Condor. Many were brutally tortured and buried, or, tossed into the sea, some alive, some dead, from helicopters and planes.” 

“As with Allende’s deposal, Operation Condor would have been impossible without   U.S. sponsorship and grandscale military and logistical aid.” 

“During the 1980s Central America was similarly bought, bullied and butchered back in line. An estimated 200,000 poor indians were slaughtered in the process, entire villages wiped out.” 

“Then, came the 2000  dot-com catastrophe.”

 “Machiavelli observed the attendant U.S. stock market losses exceeded $7 trillion.”

“What he neglected to add is that 82 percent of those stocks are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, which meant over $5.7 trillion of the loss was suffered by the rich.” 

“The U.S. economy was in the doldrums, with many large companies hurting badly.” 

“Bechtel Corporation’s earnings peaked at $15.1 billion in 1999, then plummeted to $11.6 billion in 2002.”

“Halliburton was also having trouble.”

 “Under Dick Cheney’s guidance Halliburton merged with Dresser Industries in 1998, becoming the largest oilfield engineering, services and construction corporation in the world.”

“But Dresser had lost numerous suits for asbestos related deaths, resulting in a 43 percent drop in the value of Halliburton’s stock in 2001.” 

“With the collapse of the Soviet Union and ending of the Cold War, U.S. defense budgets had also fallen throughout the 1990s and employment in the defense industry fell with it. More than 2 millions defense industry jobs were lost between 1992 and 2001.”

“Keeping in mind that communities always unify around those ideas which will most effortlessly sustain them: With the United States’ economy depressed and much of its manufacturing base off-shored, with the largest, most profitable remaining industries military-industrial in nature, what would you expect this country to do?” 

“Exactly!”

“Representatives of the U.S. elite whose social existences were in jeopardy spontaneously discovered/created an enemy it would require spending from hundreds of billions, to incalculable trillions of dollars on military hardware and military conquest to defeat: ‘Islamic terrorists;’ meaning any Muslim who stands up against the United States’ increasingly injurious practices in their countries.” 

“Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy and a neocon defender, has stated the essence of their brilliantly profitable and pragmatic logic:”

“We’re in ‘a war for the Free World. . . . /a/ conflict in which nothing less is at stake than our ability—and that of our children and grandchildren—to live in freedom and prosperity. . . . We are at war primarily with adherents to a dangerous, totalitarian ideology—Islamofascism.’”

“Since Saddam was a Muslim, since he sided with the Palestinian struggle against Israel, and resisted U.S./British attempts to gain control of his country’s economy and its oil, it made sense to begin the war against Islamofascism by invading Iraq.” 

“In preparation, a month before the attack Cheney convened an ‘Energy Task Force’ whose members included executives and lobbyists from Enron, Exxon-Mobil, Conoco-Phillips, Shell and BP America.’”

“Richard Behan relates Cheney’s Task Force ‘poured over detailed maps of the Iraqi oil fields, pipelines, tanker terminals, refineries and undeveloped oil exploration blocks /and/ studied two pages of “foreign suitors for Iraqi oil field contracts”; companies negotiating with Saddam Hussein’s regime, none of which was a major American or British’ firm.’”

“For many major U.S. corporations, the remarkable financial benefits coming from the ‘anti-terrorist’ invasion of Iraq were immediate.” 

“Bechtel enjoyed ‘a revenue of $16.3 billion in 2003, reversing a three-year slide.’” 

“In March 2004 the San Francisco Chronicle reported:”

“’. . . the invasion provided a multibillion-dollar boost to the United States’ largest construction and engineering firms. Although Bechtel Corp. and Halliburton have received the most public scrutiny, the billions of tax dollars pouring into Iraq’s reconstruction also flow through such competitors as Parsons Corp., Fluor Corp. and Washington Group International.  For sheer size of contracts, none of the reconstruction firms can rival Halliburton . . . . The company, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, holds contracts potentially worth between $12.6 billion and $16.8 billion.  Bechtel won $2.83 billion in contracts for repairing electrical plants, water systems, airports and railways.’”

“For U.S. weapons manufacturers, the war on terror has been downright glorious. ’Since September 12, 2001’, writes Robert Dreyfuss, ‘defense spending has exploded.  For 2008, the Bush Administration /has/ request/ed/ a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001 . . . U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.’”

“In an article of October 31^st, 2007, Robert Scheer noted Lockheed Martin had already ‘reaped a 22 percent increase in profit,’ for the year, ‘while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 22 percent, respectively, and Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent.’” 

“Following their anti-Muslim-terrorist logic, the Bush neocons have spread the largess derived from conquering and killing them widely.”

“Between 9/11, 2001 and June 2007, Bush requested, and Congress granted, $44 billion for biological warfare research. BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly Corp, Monsanto and Pfizer are among the many companies reputed to be involved.”

“U.S. mercenaries are benefitting handsomely. The State Department’s ‘private security’ corporations DynCorp International, Triple Canopy and Blackwater USA, have been awarded contracts valued at over $4 billion, Blackwater alone receiving $1 billion since 2001.  Dyncorp was awarded a contract for $1.2 billion to train Iraqi police, and another $600 million to assist with ‘drug eradication’ in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.”

“Even two public relations firms, The Rendon Group, and The Lincoln Group, have been cut in on the take.”

“By 2005 Rendon and Lincoln had been paid more than $400 million for helping sell the Iraq War to Americans and Iraqis, and for polishing the image of the U.S.-installed governments of Iraq and Afghanistan.” 

“From the outset of the war, with its economy starved for profit the U.S. has made a ‘grab-and-gobble’ effort to extract it from Iraq.” 

“The Organic Consumers Association describes how in 1991, and again in 2003, ‘U.S. bombing raids targeted cattle feed lots, poultry farms, fertilizer warehouses, pumping stations, irrigation systems, fuel depots and pesticide factories, the very infrastructure of Iraqi agriculture.’”

“Then, ‘one month after shock and awe,’ Daniel Amstutz, a ‘former Cargil Corporation executive,’ was assigned ‘to oversee’ Iraqi agriculture’s ‘rehabilitation’. “

 “Before leaving Iraq in June, 2004, L. Paul Bremer, Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, issued a body of ‘orders’ mandating the kind of make-money-by-driving-Third-World-peoples-to-the-wall policies which are causing such deep hatred of the United States throughout most of the Middle East.”

“Antonia Juhasz reviewed Bremer’s more truculent dictates in Foreign Policy in Focus:” 

“’Order #17: grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from Iraq’s laws.  Even if they kill someone or cause environmental damage, such as by dumping toxic chemicals or poisoning drinking water, the injured party can not turn to the Iraqi legal system; the charges must be brought to U.S. courts under U.S. laws.’” 

“’Order #39: Privatization of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises; allows 100-percent foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses; unrestricted tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds; 40-year ownership licenses; /it permits/ U.S. corporations operating in Iraq to own every business, do all the work, and send all their money home.  Nothing needs to be reinvested locally . . . no Iraqi need be hired, no public services need to be guaranteed, and workers’ rights can easily be ignored.’” 

“’Order #40: turns the banking sector from a state-run to a market-driven system, allowing foreign banks to . . . purchase up to 50 percent of Iraqi banks.’” 

“’Order #49: drops the tax rate on corporations from 40 percent to a flat rate of 15 percent.  The income tax rate is also capped at 15 percent.’” 

“IF your understanding of matters economic, social and political is determined by material evidence, by now I will have convinced you that:” 

“Except for a diminishing number of First and Third World elites, 21^st century capitalism is making it difficult-to-impossible for peoples in both hemispheres to reproduce their social existence; and, the principal instrument the United States  currently uses to hold its capitalist structure together is military-industrial expenditure, justified by the neocons’ insane anti-terrorist vision.”

“But that’s not the worst of terminal capitalism’s tragic impress.” 

“Straddling the earth like a biomechanical beast, it inflicts environmental destruction and lethal pollution around the globe; and those injuries are done to everyone, from wealthy Saudi, U.S. and Chinese elites, to the most destitute communities of Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa.”

“Google ‘pollution of _________,’ typing in the name of any country, state, province, large city, ocean, river or lake, and you will get page after page of ‘hits’ describing the poisoning of our species’ food, air and water, the destruction of the global environment, the crippling-to-fatal diseases which the poisoning and environmental destruction are producing; and, the failure of anyone, anywhere, to do anything meaningful about it.”

“To quote from just a few such ‘hits’.”

“The Mediterranean Sea: ‘Italy’s environmental minister said that in thirty years care of the Mediterranean Sea it has not improved, /it/ has worsened. . . . Much of the fish we eat comes from the Mediterranean, so if we pollute it, we are polluting ourselves. . . . Mercury levels in fish are 20 times the maximum levels recommended by the UN World Health Organization, while human intake of polycylic hydrocarbons—derived chiefly from petroleum and coal tar—are 100 times permissible levels.’”

“The Caspian Sea: ‘The oil industry is one of the main sources of Caspian Sea pollution. /T/wo countries, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, extract oil from offshore fields, /and/ Russia plans to start in the next one or two years.  There is also contamination of soil and and groundwater with agricultural chemicals, pesticides, salination, and water-logging of soil due to poor irrigation methods.’” 

“Lake Baikal: ‘Fed by 300 rivers, Lake Baikal is the world’s deepest (more than a mile), and oldest (30 million years), lake and its largest body of fresh water.  Baikal is now badly polluted, principally by pulp and paper mills and oil spills.’” 

“The Aral Sea: ‘The Aral Sea of Central Asia is laden with sewage, pesticides and fertilizers.  When the Soviet Union diverted the Ama Dariya and the Syrdariya rivers which fed the Aral to grow cotton in the desert, they created an ecogical and human disaster. What was the world’s fourth biggest inland sea is now mostly desert.  The human misery is huge.  Tuberculosis is rife and on the increase in the population.’ ‘Cancers, lung disease and infant mortality are 30 times greater than they used to be because the drinking water is heavily polluted with salt, cotton fertilizers and pesticides.’” 

“Onondaga Lake: ‘New York’s Onondaga Lake, which feeds Lake Ontario, is now among the world’s most polluted, laced with hazardous chemicals by the Olin Corporation, one of the companies which dumped tons of toxic chemicals into Love Canal, destroying the town.  Olin also shipped 40-tons of mercury to Nicaragua and poured it into Lake Managua.’” 

“The Great Lakes: ‘Industry and farmers on land surrounding the Great Lakes have used the lakes to dispose of waste chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) produced in the manufacture of electrical equipment, and organochlorine insecticides such as dieldrin and DDT.  A report for the Canadian government has called living by the Great Lakes a “hazard to human health”.  Scientists have found increasing evidence that pollutants in the water are causing insidious neurological damage, particularly in children, and infertility among adults.’”

“The Hudson River: ‘People living in towns and cities along New York’s Hudson River are cautioned not to eat its PCB-laden fish, including shad and sea bass, or, to drink or bathe in its waters.’” 

“The Nile River: ‘Nile River pollution includes municipal waste water, industrial “black spots,” and household rubbish that find their way directly to the 120 kilometer area where the Nile ends its journey and meets the Mediterranean. Damietta, Egypt’s population of over 914,614 depends on this heavily polluted stretch of river as its only source of water.  More than half of the patients treated at Damietta Hospital’s Internal Medicine Unit suffer liver and kidney diseases and infections because of the polluted water they drink.’”

“The Amazon Rainforest: ‘Environmentalists estimate that around 2.5 million acres of The Amazon  Rainforest were compromised or destroyed in Texaco’s search for oil in Ecuador.  It is a disaster that has left the jungle ravaged and its people dying of cancer.’” 

“’Members of an indigenous tribe from the Peruvian Amazon are suing the oil giant Occidental Petroleum in California’s Superior Court  . . . Andres Sandi Mucushua, a tribal representative, said: “My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests.”’

“The Amazon River: ‘In the last 20-30 years, carnivorous predators have undergone large declines and native fishermen have an increasing number of health risks facing them.’ ’The Amazon River Dolphin was listed as a vulnerable species in 1994. The Giant Otter has been listed as an endangered species since 1973. Along main tributaries epidemiological and toxicological data have shown high mercury levels in fish-eating riverside populations.’”     

“The Yangtze River: ‘The Yangtze River has become the biggest sewer system in China.  According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the Three Gorges reservoir area alone “there are over 3,000 industrial and mining enterprises, which release more than one billion tons of wastewater annually, containing more than 50 different pollutants.  Included in the wastewater are such poisonous elements as mercury, cadmium, chronium, arsenic, phenol, lead, and cyanide.’”

“The Gulf of Mexico: ‘Three times as much nitrogen is being carried into the Gulf today compared with levels 30 years ago or at any time in history. The Mississippi River enters the Gulf as a ‘toxic soup.’ Every summer there is an area south of the Louisiana coastline larger than Massachusetts that is hypoxic.  These waters do not carry enough oxygen to sustain marine life.’”

 “The Indian Ocean: ‘During a six-week expedition during February and March 1999, a team of scientists from the U.S.A., Europe, India, and the Maldive Islands, participating in the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), found a mass of pollution as large as the area of the United States – four million square miles or 100 million square kilometers. The polluted areas include the Arabian Sea, between India and the Arabian peninsula, and the Bay of Bengal, between India and Southeast Asia. Countries located within the Indian Ocean include Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and the Maldives, located southwest of India. The whole Indian subcontinent is surrounded by massive pollution.’”

“As for the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it should suffice to remind you of what you’ve been reading and hearing about for several decades: the dying of coral reefs vital to ocean food chains; pollution from nuclear testing; pesticide and fertilizer runoff from large farms; medicines—ranging from aspirin, to contraceptive pills, to antibiotics—excreted and leached into the seas; the Pacific swordfish you’re warned to avoid, the salmon and tuna you’re cautioned to eat no more than once a week, and not at all if you’re pregnant.”

“Then, there’s ‘acid rain’. The use of coal as a primary fuel is a major source of the pollution of earth’s air and water with sulfur dioxide and mercury. ‘China’s dust and soot cloud’ travels all the way to the United States.  In California, Professor Tom Cahill tracks pollution across the Pacific, and a lot of what he sees these days comes from China.’ ’It’s estimated China may one day generate five times more pollution than it does today.’”

“Poured into the air by coal burning power plants, the coal dust returns to earth as acid rain and acid snow. Sulfuric acid, nitric acid and carbonic acid from cars, trucks, and factory farm operations are acid rain’s other main components.”

“As a result, hundreds of thousands of acres of trees in the Northeastern U.S. are either threatened or dying; as are forests throughout Scandinavia and Western Europe.”

“Vast tracts of the Czech Republic’s Jizera Mountains’ forests have perished, and acid rain has destroyed so much of Germany’s famous Black Forest that it’s often referred to as ‘dead.’”

“Driven by rapid industrial development, acid rain is an impending disaster in China, India, Russia and the Republic of Korea. Between1990 and 2010 Asia’s sulfur dioxide emissions are expected to triple.” 

“And it’s not just trees that are being injured by acid rain. Entering lakes, stream and rivers, the acid  kills insects, fish and shore birds. Virgina’s native trout streams are succumbing, as are many of the lakes, streams and rivers of Wales.

“The world’s oceans are becoming increasingly acidic.  Their acid content increased by 30 percent in the last few decades, affecting everything that lives in, or is dependent upon them, including humans.” 

“Yet the U.S. Big-Coal industry (which is at once Big-Oil, Big Natural Gas, and Big-Nuclear, since they are now largely merged) is pushing for more.” 

“’Antrim Caskey laments: ‘Just as the American people and the world are beginning to recognize the necessity of shifting to renewable energies, Big Coal is pushing its dirty fossil fuel as the solution to /the United States’ energy/ crisis. Big coal and its cohorts envision a “clean coal technology” future by liquifying and gasifying coal, capturing the carbon emissions and injecting them underground. But scientists and environmentalists say “clean coal” does not exist.  The National Resources Defense Council says that using the term “clean coal” makes about as much sense as saying “safe cigarettes.’” 

“’The extraction and cleaning of coal inevitably decimates ecosystems and communities.’ Robert Kennedy Jr. writes: ‘Coal is only cheap if one ignores its calamitous externalized costs, dead forests and sterilized lakes from acid rain, poisoned fisheries in 49 states and children with damaged brains and crippled health from mercury emissions, millions of asthma attacks and lost work days. If the American people could see what I have seen from the air and ground during trips to the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia: leveled mountains and ruined lives, there would be a revolution in this country.’”

“Big Coal’s representatives have been licking their lips at the prospect of tearing the tops off more U.S. mountains to sell vast quantities of coal to China, whose own coal mining operations result in the deaths of 6,000 miners every year.”

“ENOUGH!

“What can be done about the global catastrophe I’ve described: the environmental desolation, the elimination of social existence sustaining, earth-protecting, employment?” 

“While I’m open to argument, my own answer to that question is Nothing!   Nothing—until and unless the capitalist order of production and distribution is dismantled and replaced.” 

“Alarmed, governments around the world have been passing laws aimed at cleaning up streams, lakes and seas and regulating acid producing emissions, but the problem  only continues to worsen.”

“According to a recent estimate published in Time Magazine, reducing sulfur dioxide emissions by 50 percent in the Northeast U.S. alone would cost $7 billion yearly.  If so, doing it globally would cost trillions.  And that would do nothing about all the other environmental devastation.” 

“Just cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ‘isn’t an option,’ says Chris Parry of the California Coastal Commission, and his colleagues agree. The ‘Garbage Patch’ may be the ultimate iconic representation of what our species is doing to the environment. ‘An enormous island  of trash, twice the size of Texas, floating in the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii,’ the patch is ’80 percent plastic, weighs more than 3.5 million tons,’ and is ‘growing at a brisk rate.‘” 

“Given its size, content and distance from land, removing the patch would be a mega-billion-dollar operation, requiring the design and construction of special equipment; and a second, smaller garbage patch is floating between Hawaii and Japan.”

“As for the world’s mounting unemployment, European capitalist states have begun  following the United States’ and Israel’s lead, labelling individuals whose actions disrupt their injurious practices at home ‘criminals,’ then putting them in jail; those who do it abroad, ‘terrorists,’ and employing military violence to suppress them.”  

“An honest examination of capitalism’s contamination of the planet’s air, streams, lakes, rivers and seas with myriad pollutants from myriad sources, the oil, mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, nitrogen, cyanide, toluene, styrene, phosphate, sulfur dioxide, antibiotics and PCBs, its mad use of nuclear energy and equally mad proposals to ‘safely’ store nuclear waste, along with its elimination of jobs in both the First and Third worlds, can only lead to one conclusion:”  

“The capitalist productive-distributive order isn’t up to the task of stopping the global cataclysm it’s creating, let alone building a better world.” 

“Capitalist states are no more capable of solving the disastrous problems they’re causing than nomadic slave communities could have built houses and chateaux for feudal Europe, or European feudal communities could have satisfied the need for factories, and the clothing, weaponry, railways, steam engines and trains those factories produced.”

“Which brings us to the third of our fundamental questions:” 

“If capitalism has turned into a monster devoid of self-control, has it, like its predecessors, also spawned a more effectual successor which many capitalists are having to nurture in order to reproduce their own social existence?” 

“Once that question has been posed, the answer screams for recognition.”

“Remaining competitive is obviously forcing capitalists to construct an integrated global community in which everyone is a potential buyer and seller of goods and labor, and cost is the only thing determining who buys or sells what to whom.”

“When capitalists took that Natural and Necessary step they opened a can of worms.”

 “Or, more descriptively, they entered a den of snakes.”

“The integrated global community capitalists are defensively building can only be made to function with increasingly sophisticated high-technological devices: Global Positioning Systems (GPS), robotic machinery, computers, the internet, broadband, bluetooth, etc..”

“As the computer and the internet are already demonstrating, though an indispensible tool  for capitalism, high-technology is also a revolutionary threat, because living and working in the high-technology world aborning will require that people take full and free control of their lives, and, it will require that they share.”

“The high-techies who write capitalism’s most complex software programs use an ‘open source software’ called Linux. ‘Open source software projects, writes Steven Johnson, tilt heavily in the direction of freedom: No one owns the underlying code behind Linux, thousands have contributed to it’, and ‘the software grows more sophisticated over time.’”

“The very ‘ethos’ of this high-tech community, Johnson continues, ‘has a strong communitarian tradition that encourages contributions which are rewarded only by the respect of one’s peers.’  ‘/M/odern software applications are modular enough to be built by committee, with thousands of dispersed participants chipping in their ideas; and, because the code base is openly shared with anyone interested in looking at it—unlike Microsoft’s hidden Windows source code—interesting new ideas “spread freely from one to another over the globe”’.”  

“The high-technology world of freedom, participation and sharing Johnson depicts doesn’t just touch some people’s lives. Everyone’s becoming immersed in it, and the reproduction of everyone’s social existence increasingly depends upon its continued evolution.” 

“As a result, the open source egalitarian virus is spreading like a virulent flu.” 

“In 1999, Shawn Fanning helped lay the foundation of the post-capitalist order when he founded Napster.  Fanning’s objective was to enable anyone with a computer and a little high-tech savvy to download and distribute music freely.  Though the original Napster was quickly sued into oblivion, other ‘peer-to-peer’ (P2P) programs just as quickly replaced it: iMesh, Morpheus, Limewire, BearShare and Kazaa.”

“Morpheus’ website contains a disclaimer: ‘Using Morpheus for the uploading or downloading of copyrighted works without the permission or authorization of the copyright holders may be illegal and could subject you (or the ISP subscriber) to civil and/or criminal liability and penalties.’” 

“The disclaimer is a tacit recognition many users are going to do precisely what it cautions against; namely, freely download and exchange music, movies and other copyrighted files.”

“Besides circumventing the film and music conglomerates which previously exercised unchallenged and highly profitable control over their industries, P2P groups are also undertaking a significant reduction in the corporate advertising to which subscribers are forcibly subjected.” 

“Then, there’s ‘Wikipedia,’ a ‘people’s encyclopedia’ freely written and modified by any person who has access to the internet and interest in a given subject.”  

“Wikipedia’s relativistic truths are determined not by ’voices of authority’ or individuals with vested interests. What determines whether a given Wikipedian truth will stand, and for how long, is the amount of material evidence and syllogistic reasoning its defenders can  provide the world in its support.” 

“The website YouTube allows anyone, anywhere, to freely share their camcorder clips with the global community, permitting each individual viewer, not a corporation, to determine what is sad, humorous, or politically important..” 

“Founded in 2003, MySpace enables users to connect with people in other cities, states, countries, who have similar interests, and to freely exchange pictures, music, etc. MySpace now has over 300 million users. FaceBook, also free, performs the same essential functions, has approximately 60 million users, and is rapidly growing.” 

“With hundreds of thousands of Left, Right and Liberal websites/blogs available, internet users can circumvent the national/international news presented by major media, getting news representing the experiences and interests of the people making the news directly, rather than news interpreted by corporate executives, or political representatives of the elite, individuals who have their own sharp axes to grind.” 

“As a result, the viewership of corporate-controlled evening news programs has, as one observer phrased it, ‘fallen like a rock.’” 

“CBS Evening News had 19 million viewers in 1980, 7 million in 2006.  During the same period NBC’s Evening News viewership dropped from 17.2 million to 8 million; ABC’s from 15.9 million to 8.25.” 

“To make up for a consequent loss in advertising revenue, the media increased the number of ads viewers must endure, driving more people from the TV to the computer.  Aware those still watching TV tend to be older, the media run more ads for drugs to ease/remedy every conceivable illness—real or imagined—suffered by the aged, turning additional younger, healthier viewers away.”  

“Through Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and other internet search engines, computer users are moving in the direction of becoming their own doctors, psychologists, washing machine repairmen, lawyers, etc..  Free or low-cost professional and non-professional advice and assistance is readily available on nearly every subject. Internet users can also purchase every kind of goods on line, including prescription drugs.” 

“Robert Scheer has noted rabbis, ministers and priests are finding their lives being transformed by the high-technology crusade. ‘The open source programming movement which harnesses the wisdom of crowds to collectively make a better product has grown beyond its software roots to embrace religion,’ Scheer writes.  ‘The holy texts of “yoism” shun the wisdom of high priests and rely instead on teachings that evolve online organically.’  I.e., people are creating their own philosophical perspectives.”  

“In 2006, musician Bob Ostertag posted all of his recordings on the Web where they could be downloaded free.  Ostertag’s explanation for doing it is worth citing at some length:” 

“’When record companies first appeared, . . . making and selling records was a major undertaking. . . . Making recorded music available to the general public required a significant outlay of capital, which in turn required a legal structure that would provide a return on the required investment.  The contrast with the World Wide Web today could not be more striking. . . . Putting 28 years of recordings up on my Website for free download was a simple procedure involving a few hours of effort, yet resulting in instant, free, world-wide distribution.  It makes no difference if 10 people download a song or 10,000, or if they live on my block or in Kuala Lumpur: it all happens at no cost to either them or me other than access to a computer and an Internet connection.  Recording companies used to provide you with the tools you needed to hear recorded music.  Now they charge you for permission to use tools you already have, that they did not provide . . . /W/hat they are doing is imposing a “listening tax.’”

“To the argument that musicians who do this lose financially, Ostertag replies: ‘Most records, in fact, produce good money for corporations and little or none for the musicians. This is because the recording studios and engineers, art departments, advertising departments, A&R departments, legal departments, limo services, tour agencies, caterers, and distribution networks swallow up the sales revenue. . . . Records that sell tens-of-thousands don’t “break even” not because no money comes in, but because all the money goes to keeping the corporation in the black.  At the top of the chain sit a tiny handful of media giants: Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, Viacom and General Electric. . . . There is now a very simple alternative, which is to simply post your music on the web.  No, you won’t make any money from it, but the odds are overwhelming you would never make any money from it anyway if you charged for it.’” 

“As with music, so too, with writing. Using websites like ’Database of Online Authors,’  anyone can freely read or post ‘fiction, fantasy and horror’ stories.”  

“The list of things inviting Americans to enter a post-capitalist egalitarian world is long and growing:”

“There’s Skype, which allows users to make free phone calls via the internet.”

 “GPS devices that make it possible for property owners to do their own surveying.”

“‘Adopt-a-Highway’ programs encouraging people to assume personal responsibility for keeping roadways clean.” 

“Neighborhood Crime Watch programs.”

 “American Idol, and other call-in TV voting schemes.” 

“TV news programs which urge viewers to submit camcorder tapes of auto accidents, plane crashes, robberies and tornadoes.”

 “Even the financing of national politicians is going high-tech-egalitarian.  In the fourth quarter of 2007 maverick Republican Ron Paul set a record for internet contributions, receiving $20 million in small donations.”

 “As I noted when discussing the self-scanning check-out counters in large retail stores, it is capitalist industries which must promote such system-destroying activities in order to remain competitive.”

“They manufacture the machines Oster uses to record his music and distribute it on the web.  They make the equipment used to illegally reproduce CDs and DVDs; they encourage public participation in TV programming, etc..”

“There is another community of individuals in capitalist countries whose self-sustaining activites have been chipping away at the integrity of the capitalist order: the several million members of 100-plus environmental and peace organizations.” 

“Like the Asian and Mid Eastern ‘terrorist’ leaders, most heads of large environmental and peace groups, as well as those who oversee the huge charitable foundations that fund them, are children of their nations’ elites.” 

“Like the ‘terrorists,’ they are struggling to make changes which their countries’ productive-distributive systems cannot accommodate.” 

“Unlike the ‘terrorists.’ they’re urging progressive, species-protective, changes, whereas, the social existence of the ‘terrorists’ is most effortlessly sustained by building rigidly defined feudal productive structures.”  

“‘Theoretically,’ of course, the U.S. could stop creating ‘terrorists’ by destroying the lives and health of Third World peoples, working with them to build a liveable world instead.”  

“‘Theoretically,’ it could create and install vast pollution-removing and pollution-controlling systems to restore its streams, lakes and rivers to health.” 

“‘Theoretically,’ the U.S. could solve its energy and traffic-congestion problems by financing construction and installation of solar panels on private homes, by removing hydrogen from sea water to use as fuel, and by building grids of high-speed, magnetically levitated trains.”

 “’Theoretically,’ it could obtain ample wood, and protect against the fires which ravage its national forests every year, if it pruned the forests, using helicopters to remove the trees, rather than environmentally destructive roads; pressure treating lumber with polyurathane so that it would last for hundreds of years.” 

“Unfortunately, doing such things would leave no money for profit. They are egalitarian post-capitalist designs.  And it is rank dishonesty even to suggest them without discussing their system-breaking implications.”

“Until its capitalist productive-distributive order is dismantled and replaced, I submit the future of the U.S. is clear:” 

“To keep its economy functioning will require ripping the tops off more mountains for coal; drilling for oil in environmentally destructive places; building additional life-threatening nuclear power plants; clear-cutting additional millions of acres of national forests; worsening the pollution of oceans, lakes, rivers and streams, and poisoning more of its people.”  

“It will also necessitate spending additional trillions of dollars (mostly borrowed from China and the Middle East) on weaponry; which, in turn, will make the existence of a large and continually growing enemy imperative.”

“Which brings me to the last of our fundamental questions: ‘Have some capitalists therefore begun self-protectively moving in the direction of an oppressive good-versus-evil, defense of their troubled order?’” 

“Let me answer with a few quotations which describe where you Americans are at rather precisely:”

“’The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive of May, 2007,’ ‘would place all governmental power in the hands of the president and effectively abolish the checks and balances in the Constitution,’ writes Marjorie Cohn.” 

“’Anyone can now be imprisoned indefinitely without charges and denied any judicial review,’ adds Jim Hightower.”

“The government can ‘monitor your phone calls, read your email and open your snail mail,’ observes Matthew Rothschild.  ‘Law enforcement officers can bust into your home when you’re not there, riffle through your belongings, plant a recording device on your computer, and leave without notifying you for thirty days—maybe a lot more. . . . Even if you are a citizen, the government can label you an enemy combatant.’”

“In October 2007, HR 1955, The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevent Act, was passed by Congress virtually unopposed (404 to 6).”

“HR 1955’s aim is to suppress what it defines as ‘self-radicalized, unaffiliated domestic terrorists.’”

“We know who they are,  writes Paul Craig Roberts:”

“’We’re beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers being built in the U.S. by Halliburton under government contract. . . . The answer is civil libertarians, critics of Israel, 9/11 skeptics, critics of the administration’s wars and foreign policies, critics of the administration’s use of kidnapping, rendition, torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions, and critics of the administration’s spying on Americans.” 

“Alas, explain neocons David Frum and Richard Perle: ‘There /really/ is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust . . . the terrorist threat is menacing our well-being as a people, even our survival as a nation. . . . If ever there were a war of self-defense, the war on terror is that war.’”

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                          

                  MACHIAVELLI AND MARX DEBATE IRAQ

                  The Initial Confrontation

                    Chronicled by Theosophus

 

 “Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them and refuse to ex-amine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after the process of grotesque self-deception.”                                                                                                                                                               Mark Twain                                                                                                                                                                                  

“In politics, nothing happens by accident.  If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”                                                                                                                         Franklin Delano Roosevelt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the reader may have surmised, the widely discussed Niccolo Machiavelli/Karl Marx debate recorded here was arranged for a variety of reasons.  Although Marx formulated his unique thesis one-and-a-half centur-ies ago, and nearly five centuries have passed since Machiavelli penned Discourses and The Prince, the two men continue to represent the extremes of the political spectrum. 

Opponents of the Bush Administration have repeatedly depicted its neoconservative operatives as (usually bumbling), Machiavellians.  In 2002, a year before our “shock and awe” offensive against Iraq, John Dilulio, former Director of the government’s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, called the Bush logicians “Mayberry Machiavellis.”  In a Los Angeles Times article of October 2004, Neal Gabler observed: “Roveism begins . . . with Machiavelli’s rule of force”; and Firmin DeBrabander titled his June 2007 CounterPunch essay “Inept Machiavellians: How the Neocons Misread Machiavelli.”  Liberal bloggers often use the same appellation when describing neocons.  Paul Labarique labelled former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “a pupil of Machiavelli.”  Bob Burnett referred to “the Machiavellian policies orchestrated by Karl Rove.”  And Jay Allen reflected: “I could write for days, weeks and years about our Machiavellian foreign policy and how it has created every ill that now afflicts us.”

Conversely, from Sean Hannity, to Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, the neocon’s defenders have accused liberal critics of the Iraq War, the illegal wiretapping of Americans, and the Department of Homeland Security, of embracing Marx’s relativistic philosophy regarding good and evil, reality and truth.  “It’s difficult for liberals to see moral questions clearly,” Hannity urges, since “most of them are moral relativists” who “reject absolute standards of right and wrong.”  

Coulter agrees, arguing liberals consider truth “an irrelevant category,” just “another hateful bourgeois institution.”  “There is no such thing as ‘the truth’” for leftists Coulter writes.  “There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn’t.” “The left’s treasonous scheme” she concludes, is “to destroy America from the inside with their relentless attacks on morality and truth.”  

O’Reilly goes even further, contending the left’s moral relativism has already “wreaked havoc” in Europe, and “continues to act as a mirror and an echo chamber for the dark mood that has fallen over the West.”  “Our morality,” Limbaugh says in distinguishing conservatives, “emanates from our Divine Creator, whose laws are not subject to amendment, modification, or recission by man.”

Finally, anyone who has studied the writings of Machiavelli and Marx is aware their ideas have been consistently misrepresented.  Under the circumstances, asking these famous/infamous theorists to debate the war seemed a common sense thing to do.

Reaching accord on the debate’s format proved surprisingly easy. The two theorists readily agreed to an initial meeting of four hours.   They further agreed that if either of them wanted a second debate it would occur within two weeks.  Each debater was given 30 minutes for an opening statement and allowed two 15-minute rebutals during the second hour.   Both were asked to nominate a sympathetic witness to make critical comments and pose critical questions during the third hour.  The two nominees then elected a centrist to join them in that effort.  The fourth and final hour was reserved for audience comments and questions. Machiavelli chose a Fox News political commentator to be his congenial critic, while Marx selected the host of Democracy Now.  The centrist they picked was a CNN political observer.

When Marx lost the coin toss, Machiavelli strode to the podium and, a Cheneyesque smirk-smile on his face and half a millennium of confidence and conviction in his voice, began to address the hushed audience:

Machiavelli: “Let me thank all of you for being here. In particular, I want to thank the American Philosophical Society for arranging the debate.  I’ve been waiting a long while for such an occasion and suffered a lot of undeserved animosity and vilification as I waited.”

“I intend to accomplish two things this evening: prove to you that your neocon leaders are faithful to my philosophy; and, more importantly, convince you that under their direction the U.S. will win, not only in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East.”

“If you’re honest, as I speak you’ll begin to realize I’m not merely describing individuals whom many of you regard as adversaries.  I’m also holding up a mirror and asking you to look at your own face.”

“By the time I’ve finished, again, if you’re honest,” (Machiavelli’s gaze swept the Fox News contingent seated in the second row), “you’ll understand we have a lot more in common than you’ve heretofore acknowledged, even to yourselves.”

“Now to the subject at hand.”

“My opponent has described himself as a ‘materialist;’ a ‘realist’ whose only concern is with what he calls the ‘natural necessity’ of historical conditions and events.”

“I will demonstrate Dr. Marx is nothing of the sort.  To the contrary, he’s an idealist who’s dangerously preoccupied with the unachievable world of his longing.  Marx once confessed his impractical idealism in an aphorism still popular with Leftists: ‘Philosophers have only described the world in various ways,’ he wrote, ‘ the point is to change it.’”

“In a review of James Burnham’s book, The Machiavellians, Paul Mattick described my own, genuinely objectivist, position succinctly. ‘A true Machiavellian,’ he wrote, ‘separates scientific questions concerning the truth about society from moral disputes over what type of society is most desirable.’”

“Let me begin, then, by describing the real material world for you; by which I mean the world of our experience, your experience as well as my own.”

“In the real world of our shared experience, people come together to think and act as citizens of nation-states.”

“Having done so, in the real world they create and revere iconic symbols of their nations: flags, anthems, military uniforms, sports contests, even flowers, birds and beasts.  If you can think of an exception to this universal practice, I invite you to point it out right now.”

(Silence).

“Why do people behave this way?   Again, our experience provides the answer. Only by joining together in national communities, which they give allegiance and fight to protect, are they able to acquire physical, emotional and psychological security, find employment, build homes, feed and clothe their children, and raise them to share the values they hold dear.”

“From this it follows that the foremost objective of a nation’s leader, whether president, prime minister or prince, must be the preservation of the state upon which the lives and the well-being of his people depend.”

“Unfortunately, in the real world there are times when preserving a nation-state requires its leader to order the conquering of other territories, other nations, other peoples.”

“In other words, in the real world, WAR, with its attendent brutality and oppression, is sometimes imperative if a leader would succeed in defending his state.”

“Put bluntly, at times war becomes a necessity, and, to quote from my brief essay The Prince: ‘War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.’”

“History is drunk with examples:”

“Having insufficient fertile land for its growing population to own as nobles and work as peasants, 15th century Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella preserved their state by ordering the violent conquest of New World regions: Hispaniola, Jamaica, Dominica, the Bahamas, Trinidad, Panama, the Virgin Islands, Honduras, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Peru.”

“Nineteenth century England’s leaders used a combination of economic incentive and bloody conquest to obtain the raw materials and markets needed to hold their industrializing state together.   By 1917 one-quarter of the world’s people were under British dominion.”

“Only fifty years after its revolutionary birth, a rapid growth in population made the acquisition of more land critical for the United States, particularly for the sons of small farmers.  To preserve their young nation-state, presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren thereupon authorized the expropriation of Native Americans.”

“In 1830 Congress passed ‘The Indian Removal Act.’ Although the act got tied up in court, under president Jackson’s wise direction the forcible seizure of Indian land was accelerated anyway.”

“By 1838, 16,000-20,000 Cherokees were the only large Indian community remaining in the East.   Basing his decision on a fraudulent 1835 treaty, President van Buren ordered their removal to Oklahoma.”

“Leading a militia of 7,000 men, General Winfield Scott oversaw the Cherokees’ 1,200 mile forced march to their new home. Shoeless and starving, many of them old and ill, four thousand Cherokees, roughly one-quarter of their number, died along the way.  Although a kind man, Jackson understood the necessity for this cruel undertaking. ‘Humanity weeps over the fate of the Indians,’ he consoled, ‘but true philanthropy reconciles the mind to the extinction of one generation for another.’“

“Ninety years later, as the international economy entered The Great Depression, being the wealthiest and most productive industrial nation, the U.S. found it could survive by outcompeting its rivals.  Japan was soon being driven from China and other Asian markets, while Germany suffered the same fate in Eastern Europe.  In the early 1930’s Germany’s economy, which had never recovered from WWI, collapsed.”

“Ordering the stimulation of their nations’ economies with large-scale military spending, the leaders of Germany and Japan predictably chose to employ force so that their states might endure.  Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931.  In 1939 Germany invaded Poland.  Early the following year Germany conquered Norway and France, and in mid-1941 it declared war on the Soviet Union.”

“By the latter date the war in Europe was dealing a fatal blow to Japan’s economy. In July 1941 a Japanese Cabinet Planning Board reported the war was: ‘preventing the importation of machinery from Germany and Italy, or from Switzerland through Germany or Italy, which is vitally necessary for the production of strategic materials.’ Like Germany before it, Japan was going down for the count.”

“Forced to choose between accepting a destruction of the state or fighting, Japan’s leaders undertook an accelerated preparation for war against the U.S.; the competitor whose defensive economic policies were having such a disastrous effect.  On December 7th, 1941 General Hideki Tojo and Emperor Hirohito directed the ‘infamous’ attack on Pearl Harbor.”

“Nothing I’ve said should be interpreted as a defense of Japan and Germany respecting the global conflict that ensued. To identify the material reasons for a nation’s resort to violence is very different from giving it support, just as identifying the material origins of an earthquake is different from embracing its devastation.”

“Unlike Dr. Marx, being an objectivist, I limit my analyses to explaining what’s happening and the material reasons why.”

“That said, however, as I made clear in my Discourses on Livy, I believe in the greater efficacy of democracy. Since the United States was more democratic than either Japan or Germany, if forced to take sides during WWII, I would have backed the U.S.”

“Now, to believe in democracy means believing leaders must have the backing of their populations. It has always been my position that any leader who fails to gain popular support can not long survive.”

“However, at times like those I’ve described, leaders confront a dilemma:”

“In order to protect their people they must defend the state. To defend the state they must make war. To make war successfully, they must have their people’s acquiescence, if possible, their enthusiastic cooperation.”

“The problem is that making war involves slaughtering and subjugating other humans, actions which are universally considered evil.  It is to our species’ credit that the people of every nation resist seeing themselves as murderers and oppressors.”

“In order to gain sufficient popular support for, or at least submission to, those necessary evils, wartime leaders therefore inevitably find that they must lie.”

“When ordering an attack upon another nation, they must lie to defend their country’s reputation; lie to get assistance from allies; lie to delude their victims, as occurred with the Cherokees. No less important, they must lie to soothe the collective conscience of their citizenry.  Unless they lie, the forcible domination of another state, another people, cannot possibly succeed.”

“Fortunately, whenever the preservation of the state upon which their lives and fortunes depend is at stake, people universally insist upon being provided the requisite protective deceptions.”

“The Americans who settled the West during the 19th century welcomed the justifying lies told about ‘savage and bloodthirsty Indians;’ the Indians they were exterminating as they found it necessary to seize their land.”

“When the Great Depression devastated the world economy in the 1930s, most Russians embraced Stalin’s fantastic lies about the country’s ‘pro-capitalist traitors’; lies which vindicated holding the Soviet state together by killing 7 to 10 million people and enslaving an even greater number of others.”

“During WWII, only a tiny, and pragmatically silent, minority of Germans rejected Hitler’s utilitarian lie that they were fighting ‘a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to take over the world.’”

“To give a final, and, for most of you a more personal, example: Throughout the 90-years since the Russian Revolution, most Americans have reflexively imbibed the remarkable story that the Soviet Union, and subsequently China, posed ‘a socialist-communist threat to their way of life;’ a lie no less preposterous than that told by the Spanish inquisitionists who tortured Jews in the name of Christ.”

“At the time Dr. Marx was writing everyone, including his detractors, understood Socialism to mean an equalization of basic income, Communism the more tender-hearted –‘to-each-according-to-his-need’– division of a nation’s wealth.”

“As our common experience loudly tells us, where apportioning their nations’ wealth is concerned neither Russia, nor China has ever been one whit more socialist, let alone communist, than any other country, including the United States.”

“Surely the international correspondents among you have felt the irony of filing reports in which you referred to ‘Communist China;’ a country which Forbes notes now has 10 billionaires, 400 businessmen with personal wealth exceeding $100 million, and many thousands of mere millionaires; while an army of indigent Chinese roams the streets of major cities, homeless and hungry.”

“On the other hand, it’s equally obvious that the incessant lies about a ‘communist menace’ were critical for rationalizing a military defense of threatened U.S. industries and investments in Asia, Africa, Central and South America, thereby securing the United States and stabilizing its people lives. Which, of course, is why all but a few Americans embraced the artifice involved.”

“While it’s frequently essential that political leaders lie to others, as my student, philosopher Leo Strauss, observed, particularly in wartime, it’s no less crucial that they do not begin to deceive themselves.”

“A wartime leader must remain focused on the exclusive objective and associated truth for which he is directing mayhem and telling his lies.”

“Political leaders, like the rest of us, always lie in the service of what are for them more fundamental realities and objectives.”

“When a terminally ill friend inquires ‘How do I look today?’ and you reply: ‘You’re looking very healthy!’, you lie to mask your personal truth and objective that, although he looks terrible and probably doesn’t have long to live, you want him to feel hopeful, and it would therefore be cruel to tell him how sick he really appears.”

“The wartime political leader’s objective which he lies to defend? I’ve already told you: A preservation of his state! His associated truth?   That objective material understanding which, if he can get his people to act upon it through deception, will result in the state’s preservation.”

“Whenever evil must be done to preserve the state, an unspoken agreement is made between a leader and his people.  He will lie to procure their support; which requires protecting them from assuming responsibility for the evil.”

“On their parts, the people will either accept the leader’s lies as fact, or, in the case of individuals who are less well served by the state’s evil acts, they will busy themselves with nitpicking demonstrations that particular lies are falacious.”

“However, so long as the state, and therefore their lives and livelihoods, are being preserved, our shared experience tells us they will refrain from seeking the material reasons for the evil being done.  That is, they will not attempt to discover and disclose, the leader’s personal truth; the unique objective vision which is determining his actions and prompting him to deceive.”

“Perhaps the most compelling evidence that the people of every nation prefer comforting fiction to disturbing truth is the universal reluctance to relinquish what were initially pragmatic lies long after their utility has been exhausted.”

“The majority of Japanese have yet to confront the brutality of their country’s attack on Nanking in December 1937. Two-hundred-thousand Chinese were killed, many machine-gunned in the street. Women were ‘nailed alive’ to walls, their breasts cut off and their stomachs ripped open.  Japanese Doctor Hakudo Nagatomi told of witnessing babies being ‘impaled on bayonets and tossed alive into pots of boiling water.’”

“Turkey still adamantly refuses to acknowledge that after its Ottoman Empire holdings were lost in WWI, it maintained itself by massacring one and a half million Armenians, seizing their properties in order to survive.”

“Very few Russians have accepted the breathtaking slaughter of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Estonians and Latvians which the Soviet Union carried out to preserve its existence during the depression-ridden 1930s and 40s.”

“Thirty-two years after the Vietnam War ended, most Americans continue to avoid the simple reality that their nation pragmatically defined poor, ignorant and uneducated Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian peasants as ‘communists,’ then butchered over three million of them, using every weapon at its disposal, rifles, bombs, napalm, cluster bombs, 50-caliber machine guns and grenades.”

“But is it really necessary for me to defend this obvious point? Robert Stinnett’s book, Day of Deceit, was published in 2000. Using the U.S. government’s official records, Stinnett documented what Admiral Robert Theobald, Pulitzer Prize winning author John Toland and others had convincingly argued two decades before.  President Roosevelt and members of his cabinet not only knew Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was impending, they worked to insure that it happened, convinced it would unify the public behind what they rightly considered an inevitable war. Yet today the majority of Americans continue to talk of Japan’s ‘surprise attack,‘ dismissing as ‘conspiracy kooks,’ those who express the material truth.”

(Machiavelli paused, then observed)

“It’s clear from your facial expressions that many of you find my arguments distasteful.”

“One of the most painful criticisms I’ve had to endure is that I advocate immorality and evil.”

“To the contrary, I’ve always insisted the practice of evil should be no greater in dimension and duration than a preservation of the state requires. Lying, killing and related evils are for me strictly means, never ends. Unfortunately, they are sometimes the only means by which the state’s perpetuation and its’ people’s lives can be secured.”

“In the hope that you won’t misunderstand my position, let me be precise: If a conquered elite’s hegemonic way of life can be continued, that should always be done, and they will thereafter reward the conquerors by helping to keep the masses subdued. If the elites’ favored status can not be sustained, one and all of them must be killed, for they will never cease plotting a violent restitution of their former authority and rank.”

“If a subjugated population’s way of life can be sustained, the velvet glove should always be used in their governance, since they will present no tangible threat.  If their way of life can not be maintained, they must either be destroyed or driven from the region, because it will not be possible to control them.”

(Machiavelli paused again.)

“Do you still find my words disturbing?  Then ask yourself this question: Should the state be dismantled and its citizenry allowed to suffer socio-economic devastation if the alternative is employing violence and deceit?  If you answer ‘yes,’ please take another look at the real world. You’ll discover when people make that argument they almost always have some other state in mind, rather than their own.”

“To repeat the central tenets of my thesis: Preserving the state upon which his people depend for their physical, economic and social existence must be a leader’s foremost objective.”

“Realizing that objective sometimes necessitates making war on another nation.”

“For all the reasons I’ve enumerated, getting his people to support a war invariably requires a leader to dissemble and deceive.”

“That said, there are two more things a leader must do at such pivotal moments if he would succeed in defending his state.”

“Based upon a clear-headed understanding of the material necessity for initiating a war and the war’s specific objectives, the leader must formulate a strategic plan.”

“Having done so, he must then micromanage events in order to bring his plan to fruition.”

“What makes a micromanaged strategy vital whenever a leader takes his state from peace to war? This is another question you can give an objective material answer if you examine your own behavior.”

“Your family has no need for a micromanaged plan when following its normal routine.  However, any sharp break with that routine, such as a camping trip, immediately makes it essential.”

“You will need to plan your destination, date of departure, method of travel and length of stay; and numerous aspects of the trip will have to be micromanaged in order for it to be a success.”

“If you determine to go by car, someone must assess its’ mechanical condition.  You will have to decide who’s going to do the driving; the approximate amount of fuel and food needed; who will prepare the food; the kind and quantity of clothing required; along with responsibility for a host of other matters, like tents, bicycles, fishing licenses and equipment, perhaps arranging for friends or relatives to be visited along the way.”

“So it is when a state’s leader determines to take his people to war.  Except that, where lies aren’t normally required for a camping trip, as the genuinely candid among you are well aware, they’re an integral feature of every nation’s resort to war.”

“Which brings us, finally, to the U.S. war in Iraq.”

“I’ll begin this part of my discussion by asking the critical material question that has, to date, received a hundred-and-one immaterial answers: ‘Why did Vice President Dick Cheney and the other neocon leaders’ decide to invade Iraq?’”

“In order to give an objective, answer to this question, we must consider both the United States’ material condition at the time, and the material situation in which it found itself.”

“First, the U.S.’ material condition subsequent to World War II.”

“Faced with brutal competition from Japan and other industrialized nations which enjoyed significantly lower labor costs, by the late 1960’s major U.S. corporations were in serious trouble.”

“The two leading auto manufacturers initially tried to weather the challenge by cybernating production, then, by making cars of low cost and, consequently, low quality.  In 1971 Ford Motors introduced the Pinto, General Motors the Chevy Vega.”

“But GM and Ford were soon made to understand that producing cars of inferior quality would not enable them to hang on very long.”

“How bad were the Pinto and the Vega?   In April 2000, the internet website ‘Car Talk,’ used newspaper and radio polls to determine which auto Americans considered the ‘Worst car of the millennium.’   Based on 25,000 responses received, Car Talk rated the Pinto ‘Third Worst,’ the Vega ‘Second Worst.’ Only the Yugo beat them out to take First Place.”

“With no alternative remaining if they wished to stay competitive, General Motors and Ford then began outsourcing large parts of their manufacturing operations to low wage countries.”

“U.S. manufacturers of nearly every product, power tools, furniture, canned food, skis, clothing, radios and TVs, were soon reluctantly taking the same path.”

“Dr. Marx and his disciples would have us believe capitalists are driven by an insatiable lust for increased profit.”

“Business economists, on the other hand, consider it axiomatic that corporations hesitate to move their operations abroad until the rising tide of competition is threatening to drown them.  The activities of General Motors, Ford, Levi’s Jeans, DeWalt and Milwaukee Power Tools, Thomas McCann Shoes, IBM, Dell Computers, Hershey Chocolate and hundreds of other companies have objectively verified that proposition.”

“While the ‘outsourcing’ of manufacture meant millions of American workers were losing their jobs, a consequent devastation of the U.S. economy was prevented by the high technology revolution which occurred during the 1980s and 90s. The birth of the internet and an on-line global market, along with the application of digitalized information to everything from experimental science, to education, medicine, audio communication and movie-making, quite literally saved the day.”

“Dozens of high-tech companies sprung into existence. Lavishly funded by venture capitalists, many were soon included in Fortune 500’s list of most profitable corporations.”

“The computer-savvy entrepreneurs who founded the high tech industries often became multi-millionaires almost overnight, as did investors in their novel operations.”

“In the late 1990s, the high tech revolution gave birth to the ‘dot-com’ phenomenon: thousands of internet web sites offering products and advice of every imaginable kind; health, charity, the environment, pets, politics, education, finance, jewelry, travel, book publishing, furniture making and home restoration, etc.”

“Venture capitalists and investors again provided hundreds-of-billions of dollars for these remarkable operations; and, again, sudden fortunes were made.”

The rising dot-com sea was soon lifting millions of low-tech boats, creating new jobs and expanding old ones. Stock values in general increased significantly, as the newly rich and the comfortable purchased an ever-increasing number and quantity of goods and services.”

“Fitness centers opened in towns and cities across the country. Occupations like ‘personal trainer,’ ‘landscape artist,’ ‘interior decorator,’ ‘massage therapist’ and ‘herbal medicine specialist’ acquired new respect and wider application. Bike shops and boat yards, manufacturers, sellers and repairmen of ATVs and trailers, restaurants, coffee shops and jewelery stores, travel agents and luxury-liner operators, orthodontists and cosmetic dentists, mini-storage owners, makers and installers of pools, spas and home theaters, one and all profitted from the surge of wealth.  In large cities, three, four and five thousand square foot homes became common place.”

“For most Americans, life was good.”

“Then, in the spring of 2000, the dot-com bubble began to burst. By July 2002 more than 850 dot-com companies had gone under, rendering their stocks virtually worthless.  When the calamity ended, the stock market losses amounted to an estimated seven trillion dollars, probably more.”

“You heard me correctly.  Not seven million dollars.  Not seven billion.  Seven trillion!”

“While most of the failed dot-com corporations were American, some were European; and there was considerable French, German, Swiss, etc. investment in the U.S. dot-coms.   So, those countries also felt the blow, resulting in increased economic competition between Europe and the U.S..”

“But I’ve only begun to described the United States’ troubled situation as the 21st century opened.”

“With the collapse of the dot-coms, the growth rate of the U.S. economy plummeted from 3.7% in 2,000 to 0.8% in 2001.  In 2002, it was still a modest 1.6%.”

“Meanwhile, the annual growth rate of China’s industrializing economy had risen from 8.3% in 2001 to 9.1% in 2002. India’s economy was also growing at a rate more than double that of the U.S.: 4.1% in 2001, 4.2% in 2002.”

“Although a phenomenal increase in trade between the U.S., China and India was making the three nations’ economies increasingly interdependent, China and India were beginning to pose a challenge to the U.S. in many countries; including, in China’s case, those of the Middle East.”

“Which brings me to the United States’ paramount concern in that region; the concern which led it to attack and occupy Iraq, and which, if your country’s leaders continue to act defensively, will soon lead it to saturation bomb numerous targets in Iran.”

“That paramount concern?  You know as well as I do: “OIL!”

“In case you haven’t noticed, the economy of every industrialized nation floats on oil.”

“A majority of the things industrial countries make, use, or sell, are at least partially made from oil derivatives: tooth brushes, soaps and soap dishes, clothing, telephones, furniture, fertilizers, cosmetics, lacquers, television cases and park benches.”

“Homes are heated with it, and cars, trains, ships and planes are wholly dependent upon its availability at a moderate price.”

“The pool of oil-guzzling industrial nations is also growing, and the two most competitive industrializing countries, India and China, are huge and hungry.”

“‘China’s exports soared from $10 billion in 1978 to $278 billion in 2000,’ taking it from the 30th to the ‘sixth largest trading nation in the world.’ With a GDP growth rate that’s sometimes double digit, its thirst for oil is becoming unquenchable. Yet, except for Da Qing, which produces an estimated one million barrels a day, China has no reserves worth consideration.”

“China’s consumption of oil is growing by 7 percent a year. In the year 2003-04 it shot up 19 percent, and, given the country’s phenomenal growth rate, it may well increase by double digits again.  India’s oil consumption is also increasing by more than 5 percent every year.”

“As you may know, the United States’ per day consumption of oil is 20.7 million barrels; more than Germany, France, Japan, India and China’s combined 19.5 million barrels.”

“The U.S. consumes 26 percent of the world’s oil production, three times more than it produces. And, like China’s, the rate of its oil consumption and importation continues to grow.  During the 1980s the U.S. imported 30 percent of its oil.  Today it imports 50 percent.”

“Unfortunately, while the international competition for oil is becoming daily more aggressive, the amount of oil that’s readily available—we’re still talking material reality here—is in serious decline.”

“There’s been a lot of debate about whether the world’s approaching, is at, or has already passed ‘Peak Oil:’ that critical stage at which half of the easily obtainable oil has been tapped and production begins to decline.”

“Back in 1956, Shell geologist Dr. M. King Hubbert was criticized for predicting peak oil production in the U.S. would occur sometime between 1965 and 1970.  It happened in 1970. Hubbert’s predicted peak for world production was 2006.”

“No one disputes Hubbert’s fundamental thesis about an impending ‘peak oil’ crisis any longer. It’s a matter of quibbling over the specifics of when.”

“Paul Appleby, British Petroleum’s chief economist, believes the world’s oil output will flatten, then, ‘start falling by 2010.’”

“Fredrik Robelius of Sweden, who wrote a doctoral thesis on the subject, thinks world-wide peak oil production will occur between 2008 and 2018.”

 “Other, equally informed, observers insist peak oil has already happened.”

“Jim Buckee, who earned a doctorate in astrophysics at Oxford University and now heads the Canadian oil and natural gas company, Talisman Energy, came to that conclusion.”

“After researching the subject, so did T. Boone Pickens, the famous investment tycoon.”

 “Princeton Professor Emeritus Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes is very specific, proposing the peak in world oil production occurred on Thanksgiving Day, 2005.”

“The point is, most oil men and scientists agree that while the world isn’t about to run out of oil, it is about to run low; the peak in worldwide production definitely happening before 2020, in all probability before 2015.”

“No less alarming, the impending crisis in oil production has already begun to strike the world’s leading producer, Saudi Arabia.”

“University of California Professor Stuart Staniford, who edits the highly regarded website ‘The Oil Drum,’ observes: ‘The data is clear . . . Saudi Arabian oil production is in decline.’”

“Already, half the daily output of Ghawar, the world’s largest oil field and Saudi Arabia’s most productive–from which 6.25 percent of the world’s oil is pumped–isn’t even oil, it’s water.”

To sum, the critical facts about oil production are no longer in dispute:”

 “The amount being consumed is rising dramatically.”

  “The largest, most productive deposits of high-grade, readily extracted oil are in three Middle Eastern countries: Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran.”

“The number of new deposits being discovered is discouragingly small, and none contain the huge amounts of low sulphur oil of fields in the Middle East.”

“At the same time, many of the world’s major oil fields, including those of Saudi Arabia, are showing signs of depletion and becoming increasingly costly to tap.”

 “The picture, then, is clear:”

“If the U.S., China, or one or more European state, could put the lock on the remaining Middle Eastern oil, it would be able to dominate the world economy, outcompeting other nations, and/or, controlling their production respecting a cornucopia of goods, including agricultural produce and military hardware.”

“Let’s not be timid about describing the United States’ problematic situation.  If China, or some combination of European industrial countries, acquires a monopoly on Mid East oil, in only a few years’ time it will be able to wreck the U.S. economy, reducing Americans to the poverty and dependence currently suffered by many Third World populations.”

“Given the interdependence of the world’s national economies, would China or Europe ever do such a terrible thing to another country?”

Under the right circumstances, of course they would!   So would the United States!” 

“The Great Depression demonstrated how brutally indifferent to one another’s situations nations become when the very survival of the state is in jeopardy.”

“And the threat of another global depression of the kind that produced World Wars I and II is always with us.”

“Surely, none of you are prepared to argue we have international instiitutions in place which could, and would, prevent it?”

“The United Nations? Please!”

 “Do you doubt that the U.S. faces the imminent challenge I’ve been describing?”

“Then, consider the following:”

“In the spring of 2002, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill attended the 30th anniversary celebration of the nationalization of Iraq’s oil.  During a subsequent interview, Scahill reported:”

“Mohamed Rashid, Iraq’s oil minister, announced Iraq would ‘begin oil exploration in two of the largest untapped oil and natural gas reserves in the world:’ West Qurna and Majnoon.”

 “’These two fields had been allocated to two companies,’ Scahill continued, one of them French, the other Russian. ‘But because of U.S. pressure and U.N. sanctions, the Russians and the French never began drilling’.”

“Tired of waiting for the sanctions’ removal, Rashid declared Iraq had decided to go ahead with the French-Russian explorations, for which each of those countries was committed to investing billions of dollars.”

“Iraq predicted that by tapping the West Qurna and Majnoon fields it would be able to ‘double oil production,’ ‘theoretically surpass/ing/ Saudi Arabia as the number one producer of oil in the world.’”

“Was this mere wishful thinking on Iraq’s part?  Or was it a reasonable assumption?”

 “According to the Oil and Gas Journal of March 7, 2005: ‘The oil fields of Iraq are the least depleted and least developed of any of the Persian Gulf oil producing countries, and Iraq has the potential to rapidly increase oil output . . . Only Iraq has undeveloped super-giant oil fields—West Qurna, Majnoon, and East Baghdad—and the potential to rapidly increase production to 8-10 billion barrels a day.’”

“Scahill concluded: ‘Saudi Arabia has an enormous border with Iraq. If that border was erased and the U.S. controlled these two countries—the U.S. would control the world oil markets.’”

“In other words, respecting the product most vital for the survival of every industrial nation, the U.S. would then be able to dictate to the rest of the world.”

“I think we can assume Scahill’s conclusion was apparent to American oil company executives, as well as U.S neocon leaders.”

“Nine months after Rashid made his startling declaration, the U.S. ‘shock and awe’ assault began.”

“Now consider the material threat which China-the-oil-parched-colossus poses in the Middle East.”

“In reviewing that threat I’ll simply rely on world press citations.”

 (With a wink at Bill O’Reilly). “I’ll report. You decide.”

“Last year the Association for Asian Research made the following observation:”

“‘Beijing’s target is to quadruple its economy by 2020, as it did from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.’ However, in order ‘to achieve this goal . . . China must rely on external energy supplies.’ Where it currently uses ‘6.3 million barrels of oil a day, . . . the International Energy Bureau projects /its/ consumption will reach a daily level of 10 million barrels within the next two decades or so.’”

“According to The Washington Quarterly: ‘Since 2002, the Middle East has become the leading arena for Beijing’s efforts to secure effective ownership of critical hydrocarbon resources, rather than relying solely on international markets to meet China’s energy import needs. There is every reason to anticipate that China will continue, even intensify, its emphasis on the Middle East as part of its energy security strategy.’”

“Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, China made two failed attempts to obtain that country’s oil.  It negotiated ‘a 1.3 billion dollar contract with Saddam in 1979 to develop the al-Ahab oil field in Central Iraq, and in 2001 it was in talks about developing the much larger Halfayah field.’ However, like Russia, Germany and France, ‘China was prevented from activating these deals by the UN sanctions’ which the U.S. had secured.”

“From the U.S. standpoint it was ‘check,’ but hardly ‘checkmate.’“

“China then began to focus its attention on Iran.”

 “The U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Iran in April 1980, following the seizure of 63 American embassy workers the previous year.”

 “According to an old adage, ‘political power abhors a vacuum.’ China was soon demonstrating the cogency of that proposition.”

“In the spring of 2002 the BBC disclosed an ‘historic meeting’ between Chinese and Iranian leaders at which they pledged to greatly expand their countries’ economic cooperation.”

“And that’s precisely what they did!” 

“In November 2004: the Washington Post reported ‘China’s energy needs’ had increased ‘nearly 40 percent during the first ten months of the year;’ prompting what Newsmax called ‘an exponential’ growth in that country’s relationship with Iran.”

“The Asia Times noted Beijing and Tehran signed a ‘mega-gas contract worth an estimated $100 billion’ that month.  Heralded as the ‘deal of the century,’ the pact was expected to be followed by an oil agreement worth another $50 to $100 billion.”

“Iran, China Business Weekly enthused, hopes China will ‘soon replace Japan to become its top destination for energy exports.’”

“In January 2005 the New York Times cited an Iran-China Chamber of Commerce claim that, when all the figures were in, trade between China and Iran would be found ‘to have totaled $7 billion in 2004, up from $5.6 billion in 2003.’”

“This fast-growing symbiotic union of the Chinese and Iranian economies has involved China selling Iran ever-larger quantities of manufacture, in addition to buying its liquid natural gas and its oil.”

“In a 2005 release, the Nixon Center explained China and Iran’s ‘increasingly close relationship’ results from ‘Iran’s need for consumer goods to satisfy its young, West-leaning population,’ as well as ‘China’s need for energy to run its growing economy.’”

“The Center quoted Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s former International Atomic Energy Agency representative, who observed China and Iran ‘complement each other,’ saying: ‘The Chinese have the industry and the Iranians have the energy resources.’”

“Arab News noted partnerships between Iranian companies and South Korean, French and Japanese firms helped make Iran the Middle East’s leading car producer in 2005, with an output totaling ‘nearly one million vehicles.’ China is also reputed to be building an Iranian auto plant for the manufacture of a low-priced model, while the U.S. stands and watches.”

“As forecast by concerned observers around the world, the reciprocal trade between China and Iran is continuing its phenomenal rate of growth.”

“Eurasianet.org recently called attention to the fact ‘nearly 250 Chinese firms are /either/ engaged in industrial and construction projects /in Iran/, or, are flooding the Iranian market with low-priced consumer goods.’”

“In April 2006, the Associated Press published reports that China and Iran were ‘close to settling plans to develop Iran’s Yadavaran oil field . . . in a multibillion dollar deal that comes as Tehran faces the prospect of sanctions over its nuclear program.’ That deal is believed ‘to be worth about $100 billion,’ the AP concluded.”

“On August 25, 2007 the Iran Daily quoted Javad Mansouri, Iran’s ambassador to China, who predicted trade between the two countries will reach a phenomenal $18 billion this year.”

“Mansouri cited the ‘vast economic potentials’ of both countries, along with ‘the growing economic, industrial, technical and scientific ties between them,’ as the bases of the increase in trade.”

“Nor are China’s overtures to the Middle East being directed exclusively at Iran. In November 2003 the United Arab Emirates observed that trade between China and the seven small states which comprise the UAE had grown by 42.8 percent during the first nine months of that year alone.”

“In January 2005 the NYT reported: ‘Trade volume between China and the six rich countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council—the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman—was expected to reach $20 billion in 2004; up from $16.9 billion in 2003,’ according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.”

“No less disturbing from the United States’ and Israel’s perspective, for more than 20 years China has been providing Iran with the latest weaponry, including missiles.”

“In September 2003, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a charity founded by Sam Nunn and Ted Turner, released this pertinent statement:”

“’China’s missile trade and cooperation with Iran has been a subject of substantial proliferation concern in Washington since the 1980’s.’  ‘China’s missile exports and assistance to Iran have generally fallen into two areas,’ the NTI continued: ‘the provision of anti-ship cruise missiles and related technology, and technical assistance for Iran’s ballistic missile program, as well as some exports of complete ballistic missiles.’”

“In other words, Iran has been rapidly moving toward the point at which it willl be able to defend itself against an attempt by another state to take its oil by force.”

(At this point, Machiavelli suddenly paused for what must have been several minutes. Forgetting he had not yet talked about the war in Iraq, perhaps thinking he had finished his opening statement, a few members of the audience stood and stretched.  Others started quietly conversing. Then, just as suddenly, Machiavelli resumed speaking.  His voice was lower now, and somewhat restrained.  However, it soon became evident his restraint was that of a boxer looking for a weakness in his opponent’s defense in order to throw the decisive punch.)

“If you’ve been following my argument,” Machiavelli began, “you’ll understand I’m not exaggerating when I say that as the 21st century opened the U.S. was approaching a fateful juncture.”

“Fortunately, unlike most Americans, being perceptive Machiavellians, Presi . . . er, Vice President Cheney and his neocon subordinates have been able to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.”

“The industrial world is heading for a showdown over control of the Middle East’s oil.”

 “If China or Europe were to win the struggle, given that international competition for the sale of manufacture is already intense and much of the U.S. productive base is now located abroad, in the event of an international depression it seems virtually certain America would suffer the fate of Germany and Japan in the 1930s.”

“However, the neocon’s have recognized that Western Europe isn’t a serious competitor in the battle for Middle East oil.”

“In comparison with China’s, European economies are only treading water.”

“In addition, Germany and France are able to buy enough oil and natural gas from Russia to keep their homes heated, their cars and factories running. Besides, eighty percent of France’s electrical needs are being supplied with nuclear power, not oil.”

“Germany and France would doubtlessly like to profit from the acquisition of large quantities of Mid East oil. But doing so isn’t a dire necessity.”

For the United States and China it is!”

“So, the conflict over control of the Middle East’s oil is between those two states; and whichever one wins will have the final word when it comes to determining the international practice, if an international depression occurred, even the survival of the other.”

“Due to the economic interdependence of the two countries, the victor will need to consider the interests of the vanquished.  But which state gives, and which receives consideration is going to be of the greatest historical consequence.”

“You Americans are fortunate that several leading neocons are former Trotskyists who once naively supposed that when a country commits to Dr. Marx’s communist vision it undergoes a utopian transformation.”

“Believing the failure of China and the Soviet Union to construct free, egalitarian and humane socialist systems was of monumental significance, they are now dedicated to protecting the United States as it builds a better world.”

“Irving Kristol, the former Trotskyist who’s variously referred to as the ‘founder’ and the ‘Godfather’ of the neocon movement, expressed these sentiments lucidly, writing:”

“’It is not too much to say that the collapse of the socialist ideal is the most striking event in the history of political thought in this century. The process of its deflation has been so intermittent—an irregular series of gasps rather than one instantaneous exhalation—that it is not easy for us to grasp its full significance. Since the death of socialism has not affected our belief in progress, we are tempted to interpret its passing as merely one episode in the interminable education of the human race.’”

“Optimistic, and still devoted to moving the species forward, the neocons grasp the importance of the U.S. winning this struggle.”

“For over two centuries America has symbolized freedom, democracy and economic opportunity to the entire world.”

“China, on the contrary, represents religious repression, thought control, and a heavy-handed social, economic and political manipulation.”

“In the U.S. dissidents are criticized, sometimes ridiculed.  In China they’re imprisoned or shot.”

“Tens-of-millions of people around the globe dream of becoming American citizens. Millions risk injury or arrest every year in order to enter the country illegally, hundreds dying of heat stroke and thirst in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona.”

“No foreigners dream of moving to China, or jeopardize their lives trying to do it.”

(Looking at the Fox News team intently, Machiavelli then added:) 

“Your neocons realize that more than the future of the United States is at stake!  The Western world, whose very way of life, values and traditions the U.S. represents and defends now stands in peril.”

“They recognize it isn’t a question of whether the United States should fight China for control of the Middle East oil.  It must!   And they are determined that under their guidance it will.”

“However, the neocons also understand that China and the U.S. would both be ill-served by a public acknowledgement of the battle. Their economies are much too interdependent for that.”

“As an August 2006 Congressional Research Report remarked: ‘The United States is China’s largest overseas market and second largest source of foreign direct investment on a cumulative basis . . . In 2004, China replaced Germany and the United Kingdom to become the fourth largest market for U.S. goods and remains the fastest growing major U.S. export market.’”

“In addition, only Japan holds a larger portion of the U.S. foreign debt than China: $644 billion and $350 billion respectively.”

“Considerable pressure to severely restrict these mutually beneficial relations is already exerted by American labor unions, and by small manufacturers whose oxen are being gored.”

 “If the U.S.-China conflict over control of Middle East oil were openly declared, that pressure could become irresistable.”

“The critical question for the neocons in the year 2000, then, was how the U.S. should go about waging this silent, but nonetheless epic, battle: i.e., the appropriate weapon to use.”

“Unlike during the Great Depression, economic competition will not work.”

“Few American-made products can compete with Chinese manufacture here in the U.S. . They are even less competitive in the Middle East.”

“As economist Robert J. Samuelson recently observed, China doesn’t have ‘universal social security.’ ‘Only 17 percent of its workers have pensions,’ and ‘a mere 14 percent are covered by unemployment insurance.’ Factor in its workers’ low wages, and it’s obvious that China has the upper hand where selling the Middle East manufacture is concerned.”

“Nor can the U.S. compete when it comes to buying the oil.  Given the huge sums of money that must be paid to individuals and institutions who hold oil company stock–and stock in corporations like Bechtel and Haliburton–which are involved with many aspects of drilling, shipping and processing oil—along with the exorbitant salaries of the executives employed by those firms, it’s clear China’s state-operated companies can afford to be far more generous than U.S. corporations.”

“To sum the United States’ fundamental dilemma: its’ survival, as well as maintenance of its’ dominant world position, requires that it gain unchallenged control of Middle East oil, determining which countries obtain what amounts, and at what price; and, that in doing so, it receives the lion’s share of profit coming from the oil.”

“In November 2002, four months before the U.S. began bombing Iraq, the Canadian investment firm Union Securities Limited posted a very terse, but very accurate, description of the problematic situation the neocons confronted, writing:”

“’In 1950 the United States supplied roughly 52 percent of the world’s oil production. Today it has fallen to around 8 percent . . . The Persian Gulf states have about 67 percent of the world’s reserves. The U.S., by comparison, only has about 3 percent . . .This makes the Persian Gulf the most important area in the world when it comes to supplying the fuel that the U.S. economy and indeed the rest of the world needs . . . Iraq has around 10 percent of the world’s reserves, the world’s second largest behind Saudi Arabia. Iraq is also producing only about 2.5 million barrels per day, well below its potential capacity of around 7 million barrels per day.’“

“Union Securities then identified the sole instrument with which the U. S. could accomplish what is becoming indispensible for its preservation and the continuation of Western culture: Military force! Pointing to the United States’ enormous international debt, it presciently concluded: ’Money and Oil! Is it any wonder that the U.S. is anxious to move quickly to subdue Iraq, and possibly Saudi Arabia as well, before things get out of hand? By all indications it is not a question of will there be a war against Iraq. It is a question of when.’”

“Beginning in the 1950s, defending it’s Third World interests from expropriation has required the United States to radically increase its production and sale of weaponry.  The arms sales have then helped it compensate for the competitive edge it was losing respecting the sale of manufacture in general.”

“As a consequence, since the 1990s the U.S. has been responsible for approximately 45 percent of all international arms transactions. According to the Congressional Research Service, the value of U.S. arms sales was $18.6 billion for the year 2000 alone.”

“Most of the leading neocons have Defense Department histories: Vice President Richard Cheney served as Secretary of Defense under President H.W. Bush; Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense during both Bush presidencies; Richard Perle was Assistant Secretary of Defense for President Reagan; Paul Wolfowitz served as Deputy Secretary of Defense under G.W. Bush; Eric Edelman is presently the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and Douglas Feith has held various Defense Department positions.”

“These men know well that no country, least of all China, can match the vast array, or the sophistication, of U.S. weapons systems: Reconnaissance Satellites; B-52 bombers equipped with smart bombs, cluster bombs and bunker-busters; unmanned Predators, able to track a vehicle in near silence, then blow it away with a guided missile; Black Hawk, Apache, Kiowa Warrior and Chinook helicopters, Avenger and Patriot ground-to-air defense systems; Abrams tanks; Bradleys, M88A2 Hercules Armored Vehicles; depleted-uranium-tipped anti-tank missiles; and, if needed, the latest in chemical and biological weaponry, research on which Congress granted the National Institutes of Health $1.76 billion in 2006.”

“On March 19th, 2003, the Bush neocons answered Union Securities’ rhetorical question. They ordered that the ‘shock and awe’ bombing of Iraq begin; and, to date, they have continued to follow my instructions with ingenuity and brilliance.”

“You will recall my advice to leaders who must take their states to war in order to preserve them: ‘If you are unable to protect the favored status of a subjugated country’s elite, you must destroy them! Nor will it be sufficient to eliminate the prince’s family,’ I warned. ‘The aristocrats who remain will make themselves heads of fresh movements against you, and if you are unable to either satisfy or exterminate them, the conquered nation will be lost whenever time brings the opportunity.’”

“Similarly, ‘if the way of life of the masses can be sustained,’ I counselled, ‘the velvet glove should be used in their governance, since they will present no serious threat. However, if you are unable to defend their way of life, they must be driven from the region or destroyed, because you will never be able to control them.’”

“In 2003, the neocons understood it would be impossible for the U.S. to preserve the status of the Iraqi majority, whatever their class.”

“The reasons why are hardly a mystery.”

“A June 2003 Congressional Research Report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations observed that following their seizure of power in 1968, Saddam and the Baathists ‘placed great emphasis on the industrialization of Iraq’s economy.’ As a result, the ‘middle class rose from 28 percent of the country’s urban population in 1958, to 54 percent in 1988.’ Iraq’s total population also grew significantly, ‘from 9.4 million in 1970,’ to ’22.3 million in 2000.’”

“By ‘the late 1980s,’ notes the Congressional Report, ‘the Iraqi middle class was a highly urbanized, secular, well-educated group, consisting mainly of state employees and civil servants who benefitted greatly from the expansion of educational and government employment opportunities, and from the increased levels of government revenue’ coming from the oil nationalization.“

“The ‘Iraqis also had life expectancy and mortality rates comparable to those for Saudi Arabia, Libya and other high income Arab countries.’”

“When the Gulf War began in 1991, ‘Iraq was one of the more prosperous and advanced countries of the Arab world.’ ‘It was an upper middle income country,’ the Congressional Report reiterates, ‘with a substantial middle class, considerable technical capacity, high (by regional standards) female participation in education and the economy, and relatively high standards overall of education and health care.’”

“Education to the highest university level and cradle-to-grave health care was free for most Iraqis. Women enjoyed basic equality, drove cars and wore western clothing. Many were physicians, lawyers, judges, chemists and professors.”

“For more than 35 years Saddam Hussein, a megalomaniac with a Stalinist personality, had entertained dreams of doing what Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser was unable to do: unify the Arab world, then use its vast oil wealth to modernize the Middle East.”

“Saddam recognized that doing so would be no easy task.  Iraq’s population is comprised of a Shia majority, many of whom are among its poorest citizens, a Sunni minority, from which most of the wealthiest Iraqis were drawn, a large Kurdish minority in the north, small rural communities ruled by warlords, and other, numerically insignificant, ethnic or religious populations, including Chistians. With so many divergent groups having divergent interests, the Baathists’ industrialization program inevitably did serious injury to one or another of them at various times, particularly the Shia and the Kurds.”

“Whenever any group dared to engage in disruption, however mild, Saddam used abject torture and terror to drive them back in line.”

“It was evident to the neocons that, having taken control of Iraq, the United States would not be able to cede enough oil money to maintain the cushy life style of its elite body of military officers, businessmen, lawyers, judges, scientists, physicians, politicians and entertainers, or, the comfortable existence of its large middle class.”

“Protecting the United States’ own economy would require that much of the profit be used to remunerate its oil corporation stockholders and executives, along with the heads of American firms like Bechtel and Haliburton, which would need to operate in Iraq in order to maintain the flow of oil and U.S. domination.  They, in turn, would use a portion of their swollen incomes to employ thousands of other Americans in building and maintaining private planes, sail boats, ski lodges, and mansions for them and their families at home.”

“In addition, getting France, Germany, Japan, England and China, to submit to U.S. control of the Middle East’s oil, would make it imperative that they be able to buy sufficient amounts of it cheaply enough to keep their own economies running smoothly. Given the integration of the global economy, the indicated sharing of the take would not be an act of charity. It would be a necessity if the U.S. was going to continue exporting and importing goods profitably.”

“Far more important is the extravagant cost of the instrument the United States finds it must employ to gain control of the Middle East’s oil. China has been using the free market approach: ‘We’ll pay top dollar for your oil and natural gas and sell you low-priced manufacture in return,’ it offers; an arrangement which has no attendant expenses.”

“However, military force, the only competitive device available to the U.S. in this instance, is inordinately expensive. In September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then the president’s economic adviser, estimated a war with Iraq would cost between $100 and $200 billion. It has already cost over $300 billion, and estimates of the total price if the war continues for another few years run as high as $2 trillion.”

“At the moment, the U.S. is putting much of this remarkable expense on the tab with Japan and (ironically), China.  But eventually someone will have to begin to pay. With its economy already under great strain, that someone can’t be the United States.  While their plan hasn’t started working yet, the neocons’ prewar prediction was that the U.S. would buy the weaponry used to dominate Iraq with profit from Iraqi oil. When the expenses previously mentioned are included, that would leave very little for the Iraqis.”

“Where obtaining the Middle East’s oil is concerned, China and the U.S. might be compared to guests at a pot luck dinner.  China is able to bring a dish and put it on the table with dishes brought by others and those provided by the host.  The United States’ only option is to arrive empty handed and declare ‘Everybody away from the table, I’m going to eat!’; not a very friendly approach perhaps, but the only one open to the neocons if they would preserve their state and Western culture.”

“Under the circumstances, the U.S. had no choice. In order to seize control of Iraq’s oil and profitably determine its distribution, it would have to do the following:”

“* Annihilate not only Saddam, the country’s prince, but a large section of the Iraqi elite: the military officers, judges, doctors, lawyers, university presidents, engineers and chemists who would otherwise disruptively demand a continuation of their favored situations.”

“* Kill or drive from the country a few million middle class Iraqis, whose statuses it would likewise be impossible to sustain.”

“* Destroy the economic, political and judicial system through which the Baathists held power, including the symbols of their authority.”

“* Raze the infrastructure vital to the country’s existence: its electrical grids, telephone, water and sewage systems, its colleges and universities, rail lines and bridges. This would help to force middle class Iraqis out of the country by reducing their living standard to the bare-survival level.”

“* Then, it would be necessary to break the country into several pieces, assigning control over each piece to that economically poorest group which would be capable of defending both its own authority and U.S. dominion over the oil.”

“Surely you can now understand the material truth of my claim that lies aren’t merely useful when a leader must direct the annihilation of another people in order to save his state.  They are essential!”

“Consider the insane consequences if the neocons had chosen to be honest prior to the ‘shock and awe’ bombing of Baghdad.”

“Suppose Cheney had gone on television to announce:”

“’My dear fellow Americans: to preserve the U.S. economy upon which we all depend for our survival, and to preserve Western Culture, the wellspring and the repository of all that we hold dear, we are going to lay-waste Iraq, wantonly killing between tens-of-thousands and hundreds-of-thousands of people, from babies and little children, to the aged and the infirm.’”

“’We intend to traumatize the Iraqi population by ripping out the arteries of their state: eradicating its army, destroying its hospitals, universities, highways and bridges, its water purification systems and electricity generating plants.’”

“’We will make the Sunnis’ and Shiites’ situations so desperate that they turn upon each other to survive.’”

“’We are going to urge Shia slum dwellers to vent the frustration and rage long-smouldering in their hearts by robbing and killing those who have the things they’ve been denied: the country’s professionals, its doctors, lawyers, chemists and professors. When they hesitate, we will do the killing for them in their name.’”

“’We are preparing to dispatch more than 130,000 highly-trained mercenaries drawn from around the world: the coldest, most ruthless men we are able find. We will encourage the mercenaries to murder Iraqis on impulse and at will, providing them with full impunity for their rapine and slaughter.’”

“Simultaneous with cleansing Iraq of individuals who might present a troublesome opposition, we are going to construct huge, heavily-fortified military bases from which we will direct an equally necessary destructive conquest of other Mid East states sometime in the near future.’”

“In case some of you still don’t ‘get it’ respecting the indispensable function of lies, let me end my opening argument with an analogy.”

“Imagine a fisherman who puts his net in the water, then throws in bait to attract the fish. It’s called ‘chumming,’ and it works. The fish become so intent on eating the bait that it never occurs to them they are themselves about to be caught and eaten.”

“So it is with the neocon deceptions about Iraq. Like fish feeding on chum, liberal opponents of the war have focused on, obsessed about, the lies, successfully distracted from the material realities the lies are told to camouflage.”

“’There were no weapons of mass destruction!’ the liberals have screamed. ‘Saddam did not attempt to buy enriched uranium from Niger! Nor did he provide al Qaeda with support! The Iraqi people do not see us as liberators! ‘And we are not bringing them democracy!’”

“In short, liberal opponents of the war have been using the very neocon lies they claim to reject to evaluate events in Iraq (a downright mind-boggling activity when you think about it). In doing so, they contemplate failure at every turn: the countrywide destruction; the raw sewage in Baghdad’s drinking water; the suicide bombings, with 80 to 100 innocent people killed every day; the 4 million Iraqis who have abandoned their homes, 2 million fleeing to Syria and Jordan.”

“All the while, Vice President Cheney employs the neocons’ material strategy and objectives to judge the same events and, with a condescending smile on his face, he assures reporters that all is going well.”

“To Cheney, it’s blatantly evident that the mercenaries and American forces are creating the chaotic destruction required for the U.S. to gain unchallenged control of Iraq and its oil.”

“It’s equally evident to him the neocons’ lies are working just as intended.”

“Conservative Americans continue to support the war enthusiastically, while the liberal opposition fumes and fusses about neocon lies being demonstratively false, studiously avoiding any materialist analyses of the war, as though just touching the subject might prove fatal.”

“They write, email, phone and finance presidential and congressional candidates who urge the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq, ignoring the overwhelming material evidence it isn’t going to happen no matter who occupies the White House and the Congress; a point made by retired Air Force Lieutenant Karen Kwiatkowski, who served as a Pentagon analyst and desk officer immediately prior to the war.”

“In defense of that proposition, Kwiatkowski referred to the four U.S. ‘mega bases’ already completed. ‘Of the 150,000 to 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq,’ she noted, ‘probably 110,000 are associated with one of those bases, safely ensconced behind acres and acres of concrete.’”

“The bases will ‘operate there indefinitely,’ Kwiatkowski observed, ‘no matter what happens in Baghdad, no matter who takes over, no matter if the country splits into three pieces or stays one. We are not leaving the bases, and a Democratic president, I don’t care who they are, will keep them there.’”

“All four of the bases–al-Asad Air Base, Balad Air Base, Camp Fallujah and Camp Taqaddum—are able to accommodate the largest planes. The neocons had them built to serve as launching platforms from which other Middle East countries can be monitored and, when necessary, attacked.  Their function, and what can actually be done about them, are grand-scale material issues the neocons’ opposition almost never discuss.”

“Then there’s the $700 million U.S. Embassy constructed in the heavily secured Green Zone.  While no meaningful effort has been made to provide Baghdad residents living outside the Green Zone with basic necessities like potable water and electricity, the Embassy is approaching completion. Covering 104 acres, an area larger than the Vatican, it’s the biggest embassy in the world. But its objective purpose and what can or should be done with it, are likewise critical material questions about which opponents of the war are silent.”

“The Iraq war opposition also avoids the troublesome material issue of the mercenaries operating and killing in Iraq, their number equal to that of U.S. forces.”

 “Now I’m going to tie the only remaining loose thread of my argument.”

“You will recall that the need for leaders who take their states from peace to war to formulate a clear-headed strategy which they ‘micromanage’ is a central axiom of my theory.”

“It should be evident the neocons have done both things.”

 ”Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowski, among the few members of the anti-war faction who seem to sense what’s going on, wrote of the ‘Office of Special Plans,’ the Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation established by the neocons in the fall of 2002: ‘These guys had an agenda.’ ‘Our boss, Bill Ludy, . . . announced to us that from now on action officers, staff officers such as myself and all my peers . . . were no longer to look at CIA and DIA intelligence, we were simply to call the Office of Special Plans and they would send down talking points, which we would incorporate verbatim, no deletions, no additions, no modifications, into every paper that we did.’”

“Mark Halperin, Teddy Davis, Tahman Bradley, Matthew Zavala, Paul Fidalgo and others have accused Cheney of ‘micromanaging the media,’ and indeed he did. Cheney micromanaged the Office of Special Plans as well, making repeated trips to the Pentagon to make sure the requisite ‘facts’ were being created.”

“Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior political adviser, was said to micromanage ‘everything that came out of the White House’ to insure it accorded with the neocons mysterious agenda.”

“Reporter Seymour Hersh wrote of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s obsessive micromanaging, and Bob Woodward elaborated upon in it his book, State of Denial.  According to Woodward, Rumsfeld was involved with every aspect of military operations, sending out a constant flurry of memoes his subordinates called ‘snow flakes,’ and acquiring the dismissive appellation: ‘the 7000 mile screwdriver.’”

“But, having labelled the neocons ‘Machiavellian,’ steadfastly refusing to look for their strategic material objective, which, by definition, a Machiavellian must have, anti-war liberals have gone on to accuse the neocons of ‘micromanaging’ that undiscovered, for the liberals, non-existent objective.”

“Only an idiot would behave that way, of course; and I assure you, the neocons are anything but idiots. Maddeningly, the liberals then project their own inadequacy on the neo-cons, describing them as ‘bumbling’ and ‘inept.’”

“Which brings me back to the matter of why people desire being lied to when preserving the state that sustains them requires the brutalization of another people. The lies, I observed, provide the majority with a justification for the killing, while enabling others to engage in make-believe resistance, puzzled by events, dragged complainingly along after the leader who prescribes the necessary evil.”

“When the killing is finally over, those who’ve played the role of make-believe resisters are invariably found to support the results of the destruction with what they comfort themselves are clear consciences and clean hands, characterizing them as ‘the best that can be achieved in a bad situation.’”

“Some liberal opponents of the Iraq War have already begun moving in that direction.”

“In a spring 2007 interview Hasan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah in Lebanon, told Seymour Hersh:”

“’The daily killing and displacement taking place in Iraq aims at achieving three Iraqi parts, which will be sectarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to Iraq’s partition. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. . . . President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, ‘I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.’”

“A few anti-Iraq-War liberals have now publicly backed the consequences of the neocon reality they’ve pretended to oppose. Senator Joe Biden and Leslie Gelb, Emeritus President of the Council on Foreign Relations recommended an ethnic and religious division of Iraq two years ago, and in July of this year, Edward Joseph, a visiting scholar at John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, released a plan which calls for ‘soft partitioning’ the country. Naturally, ‘Joseph and O’Hanlon expressed regrets about the ethnic cleansing they advocated.’”

(Wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, Machiavelli ended his opening statement with a boast).

“I’ve provided you with material evidence that the neocons were right to attack Iraq; material evidence they were right when they obfuscated their motives with lies; material evidence the lies have kept the attention of Americans advantageously diverted; and, I’ve given you yet another material demonstration that when preserving the state upon which their lives and livelihoods depends requires, the great majority of people will embrace fabrication before objective analysis every time.”

 

           

                

 

 

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