WARS FOR WEALTH

by Mumia Abu-Jamal

[Col. Writ. 5/1/02] 

Few things stir the national imagination as the  trappings and glitter of war.

This is true of virtually every nation, but this is especially so when it comes to those people who delight in calling themselves, "Americans."  While  the term would seem to apply to those who dwell on the two vast continental regions of North and Latin America, the name sticks like flypaper to  those who live in the 50 states called the United States, and excludes either the pacific people to the north (the Canadians), or the multicultural peoples of the south (the Mexicans).

Americans, for the most part, simply thrill at the prospect of war.

Or so it seems.

When is the last time that a politician has called for a mass mobilization of national will, without invoking the language, or the metaphor, of war?

When the late Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to  stimulate national will to eradicate the conditions of the poor, he called for a War on Poverty.

When Richard M. Nixon wanted to galvanize right-leaning constituencies against the radicals, the anti-war activists, the revolutionaries, and the teeming masses in the nation's ghettoes, he called for a War on Crime.

When Ronald W. Reagan wanted to tap into the deep puritan instincts of so-called middle America, he sounded a similar theme when he launched the War on Drugs (remember Nancy's plaintive, "Just Say No?").

While these old wars seem rather silly to us now, in the opening years of a new century, the energies unleashed by Americans, especially those of the middle-classes, was really remarkable, and impacted the lives, fortunes, and destinies of millions of people, both here, and around the world.

Millions of people are in America's vast incarceral islands of despair, or their lives have irreparably been impacted by their contact with such networks.  There are millions of victims of these quasi-wars. By the same token, however, there have been millions of people who have benefitted from these internal wars, as the security and repressive industries have employed hundreds of thousands of young males, and, to a lesser extent, females, and by extension,  supported households.

What was true for internal wars, is also true for external wars.

If the former CIA station chief, John Stockwell is correct, over 6,000,000 men and women and children have perished as a direct result of U.S./C.I.A. actions and activities, in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the second half of the 20th century.  [See his book, The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order. (Boston: South End Press, 1991), p. 81].   (However, he notes that if activist/scholar Noam Chomsky's analysis is used, that figure rises closer to 7 million people!).

Wars work wonders for the economy, for every bomb that explodes, must be replaced!

But, in another, more sinister sense, war is big business, not simply in the replacement of munitions, nor their manufacture.  War is business in the sense of who really benefits from war?

Many years ago, a military man who led the Marines into battle all around the globe, made a rather startling announcement of the purposes of his military action. It is interesting for the lack of the usual rhetoric about 'to protect our democracy', or 'to keep America free',  or some such blather.

Major-General Smedley D. Butler wrote:

 I spent most of my time being a high-class  muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street  and for the bankers.  In short, I was a   racketeer, a gangster for capitalism ... I helped  make Mexico ... safe for American oil   interests in 1914.   I helped make Haiti and  Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank  Boys to collect things in.  I helped in the  raping of half a dozen Central American  republics for the benefit of Wall Street.    [ca. 1935, quoted in Dave Dellinger's Preface  to Eugene V. Debs' Walls & Bars: Prisons &  Prison Life in the "Land of the Free".]  (Chicago:  C.H. Kerr Publ., 2000)

If you replace 1914 Mexico with 2002 Iraq, or 1990 Kuwait, it would make America's current overseas ventures clearer than ever.

Wars are waged today for the same reason that most of them were waged yesterday: to protect the wealthy elite, and to make them richer.

Democracy?  Nope.  For why is there less of that here every time a war is fought?

To make the world safe?  (Honestly -- do you feel any safer today than you did before 9/11/01?)

We are looking at War -- endless war -- for the same reasons as Maj. Gen. Butler strapped on a Colt .45 -- "... for Big Business."

 

Text © copyright 2002 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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