“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” – Arnold J. Toynbee
Nobody does war better than the United States. Oh, sorry, please don’t misunderstand me. When I say “war,” I don’t mean actual war—how passe! The bodies can pile up but that’s just a distraction from the benefits of war, the wheeling and the dealing, the slavery inflicted on nations in the name of “aid”.
Who gains the most from war?
American firms rule the $398 billion global arms industry.
Maybe I should just stop writing with that sentence. What more needs to be said? Does anyone think the Vast Machine is interested in stopping wars? All it is interested in is how to make a bigger profit from them.
The Vast Machine is a term I often use in my essays, taken from The Traveler author, Jonathan Twelve Hawks. The Vast machine is the international system of surveillance and computer snooping that now spies on all our lives, in the name of security. John Twelve Hawks is a pseudonym. The author lives off the grid, his identity unknown.
But let’s keep going with this subject because there’s some interesting details here that deserve exploration.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over four months ago was great news for the defense industry. Despite downturns in most major US markets, defense contractors continued to gain:
Raytheon Technologies, the US defense giant and maker of the Stinger ground-to-air missile that Germany has pledged to supply to Ukrainian forces, has seen its shares price increase more than 10% since the invasion began last Wednesday. Raytheon’s stock rose over 4.6% on Monday and has risen more than 18% this year.
Lockheed Martin, the maker of the F-35 fighter jet, advanced more than 5.4% on Monday. The company, with Raytheon, is the manufacturer of the Patriot missile defense system set to be deployed with the Nato battlegroup in Slovakia.
Northrop Grumman, leading manufacturer of attack and surveillance drones, saw its stock rise close to 7% on Monday, after rising 3% since the Ukrainian conflict began. Huntington Ingalls Industries, the largest US military shipbuilder, is up over 7%.
Cybersecurity is up, too.
According to Bloomberg, once the pandemic was declared “over,” Social Media companies like Peloton Interactive Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Netflix Inc. posted declines of between 43% and 81%.
That’s a lot, but it’s okay because the one thing the guys at the top have always been able to rely on is war.
“The need for security is different than any other pandemic play,” said Hilary Frisch, an analyst at ClearBridge Investments LLC. “Anytime there is a new threat announced, or there’s a hack or ransomware attack, that’s effectively an advertisement for cybersecurity as something that companies and other organizations need to be investing in.”
The majority of wars happen in countries that don’t have the ability to manufacture their own weapons. How convenient. Those less-developed countries, or LDCs, rely on savior nations, most notably the United States, to swoop down in their hour of need and sell them the latest in weapons and technology to fight their wars.
It’s a great business model. Create the wars so you can pretend to end them.
It’s a business model that works just about anywhere. Take the “Bill Gates save-the-world-model.” It all started when he created windows, then created viruses to attack the windows, then created antivirus software to fix the problem he created in the first place. People willingly paid for all of it. He then turned around and did the same thing in the health industry.
And people call Bill Gates a “philanthropist.”
Traditionally, the war industry has been represented by armies of one nation fighting armies of another nation. The disastrous Vietnam war was instrumental in changing all of that. No longer did people buy the idea of America coming in with the big guns to liberate LDCs from the bad guys. A new approach was needed.
One of the most fascinating books I’ve read lately is The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.
First of all, Perkins tells us how he was groomed by, well, by whom? It’s a company called MAIN. But is it really the US government behind MAIN, pulling the strings? We aren’t sure. This is always the big question, who is hiding in the shadows protected by layer upon layer of distractions?
Perkins argues that it isn’t that simple, although he wishes it was.
“Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than a conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.”
Okay, this makes sense as a concept. But how did this concept arise? Is there one person or group of persons we can trace it back to? We can trace the ideology of communism back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. We’ve been led to believe that a true communist society is the opposite of a capitalist society, which relies on democracy, innovation, and the production of goods for profit. But ultimately, it seems that no matter the starting point of the ideology, all roads led to the same place: power being concentrated into the hands of a few unscrupulous greedy people.
When Perkins says, “those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded,” well then, obviously he’s saying that a hierarchy does, indeed, develop and so, once again, we face the question of who has reached the top of this heap? It is a question that I keep asking because the answer is so important. Frustratingly, the answer remains as elusive as ever and if you even suggest the question might exist, you are accused of being a conspiracy theorist.
If you, dear reader, have some inside info as to who the really, really top guns are, please let me know.
Anyway, Perkins isn’t dealing with the guys at the top. He’s way down the ladder. He gets his training from a woman called Claudine—in her apartment—which pretty much destroys his marriage and sets the tone from the beginning of the book that every game played out upon us humans is about deception and exploitation, uncovering a person’s (or a nation’s) weakness and controlling them through it.
The two primary objectives of Perkins’s work, as explained by Claudine, are:
“First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to MAIN and other US companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster, and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans (after they had paid MAIN and the other US contractors, of course) so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors and would present easy targets when we needed favors, such as military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.”
It’s called “corporatocracy” and it’s all backdoor stuff. This process of gaining control can involve assassinations, as Perkins describes happened to Omar Torrijos from Panama and Jaime Roldos from Ecuador when both met their deaths in plane crashes after they refused to accede to US demands. Fomenting unrest and uprisings also work well, and even “withdrawing” from countries like Afghanistan, claiming that the war was “ended” when nothing of the sort has happened.
Before I get back to Afghanistan and Ukraine, I must deviate because war has become so much more than just when soldiers fight on the battlefield and see “the whites of each other’s eyes.”
The purpose of war, more than ever before, is not simply to gain control of a nation or a group of people, but to gain control over every single living human being’s mind and body. On a molecular level.
Profits of the pharmaceutical industry are expected to top $1,136.23 billion in 2022. That makes the global arms industry profits of $398 billion look like small potatoes. Never has the world experienced anything like this surge of wealth, all thanks to COVID.
This has ushered in the new era of biowarfare and its promise of unimaginable wealth and power.
We are being led to believe that we are in a global battle against our greatest enemy—and no, it isn’t disease, although that is the name, they give it. The battle is against the natural world and that includes disease and climate change, but ultimately, it is a war against us. We cannot trust anything natural. We cannot trust ourselves. It is all terrifying. It is all our enemy.
The only way to fix this mess is by scientific interventions and by relying on “experts” to interpret what that science is. Well, that’s nothing new. It’s just that the prize is so much greater now than, say, in the heretic Galileo’s time.
This is the same process that Perkins describes. Experts can now literally invade your body with the promise of making you well, the end result being that you are forever in their “debt” and under their control.
It’s notable that in 2016, articles were coming out like this one in Forbes: Is The Golden Era Of Pharmaceutical Profits Over?
In the mid-90s, drugs that came to market brought in an average of $4 to $7 billion in sales. From 2000-2004, that number declined to around $5 billion. But between 2005 and 2009, that number didn’t even reach $3 billion. Now, an average of $3 billion of sales might still sound pretty good. But keep in mind that research costs are rising for the pharmaceutical industry. And the number of new drugs isn’t rising in parallel to these surging R&D costs. According to Gregory Daniel and colleagues from the Brookings Institute, R&D spending is rising after accounting for inflation, but the number of drugs receiving approval from the FDA is, at best, flat:
THEY NEEDED A DISEASE AND A CURE REALLY, REALLY BADLY. (A war and a savior.)
Along came COVID and the Pfizer BioNTech “vaccine.” I think even those who engineered this catastrophe never dreamed how successful it would be.
In May of 2021 Pfizer said that it expected its vaccine to generate $26 billion in revenue this year, up from its previous estimate of $15 billion. Remember that in 2016 an average of $3 billion in sales represented ALL NEW DRUGS.
We have been made sick, not just from COVID, but from many illnesses over the years (or have alternatively been told the lie that we are sick when we aren’t) and then are sold drugs with the promise to be cured of the very diseases they gave to us in the first place.
Yet we are never cured. The promise of a “cure” turns into “chronic” disease.
Chronic disease prevalence increased by 57 percent globally in 2020, according to the World Health Organization. In 2019, China and India had a combined total of 193.4 million diabetic patients, with India’s diabetic population predicted to rise to 101 million by 2030, hence the demand for biologics medications for diabetic patients will increase.
How in the world did China and India become so diabetic? Could it possibly have had to do with all that health and science intervention so benignly introduced by the likes of Bill Gates. Or perhaps those slick American companies selling poison like Coca Cola?
Thank goodness our saviors, the pharmaceutical companies, swooped in to save us by producing insulin!
For 2021, the global market revenue for insulin products is estimated to be around $44 billion. It should be noted that half of the market for insulin and other drugs is the United States. According to the CDC more than 130 million adults are living with diabetes or prediabetes in the United States.
Overall, the United States accounts for about 45% of the global pharmaceutical market and 22% of global production.
We are by far the sickest nation, and we are by far the nation that ingests the most drugs.
Until we fight back, really fight back, by refusing to ingest these drugs and the chemical laden food they give us nothing will improve.
Chemicals are in everything, you argue back, as you take another sip of your diet Coke.
Stop with the excuses. If you are going to fight a battle, you have to start somewhere.
Imagine if everyone stopped drinking soda. Just stopped. Imagine what that would do to the poison industry?
But who will give up their soda? Who will give up their energy drinks? It is so simple, yet people won’t do it.
The military complex and the pharmaceutical companies follow the same “concept,” as Perkins says. Create a disaster and come in as a savior to fix it, making the population dependent, even addicted to your products.
Ukraine will forever be indebted to the United States, thanks to our “help” in giving them so many weapons. Europe will forever be in the United States debt thanks to their self-sacrifice of imposing sanctions on Russia, encouraged to do so by the United States.
These sanctions are bringing the western world to their knees while the alliance between Russia, China and Iran grows stronger. Something I address in my essay Splinternet & the Specter of a Digital Iron Curtain.
Volodymyr Zelensky is just the latest in a long line of puppets propped up by the US government until such a time as they have no more use for him. Proving the point, here he is with his wife on the cover of Vogue magazine. While his people die and starve, he is “working the room.” But then, everyone loves a cookie cutter hero.
Just as Perkins’ weaknesses were used to enlist his services, Zelensky has his weaknesses too. The Pandora Papers and their reveal of the Ukrainian president and his inner circle’s offshore holdings, makes for interesting reading. It is said Zelensky’s fortune has grown to near $900 million since gaining power. But at what price? His life hangs by a thread. Does he think he can take all that money with him into the afterlife?
You might be forgiven for the cynicism of thinking that when the Biden admin’s stooges ordered the withdrawal from Afghanistan, they had ulterior motives, like a new war in Ukraine, for example, and cared little for the carnage they would leave behind.
Our “fearless” leaders love war. They instigate it, revel in it, feed off of it. For every soldier who dies in a ditch believing he fought for an ideal, there are generals above him replacing his body with another expendable pawn. And with each death, the power of the highest elite grows. One need only to look at Afghanistan to see the madness of their machinations. As someone said, it took the USA four presidents, trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and twenty years to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
This is not the end of a war. It is merely stoking the flames of another one.
To say this war has ended is beyond insulting for the 3 million Sufis who now fear massacre; the millions of women and girls whose freedoms are being erased; the thousands who face death for aiding foreign governments; the some 85,000 asylum seekers who the United States abandoned to the Taliban; not to mention the heightened worry of those living in Ukraine, Pakistan, Taiwan. Surely, we see that worry coming to fruition now.
Julian Assange, speaking in 2011 said, “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”
Endless war, endless illness, greater wealth for the “transnational security elite.”
I can think of no better example of our worldly elite than the image of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fleeing Kabul in a helicopter so stuffed with cash that some of it was left lying on the tarmac.
That is who our leaders really are—all of them. Ghani unmasks them as small-time con-artists who prostitute themselves for the price of a bigger car, a bigger mansion, a flashier photoshoot. Wheeling and dealing, slipping and sliding, and then jumping ship when it’s too hot to stick around.
That is Zelensky in a nutshell.
And it’s Biden with his shady Ukrainian and Chinese business deals. Who is a greater example of a weak man easily exploited than the president of the United States’ very own son, Hunter Biden? I find him to be a tragic figure. I thought of posting one of those horrible photos of him here but decided against it.
The lives of the common folk are of no consequence. This was made clear in Afghanistan when a US drone against a supposed Islamic State bomber actually killed an innocent man who worked for a US aid group and his family. Testimony and footage raised the question that the Pentagon lied to the public about the strike.
Of course, the Pentagon lied.
One day wars could well be all about drones, impersonal, with no accountability. Just how our children are learning to live in virtual reality. Remember that movie, The Last Starfighter? He was chosen to save the galaxy because of his prowess as a video game player. What kid wouldn’t love that dream to come true?
How much fun could the warmongers have fighting over ownership of a crater on the Moon, or that nice meteor with all those minerals. In order to expand war that far, complete domination of humans on earth will need to be accomplished.
None of us kids ever imaged back then when we so innocently sat watching The Last Starfighter what the implications would be to our futures, that we would now be facing drones inflicting war on our own citizens, in the shape of surveillance. Yes, we’re a mighty nation. The Pentagon can confirm mistakenly blowing up 10 civilians, including seven children, in the US drone strike in Afghanistan back on Aug. 29, with Biden administration’s Joint Chief of Staff General Mark Milley justifying the attack in September as “righteous” and the intelligence as “still valid.”
There were ten times more air strikes in the covert war on terror during President Barack Obama’s presidency than under his predecessor, George W. Bush—and Bush was a monster who deserves to be hung from the highest tree, in my opinion, instead of fawned over as a good friend of Michelle Obama’s. Their endearing connection is supposed to set an example for the rest of us of how civilized the two sides can be. What it really shows us is how the two sides are equal parts of an evil whole.
Some of the seediest characters in these war games are lobbyists, such as Michael Toscano, representing the drone trade group Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), which was instrumental in creating the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, piloted by Representatives Buck McKeon, Republican of California, and Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas.
Its persistent efforts paid off in the form of the FAA Reauthorization Act, which flew through Congress on bipartisan wings in February and promises to unleash an estimated 30,000 spy drones into U.S. airspace in the next eight years so that local and federal law enforcement can track suspects (because the Fourth Amendment is SO out right now).
[It is predicted] that the domestic unmanned drone market will soon outpace the military, despite exponential growth in that murderous sector. It also acknowledged that the industry’s main impediment to unbridled profit will be “civil liberties.”
Beyond the drone fiasco, thirteen U.S. service members were killed, and 18 others were wounded in the disastrous withdrawal at the Kabul airport. We should never forget them, and I will continue to mention them at intervals in my writing.
Then, there were the thousands left behind.
On August 25, 2021, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said there were 1,500 American citizens, making the statement “shortly after President Biden joked with a reporter who asked about possibly leaving Americans behind in the Taliban-controlled nation.”
Blinken contradicted that statement in an Aug. 30 speech, saying, “We believe there are still a small number of Americans, under 200 and likely closer to 100, who remain in Afghanistan and want to leave. We’re trying to determine exactly how many.”
Finally, in what the media described as a “bombshell” Senate report on February 7, 2022, we found out that as many as 9,000 American citizens had been stranded in Afghanistan after the US withdrawal.
Where are they now? What are their stories? All those Afghans who helped us for so many years, discarded as pawns who had served their purpose.
Just as we have been taught by the media to have attention spans no longer than the length of a headline, the American public moved on to the next disaster and the next without ever pausing to delve into any single one more deeply. If you want to read more, aid worker Amed Khan tells some of their stories.
According to Arnold Joseph Toynbee, English historian and philosopher of history, “civilizations start to decay when they lose their moral fiber and the cultural elite turns parasitic, exploiting the masses and creating an internal and external proletariat.”
In The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman, Perkins describes a conversation where this became apparent to him:
Sitting at the dinner table with some Indonesian intellectuals, one woman explained to him the animosity between Muslims and Christians: (page 56)
…the West—especially its leader, the US—is determined to take control of all the world, to become the greatest empire in history. It has already gotten very close to succeeding. The Soviet Union currently stands in its way, but the Soviets will not endure. Toynbee could see that. They have no religion, no faith, no substance behind their ideology. History demonstrates that faith—soul, a belief in higher powers—is essential. We Muslims have it. We have it more than anyone else in the world, even more than the Christians. So, we wait. We grow strong.”
This new world government, promoted by the Biden administration, tells us we must now deny religion, faith and substance. I have never, personally, been a big fan of organized religion. But I understand its value and I respect people’s right to worship whether that is under the stars or inside a cathedral. Only lately have I come to understand how truly important this is if we are to continue and not “commit suicide” as a civilization, as Toynbee warns. I cannot imagine what any of these great thinkers of the not-so-distant past would say if they were alive today.
This is the real downfall that we do not want to face. Not from wars. But from suicide. We kill off our own humanity and replace it with the Vast Machine.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but will never imprison my mind.”
This has always been the problem that has driven those in authority into their own kind of crazy. People could be tortured to the point that they would say anything with their mouths to make the torture stop, but they were still free in their minds to rebel. Those who crave absolute authority cannot bear the thought that there are individuals who are free to think as they please. So, the war turned on our minds. The doctors, the researchers, the academicians, tinkered, and pried, they twisted, and they mixed their potions and said their magical words until they had found a way into the very secret parts of ourselves.
Thomas A. Edison optimistically said:
“There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.”
Well, I am sorry to say but war has not been abandoned. It is just being changed into something else. Something clinical and emotionless. At least you could always say of the old wars that they brought out the heroes amongst us.
Can you hate a drone? If you destroy one, there will be a hundred more to take its place. How do you fight against a drug that has been implanted inside of you that you can no longer live without? Your hatred of it is powerless.
In his book, The Closing of the American Mind, written way back in 1987, Allan Bloom tells us to:
“Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate?”
A closing of the mind. When all of our children live in this fantasy world, the invasion of their minds complete, the war will be won.
Richard Wurmbrand spent 14 years in a Romanian prison under communism, tortured for his faith in Christ. He visited my home many times when I was a child and he and his wife were friends of my parents. An incredible blessing of my childhood.
“Whoever has known the spiritual beauty of the Underground Church cannot be satisfied anymore with the emptiness of some Western churches. I suffer in the West more than I suffered in a Communist jail because now I see with my own eyes Western civilization dying. Oswald Spengler wrote in Decline of the West: You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains…”
Toynbee said “By religion I mean an attitude to life that enables people to cope with the difficulty of being human, by giving spiritually satisfying answers to the fundamental questions about the mystery of the universe, and the purpose of a man’s role in it. And also, by giving practical precepts about living functionally and harmoniously in the universe.”
That thirteen-year-old boy needs to learn to face the “difficulty of being human” rather than believing that the natural world is his enemy, even his natural body and his mind, and that the only way to cope with all that stress is to give up his free will and submit to the Vast Machine.
