Why The Anti-Genocide Protests Must Be Crushed

War is a racket, claimed Smedly Butler, and as a form Major General of the USMC he would presumably have known. And knowing that, he wrote the book on it.

In War Is a Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidized by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, making money from mass human suffering.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket

2. Who makes the profits?

3. Who pays the bills?

4. How to smash this racket!

5. To hell with war!

It contains this summary:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Butler confesses that during his decades of service in the United States Marine Corps:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

How much has changed since 1935, when Smedly Butler wrote the book on war? Judging from the Neocon rampage around the world since the end of the Cold War, but which rampage is currently stalled in Ukraine, nothing at all has changed. Hold that thought.

The great thing about symposiums of insiders is that they often end up saying to one another things that they would ordinarily never otherwise dream of saying in public. For example:

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

Empire Managers Explain Why This New Protest Movement Scares Them

The US secretary of state and a Bilderberg surveillance tech oligarch have both made some very interesting admissions about the burgeoning protest movement against the US-backed slaughter in Gaza and the problems it poses for the empire they help run.

During a vitriolic rant about university demonstrators at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security on Tuesday, Palantir CEO Alex Karp came right out and said that if those on the side of the protesters win the debate on this issue, the west will lose the ability to wage wars.

For those who don’t know, Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with intimate ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. Karp is a billionaire who sits on the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group and regularly features at the World Economic Forum and other platforms of plutocratic empire management.

“We kind of just think these things that are happening, across college campuses especially, are like a sideshow — no, they are the show,” Karp said during his rant. “Because if we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the west, ever.”

Everyone should listen very carefully to Karp’s words here, because he’s giving the whole game away. He’s making it very clear how crucial it is for the empire to stomp out this protest movement and the zeitgeist upon which it rides, because the very existence of the imperial war machine depends on it. At a time when most imperial spinmeisters are trying to dismiss the importance of this movement and what young people are doing on college campuses around the world, this is a really extraordinary admission from someone who lives deep in the guts of the imperial hydra.

Such conferences are great for obtaining useful information from swamp monsters that you don’t normally hear, because when they’re surrounded by like-minded empire goons they tend to get a lot more loose-tongued than they are when they’re more aware that they have an audience of normal people.

…

… empire managers are always acutely aware of something that normal human beings are not: that real power comes from manipulating the stories — narratives — that people tell themselves about their reality.

They understand that humans are storytelling animals whose inner lives are typically dominated by mental narratives about what’s happening, so if you can control those narratives, you can control the humans.

They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people THINK about what happens.

They understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, and mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives.

Our rulers don’t think about things like normal people think about them. They don’t think in terms of doing the right thing or acting in a way that benefits everyone. They don’t think in terms of truth and honesty or the lack thereof. They only think in terms of what stories people are telling each other, and how those stories can be changed in a way that advances the interests of the empire they manage.

…

9:26 PM · May 8, 2024

Max Blumenthal provides more highlights from this Managers of the Empire conference:

Ret. Gen. Mark Milley repeats debunked Israeli propaganda about beheadings and sexual assault on Oct 7 to argue that the US would have done the same thing Israel is currently doing to Gaza if it had been attacked

This is the shameless tactic that the unspeakable Mikey Johnson uses, as well. Blumenthal elsewhere notes:

Israel lobbyists exploit the Holocaust memorial as a platform for their demented rape fantasies

Only Zionists use the Holocaust to justify genocide

Continuing:

Ret. Gen. Mark Milley says the US has committed so many war crimes over the years, it has no right to criticize Israel's devastation of Gaza

Master of the non sequitur! How does Milley factor into this notion the ongoing and massive provision of war materiel to Israel?

Palantir CEO Alex Karp chimes in: "The peace activists are actually the war activists, and we're the peace activists."

Karp says of Gaza anti-genocide protesters, "You are an infection inside our society!"

How do we deal with infections? We eradicate them. So war mongers are peace activists because they create peace by killing all who oppose them, even in thought or speech. This is what we’re up against.