Our decades long War on Nouns.

[MadHound]

With the advent of the nuclear bomb at the end of WWII, world leaders, the ones who truly make the decisions (Winston Churchill called them the High Cabal) recognized that they couldn't engage in true, all out war anymore. To do so was to risk unleashing all out nuclear war, thus making most of the world uninhabitable.

Enter the War on Nouns. Even before WWII was done, the US and other Allied powers were positioning themselves so as to be in opposition to the Soviet Union, their erstwhile ally. On the day that Japan surrendered, the war material that had been accumulated at the harbor on Okinawa for the invasion of Japan was split up and shipped out. Half was shipped to Ho Chi Min in Vietnam, the other half to Korea, enough material to equip and provision 150,000 soldiers each.

Our decisions about the Soviet Union were made with information supplied almost exclusively by former Nazi war criminals, people who virulently hated communism. Soon, they, along with the propaganda machine at home, whipped up a frenzy about the Soviet threat. Soon, we were embarked upon our first war on a noun, the War on Communism.

This wasn't a necessary war, but it did serve its true purpose. It could be contained and controlled, not leading to all out war that would risk nuclear war. It also ate up material and provisions, making enormous sums for those in the MIC. Better yet, it lasted for decades, until the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties.

This collapse caught the powers that be by surprise, but soon they were able to provide a stopgap solution, namely the War on Drugs. Already a simmering back burner item that was primarily being used to reduce political opposition on the left, it was soon employed to militarize our police forces, reduce our civil liberties, and make large quantities of money for the powers that be. The trouble was, it simply didn't make enough money.

Thus was born the War on Terror. Already a low level simmering affair before 911, after 911 it has become the biggest show in town, possibly the biggest show ever. Spanning across continents, and effecting people both at home and abroad, the War on Terror is the perfect war. It eats up enormous quantities of material, it allows the government to further crack down on the civil liberties at home, and it creates its own enemies in perpetuity. What could be better?

Sure, it is bankrupting this country, but TPTB (or as R. Buckminster Fuller described them, the invisible power structure, or as Dick Cheney noted, the shadow government) don't care. In their Malthusian/Social Darwinistic plans, large number of people dying is fine, even just. They are already taken care of, provided for, and if this country collapses, hey, they've got other homes around the world.

Thus, we are stuck with perpetual war, a War on Nouns. It is going to consume and subsume us, it is going to be our undoing. Already we are starting to see some of the major damage done to this country by the latest incarnation of the War on Nouns.

So what is to be done? That is the question. The answers aren't easy, and they are all quiet dangerous. But what is certain is this. Somehow, we the people have to wrestle our government back from the grasp of these powers that be. We have to, once again, put power, real power, back into the hands of the people. Perhaps one method of doing this peacefully is to provide publicly funded elections as mandatory for all candidates, from dog catcher to president. Other solutions call for revolution and violence, watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots.

But whatever the case, it is becoming increasingly clear, whatever we do has to be done quickly. Our time is running short, our country has been, after sixty five years, bled nearly dry. We cannot continue down the path we're on without inflicting ever more serious damage on our country, our society, our people.

We have to end this War on Nouns, once and for all. Otherwise, it will end us.

[robcon]

1. When you need it, you just make it up...

"On the day that Japan surrendered, the war material that had been accumulated at the harbor on Okinawa for the invasion of Japan was split up and shipped out. Half was shipped to Ho Chi Min in Vietnam, the other half to Korea, enough material to equip and provision 150,000 soldiers each. "

Was this supposed to be humorous?

[MadHound]

2. No, these are the eyewitness reports of a Colonel and US Harbormaster

Inconvenient fact for you, but the US in the immediate aftermath of WWII supported Ho Chi Minh against the French, while also supplying the French in their war against Ho Chi Minh. Much of that support for Ho was on those transport ships that went from Naha Harbor, Okinawa, to Vietnam. That is fact. I suggest that you start out by reading two books, Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald, and the Politics of Heroin by Alfred McCoy. When you get done with those two, you can go on to more advanced stuff.

[liberal N proud]

4. We are good at creating our own enemies

Such is the case in Afghanistan now, we help create that mess and it snapped back at us.

[robcon]

19. Classic hoax, MadHound.

pretty funny.

[MadHound]

20. Classic hoax, really?

So it should be pretty easy for you to explain this hoax then. Or are you simply going to cast internet aspersions and run?

[demwing]

3. Can we have a War on War?

That's a war I'd gladly fight

[patrice]

15. Sign me up! Some of the Peace people I know are a little too passive for me.

I understand their philosophy and all. I just think we're in a time when we NEED to be more in-your-face about what war is. It's so frakking habitual, just waiting passively for folks to wake up isn't cutting it.

[demwing]

21. Yes, agreed. There is no passive way to peace in these time

Peace must be pursued aggressively.

[DailyGrind51]

5. "Let me 'context' that." Alexander Haig

[SoCalDem]

6. "..we're gonna effort to try...".. drives me NUTS!!!

:grr:

[niyad]

7. k and r--is this your work? excellent piece

[MadHound]

10. Thanks,

It is my work insomuch as I've compiled these historical facts and put them in one place. But as with all historians, my work is based on the work of others who came before me, historians, journalists, and the ordinary people who wrote about the times they lived through.

[whathehell]

8. ..adding a "y" to everything such as the relatively new "competency" "impotency" crap.

Competence and impotence and other "ence" ending words are fine by themselves..I'll never understand the dumb ass need to add an extra, unhelpful syllable to everything!

[DCKit]

17. Irregardless.... nt

[starroute]

9. The War on Terror was invented in 1979 by George H.W. Bush and pals

Over the July 4th weekend in 1979, Bush took a bunch of Neocons and ex-CIA types over to Bibi Netanyahu's newly-established Jonathan Institute and they ginned up the war on terror. Bush was still attempting to run for president at that time, so you've got to know it took something big for him to be out of the country on Independence Day rather than off at some county fair eating ritual hot dogs.

It was obvious by then that the "communist threat" was fading -- Bush's own tenure as CIA director in 1976 had made that apparent -- and he and the allies he had developed were busy working on a replacement. The War on Terror then became a fixture of the Reagan administration for the first year or two. In either 1981 or 1982, for example, there was a brief panic over Muammar Gaddafi's evil plans to do something-or-other that never materialized.

After that, the Nicaraguan Contras served to put more of a familiar anti-communist gloss on Reagan foreign policy for a time, but the War on Terror was still developing steadily. Israel was deeply involved in both ends of the Iran-Contra deal -- and the War on Terror has always been their baby. And the "counter-terrorism experts" who had begun popping up in the 70's continued to set up think-tanks and project their own skewed view of current events.

And when the Soviet Union finally collapsed during George H.W. Bush's own administration, the War on Terror was ready to roll out, starting around 1992. The tendency at first was to blame Iran for everything -- since they hadn't yet discovered or invented al Qaeda -- but all the basics were in place.

And though the Clinton administration wasn't particularly obsessed with terrorism -- being far more focused on South American drug lords and Russian Mafiya money launderers, at least until the embassy bombings in 1998 -- the whole counter-terrorism structure was primed to sweep into power with the Bush administration, even before 9/11 gave it the ultimate imprimatur.

So the War on Terror wasn't just something that "simmered along" until 9/11. Not only was it very deliberately constructed over several decades, but it's easy to identify the people who were there at the start and have been behind it ever since.

[cloudbase]

11. Turn them into verbs.

I Googled it, and you can really do that.

[immoderate]

14. It's called "verbing" a noun. It diagonalizes the thought process.

--imm

[rug]

12. When no one stood up for the Gerunds, the handwriting was on the wall.

[immoderate]

13. K, R & B (bookmarked)

A great analysis of the Orwellian reality we face constantly. It's worldscam™, and we have found the perpetual enemy. Now it's Muslim terrorists, and every time we attack Muslims, whadda ya know, we "flush out" more terrorists. Like Al Capp's schmoo, when you kill one, two take its place.

--imm

[patrice]

16. Awesome piece, btw! Succint, but with breadth & depth, info-rich, punch without overkill . . .

I wish! I wrote that.

[LWolf]

18. We need to drop "war" as a convenient word to describe

any agenda. We need to create instead of destroy.

Create health. Peace. Prosperity. Equal opportunity. Social and Economic Justice.

[patrice]

22. Wow, think of the differences in policy implied by just dropping that word!!

[LWolf]

30. Exactly. nt

[MadHound]

23. Not a bad idea,

But sadly, it's not going to happen.

[LWolf]

31. Labels are a useful tool to shape the nation's outlook,

especially when the nation allows them to. You're correct; nobody's going to willingly give up a useful tool.

[Cerridwen]

28. Unfortunately, any time the word -war- has been dropped by MIC

controlled areas of gov't, it has been replaced with a euphemism; -defense- or -security- as two examples.

I'm not sure which is better/worse, an outright acknowledgement of the intended purpose of a department (or law) or the obfuscation through the use of euphemism.

[LWolf]

32. There's not really any point to dropping it if

it isn't replaced with something better, is there?

That's why I suggested a replacement. Not that I think those currently ruling the roost would create those positive things.

[Zanzobar]

24. We were standing toe to toe with the Russians in Berlin

Western Europe was ripe for picking. To say the war on communism was made up, or not real, glosses over some realities.

It is hard to say what might have come from softening our stance againt the Soviet machine in later years, but the War on Communism grew from a very credible worldwide threat.

[MadHound]

25. No, not really

The spheres of influence were already settled by the time we hit Berlin, and with the American forces in Europe, well supplied and ready to go, Western Europe wasn't in any danger. The Soviet Army was battered and bloody, having taken most of the brunt of Hitler's wrath. They simply wanted to go home, and did so. They pulled up anything they could find of value in Germany and started shipping it home, including the railroad tracks. No tracks, no ability to transport massive amounts of troops back to Western Europe.

There was no credible threat from the Soviet Union, and while we had the bomb, and they didn't, they weren't going to do a thing against Western Europe. A very revealing book for you to read is by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin's The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.

The Soviet Union was probably more scared of us than we were of them. And though they were something of a threat, the reality is that they were never the vast overarching threat that they were portrayed to be at the time. In fact if we had used a bit of diplomacy rather than saber rattling, they would have probably remained, if not allies, at least not enemies.

[Zanzobar]

26. That's outrageous

The sphere of influence was not settled. Both the Russians and Americans were gobbling up as much territory as possible in the closing weeks to strenghten their negotiating positions.

The Russians eventually built a wall around the portions of Germany they had under their control and enslaved the German people for decades. Certainly it was a vengeful act against Germany, but to think we could have walked away from the rest of Europe at that time dismisses the entire purpose of the Marshall Plan following the war.

Naive!

[MadHound]

27. Only to a certain extent

Russia was wanting its sphere of influence, but it was not going to stick its neck out into Western Europe, despite the hysteria that surrounded the subject. And as I said, much of this was already decided by the Allies by the time Germany surrendered.

Could we have walked away from Europe at the time, probably not until they had rebuilt at the end of the fifties. But we certainly didn't have to engage in the arms race we did. The arms race was built on faulty intelligence fed to us by one man, Reinhart Gehlen. A Nazi war criminal and former chief of Eastern European intelligence for the Nazis, Gehlen turned himself over to the US in exchange for a deal. We employed him in his former position, only working for us. The trouble was, since Gehlen vehemently hated the Soviets, he grossly exaggerated his reports back to the US. That is how dozens of Soviet missiles became hundreds, that is how the Soviets ripping up the railroad tracks leading into Western Europe became the Soviets laying down tracks, etc. etc. We bought this garbage, and continued to buy this garbage, even after U2 overflights showed that it was false. But this exaggeration provided cover for the massive peace time military build up we undertook following the war, not to mention the various conflicts that we engaged in, supposedly fighting Communists.

[Zanzobar]

29. I don't think one can disregard JFK's actions in Cuba.

Had the Soviet threat not been credible, a standoff would have been unnecessary.

One might argue that the Soviet presence in Cuba was their response to our presence in Western Europe, but in this context that point does not matter.

The threat of aggressive communism was quite real.

I think on this point we will have to disagree.