The rise and fall of military industrial complex and mafia

Many observers have been wondering about the absurdity of President Donald Trump stigmatising and denying visas to people from some “Muslim-majority” countries, on the one hand, but selling arms worth billions of dollars to Saudi Arabia, another “Muslim-majority” country, on the other hand.

Under Trump, Muslims, especially in the Middle East, have been deemed “the enemy”, even though they have remained the largest consumers of American military hardware.

Ironically, Saudi Arabia will not be using the expensive arms it purchased from the United States to defend itself from forces that threaten Islam’s most holy places, but to wage wars against fellow Muslims in neighbouring countries such as Yemen.

WESTERN POWERS

This is part of the Western powers’ strategy to “divide-and-rule” the Arab world.

If people in the Middle East fight among themselves, goes the thinking, then they will have little energy left to fight the forces that benefit from their disunity (Some believe that Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and murdered not because he was violating the human rights of his people, but because he had a secularist Pan-Africanist vision of a strong and united continent).

This thinking prompted Trump to support the boycott by the Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia against their neighbour Qatar, even though it hosts a large US military base and despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is also known to support radical factions abroad and to propagate an extremely puritanical form of Islam known as Wahhabism. 

SUPPORT FORCES

The strategy works like this:  Name an enemy, demonise it, militarily support forces within the enemy’s territory to destroy the enemy, then let rebel groups within that territory wage war against one another (The strategy has led to an unprecedented refugee crisis in Iraq and Syria.

Some of these refugees are crossing over to Libya, which since the fall of Gaddafi, has become a major conduit for human traffickers) .

The West’s military industrial complex is supported by the “deep state” of corporate power that has now invaded the Trump White House.

Chris Hedges, one of America’s leading intellectuals, who also happens to be an award-winning journalist and a Presbyterian minister, says that this “corporate coup d’etat” in not unique to the Trump administration.

LEFTIST MOVEMENT

It started in the 1960s, when big corporations, alarmed by the rise of a strong Leftist movement in the US, started to capture the state apparatus by financially supporting the two main political parties.

These parties and their leaders then began dismantling social structures and democratic institutions they viewed as being unprofitable, such as social welfare and environmental protection, while promoting corporate interests in the oil, defence and financial sectors.

In a recent speech to women’s rights activists in Canada, Hedges stated that the problem facing America today is not Trump, who is only the face of a much deeper malaise, but the kleptocratic corporate interests supported by the Christian Right, whose vision of a “pure” white-only America is being sustained by a “casino economy” of stock market manipulation, speculation and credit card debt and by an insidious form of racism that is legitimised through racial profiling, deportation, mass incarceration and police brutality. 

PROPAGANDA

To continue with the banditry, politicians manufacture lies and propaganda.

Rights are treated as privileges, and democratic institutions are undermined through laws that criminalise dissent and demonise the media.

(Trump has referred to the press as “the enemy of the American people.”) Furthermore, violence is sanctified and associated with strength.

However, this predatory system will not be able to withstand its internal contradictions and will eventually self-destruct; like cancer, it will consume its host.

Hedges predicts that these “twilight years of capitalism” will bring about an existential crisis that will force people to re-evaluate their governance systems.

RESIST THE MAFIA

A time will come when the truth will become self-evident and when people will resist the mafia state.

Hedges says that when that time comes, people should not resort to violence, as this would be handing a gift to the authorities to dish out more violence.

Instead, people should employ non-violent forms of resistance.

The backlash will no doubt be ferocious, but in the midst of insanity, it is important to remain psychologically whole, he says, and to make one’s presence felt in public, not through “boutique activism”, as he calls it, but by forging alliances with fellow resisters.

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