Class 12: WAR AND ITS PROMOTERS
6,000 years of Human History, Militaries as Global Governors, The Imperial Media
Solutions: Global Anti-War Movement, Rise of Popular Media, Partnership Society
 

Purpose: To show how Western militaries, the largest military operation in the history of the world, have long been dedicated to protecting and promoting the interests of the global corporate empire, while the media giants, as multinational corporations themselves, perform as a mouthpiece for our corporate/military public policy.

Materials

Readings: Justice Rising, Fall 2006, Corporate Origins of War and Grassroots Struggles for Peace; Fall 2005, Vol. 1 Information and Democracy: Corporate Control and the Rise of Popular Media

Handouts: Questions, Article Ranking, Talking Points

Paradigm: Media and military are portrayed as adversaries, but in reality the press has sold the American public on going to war for corporate gain for over a century.

Context: Corporate money purchased the US presidency for William McKinley in 1896. This led to an immediate and long-term takeover of US military policy by Wall Street lawyers and corporate CEOs. They used the US military to open markets and resources for American corporations around the world. McKinley appointed well-known Wall-Street lawyer Elihu Root as Secretary of War in 1899. He became the prototype of the “wise man” who spins the revolving door between defending elite corporate interests in the courts and making public policy in the corporate interest as a government official. Root performed corporate legal work for railroad barons Jay Gould and E. H. Harriman and then enforced the “open door” policy that created US corporate access to any and all resources and markets around the world. Under his oversight, the US military blew doors open in China, Cuba, and the Philippines.

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 America’s corporate press promoted such policies, often inventing events to rile American public opinion in favor of aggressive military action.

These included:

• Hearst’s New York Journal headlines about the sinking of the Maine that the Spanish American War;

• The popular media narrative that we were bringing civilization to the Philippines as we slaughtered millions of Filipinos fighting for their independence;

• The widespread media claim that America put down the Chinese Boxer Rebellion to protect American missionaries.

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This is the sort of headlines Americans received in the media for the next century. They claimed the military performed a policing role either to improve the invaded countries or to protect American citizens at home and abroad. In reality they were carrying on a constant campaign of military brutality to promote corporate interests.

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Known globally as “gunboat diplomacy,” Teddy Roosevelt called it “Big Stick Diplomacy.” Since 1900, the US military intervened in foreign countries over two hundred times. After 33 years of participating in military ventures, Smedley Butler, the top-ranked Marine and most decorated military officer, as well as the son of the Chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee, rebelled. Smedley Butler proclaimed that in his military service he had really been a “high class muscle man for Wall Street…a gangster for capitalism…I helped make Mexico safe for American oil, Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank…I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers…I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests…I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies…In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”

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Heading into World War II, the Council on Foreign Relations, which had become a major voice in promoting multi-national corporate interests through US military and foreign policy, produced a study proclaiming that it was in our “national interest” to control certain global resources if we were to maintain a dominant position in the world. Those resources included the oil in Indonesia. Our protection of those resources animated US foreign and military policy throughout the Cold War, including our tragic engagement in Vietnam.

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Norman Solomon took on the imperial press as promoters of war in his book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, and with Sean Penn, in the movie by the same name. They highlight how the media unquestioningly spread disinformation across the country about a fictitious Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to gain congressional approval for the Vietnam War. They explain how the media/Pentagon disinformation campaign continued from Vietnam to the War on Terror.

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They also point out that the military always blamed the media coverage of the Vietnam War for the loss of American public support for the war. That excuse led the military to increasingly control the information that the media could put out, to the point that they incorporated the media into their disastrous invasion of Iraq where the media performed as partners with the military. Entrenched reporters ballyhooed the technical perfection of the new weapons, claiming they saved civilian lives. Meanwhile civilian casualties went from 10% of the casualties in World War I to 90% of the casualties in George W. Bush’s Iraq War.

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            That was a war sold by both the Pentagon and the media on entirely false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The false claims obfuscated the real purpose of the war: to “open the door” to American corporate access to Middle East markets and resources. The fallout from this fallacious, violent conquest of Iraq continues to be an all-out disaster.

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Major media outlets also supported our military policy during the Iraq war by underreporting the size of the anti-war movement in the United States while discrediting the participants. Bill O’Reilly on Fox News said that all the protesters were part of the “Far Left,” which he called, “a destructive force that must be confronted.” Michelle Malkin, another Fox commentator, called Medea Benjamin, the founder of Code Pink and one of the leaders of the anti-war movement, a “terrorist sympathizer, dictator-worshipping propagandist.” This statement could not be further from the truth. As a leader of the demonstrations against the WTO and formidable critic of US imperial policies, she has long highlighted the importance of true democracy and the power of people over corporate military power.

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The global military has positioned itself along with corporations as the two institutions taking a central role in creating de facto global corporate governance. Along with multinational corporate leaders who meet at global forums and have long-term social and financial relations, the members of the various regional and national militaries, including NATO, also establish long-term personal and financial relationships. This enables them to form essentially a single, coherent military force aimed at protecting corporate interests. Derek Reveron, professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, detailed this military role in his book Exporting Security. Quoting from the Justice Rising review of that book, Reveron “outlines the development of this globalized military coming together to support the objectives of the neoliberal strategy for corporate dominance…He points out that militaries around the world talk the same language and frame the world in a similar light, making it easy for them to establish life-long relationships of trust. These relationships have helped in partnering with almost every nation in the world to ensure security for foreign investments, corporate access to natural resources, global trade, and economic integration with global corporatization. They hold conferences and train military leaders, as well as police and other law enforcement units in operations from oil platform security to non-lethal crowd control.” NATO is the premier example of the globalized military.

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Four decades ago, corporate imperial policy identified nation-states in the Middle East, particularly Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, as obstacles to global domination by corporate empire. Since that time, war supported by Western allies has been waged in three of those countries and is often threatened in the fourth. NATO has been at the heart of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is allied with the Western Powers in Syria, and leery of the situation in Iran.

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The global military made its first foray into global affairs with its incursion in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yugoslavia was the only functioning communist state in Europe. Corporate global empire needed to have it crushed.  It was NATO’s first action in its new role as the military of the corporate global empire. For background reading, see these pieces by Michael Parenti and Michel Chossudovsky.

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As was fully demonstrated during the months before the Iraq War, there exists a huge, united, global movement opposing war to enhance corporate interests. Millions of people joined a coordinated anti-war effort in 2003 and are ready to unite under the banner of the World Social Forum, “Another World is Possible.” Here is how we portrayed this movement in our book Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire:

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Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies points out that “the more-or-less spontaneous emergence of this global movement means helping provide a space for strategic planning among key actors in the key countries, and helping to shape a political/intellectual framework on which a world-wide peace and justice movement can transform itself into a politically conscious movement challenging empire while building a new internationalism.”[i]

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As Immanuel Wallerstein states in The Decline of American Power, “A new kind of historical system will be constructed in the next half century. The worldwide battle has already begun over what it will look like...”[ii]

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Certain fundamental beliefs and values for “another world” are emerging from the movement for global justice and against corporate globalization. Among them are demands for participatory democracy, an end to all forms of racism, and a rejection of the “commodification” of all aspects of life that global capital is bent on imposing on us. This rejection is pivotal, and perhaps central, to demystifying and replacing the corporate imperial system that dominates the world.

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We are entering an interregnum between an international system bullied by a rogue empire and the dreams and demands of the multitude. Will that future be controlled by an economic plutocracy? Or will the vast majority of humanity come together and create a world that believes in a harmonious and liberated future for planet earth. As Wallerstein says, "History is on no one's side. It depends on what we do."

Activities: You can start the class with the 6,000 years of history chart we developed to show the historic cycles when people power, violent power, and money power dominated public policy making.  It extends from the Mediterranean partnership culture to the Age of Aquarius. Here is the timeline chart to print out on a 36” format printer. You can also use this PDF to print it out at 8.5 x 11 and hand out to all of the class for discussion. Here are notes to be used for discussing the timeline.

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The time line starts with the rise of non-hierarchical, partnership cultures in the Mediterranean more than 6,000 years ago. They lived without war or hierarchy for thousands of years. From there it traces the invasion of violent armies from the steppes armed with horses and chariots between 1500-1000 BC that began a thousand years of violence dominating human existence. The final extinction of any people power came in 50 BC with the end of the Roman Republic. This is the era of violent kingdoms when public policies came from the point of a sword.

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Money as we know it first came into use in 700 BC, and monied elites first showed their dominance over the power of violence with the Magna Carta in 1220, when the English aristocracy acted to curb the king’s powers because he wanted their money.

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We still live in an age where money is power, with money power often using military violence to ensure its rule. However, beginning in the enlightenment 200 years ago, personal power of the people began to emerge. By the 1960s, American Blacks, women and Native Americans, along with the anti-war movement, challenged the power of the wealthy white patriarchy. The Age of Aquarius began in 2015. It promises two thousand years in which:

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• Planetary peace and harmony will pervade human society in an eta of compassion,

• All people are revered and nurtured.

• Diversity is cherished,

• Human society promotes global unity,

• Common spiritual understandings are held universally

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I often present this timeline in 15 minutes, only covering the most important points, which include the partnership era, the invasion of violence, the beginning of money, the Magna Carta, the first banks, the first corporations, the enlightenment, the 1960s and the Age of Aquarius. You can spend as much time on it as you like.

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Once you have covered the 6.000 years, you can go back and highlight the history of the past 100 years discussed in the Context section above. Follow this up with a description of the global military dedicated to protecting the neoliberal trade agenda. Finish with a discussion of the global movement to make another world possible.

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Here is a list of videos you can use to flesh out this topic. Norman Solomon and Sean Penn’s War Made Easy is one of the best as it portrays the cheerleading role the corporate media plays in the lead up and execution of US war policies. It is a long documentary; you might want to show a few of the shorter pieces to stimulate discussion of the various topics.

By now it should be a time to take a break and go onto the second part of the class discussing the questions. Here are notes to help stimulate discussion around the questions.

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Do not forget to hand out the article rankings, questions and talking points for the next class on World Citizenry & Global Consciousness. Also make sure you give out the list of books for more in depth reading on War and the imperial media.

The day after the class, email the questions and rankings for the next class to everyone on your class list and include a current article on global citizenship and global values. Make sure that you include a PDF of the reading for the next class, which is a combination of the JR on progressive religion and Yes Magazine on Together with the Earth. Here is a PDF of that issue.

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The day before the next class, send a reminder email that the class is coming up and again attach the questions and ranking and maybe a piece on immigration or global consciousness.