In the 1940s Arthur Miller wrote his play of, ‘All My Sons’, and it was performed on Broadway and a movie was made of it; and his drama pointed up so very poignantly the cost to the ordinary guy and girl of being caught up in a war in which armaments manufacturers were doing huge business upon its carnage.

Miller is on record as having said that many businesses supplying the forces were more than happy to cut corners or worse, in fulfilling the requisition orders placed with them by the US government. For many of these businesses the war was lucrative.

Miller’s life and legacy is only valued in other lands than the US.

One sees this situation depicted in Miller’s “All My Sons” historically now, and as a failing of weak human nature in the face of temptation and some pressure to perform to fulfil at breakneck speed and in vast amounts.  This of course is being lenient on the affair; and since most of that generation directly affected by it is dead and gone now; little of moment might be gained by raising its spectre again.

Only one is not, it seems, raising a spectre again; were one to raise the issue of armaments and supplies requisitions, and their trading models and affairs; but one would be as it were, homing in again, upon a state of affairs which is more or less permanent in its persistence and in its destructive insistence.

Would it disturb you to be told that some of our prosperity no doubt comes from our militaries keeping subjugated, and often in a state of more or less permanent warfare peoples in many less powerful parts of the globe than are we ourselves?  I have felt for many, many years that our prosperity is somewhat built on keeping at bay and under duress many other less fortunate parts oft the world and their peoples; by use and application of  our national borders, immigration controls, trade deals and Intellectual Property rights’ management, and other tools of advantage to us and which come out of a box of tools which we the rich nations have crafted for our own safety and benefit.  The stronger taking the lion’s share is no stranger in fiction; nor any the less in fact, alas.

Yet to strongly help destine millions of ‘lesser peoples’ to a subsistence diet and so to much hardship in their lives; and for the sake of ‘holding what we have’; such despicable behaviour pales before the story told on US TV mainstream news quite recently by a Professor from Columbia University, a story told which pulled no punches and told like it is; how successive US governments, and by alliance UK governments, and also those of other better-off nations, are, as in George Orwell’s ‘1984’, continuing, and have been doing so for decades, a policy of wreaking permanent warfare in fairly remote and poorer, less strong, places across the globe, thereby exporting what might have been pain and suffering at home, and at the same time by bombardments and by dollar support, have been and are throwing into confusion leaders, governments and nations, which at least pose a perceived threat to the wellbeing of Western policymakers.

This my statement here sounds bizarre, offensive, off-balance, inconceivable, nonsense, fantasy, ridiculous, aggravating, malicious, lies, and in bad faith or else malevolently said, on my part.   I wish I could feel that it were merely these things; and how I wish I was the definitive culprit, and that I am passing off low gossip and seditious libels as truth and across the web to anyone who cares to stop to read these words. That would be fine; I don’t mind being hated so that the rest were not true.

https://youtu.be/_O2TRzA2ezk

This above here is a link to a recent interview on mainstream US news with an academic professor who speaks, but not raging with a dozen chips on his shoulder, but calmly, apparently without malice or mischief, and who uses a commonly agreed history, along with his own, on the record, former testimony on the same news channel, and who makes clear references to ‘classified’ documentation concerning covert CIA operations in Syria; operations which took place almost a decade ago now, and which aimed at fomenting regime change there, and in fact were the instrument which brought about the present civil war.

The professor doesn’t colour up the situations, he’s quite matter of fact, and his gentle and sober carriage in itself is damning to those who would calumniate him. He refers to a covert operation executed by the CIA, one whose name he names and is known publicly and so is authentic, but whose details have been classified as secret by the state, and those details concern actual unlawful entry into another Sovereign state and into its internal affairs uninvited; and entry with an unlawful purpose to topple the present lawful ruler, and to do this by fomenting unrest amongst its peoples so as to raise up an opposition to the status quo.  This, the operation and its operators, succeeded in doing; thus unleashing a war which over seven years, as is admitted by a US Admiral (who confirms the figures also in the same video link), has killed 600,000 people to date and has made another 14 million refugees to day to take flight from their homes and so leave their home country.

The professor also alleges that the US policy-makers deliberately helped create and have supported and assisted, with supplies, armaments and dollars, not just rebel groups of armies in Syria, but in addition ISIS itself; that set of extremists in whom we are appalled by their beliefs and behaviours; whose members who are Britons are now being sent to prison for decades, or else are being made stateless citizens by our Home Office decrees; and with some US rulers calling for their share of such rebels to be held in another Guantanamo Bay; another scandal.

So what is the Master Plan in all this horror; should all this really be a conspiracy?

Well rather than a set of insiders plotting discontents and seeking blood and vengeance; in league and in cahoots with one another, the truth appears to be stranger, far more mundane, and for that reason, far more disgusting and culpable in the sight of The Lord God.  The Master Plan is various and multiple.

Firstly it is, for the US, a means of retaining domination and hegemony in the world order. Secondly it destabilises a region which were it to unify as Europe has done or the States has done, would be a challenger, a contender, for that domination, that hegemony. Thirdly it employs energies, and labour, capital, goods and services, and so creates a steady stream of vast wealth for many, many home industries and for their industrialists in the US.  Fourthly it presents itself to the common people via news and views media as a necessary intervention on the grounds of  defending ‘human rights’ and to ‘right wrongs’. In this way it bolsters and promotes a popular reputation of the US as the defender of liberty, of truth, of justice, of democracy etc etc.  These glorious motives gather in behind them the mass of people who pledge their goodwill and hearts passions so to buy into this angle of human rights and a dispensation of common justice.

There has been in my own lifetime the following series of wars all waged by the US either by proxy or else by US and other troops on foreign shores thousands of miles from the Homeland:  Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yemen, Persia (Iran), Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Mozambique, and probably many, many, more: my memory and knowledge fail me here.  There has hardly been a time while I have been alive; and I am now nearly seventy; when the US has not been involved in a bloody and attritional war involving deaths countless, and destruction thousandfold; of living conditions and of homes, jobs, infrastructure; a wholesale and even most deliberate devastation.

How can a nation as powerful as the US, having such an amount of high-grade hired brainpower in its governments and in its defence and other departments; how might such a nation somehow ‘overlook’ by negligence, accidentally, and be sorry for being remiss; and so it failed to put together an action plan for the rebuilding of Iraq after the Second Iraq war blew the infrastructure of that nation to shreds in just over a week of bombing and missile attacks?  The US destroyed that nation’s ability to function physically in just a few relentless days of ‘shock and awe’; and sure one cannot hide behind oneself saying the US did not know that the destruction it was to wreak would be so huge and so widespread; that is not believable.

And the most likely reason why partisan sets of militias were allowed to form by the US and its Allies, and for these to use guerrilla warfare to hoist every day, for three or more years, a hundred or two of their own peoples to high heaven in endless nightmare; first for the Iraqis; and in a poor second place, for the people of Britain who suffered daily their daily being thrust in their gullets by daily newsreels for that three or more years; the reason was this: and I think it’s inescapable: the dreadful chaotic mess that ensued after the ‘shock and awe’ was well envisaged and well expected and well desired by the invaders and by their civilian leaders; but for what reason I just cannot fathom.

And this unfathomableness is the stumbling block for most half decent people to deal with: why, why, why, should our leaders want such a thing to have happened?  The difficulty in answering this question satisfactorily, and in normal common human and humane terms, is the difficulty which prevents many, maybe most of us, from believing that that dreadful lack of aftercare for the peoples and their levelled cities and amenities across Iraq, could have been all part of a Larger Plan!!

Reason tells us yes, the US and allies certainly would have known the upshots of their onslaughts; no doubt, none at all; but our honest and laudable if innocent selves, our normal human feelings tell us, No, this could not possibly be the case!

And we are being spoon-fed day-in, day-out with feelgood entertainments and sports distractions; we have full shop shelves every time we visit; we have time and money to spare, even the least of us has a little, to pass in leisure and pastimes, hobby occupations and so on; our lives are very, very sheltered and pampered in comparison; and we cannot believe the half of it, because it goes right off our moral compass.

The movie ‘Margin Call’ tries to justify the lives of those men (and women), in this case, in global high finance, those persons who make and lose billions in an hour any day of the week, and who perhaps fight their own wars with their opposite numbers in ways similar and running in parallel to the tactics and operations sanctioned by The Pentagon and the CIA.  Jeremy Irons, who is the Big Chief in the movie, claims that he and his financial wizards are the persons whom the ordinary joe and jill love to hate, and to stigmatise; and yet, he claims, at bottom these ordinary folk know in their hearts that they cannot do without these loathed heroes fighting their corners for the general wealth creation and so for the continued prosperity of the nation. This may or may not be the case, yet does it justify these activities any more than the policies of the US military and its governments can justify their interventions and their wanton, reckless, dominion over so many unlucky peoples?  I don’t think so; the rather it calumniates us, the ordinary joes and jills: after all - quo bono?

We become involved, and embroiled in the pitch which tars all with the same brush; and especially once we accept that this trade-off; these lives in Namibia and Sudan for the sake of our security and prosperity assured, is a reality or even a very likely possibility; then it is the case, as the poet says:

“After such knowledge: what forgiveness?”

Yet here I am, in that dilemma Paul Robeson sings to us about, and in it because of these circumstances. Like that singer I am also:

“Tired of living and scared of dying”

I have no intention of ‘opting out’ and thus exculpating myself from the common sins; I too am in it for the long haul, because I have a wife (who would not understand my actions) and a family, and I have other people here and there who have some dependency on my skills and abilities; it’s a life, if not a noble one, not in itself greatly predatory any more than is the next person’s in my nation.

What’s left to those whose choices are to be like mine and who know and feel the dreadful truth of these global horror games, being played endlessly to keep hegemonies secure and to feed industrial wealth relentlessly?  Well we can speak about it; and quickly be cut off from ‘air-space’ by the closing of ranks of the vested interests; and even bullied and threatened to keep shtum.  Its awfulness is so vast – utterly global, and out of a single person’s reach to affect, or even beyond any group of people to challenge, which is unconnected to and so not a part of the established war machinery.

What I am about to say may seem to you to be risible, and laughably weak and ineffectual; I say NO – it is not so – it is a valid and powerful response.  I say to you pray for us, pray for us all. Ask so that it shall be given; and knock so that there shall be an answer; the things impossible to men are possible with God.

The effect of all this knowledge of evil, of dreadful evil living comfortably side by side in the midst of us, is to humiliate a person; not make her or him humble; but to promote a stirring of sheer feelings of disgrace to be human; to be caught in a world of things which lives in this way, and to be part and parcel of it, shamefully and abjectly as all of us are; despicable creatures.

There is only one answer. There is only one God.