April 28, 2015
Chaos in the Middle East: Strategic Society Destructions for Money Control
Scott Stockdale interviews Prof. John McMurtry for The Canadian Charger
SS/CC: You have said that "the trick of the endless US-led wars in the Middle East is to control both sides so as to ensure against sovereign states able to defend the common interests of their peoples". Please explain.
JM: Whenever any nation has an independent government with fossil fuel, financial, agricultural or strategic resources not yet subjugated to transnational corporate control, there is a US-led campaign to destroy it. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Syria have all experienced this over many decades dating from the overthrow of the social-democratic president Mossadegh of Iran in 1953 to Syria’s still mildly independent social state being destroyed to the roots today. Lebanon was a civilized centre of the Middle East before warred upon by Israel in 1982 and has been civil-war divided ever since. Iraq’s region-leading social state with universal health-care, free higher education, public water and electricity, local agricultural and food subsidies has been subjected to genocidal destruction and civil war imposition from 1990 to now, with Syria being destroyed by foreign-supported civil war from 2011. Once CIA-agent coup leader Saddam Hussein could not destroy Iraq’s oil-worker led society from within after his US-supplied war against Iran was over, Iraq was attacked on contrived pretexts – the constant excuse for non-stop war crimes in the Middle-East - and the state was irreversibly destroyed “because it was floating on a sea of oil” (Paul Wolfowitz’s phrase).
Iraq is a model example of controlling both sides of the ever-shifting Middle-East wars to seize the assets of all, and so too the NATO bombing and jihadi overthrow of Gadhafi in Libya, whose socialized oil state was even more developed than Iraq’s with public programs and infrastructures, including quasi-free homes for young couples. Gaddafi was first welcomed into the Western fold after 2000 and his opponents deported and reditioned by British M-15, then jihadis were joined by massive NATO ‘humanitarian bombing’ in 2011 to overthrow his social state; and Libya too is now in civil war chaos. Induced civil wars are the divide-and-rule policy across borders, and especially successful social states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya where their people are clearly better off than neighbouring peoples under US diktat. A better example of society is always prohibited even by war criminal attacks – as in Yugoslavia and Nicaragua in the 1980’s, and Ukraine today. All are orchestrated into sectarian insanity and internecine wars. At the same time vast new profits, resources, lands, price climbs, markets, agribusiness and – most of all – looting of public resources and finances by private foreign financiers and corporations proceeds more freely with stable social fabrics destroyed, not only in the victim societies but at home.
SS/CC: How does ISIL connect to all this?
JM: The historical background is that US-financed Islamic fundamentalism coupled with royal absolutism has come to rule inside and outside governments – Saudi Arabia being the prime example. When I travelled overland through the Middle East, including North Africa decades ago, secular “Arab socialism” was the rule led by Nasser and Egypt; and Islam was the background mass religion. Then a great US-led policy turn occurred in which fanatic jihadists were financed and armed across the region to ensure against “communism”, the Great Satan of the US. The massive funding and arming of jihadis as a war machine began with the US-orchestrated civil war in the then quasi-socialist secular state of Afghanistan to bleed the Soviet Union dry. Since the justifying 9-11 event, the US with local allies has increasingly sponsored jihadists of every kind to take down any remaining social state, while also justifying their oil-for-weapons empires producing no life good but only death and destitution. Observe the connections today. Private armaments and military servicing corporations drain the public treasuries of the US and allied royal states, trading oil for arms in the trillions while financed jihadis provide justification for all the death machines and attack target states at the same time.
If one wonders how a desert-crawling line of Japanese auto-trucks with countless irregular fighters in plain view could ever have ever made it overnight to the state where Western military and political leaders are saying “the war against ISIL may be interminable”, one begins to see the game. ISIL is a construction financed and trained by covert US and oil-king allies that ruins every place it enters, like Syria, once the regime began to win the civil war. Al-Nusra/Al Qaeda was not enough. ISIL is a step up in the US-led control of the Middle East by terror, chaos and social devastation. “The Salvador option” was the first name for the post-war death squads in Iraq, but “Islamic State” stirs much more apocalyptic passions pro and con. Best of all, the ruling foreign war machines of the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and NATO are now far better justified to “fight the barbaric terrorists”. Saudi Arabia with US support is now even projecting the “terrorist” and sectarian “Shiite” labels on the people’s popular uprising of the poor in Yemen against a corrupt US-Saudi puppet government. One objective alone is achieved. Peoples and resources of the region can be predated without sovereign social defences or unity of collective life purpose, the ultimate target of every US-led aggression. As long as all evils can be blamed on an ever-shifting enemy, there is no overcoming recognition.
SS/CC: If someone were to say, this is “another conspiracy theory”, how would you reply?
JM: It is the very opposite of a conspiracy theory. Civil war chaos has been instituted across agents, places and times. The underlying pattern of destroying evolved societies and their collective control of life resources is far deeper. The only diagnostic model that fits all the hallmark characteristics is a runaway cancer system at the macro level with no social immune recognition. It is not recognized even as it keeps invading wider, hollowing out more societies towards social collapse. Look for disconfirming evidence of the objective pattern – for example, a society made better rather than worse anywhere in the Middle East since 1991. The divide and rule reign of civil destruction is now deep into the US and Israel themselves, with civil war or its repression now pervasive in the Arab world. This was not originally gamed as the outcome. US geostrategic planners are social morons by the nature of their game model, as I have explained in my The Moral Decoding of 9-11: Beyond the US Criminal State. But the invariable result of the civil wars they foment and manipulate still forces other societies’ resources open to private corporate control and exploitation without limit until they move onto the next. You do not even need corporate trade agreements to do it; it’s like Road Warriors Middle East. Even if the US people themselves keep being bled dry with their common life bases and interests stripped out by military and financial claws in the trillions every year - not to mention the agro-industry - the same private transnational corporations producing no life goods but destroying them keep money-profiting more. Plundering public purses and resources across continents is the unseen means.
As transnational private money sequences alone multiply, everything connects in social and environmental life depredation out of control. There are myriad masks of the disorder, but always the evolved collective life capital bases of societies and their ecological life hosts are devoured and torn apart. Now after Syria and Libya since 2010, Kenya and Nigeria too join the jihadi-split nations to open a state of permanent war, looting and profiting with no social organization to stop it. The Congo and Somalia are long gone, Mali and Yemen deepen the spectrum of peoples fighting back along with Venezuela and Ukraine, but the same civil war method unfolds across continents. Twenty-five years after the dismantling of Yugoslavia into atavistic nationalisms steeped in the Nazi past, the same happens again in Ukraine into Russia. One outcome has become predictable across borders - impossibility of socially organized development beyond the private transnational feeding frenzy on collective financial, agricultural, natural and strategic resources, pillaged unless stopped by the rule of life-protective law, with the force of law. This is remarkably led by those who never formed it. The world is awaking beyond the falling empire of the West to the only thing that has ever worked across peoples - codified and transparent law against disabling human life and life means, beginning with murder and destroying life fields of all. The prophesy does not exist, but the reality does.
SS/CC: How does Harper Canada fit into all this?
Canada is very privileged with vast natural resources. It is not historically soaked in blood, and has evolved a civil culture without fanatic ‘isms’. It is not acceptant of attack on the weak. This has been the underlying covenant of being Canada, leading with humanity.
Yet after Alberta Reform swallowed the Progressive Conservative Party, its PM Harper incarnates the divide-and-rule war of stripping social life infrastructures and public funds in the name of the nation, while serving only private market powers to multiply across borders. There is no exception. Now aerial bombing Canada in Arab lands – also funded by public money - joins the mayhem killing as moral strength, even though the target beheaders and company are financed by the allied states bombing them.
Whatever one’s own preferences, the morality in charge means only what serves the transnational corporate system. This is the market God which now dwarfs all world religions in power to dictate and destroy and capture imagination. Its cornerstone of defence for war crimes beyond the Nazis in extent is to blame another enemy– as with the Nazis “terrorists” are those who block or resist its rule. The differences between Canada and Palestine or Syria are obvious at the level of conventionalized horror and life deprivation. But the underlying value system is the same in principle. The master driver is the solely ruling compulsion to turn private money demand into maximally more private money demand without limit, border or higher purpose at all. This is called “freedom”. No life coordinates ever enter the sequences and equations in this system in its deregulated mutations. Not even eco-genocide can be seen through its prism. Yet few dare recognize the blind war against life itself which spreads the more its fatal disorder is denied and rationalized away.
SS/CC: How does Islam fit into this pattern of global corporate-state destruction of societies?
JM: The Prophet’s abomination of idolatry fits well to the disorder. It is the greatest idol worship of history, and no idol of the past remotely approaches its direct ruin of one society after another – again a pattern that Mohammed emphasizes again and again in the Koran. The idolatrous depraved moral code at work here is behind the Middle East holocaust of nations even more deeply than the US, which has become its creature. Civilizing Islam long worked – as, for example, in architecture-rich Moorish Spain from the eighth century to 1492 when a rising European imperialism launched its genocidal seizures and destructions of other people’s lives and life-wealth across continents. Degenerate versions of ‘Islam’ from absolutist oil-kings to jihadist death squads have followed, and whatever their pretences, they serve the underlying agenda of corporate money-sequence globalization. They keep peoples superstitiously suggestible, force obedience by violence and threats without understanding, and collective life-serving programs for all – as found in Iraq and Libya before bombing – have disappeared into the past. The corporate state now rules in pseudo-Muslim form. Even ‘austerity programs’ have been instituted across the Middle East, with life-coherent social organization – public health and free higher education, social security of the person, ecological regulation – stripped away.
Islam confined to ritual repetitions and prohibitions without social life standards fits to the transnational money-sequence idolatry. It allows submission to life-blind rules of oppression as ‘submission to God’s will’, long exploited by local and imperial exploiters. Thus the transnational lootings of the people’s common wealth by oil dealing, weapons, finance, GMO agribusiness, and money-trough military services and reconstruction only multiply to more corrupt and private oligarchical control and demand. Mass submission, resignation, obedience, faith without organization beyond faction parallels the dispossessed anomie of the West.
SS/CC: “You emphasize the ‘ad adversarium fallacy’ as the dominant ‘track-switch’ of people’s thought which invariably diverts their attention away from humanity’s real problems.
JM: A simple example would be accusing me of being “a communist” or “an unbeliever” or “a conspiracy theorist” for what I say above. The topic is diverted to a familiar hate-object of the audience. Corporate mass media and politicians do this as their stock in trade. It gets attention and usually sells. This blame-the-enemy diversion dominates across cultures, but is almost never named. It runs so deep into the group psyche that not even logicians, psychology and cognitive scientists recognize it.
Once diverted to the hate-object of the group - say “Saddam” or “Putin” or “state socialist” or “terrorist” - most people block out facts to be acceptable to the surrounding group or community. Challenge by evidence or reason is derailed onto blaming a known enemy of the audience. This is the underlying track-switch of thought upon which all mass-murderous wars and system oppressions depend, as well as most propaganda of daily life. It is the cornerstone of ruling American ideology which has no common ground but it. Yet not even academics will stand up to the accusation of “Putin-lover”, “9-11 conspiracy theorist”, “communist”, or whatever the designated enemy may be. US Republicans may rely on this track-switch before all else. This is why evidence basis, public statistics, knowledge of anything outside the game, is not now safe in corporate states if it can be stopped. Public knowledge itself is the ultimate enemy of the whole game. That which sees, documents, shares, certifies, distributes, or organizes purpose to prove and act for the public good is forbidden in a thousand ways even in Canada – the secret behind the Harper agenda of information control from defunding NGO’s to gags on government ministries and scientists to allowing only his photographer’s pictures into the mass media. In the Middle East, silencing is by the drone, secret police, bombing, special forces, mind-stopping lies, and unending murder, mayhem and terror in manufactured civil wars. Always the ultimate operation is to blame the enemy for all that goes wrong even if the enemy is the endless primary victim, as in Palestine. In the case of Israel, the imperialist nation with its boot in the face of the people is for the first time in history proclaimed as the victim (as bravely observed by Israelite Gideon Levy). “Who is denying whose right to exist?” is not a question asked here.
“Who is throwing stones at Goliath in Israel today?” is an unspeakable thought. Total reversal, blaming the oppressed for what you're doing, endless diversions to the designated enemy is the ultimate lie of the human condition, but today rules the Middle East by a more complex process of shifting wars and hates than ever before.
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Prof. John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and his work is published and translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author and editor of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his latest book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism/from Crisis to Cure.
