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Quote by The Layman with a Notebook

“People are not only talking glibly about War but working for it. The universe is a huge munitions factory. Fear and spiritual negation keep that factory always at work piling up armaments ready for use at any moment. Humanity spends £200 every minute on armaments, and that in what is supposed to be a period of Peace!”

Quote by The Layman with a Notebook

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The Layman with a Notebook

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“The reason for breaking out an old Soviet military textbook is to show that Russia is still following Soviet ideas. At the same time, America does not seriously embark upon war preparations of its own. The American side does not place its key military industries under mountains, and does not teach its population the principles of nuclear civil defense (as the Russians do). Even more critical, the American people have never received any schooling on the Russian threat. With rare exception, American schools do not teach students about the enemies of America. This was not even done at the height of the Cold War. In fact, Marxists were busy infiltrating U.S. schools and universities during the 1970s and 1980s. American students were more likely to receive indoctrination closer to that given in communist countries than to receive any proper orientation about a communist threat to the United States. And so, there was never any similarity between Russian war preparations and American war preparations. This is a fact that ought to make a deep impression, as it dispels the usual propaganda about the all-powerful U.S. military-industrial-complex.”

“The intimate relationship between the military-industrial-complex and the refugee-industrial complex is that they serve each other by first destroying nations and controlling their resources; and second by bringing to the West cheap laborers who do both menial and highly skilled work. This means that the system benefits from the victims twice: once by destroying their nations and stealing their resources, and twice by capitalizing on their labor and skills. More ironically, refugees often make ideal consumers for goods produced and promoted by the same corporations and warmongers who destroyed their countries, lives, histories, and memories forever.”

“A refugee is someone who was forcefully taken out of their time and place. They were then placed in another time and another place that insist on dehumanizing them. It is a tragedy. The ultimate paradox and irony of this tragedy is that, in many cases, those who caused their displacement and those who hate them in their newfound ‘homes’ in exile are the same people! In this way, they leave no place for a refugee to feel at home or even alive.”

“Strange as it may seem — and irrational as it would be in a more logical system of world diplomacy — the dollar glut is what finances America’s global military build-up. It forces foreign central banks to bear the costs of America’s expanding military empire. The result is a new form of taxation without representation. Keeping international reserves in dollars means recycling dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bills — U.S. government debt issued largely to finance the military spending that has been a driving force in the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit since the Korean War broke out in 1950. [...] “China National Offshore Oil Corporation go home” is the motto when foreign governments try to use their sovereign wealth funds (central bank departments trying to figure out what to do with their dollar glut) to make direct investments in American industry, as happened when China’s national oil company sought to buy Unocal in 2005.[...] So Europeans and Asians see U.S. companies pumping more dollars into their economies not only to buy their exports (in excess of providing them with goods and services in return), not only to buy their companies and commanding heights of privatized public enterprises (without giving them reciprocal rights to buy important U.S. companies), and not only to buy foreign stocks, bonds and real estate. The U.S. media neglect to mention that the U.S. Government spends hundreds of billions of dollars abroad — not only in the Near East for direct combat, but to build military bases to encircle the rest of the world, and to install radar systems, guided missile systems and other forms of military coercion, including the “color revolutions” that have been funded all around the former Soviet Union.”

“And herein lies a key ambiguity about large defence contractors: they are pillars of the free market economy whose shareholders are supposed to provide oversight, while receiving extensive state support which insulates them from market vagaries and meaningful oversight. One thing, however, is constant: this either-or status has resulted in companies that are often badly managed and regularly find themselves in financial difficulties, despite their government’s efforts, sometimes illegal, to find them business.”

“Military thinkers and actors dominated the new White House and the key departments of state, both military and civilian. Over thirty senior arms industry executives, consultants or advisers were placed in key positions in the military and across government... More than half a dozen important policy positions in the Bush administration were occupied by Lockheed Martin executives, lobbyists or lawyers, reflecting the influence of defence contractors across the breadth of government.”

“These artists of war are active even when their societies are officially at peace, quests for power being unrelenting, and in the absence of open hostilities they can be found either hunting for ever-present enemies within or otherwise divvying up that booty always conveniently proximate to those capable of wanton slaughter, spoils these days often cloaked in purchasing contracts and share-price movements.”