The Cause Of Rising Military-Industrial Complex and Fear Based Propaganda

In the midst of current events regarding Trumps decision to expand US military intervention in Afghanistan, I would like to impose a question: How did we came to the point that the world leaders are engaging in wars on our behalf and there's nothing we can do about it?

Well, well, well...

The current economic system has not only led to the impoverishment of the largest part of the world's population but making them debt slaves. One of its necessities is the strengthening of military-industrial complexes and mechanisms by which elites protect their rising wealth from the poor and their position of power. It causes an increase in the concentration of wealth in the hands of a privileged minority. As class conflict intensifies, so does the need from elite to protect themselves from the organized resistance of the disfigured and systemic change.

In general, the entity that stood between citizens and societal hazards, set up by the social consensus and the social contract is the state. The state seeks obedience from citizens with the promise to protect them from threats in return. That forfeit of force in favor of the state is known as the social contract.

The state as an entity that promises to protect its citizens from for the foreign enemy, seems highly elusive when it comes to fulfilling its protective role and shifts the focus of responsibility for security from social to personal or individual. That is done covertly buy proclaiming enemies from those who don't impose a real threat or don't exist even. For us, the individuals a Darwinian task imposes, to live and overcome the consequent fear that is systematically produced. Some of us can materially mitigate it, as this same system finds various ways to charge us for their weapons.

While the latest global crisis of capitalism affects the majority of the population, certain economic sectors benefit from it, primarily military and security. It seems that the elites are preparing for the monetary collapse, they are responsible for, by securing their positions.

The US Homeland Security industry made a profit of $ 142 billion in 2009; $ 2.7 trillion between 2010 and 2012, with a growth of between 5% and 12% per annum. The largest private security firm in the world, G4S, with 630,000 employees in 125 countries, is securing the London Olympic Games, as well as prisons, asylum, oil and gas installations, important personalities, embassies and airports and various other infrastructures. Among other things, this company is present in the former Yugoslavia Republics, where in exploitative conditions it employs mostly men who have lost their past jobs, and often participants in recent wars.

Wars, which are viewed from various angles, but only not from the driving motivations - economic, are led in the name of peace and security. Barbed wires are raised to that name. Investments in the military-industrial complex are rising instead of eliminating the structural causes of violence: 1.6% of our state budget (Serbia) is spent on international assistance, while 13.3% of weapons in the UK, in the US this difference is even higher 1% against 25% of the budget.

Proponents of the security discourse in Serbia, the state of peripheral capitalism, faithfully reproduce the mantras that come from the centers of power. Thus, it happens that the Austrian Foreign Minister Kurz is thanking the former Prime Minister Vučić for the closure of the Balkan migration route, as it also protects the business interests of the headquarters of Austrian companies in Serbia. But the refugee crisis is a whole nother topic.

In order to strengthen the function of the regional EU Military Area, defense resources are also needed. In the deindustrialized wilderness, military industrial factories are developing with the praises of political elites and promises of economic progress and increased security power. And while the military industry exports arms worth hundreds of millions of euros with the tendency of growth primarily because of the availability of cheap and endangered workforces, it turns out that this additional engagement in warfare serves only the elites, both international and local.

Urban control

Changes in global demography led the elites to concentrate their presence and power in cities. In cities, disassembled masses can be easily organized. Statistics say that by 2030, the number of inhabitants in urban settlements will increase by 1.4 billion, making the percentage of city dwellers rise to 60% of the total population of the planet. That is why urban centers become the focus of future struggles.

This threatening scenario is highlighted in the movie that the Pentagon is using to train those in charge of a militarized version of peace and security. Although the movie focuses on the development of poorer megacities, mostly formerly colonized centers by the European powers, the militarization of control and richer Euro-Atlantic cities is increasingly based on various colonial practices of segregation. Everyday practices of class segregation are taking place in front of our eyes, from the militarized violence carried out by the communal police in Belgrade, primarily in order to suppress the gray economy, the often existential solution for the unemployed, to BusPlus control and public transportation. This will be depicted in another separate post.

While high-class members are locked in fenced-up settlements or improvised bunkers from the fear of a collapse of civilization, members of the lower classes are left to participate in a surveillance apparatus that monitors them to ensure their existence. Private British internet company Eyes offers a reward for registered members if they successfully noticed and reported a theft through their CCTV cameras, which they have access to through their computers.

What are we afraid of?

But why are we looking at all those CCTV cameras? The recently deceased Polish sociologist and philosopher Zigmunt Bauman in the book "Fluid fear" in 2006 discusses the more and more present phenomenon that defines our society of the present - fear.

Fear is known to all living beings. Basic or animal reactions to fear can be divided into escape and aggression. In humans, however, there is a "derived fear", or a secondary fear, which represents the precursor of past experience. The performed fear is reflected in the sense of exposure to danger, primarily in insecurity and vulnerability. Such feelings can occur even when there is no actual danger.

According to Bauman, there are several groups of real danger. The first group includes a physical threat to life and property (accidents, fires, floods, etc.); in the second group it is a threat to the sustainability and reliability of the social order (which provides resources for living: income, jobs, disability benefits, pensions, etc.). The last group is a threat to individual positions, such as identity or position in the hierarchy. Bauman's ubiquitous fear is defined as fluid.

We run away from potentially subversive feelings, especially those associated with mortality, aging, and disease. The consumer culture offers many solutions to combat fear and insecurity and assures us that winning is possible, with a fee naturally. Carpe diem approach - enjoy now, pay later - favors the astronomical growth of the debt based economy and the strengthening of speculative capital. Also, as a form of relieving anxiety, statistics are presented with the risk calculations carried out by insurance companies and banks. Ultimately, we concentrate on things that we can influence, and we ignore those that we think we can not, continuously reducing the scope of the fields in which we operate.

The atmosphere of globalized fear is a direct consequence of economic globalization. What really surrounds us is, in effect, selective globalization: trade and capital are expanding freely, while the movement of people is primarily class-based. The surveillance system is also globalized as well as the sharing of this information. Monitoring and control consequently cause censorship and coercion through self-censorship, arms trafficking, and human beings effectively bridging the various barriers that have been established so far, crime and terrorism are truly internationalized.

Resistance to fear

In addition to the fear that is massively produced by the system, and its economic causes, it is important to address another fear, which is a product as the spirit of time - the fear of systemic alternatives. Liberal democracy (that is, bourgeois parliamentarianism) presents itself as the end of history or postideology. The goal of this work is to stifle the potential of resistance, which would be based on the awareness of material conditions at the root of the problem and that is debt enslavement. Propaganda is working to ensure that the collective things there are no alternatives, and if there were this is no time to be messing around, we have a war on our hands goddammit!