Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production. If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some alleged good can justify it — there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Men who are free to produce, have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to lose. Ideologically, the principle of individual rights does not permit a man to seek his own livelihood at the point of a gun, inside or outside his country. Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy, where wealth is privately owned, the costs of war come out of the income of private citizens — there is no overblown public treasury to hide that fact — and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his own financial losses (such as taxes or business dislocations or property destruction) by winning the war. Thus his own economic interests are on the side of peace.
In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble. The truth is that foreign spying, meddling, and outright military intervention in the post-World War II era has made us less secure, not more. And we have lost countless lives and spent trillions of euros for our trouble. Too often official government lies have provided justification for endless, illegal wars and hundreds of thousands of resulting deaths and casualties. http://venitism.blogspot.com
In Benghazi, rebels have got their Transitional National Council (TNC), which is sort of their legislature, and they've got a – sort of a cabinet. In the last four months, TNC is making progress. Diplomatically, TNC has made tremendous progress since April gaining international recognition now from about 30 countries, including, significantly, USA and Fourth Reich. This helps them in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of their own people, in the eyes of the Libyan people who are still under Qadhafi's rule, and it also helps them in the sense that it increases the pressure on Qadhafi.
Financially, TNC has made progress. A number of countries have come forth and offered loans, most recently Turkey and Qatar and the UAE and Kuwait. And of course, with political recognition, they're hopeful that they'll be able to gain access to the frozen assets around the world.
Militarily – although it's been slow – they're also making progress gaining territory from Qadhafi. There's the Western Mountains, where they've got fighters inching their way towards Tripoli. There's the Misrata front on the coast, where they've not only fought off Qadhafi's forces successfully, but they're also pushing west up the coast towards Tripoli. They're getting close to Zliten, which is a significant town. And then closer to Brega, where they're now encountering difficulty with landmines, unfortunately. Hopefully, they can get through those.
There was a security vacuum when the regime fell, and they had to stand up very quickly TNC. The police, for the most part, just left their posts because they were afraid of popular reaction against them because they had committed abuses in the early days against the people. So there's hardly any police around, and because of that vacuum, militias started to form and step in.
And so looking after the security of Benghazi and eastern Libya, you've got a lot of militias and a few police. And this had led to some security challenges. And the TNC is working to address these problems. The Americans, The Britons, the French, other diplomatic missions there are sort of keeping the pressure on the TNC to get their arms around the militia problem so that they can provide better security as they try to move forward to Tripoli and hopefully to Qadhafi's departure.
The largest kickbacks originate in the military industry. Military procurement is a corrupt business from top to bottom. The process is dominated by advocacy, with few checks and balances. Most people in power love this system of doing business and do not want it changed. War and preparation for war systematically corrupt all parties to the state-private transactions by which the government obtains the bulk of its military products. There is a standard 10% kickback to kleptocrats for military purchases.
Participants in the military-industrial-kleptocrat complex(MIKC) are routinely blamed for mismanagement, not infrequently they are accused of fraud, abuse, kickbacks, and waste (FAKW), and from time to time a few of them are indicted for criminal offenses. All of these unsavory actions, however, are typically viewed as aberrations, misfeasances to be rectified or malfeasances to be punished while retaining the basic system of state-private cooperation in the production of military goods and services. These offenses are in reality expressions of a thoroughgoing, intrinsic rottenness in the entire setup.
Offset contracts were also signed to the tune of many billion euros. Offsets are arrangements made by purchasing governments with their suppliers, requiring the contractors to reinvest a percentage of the value of the deal in the importing country. The arms trade is already an incubator of corruption with such large sums of money flowing around, and all that secrecy. It's so easy to avoid clear accountability about what you've bought, and why. The best antidotes are transparency and competition. But if you add offsets to the deal, it only gets murkier.
Out of sight and out of mind appears to be the motto for most citizens. Like past imperial powers, war has become both constant and largely invisible. Military personnel die and funerals are held; service men and women are injured and families suffer. But most citizens go about their lives with little sense that their government is sending fellow citizens to kill and to die in their name. http://venitism.blogspot.com
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